According To Hoyt

When I was in college, one of my best friends made a middle-class salary from part time modeling. I tried out for it, but I was turned down, because I was a little short. Mind you, this was Portugal in the eighties, and I was five seven and a size seven, which means in every group of women I was usually the tallest by a head. Except when I was with this particular friend, who was half Italian (from the German border) and who was six feet tall and blond.

The person that they wanted on the runway, selling clothes to Portuguese women had in fact nothing to do with Portuguese women.

In fact, considering that some of the models modeling men’s clothes are women, (and very oddly vice-versa) I’d guess that most of the models on runways today have nothing to do with men.

Of course being rejected for the job, immediately made me feel worthless and ugly and totally destroyed my life.  Also, another thing that destroyed my life, and the reason I’m living in a cardboard box under a bridge is the fact that I looked at that runway and saw no one that looked like me.

So I knew I’d never amount to anything, right?

Which brings us to models of another kind. Role models.

I’m not going to look for it, but last week an article from the Telegraph caught my eye. It was about how Britain now has some sort of minister/secretary/whatever for science. And she’s a woman. This will immediately (implied, to great rejoicing) increase the numbers of women/girls/female creatures in all branches of science.

I don’t know what to say. Except maybe W(inning) T(he) F(uture) people?

What is this obsession with role models and with someone you can identify with in all walks of life and in literature too?

And no, btw, I don’t think that having a woman in charge of science something or other will result in hordes of people of vaginitude storming the halls of science. Seriously – how would that work?

Kid, playing with dolls on carpet. Looks up. Sees adult woman giving boring speech. Sees that she’s minister/secretary for science something or other. Puts doll down. “Mom, you must give me a test tube set, for I now know that because bureaucrats do science stuff, and one of them is a woman, I too can do bureaucratic science stuff! Forget the test tube, buy me a rubber stamp.”

We’re assaulted with this type of strange magical thinking at all levels.

Girls need role models.  Minorities need role models.  People don’t read because there’s no one like them in the books. If I look around an organization and everyone there is blond and tall, they’re putting me down, because I’m not, and now I know I’ll never be successful.

Because totally what counts is if people match me on the outside.  Well, it is what is important if I want to borrow their clothes a lot.  For other things… not so much?

In school they used to tell us we needed more women teachers so girls would have role models. Now, of course, no one says anything about the dearth of male teachers.

In the same way, we’ve been told ad nauseum that we needed more women heroes in books, so that girls could aspire to being heroic. No one is saying anything about the complete dearth of male anything in books these days. Instead they say “boys don’t read.”

So, let’s talk about reading and role models in books.

When I was little I was very aware of male and female stories. Male stories (often swiped from my brother) were about adventures and exploration, about killing the bad guys or at least hurting them very badly. They were fun. Female stories were about friends and feelings and oh, my heavens, clothes. I could enjoy those too, in a certain frame of mind. Not all of them. I never got the thing with the bullfighters and mourning them forever.

However, I really liked, oh, Tom Sawyer (a boy book); The Prince and the Pauper (an in between book); Tarzan (boy books); The Countess of Segur (Girl books, and btw, dealing with surprisingly modern themes for fairytales, including spouse abuse); The Adventures of Captain Morgan (boy books); The Little Princess (Girl book.)

That last one, btw, could have been a boy book too, but my brother hated it with a burning passion. I think it was because it’s your classical Cinderella story and there’s a lot about how she was mistreated and then rescued from it all because she was deserving. I loved it for the adventure and the stealth involved in bringing the happy ending about.

What I’m trying to say is this – in my head at a very young age, I classified books as “boy” or “girl,” but it rarely had anything to do with the sex of the protagonist. What it had to do with was with the feel of the book and the virtues it relied on.

I don’t remember once – not once – thinking I needed a role model in a book, or thinking (even) that there must be someone like me in the book for me to enjoy it. Heck, Captain Morgan hated a lot of things, but he hated Portuguese most of all. He set fire to their ships and put them to the sword. Reading the books (mind you, by then I was 12) I thought “okay, it makes a certain sense since he’s a dedicated anti-slaver and at that time Portuguese ran slave ships. Also, you know, nations have disagreements. He was English and hated the Portuguese. These were imaginary Portuguese. No real Portuguese were harmed in the making of this book, and I certainly hadn’t been harmed.

The Three Musketeers (a boy book) held forth that Frenchmen were the pinnacle of civilization. Well, they would. They were French. It didn’t make me like them any the less.

But, you’ll say, what about the virtues girls are supposed to learn from books? Should these be masculine virtues?

I think that learning to be good to those who are weaker; kind to those in need; self-restrained; logical; protective which are the virtues those books embodied don’t hurt women. What about the more female-like books? Well, they taught the same virtues, except that you did all of that while in snazzy clothes, something I don’t exactly object to either.

The only difference I see is that women in real life tend to be “no holds barred” fighters, while books for men tend to teach restraint, more than books for women do

Restraint is usually the better road.

I don’t understand the idea that in books; in positions of power; in professions you need to see someone like you to make sure you can go there. Perhaps this is odd in me? Even if there were no woman writers, I’d still want to be a writer. The relative dearth (not complete, but relative) of women writers in her class didn’t hurt Jane Austen after all.

And I’ve loved books where the voice character was a very heterosexual male. The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress comes to mind.

You see, as far as I’m concerned, books exist for one reason: to make it possible for me to experience a narration/life/point of view from behind someone else’s eyes instead of my own.

Story? Nah. I can watch story on a screen. But watching story is not the same as living it, as feeling sweat drip, as having that itch behind your knee just as you’re going into battle. Only books can let you live it.

Which is why the obsession with “having one of me” in a book (and its mirror image of having to be a certain race/sex/orientation to write about that) is maddening. If I wanted to stay locked behind my eyes, dude, I wouldn’t read books.

