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Tudors Tales and Turpitude – James Schardt

Greetings everyone. Normally, Sarah would either be posting here, herself, or would have someone who, at least, has a blog of their own post here. However, in the interests of keeping her writing the stories we all want to read instead of the unprofitable columns or gif posts she sometimes feels obligated to write, I am stepping in. Sarah, go write. We gots this. *cracks neck*

 

Brad Torgersen reposted a link to his “Nutty Nuggets” column Sunday. To summarize it, Brad felt that sales of Science Fiction books had gone down because the stories published had drifted away from the themes that had attracted people to Science Fiction in the first place. I am going to expand on this and point out that the same themes that attracted people to Science Fiction are the same themes that attract people to stories in general. And blatantly inserting current issues into a story stands a good chance of marring that story and rendering it preachy and forgettable.

An anecdote was posted last year by an author who had personally delivered a story to an editor, I think it was John Campbell, hoping for it to be published. For his trouble, the editor took him out to lunch. During that lunch, the editor asked him if he could name one story written by a man in a mud hut 4000 years ago that is still sold in airport book stores today. The author looked confused. The editor told him he was talking about “The Iliad” written by the blind poet, Homer. His point was that people wanted to read stories about heroes striving to overcome things. Brad feels that the striving has been lost in a sea of messages that will have difficulty resonating five years after they are written.

This year, the big issue in the news, besides the election, seems to be whether to allow non-op transsexual persons to use the restrooms of the sex they feel they are as opposed to the restrooms and locker rooms they physically are. Three years ago, this wasn’t even on the radar. I would have to look up opinion columns and news stories to be able to tell you what issues were big even five years ago. Time passes and people move on. Laws will be written and passed or rejected. What is controversial today may not be controversial tomorrow. While I cannot tell you how society will eventually deal with this, I can guarantee this will not be a big issue two years from now. This means basing a story on a current issue is probably unwise.

Does this mean you should leave out these issues entirely? No! Look to authors who have remained in the public eye for years, even centuries, after they have died. There are several of Shakespeare’s plays that are, to put it bluntly, nothing more than Tudor propaganda. He set up a whole series of historical plays just to lead up to showing how bad Richard III was and show how justified Henry VII was to take the throne from him.

In his time, one of the major issues was the legitimacy of Queen Elizabeth and the House of Tudor. England had a woman on the throne (scandal!) Her father had broken from the Catholic Church (scandal!) Her grandfather’s claim to the throne was tenuous at best (scandal!). Needless to say, her political enemies, both inside and outside of her kingdom, were happy to use these issues to weaken her power and possibly take her throne from her. But, unless the reader is a serious student of history, nobody remembers this.

We remember the strained relationship between Henry the IV and his son Harry in “Henry IV part I”. We remember King Henry V inspiring his soldiers to overcome the odds against them at Agincourt in “Henry V”. We remember how Richard III’s quest for power and hubris brought about his downfall in “Richard III”. Nobody remembers the politics behind these stories. But that doesn’t mean it was not there. The story came first. The issues were woven in with subtlety. People’s minds were changed. And Elizabeth I is still remembered as one of the greatest monarchs England has ever had.

The legitimacy of the English throne was a topic for discussion, but it didn’t effect that many people outside of the nobility. People eating and not being robbed in the street were what mattered on a day to day basis. It wasn’t that people didn’t care about who their rightful monarch was, they did. It was simply a lower priority. So Shakespeare slipped the message he wanted to put out into his plays. He barely mentioned the Tudors in Richard III. The focus was on how rotten a person Richard Plantagenet was. At the end, his audience was saying “Thank goodness Henry Tudor got rid of THAT guy.” The message, the Tudors are legitimate because the Plantagenets were bad, worked. He didn’t have to beat people over the head with his message. They came to that conclusion themselves.

By contrast, his play “Henry VIII”, is mostly remembered for accidentally burning The Globe Theater to the ground. It is a blunt message play that is simply there to remind people that Queen Elizabeth is, indeed, King Henry’s daughter. It did not resonate at the time and it is largely forgotten now. This is the sort of fiction Brad was talking about when he was saying it wasn’t “Nutty Nuggets” and what others talk about when they say “message fiction”. Making the message the story is simply preaching. If your reader wants preaching they’ll either go to church or listen to the shaggy guy with the sandwich board ranting in the park. Readers want a story. If there is a message, fine, but the reader wants a story first.

Take a timeless theme. A story that would be recognizable to both your grandparents and your children. Put it in a future or fantasy world. Weave your message in with subtlety so it is barely seems to be there. Your story will be memorable and it will plant the seeds you want to grow. The story wins over the message. Always.

As you guys know yesterday I came across mention of an IO9 article that said that we’re already living in a science fiction world, and so all that was left now to justify science fiction’s existence was social critique.

I didn’t read the article, partly because it was IO9 and who the heck wants to wade in that, but the concepts struck me as worthy of “unpacking.”  Frankly, they need to be unpacked, as it’s impossible to deal with that fermenting load of insanity  in a single post. “Wrong too great to fit in a few words” would be a good description.

Yesterday I dealt with the idea that we’re leaving in a future world, as though the future were a destination, at which the train of time arrived and, having disembarked, we now have nothing to do but mill around and criticize each other, like school girls on a field trip.

I am being unkind, but only partly.  There is a deeper truth behind that image of school girls ripping into each other: the idea that criticizing others is a deeper virtue and that it is not only useful, but good and necessary.

First, let me start by saying, because some idiots (and they are idiots) are going to say I’m talking about an article I haven’t read: this is not about the article.  It’s about the concepts, which I’ve come across in panels and talks over years of attending science fiction conventions.

One common presentation of “the end of science fiction” is that we are now living in the future which is why kids aren’t interested in science fiction.  This is of course mind-bogglingly stupid, because for the kids the time we live in is not THEIR future and it certainly isn’t science fiction. It could be the reason the kids aren’t into science fiction is that twin idea that “since this is now a science fiction world we should turn to critiquing the injustices in it.”  The kids get quite enough victimhood whining and guilt in their normal curriculum, which leaves them quite uninterested in more of it in their entertainment.

In fact I don’t know ANYONE who is interested in their entertainment being a bunch of whining and critiquing the flaws of society.

Look, I went through middle school at a time when “revolutionary juntas” took over SCHOOLS and changed the curriculum.  I wrote my fill of “social critique” then.  You sort of had to, because your parents didn’t understand that education had stopped being about knowing stuff and started being about signaling virtue.  Well, mine didn’t.  And they had an attitude of “if you have a problem deal with it”.  So I dealt.

It wasn’t general whining, mind, or real social critique.  I mean, none of us wrote about the injustice of coming to school and finding your curriculum had changed over night and you were studying Marx in five courses gain; or how upset you were about their abolishing Latin, because you’d been hoping to finally read Virgil in the original.  OR even how you thought Mao’s poems, which were being pushed at you in literature, sounded like they’d been written by a boastful kindergartner on speed.

No.  It was critique-of-that-which-the-teacher-wants-critiqued.  I remember one occasion where she read a bunch of things about the injustices cleaning women suffered, and how their work was demeaning, then asked us to write a story about it.

I wrote a story that could make you weep, all about this poor woman’s aching knees, and how her husband oppressed her by not doing housework.

In point of fact, in the village, cleaning women — particularly those who worked for the wealthier families — were often among the upper social strata and almost for sure made more than my dad did.  Their kids often went to private schools with their employer’s kids, and since they worked for the “better” (not us, though we were in a way, but only among true natives of the village, which these people weren’t) families, they had all the conveniences and their cleaning the house once a week and touching up in between was probably less work than my mom did in our house, in addition to her more than full time for-pay work.

