*Before I fully give the floor to Jason, if he needed his point proven, there was Tore this last week accusing the Holocaust survivors who made in this country of “white privilege.”  Apparently if your skin is white-ish, you’re automatically privileged.  Centuries of progroms, inquisitions, expulsions and suffering discrimination, but you don’t have enough of an hereditary tan, so shut up, you’re privileged.  THAT, my friends, is racism, straight up, with no dilution — Sarah*

Aristocracy of Victimhood- by Jason Hobbs

I am a terrible person.

Allow me to first introduce myself: I am Jason, a conservative-leaning white, Christian, cismale heteronormative fascist. Because of my birth-gifted sexism/racism/homophobia I have very little authority with which to tell you, dear reader, about the Aristocracy of the Victim.

It’s a trend I’ve been noticing more of as late, as people are told “Check your privilege” instead of simply “shut up.” This is one of those Alinskyite tactics of language control which confers superiority of the person demanding the check while at the same time seeming ‘profound’ and ‘enlightened’. Moreover, it’s about authority and submission–the Authority of the Victim seeking the submission of the Enemy of the Week.

Allow me to explain. For the past several hundred years, the world has seen a massive shift of power. A funny little country of Odds managed to rise up against one of the great world powers, throw off the chains of an aristocracy and oppressive government and determine its own path. What’s worse, it’s been steadily growing more free, throwing out year after year, decade after decade the different trappings of hierarchy and class. People who were oppressed, who were regarded as little more than property, people who were once considered sub-human all have been given a place at the table. It’s by no means perfect but is going to continue being an on-going process of growth…unless certain folks have their say in the process.

America, quite frankly, is an abnormality. We put our dirty laundry out, we agonize over ideas, and we place the individual ahead of the state. We tell people they can rise above their assigned or born class and be greater, not in spite of their origins but because of their work. Unfortunately, throughout history this behavior has generally not been the case. Despite any claims to meritocracy, there always tended to be a ruling class defined by birth. Born to a king or a noble? Congratulations, you win at life. Born as a serf? I hope you like dirt, because you’re going to be seeing a lot of it. Look around the world. Ancient Persia, Feudal Japan, Pre-Communist Russia. Say what you will about Game of Thrones, Martin nails the worth of the serf perfectly.

Enter America, and the formula changed.

There’s one problem, however: some people have issues with all this rampant freedom going on and without the ability to slide people into their little classification boxes the world ends up too big and scary. (Where this comes from is something I’m not going to bother with; see a shrink.) This attitude tends to be prevalent in the Progressive movement–just study a moment the early Progressives of the 1900s, obsessed with superiority of race and ideals. If you don’t believe me, go ahead and look it up. I’ll be right here waiting for you. And no, I’m not going to feed you a link. Go forth and claim knowledge for yourself!

Alright, back? Great!

The question is, how does one divide people by class if it’s become a cultural and social taboo to do so? Simple! By raising up those different classes as paragons of inferiority and victimhood, you can be as condescending and judgmental as you please, but now you’re doing it because you care so very, very much about them. Thus, a form of Victimhood Aristocracy was born.

Instead of being called inferior or lesser because of your race, gender, religion or orientation, you’re now a victim. And the more of these ‘titles’ you claim for yourself, the greater your ‘authority’ to fight the ‘injustice’ which made you a victim. For example, to the progressives today, a transgendered homosexual African (Dark skin–white skin need not apply) Muslim holds an incredible amount of moral authority (not to mention mind-blowing amounts of irony)–congratulations, you are now the Duke/Duchess of Victimistan. If they speak, they are to be listened to as long as they continue to speak the proper ideology, though their various titles protect them to a point from ideological heresy accusations. Too much heresy and the condescension and hate will become overt, of course, and they will be stoned for their transgressions.   Myself, on the other hand…

I am told to be silent, to “check my privilege.” If I still speak out, I am to be shunned, unless the words I use are of the correct ideology. In that case, I become a champion of the cause to be lauded…right up until I say the wrong thing. Then I’m required to pay a fine and go on an apology tour. But I digress.