Are there really people so narcissistic that they just want to read about themselves, forever?

Or are they looking for reinforcement and idealization. “Look, that’s me on the stage, and I’m six feet tall and blond.”

Perhaps that’s why the modeling industry in Portugal, in the eighties, loved my friend. Or perhaps it was because she made the clothes look good.

And perhaps there are really people who love seeing themselves reflected mirror-like on the books they read. Or perhaps – perhaps – this is all nonsense and people just like characters that engage them and carry them along, no matter what they look like/are like.

And perhaps the obsession with making sure there’s someone for the reader (particularly women, for which I think we should feel insulted. Do they think we lack imagination?) to identify with by mirroring what we think these readers are is a peculiar insanity of the elites.

Like the idea that having a woman science “minister” will immediately make little girls forget everything and want to be scientists.

Because if all the push in schools, in the media, in stories, can’t make them do it – yeah, sure – the bureaucrat with a science title will surely bring about utopia.

 

I just realized that I don’t have a bunch of you cartoon critters on my flist or that I can’t figure out how to tag you.  SO….

I first watched this as a presentation.  I have since given it to at least four creative friends who were going through a rough patch.

It’s free.  Go.  Download.  Trust me on this.  Go and download.

 

*I displaced Amanda’s monthly guest post yesterday for the character blog tour, so I’m putting it up today.  I’ll add one thing to what she says below — well, a few — when my kids were in elementary, there was a city program where they were given incentives to read.  Read x pages get a burger.  Read x pages get a movie ticket.  I never let them participate in the program.  Why not (besides meanness?)  Because I didn’t want them to think of reading as a chore you had to be compensated for. This is the mentality I keep running into, even from thirty somethings “reading is a chore and you need to give me stuff so I’ll read.” For some this becomes “reading is a chore, so I’ll read only ‘improving’ materials. And thus we come to writers who think that writing is kind of school work and that it can be graded by how many “ideas that improve the world” it has (in their opinion) instead of a purely ludic activity. Me?  I believe whatever else writing might be, it must be fun first, or it already failed.  No one was paid or compensated for reading Dumas or Austen.  They were read because they were fun. Shakespeare was read because he was fun. Did they accomplish other things? Maybe. But fun comes first.*

Of Grants and Literature and the Brainwashing of our Kids -Amanda Green

 

Earlier this month, New Zealand author Eleanor Catton announced that she was establishing a grant that would allow authors to take three months leave to “read the work of their fellow authors.” My first thought was “Cool!” Then it read a bit further and realized that she was seeding the grant with only $3,000 and that there weren’t a lot of other details in the story. So I went in search of more information and the more I read, the more I shook my head.

For those not familiar with Catton, she has written two books. According to her Twitter feed, she made more than $140,000 last year and is happy to pay 40% to “give young kiwis in poverty a chance” and goes on to say what a great policy this is from the Green Party. She also notes that artists don’t create to help people or make money. According to her tweet, artists create to “discover the truth underneath the assumed and bring it to the surface.”

Hmm, starting to sound familiar yet?

But back to the grant. According to another piece, it would allow writers the “ability to read” and the only requirement would be that the recipients post a short non-fiction piece online describing what they are reading.

Now, I’ll admit the idea of being paid to read appeals to me but it isn’t necessary. Far from it, in fact. More than that, I don’t think I could take three months off from writing and not go stark raving mad. But it goes beyond that. No matter what my deadlines or how immersed I am in my writing, I am still reading. I may not read as much when I’m mid-book as I do when editing or planning a new project, but I’m still reading.

My concern with the possible rules for the grant – I say possible because I haven’t been able to find anything more than Catton wants to fund it and let authors take 3 months leave to read – is that they will limit what authors can read. That concern naturally, at least in my mind, reminded me of the frustration I had with the school system when my son was still in school, a system that came very close to destroying his joy of reading and has done just that in so many other children.

My son is now an adult, one who loves to read. But it very well could have gone the other way. The war to save him as a reader started in the third grade. That is when he had a teacher who decided to use reading as a punishment. She chose the most boring, most inappropriate books she could for a boy of my son’s age. There wasn’t a single book during that time that had any action. Not one that had someone my son could identify with. No fun stories and no happy endings (male version). Instead, we were being exposed to the first attempt to de-manify (it is, too, a word) our boys using books. In each of the books he was given to read, the boys were bullies, the men evil.

The only good thing that came from that year was that my son got to see up close and personal that his parents would go toe-to-toe with teachers and administrators we felt were not doing their jobs.

But the damage was started and the education system as a whole continued the attack. The responsibility for coming up with summer reading lists was turned over to people who weren’t in the trenches with the students on a daily basis. Instead of books our kids, and especially our boys, would want to read, these were books that were “socially relevant”. In other words, they continued the attack on boys and men and more, much more.

The list for the summer going into fifth grade included books about drug abuse, living in poverty, teen pregnancy – not through rape but through consensual sex but without dealing with the consequences after the birth, at least not the consequences for the girl because her family, poor as they were, rallied around her and they lived happily ever after. But the one with the penis was evil because he didn’t control himself even as the girl was a willing partner – mental illness and confused sexual identity.

Doesn’t that sound like a list of topics you wanted to read over your summer vacation when you were still in elementary school?

But I think it was worse the next year because the socially relevant and politically correct topics were better hidden, at least at first glance. I’ll never forget being on vacation with my son and mother that year. We were visiting my aunt and her family just outside of Cleveland and one afternoon my son and I were reading. I soon learned I’d made a big mistake by not reading all of the book he was currently reading. Yep, another summer reading list book. I’d skimmed the first few chapters and it had seemed harmless enough. A gothic novel with the mandatory ghost story.

And then he got to the end.

And then my temper went through the roof.