Never mind.  The teacher wanted the injustice critiqued.  I critiqued it and I got an A.

And that’s sort of what we’re talking about here too.  The injustices that the left wants critiqued never have anything to do with the REAL injustices, in the real society.  They have to do with Marxist theory, viewing people as widgets, and their permanent illusion that we live in a 1950s-that-never-existed, with victimhood classes frozen forever in place, and those “deserving of help” always in need of help till the last syllable of recorded time.

Most of the authors who have pivoted to this form of writing aren’t bad craftsmen, but their stories ring hollow.

It is the duty of every writer to put the reader through the wringer, and this often involves picking a character in an invidious situation and then making his/her life WAY worse.

In a normal story, then the character starts fighting back and finds his way out of the bind, taking the reader alone, which leaves the reader feeling released and powerful and maybe even able to tackle his problems.

The issue with “critiquing society” is that it’s not that type of story.  Rather you start with the oppressed and end with the oppressed, and along the way you show how mean and evil society is.

There is a reason for this (DUH) in dialectical Marxism.  You see, Marxists believe the only reason that men are: greedy, murderous, evil, envious, etc. is that they live under capitalism, which in their heads (and their heads only) is an artificial system which Man (note capital m) wasn’t meant to live in, and which twists humanity into what Christianity would call sin.  (This is not the first, nor the last instance of Marxists stealing Christian theology, and the idea that the offense of the first sin stained humanity’s tendencies and ways.)

The only way to overcome capitalism, and incidentally to make socialism work is to reform man. We know how well that goes.  That belief has two prongs, both wrong.  One is the idea capitalism is unnatural, instead of arising wherever allowed, and often where not allowed: an inherent part of how humanity functions.  The Second is that humanity can be changed completely and made like onto the angels.  this idea is responsible for filling AT LEAST 100 million graves.

But armed with this belief, the academics and pretentious pseudo-glitterati who are trying to submerge science fiction in the same morass that consumes every genre they touch, have decided the way to reform man is to harangue them.

Look, I know that preaching is considered good in Christian practice.  I also know that a famous saint so gave up on its having any effect on his flock, that he went off to preach to the fish.

While Christianity changed the face of Europe there is very good reason to argue it was done less with “critique” and more with the way they lived, and the way they did care for the poor and downtrodden in a very material and personal way, which in turn gave the new religion an edge into society.  (Recall it started largely as a slave’s religion.)  Yeah, there are twists in there, including converting the leader and having him order the conversion of his people, BUT none of this was simply by telling him how wrong he was, over and over again.  Much less was it by criticizing a society that didn’t exist and probably never had.

If a Christian missionary had marched in hot foot into a primitive German tribe and started haranguing them on micro aggression he’d probably have escaped execution.  For one, those primitive tribes had a great fear of the insane.  For another, people who are asleep can’t kill you.

Note I’m not saying — I know you know.  I also know teh stupid will dissect this looking for poo to fling — that science fiction should be all about adventure and shouldn’t deal with weighty subjects.  I loved SF when I was very young because it dealt with weighty subjects.  BUT what allows us to do that is not that “we live in a science fiction world” or that we’re “speaking truth to no longer existent power, just like everyone else.”

No, what allows us to do that is the fact that we take the weighty moral questions out of context and can examine them more clearly.  Take colonialism.  All of us — every human — is descended from colonialists and colonized.  (I was explaining to son some peculiarities of Portuguese that create homophones which have CLEAR nothing to do with each other, and I had to explain Portugal probably started as a Celtic colony — though some new genetic studies claim it might have been a colonizing center, rather — then Carthaginian, then Greek, then Latin, and all of those left linguistic debris behind.)

However recent history makes the idea of colonist and colonial a hot point.  Also, you really can’t discuss things such as “what is human” without people getting very upset (as they should be.  The recent history of people who would do this is not good) but you can do it in an SF sense.  Suppose we go out to space and find a much dumber, but obviously sentient alien race.  What are our duties/obligations/rights in relation to them?  Morally HOW should we treat them? What if we go to space and we find we’re the slightly impaired aliens in relation to everyone else?  How do we cope?  How should be be treated?  I don’t know, and if I continue not knowing, I can write an interesting story that explores the possibilities.  H*ll, there’s novel series in that (some already written.)

If I go in with the idea of “critiquing current society” though, I’ll use the downtrodden aliens as a vessel to blame/hate on humanity and rage at our “history of injustice.”  (Compared to WHAT?  The history of angels?)  This just falls into the “approved” paths and it’s boring because it’s obvious the story is a device to hector the reader in the same old way that those who speak power to truth (in order to keep power) use.

There have been societies that have been completely changed by a new idea, a new revelation, a new way of looking at things.  This is usually because the person or persons who bring it in show the new idea/way/revelation to be a vast improvement over the way they live.  Also this change always comes from outside and not the current structures of power.

In the whole history of humanity there isn’t a single instance of a society being changed by prim scolds, hectoring people about sins they know d*mn well they didn’t commit, and promoting a way of life that — no matter how the scolds try to hide it — leads only to misery and mass death.

The only change such prim scolds bring about is a sudden onset of a desire to be anywhere we can avoid them.  Which when it comes to their scolding being a supposed for-profit enterprise means avoiding it like the plague, and finding alternate channels to get our entertainment.

Which is exactly what is happening.  And which only causes them to scold us harder and tell us we need our medicine more.

I suggest we leave them mumbling to themselves and others like them, and go read a good book or ten.  Because they can no longer keep us from publishing.  They certainly can’t — never could — force us to buy them.

The gatekeepers are bravely guarding the gate, while around them the walls have crumbled.  Step over the fallen stones and come on out.

There’s good reading out here.

*Sorry about lateness.  I should know better than NOT to blog on Friday night.  Saturday morning we always have errands which ends up making the blog very late.  I’m not done either, I’m going to need to clean the cat boxes.  I’m being glared at by Greebo as we speak, I’ll have you know.*

Yesterday in one of the groups I belong to and check irregularly, someone posted an article from IO9.  Full disclosure, I didn’t read the article.  Life is too short to hang out at IO9.  But this is not about the article, not really.  It’s about the concepts which were summarized in the lead, and confirmed by those of my fans/friends brave enough to put on waders and climb down into IO9.

The concept of the article was this: with our communications technology and gene splicing and other goodies, we’re living in a science fiction world.  There is no point to science fiction anymore, except to “critique the world.”

This is a point of view I’ve often seen defined in panels too.  I call it the “we had to kill science fiction in order to save it” point of view. There was more to that, like there should be no “retro” science fiction.  There’s fodder for a post there, and there will be a post, about what is “retro” science fiction and whether there’s a use for it or not.

We will, possibly in a later post get into the whole concept and potential value or lack thereof of critiquing society; what it actually means and what it actually does.

Right now I want to concentrate on WHAT is science fiction after all.

I’m fairly sure I know.  I’m also fairly sure these people are spectacularly confused.  They seem to hold on to how science fiction was explained to me when I was eleven and stumbled onto it.  (I’d already read Have Space Suit Will Travel, at around 9, but it didn’t strike me as science fiction, just as a slightly fantastic present day adventure.  Look, guys, what did I know about what America was really like?  Remember I thought Denver was by the sea [I think I confused it with Dover. And now I have a story title that’s going to bug me till I write a short story.  The White Cliffs of Denver.])