The fact is, victimhood and its aristocracy of titles is nothing more than a softer form of unwitting racism, homophobia, sexism and general hate. It’s just been sugared up so it tastes better and is being used daily to carve us up back into our little segregated groups to deal with all this pesky freedom America’s been spreading.

Because if there’s one thing aristocracy and dictators hate, it’s the proles thinking they can do on their own something greater than their allotted station.

 

Guys, I have a chapter half written, I do.  And I’ve been sitting here, trying to finish it, but–

But–

Yesterday the older son — elephantus majorus (totally Latin, shuddup) — graduated summa cum laude (this really is Latin) and as outstanding undergraduate student in his area, with a BS in bio and a BA in chem.  There is something about this type of occasion, and a day spent celebrating (you know this family’s wild and crazy parties.  Yep.  The zoo.  How did you guess?) that leaves me totally wiped out.

I NEED to write on Through Fire, and I need to write a WAY overdue novella, and the chapter is just cluttering up everything else.

However, if you need something to read — and who doesn’t — sashay over for Cedar’s view on Amazon and the current Amazon is teh ebil madness — they want, of course, the government to step in.  We pause the outrage to remind you: Amazon is a business.

For those who don’t know what has been going on with Archon, here’s some level setting: From the Lair of the International Lord of Hate, and from Mad Mike, who is more than a little miffed, and from me.

And meanwhile, did you know the reason Holocaust survivors did well in America was “White Privilege” — if you’re like my friend Kate, There Are No Words.  (Which is funny because I said several, starting with “F**k Toure and his eastern seaboard upper class college education and his easy living, coasting in America privilege.  Also his little dog too.  Just for completeness.”

And none of these upheavals help the writing, so now I’m going to write.  Through Fire.  Because.

I was going to write about something completely different, mostly about “victimhood as saintliness” but I was listening to Waldo and Magic (Robert A. Heinlein) while cleaning the kitchen, and something rubbed me wrong. More than once, he referred to the formation of the UN as ending war; and then he mentioned “the US had an army at the time.”

And my hackles were well and truly up.

Oh, I understand how Heinlein came to make that mistake. You see, he sort of assumed that the UN would be run with American values. It was a logical mistake. At the end of WWII we were a colossus bestriding the globe. And everyone who has been in that position before imposed its values and its culture on the world.

We didn’t. Part of it might have been our administration at the time and the shameful deal that created the cold war.

Part of it might have been that we didn’t want to scare Europe and wanted to make them feel like equal partners.

I think it was a mistake, and means we’ll fight a global war again. (I might be wrong, but I think I can sniff it in the wind.)

The point is that the UN without universal values that all the world agrees on is a sheep and ten wolves arguing what is for dinner. It has become a vehicle for countries that would otherwise be totally disregarded – and which by culture should be. I mean, Iran is in charge of women’s status in the UN – to hit out at bigger, more successful countries. Also for countries to cadge Dane Geld from bigger, richer countries (mostly the US.)

One wonders how long the scam can go on, when it’s obvious that this is not a way to create universal peace, which is how it was billed. Instead it’s a rent seeking organization with a side order of “make the US feel guilty” which is necessary, of course, for rent seeking.

But that’s not the topic of this. The topic of this is the concept of internationalism.

I was talking to a friend this week, and he said the world – due to increasing connectivity – is bound to become a mono-culture. We’re already trending that way. And if it becomes a mono-culture, it will stop having “stop points” and “corrective measures.”

Look, all cultures go crazy now and then, sometimes temporarily, sometimes terminally. Sometimes they survive their insanity for a while. Rome was nutso-crazy for centuries before it died. But Rome lived in a more stable world. Europe (and at this level, Europe IS a monoculture) has been howlingly insane since WWI. I’m not sure Europe will survive. I’m not sure it would have survived this long without our financial, moral, and cultural influence making it a “satellite culture.” Frankly, I doubt it. And if we crash, they’re going to hurt worse than you can imagine. I remember living there and how much fun the seventies were because ya’ll went crazy and elected the peanut farmer. I gather they’re almost as interesting now. And of course, the Europhiles in and out of the US don’t see this. Never mind…

The point is that a mono-culture which goes howlingly insane at the same time could destroy not just civilization or culture, but the whole race.

