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The past is another country…  And they’d laugh their a**es off at us if we went there.

It struck me for the first time a few years ago on that Tor symposium on Heinlein that humans – perhaps all humans – have a necessity to view history as a ladder and themselves – or their generation, their kind, their club, their kin – at its pinnacle.

To a certain extent, for a long time, this view was encouraged by the sheer material success and each generation being a little better off than the last – and to an extent a little more knowledgeable, a little more in control of their environment.

But what happens when something is in decline?  When a civilization hits one of those potholes that it does hit?  (Note that like the Heinlein quote above I believe the future is always better than the past – but there are areas where the golden age turns to silver, or bronze, or saw dust.  And there are places and times where the clock of control/comfort/civilization runs backward.  Inevitable.  Humans are humans and civilizations are composed of humans, so they can’t just march straight forward like machines.

What I’ve seen is that when material civilization and objective markers of achievement have marched backwards, we tend to compensate with moral preening.

Hence, the middle ages (yes, I know, there wasn’t a total collapse.  The collapse was greatly exaggerated, etc.  BUT in many of the places the hey day of Pax Romana was followed by the strife and squirmish of the barbarians, invasions, warring petty lords.  And yes, a lot of the daily comforts were lost, because a lot of the trading was lost.)

Of course, even the most dirt poor peasant in the Middle Ages could and did preen himself on being a Christian, not like those pagans.  Now, I’m not going to knock down the moral merits of Christianity versus paganism, nor is this a place for it.  (I think part of the exceptional qualities of the Western civilizations are because of first Rome and then Christianity.  But that’s not the point here.  The point is that–) Often these Christians weren’t particularly Christian.  Improperly digested catechizes and a lifetime of tilling the ground for subsistence gave a veneer of Christianity to a lot of pagan superstition.  (No, you can’t argue that.  That still described probably ¼ the Christians I grew up with.  Things get passed on…)  And some of the pagans were neo-platonic and probably fairly close to the Christian ideal.

This didn’t stop the preening or the sense of attainment.

I wonder how the culture warriors today would react to being compared to those fairly ignorant peasant Christians who nonetheless preened on the certainty they were better than their forebears because they were more “moral?”

No, wait, I know exactly how they’d react.  Yes, I’m smiling right now.

But in point of fact, that’s exactly what they’re like.  No, our material civilization hasn’t collapsed.  And if we’re very lucky (brother, it hurts to type with my fingers all crossed) it won’t.  But to an extent – knowledge, ability, craftsmanship and what the French call savoir faire – it has been on a downward trend for a while.

If you want to know why, look at the demographic bulge of the boomers and the idea of the time (visible in a lot of Heinlein books) that the next generation would be bigger than the last.  A lot of this is not the BOOMERS’ fault as such, but the fault of those who gave on teaching on controlling “that many kids” – and of course on the few rotten apples who took over colleges and demanded easier curriculums.

There was a belief that whatever the young wanted was “right.”  This combined with a lot of fast changes after World War II and…

Sometimes I feel like my generation (no, not boomers, again, simply on experience.  Our class sizes were shrinking, by then) has spent most of its life learning stuff no one taught us.  From religious doctrine to how to cook from scratch, I had to go out and learn on my own, because the people who were supposed to teach me were either boomers who’d never learned, or the generation before them who had “given up on that old stuf.”

There are certain arts of living, like how to iron a shirt properly, or a lot of home maintenance, which I had to discover like… an archeologist digging through the past.

And in my field, specifically, a novel from the bad old pulp years could outsell a modern novel (you know, full of significance and meaning, but often nothing else) by a factor of a hundred.

Yes, I’ve heard the excuses “movies, television, games.”  To which I say Mierda de Toro.  And possibly caballo too.

These entertainment forms don’t supersede each other.  And besides, there are still a lot of us who read by preference, for entertainment.  And we often have trouble finding anything to read… and often end up re-reading those old pulps.

I wonder if there’s authors out there who don’t know this?  Perhaps at this point the reflex to attack the pulps and the writers of the past is just that, a reflex, and not for a reason the authors know.

Or perhaps they know it.  Perhaps they know they’re in a diminished age, and their craft, their ability to engage the reader and drag him through the story is not what those other writers’ was.  Perhaps deep inside they suspect it, at the very least.

Because lor’ there is enough moral preening to sink a boat.

Someone posted in my conference a link to an author interview, where the interviewer and the writer were agreeing she was not “like the rest of science fiction.”

I speak fluent Female Prog Bragging, so this was like waving a red (eh) flag in front of a bull. I said some unkind things, and my husband (!) sprang to the defense.  My friend Dorothy calls her husband “calmer half” – well mine is “reasonable half.”  And you see, he didn’t grow up in a Marxist country, so he is not as attuned to signs of trouble.  He gives people the benefit of the doubt.

He said she really might be different and new and good, even if she sounded a little literary.  And then he went and downloaded five chapters of one of her novels.

And he was disappointed.  He said it wasn’t so much because it wasn’t that… interesting, but because it was so “generic” – like every other SF out there, written by a woman of a certain generation and appealing to a certain demographic.  And he asked me “How can she think it’s unique?”

And then I had to explain that – like the people who object to “male dominated science fiction” – these people are not in fact comparing themselves to any science fiction that exists… or existed.

Even in the fifties there were women writing science fiction and women tended to play a greater role in SF than in many parts of real life.  Certainly than in any literature but Romance.

They have never read Heinlein (they might have skimmed till they found something to be offended at, but that’s not the same.)  They certainly have never read Simak, or Schmitz, or even Asimov (though strangely, given his politics, one often got the impression HIS women were mere props.  Never mind.)  And I don’t have time/inclination/spoons left to go over my bookshelf and quote other names from the fifties, sixties, seventies… not to mention today.  And let’s do keep in mind that the seventies were FIFTY years ago, and that we had plenty of women writing both SF and Fantasy.  (I am writing a thing about that for PJmedia.)

And yet, today, women can without a trace of irony make the following statements, (I’ve heard them, in panels) – my novel is totally different.  It has a strong female main character.  (No, really?  Astound us.  Is there a strong male character that’s not legacy still being published?  In recent years?)  and “I’m not like all those old pulp science fiction novels.  I care about ideas and what they mean to people.”  (You mean, like whether an ant-like civilization would be preferable to human; or what happens when a supercomputer runs the world; or what happens when a cloud becomes intelligent; or the complexities of rebuilding a civilization built on the Catholic church after a nuclear holocaust; or whether our dreams exist in another dimension; or–  Those pulp non-ideas?)  Or – in fact, over the recent kerfuffle – how they’re writing stories about people of different genders, you know, away from the stifling conquering male of the past… or… how YA (interview above) had no cache for years and years (really?  It wasn’t a preferential genre, but it was as well regarded as the rest of sf/f.  Maybe better regarded.  At least since the mid century.)

Do they really believe this?  Are they so devoid of knowledge of the field that they believe that all that lies behind there is cartoon-like sci fi, not even rising to the level of Star Trek?

Surely not.  These writers, so surely they read.  And the evidence of the past is very much with us.

On the other hand, reading past giants is like to make present day pigmies aware of their lack of reach.  Much easier to preen and pretend to moral superiority.  Even if that can only be maintained by never reading those people you deride.  Much easier to keep claiming “but we’re better” by pretending the past was this comic-bookish simple place where simple souls lived; simple souls steeped in the sins of sexism, racism, homophobia, classism and whatever the latest “privilege” of the day is.

This disturbs me, because I hate to see history raped.  BUT it is easier.

Much, much easier.  Because we know we don’t have the sales numbers.  But if we can say we are more moral, more evolved, we’re still better.  They were discriminatory meanies, and we’re not!

And that all that sense of superiority and $3 will get them a cup of coffee.

Will studying the masters fix the problem.  Probably not.  Attracting readers back will take time.  And studying the masters will take also knowing their time and what appealed to their time that won’t work in ours.  (Jane Austen, for instance, wrote markedly less visual books than we do.  No TV among her audience, so techniques were different.)  It involves reading old and new or and what is different, and what to keep and ditch of both.  And it involves actually trying to be original and think for yourself.

Or you can continue fighting a phantom and claiming you won.  It’s not like any of those guys from pulp years are going to complain after all.

But what will the future think of us?  And how hard will they laugh at our pretensions?

[Christopher Nuttall sent me this, and I thought it it might spawn an interesting discussion.  Yes, I do promise an original — and my — post tomorrow.  Sorry.  I’m trying to at least catch up on SOME of the things that slid while I was sick.  At any rate Chris reminded me of my unhappy attempts to introduce friends to science fiction.  While I think what he says is true to some extent, it’s also exacerbated, in the present era, by the tendency to series.  While series seem to be a decent deal for writers/publishers, I wonder if they’re not, in some small measure responsible for the diminished printruns of our day.  I know I’ve found myself frustrated trying to enter a series in book 10 (this was much worse when the other nine were likely to be out of print by the time I found ten.  This is now, fortunately, a thing of the past.)]

Entry-Level Fiction — A Guest Post By Christopher Nuttal

The recent kerfuffle over the direction of SF fandom started me thinking about how I got into the scene myself.

I have a terrible confession to make.

When I first looked at Starship Troopers, I didn’t like it.

