War might be the inevitable condition of mankind.

By this I’m not saying humans are bad. Humans are humans. Even if you believe they were built by G-d, keep in mind they were built of the “clay of the Earth.” In a more evolutionary sense, we have, in our construction, lizard and ape and from what my son tells me, when he discusses structures in the brain, some of which still cause us to react, other things, too, like fish, and shrew.

Upon all this, we impose a structure of rationality and we say we’d like to have peace. (Like who wouldn’t? War sucks.)

But Freud, wrong on most things, was right on one thing at least – our thought processing doesn’t go on at the rational level, or at least not most of it. There’s a ton of stuff going on at the backend, stuff we’re not even aware of except vague feelings and ideas.
Complicating the situation for lasting world peace are two problems: the first is that most people aren’t really well acquainted with the contents of their own mind. This also isn’t a criticism. No, seriously. It’s a professional hazard that I have to spend way too much time examining how I think and come to decisions – because it’s important to create characters that sound real.—Spend too much time in the grey stuff, and you start being able to justify just about anything. If you haven’t had a very strong formation, you will entertain five heinous things before breakfast. OTOH spend too little and join in tribalism and the effects on group cohesion of attacking the same person, and war at any level is all too easy.

The other problem is that there is no over-authority that can prevent this. Every hope that an international body would do it missed the fact that international bodies are made up of humans in tribes. So, in the end, they worsen it.

Blame for war after the long war in Europe was placed on many things. The Europeans think it’s the fault of nationalism, and so have refused to stand for their own homelands, have instituted open borders to hostile immigrants, and have generally been committing suicide.

They blame all sorts of other things, too – militarism, the existence of armament’s, science (“If only we hadn’t invented the nuclear bomb.”) etc.

But none of that matters, because what causes us to go to war is what causes us to be humans. There are good sides to tribalism: without it we’d each be loners in a state of nature and the species would long since have died out. And there’s good sides to bellicosity. Without it, that mutant shrew who’d lead to us would have been someone’s lunch and we wouldn’t be here.

The same war like impulse that kills unprovoked, also defends the defenseless. The same nationalist impulse that caused the Nazis to goosestep (and frankly focusing on nationalism as the driver there is insane. As well focus on New Age Theories.) causes a country to provide mutual assistance to the weakest people, and to try to make their territory safe for their citizens. (And btw, the impulse to help others goes down as the surge of unrelated – blood or beliefs, including national allegiance – people come in.)

So even the best, most benevolent overseeing body in the world couldn’t stop war. It could at best, make them regional, smaller, and probably more vicious.

Actually we know exactly what a benevolent body can do. The US, poor Aspergers nation among nations, took seriously the “peacekeeper of the world” mission. Americans have not only bled in battlefields where there was no American interest involved, they’ve bled in contravention of objective American interest. For those following along at home and impressed by the “No blood for oil” slogans, it might interest you to know not even our oil companies benefited. We let France and Russia take all the contracts. Which either makes us prize patsies or well meaning people. Or yes.

And what the US has done is a) keep bleeding and dying b) impoverish itself while nations that no longer needed to defend themselves called us war-mongering. C) botched a few things, because in war as in commerce, you can’t make a decision for other people on what they want. Not in the end.

Which is why at long last, the US elected the man other nations wanted us to elect, the man who would make us just the same as the other nations. One in the group.

So, we’re disarming while Russia is on the march, China is testing weaknesses, and the middle East burns.

The first impulse is to say “well done, you prize idiots” and to step in and calm things down. You see, we don’t want war anymore than anyone else. And if we step in and calm things there will be fewer/smaller wars.

But here’s the thing: we’re broke. And the rest of the nations of the world haven’t been particularly thankful. In fact, they predictably hate us for not letting them slug each other to death.

Fine. If we’re going to be a peer among peers, we have to do something other nations have done since the dawn of time, to secure a generation or two of peace: “Let you and him fight.”

I.e. Russia and China? If they’re fighting each other we’re (relatively) safe from them. The Middle East? Protect Israel (our ally. Allies are important when we need them, and we will because war is inevitable.) and let the others fight.

Unsightly you say? Heartless? The world will burn and there will be piles of dead? And think of the children?

Look, bub, I don’t like war any more than you do. And I have very strong objections to dead children.

But there is no third option. Humans are not malleable. They can’t be posed into something they’re not.

There’s been war since Ogg beat Mogg over the head and stole his mammoth steak. There will always be war.

We’ve proven – and proven and proven – there’s no such thing as an impartial international body, and the US has done better at being impartial than the rest of those organizations.

So, you can let the US be the world’s policemen, with all the ugly stuff that entails, including anger and resentment from those we protect.

Or you can promote “lets you and him fight” and tend our garden, and look after ourselves, while the rest of the world burns.

Both solutions are unpalatable, but no one ever said life was fair, and heck, this administration might have closed the other door for us, and we might be down to “lets you and him fight.”

Most of us haven’t lived in a world without Pax Americana, and if we have to, we’re in for a bumpy ride.

But it could work, which rubbing the lamp and wishing for peace doesn’t.

As could – as does – Pax Americana. It doesn’t work perfectly, but it works better than anything else.

So – what is it going to be? Unpalatable one or unpalatable two?

A hated giant bestriding the nations, or a meek equal quietly saying “Let’s you and him fight?”

 

And there’s a reason for that.

Yes, I have guest posts from ya’ll.  Yes, you were even kind enough to resend them.  The problem is I haven’t had time to read them.  Well, except one, but that one, first got stripped of attachment and THEN the email thought it would be fun to put a bunch of symbols when he pasted it in the body of the email.  I can’t deal with that on this computer and on five hours sleep.

So, why five hours of sleep.  I don’t know.  I don’t even have that many panels (though I tried — and often failed — to make it to friends’ and relatives’ panels.

The thing is that there are so many huns at this con.  I haven’t even — yet — met Barbara Beck, so I’m going to guess she’s been spinning in a different direction from the rest of us.

I’ve tried to get time to talk to each of you guys, but I know some I haven’t SEEN.  I haven’t spent any time with Speaker, for instance.

I did get to hold practice-grandbaby, aka wee Dave… a lot.  Cedar posted pictures on FB.  And I got to spend time with the Grants, Cedar, Vanessa and I had a panel with the inestimable Sabrina Chase.  I also got to see Stephanie Souders and her parents, and we’ve sort of talked, though not for long.

I forgot to set a breakfast for the huns.  (If I only had a brain) but WE’re having breakfast at the nearer city cafe at nine, so if any of you are out here and awake (WHY?) come along.

We’ll be leaving after my last panel, the inexplicable panel on Through Fire.  Heaven knows what one does on a whole panel on a book.  I don’t.

I have various posts I need/want to do, including on changing mores and also on a strategy for world peace called “Let’s you and him fight.”

I’ll probably pre-empt Monday’s raiding party post and switch it to Tuesday for one of those.  Maybe.  Depending on how eventful the trip back is.

I got to read from And Not To Yield at my reading but I don’t say that to make you jealous.  Now there are a dozen people out there who will forever read my books and hear my accent, poor things.

Okay.  Be good.  I’ll be back tomorrow.

 Altering History: Tweak or Wallop? – Alma Boykin

Given the spate of alternate histories and the rise of Steampunk, a writer interested in poking around in the genre needs to look at a couple of things. First, what culture and time period are you going to play in? Second how do you want to change it? Third, are you going to shift it to a different place and play, or keep it on Earth? Fourth, how big of a deal is the alteration to the big scheme of the story? And fifth, what do you need to do to make those changes? There are probably other things I’ve not thought of yet, but for now this essay focuses on the last question.

Before we go too far into the discussion, I’m going to touch on a slight variant that may or may not be alt-hist, depending on what definition you like to use. Straight history but with magic could be considered alternate history, or it could be “fantasy set in Victorian-British-Empire-like world.” It’s up to the author, because how much the magic changes past events tips the balance. Sarah’s Magical British Empire strikes me as closer to fantasy, even though she’s done a lot of research into the time and place and how magic would complicate social and political goings on. But adding Shifters to WWI feels more alt-history, unless it is “magic-talisman type were-creatures” instead of “tough luck to be born an polar bear Shifter in Tucson” like her other were creatures. Patricia Wrede’s Magical West is another that I’d call fantasy rather than alt-hist, although it has major alt-hist elements.

So, how do authors go about mucking with the past (aside from time-travel)? Some people favor the “something didn’t change” method. The western Roman Empire never fell, but shifted over time, developed new technologies, and the year is now [thousand plus years] After the Founding of Rome. Or the Byzantines beat off the Arabs and took over Europe. I look at those as more of extrapolations than the current alt-history trend.

Another way is to take a possible “tipping point” or “hinge of history” and reverse it. What if Rome lost the Punic Wars and North Africans and Arabs dominated the world? Toss in Viking slavers and keep the same pace of technological development, and you end up with Vikings and Arabs colonizing the New World and stocking it with plantations of Celtic Christian slaves (Lion’s Blood by Steven Barnes.)