I stumbled onto science fiction with Out of Their Minds, by Simak, which was and wasn’t a problem, because, you know, while it took place in the future, sort of, it was the near future and I could call it “fantastic adventure.”  But my second science fiction book was A Canticle for Leibowitz and that I could not just write off as “they made up some stuff, but it’s essentially the world as we know it.”  So I asked my brother what weird-*ss books he was reading (my early sf reading was standing up by Alvarim’s bedside, ready to toss the book in the drawer and run into my room at the sound of a footstep on the stairs.  you see, he’d told me not to read them, showing both a remarkable care for my innocence [SF in the seventies.  Yeshhhh] and a complete lack of knowledge of my character.  Yes, I also read Masters and Johnson standing up by his bedside table.  Did wonders for my English, it did.]

His explanation was “Science fiction are stories set in a future world.”

While this is, technically, true, of course, it neglects that little fact that making predictions is hard.  Particularly about the future.  And also that now that we have almost a hundred years of science fiction behind us, it makes a lot of the futures depicted in those books the future of the past.  Or in Sir Pratchett’s fantastically appropriate description “the future of another leg of the pants of time.”

I mean, the “The future is now” people are very funny.  Yes, we do have a lot of technological marvels (like, when haven’t we?  Even if it was just a better plow) and it’s affecting society (like, when hasn’t it?) BUT is it the future depicted in science fiction novels?  Pfui?  Do I have a flying car?  WHERE are my moon colonies, my weekends on Mars?

Second, “the future is now”?  Really?  I’m no longer surprised at their lack of understanding of gender.  I’m somewhat puzzled that they ALSO don’t get verb tenses.  I’m told that some very primitive societies have no concept of past or future.  Everything is an eternal now. (I don’t know.  I never did linguistics field work.)  For my money they’re more advanced than people who think there used to be a future, but now we’re living in it and time stopped.  (MAYBE that’s what’s actually wrong.  Maybe there’s a whole group of people we should never have taught to talk.  How much damage could they do by rhythmic blinking, after all.  Never mind.)

Do we have things that our parents didn’t have?  Bother.  We have things that were unimaginable when I was a little kid.  More so than your childhood, mine was temporally dislocated from the normal time.  I mean, I still remember my mother ridiculing the idea I’d ever afford a house with running hot and cold water.  (She built one herself 3 years later.  Never mind.)  I remember trimming oil lamps (partly because we had electricity — sort of — but it was really unreliable.  I am daily humbled by living among marvels of human ingenuity.

What I don’t imagine is that this is the end of the human ingenuity or the human story.  I don’t presume to say “we won’t go any further.”  And I CERTAINLY don’t presume to say “we should go no further.”

To say “we’re living in a science fiction future, there is no reason to write science fiction anymore” is wrong on EVERY front.

First, yeah, sure we’re living on  science fiction future.  Just like people in the 1930s were compared to their parents.  Your point is, precisely?  That’s a tautology on the order of “the black horse is black.”  Yeah, and so what, Captain Obvious?

Second, I don’t think science fiction is what you think it is.  We don’t each have a crystal ball and write about “the future as she will be.” See part about making predictions and how that’s hard, PARTICULARLY about the future.

So if you think the point of science fiction was to predict the future, then there was never a point to science fiction.  It’s sort of like saying the purpose of pigs is to fly because you saw a drawing of a pig with wings.  The only answer to that is “You’re not from around here” and by around here I mean reality.

Yes, yes, science fiction dresses itself in future tropes, gives dates, etc, but it’s actual and point of fact purpose, as a branch of fantastic literature, is to give the artist (or the craftswoman, in my case) a broad canvas on which to tell stories that can’t be told in our present-day, limited-to-reality universe.  Sure, it makes it interesting, and it’s one of the constraints of the genre (sort of, before you get into alternates and counterfactuals) that you at least do some hand waving at “how we get there from here.  The readers of the genre expect it, and it’s polite, kind of like it’s polite not to mention lucrative to meet your readers’ expectations.  BUT it’s handwavium for the paying patrons, not a fact of life.  Every science fiction universe, even the most grounded in reality is always “what might be” not “what will be.”  Because the future and reality are way more complex than you can cram in a book.

So there is a point to science fiction.  The same point there always was.  The future is by definition not here yet.  It never will be.  Because that’s the quality of the future.  It hasn’t happened yet.  (These people probably eagerly believe signs that say “Free beer tomorrow.”)

And I bet you that it surprises you.  I bet you there are wonders we can’t even dream of (though we try) waiting just around the corner.  And I’ll dream them until I get to see them.  And I’ll take as many of you as I can along for the ride.

These people belong to the future of the past.  The future that belongs to them (eh) is the future imagined circa 1930s.  A future of central control and exact distribution of limited resources.

They’re both disappointed they don’t have it — hence the reason that they think SF should “critique” things — and bewildered by the advances that have really happened, hence the almost forlorn lament that “we’re living in a science fiction future already.”

If you can’t imagine anything more than what we have, I suggest you’re in the wrong field of writing.  I hear there is a lot of demand for technical manual writers. It demands no imagination.  (Though it does demand a mastery of verbs, of course, which might be a negating condition.  On the other hand you can call machinery xyr and no one, not even the machines care.)

If this REALLY is the wildest future you can imagine, that’s fine.  Sit down,  stay here.  Rest (or bitch) a while.

The rest of us?  We can imagine a million interesting futures.  And we’re going to dream of them until we get there.

 

Sorry.  I don’t like taking days off from the blog, and I’ve taken too many, but I woke up at six am with all the symptoms of stomach flu.  I’m fairly sure that’s not actually it, and suspect it’s just stress, but right now is the first I made it to the computer and way from the bathroom.

I have four short stories to write and deliver, and as you imagine those have precedence.  So, I shall now work on those. Then I shall start the final going over of Darkship Revenge, hopefully to be done by Monday.

 

Blog to resume tomorrow.

So, I hear Donald Trump is now promising free college.  Don’t bother explaining that that wasn’t really what he said, or why it is the best idea possible.  I’m not interested in the Donald.  What I’m interested in is this idea of free college.

Free education was an idea of the liberals, back when liberals stood for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.  They had the idea — which was amiably passed on to me by my parents and grandparents — that you could educate anyone into … well…  what they would have called a person of worth.

To an extent they were right.  Remember the people who came up with this idea were at the very cusp of the industrial revolution.  The first jobs in that were dirty, ceaseless and deadly, so about on a par with agricultural jobs (the idea that agricultural jobs were paradisaical is an invention of the romantics, all of whom had never seen a shovel and if they did wouldn’t know which end to use.) The difference is they weren’t learned by watching and starting to participate as soon as you could walk, which allowed a break up of large familial structure, of the bonds of tradition on any given individual, and allowed individuals more freedom of action.  To put it another way, just because your dad, your grandad, your great grandad and everyone else you could trace were farmers, it didn’t mean you couldn’t go to the big city and be a carder or a machinist.  Which freed you also to marry whomever you wanted from a much larger pool of candidates and, yes, if you so wished, to go to hell your own way with beer and blue ruin.