Which is why my friend said it was important to get to space, and to create societies that aren’t so close and so easy to influence. So that – in that sense – diversity can lend strength. A world or colony could collapse, and another would go on. For the species.

I agree with him, but that’s besides the point.

I’m going to come back to the idea of the UN, of a world body that can stop wars, and teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

Not only is that impossible, unless we agree on one culture (Be fair to the soviets. Their internationalism was SANE. They wanted a one-world government, and that government soviet.) but is it really desirable?

It amuses me that those who agree on “diversity” in everything are unable to see that diversity of culture and thought might be desirable. At least they are unable to see it when it violates their sacred cows.

I’m all with Heinlein when it comes to “making it one world and that world American” if we’re talking about the America of his time. But now? How many apologists for barbarism, guilty for not being a minority, cult of victimhood representatives do we need? And do we want science fiction world wide to be all wall to wall glittery hoo has?

Okay, that last was a joke, but it brings up a point. The glittery hoo ha and the rot in science fiction developed because the structure of publishing became centralized and a mono-culture and that culture Eastern Seaboard Liberal. This didn’t fit even the rest of the country and has been a resounding commercial failure. And meanwhile they, isolated from all criticism, became ever more crazy and started drinking their own ink. Which is why we have a field already dominated by women crowing about “kicking patriarchy in the balls” by giving awards the outer world ignores to people on the basis of their genitals.

THAT is what happens to cultures that are isolated and get their own feedback loop.

Now, I’m going to tell you right now that yeah, I think our culture is superior to others in some basic things, and that if I had an army, I’d march into certain countries and stop cold the brutalization of minorities (yes, sexual and orientation minorities, but also religious and ethnic minorities. Such as the killing/running off of Christians in the middle East. Or the running off of the Jews in the same place.) Because in my opinion no good comes of those practices.

It’s a good thing I don’t have an army. No, I don’t believe the Islamic womb will conquer the world. I think they’re already spiraling the drain which is what makes them so dangerous. No, I don’t believe they’re the next big thing, and history would seem to back me up. They’re not, shall we say, known for creating anything enduring or innovative. (Most of their so-called ‘inventions’ were stolen from the Persians.)

Could I be wrong? Oh, boy. Scholars have been wrong about less obvious things.

Look, I’m not saying we stop (or perhaps don’t start is more appropriate) calling them to book on their treatment of women, gays, Christians, Jews, Non-Muslim. I think we should defend our own culture and fight for it hot and heavy. To the diplomacy for other means state, if needed.

BUT I think that’s what cultures should do world wide. If you believe in your own way of living, defend it. Not in some namby pamby “everyone gets their say and we all gang up on the big guy” way, but in the real world, where we say what we mean and shame the devil (and Iran.)

I say that’s how it must be because it’s the only way that human civilization advances and that what is best for the species happens.

Maybe, as revolting as I find it, it is best for the SPECIES SURVIVAL for women to be dressed in sofa covers and treated like chattel. I don’t know. And neither do you. And neither do the people who do this.

Early signs are against it (if you believe their population figures, I have some swamp land in FL I’ll sell cheap. ALMOST no gators.) But it could be.

We don’t know. We can’t know. We don’t see with the eyes of history. We can’t see with the eyes of history. We can only make individual judgments and fight for what is right. And we can resist the attempts at all levels to make us a mono-culture.

Look, in the course of normal human thinking, there are no absolutely monolithic cultures, and enough variety will remain for some reality checking.
Even if we prevailed tomorrow and the American way as Heinlein believed it owned the world, countries would have individual quirks from their history and culture that would make things different.

It would never be as the glittery hoo Ha social justice workers want to make it, a monolithic agenda and only “right think.”