And it was a very good thing we were more than 1,000 miles from his school because I would have been in raising hell.

The last half of the book turned into the typical man-hating book. Men ruled by desire for sex at all costs and the woman’s consent – or lack thereof – doesn’t count. A woman who, in the beginning of the book was capable and had a brain, suddenly was helpless and a victim. Add to that a very brutal attempted rape scene, thwarted by – wait for it – the ghost and the book went flying against the wall.

Fortunately, before he finished reading the rape scene, my son asked me what something meant. I’m not ashamed to admit I did one of those cartoonish head whips with the eyeballs bounding out of my head before rushing back in. I grabbed the book from him and read the paragraph in question. Then I backed up and read the entire page, and the entire chapter. And then I told my son he didn’t have to finish the book and here was what happened.

Was it a sanitized version? Sort of. I told him about the attempted rape and I told him how the ghost intervened. But then we talked about how the bad guy wasn’t representative of all men and certainly not of him. We had our first in-depth discussion that afternoon about how authors and publishers sometimes have an agenda they try to push with their books.

That was when he finally voiced the question I knew he’d been thinking. Why was the school forcing kids to read stuff that was boring and insulting? I told him I didn’t know but that we would go ask just as soon as we returned home.

And we did. The first day we were back, we piled into the car and went to the school. Our first stop was the administration office to see if the big wigs could answer the question. I wasn’t surprised when they passed the buck and said to go talk to the teacher. When we tried to do that, I had a very strong sense of déjà vu. Once more we were back to the third grade with teachers trying to convince my son and other boys that they were second class citizens because they were – gasp – male.

When I made it clear that wasn’t going to fly, the young female teacher informed me that if I had had any objections to the reading list, I could have lodged them before school was out and we would have been given an alternate list. Since I hadn’t, it was all my fault.

Looking back on that day, I can smile now. Then, I saw red. Even my son saw the warning signs and he knew the teacher had gone too far. She had no idea what sort of monster she’d just unloosed by trying to put the blame on me. But she would soon learn.

Very coolly and calmly – that stage when anyone with an ounce of sense knows the berserker is lurking just beneath the surface – I asked her to show me where in the curriculum or school/district information there was anything to say we had a chance to review the summer reading list before it was handed out. She couldn’t. I was told it was something I should have known. Yes, I asked if I was supposed to just intuit it. She stared at me as if she had no idea what I was saying.

Then I asked her to present me with a copy of the alternative list. Of course, she couldn’t. She said I had to get it from the librarian. Hmm, the alternate list came from someone who wasn’t responsible for the original list. Why was that and how was I to know? Another blank stare and another attempt to pass the blame back to me.

When she tried to tell me I should have read all the books before my son did, I swear my son took a step back. He knew the explosion was about to come. He was wrong. By then, I was like a cat playing with a mouse. I had read almost all the books. But I also knew I was the exception to the rule because I’d done my homework and called some of the parents of the kids in my son’s class to see if they had read any of the books. No, they hadn’t but they had noticed how their kids weren’t doing the reading. Now they understood why.

When I asked the teacher if she really thought parents would read all the books before letting their kids do so, she said that wasn’t her concern. If we didn’t like the list, we could have asked for the alternate list. But she really didn’t see anything wrong with the books on the list. After all, the sooner our kids learned that the world consisted mainly of poor people living in squalid conditions and that it was our duty to make the world better for them, the better. She went on to say that the books, like the one I was objecting to, were there to show the boys that they needed to curb their animal side and take their cues from the women in their lives because, you know, women are so much calmer and exercise better judgment than men.

I think I laughed then. I know I asked if she’d paid one bit of attention to her female students and if she remembered junior high.

Looking back now, I realize I had just met a GHHer in training.

How does all this relate back to the grant to let writers read? One way is that I have a feeling that they are going to be encouraged to read “literature” and then pass on how wonderful it is. For another, those of us who don’t write “literature” are too busy writing what we enjoy and what sells to worry about taking three months off. We don’t take years to write a single book. More than that, we read even if we are writing. We don’t need someone to subsidize us so we have what is basically a three month vacation. We’re working stiffs who understand that three months off will impact our bottom line down the road.

In other words, going on the dole – even if it is a grant from another writer – isn’t the way to prove our worth as a writer or the way to recharge our batteries. It is a way to decrease our earnings over time. It smacks of the guaranteed month off workers get in some European countries, countries with the ensuing problems because of that.

Thanks very much, but I won’t be applying. As it stands now, even when writing, I read anywhere between 1,000 – 5,000 pages a month, sometimes more. Now, if someone wants to pay me to do that AND let me write at the same time, cool. Until then, I’ll keep being the hack I am and writing books folks want to read. Books where there are good and bad men AND women, books with more than a socially relevant message to them.

And, until the education system is overhauled, if you have kids in school, please check what they are reading and be prepared to offer counter-arguments to the SJW pabulum that is being spoon fed to our kids in an attempt to “socialize” them.

*This is oddly topical for science fiction — and not just for science fiction, interestingly.  Oh, and those who are subscribers, I put out subscriber chow in the protected space.  Second chapter of To The Dragons.*

This is a post about the qualities and the effects of despair.  There are several reasons for it, the proximate one being that we are fed a lot of it – purposely? – by our art and entertainment complex.

I’m well acquainted with despair.  You could say it is an old friend of mine, except that despair is no one’s friend.

Despair accounted for how long it took me to break into publishing, to an extent, by creating long gaps of silence in my production, and several attempts at doing something else – anything else – with my life.  My basement is littered with the beginnings of would-be-money-making projects I tried to engage in to avoid what seemed to be a hopeless attempt at getting published.  Despair has accounted for how few of my books have been out the last two years.  Those of you who have followed my blog through that time know I hit the nadir of despair about a year ago, when it looked like despite all my best efforts to keep running on ice, my career in writing was over.