On the whole the industrial revolution represented freedom and the toppling of oppressive societal structures (yes, there was something to be said for those structures, to wit that you were less likely to go to hell with beer and blue ruin, because the people around you would interfere.  This is what the romantics noticed, and what turned their heads to mush longing for the good old days.  They confused “freedom to do it” with “necessity to do it” and concluded industrial production and capitalism were bad for humanity.  Their heirs, the greens, suffer from the same illusions. They think there’s something soul-satisfying about agricultural work, close to the land, etc.  Because the only part of it they’ve experienced is hobby gardening, they’ll continue thinking so.  Also, they don’t look at what’s happening in places like India and Chine as they, too, undergo their industrial revolution.  People are voting with their feet.)

But after the initial impetus, machines grew more refined.  It has been observed the first thing industrialization teaches a country is to keep time.  People become conscious of punctuality.  You can follow how important punctuality is in a culture by running an inverse proportion of how recently a country was industrialized.

Then other things happen.  You start to need people who can memorize schedules and sequences of actions.  The cities themselves lead to a need for people who can read instructions and information.  (Mostly pre-radio and pre-tv, for western countries.)

This means for the first time in human history, reading writing and ciphering become a real asset, and not just “prestige and for the rich.”  Those who read, write and calculate have a demonstrably better life, as they become supervisors.

At this stage, it is easy to confuse “better life” with “reading, writing and arithmetic.”  It is also easy to conflate such bourgeois virtues with the ability to read morally improving works.

This is how free public education gains impetus, with the best intentions in the world.

But that was about 200 years ago, most places, and what we’ve learned in between is this:

1. It’s easier to indoctrinate people than to teach them, and for regulation and governing purposes, indoctrinating is more effective at control than teaching.
2. The average person only needs to know so much.  For instance, through 9th grade I got up to pre-calc, which I’ve used … never in my subsequent life.  (Though trig comes in handy, now and then.)
3. There is no practical correlation between education and morality.  Some of the earliest educated classes in the world were responsible for most of the massacres of the 20th century.

This hasn’t stopped the public drive for more and more free education (or education) for various reasons.  a) it’s easier to indoctrinate people more the longer they stay in school, so various governing bodies love the idea  b) there seems to be a correlation, at least in the cases we hear of (many more we don’t hear) between more advanced education and a better life.  Even where that doesn’t apply, there’s the recent memory of a time when it was so.  c) there is an entire apparatus in place to push us into believing that more education equals a “betterment” of the individual in the moral sense.  Mostly because those in power consider “good morals” to agree with them, and look up there at point a.

It’s gotten to the point now, where we have people with phds working as baristas, and the fact our educational costs have gone straight up (having two kids who wanted stem degrees there was no option for “apprentice” for them, or as older son put it “if you cut people without being a doctor, they arrest you.” I’m acutely aware of this.  In my time it was difficult but possible to put yourself through school in a timely fashion by having a job.  Now you can still do it, if you’re willing to take ten or fifteen years to get through a bachelor’s.)  Also, in most fields of study, a bachelor’s now means as much as a high school diploma meant in previous years.  I thought  this was merely due to glut and inflation of credentials (and it is due to that too, I think, but) some years ago I fell into this pattern where various friends with college age kids asked me to tutor their kids in foreign languages and/or literature.  And I found out that these kids’ were less proficient than the high school kids I’d tutored twenty years before.  I hadn’t realized it because I discovered when older son was in 3rd grade that they weren’t teaching him … well… anything… and started teaching him on the side, when he was home from school while using the school merely as a babysitting system so I could write.  I thought, at the time, it was because we were in a tiny town, with a backwater school, but some of the people I worked with ten years ago went to PRIVATE schools with an excellent reputation, so I don’t believe that’s the case.

Now, when your bachelor’s degree doesn’t get you much of anything and you start life in deep debt (which in turn means a population crash among many, many other bad things) I understand why people think “free college” will solve their issues, and why politicians on the make promise it.

Let me tell you, ladies and gents: it won’t be worth the paper it’s printed on.

I remember being very shocked there was no free college in the US. When I first came here in 12th grade, I fully intended to go through free college in Portugal.  And I did.  So it might seem a little hypocritical of me to ding it…

Except that back then (things have changed, and how) the same percentage of people went through free college in the US as in Portugal (yes, I know what I said.)  The same type of people too.

When I chose to go back to Portugal — mostly dad’s letters begging me to come back — I turned down a full ride scholarship to college, that two of my high school teachers had been at pains to arrange for me.  (Sorry, guys, if you read this.)  My husband was accepted to an ivy league peripheral college, with a full ride.  (He didn’t finish there by reasons of clinical depression for reasons that weren’t related to school and which, at the time, the schools weren’t alert are likely to strike people in a certain IQ.  Ah well.  Another leg of the pants of time.)

These pure-merit scholarships by and large no longer exist.  Now you must have merit AND be an interesting minority.  But that’s something else and a discussion for another time.

Meanwhile, while here I realized that the American college system was very different from the Portuguese one, too.  The Portuguese system is rooted in medieval traditions, which is great if you want to attend a non-magical Hogwarts for grown ups (complete with robes) but sucks goat teat if what you want to do is get a job in the real world.

This wasn’t as obvious to most of my family, the family afflictions being medicine and engineering, which have eminently practical applications.

But I had issues with transposing digits, which I couldn’t even talk about since it wasn’t a recognized disorder and I thought I was going crazy or was stupid.  (Ironically both my kids inherited the issue and I learned tricks to overcome it while teaching them. I’m still a menace with phone numbers and addresses, particularly when I’m tired.)  And the idea of cutting dead people, let alone living ones that I intended to keep alive, made me queasy.  I gave psychology a try by auditing while my transfer from the US was being dragged very slowly through bureaucracy, and dear BOB, it was all meringue, no cake.  Particularly since at the time they were in the throes of behaviorism.

There were things I genuinely WANTED to do: agricultural engineering, nixed because at the time it only made sense if you had family lands to work on; and archeology, nixed after I figured out it didn’t pay much and what it paid necessitated grants from the government.

Which took me to the “hardest” of the humanities.  I.e. if you take language and literature, it at least teaches you SOMETHING real.  The language part. Within that, I picked the hardest disciplines, English and German (because furthest from Portuguese.)  This was the path to teaching in school — as were most other humanities and even pure science degrees — which I had no intention of doing, so I started taking about a million (okay four to five) courses on the side in other languages, at consulates, embassies and institutes.  I paid for these courses by working, and I was glad to do it, because it meant I could learn languages that, had I stayed in Portugal, would have made me a sought-after translator.

I’m often asked why for the love of heaven I chose to learn Swedish, for instance.  Well, because textile factories were then (might still be) the main industry in the North of Portugal.  And because my dad worked for one, I KNEW that the machines were imported from Sweden, and that the most legible/accurate assembly instructions were in Swedish.

My idea was to become a free lance interpreter/translator, and what I’d realized up front is I couldn’t do it with my free education alone.  Our curriculum hadn’t changed from the nineteenth century where its main aim was to create young ladies who could speak various languages and be an ornament to society with erudite talk, or teach other young ladies to do the same.  I had more training in translation in high school, whose curriculum had been modernized, than in college.  Yes, the diplomatic corps mined our school (particularly the best students) for its ranks, but really they preferred those people who for whatever reason knew more than two languages, and knew them better than they were taught in college.  Hence, you know, jobs abroad, and paying for courses on the side, and well… everything else.  (Though knowing myself I was never interested in the diplomatic corps.)

However, look above, unless pursuing some thing  that has a clear definition and clear goals “free education” is worth what you pay for it.  Not being consumer driven, it tends to become fossilized in whatever worked back when some do-gooder founded it.  Or to become subverted for the purposes of government.