In my defense (before I get booted out of the Heinlein Fan Club), when I first looked at it I was somewhere around eight or nine and already reading well outside my age group.  Science-fiction had captured my interest from a very young age; I started with basic children’s books, then just kept working my way upwards through the library’s vast selection.  But some books were just too complex for me at the time, including both Starship Troopers and Stranger in a Strange Land.  It wasn’t until much later that I actually got into the former.  The latter, while very clever in places, never struck me as a readable book.

A few years later, I was asked to recommend a book for a friend who was trying to get into space opera.  And I, vast devourer of science-fiction books, recommended Excession, by Iain M. Banks.  But my friend didn’t like it!  He read through the first few chapters, pointed out that he didn’t have the slightest idea of what was actually going on and then gave up.

My first reaction was shock.  Blasphemy!  How could someone not like Iain M. Banks?

And then it dawned on me that I’d tossed my friend into the metaphorical deep end.

Excession is a genuinely clever book that rewards its readers, but it really needs some prior knowledge of the Culture Universe before it becomes accessible.  This is actually true of most of the later Culture books, even though they’re not sequels in the normal sense; they reward the long-term readers more than they reward newcomers.  These days, I would advise readers to start with The Player of Games and then work their way through the universe from there.

This is true of many other terrifyingly-thick books.  The Mars books, by Kim Stanley Robinson, are definite doorstoppers.  Unlike the Culture novels, there isn’t a single small novel to help someone into the universe from the shallow end.  When I first read Red Mars, I enjoyed parts of it, but other parts just bored me.  KSR put a lot of work into the series and I won’t deny that it is an impressive achievement, yet it isn’t particularly accessible to the new fan.

Science-fiction is a genre that rewards long-term interest and investment, but it rarely rewards people who try to start out with an inaccessible book.

Consider, for example, David Weber’s On Basilisk Station and Mission of Honor.  The former is very accessible (indeed, it was my first Weber book) while anyone who picks up the latter without any knowledge of the previous eleven mainstream books is going to be very confused.  Who is [insert name here]?  What are they doing with [insert planet name here]?

If one looks at Heinlein in general, it is easy to see that some of his books are more accessible than others, particularly for the young or new SF fan.  Indeed, to some extent, the earliest books he wrote are often more accessible to the young.  Most of Heinlein’s detractors, I suspect, actually tried to start with his older works.  Job; A Comedy of Justice is often funny and quite clever, but it doesn’t pass the accessibility test.  Heinlein wrote to reward his fans, rather than invite newcomers into his works.

JK Rowling is another author who passes the accessibility test, at least with her first three Harry Potter books.  Compare Harry Potter to Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell.   The latter is an immensely clever piece of work, but it isn’t anything like as accessible to a new fan; indeed, I came alarmingly close to discarding the book before deciding to press on and discovering that I rather liked it.  Susanna Clarke, too, wrote to reward fans of the thoughtful fantasy novel, rather than lure new readers into the fandom.

I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with that, because there isn’t.  Authors who write in the same universe should allow it to become more and more complex as time goes on.  But their readers, particularly their dedicated fans, should be aware that newcomers are simply unaware of the universe’s prior history or of the writer’s reputation.  There are quite a few books I number among my favourites that I wouldn’t recommend to any newcomers, simply because they would be inaccessible.  The prospective fan would need to build up a familiarity with the genre before cracking open a long, immensely complicated book.

If you’re selecting books for children, there are quite a few decent pieces of SF work out there that kids could read without uncomfortable adult situations.  Heinlein and Asimov both wrote stories for children.  Selecting books for adults is a little harder; it’s probably better to focus on a given writer’s early works, the simpler the better.  Maybe something more in line with the other books they read.  (Do they like military stories?  Introduce them to Weber or Ringo.)  And then move on to the ultra-complex books.

Thoughts?

[Christopher Nuttall is the author of The Empire’s Corps, Ark Royal, Schooled in Magic and many others.  His website can be found here.]

Mumble years ago, my husband and I were sitting in a comedy club in Charlotte NC when the poor visiting comedian decided to make a riff on common cats’ names versus common dogs’ names, or such. He started by saying that dogs were given manly names – I don’t remember the examples he gave – while cats got names… and here he made the mistake of pausing and asking who in the audience had cats. Our entire table raised their hands.

The comedian might still have saved himself, had he noticed that we looked a little… unusual… He didn’t. So he asks my husband his cat’s name. He said, “Petronius the Arbiter, cat from Hades.” Comedian said “uh” but, nothing daunted, proceeded on his – oh so very – unwise course. He points at me – clearly not taking the hint that we were married from our holding hands. Or perhaps he thought one of us had to be sane, the silly man – and says, “And your cat’s name?” “I have two,” I said. “Random Numbers and Pixel Who Walks Through Walls.” You’d think by this point he would take a hint, but nothing doing. He points to a friend of ours at same table and says, “And yours?” “Crystal.” Another friend, “Yours?” “Myiuki,” he says. “It means Deep Snow and…” At which point the man lost it. “WHAT are you guys? Did you land from Planet Weirdo?”

All I can say is he could have done worse. He might have found a table full of writers. Recently while talking about cats to a friend, it occurred to me that writers have a strange and creative approach to naming their cats. (Some of them carry this as far as naming their kids, their cars, their home appliances and their dental floss. The least said about THOSE writers, the best.)

For instance, the Hoyt demesne is afflicted with a mix of variously named felines, ranging from our own characters to other people’s characters. Under my own characters we have Miranda Princess D’Ardenes (And no, Sean, if you read this, I did not want to name her after the little b*tch in my third published book. Unfortunately it was the only name she responded to), and D’Artagnan Monsieur de Pink Nose. Dan’s character’s name Ninth Euclid Ancel graces the black silky fur (except in the places he’s pulled it off, aka his legs and tummy) of the cat otherwise known as The Neurotalon. Inexplicably, for reasons known only to Bast – who clearly has a sense of humor – our newest cat, the fluffy bundle of purrs and squeaks we found at a golf course, would only answer to Havelock Vetinari, aka Terry Pratchett’s Patrician. In Havey’s defense, he probably heard it as “Havoc” and has been living up to it. The outdoor not-our-cat TM (Ask my husband. Cat is named, chipped and vaccinated, but he’s NOT our cat. Dan says so. And I think I swore to obey him. Or the other way around. Well, obedience was in there, somewhere.  It was in another country and in a foreign language.  I don’t remember.) earned the name Greebo by beating up a mad feral tom who was courting mom cat when Greebo was around ten weeks old. His brother who — I think — is the mastermind of the duo, answers to Maurice. He usually “talks” in response, which goes to show. (Not sure what, but it does go to show.  Possibly it goes to show he likes bossing us around.)  [Since this time he has moved mostly across the street to live with neighbors.  Which shows Maurice has no taste.  And right now Greebo is mad at our egregious management of the weather, because it snowed today March 18 2014]

And if at this point you’re thinking my family is exceptionally weird, let me grace you with the names of pets of a few of my writerly acquaintances: Walter Jon Williams has a cat named Charles Dickens, because he (the cat, not Walter!) is one. Cynthia Ward calls her (we’re sure blameless. We’ve yet to meet a cat who wasn’t) cats Schwa and Umlaut. Tom Ashwell named his cat Smudge, which sounds downright cozy and sane. Darwin Garrison (we’re sure for good and sufficient reason. We’re afraid to ask WHAT reason) calls his gray Himalayan mix Vash the Stampede. Michael Britton has cast the name Francisco Thomas on the head of his unsuspecting captive feline (though in Michael’s defense, he calls the cat Sisko.) Jessica Schlenker not only called her cat Vampire Hunter D, but seems to have called him that because he used to suck people’s necks. [No, we’re not going to enquire any further. We’re scared. (As for why I’m using the first person plural it’s because I’d be afraid of being singular in the presence of these names.)] Brad Sinor comes in on the side of nominally sane, since he named his grey cats Ash and Pewter which at least has a nodding acquaintance with shared reality. Aaron Bilodeau has named his cat Grendel (doubtless the next addition to the family will be Beowulf.) Julie Hyzy calls her cat Kitka which might seem charmingly feline, until you hear it’s short for Kitayna Ireyna Tatanya Kerenska Alisoff, apparently a name assumed by Catwoman. (Um, tangentially related to cats, but I think in violation of the rule that no cat should be given a name longer than the cat itself.)

Meg Turville-Heitz admits to Scooby, Pig, Spot, Razz (short for Raspberry) and the most boringly named Callie, who replaced Dudie the Himalayan. To make up for Callie, though, she offers to give us the names of the chickens and the sheep. (And apparently they don’t go by the collective name “food” – who knew? Though she does say the sheep tend to get food names. Considering I once named pet mice Whiskas and Nine Lives, I can’t comment.) Walt Boyes named his cats Stinkerbelle-of-the-ball and Mister Grimace. Strangely, neither of the cats has clawed him to death in his sleep. Go figure. All of this is eclipsed by my writer friend, Amanda Green, who named her cat Thena, after the main character of Darkship Thieves. (Ladies and gentlemen, would you do that? And then cuddle said cat? I’ll note cat does her best to live up to it.)