I was wrong.  I was wrong for several reasons, one of them being that Darkship Thieves – my heart’s darling at that point – did well for itself, and continues to do surprisingly well.  I was wrong, because indie possibilities opened.  I was wrong because I lost it – truly lost it – and started telling it like it is, and weirdly, surprisingly the “me” I’d suppressed so long, in order to have a career that would allow me to feed the kids, allowed me to find readers who helped my career.  Go figure.

But the point is not that I was wrong.  The point is that I know from despair and what’s more, I understand why despair is considered a sin.  This is not always the case, and I’ve always had an issue with, say, sloth, since – being active by nature – I can’t imagine a worst punishment than being forced to do nothing.

Despair is a sin because it eats you, from the inside out.  Despair comes with “I will never” and “what is the use” and “the game is rigged, so why bother?”  Despair comes with beating your head against a glass window that shouldn’t be there, and yet is.  Despair, in its ultimate form has blighted more artistic careers, destroyed more souls (and by soul here, I don’t require you believe in an immortal entity.  I refer only to that which makes your mind and spirit yours) caused more suicides than anything else.

Despair is that feeling you get when you’ve run the maze, you’ve done your best, and you come to the end and there’s nothing but a blank wall.

It is a powerful emotion, at least for those of us who have faced it.  It is dramatic, if you end a story with it, after a good run and a lot of hope.  It stays in the mind.

It is in fact a primary color, and it’s small wonder beginning writers use it, just like beginning artists – say kindergarten – use primary colors.

And it is a sin.  It is a sin against your future self.  It is a sin against humanity.  It is a sin against possibility.  Remember that.  We’ll come back to it.

However, the fact that it is an easily identifiable tint and primary doesn’t explain why there is so much of it larded around science fiction and fantasy, which SHOULD be the literature of possibility.  Sure a lot of this can be explained by the youth of writers (in truth or in practice,) the youth of editors (most of the ones working with newby writers are just out of college) and a certain fashionable air of the times, when it is considered smart and hip to dress all in black and moan about the evils of the future.  (Kind of like it was fashionable for Goethe’s Werner.  Never mind.  Hip, I tell you.  futuristic even.)

But wait, there’s more.  There’s what despair serves to do.  People who despair don’t try to change things and/or undermine the establishment.  People who despair, at the very least go away and shut up, even if they don’t deliberately kill themselves.

There is a striking scene in one of Leo Frankowki’s books, in which a Mongol Lord gets peasants to line up so he can behead them.  And when the hero comes along and kills him, the peasants turn on the hero because “now you’ve gone and angered them.”  And when the hero asks what can be worse than being killed, they have nothing, except “they will make it worse.”  THAT’s despair.  Despair makes you embrace death willingly rather than rebel, no matter how bad things get.

While I don’t believe in a grand conspiracy among publishing outlets and entertainment venues, I do believe in a tribal culture in what is – after all – when it comes to influential people maybe a few thousand people: a small village.  Tribal cultures are easy to influence.  I’m not saying anyone is, I’m saying it’s possible – and we’ve found that type of influence behind a lot of the recent “trends.”

So, before you give in to despair, ask yourself qui bono?  (And if you’re not into asking yourself Latin questions and are now wondering if you should have been paying more attention to Dancing With The Stars and supermarket tabloids, let me dispel your confusion.  That means “Whom does this profit?”)

Dave Freer talks about sheep and goats.  Most of humanity are sheep.  Some of us are goats.  The problem of any establishment, any power, anyone who abrogates influence over human hearts and minds is to control the goats and to make the sheep do more than stand in place and bah.  The more brutally repressive regimes eliminate the goats, often physically, and leave only the sheep.  The result is all the innovation and elan of… North Korea.

The best regimes manage to allow the goats their head, keeping them only off the things that will hurt other people.  They usually result in the highest production – both artistic and material.

In between there are several types of goat-herding schemes, including tolerating them within certain bounds and shipping them abroad to claim new pastures for the sheep.  The British Empire used both strategies with great success since the Elizabethan age.  They eventually stopped using it and resorted to despair.  The British Empire didn’t survive much longer.

So ask yourself what about the current establishment makes it resort to despair?  It’s surely the mark of a philosophical system that has nothing else to offer its goats.  It’s the mark of a philosophical system that is doomed, and wants to keep things quiet “just a little longer.”

And it has been THE culture in publishing since the seventies.  The embrace of declining numbers, declining revenues, declining living standards for writers – the willing embrace of decline – the meek submission to the people who are killing us, because you wouldn’t want to get them angry.  They could really make it unpleasant then.

We’ve talked about how going Indie is a mark of impatience… or something – at least according to the establishment.  We’re supposed to stay still, and let despair permeate us, and slowly tighten around us like a band, allowing us to make only the approved noises, which increase the cultural despair and get everyone accustomed to decline and darkness, and no way out.  When publishers say the mid-list should die, they expect us to curl up and do so.  How quaint.

Despair is a sin.  And, to quote Jerry Pournelle, it might not even reflect the truth.  Look at Heinlein, a smart man and most of us would say an optimist, who chose not to have children, avowedly (yes, I’m aware there might have been other reasons) because “the world was such a mess.”  And yet, if he’d had a child in his first marriage, that child would now be older than my dad, who has had a full life, and not an unpleasant one.

Do not take Mr. Heinlein’s example in that particular aspect of his life.  Take his example in his writing.  Despair is a sin.  And there is usually another way: a way through, a way around.  Find the way.  Pull the Mongol horseman down.  If you kill enough of them, they’ll go away.  Refuse to write despair.  Refuse to believe despair.  Look doom and gloom in the eye and ask them “you and what army?”  Yes, it might all come to the same in the end, but at least you’ll have fought and died like a human being and not a bah lamb.