BUT, you’ll say, so does paid education.  Look at what is happening with people taking degrees in puppetry and basket weaving.

Well… there will always be a number of those when value is put on “a diploma” more than on what you can do with it, and when a piece of paper is your credential to entry in an “educated class” who might not be able to do anything, and therefore holds to the credential as a positional good with more fervor than ever.

Also “paid” is …. debatable, as the government is funneling money to schools via the students.  What I mean is there is no effort made by anyone along the line on establishing whether all that “education” is good for anything.  What I mean is, as in the insurance system, where the third-party payer for health care doesn’t care if the patient lives or dies, the scam of passing money from government to professors doesn’t care if the patsies in the middle get anything useful out of the deal.

Hence the fact that even in the hard sciences students are required to take courses in gender studies and micro-aggression sensitivity, keeping those otherwise utterly useless departments alive.  Also a reason there are no more Western history courses or Latin in most schools.  Because the consumer has less and less say in it every year.

It wasn’t that way thirty years ago, when most courses still taught SOMETHING you could use in the employment world, but that is neither here nor there.

Also, in America, the paper — as in Europe — has come to mean more than knowing the stuff.  And this is stupid as knowing the stuff is easier in the US than in Europe.  Not that we’re smarter, but we have lending libraries, massive bookstores and even before the internet, ways to order out of print books.  What this means is that self-education doesn’t have the issues it has in Europe.

I figured this out when I was writing the Shakespeare books.  This was almost 20 years ago, and I have since forgotten what the issue was, but I had a question about Shakespeare biography and called the library, who called the local college, who got me in touch with a professor, who got me in touch with another professor at a much better university.  As I explained my problem and asked my question, the gentleman asked me other questions.  In the end instead of answering me he laughed and said I might now be (after 15 years of reading everything I could find) the foremost expert on Shakespeare biography in the US.  Which amused him.

Of course I didn’t have a degree, so I couldn’t teach in college (or anywhere else.)

Which brings us to what they’re promising when they promise free college.  Look, guys nonsense aside, there’s a reason courses in line-fishing and popular music lyrics exist.

Countries that have free education MIGHT by and large have lost all touch with the economic realities, but they do still have a fairly demanding course of studies (even if it’s for being a well educated nineteenth century lady.)  Because they only have free education for the top 5% or so of students, if that much.

The mass of students — you guys went through school, right — not only can’t, but don’t want to engage in rigorous courses of study.  They want the credential, because they’ve been told it does all sorts of nifty things (as far as mine is concerned, though I never tried, I’m told I could make a nifty paper plane out of it, though the lacquer seals might make it hard to fly.)  BUT they don’t have any particular intellectual passion, and aren’t even interested in any work that requires extensive intellectual training.

So if you institute free college here, what you’ll have is a) more degrees in ant-watching.  b) more time to teach students what they actually need to know.  We’re now at the point where college graduates are less literate than my classmates at the village school were, and know far less useful stuff about the real world.  (By fourth grade, we learned about useful plants, how to buy and sell at a profit, and the geography of the region, among other things.)

I look forward to the time when you’ll need a doctorate before you can be sure the person knows how to read, write and count to twenty without taking off their shoes.  Because a system designed to accommodate those who have no interest in learning necessarily descends to the lowest common denominator.

Of course, it doesn’t matter if it’s free, right?  I mean, who does it hurt?

It diverts a substantial portion of the GDP to an idle and otherwise useless class as well as giving politicians more chance to indoctrinate the young.  It creates a false sense of entitlement in said young.  It dulls even the brightest minds as “education” becomes more and more a matter of dotting the is and crossing the ts with no thought involved.

Most importantly though, it costs the young their most productive and mentally alert years.  It means careers — and marriages, and kids — are postponed until the complexities of Marxist analysis of line fishing are mastered to perfection.

In the end, it means we’re poorer, older and dumber.

TANSTAAFL.

You get what you pay for.  And what the politicians give you for free is always bought by you.  At a higher price than it’s worth.

*Hugo Season is here again, and the cry of the butthurt is heard in the land.  I don’t have time to deal with it, so nip on over to the inestimable Nicki Kenyon’s blog for … well, blunt opinions, language, and some criticism of a sometime beloved science fiction author and a never loved science fiction poseur and some totally unwarranted insults to a fermented body secretion. Given what’s going on, it’s time to rerun the post below.*

A Game Of Mirrors – A Blast From The Past From February 2015

I remember a more innocent time when we watched Law and Order AND didn’t snert behind our hands at “Ripped from the headlines.”

Now we don’t watch it, but my eyes on twitter has been branching out, and he told me their gamer gate episode was about how all these guys were upset at there being a female game developer, so they kidnapped her and raped and stuff.

Uh.

How can they even? I mean, the worst PROVEN thing that happened to one of the SJW shills in gamergate was that someone wished she would kill herself, which she helpfully translated as “death threats.”

And Dan works in software and has for 30 years (though now the software has a math component at last) and the only time he hasn’t had a colleague who is in the same profession in his office and is female is for the last three years, and that’s because there’s only two developers. (They do have a female co-worker, but she does non-software stuff.)

Now, I know software isn’t the same as game design and gaming, but I’d be willing to bet there’s a massive overlap/similarity of conditions.

Female developers isn’t even a surprise. There might be fewer than men (not where my husband has worked, but hey) but not many fewer and they run the gamut. From what I understand, there are fewer in game development but if they are true geeks, they’re not only accepted but lionized. (I’ve experienced a similar effect as a space/science fiction true geek, (meaning I spaz on the concepts/science, not the feels) a community in which females are pretty scarce. Let me tell you, once a guy realizes I really am interested in space travel, it doesn’t matter how ignorant I am (and I am.) All their lives women have looked at them quizzically over this obsession. Finding out a woman shares it brings forth their very best.)

Besides, though I admittedly am not a gamer, I have skimmed enough articles to know that the problem here is not that WOMEN are writing anything, it is that there was suspicion of corruption in game journalism which happened to involve women. And also, as the catfight extended, that some gamers disliked a certain type of games they felt were getting unfair good reviews. Is that true? Don’t know. However, judging from the arguments the other side put out “games shouldn’t be fun” and “escapism is bad for you” I’d say whether journalists were corrupted by coochy or not, they’ve been corrupted by the same sort of “fake promise of prestige” that has seduced science fiction reviewers. In other words, they’ve become convinced of the rather juvenile idea that the purpose of entertainment (which is ultimately what science fiction and games are) shouldn’t be fun, but should be a lever for “changing society.”

And then I started thinking of other “moral panics” driven by the media (and they never tell you they were driven by the media, no matter what basis there was or wasn’t for things.)

Take the militia panic of the nineties. Every TV show, every conspiracy, the answer was “militias.”

There never was any real basis for it. Sure, there were crazy people. Fundamentalist cults. White supremacists hiding out in the country.

There always are. This is a very large country. There were even militias. We know. We were friends with a guy who was in one. He owned a large amount of guns and so did his friends. On the weekend they engaged in healthy exercise and shooting up targets.

Were they a menace to the government? Not any legitimate government. Not even Clinton. They were however concerned with the direction of the government expansion and they were survivalists preparing in the eventuality the S would hit the fan.

So, how to spin an entire moral panic out of this?