That leads to the question of just how to go about changing the past. Two general methods seem to be emerging from within the field at the moment, although I sure there are a lot more that I just have not come across, or that people have not published. One is what I’d call the “Wallop” method, like that favored by Eric Flint and S. M. Sterling. These are authors who took a single, massive event and (literally) dumped the change-inducing thing into the past, in one case a West Virginia town that suddenly appears in Central Europe in 1631. In another case a meteorite causes the abandonment of the British Isles and the relocation of the British Empire to India, wipes out part of North America’s Atlantic Seaboard, and creates a steampunk world in the process. Yanking Nantucket Island back a couple thousand years also works. In all these examples, a single huge disruption yanks the path of known history out of shape, and you go from there. You can have moderns running around and getting under the skin of historical figures, or introducing new technologies that tip the balance of world power (or perhaps not), or delay the development of certain technologies (usually electronics and the internal combustion engine). I tend to think of the “send agent back in time to assassinate [major world historical figure]” novel as a Wallop School novel.

It looks easy, it’s dramatic, and you can have modern characters as well as historical ones. Imagine Gloria Steinem lecturing Eleanor of Aquitaine on women’s liberation! (OK, maybe not.) Or giving repeating rifles to the Hussites in 1423 (not that they needed much help), or dragging other high tech or medical tech back in time and changing everything.

Then there’s Tweaking the past. What if Richard the Lionheart decided to stay home and do his dynastic duty? Well, you might get Lord Darcy’s Angevian Empire, for example, with or without magic. What if Emperor Qui Huang Di had managed to eradicate all the teachings of Confucius and Lao-Tse? Would China have developed a different sort of Buddhism? Or would Nestorian Christianity have made more inroads in eastern China, leading to a three-way split in Christendom of Roman Catholic, Orthodox, and Chinese, all fending off the Muslims? Imagine China waging a crusade against the pagan Japanese and sending missionaries to North America and Australia in the 1500s.

Your tweaks can be less dramatic. Let’s say that in 1629, during the Thirty Years War, Emperor Ferdinand II Habsburg issued an Edict of Restoration that established a formal legal process for transferring formerly Catholic ecclesiastic properties back to the Catholics. By doing this he acknowledged that some property had been in Protestant hands for almost a century, and other monasteries and convents had been destroyed, and that a full return was impossible. His Jesuit confessor, who had pushed for a complete and instant reversion, became ill and was unable to push his case at the last minute. As a result, although unhappy, the Protestants leaders were unsurprised and everyone approved of the legal system put into place, more or less. When Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden invaded the next year, the Protestants welcomed him, but warily, and did not go out of their way to open doors. He made less progress as a result, and when the Thirty Years War finally ended, Emperor Ferdinand III was in a much better position and the Empire was stronger and more flexible.

Then, say, in 1864 the Austrians win the Battle of Sadowa, although not easily (and they almost did IRL). This gave Franz Ferdinand considerable power to leverage against the Hohenzollerns, especially since Bavaria waffles, tip-toeing as a neutral between the two, even though officially it remains within the Hohenzollern sphere. This discredits Bismarck, who is unable to take advantage of the situation that develops in Italy the next year, when Count Cavour’s death removes the last obstacle to the unification of the peninsula (another tweak). Garibaldi died in 1850 of a combination of malaria and a riding accident (larger tweak). The Germans concentrate on the French and on their African colonies, leaving the Habsburgs to focus on cementing their control over Eastern Europe and maintaining strong diplomatic ties with some elements of the former Holy Roman Empire.

So, by the time WWI breaks out, you have a different situation in Central Europe, one that would allow for the creation of a Habsburg Confederation after the war, a commonwealth based on the Habsburg Emperor as neutral arbiter and focus of loyalties and shared interests. None of the previous tweaks, in themselves, were large, and all were possible, but the final outcome is very different from Real History. It also means, to do it well, that you have to have a pretty good grasp on what did happen, the personalities involved, and what the different tweak-points might be.

Many authors tend to blend the two, using one moderate Wallop and a number of Tweaks. After all, at a certain point you are going to run out of the technology you dragged back in time as things wear out and can’t be replaced.

It all comes down to the story. Which technique fits your story and the characters in it? You might have Vesuvius in the late 1700s do what it did to the Romans and kill off Lady Hamilton (who was stationed with her husband at the diplomatic mission in Naples), so Lord Nelson settles down and gets married. Or a meteor strike drives the Mongols farther west, so instead of conquering China and India, they take over Europe. You might have Fredric Engels disinherited so he has to work for a living, which keeps him from funding Karl Marx and gives him a rather different view of economics. Or Poincare might die in 1922, which allows the other French, and American and British leaders to ease up on reparations demands from Germany, Austria, and Hungary, and will change the social dynamics when this short Austrian painter starts ranting about Lebensraum. (Except dibs on that last one, I need it.)

This is And Not To Yield, a novella approaching completion, though it would be easier if half of hun-dom didn’t somehow end up in my room every day.  It will (fingers crossed unless I mess it up very badly indeed) be in Worldfire’s five by five anthology of mil sf.  It was a bit of a challenge, since as ya’ll know (but no one else seems to) I don’t write mil sf as such.  This is first draft with all its typos upon it, and I’m sure I made a hash of military ranks, as usual (I’m worse with those than with digits which I transpose on a routine basis.)  So, don’t jump on me.  First this is not US military.  Second the military it is is writing its rules as it goes, because well, revolution and war.  Third, I’ll run this by military betas as soon as it’s done, sweartobunnies.

For those who haven’t read A Few Good Men, or even those who have, this is the same characters, ten years later.

 

And Not To Yield

 

Sarah A. Hoyt

 

The trial starts with a sad-eyed major sitting behind a desk. My desk. My office has been commandeered for my own martial court . We’re almost alone. The new laws require trial by jury – trial by twelve as the people call it – but that rule is not for military trials, where the autocratic rule prevails. Not as bad as under the regime we overthrew, the regime of the Good men, mind. You won’t get condemned and killed because one man, the sole, undisputed hereditary ruler of the Seacity is having a bad day. No. Though there are two privates by the door, both fully armed, ready to shoot me down if I should make a run for it, I’m not treated like a criminal.

Instead, I’m presumed innocent until proven guilty, and I stand in my full uniform, with the colonel insignia at shoulder and sleeve, above the patch showing the legendary mountain from which my land gets its name. And I have a defense council, a judge advocate. He’s not a lawyer but an old friend, Royce Allard, looking hot under the collar and a little afraid.

He should be afraid. The procedures might be impromptu, the courtroom an office, but the results of this procedure are full and binding and final. I stand accused of going AWOL in time of war, and of disobeying the direct orders of my superiors. Then comes the bagful of minor sins, including risking important information falling in the hands of the enemy and risking being taken hostage, and a few other things, possibly including, but not limited to using bad language and being seen in a ragged uniform. All together those are worth little. A few days in jail, a reduction in pay.

It doesn’t matter, because the major charges, if proven, will see me hanged by the neck till dead.

And they will be proven, because, you see, I am guilty.

***

War for me began ten years after revolution had freed Olympus Seacity; five years after I’d been made a colonel and head of our propaganda machine.

It is not war to pilot a desk. It’s not war to think up clever hollo-casts and methods to subvert the enemy’s carefully planted idea that their regime has given the Earth three hundred years of “peace and security”. It is not war to wait, to hope, to search the casualty lists every night, to pray to a God I wasn’t sure of believing in that his name wouldn’t be among the dead and missing.

Though we were both technically believers in the long forbidden Usaian religion, he was the believer, and I believed in him. And though both of us had been instrumental in the revolution that set the Seacity on the path of restoring the ancient principles of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, the truth was that Nat – Nathaniel Green Remy – fought. I stayed home and planned and waited.

Home had been reduced to a small part of what had been my ancestral palace.

My name is Lucius Dante Maximillian Keeva. I was born to one of the fifty men who between them ruled all the Earth – the Good Men, as they were called — and raised as heir to Olympus Seacity and its subject territories. Or not quite. It turned out the intolerable rule of the man whom I have to call father had other dimensions, other implications. Some of which had led me to solitary confinement for fourteen years and to the raw edge of what I must for lack of a better word call sanity.

Nat – and his family – had hauled me back to life and humanity, and if what it cost me was surrendering power and position I never wanted and helping them install their government based on the principles of the long vanished United States of America, I could do that.

Two rooms in the house and the use of an office were all that would have been truly mine, anyway, had I ascended to rule as the Good Man of Olympus. The absolute ruler of that kind of vast empire is no more free than a slave. Oh, his particular whims and his odder tastes might be catered to, but like a slave he is the prisoner of his role, occupied with it from morning to night, his every minute poured into that role.

So, I wasn’t any the worse off for my change in roles, from would-be heir to the territory to officer in the revolutionary army. And other people were happier. Probably. Almost certainly.