Tell the Grocers of Despair you have better things to do.  There is a fight going on, and you’d rather fight.  And then go on and discover new pastures.  The poor sheep need somewhere to graze on.  And you’ll have more freedom to breathe.  And everyone wins in the end.

Remember qui bono?  If they sell you despair it’s because they’re afraid of what you can do if you don’t give up.  Don’t give up.  Nothing will piss the establishment more than your continued – and cheerful – battling on.  Do it.  Let THEM despair.

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

The Rogue, Himself

The Honorable Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage

 

There was a feeling like being dragged backwards through a piece of silk, which ripped as I went through. It reminded me of this time when Ferddy, the honorable Ferdinand Holloway that is, had taken us to this brothel in Cheapside, where we were supposed to lie naked atop silken sheets under which were the, so to put it, hospitality workers of the place. By their moving around and wiggling they were supposed to bring one to ecstasy, only I’d gotten annoyed halfway through, because I wanted to touch the gels, not the damned silk, and had left to have a drink at one of my favorite taverns.

Funny thing isn’t it wasn’t until I went to the second tavern that anyone – myself included – noticed I was naked. I’m not sure what this means about my normal state of dress or what people expected of me.

This time I didn’t arrive naked, which is a demmed good thing, because after the feeling of silk ripping against me, and a blink’s worth of darkness, I found myself in as elaborate a study as you’re likely to find, full of globes and mechanical contraptions, and with a gently curved glass-front window overlooking Fairyland.

And what’s more the room was full of chaps, in front of which it would be quite beyond the point to be naked: Seraphim Ainsling, his younger brother Michael, his half brother, the king of fairyland and my brother in law – and the king of Fairyland’s cher ami – Marlon, lord Sydell.

They all looked expectantly at me, as though they thought I were about to conjure a rabbit from the hat I was not wearing.

And then, without so much as a good-day, Seraphim turned to Marlon and said, “I can imagine, if the intention is to create a poisoned package of some kind that might corrupt the enemy, then conjuring Jon here into the middle of it is the way to go.”

I opened my mouth to protest, but Seraphim turned to look at me and smile a little, “Sorry, Jonathan, but you must admit when it comes to powers of corruption… Most of us still remember the games mistress and the frogs.”

I opened my mouth again, to explain that prank hadn’t even been my idea, and that turning the frogs into muscular naked young men was supposed to make her run screaming into the night, not… well, not run screaming into the night. But instead, I simply cleared my throat and said, “Where are we? And to what do I owe the pleasure?”

It was explained to me that this aerie – that’s what he called it – was by way of being the safe spot of the king of fairyland, and also, that the king of fairyland had not so much involuntarily split as split himself to hide from his enemies.

His kingdom was under attack by the mythworld, an older and darker world that claimed all our worlds came from it. If they took Gabriel Penn, such the connection between his world and himself, they would assuredly take all the world.

I contributed what I had gleaned, from Ginevra, “they mean to sacrifice those of us who are… uncomfortable in our position in life. I’m not sure why, but there is something about having great dammed up possibilities that will propel the greatest magic.”

Gabriel waved a hand, “I know that. That will give them power to take over my kingdom, myself and my world, and through it all the worlds.”

I frowned at him. There was something to what he said that made no sense, and which bothered the back of my brain, like a sweet you’re halfway through swallowing that sticks in your throat just out of reach and won’t be dislodged. But when I tried to think what it might be, it was just out of reach and refused to be expressed in words.

I’d have taken the next suggestion more easily if it hadn’t been made by Seraphim’s younger brother Michael, who wasn’t exactly what I’d call an engaging scamp, or not as we’d been at his age, but who’d nevertheless always struck me as a serious, well-intentioned and well brought up young man. So imagine my surprise as he said, “So we thought we’d have them sacrifice you, Lord Savage.”

I rounded on him, “Oh, you did, did you? How kind. I’ll have you know, young jackanapes, that they mean to sacrifice all of us. Myself, your two brothers, your sister, my sister, and a lot of other people connected to us, like the manager of manufactories for my house.”

His mouth dropped open in surprise, as though he’d never intended to give offense, which only goes to show you he had windmills in his head. And then he said, “Oh, but I don’t mean like that. You see, you have to agree to it. And you have to go into it with your mind fully alert, and be ready to counterattack. They will jump at the chance to take you, you see, because you have possibly the greatest power of the lot, and the more… ah… complicated power, being, as you are, descended from Hermes in the fifth generation.”

“I beg your pardon?” It was official. The young man was completely and utterly insane. I tried to catch Seraphim’s eye to give him my condolences that they’d have to lock young Michael up, but Seraphim was looking attentively at his brother, like an adult watching a precocious child say his lessons. Maybe the entire family was touched in the upperworks. I mean, I suppose Gabriel was no crazier than most kings of fairyland, but still that was an awful lot of crazy.

“Oh, you didn’t know?” My brother in law asked, conversationally. “Yes, the blood in your family line was not elf, as has long been rumored, though we can see how someone could have got confused, since it’s the blood of one of the trickster gods, but all the same, Lord Sydell, it is true that you have a very great power, and that if they sacrifice you, or start to, and you’re ready to counterattack, we have a chance of escaping.” I wasn’t sure what it meant that my brother in law called me Lord Sydell while Seraphim called me Jon, but neither was I going to investigate.

“Be clear at once, what is this thing about my counterattacking,” I asked, lost to patience.

“Oh, he means,” Michael explained. “The poisoned pill. You start to let them engulf your power, so you can get access to their… their magic and their… true selves, and then you act. Of course you’ll need to know exactly what to do and some of it… some of it is going to need to be instinctive, since people without the blood of the old myths can’t fully understand their power.”