Well, you see, the media was guilty. To wit they were guilty of covering up for Clinton when his attorney general caused the death of the Korresh cult and when his ATF killed a family of white supremacists. [It has been pointed out to me Ruby Ridge happened under George H. W. Bush.  I checked and this is true. [And not a surprise.  H.W. or his son for that matter, were not exactly anti-statists] It is interesting in my mind I remember it as happening later, under Clinton. Now, I got my news at the time from TV and the papers.  It tells you something that when I heard a lot about it was under Clinton, to justify crackdowns on “militias.” The murders might have happened earlier, but the full court press was under Clinton.]

I’m not saying, understand, either of those sets of people were good people, but they were the victims here, not the perpetrators.

In this country there are always crazy people doing crazy things. There are very few crazy things anyone deserves to die for.

But under Clinton this stuff happened, and the only way to deflect it was for the press to go on an almighty panic about “militias.” Until people forgot what the question is.

Or take the “satanic child abuse” panic of the eighties. If you hear the media talk about it now, this was the result of some fundamentalist parents going crazy and stuff. (Rolls eyes.)

In fact I was there and lived through it. I remember the TV programs filled with speculation, when they weren’t trotting out psychologist-abused children to babble lurid details. I remember newspaper articles going on and on about ZOMG satanic cults, their history, etc. For pages and pages, and pages.

I don’t remember any PROGRAMS on it, but then back in the eighties I was new in the country and the shows Dan and I watched were mostly vintage star trek and old sitcoms. There probably were some, though. These things always seem to be a coordinated effort between news and entertainment, one winding the other up.

Anyway, just from the headlines/tv programs, one would be excused in thinking that every daycare was a danger. So everyday parents who had to work and put kids in daycare worried. As they should have, given the barrage of “truthful” and “respectable” sources claiming this.

The truth behind it was a little more complex, and has been swept very deep indeed. I don’t know how many of you even remember this, because possibly you might have needed to be in the circles I was at the time (mostly my brother’s circles, which were hippie/ex-hippie/avant guarde. I mean, in my teens we watched an Ingmar Bergman film cycle in the smallest theater in town. You know what I mean.)

There was a very hip, very transgressive, very intellectual and credited in intellectual circles, idea that children were (and should be) inherently sexual with adults, and that to withhold sex from them retarded their development and trampled their rights. (Now my brother’s circle – at least to my knowledge – never engaged in the active side of this, not being thus inclined. One of the fondest memories of my childhood was going to the beach at eight with a group of ten or so long haired (male) hippie freaks, and – since we couldn’t afford a changing booth and they just wore their swim trunks under their clothes – having them form a circle facing outwards, so I could use the center of the circle to change in.)

I heard an echo of that in Marion Zimmer Bradley’s testimony. It was clear she’d heard this theory and internalized it, which caused her to buy the excuses of her pedophile husband. Science fiction writers – and readers – being Odd are capable of convincing themselves of the strangest things. As in “you have to be very smart/an intellectual to believe that utter bullsh*t.”

And I can’t tell you this for sure, because a) I was very young. b) there was no alternative media and this stuff has been pretty thoroughly memory-holed, though you can sometimes find echoes of it, particularly in European stuff, but I suspect our media and intellectual establishment fell for that theory head over heels.

Then when they realized the absolutely horrendous results and that child abuse leaves the victims scarred for life, (if not in therapy.) they swung around and created a whole moral panic over those other people abusing children. In this case the “other people” being some sort of mystical believers, though at the time they weren’t bold enough to accuse Christians. But after all, Satanism if a co-dependent belief with Christianity, so that was fine.

And then when that panic was revealed to be crazy, they accused everyone but themselves of it.

Now the panic is that in these geeky/low prestige fields people the journalists don’t fully understand are afraid of “the other” be they women, people of other races or sexual minorities.

This one is so weird that it leaves me trying to grasp it. As I said, all the geeky fields I know are not just welcoming but ridiculously welcoming of women who are genuinely interested in their passion. It’s the only thing that explains why at my age and avoir du pois I count as “hot” in my circles. But not only is it what the other side believes and resets to, but it is clearly and obviously the “narrative” that will be pushed.

They want to believe the issue people have with the way science fiction has gone, the way games are reviewed, etc are because some imaginary troglodytes, in a cave, probably in Alabama, object to the fact the people creating sf/f and games have innies instead of outies.

The thing doesn’t pass the smell test.

So, what is the truth of it?

The press and the intellectual establishment (which includes the publishing establishment) have been pushing science fiction into an unsaleable/unpopular direction for years. They had, for a while, control of what ended up on shelves, and people didn’t see anything else. They still have control of news.

And the direction they’ve been pushing in is “it shouldn’t be entertaining. It should effect social change.” (But why must it always change TOWARDS Marxism? Marx is after all a dead white male. Eleventy ;))

That is the prestige position in journalism and academia, and so that’s what’s got pushed.

However it’s been disastrous for print runs. So, as the field lies gasping and they’re all out of excuses (indie has proven that people DO still read and no, the American public isn’t illiterate) they have to justify their stunning lack of success. “It’s because we have women and minorities! The evil troglodytes hate women and minorities.”

The fact that women writers are now a majority in the field (and have been my entire professional life) and that if you add in that most editors are women there’s mighty little difference between SF cons and RWA doesn’t even give them any pause.

They’ve got to convince the public that the problem is hatred of women and minorities, because then the explanation for the collapse of the field is someone else’s fault, and they’re the enlightened heroes.

And the same, of course, goes for the gaming field. “Don’t look at the crap we’ve been praising and pushing you to buy. Don’t look at how difficult it is to find something you actually want to read/play. Buy the stuff we tell you, because otherwise you hate women and minorities, you evil h8ter.”

In fact, it is the games books vehicles of social change they’ve been pushing that are excluding of “others” if the “others” are male, or working class, or religious (of a religion not Muslim) or most things that are not white females in an academic environment.

But they hope to make enough noise and use it as the plot of enough TV shows (ripped from the headlines! Eleventy) and movies and articles to convince us they were right all along, the collapse of the field is not their fault, and we should believe them, not our lying eyes.

But we have an internet. And pointing fingers. And laughter.

I don’t think it will work.

Yesterday I was thinking, always a terrible mistake, while I did the cat boxes and scrubbed the toilets (it was that kind of day) about how part of our problem today is not only that parts of our culture don’t know each other, but that parts of our culture actively know stuff about the other parts that absolutely isn’t so.

This is a problem for various reasons, one of them being that various parts of this vast and varied nation think they need the government to protect them from “those fellows over there’ who in fact have no intention of doing anything about/to them. And this is a problem because our system is not designed to give a centralized government that much power; our nation is too varied/different/peculiar for every spot to be justly ruled from a central location (take the $15 an hour boondoggle.  Btw, this is $2 less than than most medical interns make an hour, but I digress.  In some places in the country this is what an adult with practice in his trade — say retail manager — can hope to make, and you absolutely can raise a family on it.  In other parts of the country even $15 is poverty and destitution.  Having a centralized government dictate a minimum wage for everyone regardless of local cost of living makes as much sense as making only shoes in size 8 for the left foot.)

Now it’s always been normal, and it’s part of that human tribal thing, to believe that those guys over there, across the bridge and over the mountain are REALLY weird.

My grandmother as she got very old read newspapers full of marvelous accounts of women giving birth to snakes and other such odd “news”.  I almost swallowed my tongue reading Truth by Terry Pratchett because it pictured that so exactly.  No woman in the village would ever give birth to snakes, but we were civilized and nice, and who knew what those people over the mountain did?  If someone said they did and it was right there in the paper, surely the paper wasn’t allowed to print falsehoods, right?