Only the Good Men had not let things go lightly. Authority and power are not surrendered willingly, unless it is meaningless and the rule of the Good Men was very meaningful indeed.

For ten years we’d been involved in a war; we’d lost countless people. Young people had been killed in the army, and people of all ages had been killed as the Good Men resorted to terror tactics on the territories; released bio-engineered viruses; destroyed crops and generally made the life of the citizens of Olympus and our allies hell. Against this Nat fought. Against this I composed a war of words, a concatenation of holograms to make it clear to the people under Good Men Rule that we were the better choice; that they should rebel and come to our side.

It worked. Sometimes. Entire cities and seacities had come to our side. But not enough to end the war.

Which meant Nat continued fighting, and I continued to check the casualty and missing list, every night, after a full day of work, and just before turning in.

Which brings me to that August night. It was hot, and I was asleep, uncovered, in my too-large bed. My room is at the top of what used to be the palace, and the door opens to a terrace which in turn looks down all the way to the sea. That door was open, to a smell of salt air, and at first I thought what I heard was the cry of seagulls.

***

“How do you plead?” the sad eyed major asks, after the litany of charges against me is read. “On the charges leveled against you?”

“Guil—” I start. And my judge advocate is there. Royce’s hand clasps around my upper arm so hard that he will leave bruises. Which takes effort, since I’m six seven and built like the proverbial brick shithouse, and though Royce is not a small man, his hand doesn’t even fully go around my arm.

“Sir,” he says, and I wasn’t sure if it was to me or the major. “Sir,” he says, and this time he looks fully at the major. “Sir, Colonel Keeva pleads not guilty due to extenuating circumstances.”

The Major opens his mouth. For a moment I think he’s going to say I’d pleaded guilty, but of course he doesn’t. Instead, he closes his mouth and looks at me, eyebrows raised. Royce’s hand is like an iron band around my forearm. “Yes,” I stammer. “Not guilty due to extenuating circumstances.”

The Major nods. “Very well,” he says. “Do you swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?”

“Yes.”

The judge gestures, and one of the privates by the door, a young man who looks too young to grow a beard and too innocent to be in any military, comes forward with a small, dark box, which he opens. Inside the box is my piece of flag. Not the flag of Olympus, which is a blue flag with the representation of the mythical mountain, but THE flag, the one sacred to every Usaian. At some time in the twenty first century, after the fall of the United States of America, and after the founding of the religion based on the founding documents of that lost country, someone had put all the flags they could find that had once flown over American territory before the fall into a climate-controlled room. Since then every member of the religion got a little piece of the flag. Some were inherited within families. Mine had three stars, and a blood stain. The stain had been acquired when a past owner had been martyred to the faith. Another past owner, martyred to the faith, was my only friend growing up, and Nat’s uncle, Benjamin Franklin Remy. Ben has been dead for twenty five years. Which is good because he might very well think I’d disgraced him and our shared scrap of flag.

The young man hands me the flag. I know what to do. Usaians have sealed all their oaths with a kiss on their piece of the flag, that visible symbol of their allegiance, for centuries.

I press my lips against the flag, and then it is set on the desk in front of me. I look at it and mentally I ask Ben’s forgiveness. “I never meant to sully the flag or the Usaians by association,” I tell him. “But you see, I had to save Nat.”

So, I have guest posts by Alma Boykin, Foxfier and three or four other people, but being the brilliant person I am (eh!) didn’t cue them before we left.  I thought I could access that email from here, but it turns out I can’t.  The only email I have is SFF.net and Alma, at least, isn’t on FB.  Or not under a name I know.  Also, I can’t access FB from this computer, but only from the tablet (no way to transfer stuff.)

So… will those of you who sent me stuff either ping Charlie on FB or at Friday book plug address, and ask him for sff.net address, then re-send stuff?

And meanwhile, I woke up too early and I’m going to shower and have breakfast before I post something, which could end up being a snippet for all I know.  We’ll see when I’m awake.

I read Jason’s piece after this other piece of his about SFWA and the functions of SFWA. Because that wasn’t published here, I thought I should mention it to people, before I start bringing together the posts of the last few days.

For those not wishing to click through, Jason starts with a fairly outrageous thought experiment of, would you throw a switch on a runaway train to save five people at the experiment of another person, and then gave that person and those five people various identities.

The thought experiment hit so many people wrong that it was called “juvenile” all without getting to the last bit of the post, which was this:

Take this all into comparison with the current dust-up in SF/F and you might… MIGHT… begin to understand. For some within the SFWA community, battle lines MUST be drawn. The very soul of science fiction is at stake, they’ll argue. It is their job to protect it from racism, sexism, misogyny and whatever other buzzword of the week is.

Finally… back to the philosophical questions posed above. Please, I want you to be honest with me (and yourself) in this matter… but did you even think of asking if there was someone else around who could help you save everyone? Because, despite your protestations otherwise, you are not the moral majority and you do NOT get to decide who lives and who dies. NOBODY has that right. You do not get to choose whether Neil deGrasse Tyson is more important that anyone else, or that anyone else is more important that Dr. Tyson.

Or, in the case of Science Fiction/Fantasy, you do not get to determine what is the heart, and what is the soul, and you definitely don’t get to decide what is good and what is bad.

Note that Jason is almost young enough to be my son. Or could be my son, if I had been precocious and naughty, or else if I’d been married at the age some of my ancestresses were.

I loved that sentence I bolded, because it’s not something that would ever have occurred to my generation or older. The whole function of the publisher was to decide what was good and what was bad. There were not enough slots to publish everything, and therefore they chose who (in the literary sense) lived and who died. As my friend Dave Freer pointed out, this was hardest on the top ten percent of submissions who were probably good enough to be published but didn’t “fit what we’re looking for.” As someone who got this answer (personal, so it wasn’t just a dismissal) from the very first short story, I’ll endorse this and add something: the problem with my early stories was that I was writing in a highly individual style, partly due to my background. I reshaped my voice to fit the market to such a point that I could not now recapture that young voice. I think I’m better now, but I would think that anyway. I wonder what an explosion of voices and styles the fact that we can go to the public directly will lead to. But that’s a side excursion.

The point is that right now, even as to the quality of the story, you don’t have to go through anyone who judges whether you’re worthy.

Certainly a lot of the things people publish seem to me well-nigh unreadable. And certainly I’ve found myself wondering if fans were quite sane. This was long before electronic indie. Someone local had written and published, at enormous expense, a book which she read excerpts of at a con. To say they were atrociously bad would be mean, but they were pretty d*mn close. They reminded me of my own very early efforts, say, circa 11: a pastiche of fan imitation and lack of technique, such as how to convey something in the book is supposed to be funny.

This woman had fans. It might have been the theme which involved unusual romance, but she had fans.

I’m not a snob, but I sat there thinking “How? How even?”

However the point is I went through the mill and I was taught what “publishable” is. She wasn’t. Was she good? I don’t think so, but who knows? A million styles will undoubtedly come through now, and some might be pleasing to readers. That’s fine by me.

So, if this judgment is so hard to make, what about moral judgments, the sort SFWA is trying to make, of who is good and who is bad, and to whom and to whose ideas should Science Fiction belong?

Supposing she were alive, and tied to train tracks, would you throw a switch to save Marion Zimmer Bradley from being killed by a runaway train? What if the switch sent the train to the tracks where Resnick and Malzberg are tied together?

I know the answer of the glittery hoo-ha Social Justice Workers, but what is YOUR answer?

The answer of SFWA of course should be that it gets all its members into those tracks at speed to untie all three and pull them to safety. In a metaphorical sense, this is exactly what SFWA was supposed to do in a system which was inherently unfair to the writer.

Moral arbitration never came into it, and it only comes into it now because the people currently in charge of SFWA both think they have all the answers and are stupid enough to think that history is uni-directional and runs in the direction of their beliefs. I’m tempted to say they’ll grow up, but some are my age, and those who aren’t are only ten years younger and ten years ago I knew better.

Moral arbitration requires a system it doesn’t and can’t have, one that looks at the evidence and filters hearsay, one that determines if a crime or even something morally repulsive occurred. It is not “the court of public opinion.”

Dr. Pournelle commented on Jason’s post yesterday. Normally I’d link it here, but I’m away from home, en route to Liberty con, and accessing the comments is something that would take me an hour, otherwise I’d quote his comment. What he said was to the extent that neither he nor Poul Anderson who knew MZB well ever saw evidence of evil-doing, or even indications thereof, and that even the case against her husband seemed a whole lot shakier.

I’m an admirer of Dr. Pournelle, and also, I hope, a friend, and knowing him I would believe his judgment over, even, that of other witnesses. But as my friend Dave Freer answered in comments, no pedophile in their right mind would show even hints of such behavior around Dr. Pournelle or Poul Anderson (whom I’ve never met, so I’m guessing from his books.)