Dead cats aren’t particularly safe. We’re sure in whatever after-mice they inhabit, Steven Swiniarski’s Schrodinger & Mu are still wondering why those names. And we’re fairly sure death hasn’t stopped Fuzzard meditating revenge upon Danney Reese (wonder what spectral hairballs are like?) Lin Wicklund’s late lamented black cat was called Sam Spade, the Maltese Feline – we assume she was hard to find? (She? Lin! And we thought we knew you. [We’re WAY past binary gender, here, ladies and gentlemen.]) Walter Jon Williams had a cat called Tenzing Norgay because he liked to climb. (Are there cats who don’t? Where have all of you been hiding them? Can someone hook us up with a kitten who won’t dance along the top of our bookcases raining books down on our heads?) He also tells us a conveniently unnamed friend (wink, wink nudge, nudge?) named her cat Frogs In Space. “She” used to go to “her” door and yell out “Frogs in Space.” (We think Walter should admit he’s a writer and therefore strange and stop trying to pass that amazingly creative feat of naming onto an imaginary friend. :) ) Debbora Wiles has had an array of dauntingly named cats: Tea Pot, Ginger, Dominique, Pepsi, Knight Rider, Booger, Sparks, Sebastian, Kasper (whom we assume is now the friendly cat ghost.) She’s offered to give us the names of eighty or so named koi out in the koi pond, but we feel there is knowledge man (or woman, or small child) is not supposed to pursue.

Writers frustrated by the lack of cats aren’t any less weird. Taylor Lunsford’s dog glories in the unusual name of Flyer (you know he sits on top of his doghouse, chasing the Red Baron.) Mark W. Tiedemann named his dog Coffey. Meg Turville-Heitz, in addition to cats and sheep and chickens, has a dog named Murphy (whom we presume is a law onto himself.) Carol Hightshoe had a dog named Bexar Waarigul Little One Whimper Hightshoe. For some reason she seems to believe the fact she called him Beer Bexar for short makes it all better. Ryk Spoor believes the fact that he’s allergic to cats will excuse him for naming a dog the macho name of Ferocious. (Though I admit the fact that it’s a miniature poodle might earn him some irony points.) And Dave Boop claims innocence due to lack of cats and dogs, but cops to OWNING a ten year old and some fish. I’m scared to ask their names.

OTOH, no cat, dead, alive, or so eccentric as to be a dog (or a sheep, or a chicken or, for that matter, a koi) can glory in a name as strange as the young cat adopted by my friend Kate Paulk, which — in the Terry Pratchett scale of names most and least suitable to be called out in the middle of the night while banging a spoon on the food dish (number ten being a short, non-embarrassing name like “Zut”) — is at least a -20. This cat, ladies, gentlemen and writers, glories in the name Little Bugger. Imagine roaming your neighborhood at night, banging on the cat dish and shouting, “Little Bugger, come to Mommy, I have nummy tuna.”

Now excuse me, I must go out and call Greebo Witchcat Ogg Hoyt and find out twhy he hasn’t shown up for dinner.

The first time I heard of “the international” as in the communist song, it was in a Giovanni Guareschi book.  Since this was the seventies in Portugal, it tells you that at least the Portuguese socialists and communists had learned not to press that facet of their beliefs too loudly.  Certainly not to celebrate it.

I’m not sure why.  The socialism that we were taught as – as someone on this blog put it – people in the US in a certain time had civic education was very short on the HISTORY of socialism.  Possibly because well, after a while, when you study the thing, you get a feeling that there is a lot of failure of wonderful predictions.  Oh, and a lot of blood.

Instead Marxism and Marx-inspired regimes were presented as a sort of eternal ideal.  Socialist and communist revolutions were the end of history, and the countries need not be studied after that.  No, I won’t tell you how Stalin was pictured.  No, trust me, truly you don’t want to know.

But the international nature of the beliefs was still there.  After all “capitalism” and “imperialism” caused war, while socialism was for all the peoples of the world, and when it succeeded, war would be gone. (True as it goes.  Graveyards are remarkably peaceful.)

This played against the background of communist and socialist leaders constantly attacking and constantly accusing this and that and the other of being enemies.  Perhaps it is because I was born jaded, but their constant excuse that these people were brutalizing them by existing didn’t fill me with confidence.

And then there were the communists and socialists I knew personally.  Depending on their… uh… mental orientation, they viewed Russia or China as the spiritual center of humanity, and their own country as negligible.  They weren’t internationalist so much as “we want the whole world united under the Soviet/Chinese boot.”  In a way they were patriots, just not for their own country.

As one read more about what went on in the USSR’s buffer zone, and managed to listen to/read an expatriate or two, one started – well, this one started – getting the feeling that this “international” and “the world is one” thing was sort of the advance ideological wedge of truly imperialistic and expansionistic regimes, seeking to get Western democracies to surrender before a shot was fired.  The horrifying thing is how often it worked.

It has worked particularly well in the US.  This is partly because most young people in the US live in a Star Trek world.

This is not a real world, mind you, but the world peopled in their minds by their teachers’ rather odd attempts to make them culturally “tolerant.”

First of all there is much to be said against the concept of “cultural tolerance.”  Oh, sure, there is no earthly reason to despise someone for the food they eat or the clothes they wear (unless they eat live children or wear clothes made of ditto.)  There is no reason to consider some language backward (well, there are languages without verb tenses for past and future, which must be pure h*ll to manage modern life in, but that’s something else. Normal human habit in these situations is to borrow like mad.)

In fact, most of the type of thing you learn about other cultures in school aren’t something you should well… have an opinion of any sort about, unless it’s aesthetic.  I hate south American decoration on fabrics.  This doesn’t mean it’s bad.  It’s an aesthetic opinion.  I’m also not particularly fond of the things Scandinavians do with furniture.  Aesthetic opinion.  My kid likes it.  It’s… what you like.  I can say “Bah, no Swedish straight lines, thanks” when shopping for a table.  That doesn’t mean I despise the culture.  Oh, and some African carved masks give me the holly gibbies.  (Though I rather like animal carvings.  Go figure.)

None of this is lack of tolerance.  I like what I like.  You couldn’t pay me to wear a ball cap, for instance, and that’s the culture of my adopted people.

But this is all the level they can teach in school.  First of all because the units for world culture or geography or whatever start in elementary and rarely go beyond middle school.  Do you really want to discuss genital mutilation with your elementary school daughter?  I wouldn’t.  Do you want to explain how the concepts of personhood and individual value vary across the world?  Or course not.

Worse, the teachers are often fluffy internationalists, having been taught what I call “tourist multiculturalism.”  They believe that “culture” is clothes and crafts and food.  Or, as I kept running into when they told me to teach the kids their “culture” and I replied I was, that they were perfect “US Geek.” They got upset, and wanted me to teach them Portuguese culture.  (Why this would trump the culture of their father whose family has been here since the 1600s is a mystery.) They have some vague idea culture is genetic.  And they lack the historical knowledge to realize that is one of the most racist ideas ever.

Culture is not genetic.  It’s also not as plastic as people here tend to believe.  Not if you stay in your homeland, in a group. This is because it goes a good while deeper than clothes and food.  Clothes and food change.  By the time I was a teen, Portuguese wore clothes that had more in common with Paris fashion than with the clothes of grandma’s time.  And since I’ve moved here, 30 years ago, Portuguese have started eating pizza and hamburgers.  (American pizza, not the first Portuguese approximation to the dish.  Dan and I went back two years after marriage, and there was a pizzeria, and out of curiosity we went in… only there was something odd about the pizza and we couldn’t put our finger on it until it hit us: no tomatoes.  When we mentioned this to the waiter he brought us a ketchup bottle. No.  I am not joking.)

But the hardware in the head, even though these days they’re trying very hard to be European, is still closer to my grandmother’s than to that of American people the same age.  They might make the right sounds – they have US movies after all, and US books – but you scratch that, and you’ll find some curious beliefs about women and men, about female demeanor, about work and oh, tons of other things.

Because culture passes through not by explicit dictate, but by what we do and fail to do and what our kids see us do and fail to do.

Okay, so odds are a little different about it, but even we absorb a lot we don’t realize we’ve absorbed.

But America is exceptional in this too.  Of the “nations of ideas” (Dave Freer’s term) we had “earliest diversity of input”.  And because until very recently if you came here you severed linguistic ties with the mother country (okay, unless your mother country spoke English) a lot of the implied things that are passed in a language disappeared, which resulted in new legends and new stories dating back about a hundred years and sometimes less. But more importantly, it resulted in new mannerisms, new ways of viewing the world, until the only way to make sense of “culture” was rationally or at least by rationalizing.  Which makes us, as I’ve pointed out, the autistic kid of the international community.  We take “rules” and “How things are supposed to be” really really seriously.  And we act like words are the things.

This results in other people not getting us, like the fact that even my brother who is educated and has read a lot of American books doesn’t get how FREE we are, or that our press is more likely to run America down than prop her up.  He goes on the assumption of the Portuguese press, which will always chauvinistically favor/soft pedal things for Portugal.  Part of the hatred for America in the world is that they listen to the anti-American things people here say and they think “It must be much, much worse since clearly they wouldn’t report things that hurt their face.”  Or that Russian guy who predicted how America would break apart – because they take what Americans say about each other and amplify it, multiplying it by “they wouldn’t say that if they weren’t a lot worse.”  Yes, sure, Portugal is (mostly) a free country, but the culture wouldn’t let them run down their country in the world stage, in public.  In private and to each other, sure, but not to foreigners.  And they don’t get we don’t have that internal stop, which almost every other country does.

Of course, this works the other way too.

We don’t get what we’re talking about when we talk about “the international community.”  And Americans born and bred, particularly those who’ve never lived abroad, isolated from their kind, and not with special status, often fail to get that the rest of the world aren’t just Americans who talk funny and have exciting new recipes and cool clothes.