“Oh,” I said. And then, as a memory emerged, “But isn’t that the spell that Merlin did that caused the world to shatter into several worlds, and which encased him in an impenetrable shell in the betweener forever?”

They didn’t need to answer. The answer was on all their faces.

“I think,” I said. “I’m going to need a seat. And a glass of brandy, if it’s all the same to everyone here.”

No man should be required to face death without brandy.

 

I grew up in the seventies, or at least that’s when I discovered history and philosophical currents. I read both the treatises from my grandparents’ time and before, the attitude of which can be summed in Shakespeare’s lines: “What a piece of work is man… etc.”

But I also read a lot of seventies claptrap moral philosophy and theorizing about man. I don’t have a very high regard for the seventies, an era that seems to me to have been heavily influenced by drug use and eye-searing polyester to the point people could believe two thousand impossible things before breakfast, which ran into lunch because they were passed out on the floor, tripping on horse tranquilizers.

Okay, maybe this was just the view of a young woman just coming of age in a country undergoing great upheaval.

However, if the sixties started it, the seventies is when the ah… new age of entertainment and thought hit the mainstream. Perhaps it was when the slow marchers got enough power to influence things. Suddenly every book and every movie seemed bent on rubbing our noses in the fact that humans were animals and not nice animals.

In anthropology – I was a weird kid. As the youngest of a huge extended-but-living-in-each-other’s-pockets family, I was very lonely (my ten years older brother was the nearest to my age) but also well provided with books, college texts, and stuff on subjects my much older cousins favored – it was the age of the Naked Ape, red in tooth and claw.

Universally the view as that we were bad, bad, bad all through and that the only hope for society was for our betters to take us in hand and change us.

I didn’t realize at the time this was a vile-prog point of view. I do realize now it hasn’t changed much.

Watching people at the DNC say “We all have to belong to something, so we belong to the government” made my hair stand on end, but if you believed that man, the human by itself, left alone, is an evil being, a uniquely evil being in the scale of the world, wouldn’t you think you needed something – some entity, some enlightened someone – to fix him? And if you don’t believe in G-d, who are you going to call? Other humans. And because you have to believe in something you believe that government somehow transforms humans into angels.

Don’t ask me. I don’t get it either. I believe both in G-d and that he created flawed humanity and believes in us and in our ability to struggle to salvation.

But whether you believe in Him or not, if you believe we humans are unredeemable, it explains both the ridiculous need for “overseers”, the hatred of humans (zero population growth and extinction-lust programs and books), “bad humans, good aliens” movies (gag) and the endless pathology of the left which seems to hate humans just a little more than they hate… everything else.

And this is nonsense.

Those books of seventies sold us a bill of goods, including that humans are the only beings who murder their own kind; the only humans who commit murder; the only animals capable of making war, and who knows what else.

None of those are true. What is true is this: we are sentient creatures built on an animal base. The structures of our rationality are built onto the body of a pre-rational animal. We are built on an ape base, and that comes with certain qualities, as much a part of us as anything we want to be or think ourselves to be: we are sexual beings; we are creatures of instinct; we are social creatures; we are both lazy and clever, an ape who makes complex things.

The important thing to remember, though, is that we have the qualities of our vices.

I’ve moaned here, and you’ve heard me moan that we’re tribal creatures. This has some awful side effects because we tend to tribal-up. Some of the effect is minor. Get a bunch of my friends and Dan’s in a room. Or just an undifferentiated bunch of IT people and writers. As the night advances, we’ll divide into two groups and roll our eyes at the other guys.

This drives the social justice warriors nuts. They want to understand/integrate/whatever the other. They want to lift up the other and debase the group to which they belong. But they too are build on the same social animal base we are. So what they end up is forming a tribe of “The people who care deeply for the other” and… well, the other. Those of us who couldn’t care less and some people who think there’s nothing wrong with them that a few swirlies couldn’t fix. (And sometimes my loyalty veers to the second tribe.) This is the basis of all oikophobia. Wanting to belong to the tribe that is achingly, achingly I tell you (stop laughing) sympathetic to the “other.” Unless the other is their own tribesmen who think they are a few buckets short of a gallon of water, to be caring deeply about people who would stone them to death for their behavior.

What they – as well as the moralists who would have us all, even the least suited to it become utter saints – fail to get is that you can’t – not as a fellow human, not even, often, as yourself – excise the bad parts of someone and leave the good standing. That’s not how it works.

As individuals or as a species we are the same: we have the virtues of our vices. So humans who are tribal might get in league against “the other” but they also, by being tribal, stand in close association and protection, and will take care of the weak and the old they consider to be their own. (The SJWs want the government to do it, but that’s something else. It’s a delusion of sorts.)

Men are aggressive, but that aggression turned to protectiveness, has caused them to die in droves to protect the homeland and women they never even met.

Yes, humans strive against each other in war, but that’s a side effect of striving FOR something.

Civilization consists of individual humans choosing to channel their natural instincts productively. A functional society consists of giving them incentives to do so, instead of killing and pillaging.

Yes, there are bad men. Yes, there are bad women too. Yes, periodically all civilizations go dysfunctional or at least dysfunctional for a while, and yes, Mr. du Toit might be absolutely right that our collective psyche is being fractured by the speed of change which creates a sort of regression in some people who would rather go howling into the dark ages than towards a future they don’t understand.

But by and large, humans have done well. It’s not just a matter of our covering the face of the Earth, not altogether bad for a “naked ape.” It’s also the fact that we can look back just 400 years to Elizabethan England and see how far we’ve come.

It’s entirely possible, mind, that Western civilization is a terrible thing. (Terrible according to WHOM?) but if you are disabled, weak, a woman, a child or just plain weird, where would you prefer to be? In a Western nation or elsewhere? And more importantly, in the world now, or elsewhen?