The same as various people are testifying, seemed to be the case with Ed Krammer, founder of Dragon Con, whom various unimpeachable (and not leftist – which is important because people who lionize Che have no more standing. Che’s biography reads, to steal from Grosse Pointe Blank, “like a demon’s resume” but they wear him on t-shirts and hang up posters of him) figures in science fiction were convinced was innocent and came forward to defend.

Does this mean there is a chance MZB was innocent?

Let’s talk about innocent, shall we.

First of all, there should be a defense called “Whilst the balance of society was out of its ever-loving mind.”

It is neither politic nor possibly kind to bring it up here, but in the seventies various authorities who should be hung by the thumbs till dead, were convinced sex with adults was good for children and kept them from being frustrated and such. Yes, this is wrong and here I’m going to say it’s objectively wrong. I have more in common with Jason than I’d like to discuss right here, right now, though in my case, its being a family friend and my not being able to convey to anyone what had happened, at least the authorities didn’t make it worse by taking me away. (He eventually drifted away – I’d grown too old for him – and my parents didn’t find out until he died and his own daughters talked about what he’d done to them, at which point I told my mom – I doubt my dad still knows to this day. The theme surfaces in some of my stories, which I hope no one thinks means I’m advocating it.)

Our current stand is perhaps a little too hysterical in the other direction, though. Please, don’t throw things at me. I am not, nor will I ever, advocate sex with children under or just past puberty, and frankly, as a human being of middle years, the thought of sex with anyone my kids’ age (well beyond age of consent) is puzzling, because what could you possibly have in common with them? BUT I’m sick and tired of moral preening and outrage when some guy gets caught with a woman a few months below the age of consent. Yes, there’s a power imbalance. Yes, there is to an extent an adult “taking advantage” of someone younger. But that way goes the thought of the SJW’s and ends with all PIV being rape, because power imbalances in societies, oh, noes.

The fact is we don’t grow a visible (or invisible) mark of adulthood when we turn eighteen. In fact adulthood at eighteen is a fiction, and a crazy one. Some of my worst mistakes which were largely due to stupid immaturity came in my twenties. I was older than my years in some ways and a moral infant in others.

You need a convenient dividing line, and it’s been set at 18. Fine. I don’t intend to buck it (see where I have no interest in anyone under 40 or, really, anyone but my husband.)

But be aware of how extremely the pendulum has swung. Yes, in the seventies, reputable (and very Marxist, which was part of it, because of thinking of people as not having a moral dimension) thinkers thought sex with children was not only a okay, but might be beneficial.

There is a distressing tendency in SF/F to throw in with the latest scientific obsession, and some hint of that came across to me from MZB’s disposition – that “I traveled so far in my thought that I lost my bearings” bewildered tone of “Some people might be mature enough for sex at—”

While this did not excuse her turning a blind eye in Breen’s case, it does explain the circumstances of it, assuming that she were innocent of it herself.

Guys, it’s no use whatsoever pretending our people aren’t weird, and sexually weird, as well as in other ways, and that part of our weirdness is driven by “thinking too much.”

There is a book called House of Redgrave, which so far as I knew is not available in ebook in the US, or at least it wasn’t a few weeks ago, when I looked. It is the “biography” of actress Vanessa Redgrave, or perhaps of her family. My son and I stumbled on a review of it at the same time. The review described a scene of Vanessa coming in and finding her husband and father in bed together. According to the reviewer, her father said, “Darling, what is the problem? You love him, I love him—”

It came up in conversation with my son (my son is 22 and, yep, we often discuss cultural stuff and weirdness) and he said, “The worst part is that I can imagine hearing the same story at a con, and at least half the time the ending wouldn’t be that she ran screaming from the room. No, it would be “and I thought about it, and he was right, so we’ve been living in a threesome for 20 years, but it’s all right, because my dad and I don’t do anything, we just share whateverhisnameis.”

And you know what, he’s absolutely right. Our field – mostly fandom, though there are some authors too – has some of the most… ah… interesting amorous arrangements in history. Most of this falls under the heading of group marriage, as I found out as I made what I thought was a joke about it at a con, by saying that polygamy was its own punishment and found more than one line marriage among the audience. (All of them offended.)

It takes very smart people to try something that crazy and make it work. Now, as far as I know, those are all adults, and no, I’m not putting it on a level as child rape, but while normal people would recoil from line marriages, among our people you are likely to find them accepted and have to worry about offending them. From that point, it’s easy to imagine MZB thinking there were circumstances under which a bit of pedophilia was excusable, if not morally justified.

Then there is hearsay. I presume the depositions are authentic. They have that feel. And please don’t think I’m impugning MZB’s daughter, I’m sure difficult, coming out with her own story. I believe this is all true, simply because it has that feel and it connects with the history other people peripheral to the circle, have talked about.

However, if one wanted to judge, really judge, finally and with the consequences of a court at law, more would be needed. Much more.

Again, I don’t think it applies in this case, but we’ve all heard of false memories, not to mention anything else.

What I’m trying to say here is that it’s possible for us to work and live alongside people who do heinous things and never know they did those heinous things or even suspect something is not quite right.

My parents certainly had no idea what was going on with their old friend who was very careful around them. (My mom should have guessed from what she walked in on, once, but who am I to judge. I might not have guessed, particularly if this was an old friend and I had reason to like him and think him a good person and my daughter were 9, looked like a boy, and I thought her too young for anyone to think of her sexually.) Even though he was abusing their only daughter under their own roof.

Much less could colleagues and even con-friends of various people know what was going on in their private lives.

I despise the “you must distance yourself from” mentality that pervades politics because of that. Ninety percent of the time the horrible blurting one must distance from (or even the horrible reported actions) have been spun to be far more heinous.

The insistence one pass moral judgment on people with whom one associates only in a distant and at a remove way, like colleagues or, more ludicrous, someone who shares SOME of our opinions, is a recipe for witch hunts. Irrational ones.

What happened to Resnick and Malzberg was certainly irrational, and we have young people thinking they were “describing” women in bikini and going on about how hot they were, instead of mentioning in passing how beautiful an editor was, and also committing the unspeakable crime of calling someone a lady.

And it’s equally irrational to tar everyone with child-rape because they didn’t know MZB likely was committing it, and supported her in other capacities.

Which is why that is not what SFWA is supposed to do. Not by any remote, or even insane stretch of the imagination.

It is a professional organization. That’s all it is. If someone is tied to the rail of a bad contract, bad publicity, inability to navigate the world of publishing, it’s supposed to untie them, not throw the switch to someone “more guilty of bad think” or disapproved of by the majority of its members.

Instead, in an age where the aesthetic judgment of publishers is no longer needed nor indeed productive, its chosen to throw its lot behind MORAL judgment and a sort of aesthetic based on politics. I don’t know what that aesthetic is good for, but it’s certainly not for choosing stories that will have broad appeal. (If you were a science fiction writer, my love, you’d know that that particular story was the sort of twaddle written by a precocious/delayed adolescent trying to hit all the right buttons.) And I don’t know what their moral judgment is good for, but I defy anyone sane to explain why one should destroy all books written by someone who – like our president for most of his term – disapproves of gay marriage, (and for the record, I support gay marriage, so this isn’t even an opinion I agree with, just one that is neither criminal nor particularly rare) – while keeping the books of someone who stands accused of child rape by her own daughter.

The book is not the writer. Yes, a certain type of book makes me recoil: books that ADVOCATE (not merely mention or even write about it, says she who got a story rejected 70 places because someone confused describing Roman ephebophilia with advocating it.) pedophilia are among those. As are books whose “moral” is that human beings are the worst creatures on Earth. (Compared to what?) she asks. Other books I have no interest in are noble savage books, that put down Western Civilization in favor of some mythical, untainted culture. (There is never any such thing, all cultures being composed of human beings.)

BUT note I don’t advocate shunning those books. They’re not for me, but some might find value in them.

I don’t advocate shunning the writer, either, unless instruments of justice finer than we, as colleagues and fellow writers, can command, determine the writer is guilty. Then you’re free to recoil, as you would from anyone else, but you don’t have to “distance” yourself anymore than a computer programmer would have to distance themselves if another computer programmer were a mass murderer. Of course, if you know of what happened, and that a court found them guilty, you also shouldn’t write a lauding biography with no mention of it.

But you don’t have to say “my whole field is tainted, woe is me.” I’m neither into pedophilia, nor into line marriage. And the fact that many of the active fans and some of my colleagues are capable of entertaining very weird ideas doesn’t even make my field unique. Almost any “geek field” is like that, part of thinking so much you can believe and/or excuse anything.

You don’t share anything with these people but an avocation. The avocation is not what makes them either call women ladies or sleep with children. (And if you don’t see a difference in “crime” between those two, you might consider having your head examined.)

No organization of writers, in fact no “Consensus of the field” should have an opinion in this. Individual writers may, if they so wish.

As someone who grew up across the sea, thinking of all science fiction writers as gods in their own little Olympus I say, let the evil that men (and women) did be interred with their bones. Judge them only as writers and as colleagues. And be aware other people will judge them differently.