And this is a good thing, because if it were, then there would be no feed back, and we’d have a world of Glittery Social Justice Whiners for … about a generation, before the population collapsed, because after all PIV is rape. Or something.

You see how that would be bad?

Well, there are ways in which even our own culture could be bad, too, for human survival. We don’t know. We can’t know.

I agree with my friend that we need colonies, far flung and with varied experiences to be quite sure we have enough variety that the species will survive.

But until then? I say we’ve been on the wrong track with this world-unity thing. Surely war – large scale war – is to be avoided if possible. I don’t like it and neither do you.

However, the history of our race seems to show that’s how we work and how we survive.

So I say, let cultures defend themselves and their beliefs.

I say the other guys are wrong. And I say we tell them that.  I say we stop them upholstering women and treating minorities like dirt.

Let the better culture win — for a while — and carry the torch of species survival for a time.

Until we can get out of this mud-ball.

What does woman want? This was Freud’s big question, because Freud based all of the male’s needs on the fact that males had a penis (Freud was a proto-glittery hoo ha) and so he couldn’t imagine what women, not having a penis, had at the center of their needs. (If I had a time machine, I’d bring Freud forward and show him that the glittery hoohas do quite well with thinking with the innie, just as much as some guys do with the outie. No, more so, since they’re persistent and relentless. But then he would go back in time and in a minute, I’d find myself in a burka, locked somewhere in the house. No.)

So his entire idea was that not having a penis, women were mostly moved by that fact and suffered from penis envy. (Maybe I DID bring him forward and he read some of the GH’s blogs?) I will confess that I did suffer from penis envy round about six, but it had nothing to do with sex (and even then I thought having to deal with that thing hanging down inside your clothes all the time would be a pain) but with the fact that my – mostly male – play friends could pee standing up. I couldn’t, so I had to leave the rousing game and go inside to use the bathroom. Which meant by the time I came back they were doing it wrong! (If there had been a ban bossy campaign back then, pigtailed, glowering me would have been the poster girl. And btw, if I’d been taught to curb those tendencies at that time, it would have made high school MUCH easier.)

So what do women want?

I don’t know. I know what I want, and what my friends want.

I’ve been moved to write this by a few surveys recently, which claim that women are far happier being wives and mothers than being wives and mothers and working women. Combined with the fact our population (I suspect worldwide, but we can only prove it in developed countries) is dropping like a rock, and the inescapable conclusion is that women should be back in the kitchen and pregnant.

I don’t like inescapable conclusions. Not when it comes to humans. I’m not a “feminist’ who thinks women should be a sort of ersatz male and views pregnancy as a violation. (Yes, I know that’s not what they say they think, but if you read them, you end up getting that very clear picture.)

In fact from a certain point of view, if you squint, I took a very traditional path. We got married and I worked a little until the kids came when I stayed home with them. If you stop squinting, it’s not so traditional. For one, we made the decision based not on who had the outie and who had the innie, but who was bringing in the real money. Given my job which was like writing and required me to establish myself, etc, I was making almost nothing. And then there was the fact I wanted to write, which made staying at home and looking after the kids perfect. (In execution it was more fraught, which is why progress was so slow. There were years I could only write in a two hour window, while the kids were sleeping.)

But then there’s the other side of the coin.

I grew up in a village.

My path was the most common one. Every mother I knew was a working mother, usually while totting behind/around them a vast number of children. (Okay, not so vast. Three or four was many, but that’s also because so many died in childhood, infancy.)

The myth of the stay at home mom who eats bonbons and watches soaps exists only in the heads of people. I don’t think it was ever that way, save for a very small, very wealthy or very devil may care minority.

I mean if you squint and look sideways my mom was a stay at home mom. Only she wasn’t. I mean, she worked at home, and for the first fifteen years of her career she worked from a three room shotgun apartment, where the kitchen table got cleared and used for her work table. If she couldn’t clear it or was on deadline, she might send us next door to grandma for supper, but that happened rarely as the two had a “competent mother” competition going.