It’s all in how you channel your aggression. You’re not born human. You’re born something like human. A civilized society can make you human, though, and we’re getting pretty good at this.

If we understand this, we can stop the self-reflexive hatred.

Virtue and vice are one, and the denied one fuels the other. No human is so good he’s without bad impulses, no. BUT he can choose. And those impulses are often never expressed.

We might, yes, be a killer ape. But we’re a killer ape whose expansionist desires can make him dream of the stars, and realize we might even be friends with those we meet there – if they extend a hand of friendship to us.

A naked ape can’t ask for much more.

We’ll start at the beginning, with the Telegraph asking if the west can reinvent itself in time to meet what’s coming.

It’s a question I’ve asked here myself, but they’re asking it the wrong way.  It’s not the west, by and large, that has lost civilizational confidence.  What it has lost are elites that are on its side.  Anywhere, in any country, you find the people quite sure they’re better than any other people in the world.  This is stupid, wrongheaded and absolutely right.

Humans are tribal creatures, and who should they identify with but their own tribe? It is easier to negotiate relationships between tribes and try to find what’s best in an imperfect world than to make humans non tribal.  But our leaders don’t get that, and even when the “tribe” is mostly a consensual one of belief, our elites think this must be broken up in various ways, so as not to let the people on the street think they’re better.

Apparently the labor party in England engineered mass immigration so as to “rub conservative noses in diversity” — because in their minds these “conservatives” are those of the nineteenth century who believed color of skin was a marker and not those of the twentieth century trying to keep a culture in which women aren’t treated as chattel.  The difference between — and here we chance wording, because the British system is different but these underlying groups are the same — vile progs and sane people who live in the sane world, is that sane people would never encourage more Rotherhams in order to rub the vile progs nose in it.

Which is why the west is losing the narrative, and its elites are in the end completely cut off from reality, free to do things like tell the rubes there is a human-life-threatening crisis which they ignore in their every-day behavior.

I’ve in the past posited that our culture went into a tail spin in the aftermath of WWI.  I read somewhere, this week, and can’t find it now that this too might not be exactly true.  That it might be the narrative of world war I.  I will confess that it was always a little odd how the narrative went and how nationalism was to blame for everything.  Perhaps even then, the narrative was being shaped in favor of an “internationalist” view by those vile progs who thought that communism was the answer.

We can’t know because — due to the mass-industrial mode of communication that still remains from the 20th century, and due to the fact that this has been taken over long ago by vile progs, it’s entirely possible everything we ever “knew” from academic history to journalism is a lie.  Some days I feel like we’re stuck in the soviet union, where the future is known (and ever bleaker) but the past keeps changing.

Because most humans are tribal, they want to have a cohesive narrative, and since the narrative is provided by the elites, it seems like all of the west has lost its nerve.  But there are some signs at least that the people aren’t buying it.

Which is good, because the elites have gone howling mad.  Apparently it’s not just my impression that any airport-related industry goes out of its way to hire people who might be presumed to possibly have a grudge against the US, from Chinese people who can barely speak English, to Russian people ditto, to of course any Arab/Muslim they can get to apply.  I’ve told myself surely they screen these people.  Surely I’m just being prejudiced.  No one would be crazy enough to hire these people without serious screening.  Apparently these are just things I tell myself to go to sleep at night.

And apparently our elites really, really, really are lost in narrativium.  For instance, it is a surprise to them that Isis isn’t amenable to outreach.  They think it’s a great idea to name public centers after the man who doesn’t have a plan to deal with Isis and who frankly seems to hate the guts of the country he leads, and only reverse themselves when there’s “public outrage”.  They thought that putting a sector under control of the government would lower costs. They think they can end wars by fiat.  They think that because the enemy is nutty we shouldn’t fight it, or something.

At this time, and in this place, the strange thing is not that a governor talks about the threats coming over the unsecured border which the elites have opened (I guess to rub our noses in diversity? — something the smart idiots being educated at our colleges STILL think it’s a prime priority.) The strange thing is that our president is “passionate” in his certainty that the enemy doesn’t want to kill us. This is not a problem of people who live in the real world, where if someone is armed and says they want to kill you and shows that they’re willing to kill you by beheading those of you they can get hold of, you should believe them.

It’s time to wake up.  This pervasive lullaby the elites have been playing since WWI which tells us that the cause of WWI was not different needs and aspirations, and each group of people striving to better themselves according to the way humans are humans, but it was the fault of “nationalism” and a belief in G-d and whatever else the elites despise this week, must stop.

It’s time to wake up or be killed as you sleep.  Remember, WWI not only might have been far more complex than the elites taught you (I bet it was.  Real history is messy) but also the reason it was such an abattoir was THEIR elites belief in how a war should be fought, despite new technology that made those methods just a way to kill people faster and in greater numbers while solving nothing.

The truth is the stories the elites told you were always a load of bull.  They’re desperate to establish themselves as better than you and utterly confident in their own abilities, even though everything they know of life is a narrative of a narrative of a narrative.  It turns out humans are in the end very much human, and every progressive society reverts to theocratic paganism, where the “dear leader” becomes a living or (after death) ancestral god: the Castros, the Kim’s, and apparently now that world class clusterf*ck, Chavez. Because the man who took a civilized country to a total inability to buy beg or steal toilet paper is totally someone whose ghost can dispense favors.  And hey, aren’t socialists/communists supposed to be atheist?

The elites can tell themselves these stories because they’re insulated.  Also, being selected mostly on compliance with the program and ancestry (mostly because their parents were elite, though of course our current affliction was chosen because he tans interestingly) they aren’t nearly as smart as they’ve been told they are.  And at some level, I think they know it.

It’s time for the rest of us to start the alarm clock.  It’s time to stop discounting people just because they don’t fit the credentialism which picks mostly for ideology.  This means, yes, respect indie writers, read to blogs, and maybe consider politicians who didn’t go to “the best universities” or to university at all.