There is no imperative to – universally – like or dislike the same things, or even the same type of things, or even things with the same structure.

My guess is over the next ten years the field will become so aesthetically diverse that the idea of judging the “best sf novel of the year” will be an artifact of a time long gone.

And the idea of judging writers’ work by the writers’ morals or bad think or lack there of is already crazy, and will by then be simply alien, like a fragment of something found on alien ruins which might have been an object used every day, a piece of a spaceship that once landed there, or a rare object d’art a long vanished race thought beautiful.

There will be no way to even guess at its form or function.

 

 

 

 

Tacare Consensu- Jason Cordova

Once upon a time (let’s call it 1983) in a land far away (California), a young boy was molested for almost a year by his mother’s at-the-time boyfriend every night while she was away at work. The man told the little boy that he needed to check on him, per doctor’s orders, and his mom said it was okay. The little boy, being of the trusting sort, let the adult do whatever he wanted. The grownup was eventually caught, tried, and convicted… of 6 months in a mental rehab center, where he would be discharged 4 months later since whatever was wrong with him was cleared and he was “cured”. Meanwhile, the little boy was moved out of the home and into a group home, where he would bounce from group home to group home until he was emancipated at the age of 17, after finally getting a brief shot at a foster home.

The grown man served 4 months, the young boy served 13 years. Somehow, the wrong person was punished.

But how, you may be asking as that small, cold sliver of hate is infiltrating your soul, is that relevant to today? The young boy obviously dealt with it better than most (indeed he did, at the cost of his sanity for X number of years), so why would it matter in this day and age?

Because someone decided to write a wonderful, glowing piece on Marion Zimmer Bradley about how she has helped so many people, and her being a classic icon in modern feminism, and…. oh yeah, being a pedophile enabler and a child molester herself.

Fuck your trigger warnings. Buck up, buttercup, because shit just got real.

It came to light these past few weeks after Tor.com wrote a glowing piece about Marion Zimmer Bradley that MZB’s daughter, Moira Greyland, came out about how her mother abused her when she was a child (in addition to defending the abuse her ex-husband committed on young boys, and then showed no remorse or sympathy for the victims – per her own daughter’s words). And you know what? People are still defending MZB and saying that her actions in life should not be taken into consideration when people think about her, and instead, they should focus on the writings in her books and that only.

That is some twisty logic right there. Oh, wait, that’s not logic – that’s apologia.

Now it’s one thing to ignore someone’s politics while reading their work (I love Eric Flint’s books, but he’s a card-carrying communist). It’s quite another to ignore what they do as a human being. I mean, they tried that once, and look how well THAT turned out (see the curious case of Jack Unterweger, prostitute murderer and literati darling). There are monsters, very real and ugly monsters, and yet for some reason people will defend their actions or, worse yet, try to obfuscate them.

So who is the real monster: the person who committed the acts, or the apologist explaining the acts and even, in some cases, justifying them?

Yes, you there, defending MZB because you enjoyed her books– you’re a monster, too. You use psychology to defend her actions, you claim her ignorance was a product of the way she was raised, you state that her dislike for sexual favors from her ex was a result of her inherent lesbianism (yes, someone stated that) and she could not possibly understand what her husband was forcing a child to do. You are as much of the problem as the actual perpetrator is, because you are an enabler There’s a special little place for you.

(oddly enough, if someone accused of racism tried the classic “oh, I’m just product of a different era” excuse, people would be jumping on that so quickly that it would make heads spin and babies cry)

But frighteningly enough, here is someone far worse here. A… parasitic disease which has wormed its way into what some call Modern Progressive Liberalism (which has corrupted the meaning of the word “liberal”, but that’s for another day). The disease is in plain sight, yet nobody speaks of it lest they incur the wrath of the MPLs. It’s the people within SFWA who aren’t 100% true believers but watch guys like Larry Correia get attacked– and do nothing. They’re the women who watch as Feminists viciously attack Sarah Hoyt– and say nothing. They are enablers of the worst sort. They are… dun dun duuuun… Tacare Consensu, the Silent Consent (rough translation; my Latin sucks and I had to use Google). They see it happening and ignore it. They know what has happened but say nothing, do nothing, and allow others to “circle the wagons” to protect someone who should be dragged through the mud, tarred and feathered publicly, and rode out of town.

And it is a disease, one that seems to infest members of the SFWA. There has been no call to excommunicate Samuel Delaney, 2013 Grand Master of the SFWA (and… wait for it… proponent of NAMBLA – the North American Man-Boy Love Association), no call to kick him out. There has been little effort to do much of anything, actually. Hence, the full-force arrival (or… absence of, depending on how you look at things) of SFWA’s Tacare Consensu (I really hope I got that translation correct). You know what? Someone suggested that the Nebula Award should be renamed NAMBuLA and I, for one, completely and totally agree with it.

Look, I know that most members of SFWA are simply thrilled to be part of an organization that condones and endorses child molestation. I know that they back their organization 100% despite the organization which was designed to protect them from predatory publishers and agents allow those predatory publishers and agents to be members as well. I’m sure they’re glad to get lumped into the same group as the race baiters and hate mongers simply so they can call themselves “professionals”. Hell, why wouldn’t they want to be part of a group that, if one uses the same logic they use against people like me, is totally cool with pederasts.

After all, they’re silently complicit.

Just like the neighbors of that little boy were back in 1983…

 http://www.jasoncordova.com

 

*Sorry this is slightly more incoherent than normal.  I’m being interrupted by packing and sorting stuff.*

I did not mean to write this post today, but I feel I need to to link it both to Cedar’s post yesterday and to a guest post by Jason Cordova tomorrow, a day that will be taken up with my travel to Liberty con, and so a day when I can’t write or think very clearly.

I will have access to the internet from the hotel, so I’ll try to write posts, but I might round some out with Blasts from the past or pictures from the con.

No chapters on Saturday and Sunday, instead of which I have guest posts to go up.

Anyway – sometimes things other people say become part of a discussion that takes place entirely in my head, and this is part of it.

All of you know, though I can’t find it now, I objected to their kicking a member (I’m not naming him because some trolls search out his name and descend en masse) from SFWA on trumped up charges but really because they thought he was an awful person and a racist. I objected to this because – and I used the most extreme example I could think of – a plumber’s union doesn’t kick out a guy for being a child molester. If SFWA were a professional organization, their kicking someone out for double ungood thought crime would be crazy. As would be kicking someone out for being a child molester, or a murderer, even.

Of course, SFWA is not a professional organization, but a sort of fluffer’s club for people who wish to kiss up to publishers. And that’s fine by me, of course.

I don’t have to belong.

But both Cedar’s post yesterday and Jason’s tomorrow (which I have of course read) got me to thinking of the relation between the artist and the art. The fluffer’s club is screaming it doesn’t matter when it comes to unsavory actions by people they admire – Marion Zimmer Bradley, Delaney – but it’s absolutely to be taken in account when it comes to people who do things they don’t like, like Larry Correia happening to admire the story by the disgraced SFWA member that shall henceforth be called “The Banished One.”

This is the sort of extremely coherent reasoning and moral honesty we’ve come to expect from people – particularly artists – on the left side of the isle. After all they couldn’t admire communists and socialists without being able to turn their beliefs off and on at will, could they? It’s not a big secret, in the age of the internet, that Che was a psychopath who enjoyed killing people with his own hands (and weapons) but they still wear Che t-shirts, because cool and hot. And if they ever tried to coherently examine their beliefs, the stuff would fall apart like the moth eaten cloth it is.

Which brings us to the relation between beauty and the creator thereof and the creator’s personal life.

You know, Heinlein somewhere has a comment where he says you could shred the universe and find not one atom of beauty or truth. Because those reside in the human heart.

This is true, and not. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Jubal Harshaw gives one of the more blistering critiques of art in general that I’ve ever heard.

That is the duality of Heinlein who even as a Fabian socialist wrote stunningly individual and self-responsible characters. You can’t pin the man down.

Just as you can’t pin beauty down. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

Back in the seventies it was normal to try to break the rules of storytelling. I’ve said before that I had to read – for school – a novel that bragged of having no plot. It’s just two people, talking in a car. (And it sucked.)

What we found through those experiments is that the human brain is wired to take in story in a certain format, that format being “the hero’s journey” which is at any rate rather fluid and lose. Pixar formalized that into a list of steps, which can be found in a book called The Writer’s Journey. Pixar was denounced for it, as having created a formulaic check list which impairs creativity. Bushwah.

The list is merely a constraint, and you can make completely different stories within it, particularly if you scramble it a bit, which the hero’s journey allows for, since some steps are optional and some can be re-ordered. (Though I have to tell you right now that if you leave the acceptance of the call till mid-book you’re going to cry in your soup. It doesn’t work.)

There might be no objective beauty outside the human brain, but the human brain is built along certain lines, which means that most of us tend to react to certain things in a certain way.

For instance, while working in the yard yesterday I came across (okay, tripped on) a piece of rotted root that I thought was beautiful. But I thought it was beautiful because its shape looked like it had been fashioned by little people as an entrance to their home.