Grandma too, if you squint and look sideways was a stay at home mom and for most of her life a single one, as granddad was in various countries, making money. But if you stop squinting, she brought up four children while running her own business, tending the … backyard farm (it’s hard to explain how this works. We had a relatively small space in the backyard. Like your average suburban backyard, say, but none of it was lawn and all of it was fruit trees/vegetables/vines and the place for the potatoes (the open center, which got enough sun) except for about a fifth of it which was “put to” flowers because grandma considered flowers an essential part of housekeeping. (And in a way it was, since doing the flowers in the cemetery was the woman’s duty every weekend, on all the graves of the departed family, and if you didn’t do it people would consider you bad or neglectful. This might very well be a roman custom for all I know.)

But then there were also properties we had “a right to.” These were either still or originally owned by the family and either sold or rented out, with reservation of the “right to”: the right to wine (i.e. the vines growing on the land were still ours), the right to till (i.e. to plant and harvest what we wanted in parts of the property) and so on. I suspect all together it amounted to d*mn near a small family farm. We surely didn’t buy anything but exotics (grandma’s attempts to get the hazelnut tree to fruit never worked) and meat/fish. And grandma ran all of that (up to the time she died, pretty much, when she was paying for someone to come do the actual work, but still running it and distributing the produce.) I understand before I was born, ie before grandma’s mom died, and she had to face killing things she’d raised, we also grew a lot of the meat up to and including a small calf. (When I was a kid the chickens were mostly layers and a lot of them became pets and were given “retirement.”)

So, woman in the kitchen with her children about her is rather a wrong idea.

But never minding that”: were most women in the village happy “just being wives and mothers” Well, most of them weren’t. At the very least they were housekeepers in time and place where this involved sometimes carrying clothes to the public washing through (built by Trajan. The inscription said so. The weird thing is that it was called “the river” though it wasn’t, but a stone square with the water diverted to flow through it and down into the drainage ditch. BUT before it was built women washed in the river and linguistic habit is an odd thing.) then beating the living daylights out of them, after soaping them with soap you might or might not have made, then carrying the sodden mass back home in a huge basket, to hang in your own property. (We didn’t have to do that because we had our own “tank” which was more like the “river” than like washing tanks you’ve seen. Family lore says my brother went head first into it at three, but they fished him out in time to revive him. I wasn’t allowed near it till I was tall enough to stand in the water.)

Still let’s call these women “just wives and mothers” since most of them had no career in the modern sense.

Were they happy?

What do you mean by happy? I mean, seriously. Sometimes I think happy is a modern invention. Very modern. Acquired through radio, television, books.

What is “Happy”? Does anyone go around in a flutter of blue birds and singing Disney princess songs, all the time? Or do you call “being generally contented with life” “happy”?

This is important, because it has a bearing on the conclusion of whether women should stay home with children to be happier.

I think if you’d asked most of these women if they were contented with their lot, they’d have said yes, even though a significant number of them were really tight on money and a lot of them got beat at least once a week.

But see, here’s the thing: this is what they’d been taught to expect. They’d grown up expecting this sort of married life and looking forward to its consolations: children, a home of their own, an old age surrounded by grandchildren who respected them. Hankering for a life where they weren’t beat, or a life where they had a “career” in the modern sense would never occur to them, and no it wasn’t oppression necessarily. Well, being beat was, but not not having a career. Most of them would have said “but I don’t want that. Don’t I have enough to do with the kids?” And the idea of not getting married at all would have made them very unhappy because, being normal women, most of them liked men.

So if you took a survey of their contentment, most of them would be pretty high.

On the other hand, if you took a survey of women like my mom and grandma – women of the striving class – you’d get a much lower level of contentment. But if you thought it was because they (and my grandmother’s grandmother before her, etc, world without end) didn’t like working, you’d have it backwards. Women in my family worked because they weren’t contented with “just” being wives and mothers. They expected more and had ambitions, so their level of contentment was always lower, as they wanted to get further ahead/do more. Stopping working wouldn’t make them happy. It would make them more neurotic. (My mom had to stop working for health reasons when I was twelve. We’ll draw a veil of decency over about five years, until she discovered investing and jumped into that, leaving me – thank heavens – in peace and no longer micro-managed.)