Look, the precious feminist flower who came up with the idea that we should hold male population down to 10% of the births?  How does she plan to sell that idea to Arabs?  Chinese?  Indians?  Does she think there’s a chance in h*ll of success?  (And we’ll leave alone the dystopia that would result.)

In the same way, I’ve quoted this before, but there were all the people talking about how Saddam couldn’t have a weapons program because, well, his people didn’t even have clean water.  It never seemed to occur to them that a country might prioritize weapons over clean water.  The fact that this didn’t occur to them about a country that had been attacking its neighbors for years was… breathtaking.

I’m not saying that American internationalists are the only internationalists.  There are internationalists in other countries.  But the internationalism is often a veneer.  In certain cultures – Russia, China – it’s often a cover for rampant nationalism.  It usually means “The world will be united and we’ll rule it.”  Might never be SAID, but it’s firmly there at the back of their minds, the same way a Frenchman never doubts his land is the cultural center of the world though – ooh lala – it hasn’t been for 200 years at least (and though he might make noises like he’s not nationalistic AT ALL).

But American – and some British and for the purposes of this most Canadians – are a particularly dopey form of internationalist.

Part of this is the education system which has taught them the same sort of canards I got.  “Nationalism is bad and capitalism is bad, and they cause wars.”  This is part insanity from around the time of WWI, and part … Soviet Agit prop.  “Surrender now, after all, nationalism causes war.  You’re not supposed to love your own country!”

But war shall always be there.  It’s part of being human.  Not of a nationality or a country, but of being a person with a body in a certain place.  If we ever actually succeeded in making the world into a single country, we’d just have civil wars.

Look, I’ll be blunt: there will always be something a group of people want that at the very least involves intimidating another group away from it.  If the group refuses to be intimidated, there will be war.

Most of the time, in small groups, the war is satirical blog posts, or the occasional mean joke. Move that up in size, and war is village boys who beat up boys from the next village who come to court “their” girls.  (This happened, still, in my time.)  Up another level, and there will be regional interests, at war with other regional interests.  Here in the states, that’s mostly states trying to take each other’s federal money.

BUT put it on the world stage and… well…  You have two regions which want — or need — the same thing.  Only one can have it.

Until people stop living in a material world, that’s not going to change.

Internationalism wouldn’t cure it.  And putting down your own country in favor of every other country won’t bring peace everlasting.  It just means you’re one of those people who refuses to accept human flaws and who assumes that EVERY OTHER nation is better because they show you their better faces.  (“Distance and death dress people with their most beautiful smile” I don’t remember who said it, but it applies to peoples as groups too, which is why so much nonsense is projected backwards into pre-historic people and a few fragments of bone are transmuted into some sort of matriarchal utopia, even though rational people have to know it never was.)

In the end, at the most basic level, what I’d call “decent” patriotism is the appreciation of the good qualities of your country and your people – which you’re more likely to know than any other countries or people.  And the desire to defend your country and your neighbors.  Does that lead to war?

How could it?  It leads to defense if you’re attacked, but unless your entire philosophy is the alien implant of a would-be subjugating power… how could that be wrong?  Why should you and your neighbors be especially evil, if no one else is?  Contemplate what might hide behind the artifacts, and the clothes and the neat food.  Why would people abroad be any better than your neighbors?  Do you think they aren’t fully human and are therefore incapable of human evil?  Isn’t that truly racist?  To consider your neighbors as the only humans? Think about it.

Or don’t.  After all, it’s great fun to protest the great evil of the word “bossy” or attempts to limit abortion on demand after 20 weeks gestation in the US – but I’ve noticed that none of these people see anything wrong with cultures that make women wear burkas.  Instead, they buy the pap that it’s good for the women and makes them feel “protected.” Oh, and that the women themselves want it.  (Which is why, I suppose, there are religious police armed with whips in markets, ready to punish the woman whose ankle shows.)  They will tell you how terrible it is if an underage woman can’t get an abortion without parental consent, but kids under 15 being married to old men in other countries?  Oh, perfectly fine.  It’s “cultural” see.

The fun thing about our multiculturalists is sort of like the saying that people who don’t know what to do with themselves on a Sunday afternoon think they want to live forever.  In this case, naïve internationalists who don’t even understand their own culture or how different it is from the rest of the world imagine they have what it takes to bring the world together in peace and harmony — and it’s all manageable if only they abjure any love or defense of the country they were born in.

Bah.  Innocents abroad doesn’t begin to define it.

If they ever got 1/10^th of what they think they want, these people would in fact get eaten alive.  Probably not literally – but close enough.

It’s late, and I’m dozing off after a day of writing, so to get the full disconnect of our “nationalism is evil” crowd, I’ll leave you with the thought of what EXACTLY the Chinese would say to the eager young woman in charge of world reproductive policies who told them males should be only 10% of all births.

Yeah, brings a smile to my face too.

Unfortunately, though they’re unlikely to get that kind of power, the “internationalist” crowd does what it can to dismantle the very country and protections they do have.  We either teach the kids better or we won’t have a country to defend.  And no, the result won’t be a wonderful and vibrant one-world community, in which each culture has one different characteristic and every misunderstanding is easily and rationally explained.

No.  At the other end of that, lies a world in which all the innocents are dead.

For their sake, we must fight their wooly-headed ideas.

No, this is not the post about the first originator of the links we still keep getting to this blog by people who think this gentleman did an “excellent summary” of Toni’s post, or that what she’s calling for is a return to the “golden age.”  (They do know she’s ten years or more younger than I and even I came of “age” in SF READING during the seventies, right?  And that her tastes in reading reflect it?  And are frankly way more girly than mine? No, of course they don’t.  They never even thought about the rules for internet war.  They’re just trying to sit at the cool kids’ table. )  — I’m giving the originator of the attack no links, but if you want to get a good idea of the problem, with extensive, not taken out of context quotes, my friend Rick Boatright wrote about it.  (And he has links to the original.)

Those links do worry me because well, I think I did find the problem with science fiction fandom and frankly with literary fandom and maybe even society in general.  Either most people have the reading comprehension of stale cheese, in which case we’re in trouble, or — and this is more likely — most people are strangely interested in having a great leader and once they find him, no matter how malicious, willfully destructive or self-aggrandizing through fake controversy he is, they’re going to do this:

But enough about politics.  Let’s talk about something completely different.

About a month ago, one of you — he can denounce himself, if he wishes — thought I was too stressed and therefore needed something to make me laugh.  He started pming me with stuff about The Disaster Artist, by Greg Sestero.

The disaster artist is a book about the making of The Room.  Note that the Hun in question never doubted I had watched what has been called “The Citizen Kane of bad movies.”  Sometimes I love how my fans peg me.  You know I don’t watch much TV and I watch maybe two movies a year, but The Room?  Yeah, I definitely have watched that.

It was, like almost everything, the boys’ fault.  Summer before last, they found it, dragged me to the sofa to watch it, hunted down the Mathematician from his lair, took his lap top away, escorted him to the sofa, and made us have a “family evening”…  with The Room.  Yes, that’s how twisted the boys are.

They in turn had found it via The Nostalgia Critic’s Review of the Room and if you have twenty minutes to kill today, you definitely should watch it. I warn you it’s incredibly cheesy, though not as cheesy as The Room.

The movie is the 2000s answer to Rocky Horror.  It is shown all across the land at midnight, and fans act out choreographed scenes.

If you don’t have twenty minutes, this is enough to give you an impression of the room and Tommy Wiseau its writer/star/producer/etc.

Tommy Wiseau is the guy with long hair.  The other guy in the scene is Greg Sestero who wrote — well, at least the first draft — The Disaster Artist.

The book chronicles their acquaintance and it’s funny and lsad and strange and … Everything, all the time.  It also chronicles, of course, the making of the Room, just like it says on the label.

Tommy Wiseau, btw, says he agrees with about half the book — but not which half.  I find that fascinating, because on one hand it makes you wonder whether he agrees with the parts of how he completely botched the writing/directing/etc, or what parts exactly he agrees with.

For me the book is somewhat bitter sweet, because, yes, even though Tommy Wiseau is someone who makes the Oddest of Odds seem like a perfectly normal, average person on the street with no distinguishing characteristics, I found myself feeling a certain kinship with him.

What I mean is, as an immigrant, I could see myself particularly at first.  My misunderstandings were never so completely odd as thinking you have to buy all the equipment to make a movie because otherwise your production is “Mickey Mouse” and my adaptation to America is better, at least to the point I don’t cause traffic jams wherever I go, but then I took the golden road, and didn’t come from France as stowage or something.

Tommy Wiseau who is at the center of Disaster Artist and the man responsible (in all senses) for The Room is an immigrant from an unspecified Eastern country.  He talks of seeing movies, of dreaming of being in them.  On the way there things got… complicated.  His history is somewhat dark, but some of the parts of it that Sestero doubted the most, such as Tommy’s treatment as an illegal immigrant in France seem absolutely plausible to me.  They are exactly like the stories I heard from Portuguese who were illegal immigrants in France.

Sestero also — being a product of upper class USA,natch — seems to think Tommy’s deep and apparently authentic love of the US funny or at least cute.  I saw nothing funny about it.  Those of us who come from elsewhere know how good we have it here.