If I drew that piece of wood, would it evoke the same image in people who are not steeped in fantasy? I doubt it. So, if I drew it for the commercial market, I’d have to call it “fairy’s doorway” and even then, chances were half the people wouldn’t see it. Now, if I drew it for the fantasy circuit, and put in the inner hole just a glimpse of a winged form, it would evoke the right emotions – for a limited market.

I think what I’m trying to get to is this: there are some innate things that make us perceive things as beautiful. Certain parameters within which the human brain functions.

Ojectively, that means that some people will find the horrible beautiful, but those people are also – usually – objectively brain damaged. Not insane, just… peculiar.

There is a theory that the push for what is objectively ugly or meaningless to most normal people in all fields is an attempt to corrupt the culture and a grand conspiracy. Maybe. Normally I laugh at such things, but since Journolist, not so much. OTOH if it is a conspiracy, it has to be the sort of loose one that can survive generations. PERHAPS it is (also objectively) or was at one point directed by communist propaganda against the west and its art. I know that various artists and writers organizations were hard left, and I’ve heard that sf magazines were subsidized by CPUSA to publish anti-US stuff. Who knows?

But mostly I think what happened to art after WWI was an effect of WWI and of people being disillusioned with western institutions in general. My colleague at PJM, Ed Driscoll has done some stunning work in that theory. I don’t have links to hand, but I’m sure some of you will in the comments.

In that sense it would be more accurate to say that a traumatized civilization can’t express itself coherently in art, or in the appreciation of beauty.

Which brings us back around to the artist and the art.

Can someone who is a murderer, a pedophile or – ah, poor Banished One – capable of bad-think make good art?

First of all let’s establish what is and isn’t a … “corrupting effect.”

If you have bad thoughts according to current PC, you might still be a decent human being who pays your bills, feeds the dog, takes in stray cats, is kind to friends and children, etc. So we’ll establish that bad thoughts by themselves ned not have a corrupting effect on your life, and perhaps not in your fiction, unless they obsess you to such a degree that you can’t help but put it in your fiction. Let’s point out right here that I know people who do have that issue, usually with kinky sex, which starts leaking into their novels. In the cases I know, a little bit is okay, but if you let it BECOME the only thing you write it’s a problem. Of course, by the time you get THERE, you usually have lost control of other things.

Which brings us again to who the artist is, and what the art is.

For years I tried to write books that were utterly divorced from myself and had nothing to do with me. This is because, partly, I didn’t want to write about politics. Partly it was because it was part of my distancing myself from books that were being killed.

You’ve heard that for a book to be good, the writer must put himself in it to some degree. I confess I became successful when I started doing just that.

The reaction we get to art is not from a perfect execution or detail polishing. It’s an emotional gut reaction, which is best achieved by having the artist pour out a bit of his own emotional gut reaction. (This is perhaps the reason I prefer some artists in what is objectively their decaying mode. The later Heinleins, the last few Leonard Cohen albums. They’re less controlled, but speak more directly to the emotions.)

Now a good artist knows how to take those bits and shape them so they appeal to a larger majority. Or at least a good artist tries to. I have analyzed both my peculiarities and those of the “general public” or the greater majority of reading people, and try to shape my strange stuff to fit with other people.

Would this be possible for people who live such disordered personal lives that it falls into “criminal”? I don’t know.

You guys know all of us, artists, are to an extent outside the social order. It’s what allows us to do what we do. Tomorrow we’re supposed to meet my husband’s best friend from college, and I have some trepidation, as he seems to have become absolutely conventional, which means we’ll stand sideways and upside down to him. And we are, mind, one of the most boring “middle class” couples in science fiction. But we have a taste for low dive diners, which apparently caused him to react with horror to the suggestion we meet in one. And at the same time when we have money (alas not now) we will know the best restaurants in town, because sometimes what you need is a very good dinner and jazz-dancing afterwards. (Okay, birthdays and important anniversaries, but still.)

More than that, we’ve all read biographies of artists and writers, starting with DaVinci who was tried for what sounds uncommonly like child abuse but was, probably, just a spot of sodomy between studio apprentices. (Hey, it was cold in those big stucco buildings.)

And you come back to “How can people create this and yet be such horrible human beings?”

I don’t know.

First the concept of awful human being is different depending on the person. For instance, I think thought crime counts for nothing. And I think even “child abuse” has soft edges. For instance, I sympathized with MZB saying that of course some people were mature at different ages. HOWEVER no one is mature enough at 10 or 11, and there are uh… other shadings of influence and coercion that are harder when there is a great disparity in age. But if it comes to a seventeen year old girl… well… My brother was born when mom was just on eighteen and dad was 21. I know, the age difference wouldn’t make him a child abuser, but at 15 she’d dated a much older man. At 15 with the life she’d led, she was objectively an adult, and had been earning her own living for three years.

I’m NOT defending what MZB did, particularly considering she was herself apparently doing a spot of child abuse on the side starting when the child was at a very young age indeed; I’m just saying that these things change with time and place. No one in Portugal in the fifties would condemn my mom’s boyfriend before my dad just because there was six years difference between them and he was 20. BUT if my 20 year old brought home a 14 year old girlfriend, we’d have to talk. And there better not being anything happening between them.

This is because the law has changed, but also because people have changed. There’s a great difference between mom at 14 and an American middle school girl now.

However, let’s establish that an artist or writer is objectively depraved. Let’s say he’s a mass murderer.

Can he still produce breathtaking beauty?

I don’t know. Most of the cases – as with MZB – that have come out, have turned out to be people whose work doesn’t touch me. In fact most of them are “vanguard” and people who change the work to make the awful beautiful. People who turn against not the established order (which these days is mostly left) but the traditional order of art and beauty.

Of course innovators turn against that too, which is why our art doesn’t look like it did in Summeria.

However there is a difference between art that takes the principles and uses them in new ways, and art that subverts the principles in service of ugly. Ugly visuals, ugly thoughts, ugly deeds.

As someone who writes, I don’t think you can separate the art from the artist. Not intrinsically.

A lot of what we do is subconscious and will come through.

Now, that doesn’t mean some Marxist might not find great solace in my work, if he or she puts a mind to it. I’m just saying that what they’re reacting to is NOT nor can it be the central point of what I put in it.

I love Pratchett, even though I disagree with most of his political views. I love Heinlein, but most of what he believed for most of his life is alien to me.

So, you can’t separate the art from the artist, but what the artist puts in the art, if true art, is not always what he is. As I said, early Heinlein had plenty of individualism, despite his earnest lectures on how bad it was. And Pratchett hits on the truth more often than he allows himself to think about.

The same applies to a lot of writers and artists.

The question comes down to – pardon me – the sin and the sinner. If the artist has some… uh… moral warts, they will slowly (if he fights) corrupt his art. But that doesn’t mean at least his early art won’t be fine.

What I mean is, what destroys the art is not the crime or the evil acts commited by the artist. It’s the way those, in turn, change the artist. If you killed someone and then consciously try to justify it, the justifications will leak into your art and corrupt it.

Does that mean I won’t read Marxist authors? Well, not after I start seeing the corruption seeping into the art. But I will read their early works.

And as for judging people… Well, I never read much Bradley – couldn’t get into it – so I’m not purging her books from my library. Ditto with Delaney.

But if it came out tomorrow that Heinlein had a liaison with a 15 year old girl? Would I stop reading him?

Well, no. I didn’t see the issue in his books before, so they’re still fine by me. But in the same way, I will not refuse to read the Banished One or even vote for him for awards just because he’s alleged to have double plus ungood thoughts.

Some people I’ve met before reading I can’t read (a good argument for writers to NEVER meet people, btw) because they were so abrasive, awful people in person.

But the rest? I don’t judge people positively or negatively because or despite of their books. Unless the books themselves are repulsive or show the stain of what they did.

That way lies witchhunts and censorship, because I guarantee if you go out three degrees of separation all of us are linked to awful people.

On the other hand I think the evil that men do (and women), the evil they’re aware of having done, leaks into their art. If you create, be aware of it.

And let’s be done with art that celebrates evil or horrible things. Yes, the shock it causes can pass for strong emotion for a while, but look, the only reason Titus Andronicus survives is because of Shakespeare’s other work.

No, I’m not calling for censorship. I’m calling, though, for Western art to return to certain ideals of loyalty to and celebration of that unique and odd creature, the human.

Let’s be done with showing only his ugly and brutal side. We’re not creating art for the sentient lobsters of alpha centauri but for humans, and what humans read influences them.

Let’s be done with “all humanity is evil.” Let’s put an end to “everyone is awful” as a view of the world. Humans are flawed, yes, but they often have the qualities of their failings.

Write Human Wave. Read Human Wave. Celebrate being human. And try to be the best you can.