So, would sending all women back to the kitchen and children make them happier? I don’t know.

Look, most women, like most men don’t want a “career.” They work because they have to, because our system of taxes makes a one-working-parent family nearly impossible (trust me I have reason to know. I didn’t start making any money at all from writing till Robert was about six.) Some percentage of the women also work because they’ve been shamed into it. (At the lowest level, the cost of daycare, work clothes, transport, outweighs the money they bring in. Not to say her job is useless. Just having resilience during layoffs which are a feature of our time, is worth it.) But a large percentage of men and women have no lofty ambitions and are never going to set the world on fire in a career.

Staying home with kids might make these women (and men) happier. But then you have to wonder if they’d be a material addition to the household, if they hadn’t learned to make and scrape. But that’s something else.

Part of the problem with the “everyone would be better for a career” movement is that it comes from people with a career, people who always wanted to have one and who learned and studied and who would work even if they became millionaires tomorrow.

Cast your mind back to high school. Remember the vast mass of your classmates? They were there because they had to be there. For all they learned and all the pleasure they derived from it, they might as well have quit in second or third grade. (Even if this were when schools still taught.) Why would you think this changes with adulthood? Why do you think women (or men) want to devote eight hours of their lives to some random activity they get paid for?

The essence of humanity is to do just enough to get by. People like me who are compelled to work at something are broken. There’s something wrong inside us. (The fact that hobbies are much higher and taken more seriously – like mini-careers — among Americans than anywhere else in the world makes me wonder if we have a higher percentage of people born broken in that peculiar way. It would explain much.)

There is something else to consider which those who were never mothers might or might not know. I was not ever a particularly good mother. I like kids, but they’re not the center of my existence. However, when I had to work when the kids were little, like when Dan was unemployed and I took a job while he was looking for one, I missed them constantly. Even when my work was doing better, and we hired someone to look after the kids so I could write more, it only lasted a year, because I realized no, this was NOT the part I wanted to subcontract. House cleaning, sure. My kids, no.

There was a very strong sense of ownership and also the ah… sense of responsibility for them. But there was also an instinctive-level attachment which I think would have been painful to break. I wondered what they were doing, ALL the time.

As for “we’d have more children if women just stayed home,” it’s probably right, but it misses a factor. It would greatly help if men either stayed home or had more flexible schedules. With all the will in the world, there were long periods of time that Dan came home, collapsed into bed for four hours, shaved and went back to work. You can’t – ahem – rouse the dead. And this was normal scheduling for programmers in that day and age. Which means our kids are that far apart because he was establishing himself in his work.

If having kids is a priority – and I think it will be, and soon enough. We might limp another fifty years with trick statistics, but sooner or later we’re going to “get” it and panic – then the best system for it would be work from home which I suspect is the way we’re going anyway. For men and women.

As for happiness… meh.

I suspect most of the women who are happier staying home with the kids would have been happier doing it even if they had a work at home job. It’s all in what you expect.

The women with “careers” who are impelled to it to “show” the men and who never married because of their feminist faith, etc. they’re the other side of the coin. I don’t think they’d have been happy ever, at any time and with anything.

And then there’s people like me. What does woman want?

Impossible to say. Freud, like Marx, is dead. There are some basic things all women want including food and shelter and food and shelter for their kids, and possibly someone/something to love.

After that needs vary. This particular woman– and most women she knows– wants all that, plus she wants her kids to be successful and happy, she wants her husband to be happy, she wants to continue working at her craft since she feels compelled to, and she wants to make a decent living out of it.  Most of all, she wants the chattering heads to shut up. She would have been just as unhappy in a corporate career as she would have been in “just” motherhood. Both would have bored her to tears.

In the current state, despite the fact she has nine kids less than she wanted and all the uncertainties and upheavals of this stellar economy, she’s pretty happy. I mean, not right after she reads politics, but pretty happy. And she wouldn’t trade all of this for queenship over the known universe and the fawning of courtiers.