This might sound like a bumpkin’s idea, but really it isn’t and there is more about this later.  All humans are susceptible to this to some limited extent.  And people who are quite shrewd in one or two areas can be absolutely dumb in things they don’t pay much attention to (see current election for examples.)

For instance, once when I was 15 or so, I needed to get to my high school at indecently early hours.  I don’t remember why, it’s entirely possible it was to finish an art project or to do some volunteer thing.  To get to the highschool I took a train from the village downtown.  We weren’t a station (though the village has one now) but a very informal stop at which maybe one in ten trains stopped (and sometimes scheduled ones forgot and I had to call dad from next village over to pick me up, or if it was early walk the five or six miles back.)  Anyway, the only train available before five am was full of people from the villages beyond the mountains, who came to sell at the big city fairs.  These were sharp people, and small business people.

However, it’s unlikely in those days that their remote villages even had good radio reception, and newspapers would probably have been difficult to obtain. While they were in the city they were working and would absorb any gossip they heard, but not seek out newspapers and news.  At any rate, likely, these people had third grade if that much, and reading might have been a chore.

I was sitting by the window, listening to them talk, and let me tell you, they sounded absolutely as smart as my parents or anyone else.  Until….

A young man with a Spanish accent moved down the carriage telling a story and getting money.  He was a refugee from the Spanish civil war, and all his family had been killed, and he needed money for a new start.

No, don’t tune your receivers.  There was no civil war ongoing in Spain in the seventies.  BUT these people hadn’t paid attention, had vague memories of hearing mom/grandma/great grand say something about a civil war in Spain. They opened their pockets and gave deep.

Rustics, you say.  And yes, it was always part of high culture to make fun of rustics.  Cozened literally comes from the con game in Elizabethan England where a con men would approach a new comer from the countryside, pretend to be their cousin and trick them/rob them.

But now we have something completely different.  While the Rustic in Elizabethan England was a stock character in London, if a person from London traveled in the countryside, it is likely after a while they’d become aware not everyone there was simple, or gullible.  They’d learn to see the countryside as it was, not as they were told it was.

The problem we have right now is that this is near impossible, and the divisions aren’t only geographic.  It’s very easy to set one race against the other, one orientation against the other, even micro cultures against the other.  (The number of times I’ve been informed I spend my weekends wearing Spock ears don’t bear mentioning.)

We’re back to not only the fact that we’re more pervasively immersed in entertainment than any people before, but also that our entertainment, particularly in movies, but also books, is designed to create “false memories.” We are supposed to believe that we lived this.  That’s what the narrative techniques do (if they’re good.)

I’m fine with that, as I read to enjoy being someone else for a time.  And it would be fine if for a while there every news channel, every sitcom, ever movie, every book hadn’t been a unified force selling the same version of reality.  Reinforced experience (aka the big lie) becomes doubly real because “everybody knows.”

Examples of “everybody knows” involve for instance that everybody knows Southerners will be hostile just because you’re not “from around these parts” and also that they’re all inbred ill billies; that no gay man can step outside safely at night without being beat to death; and that everyone on the right is not only Christian, but insanely, unthinkingly Christian and takes orders from their pastors.  And don’t get me started on the ‘murders of abortion doctors’ which many people think rival the numbers of Islamic terrorism, 9/11 and all.

And take the kerfufle over bathrooms and transgendered people using bathrooms.  BOTH sides behave as if they lived in an imaginary and very strange country.

The “You must let transgendered people into your bathrooms” people suffer from the “If you were a dinosaur, my transgendered love” syndrome, in that the only world they really know is the faculty lounge or the privileged country club where the right people assemble. They’ll believe anything of those people out there, beyond hte hill, including that those  people will stop an effeminate looking man or a butch looking woman from using the bathroom and demand they drop trou to prove their identity.  Seriously, what is this actual cr*p about the transgendered being unable to use bathrooms of their assumed sex?  I have friends who are butch women or effeminate men, (and most straight) and none of them ever got stopped at the door and told to prove they were male/female.  So if any transgendered person is making even token efforts to pass, no one is going to question them.  Because in the hinterlands, outside the enlightened faculty lounges, everyone knows people don’t match any label, and there is no defined “masculine” or “feminine”.  If someone looks like they sort of belong, we assume they know what their genitals are.

And then you get into the “but what if it’s just a guy who says he feels like a woman?”  Well, in saner times that would be idiotic, but nowadays it’s possible, thereby justifying a fear of the people against this.  OTOH when the people who say transgendered people are more likely to get assaulted in the bathroom of their birth sex, CANNOT be referring to people whose external appearance entirely and congruently matches their birth sex.

(As for fears your kids will be assaulted, I feel for you, but you realize no one is checking genitals and there are no bathroom guards, so people can and do sneak in and assault the unsuspecting, anyway.  Yes, yes, no reason encouraging it, but seriously.  Making a law against people using the other bathroom would obligate you to check genitals, and you know that we’re not going there either.  Ideally, as a friend suggests, we should have individual bathrooms, like the “family restrooms” available in airports.  This would both equalize the male and female bathrooms — one always over the other always under supplied — and permit people like me who only have children of the other sex, to keep an eye on them when they’re frankly too young and nuts to be trusted in there alone.  And for reasons unknown to me, women objected to Robert in the ladies’ room when he was little more than 3 and to Marshall at 6.)

What you have here is extreme suspicion of a vast majority (people outside the academic lounge and the entertainment industry) built by all our entertainment and news, until people decide a slightly less butch male and more butch female walking into a working class bar would get beat to a pulp for the crime of looking different.  Which is insane.  And which makes every little subgroup feel they need the government to protect them.

This is a dangerous road to go down, because no minority fares well under a totalitarian regime.  That is, the same people who help usher in the tyrant, because they think they need protection from their co-citizens, are the ones who end up suffering the most under it, because in the hard times that accompany tyranny, minorities must be made invisible or destroyed.

Yes, there are new ways to reach the public, and I’m imploring you, if you have an ounce of talent, start running blogs, writing books, doing what you can to wake our co-citizens out of the unrealistic consensus reality that is pitching them against each other.

We must — must — stop seeing each other without the blinders of the ideas pushed on us by those who would be our masters.

Only that way can we remain free.

Because when we get to the point we need the government to tell us where to go to the bathroom, the hour later and the situation far more serious than I thought.

 

 

 

I’m horribly late, partly because I slept late, but also because I feel still groggy.  In explanation, we have an accepted offer on a house — not short sale — and hopefully will be permanently housed in a month and a half.  Early days, yet, but tentatively that’s the plan, and just this is farther than we’ve been since November.

I must have been under a great deal of stress I didn’t even realize, because not only did I sleep better than I have in months, but I woke up late and still feel rather “boneless.”  I also actually feel like working, it’s just that all the little stuff getting there (breakfast, admnistrivia) took forever.

So, establish that I’ve been under a lot of stress.  In such times I tend towards horror.  In the days of the old writers’ group, my friend Becky Lickiss used to say she could tell when I was really depressed, even if I was putting a good face on it, because I always wrote horror.  And the darker the horror, the more depressed I was.  I’d never noticed the correlation.

Now Horror is qualified, when it comes to reading.  I write horror, I can’t read it.  Or at least I can’t read straight up horror, with the meaty skulls and snakes, if you know what I mean, or iow gross-out horror is right out.  And as for creepy horror, well, supernatural horror can scare the bejeezus out of me, but as someone who grew up with a definite tradition and local stories, most of it just makes me roll my eyes and go “that doesn’t make any sense.”