 

 

Who Murdered Beauty?- Cedar Sanderson

 

We meet today, my friends, to attempt to solve a crime. A crime against all of humanity, one which is extinguishing the life from Art, Philosophy, and even Ethics. Unlike with a human life, the existence may yet be restored to Beauty, but it will take solving the murder first, so we may begin to breathe life anew into these noble causes. We may look at the vast scope of what we contemplate, and wonder: can we do this? Is it worth doing? What difference can we few make?

 

I say, let us discuss Means, Motive, and Opportunity, and in doing so, you may find answers to some of your questions. I may take an obscure path, through all of Aesthetics, but I think you will see our steps guided through the philosophy of the nature of humanity and soul, to the visual feast of Art.

 

Motives

 

The death of objective standards of beauty, which would lead in time to the demise of Art, and which was a visual indication of the state of affairs in which Ethics and Philosophy find themselves today, began innocently enough. The rise of the great philosophers in the 18th century was lauded as a new wave of humanism. Gone was the world’s dependence on that crutch, religion. Humanity was the be-all and end-all, and with death, there is only silence hereafter. A world ready to abandon those who would tell them what to do and how to do it, embraced this concept, only to find themselves very shortly back in the same situation.

 

“Beauty is no quality in things themselves: It exists merely in the mind which contemplates them; and each mind perceives a different beauty. One person may even perceive deformity, where another is sensible of beauty; and every individual ought to acquiesce in his own sentiment, without pretending to regulate those of others.” (Hume 1757, 136)

 

With nudges and suggestions and sly winks, Hume, Kant, Nietzsche and many others removed the idea that there is a standard, be it for morals, beauty, or thought. If all is relative, relative to what?

 

The rise of Humanism brought about the rise of Nihilism, and “What began as a critique of divine authority due to humanist influences became part of a much wider social movement that criticised any kind of authority as ultimately unjustified…” (Nihilism and the Sublime Postmodern By William Slocombe, 2006, p11)   What had begun, in other words, as questioning authority, had become a rejection of any authority, of any standards or objective foundations. All must be destroyed, and a new thing brought up in the rubble, to separate the new from the old.

 

Means

 

 

 

Philosophers who were engaged in the building of the New Western Culture, one stripped of all that had gone before, inasmuch as they were capable of, affected the academic and literary bastions first, then slowly this rippled throughout the world as it was taught to those who would teach, and so on. Nietzsche was one of the ‘rockstars’ of this early movement. “As early as 1873, Nietzsche was arguing that human reason is only one of many peculiar developments in the ebb and flow of time, and when there are no more rational animals nothing of absolute value will have transpired (“On truth and lies in a non-moral sense”).” (Dale Wilkerson, ND)

Values, much less absolute values? Valueless. “Given that no absolute values exist, in Nietzsche’s worldview, the evolution of values on earth must be measured by some other means. How then shall they be understood? The existence of a value presupposes a value-positing perspective, and values are created by human beings (and perhaps other value-positing agents) as aids for survival and growth.” (Dale Wilkerson, ND) And here we come to the nut of the matter. If all is relative to the human experience, no more and no less, how can we possibly say one thing is better than another? If you see it as beautiful, and I do not, and you are louder than I am, in control over me, as socialists would have it (because in communal control, all are in control over all the others, unless there are some who are more equal than others, in which case they are in control. “The tendencies in socialism that came to be known as ‘Marxist’ or ‘Communist’ exemplify this position. The rhetoric was always that the goal was the direct and communal control of society for the common benefit of all members.” (What is Left? Nihilism vs Socialism, 2012)

“This is simply a statement of solipsism -‘without me the world does not exist‘ – although it does have wider reaching implications when it is perceived as the belief that nothing exists at all; that is, nothing exists, there is no reality against which to measure this, and no-one to measure it anyway. It is based upon the belief that reality is illusory, an arbitrary set of rules that has no meaning. The view that ̳nothing is real ‘can lead to either a magnificent furore of being the centre of the universe – without its perception by the observer, the world does not exist – or to complete impotence in the face of an overwhelming nullity, depending upon the extent to which this nihilistic formulation is pursued.” (Will Slocombe, 2003)

We are left now, in the age of progressives, post-modernism, and nihilism, with an emptiness. We dare not say ‘this is beautiful’ or ‘this is art’ or even, ‘this is true’ as they have taken all those things from us. They have cut the head off of beauty and proclaimed that it never existed, that there are no standards, and there ought not to be. All is relative… self-evidently relative to what they want, as they are in control.

Hegel, lecturing on Aesthetics, comments “Beauty and art does indeed pervade all the business of life like a friendly genius and brightly adorns all our surroundings whether inner or outer, mitigating the seriousness of our circumstances and the complexities of the actual world, extinguishing idleness in an entertaining way, and, where there is nothing good to be done, filling the place of evil always better than evil itself.” (Hegel) And here again, we have found one of the pieces of the puzzle. For the goal of the ones who would kill beauty is, after all, to deny the existence of “good” and “evil” in this world. Only through that may they claim that the ends justify the means, when the means is accomplished through the deaths of millions of innocents. Only in their world, there is no innocence, either, which is why they exalt those who prey on children.

Opportunity

 

We have abandoned the lists, my friends. PostModern art claims no standards, no need to be beautiful in any way but how shocking it may seem. Nothing is left to do, “The fundamental principle that there is nothing new to create has made the use of quotations an important stylistic feature of postmodern art.” (Andrea Gern, 2003) So why even bother trying? And certainly, if you look at a display of postmodern art, you will wonder why they did bother trying.

How can we be encouraged when it seems the Art we desire has been eclipsed by schools of thought like this? “An interesting set of ideas about art, its context and its relation to philosophy comes from the American philosopher and art critic Arthur Danto. What makes something a work of art is not, says Danto, to be found by looking at its obvious properties. Danto believes that what “makes the difference between a Brillo box and a work of art consisting of a Brillo box is a certain theory of art. It is the theory that takes it up into the world of art, and keeps it from collapsing into the real object which it is.” (Anja Steinbauer 2006)

“The “art” that has been produced over this time is revolting, and the general public dislikes and disrespects it. It has become a joke of sorts. Everything associated with “modern art” is so crazy and irrational, people have stopped paying attention to it. They believe it’s a stupid game played by intellectual snobs. They don’t understand the “art”, and don’t understand the game. They ignore it, deeming it to be useless.” (Jeff Landauer and Joseph Rowlands, 2001)

One of my favorite fantastic artists (in the sense of genre and art style rather than adverbial) is Bob Eggleton. He has been derided by the general art community for his choices of venue, but has a skill and style, and above all, beauty to his artwork that few can claim. He has this to say, recently, “The sad fact about the “Art World” is people get told to like/buy into certain fads, trends and fashions. This results in a lot of questionable art(“Is it art? What is it? It’s a line on a canvas”) being sold at very high prices. Read a quote where one artist said “If something doesn’t sell I go back and put a cat in it” as if his entire show was a failure because 7 out of 8 paintings sold. He was serious too. The reality of all this makes my stomach curdle. Along with overhearing a younger person talk about a museum with priceless works in it having utterly no interest to him, his interest being the latest smartphone tech. If people detect any notes of defeatism in me lately, I think it’s hearing this kind of mindset….”

Conclusions

 

I know this has been long, and tedious to read. I believe it is important to discuss this, the death of beauty, and how it came to pass. Only then can we discover how to revive it. Not art for art’s sake, but because in knowing what is beautiful, we can rediscover what is right, pure, and good. Only then can we reject that which is evil, destructive, and immoral. For there do need to be morals. Rejection of ‘immorality’ opens up the pit to whatever may slither forth and root itself in society, the breadth of human appetites, and this is why humanity has come to loathe itself.

Self-loathing, and a desire to be extinguished, turned society’s face from beauty. Our hostess, when I talked about this post and what I planned to discuss, pointed out that they want to add ground glass to every candy. All: fashion, toys, art, literature, everything a human can craft to elevate their existence, is immolated. You see, if they can elevate, they must be pulled down, in the name of equality. If all are to be common, and in common held, as socialism strives for, then none can achieve a higher plane, whether it is through the creation or appreciation of beauty.

But before I go, I would like to inject a note of hope into this conversation. I am an artist, however slight, and I love art. I do not wish to see it remain dead, and like so many others, I have despaired of what calls itself ‘Modern Art” or “PostModernism” or whatever other title it claims. It certainly rejects any suggestion of skill. But there is DeviantArt. It’s not an ideal platform, and there are many there who are beginning, or just haven’t the ability… but there are those who do, and my word, they are capable of great beauty. Many of them have little or no formal education, which might be why they have this heart for art, as they have not been told what they must (or must not) do. Take a few moments, as you can, to look here for exemplars of art and beauty, and know that this is truly modern art, of the like you will rarely see enshrined in a gallery or museum.