Take Tommy’s story — barefoot boy from somewhere behind the curtain, first immigrated to France, then to the US.  There are disturbing hints of abuse of the worst kind in his past, and it is quite likely he got a little scrambled along the way.  He first made his living selling little mechanical birds on the street.  Busboy in a restaurant was a step up from that.  (One of the things never explained is how he made a fortune.  Also whether or not he’s a vampire.  Don’t laugh. If you read the book, you’d debate it, like my family did around the dinner table.)

But his dream was to come to America and make and star in movies.  And he did.  And he’s even famous, and has a fandom of his own.

Yes, his fandom comes from how WEIRD and unintentionally funny his movie was.  But it’s still fandom, and he’ll be remembered in the history of film.

Yes, it took crazed persistence and desire on his part, and work and suffering more than any of us would ever invest in something (and maybe he only did because he’s a little crazy.)  But Tommy Wiseau did make it in America, as he knew he could make it in America.

Let all the people who lament how the American Dream is dead take a powder.  Their American Dream might be dead — but did they have half the HUNGER that propelled Tommy Wiseau?

Tommy Wiseau is living proof that whatever your American dream, no matter how far fetched, if you’re willing to go all out for it, you will catch it, or a version of it.

And that, my friends, brought tears through the laughter, while reading The Disaster Artist.

*Sorry this is so late.  There is carpentry going on six feet from my desk, and it has required my assistance so doors don’t crush the Mathematician.  Long story.  Anyway, it’s done now.  And I know Musketeer’s Inheritance isn’t up yet, my editor caught death-flu.  And I haven’t finished entering changes in Witchfinder, but it really SHOULD be in subscriber’s hands this weekend (and up by the end of the month, G-d willing.)*

The prequel to this — Witchfinder — has been removed.  I do promise to go through the copyedits as soon as humanly possible and send the advance copies to those who pre-ordered.  You’ll know when that’s eminent because I’ll remove scattered chapters from this blog.  I do hope to manage it next week, but I’m not promising as I’m still finishing a novel under contract to Baen. Meanwhile, if you donate $6 and note it in the field, you’ll get advance-subscribed to this novel.  I do, however, understand it can be a long time to wait, and if you want to, do so.  I will continue to post chapters here, roughly one a week.

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

The Maiden Alone

Helen Blythe, sister of the Earl of Savage

I didn’t know when Mister Merrit disappeared.  Between a word and another, he was gone, as though swallowed by the air.  Around me, it all remained crisp and clear, as I walked a path among what seemed to be flowering apple orchards, their scent heavenly in the soft, warm air.

I remembered the fairytales nanny used to tell me, and had a moment of surprise that anyone – frankly – would tell such stories to children.  But I remembered liking them, yes, even the ogres that ate children who disobeyed quite arbitrary rules.

But the thing was when you were a child, even a child in a world such as Avalon, where you knew that fairyland was a place, you never really expected to go there.

But now, I was there.  And while terrible things happening to people you don’t know far away are interesting and fun, terrible things happening to you right now and right here are not.

I remembered all the injunctions about not leaving the path and about helping strangers, and also unlikely tales of maidens made to cook up an entire menagerie of animals, or a lake full of fish. I certainly wasn’t about to spin any straw into gold.  I’s seen a spinning wheel once, and it seemed quite likely to me that Sleeping Beauty hadn’t so much been cursed as faked sleep for a hundred years to avoid the painfully drudgery of spinning and the cuts people must get from winding the thread through their fingers.  I’d have done it.

Or I’d have run away to become a pirate.  I felt a fleeting sense of guilt.  Fleeting because, while my original notion might be misguided, certainly I hadn’t asked for any of the further adventures, including having to resist the importune advances of the fish king.

But I did feel some guilt, still, over involving Mister Merrit in these affairs.  If I hadn’t taken such a hasty step as to try to escape to sea and become a pirate, he would not have needed to come after me.

For the first time it occurred to me how odd it was that of all the people in my brother’s house, the superintendent of manufacturies had come to rescue me.  Not my brother, not my mother, not even one of my horribly prim little sisters, but one of my brother’s servants.  Or at least one of his deputies.  I wasn’t sure one would call someone with as much power as Mister Wolfe Merrit a servant.  Not exactly.

On that two thoughts entered my mind, the first being that he was certainly not much to look at, and the second not quite a thought with words, but the memory of all we’d been through together and that he’d tried to protect me.  Which brought with it a strong wave of gratitude, but I gave myself a little shake.  Yes, being romantically interested in my brother’s … adjutant would be highly improper.  I was very sure that Mr. Merrit was not a person of quality.  Yes, it would make mama faint.  But besides that it had nothing to recommend itself to me.  After all, I wasn’t a fool, or at least not a complete one.  I shouldn’t think I had more in common with Mr. Merrit, whom I vaguely remembered was a cottagers son than I’d had with the fish king.  And there was the fact that, unless he – and I – was much mistaken, he was already married.  And that he had a son.  And that he’d been in fairyland before.

It occurred to me that perhaps my family didn’t have the best possible hiring practices.

None of which made me feel better about either having led him into danger or where he might now be, in some thicket of magic, in this very strange and very dangerous land.

Just as I thought this, I heard his voice call from somewhere to my right “Oh, help me, the horror.”

I started to pivot that direction, then stopped.  They said when you walked in fairyland, you should never leave the path.  You were safe on the path, but not away from it.

How this tallied with helping three people on your journey, I didn’t know, but unless the three people were kind enough to stay on the path and to let me stay on the path, it was all very well, I wasn’t going to leave it.

I knew the magic logic of fairyland, which was the same lotic you used with nefarious creatures such as vampires.  Not that I’d ever met a vampire, though mama said in her day there had been a duke who was a Vampire and who was a great rake and very dashing and all the young women were languishing for him.

It seemed to me a great deal of nonsense, particularly as mama seemed to think the most wonderful thing about him was how he sparkled in the sun.

But what I mean is that vampires cannot do things to you unless you enable them by breaking the rules, by which I mean inviting them in through your door.

I suspected it was the same in fairyland.  If I stepped out of this path, I’d give them permission to do what they wanted with me.  And that, I’m sorry, after my adventures, I wasn’t about to do.  As well have stayed and let the fish king marry me.  Or the monkey king.

And while at that, why were all these creatures interested in marrying me?  Never had a belle in her glittering first season been so sought.  Mama would have been quite happy had I been offered for by a viscount.  She’d swoon at a god.  Or maybe not.  At any rate I wasn’t having any, and if Hermes offered I wouldn’t have him either.  It would be like marrying Jonathan.

I confess part of the reason for my disordered thoughts was to avoid the screams which continued, in a piteous voice which couldn’t possibly be Mr. Merrit’s.  For one, he’d never beg abjectly to all and sundry for rescue.  And besides, there was something false in the tone of the voice, as though … as though it were his voice being imitated by an inexperience mimic.

No.

I’d not leave the path.

At that moment, as though out of nowhere, I realized there was a young child walking beside me.  A pretty young child, with curly dark hair and bright green eyes, dressed like a ragamuffin.  But when he spoke, his words were hesitant but cultured.  “Please, Miss,” he said.  “If you please, will you show me the way home?”

Huns, Hoydens, assorted lurkers, I bring you the illustrious Reader Promotion Post! Come one, come all, read some new books, and make sure to leave reviews! As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to freerangeoyster [aht] gmail [daht] com. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Perambulatory Mollusc, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Hypothetical Chairman

Cyn Bagley

Perchance to Dream

Kat Igardson is a visionary, a psychic, and a protector, but doesn’t gain her hereditary powers until the death of her Grandma. Daisy Amulda, a black witch, is stripped of her power by her father. These two unlikely women become allies to fight an evil that corrupts and taints Earth and its innocents.

Will they survive?

H. Irving Hancock

The Young Engineers in Colorado

Splendid stories of young men who know how to get the most out of both work and play and also make each year if their life a preparation for a better year to come.

Tom and Harry find their aspirations point to the great constructive work done by the big-minded, resourceful American Civil Engineer: bridge building, railroad building, mine tunneling. In other words, the building of any of the great works of industry.

“The spirit of adventure into unknown frontiers of hope in technology and the human spirit together very alive and well.”

R.K. Modena

Seda’s Diary: Bias

Seda is a young, idealistic Tzaro healer in charge of taking care of the elderly in a Church-run community for the aged. All is well and right in her world – until the day she is assigned to a patient she is unable to treat like any of the other tenants in her care – an aged Szari woman. Aware of all the atrocities that the Szari have perpetuated in the past, Seda cannot find it in herself to attend to this woman with the same kindness as her Human or Tzaro patients, but is determined to do her duty regardless. Certain anomalies regarding the treatment of the Szari begin to surface as Seda finds herself challenged by her mysterious ward – who defies all her expectations. What Seda discovers will have her not only crossing the authority of the Church, but end Tzaro life as she knows it. The choice she must make costs a high price and she isn’t sure if it’s worth bringing the truth to light. . .

Also available through Lulu.

Seda’s Diary: Outcast

Seda finds herself exiled to the farthest reaches of the Dynasty for doing what she believed was her duty. Ordered to take charge of an old outpost, she expects little of herself or the men and women assigned to her command.

But the ruins hold many mysteries and secrets, and the band of misfits, old soldiers, outcasts and rejects of the Dynasty lead her to discover further crimes – and more victims of those in power. Determined to try make a better life for them, Seda brings the garrison together to improve their lot with their own hands – slowly earning the beginnings of their trust.