Most of the horror I read is in fact dark fantasy, and about the darkest is Repairman Jack, by F. Paul Wilson.  (Some books are darker than others.  And some are terrifying, but the thriller aspect and… well… it’s human wave fiction, definitely, keeps me reading.)

There are some interesting observations on the series, which appears to have been written from several points inward.  What I mean is that he started with several isolated stories, which are then tied in into a grand theory or conspiracy or something.  Being a writer one can’t help but wonder if he started out with the world built and then went several places in it, or if he simply had these stories and novels, and came up with a world to fit them all into.  It doesn’t matter, of course, but as a fellow craftsperson, one is curious on how the thing one likes was made.

I’m not going to go any deeper into Wilson’s work, though at some point there MIGHT be a post about it.  I do like it very much.

I will mention in passing that the vaunted craftsmanship of traditional publishers never fails to amaze me.  I realized as I was reading the books that my copy of bloodline would not open and kept saying it was licensed to another user (which is stupid.  Look, there’s only one user for this kindle.  That’s doesn’t even… ow, my head hurts.)  After a session with Amazon’s customer service, the problem was fixed and I opened the book for the first time since I first bought it…

And stared at the title page wondering if I’d made a mistake or they had.  The title page says this book is By The Sword, another book in the series.  I decided to read some of the text before complaining — I re-read By The Sword recently — and hot d*mn the book is not By The Sword, but Bloodline.  Which has, atop of it, all the title and copyright info for By the Sword.

I am forever deeply impressed with the craftsmanship and professionalism of the great houses, and the professional care they give to every one of the books contracted to them.  This is me, doing a slow clap in appreciation. And for this you charge the price of a paperback for an ebook.  Of course.  I mean, there’s all that expert help you need to pay and layers and layers of fact checkers and all…

So, where was I?

When I realized I was worsening my depression by reading horror, I decided to read fluffy regency romance.  I read a lot of these.  I don’t require historical accuracy.  I don’t remember most of them a minute after I read them.  It’s just something that doesn’t use up brain cycles, but feeds the need to read.  I read it usually when I’m writing something COMPLETELY different, so that my writing doesn’t become taken over by someone else’s vision/style.

Now, again, while some regency romances (Heyer!) compare well to any other book of any other genre, most of the field’s production (like any other field.  Only regency tends to have happy endings and has relatively less PC bs to fight through)  is what could be called “popcorn”.  They are not well researched, they recycle plots, the characters are extremely well dressed stereotypes, etc.  That’s fine.  As I said above, they tend to be relatively “happy” and angst free, and that’s what I read them for.

OTOH I didn’t feel like spending money (none of the better authors had anything out in a series I follow) and I didn’t want something so riveting it ate up brain cycles.  So I went to Kull and started looking at the better rated regency romances.

I downloaded one with 300 reviews and something around four and a half stars.

And then I started reading it.  By page seven I was wondering if this was written by someone with a cognitive deficiency or just a product of our education system.  It told me, for instance, that London was divided into two sections, the High section where the rich people lived and the low section or low town where the “disadvantaged” lived.

I thought “okay, that’s weird.” but decided perhaps the author had thought that she’d fill in stuff later, then forgot in one section.  I mean reducing the richness of Regency London to “two sections” was a little odd, as though it were Podunk, population 300, but okay.  Give the dog a bite.

By page eleven my eyebrows were attempting to meld with my hairline.  This woman described the day of the Baron’s wife and his daughters and started by telling us that every morning they went around and bought all the food for the household, which they then brought home and gave the servants to cook.  And, btw, older daughter wonders why they can’t just cook it themselves.  After all it’s a family of four.  She often sneaks down to the kitchen to cook in secret.  (Wait, what?)

There follows a highly unlikely escapade in which the two girls go to a street fair (which sounds rather like a high school carnival) in the middle of the night.  yes, in Regency London.  Two young girls.  Middle of the night.  There is a bit of “what are chaperones needed for?  We know the way” — chaperones or GPS?  We report, you decide — but that’s really not any more egregious than in the average Regency, even /particularly traditionally published regencies. (Because feminism, and girls should be allowed to walk around unarmed, after dark, because men and women are exactly alike, and don’t you go talking of different body strength and ability/likelihood of pregnancy in an age where there was no real way to avoid it, you sexist.  We KNOW you just want to keep women down.  Eleventy)

Anyway, I kept reading.  And then the dark stranger who saves them (of course they require saving.  This in no way makes them inferior, you sexist) upon being accosted by the older girl the next morning (She told mom she was going on an errand for an elderly neighbor.  Because Regency ladies ran errands to the store instead of sending a servant.  Totes) tells her he hates the guys who tried to attack her the night before.  As in “I hate those guys.”  Verbatim.

The book didn’t go against the wall because it’s Kindle, and kindles are expensive, but sweet mother of pearl, what a mess.

It’s very clear the writer is trying very hard — and failing — to think herself into another time and place of which she had vague inklings through reading maybe a couple of regency romances.  She knows the ladies of the family spend a lot of time shopping, and being innocent of any knowledge about the incredibly complex rituals and manners of the time, or of the difficulty of showing up every day in a somewhat different attire during the season, she decided “well, they didn’t have refrigerators.  I know! They’re buying the food for the servants to cook!”

Then there is the whole cooking matter.  It is clear that this woman is unaware of the difficulties of cooking “for a family of four” using only coal fired (or perhaps wood fired) stoves, and no dishwashers or refrigerators, no microwaves or other conveniences.  Particularly when the class of the family dictated they host meals and balls.  “Cooking for a family of four” was probably a full time job for at least two, more if entertaining and/or visitors came into it.  But I’m fairly sure this writer was imagining microwaves, only more steampunky.  And viewed people having servants at all as some sort of social injustice.

We’ll look away at her idea that chaperones aren’t needed and somewhat demeaning in a world where a family’s honor (and sometimes fortune) depended on an unsullied daughter.

And we won’t even mention the serious malappropism of “those guys.”

Instead, I’m just going to remind you that this woman has 300 highly favorable reviews and an enviable rank on Amazon.

And that both she and her reviewers likely vote.

Have a happy Monday!

Just slept really late, and dealing with an excess of blood in my caffeine stream.  Post soon.

*Yes, yes, yes, Royal Blood, the second to Sword and Blood will be coming out in May.  Might be mid-may instead of early, because of other obligations and the round of house viewing, but it will come out. Then Eternal Blood in June, come h*ll, high water, comicon OR moving.)

The Promo, the Good and the Readable- Free Range Oyster

 

 

J.M. Ney-Grimm

Hunting Wild

Young Remeya – fosterling and maid-in-waiting to King Xavo’s sister – worships the forbidden horned god alongside the princess. A worship made taboo half a millennium ago. Performed still in secret by a few. Quietly tolerated by the king. Epic fantasy in which old beliefs and old loyalties clash with hidden magic in the Middle Ages of J.M. Ney-Grimm’s god-touched North-lands.

Cedar Sanderson

Inktail & Friends

A Coloring Book

Inktail is a coloring book for all ages, with designs that encourage the user to add their own creativity to the existing art. There is also a section on learning to draw your own dragon.

Leigh Kimmel

Grandmaster’s Gambit

The disastrous war of 1913 is over, and young journalist Isaak Babel has used his fame as a war correspondent to win a peacetime job covering an international chess tournament in New York City. However, trouble is aboard the airship Grossdeuschland, in the form of the notorious Bolshevik terrorist Koba and his henchmen. Men with a dark plan, and New York City will not welcome their visit