They proclaim that they are breaking all the rules, but as I referenced above, they are actually following what they are told to do, by an establishment that does not tolerate individuality. “Thus Marxism begins by recognizing that, strictly speaking, individuals do not atomically exist: “the real nature of man is the totality of social relations…” (John Rothfork, 1995) Perhaps it is time to remind people that there is beauty in the world, there are objective ways to measure it, and as one of the articles I read suggested, to do a scientific study on that which is beautiful. If it were subjective, and solely dependent on our own culture and experiences, how could I look at the art of a country and culture not my own, and think, ‘my how beautiful that is’?

 

*Yes, it’s late.  Deal.  Also I haven’t had time to go back and fix all the “concordance points” so if you go back you’ll find the story occasionally contradicting itself.  You’re most surely going to have to deal.  It’s been crazy out here.  I want to get to it in the next month, and G-d willing I will, but who knows? On the good side, we had a valuation on the damage from the hail storm a month and some back, and we’re going to have to replace our roof.  Whether it can be done with the money they allocated, given it’s a Victorian and there are inevitably surprises up there, who knows.  At any rate, at least so far nothing is leaking, and it’s impossible to find good roofers just now given demand, so it will have to wait.  If it sells before that, we’ll make arrangements with the new owners.  But it’s one more complication and one more task.  Because we needed that.  So, between finishing overdue stuff, I must do this — and Michael’s story — but be patient with me about this AND the subscribers’ space and loot.  It will come.  I haven’t forgotten a single one of you — it will come, and I’m sorry for the time.  My life seems to have become a plaything of chaos this year.  Which mind you it’s better than illness (last year.)  And when I got back through RM I have a strong feeling it’s going to be thirdpersonized…  I feel uncomfortable with the multiple firsts.  We’ll see.  Chapter over at MGC in an hour or so.  I need more tea. Or not.  Something just came up.  So I’ll run something a blast from the past at MGC, with apologies.  Sigh.*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — is now up on Amazon.

This novel will get posted here a chapter every Friday or Saturday, or occasionally Sunday.  If you contribute $6 you shall be subscribed for the earc and first clean version in electronic format.  I think it will probably take another three months to finish.  Less, if I can have a weekend to run through and get ahead of the game.  It hasn’t happened yet.

NOTICE: For those unsure about copyright law and because there was a particularly weird case, just because I’m making the pre-first draft of my novel available to blog readers, it doesn’t mean that this isn’t copyrighted to me.  Rogue Magic as all the contents of this blog is © Sarah A. Hoyt 2013.  Do not copy, alter, distribute or resell without permission.  Exceptions made for ATTRIBUTED quotes as critique or linking to this blog. Credit for the cover image is © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

 

Seraphim Ainsling, Duke of Darkwater, Royal Witchfinder, Prince Consort

 

I’d had the bright idea that I might be able to turn back the clock. All right. Not precisely that, but I had the idea of going back to the time before Gabriel had fracture and warn him not to do so, and maybe try to find some way around the unbearable – it must be unbearable, right – pressure that made him do it.

Of course time magics are most forbidden for good cause. For one, none of us fully understands what time magic does, or why, or what happens to the future that was, but now isn’t, when the past is changed. The shifts in magic when that happens are bad enough to give magical cartographers the cold sweats and to keep magical theoreticians happy for years figuring out the equations involved. But though I’m sure Marlon would be quite happy to lecture all of us on the occasions we know it happened, no one really knows what happened.

At least one of the theories insists that when this happens it can give rise to worlds without magic, such as the Madhouse. It might be nonsense, though, because here’s the thing: we think it has happened before, or at least that’s how theoretical magicians and magical cartographers explain certain shifts in magic which they can’t account for. But we’re not sure either way. How could we be? After all, if a future doesn’t exist it doesn’t exist, much less an abbreviated future that stops short. There are some traces in the magic, but no one can be sure what they show.

In the same way, we know there are multiple worlds and that they branch off at what could be called decision points for the past. But do they really? Or were they always like that? There are multiple explanations for them. In one of the worlds they’re convinced it was caused by the loss of the eyes of a goddess in deepest Africa. I didn’t visit that world often. It was crazy in more ways than one, and it severely represses shifters. So the only reason to go in is to save shifters. Though last time I had to go in they were involved in a war that took up the whole world. I wonder how places can get in that much of a mess.

And I refuse to believe that it’s a branch off of my own world.

Yes, I heard the stories that our own world tells of the branching off, said to have occurred when Merlin was imprisoned over in France.

I don’t believe it anymore than the eye of the goddess story. They might be true, of course. All of them. Since the worlds diverge at some point in history, and not all along the line, perhaps some happened at one time and some at the other. Who can tell?

On the other hand it’s possible the worlds were simply made multiple from the beginning and that history just obeys laws we don’t understand. On top of which, it’s entirely possible that time travel, for which parameters and spells do exist, if tried in real life would destroy all the worlds. And while I was fully aware that if I did that, and it destroyed all the worlds, my wife would be very upset and find a way to yell at me, the truth was with the king of fairyland – who was fairyland itself – disintegrating at a fast pace, and with us knowing for certain sure that fairyland was the engine of the worlds, if I didn’t do anything, we would all disappear or die, or perhaps never have existed, anyway.

So I reached into my mind and ran through the spell sequence. It was all mental work. It’s curious how the more complex spells are, while the simplest might require physical action and the words as well, and the medium ones require spoken words. It’s as though the more powerful the spell the more it moves inward.

For a moment nothing happened then I felt the biting cold of betweener which happens when you move between worlds. Since I was trying to go backwards in time, in fairyland, this made perfect sense.

But the minute I landed, I knew it had all gone wrong. Possibly disastrously wrong. You see, I’d started the spell in my office, with my back turned to the desk, facing the door to the office. Through it, I could see, at the angle I was, part of the plaza where they were cleaning up the remains of the statue, blown to pieces by Jonathan Blythe’s pocket bomb. Which, by the way, should I say the words in public, would make no one think of a real bomb. I wouldn’t say that in public, but I thought when all this was over, I’d like to mention it to Nell, my wife, who was raised in a more straightforward world and who would gurgle with laughter at the idea of someone setting an explosive device in Jonathan’s pocket, given that Jonathan himself was in many ways an explosive device.

Of course, she would gurgle with laughter, if we’d all come through it unscathed. Something that seemed less than likely, as I faced a door that no longer displayed the plaza, but a glowing pink mist of sorts, the kind of magical mist you get when some spell has gone seriously wrong.

I didn’t say the word I thought – a wise precaution, in case I was in fairyland, where words are spells – and turned around, to face… me.

Then the person behind the desk did something, and I realized it wasn’t me, but my half-brother, the elf-king, Gabriel.

“Penny,” I said, wondering if my spell had worked after all, but wondering if we were in my office. The nickname, derived from Gabriel’s last name – Penn – and used for years mainly with the intent of nettling Gabriel out of his sometimes disastrously serious moods, came unbidden to my lips. It had its effect too, as he narrowed his eyes and sighed before he could help himself.

So I’d established this was the real Gabriel, which was good enough, considering that in fairyland seeming and semblance was rather a specialty and who knew what he might have thought to do. Also, I’d not forgotten he’d looked just like me, as I came in. “Penny,” I repeated. “Would you tell me what you’re playing at, and why you’re in my office?”

He opened his mouth, snapped it closed with an audible sound, sighed again and said, in a tone of exasperation, “oh, Duke!” which was what he called me, when he wanted to cajole me.

He stood up. As he stood the remnants of whatever spell was supposed to make him look like me vanished, as did the remnants of whatever spell it was that made the place look like my office.

I found myself in something that more closely resembled my brother Michael’s workshop, with magical machines twirling and turning al around. Only, as I blinked I realized these weren’t machines exactly, but the models of various worlds. The one nearest me was Avalon, in miniature, and as I looked I could see tiny ships on the sea, and carpetships flying the atmosphere, and I thought, if I leaned farther I would see all the buildings too. Then I thought these were not models, and felt a strong shiver.

The wall behind Gabriel had turned into curved glass, looking out onto… fairyland, I’d guess, from a height, showing all the crazy and changing variety of landscapes, the sudden shifts of reality. In a plane, front and center two armies were meeting, one of them centaurs.

And Gabriel’s outfit had changed into something odd, and shimmering, that seemed to be made of silk and glow. Worst for my retiring brother who, in his human form rather preferred traditional suits in unassuming black, he was wearing full royal robes from a few centuries back, at least for Earth. He had on a sort of long tunic ending below the knee, and hose beneath that. He also trailed what looked like a mile of cape, all of it deep blue with pinpoints of stars. And he had a cepter.

“Your majesty,” I said, and used my most acid and ironic tone, because I’d like to know what Gabriel thought he was playing at to try to impress me in that way.

He looked down at himself with an effect of surprise, and waved his hand. At which gesture he reverted to his black suits, and sighed. “Sorry. I wasn’t thinking and in this damned place the clothes are mostly controlled by thought.”

“So you were being your majesty and so—”

Another sigh. He was setting a record. “Something like that. Seraphim, what in heaven’s name are you doing here? I was counting on your staying well away from me. It was in fact my only measure of safety.”