The corruption of the Dynasty is far greater than Seda anticipates, and soon the young Tzaro must decide which she will be a peaceful, law-abiding Healer, or the new leader of the garrison of NovaVita.

*Trigger warning: this post contains special snow flake melting triggers, you’re not the center of the universe triggers and meltdown triggers for unspanked babies over the age of twenty – you’ve been warned.*

First let me tell you I don’t discount PTSD triggers.  One morning, a few years ago, I came out of the grocery store with my son.  For various reasons I was very stressed, but also very stressed in a way that had been familiar in my youth, where on a few occasions people near me were shot or at least shot at.

When a car backfired, I found myself under a parked truck.  I’d dropped the bags and taken a long dive.  My son was looking at me like I had gone around the bend.  I had to crawl out, grab the bags, and explain.  I was shaky the rest of the day.

Now, this doesn’t even happen every time a car backfires, and I’ve gone to a gun range without looking for shelter.  The noise bothers me, but it’s not that bad (It bothers me because it’s in a range that hurts my ears, not because it gives me flashbacks.)

But put me in the right kind of stress, in the right situation, and the back brain takes over.

I don’t care.  As issues go, it’s not that bad.  Weird, yes, but not that bad.  And it gives me understanding for friends who have much worse triggers to much worse flash backs.

Other PTSD symptoms from growing up in an unstable country are more subtle.  Two hours after hearing about the World Trade Center bombing, I was driving back from the grocery store, my truck filled with groceries, but particularly cooking oil and toilet paper.  This is in no way rational.  There was nothing about the bombings – even when we thought there would be a lot more of them, as we did – that would affect the supply of canola oil and toilet paper in Colorado in the proximate future.  BUT in Portugal in the seventies having these in stock was a very good idea, as they often disappeared from store shelves.  In other words, they  made the confused, scared kid inside me feel safe.  It’s all right.  Took me a year to get through the supply, but it’s all right.

Some of my friends with much worse experiences sleep with a gun at hand, or under their pillow at certain times of the year.  Or completely isolate themselves from humanity for two weeks, because they can’t be trusted not to snap at a triggering incident.

I don’t know anyone – not one person, and trust me I know many sorts of people who are broken in many sorts of ways – who gets their PTSD triggered by a WRITTEN word or a blog post.  I could see, perhaps, a novel that was all-absorbing, about a civil war triggering my feeling of vague stress that could make me vulnerable to PTSD.  This is one of the reasons that, though I love military SF I don’t read it often.  And I have to be careful when I write anything resembling it (I don’t write military sf, I don’t know enough about life in the military, never having served.)  But it would have to be a darn good novel. ALL absorbing.  Way beyond being “a good yarn.”

Normally the triggers are more primal and connected to the gut.  Smell is one of the strongest, in most humans.  You know that, right?  Smell something and suddenly you’re there, when you were three and seeing whatever.  Sight, of course.  Often a certain season/time of year with all the cues.  I thought Pratchett did that beautiful in Night Watch with the smell of lilac.  It was RIGHT.

So what in holy, bleeding, sulphurous h*ll is this about?

Twenty years ago, critics such as Christina Hoff Sommers, Daphne Patai and Noretta Koertge, and Karen Lehrman described the bizarre “therapeutic pedagogy” in many women’s studies classrooms, where female students were frequently encouraged to share traumatic or intimate experiences in supportive “safe spaces.”  Today, at many colleges, academic therapism has spread to other fields.  Welcome to the age of the trigger warning.

The trigger-warning vogue began a few years ago on feminist websites, and then spread to other “social justice” blogs.  The idea behind them is that for people who have post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), something that reminds them of the trauma can trigger painful flashbacks and panic attacks.  Initially, the warnings were primarily for sexual assault and partner abuse. Eventually, on some blogs, they spread to just about everything that could be potentially upsetting  to any person of politically correct sensitivities: sexism, racism, homophobia, “ableism,” “victim-blaming,” “slut-shaming,” “fat-shaming,” “body-shaming” and a host of other sins and oppressions.  (My personal favorite, from Melissa McEwan’s Shakesville site, is a warning for “discussion of gender policing”–that is, of norms dictating proper bounds of masculine and feminine behavior.  How startling to find such a discussion on a feminist blog!) Warnings for mere references to gun violence, suicide, self-harm and various mental disorders, as well as things that trigger phobias–from spiders to small holes (really)–have proliferated as well.

I’ve seen those warnings a couple of times, usually on articles about cutting or other addictive dysfunctions.  That I understood.  These are ADDICTIVE dysfunctions.  If you cut, you do it for the endorphins.  There is a seduction to it for you.  The same for drug use.  I can see where a well written, evocative, biographical article on it COULD start you thinking about it and could lead to your wanting to do it again, even though you kicked it.  G-d knows I understand that.  Every time I give up writing, I read a book…  Never mind.  Not the place to joke.  (And I’m not even sure I’m joking.)

I get that type of warning and it’s where I’ve seen them.  If you still choose to go ahead and read the article, you should have a quick dial to your buddy or twelve step counselor or whatever.  Right.  That’s fine.  You’re more than allowed.  You’re encouraged to do this.  In certain circumstances, maybe, if you squint, an article on suicide might even lead you to consider it again.  If the article makes it appear as wonderfully seductive as it has to me in my worst times.  NOT normally, but if you’re at just that point.  It’s a small demographic, but I could totally see a warning before playing certain songs or reading stories to a group of people that goes “If you’re suicidaly depressed…”  (Of course, who admits to that?  And to what end personal responsibility?  Most of us who are cyclically inclined towards depression are aware of it, and compensate.  Weirdly, actually, sometimes the more depressive songs are what pulls me out of it.)

But what the heck, people, seriously WHAT THE HECK?  sexism, racism, homophobia, “ableism,” “victim-blaming,” “slut-shaming,” “fat-shaming,” “body-shaming”?  Spiders? Small holes?  WHAT?

You cannot have PTSD to any of those, because none of those are the sort of trauma that causes PTSD.  Guys, I have black friends who lived in South Africa, under Apartheid, who don’t have PTSD relating to racism.  They get upset at it, sure, (everyone does, with real racism) but they don’t have PTSD.  There can be no “trigger” unless your idea of “trigger” is “something that makes me feel uncomfortable.”  If that’s it, then everything is clear, from the “triggers” for mentions of spiders and small holes, to not feeling safe at a convention because someone, somewhere might make a fat joke.  (Actually fat jokes don’t even make me feel uncomfortable.  I know I’m fat.  I don’t like it.  For various reasons I have trouble controlling it.  But you know what?  It’s still funny.  Heck, I make fat jokes myself.  My favorite is that if my local thrift store doesn’t stop putting size 3 suits in the size 18 section, I’m going to find the sorting clerk and sit on her.  At my weight, that’s serious punishment.)  A fat joke can offend you, if you feel it’s directed at you – though then, that’s not a joke, but just a rude remark.  In the same way a sexist/racist/homophobic comment might upset you.  THAT IS NOT A TRAUMA.  That’s just being bothered and upset.  The proper outlet for it is to either roll your eyes, tell the person they’re annoying (if they’re nearby and not like a performer), not listen to/read the person again, OR, if it really gets on your nerves, vent to your friends about it.

I knew we were in some sort of trouble when I stole my kid’s psychology textbook and found that having mood variations of any sort was being classed as “bi-polar” and needing medication.  I have no idea how it’s being applied, but let me tell you, I know what a real bi-polar person is like.  I grew up with one.  Getting mildly upset or happy doesn’t make you bi-polar.  It makes you human.

You can’t feel unsafe because someone near you might possibly eventually say something that could remotely perhaps apply to you and upset you.  You can’t even feel unsafe because someone might turn to you and tell you you’re a fat cow.  You can get angry, but getting angry is okay. To feel unsafe you have to have a reasonable (note, REASONABLE) expectation of physical HARM.

Listen to me – this thing you’re experiencing?  This upset in the pit of your stomach?  It’s perfectly normal.  Trust me.  It’s part of being human.

That thing where whatsherface heard Larry Summers say that at the very top in the sciences there were few qualified women and felt like she was going to faint or throw up?  Learned reaction.  And the fact that she somehow got it into her head that she should never, ever, ever be upset.

Any woman who feels the need to faint when faced with a statistical truth – that women tend to cluster in the center of the bell curve while men cluster in the center.  Yes, there’s more male geniuses.  And more male morons.  BUT this is not predictive of any given woman or man.  It’s a statistical universe thing – is an unspanked baby.

No, I don’t believe babies should be spanked.  (Yes, I can see the twitter storm now.  That’s fine.  I don’t care.  They’re going to play telephone with anything I say anyway, let them have their fun.)  But I do believe that if you’re never been metaphorically spanked, if the world never hands you a set back, if everyone tiptoes around you and tries to make sure that your tender, delicate, lilac scented feelings can’t ever ever ever be offended, you’re not going to grow up.  You’re going to continue to think like a baby who attempts to control his environment by crying and pumping his hands and feet.  And the more mommy and daddy – or total strangers who buy into your entitlement – rush to protect you, the more you’ll try the trick because, oh, my, that must be your G-d given right.

Listen, princess (and it’s mostly women, though some men are also drama queens) I don’t care how privileged your upbringing, how cushioned your adolescence; I don’t really give a good g*ddamn how many people told you that you were special and must be accommodated in all things, you’re human, living in an human world, and sooner or later reality is going to bite you on your pink powdered ass.  And the longer it takes for reality to bite, the worse it will hurt.