In a world where the past keeps changing, all an “excellent education” signals is an ability to either be gullible or double think.

That we can’t afford.  Stop the lullaby.  Read, think, create, make yourself heard.  For a century we could afford to let our elites go emo and wallow in their own self-blame and the hatred of their own nations.  We were that rich and that insulated.  And there were enough even in the elites that retained a modicum of sanity.

That safety margin is gone.  It’s time to wake up.  The question, it turns out, is not whether the future is queer.  The question is whether the future is medieval.

When I was eight years old, I read Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit Will Travel. At the time I had no idea it was science fiction, because as far as I was concerned, trips to the moon was just what went on in America.

So it went unremarked.  That was the same Summer I read Tom Sawyer and The Prince and the Pauper, so you might as well consider it my induction in the evil league of evil, since I was reading a dead white male and all.

Then when I was eleven, and my brother was studying engineering in college, he fell in with a dangerous crowd.  By which I mean he made friends with a guy who had every science fiction book ever translated to Portuguese.

My brother borrowed them and told me I was not to touch them on penalty of pain.  I later found out he was afraid I’d come across a sex scene or something and be shocked.

He didn’t realize the best way to get me to read something was to tell me I couldn’t do it.

It was, mind you, more fantasy than science fiction, but it contained Robin Hood and various cartoon characters and I thought “This is cool.”

So the next book I picked up and read, from my brother’s bedside table, standing poised and ready to drop the book and run to my room at the sound of a foot on the stairs was A Canticle for Leibowitz.

And I was like:

At which point, I went a little crazy.

I wanted it all, and I wanted it now.  By the time I was thirteen, my brother and I would pool our resources and go halvsies on books.  He’s so lucky that I got married abroad and never claimed my halves.  The judgement of Solomon would have left us with half a book and half a memory.

Mind you, at the same time I was reading all the stuff that young ladies were supposed to be reading, too.

The only stuff that left any impression other than the sf/f were Dumas and Shakespeare.  (I’d come at Jane Austen much later. I had to know more about the time period.  While she liked her little bits of ivory, I liked my stories big.)

And then I started writing (bad) tales of science fiction in class, and my classmates loved them.  And then I submitted one as an assignment in Portuguese class.

Apparently this genre with all the wow and the metaphysics and the deep pondering of how things were put together and whether they could be put together another way was not only bad, oh no. It was wrong.

So I read all of that, and also all of Camus and a lot of other stuff that everyone said was REALLY IMPORTANT STUFF I should read.

Though I never finished War and Peace because I:

So I liked some of that stuff.  Like Jorge Luis Borges.  Though, you know, he kind of reminded me of Bradbury.

And then they assigned me 1984 and Brave New World.  I believe assigning both of those in the same year is the language teachers’ attempt at population reduction.

The effect on me was more like “Science fiction.  OMG, they’re letting me read science fiction.”

So, I mentioned this to my teachers. And they told me I was wrong.

At which point I realized two things.

First for something that talked about the future to be “good literature” it had to be depressing. Because that’s how you know it’s serious.

Or, to be considered serious, science fiction has to somehow mirror our present reality.

 

 

And then I thought, no, scr*w that. My teachers clearly have no clue what they’re talking about. If art were all about reflecting reality and showing dangers and pitfalls and injustice and stuff, no one would ever read for fun.  And fun stuff — all of Shakespeare — would never touch you deeply and make you realize something about humanity you couldn’t verbalize before.

And then I had an epiphany.

Perhaps they wanted/needed everyone else to live lives of quiet desperation, so they could feel better.

So, imagine my surprise, when I broke in science fiction to find that somehow we’ve got invaded by English Teachers.

I got told over and over again that what I needed to write was “deeply significant” literature, by which they didn’t mean stuff like exploring the past and the future and the implications of what science might do. Or at least they didn’t mean that, if it didn’t make you want to do this:

The other option, as time went on, was for something to be really… how to put this?

Because of course our current problems and concerns are the most important thing ever, and no one in all of the history of human kind will ever get over them. And you’d never want to read anything else, ever:

Still, some good stuff sneaked through now and then. Until a few years ago, when we found out that we wouldn’t be allowed to have fun anywhere near science fiction, because science fiction, really science fiction is deeply significant and reflects reality and…

And I thought…

Wait a minute…

and then it was like

But apparently, no. They’d already done their worst to Mystery and were starting to tackle Romance. In their great quest to destroy all the fun that might remain in printed pages, it was our turn.

Only then a miracle occurred:

Now, of course they don’t like it one bit, so they’re like:

Or at least that’s what they think they’re doing. But we’re like:

Because now that we can publish without them, their opinions should matter to us why?

Like my teachers back in High School, they’ve never read anything just for fun.  And they think that literature is all about looking at themselves in the mirror, forever.

Because, you know, they’re so endlessly fascinating.

So while they massage their deep insecurities

 

And tell themselves they’re every bit as worthy as all the stuff they were forced to read in school, the rest of us whose dinosaur rampage fantasies are more fun.

The rest of us will continue to write mindless stuff about princesses robots giant lizards The nature of evil; the role of government; the importance of colonization of new lands to human civilization; the implications of time travel.

And, oh yeah. We’ll continue to have fun too.
Because

You do your thing and we do ours. You keep treating science fiction like the redheaded step child of literature. And we keep enjoying the big horizons and imagination of the genre. Because that’s how much your opinion matters to us, you guardians of culture and class who haven’t read anything published before 2000 and think past and present and all is all about you forever.

We don’t mind. Ya’ll have fun with that mirror now, you hear?

We have spaceships (and dragons) to fly, and monsters to kill and magical cities to guard, and planets to invade and stuff.

Ya’ll take care.