This doesn’t make you a victim (and being a victim doesn’t make you a good person, btw) or entitled to compensation.  Depending on how you take it, it either makes you a grown up, or a bloody nuisance.

But you have TTTTTTRAUMA.  Some uncouth man has looked at you too long, slapped your butt, told you that you were hot…  Some guy – trembles lip – tried to get into your roooooom at a con.

Look, my upbringing was no worse than most people’s.  It was probably better than most in my time and place.  My parents were middle-middle class.  By education probably upper middle class.  BUT thank G-d neither of them believed that I should be raised as the bubble girl, with every harsh feature of the world and humanity cushioned and softened for me.

I know they didn’t like to expose me to what was at the time and place quite a rough and tumble world.  I didn’t like to expose my kids, either.  I remember that first day in kindergarten, letting go of the kid’s hand, knowing they’d get in trouble, be made fun of, be spoken harshly to.

I didn’t get advanced from first to fourth grade because fourth grade was the last grade in the village, and after that I’d need to take a bus to the middle school.  Mom thought a girl of eight was too young.

Now let me tell you why she thought so.  Portuguese buses are usually overfull.  There is either a class of men who rides the bus all day practicing frottage, or there are a lot of these men.

Yes, I’ve had total strangers pleasure themselves by rubbing up against me.   When I was as young as 11, which is when I did go to 5^th grade.  Do I have PTSD due to that?  Oh, hell no.  It was ewwwwwwwwwwwwww beyond all measure, but it happened to everyone and I had been warned.  On the advice of my female cousin/sister (she was raised with my brother and I) Natalia, I’d provided myself with one of grandma’s hat pins.  It became a game to shift just slightly, then STAB.  Oh, the screams, the clutchings, the moans that they weren’t doing anything.  (At which point more often than not the conductor would come and toss them out.)

There were other worse incidents.  It was the culture.  Does this mean I feel unsafe around men?  Oh, please.  Why should I?  WHY would that be a horrible trauma?  Some stupid idiot thought he could get off by doing this.  It makes me feel disgusted, but disgust – LISTEN TO ME – is NOT TRAUMA.

Being rubbed on by a stranger, or being groped by one, even, or even being cornered in a deserted classroom by a guy six years older who is intent on raping you IS NOT TRAUMA.  NOT if you got out of it unscathed.  It was scary.  Oh, it was very scary.  BUT BEING FRIGHTENED DOESN’T CAUSE TRAUMA.

Rape can very well be trauma.  Very bad trauma.  But how many of you have been raped?  Tell me the truth, princess.  Not “slept with him and found out he was not very nice.”  Not “my friends all thought I was stupid for sleeping with him, so I told them it was rape.”  How many of you have been held down and forcibly raped?

I know there are real cases of this.  And I know it causes trauma.  I have friends – female AND male – who have been raped, and who are still traumatized by it.

But look, honeychild, if being “slut shamed” is enough to traumatize you, you’d expect these people who have been VIOLENTLY and FORCIBLY raped  to be huddled under their beds, crying, right?  For the rest of their lives?

The people I know are all functional human beings.  They might have some scars they have to route around, but I can tell you something, your highness, NONE OF THEM WHO READS THIS (and a few will) will complain I “triggered” them.  They can be triggered, yes.  I’ve handled meltdowns with a couple of them.  But not by reading some words on a blog post.

I know my friend, Amanda, likes to just yell at people like you to “grow up” – yeah.  You should.  But I don’t know if you can.  That is, I don’t know if it’s that easy.  Sometimes I wonder if this panic and “injury” is sort of like the psychological version of humans who grow up in houses that are too clean end up having asthma, because their body reacts to ANYTHING as a major threat.

If that’s the case, you can’t just volitionally do it.  But you should try to do it, nonetheless.  Expose yourself to the company of those who disagree with you and DO try to defend your point, instead of screaming they’re hurting you and running away to the “comfort” of all your friends who will pat you on the back and assure you that it was indeed horrible trauma.  Depending on how capable of immersing yourself in art you are, reading biographies of people who really WERE traumatized and didn’t end up as quivering pools of jelly (the world is full of them.  No, seriously) might help.  Or you could help people who have it worse than you.  Take yourself out of your comfort zone.  Baby steps.  Remember, being upset is not abnormal.  It’s part of human existence.  And you are not a fairy princess.  You’re human like the rest of us.

But you have to do something – other than scream and moan and demand to be protected. — Because I’m going to tell you this, Rapunzel, right now a well protected Victorian maiden would laugh her ass off at you.  As much as they presented the “delicate maiden” to the world, theirs was a rougher environment, and they were likely to withstand a lot more than you can, including death of siblings and worse. Certainly being spoken harshly to and being TRULY discriminated against.

And here’s the thing, Cinderella, if you don’t change your ways, you’re giving Victorian maidens a bad name.  I don’t care how much you roar in your “safe” places that you’re an all conquering warrior queen.  The first time you faint at a harsh word, you’re validating all the stereotypes people like me don’t want to have brought back.

You know the whole frottage thing in buses?  And why it was dangerous for a woman to be out alone after eight?  And why a lot of families where I grew up considered it dangerous to send their daughters to mixed-gender schools at all?

Because women were assumed to be too fragile for this harsh workaday world.  They were supposed to be kept cabined, cribbed, confined – PROTECTED by their men.  And any one that was alone out could not be a virtuous woman, not even an 11 year old girl.

Now I wasn’t in the first generation to break that, not by a long shot, BUT there was still enough of that in the culture that I had to be aware of and fight and show that I could handle things so I’d be allowed to go on.  A lot of that.  And I fought back at it, because I did not want to be “protected.”  I was a human being and I wanted to be treated as one.  I wanted to learn and work, and be, just like my brother or my male cousins.

But if you keep up with the helpless-flower act, you’re going to end up giving people the impression that ALL OF US need to be protected.  Slut shaming?  Why, darling, you might not end up locked in the house, but the generation after you will.  It’s so easy.  “I don’t let my daughter go to school.  She’d faint if someone made a joke about her body.”

Next thing you know, we’re all in burkas and being kept from that terrible rough and tumble world.  Maybe that’s what you want for the generations of women after us.  It’s not what I want for my potential granddaughters or great granddaughters.

So, princess, get off your tuffet and stop making like you’re a melting special snow flake.  You aren’t.  And before you destroy what much better women than you have worked for, I’ll see you in hell.*

*and if you thought the last was threat and you wanted to faint or run away, then yes, this post is all about you.

A couple of years ago, I wrote a post on my adventures in traditional publishing, all of it based on the premise that – back then – no matter what your publisher did, it was always the writers fault, and if you had problems with that, well, just shake it off.  He beat you, but he was your publisher, and if you left that, well, you just wouldn’t have an audience.

Those days are gone, thank heavens.  I now can follow Dave Drake’s advice to me eleven years ago, to only work with publishers I respect.  This is because I have the option to go indie for my other stuff.

But in that post, I mentioned something about being Latina, and refusing to claim that and to play the game.  Someone of a ah… politically correct persuasion in the comments to the Passive Guy got all upset because I was claiming that the publishing game was easier for women and minorities.

The answer is yes… and no.

Publishing is easier if you’re a woman/minority who agrees with the Marxist definitions of your role and place in the world.  In fact, if you’re a minority woman whose politics confirm and flatter the New York establishment, you’ll get the red carpet ride to success with extra flowers and champagne.  (So, okay, nowadays that might not mean much.  The champagne has gone moldy and the carpet is moth eaten, but give the bastards their due.  They will try their very best to get you to the top as fast as they can.  Mind you, it’s still better to be a WHITE woman of socialist-feminist upbringing, like the precious flower who got 300 thousand dollars for a book that went on to sell eight thousand copies.  And then got ANOTHER 30k advance.)

If you can be that, or pretend to be that, they will help you any way they can.  (More, of course, if you have minimal talent.)

Note what I’m saying here – if you fit their preconceptions about you.  Or if you are willing to sell your soul to pretend you do.

I was told that I could get the golden ride IF I were willing to write an auto-biography that hit all the right notes.  I wasn’t.

Why wasn’t I?

Well, it starts with the fact that I’m a little contrary.  No.  Wait.  I’m a lot contrary.  Even if I’d agreed with them, I’d have got pretty upset at getting shoved in the “Latina” box and in the “feminist” (whatever this means this week) box.  That’s to begin with.

The other part – EVEN IF I AGREED WITH THEM POLITICALLY – is that this is not what I wanted to write.  It just isn’t.

I can write non-fiction (eh, you’re reading it) and essays and biographical crap.  I can also drive a truck for a living (okay, I can’t, but I could learn.)  For all the joy I’d get out of it, I’d rather drive a truck.

What I wanted to do was write science fiction and fantasy (and mystery, too, but that was more distant and came later.  I had mystery mostly as my popcorn reading for years, not as my ‘work’.)

It was sort of hinted (and driven towards by various agents – I ended up with four serially and those were the ones I didn’t reject outright in initial interviews – that this was fine too, if it was, you know, Latina, feminist SF/F.

Look, maybe other people have more control over what they write.  Me?  I ended up with psychotic b*tch female from h*ll in DST and for a switch a gay male barbarian in AFGM.  It wasn’t my doing.  My subconscious hates me.  (Yes, they’re both lovable.  That’s because I can’t help loving them.) I’m the libertarian whose books become ensemble casts as a matter of course.  This thing is loaded and not fully under my control.

I can’t put that sort of restriction on my work.  My work seems to well up from a deeper part of me, where I can’t dictate.  If I try to it just stops cold.   I can make minor modifications/tweaks, but that’s it. Oh, some of my characters have Portuguese or Spanish names, but I really don’t think once you get to the 25^th century that means the same it means now.  And if we’re going to talk in fantasy… My people’s Celtic notions got thoroughly stomped by the Romans who in their way were the most pragmatic people ever.  Even their magic was matter of fact.  I can write elves and fairies and all that, because I research.  Nothing “authentic” about it.

Besides this being “Latino” or “minority” fiction or whatever IMPLIES an imperative to whine about America and American values.

A)    I think that’s a load of nonsense, and I did even back when I was 15 and some idiot was telling me the reason Portugal didn’t have a computer industry was that America wouldn’t allow it.  (Or it could be the regulations, the innumerable restrictions on invention and a culture that tends to Manana.)

B)    I came to America.  I chose to raise my kids here.  What you’re telling me is that I’m a morally reprehensible person who will trade in her morals/dignity to be part of the “oppressors”?  Much obliged for the image of me you have.  Or I could have come here because I believe in Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness which this country, flawed though it is, still (more than any other in the world) guarantees its people.  And because I think that’s better for everyone, of whatever heritage.

Of course it’s no use saying this stuff to the people of the NYC traditional publishing establishment.  See, they’re not even badly intentioned.  They’re just convinced it is their MISSION in life to improve how people think and through it society by … mostly pushing a bunch of tired Marxist nonsense at people.  First it starts with viewing people as classes and genders and levels of oppression.  At no time are these people people, with real histories.  For instance, a female of upper middle class background who went to Harvard is ipso facto more “downtrodden” than a man who grew up in poverty and went to community college.  Because she’s female.

They believe this on faith, not on any empirical observation, and they’re encased in an impenetrable wall of kafkatrap.  If you’re a male and say that you’re more oppressed, they scream at you for not knowing your very own “male privilege” , and if you’re a female and say males have it worse, they tell you you’re “colonized.”

They have in fact, in their own minds, formed a completely hermetically sealed alternate reality.

Which would be fine, if it didn’t affect their decisions in our reality.  But it does.

And the problem with the NYC publishing establishment is that it’s not just publishing houses who live in this alternate reality: it’s also distributors, heads of chain bookstores, and in fact all the commanding heights of business and culture.  (They ARE the man.)  Because a pre-requisite of hiring is to have gone to the good colleges where this Marxist (but never acknowledged as such and the usual idiots on my FB page will pull the “no true Scottsman” on me again on this) vision of the world prevails.

So the signs of the books that SHOULD be pushed because they will “educate” and “improve” people are those books that agree with them.  Disagree with them and you get consigned to midlist hell.

Disagree with them while blatantly refusing to be what they think you should be because you are female and technically of a protected ethnicity and…

Well, just before three years ago, when DST did well and indie opened up… I was considering walking away from writing forever.  And writing stories is the only thing I wanted to do since six.  But there’s only so much the heart and soul can endure and I HAD HAD enough.

The choice was to become what they wanted to me to be – and I couldn’t.  I was me, not some widget labelled “female, from Latin country, MA in Languages and Literature.” – or I could walk off.  And I was ready to walk off and try to find a retail job or ANYTHING ELSE that didn’t require me to sell my soul piecemeal.

So, is it easier to be a female of color in publishing?  Oh, much easier, if you’re willing to sell your soul, to void yourself and be exactly what the publishers want.  If you mirror their prejudices at them, they’ll push you as hard as they can.  Of course, as I said, with the new competition from indies and Amazon turning the market on its head, that’s not very far… but it’s farther than you’ll ever get if you insist on being an individual with individual beliefs!

And their prejudices aren’t only of the Marxist kind, mind you.  Being “socially conscious” individuals, they get to indulge their often shockingly old fashioned prejudices in a way that anyone less politically correct would get crucified for.  So my friends who weren’t even distantly “Latina” got told that they couldn’t write science fiction because “women write fantasy better.” or “Ladies can only write fantasy.”  (This was told to a friend with a graduate degree in physics.) I got told that too, and also that “Women rarely plot well enough for mystery.”

This was all said by people who pride themselves on their open mindedness.

So, yes, women writers of sf/f (and anything except maybe romance) meet with prejudice.  And women writers of color meet with worst prejudice.  We’re dehumanized, widgetized (totally a word) and if we refuse to play along we get relegated to a sort of soft midlist ghetto where we’ll never ever be allowed to get ahead or get any support because we just are the wrong kind.

We’re not given the freedom or our own experiences or our own minds, because we iz poor womnynz of color and that idea we have that we have our own mind?  Yeah, totally false consciousness.  We need our betters to tell us how to think and what to feel.  And if we don’t take that received wisdom we are bad womnynz of color and need to be kept in a place where they won’t wrongly influence other people who clearly can’t think for themselves.

Apparently the only people allowed to think for themselves are properly ivy educated white people who can do whatever they want to (but don’t.  They willingly turn in their brains for the contradictory ideology of a crazy German scribbler.  Never mind.)

Look, I can’t imagine a worse “colonization” than that, frankly.  I can’t imagine a colonialist, racist of the 19^th century saying that a subjugated person doesn’t have his own thoughts, is not ALLOWED to have his own thoughts, and if he has his own thoughts he’s wrong and bad.  Or rather, I can, but you’d have to go all the way to slave owners.

So… I don’t wonder why many women writers in science fiction are furious.  I just wish they’d stop and think at who is causing their fury.

No, I really don’t care if your PUBLISHER told you that the reading public wouldn’t take a gay character (told me that.  Agents, too) and I don’t care if they tell you it’s those troglodytes, out there in redneck country who don’t like your daring prose.

Your publisher and your agents are inside a parallel reality. They talk to people like them, and they know what it takes to “sell” books to distributors and store managers, but not necessarily to the people on the streets (which is why printruns keep falling.  Never mind the excuses about videos and games.  Write stuff they want to read and they will come.)

In the last few years, I’ve got to talk to a lot of real people, out there, some even fandom but not organized fandom, and I have yet to see any who resents that I’m a woman, of color (Well, I used to be tan.  Days spent inside have given me this sallow olive look.  I must make enough to buy a beach house.  Then the color I am is exactly that of toast with butter) who writes whatever crosses her mind and none of it victimhood.  The only person who has scolded me for not writing “more Portuguese” was someone mad I write historicals about English History.  (He was from Portugal and I actually agree with him on the wonderfully rich history.  The problem is that there isn’t a substratum of knowledge for it to peg onto in the states, which are still my main market.  I could write Portuguese history, but it would have to be disguised and in the far future.)

The fans don’t care, provided I give them characters they care about and an interesting story.  Heck, my leftist fans stick around despite my obvious libertarian beliefs, which, yes, do bleed through into books.  You can’t help it when you’re writing from the soul.

And interestingly enough, Baen doesn’t care either.  Baen, that evil Right Wing House (which publishes Eric Flint, an avowed communist, and more than a dozen leftists of various shades.  Ah, but they publish people who aren’t leftist, and that makes them ipso facto evil and right wing.)  Baen looked at my books and bought the books.  They accepted that this woman of Latin origin can have a mind of her own and allowed me, for the first time in my career, to write what I really wanted.

Curiously – or not – that was a book that sold better than anything else I’d written to date: Darkship Thieves.

And then I sent them A Few Good Men, on Spec, and they liked it so much, despite the BLATANT gay romance, that they sent me copyedits before the contracts.

(Which is of course, how evil they are, see, they even let the little womyn of color write things that are clearly false consciousness.  The pure evil! – do I need a sarcasm tag?)

So you see, my story has a happy ending.  I escaped from a situation in which I was a widget and there was only one path for success and I’m free – just like a real person! – to forge my own path to heaven or h*ll.  No guarantees, but I get to do what I want to.  I don’t have to sell my soul to be allowed to create “approved of” art.

So, all of the women screaming about their oppression can stop being oppressed.  They can walk away from publishers who demean them, and go indie or find a publisher who respects them.

You can’t force the world to stop thinking whatever it will think, but you can go around and forge your own path and reach readers who just want to read.

And you know what?  The readers don’t care if you’re purple with pokadots.  I know this, because I’m a reader, and I don’t care.  I don’t even care about your politics if you tell me a good enough story that I’ll read it despite rolling my eyes at a few paragraphs.  And I’ll buy the next, too.

Your success is in your hands.  And it has nothing to do with what’s between your legs, or your pigmentation.   Or even what’s between the legs of your characters or their pigmentation.

Traditional publishing, the NY way was making me insane with the lies of its parallel reality.  It was killing me softly with its intent to help me ITS way.

So I walked.  No, I’ll never get the magic carpet ride.  But I’m not afraid of working.  And I’m not afraid of selling to the fans.  I can tell them stories, and that’s all I ever wanted to do.

To every writer treated like a widget: Stop driving yourself crazy.  Set yourself free.  And consider that likely your tormentors are the ones who claim to be your liberators.

UPDATE: Because Kate had trouble slice-o-dice-o-mating our little precious flower link troll yesterday in comments (because, you know, she’s not rude and tries not to wall of text the comments) she continued the vivisection over at Mad Genius Club.