So I guess this woman has got what she wants*.

Let women be individuals just like men are individuals and stop pushing them this way and that.  Let them find their own happiness.

*And since she’s lapsed into talking of herself in the third person again, it might be wise to give her an evil-villains lair stat before she decides what she wants are some minions in the piranha tank.

Okay, to everyone out there, celebrating the fact that all the Nebulas were won by women, and hardly mentioning the stories but only that “Squee, they were written by women!” I have one question to ask:

Do you hear yourselves?

Let’s turn this around. Let’s say that all the Nebula Awards this year were won by men and that men were out there celebrating “Take that, biatches, we showed those women that their science fiction writing sucks.”

It would look like this, right?

And of course you’d think that they only voted for these guys because they’re male.  I mean, that’s all they’re celebrating.

How does that sound to you, good?  An attractive image?

No? Shocking.  I wonder now if I can make it clear in another way.

Let’s suppose that only white writers won.

And they’re out there going “Yay, only white people can write science fiction.  It’s time we showed those other darker people what good science fiction is! Who are they to think they can tan and write science fiction?”

And right now you’re stomping your foot and saying “We’re nothing like that.  You totally misunderstand, because you see, there was this great matriarchy when everyone — even guys — was perfectly happy:

And then men revolted against this perfect rule, and instituted patriarchy.

But wait.  If the matriarchy was so perfect and stuff, how come they revolted?

Right…. if you’re done with your fairytale, which, let me point out, is a less compelling narrative of Eden and the fall of humanity.

There is absolutely no proof of any primitive, lost in the mists of time matriarchy.  Sure there are female goddesses, but Greeks had those, and they sure as hell weren’t matriarchal.  In fact, save for isolated, special instances in small tribes there is no primitive matriarchy. Because when you’re living close to the bone and wrestling a living from nature with your bare hands, brute force is the only force, and men have more of that than we do.

And how in heck do you believe that back when all humans were scattered in small groups they were all ruled the same way?  Did it come over the internet they didn’t have?

Or do you think females ruling is “natural”?  It’s not natural among the great apes our cousins.

But let’s suppose there really was a great matriarchy where women ruled and everyone was happy, way back before history, where you can’t be proven crazy wrong.

Come on, guys, grapes.

And that evil men broke it.  You do realize those men would have been dead A LONG TIME, right?  And that men today were not responsible for breaking your matriarchy.

So what’s wrong with men in positions of power?  Oh, right.  They have penises.  Which don’t monologue.  (Thank heavens.)

But Sarah, you say, the problem is that they created this structure where only men can win.  After their perfidious revolution they took over everything.  Look how they kept women down for centuries.  Centuries I tell you.

Oh, ladies, people of vaginitude, newsflash.  For most of those centuries, everyone was kept down:

Everyone worked harder than you when you wrote your dissertation; they ate less than you do on a diet, and men and women noblemen and serfs were all kept to strict, oppressive roles.  Because this thing we have called technology wasn’t around.

See, you say, that’s the patriarchy and the patriarchy–

So, what you are saying in essence is that a system in which only women are allowed to rule is inherently fair, because supposedly the ancient matriarchy was divine.  But a system in which only men are allowed to rule is inherently unfair.  No?  How not, if none of the men alive today caused the problem?  It must be because men are inherently inferior to women, right?  When it comes to governing, right?

Because of course, when we write about the organs of government THAT is what we mean, right?

You might want to take a good look in that mirror:

Because what you’re looking at is someone who hates and despises half of humanity because these people — through no fault of their own — were born with outies instead of innies.

Let’s translate that:

You’re saying that you believe that if you’re born with a certain characteristic you’re inherently inferior and unable to take any positions of leadership.  Because of characteristics you were born with.  Through no fault of your own.  Because of mumbo jumbo and pseudo scientific stuff, people born with this characteristic are inherently evil and bad, or at least stupid and can’t help themselves.  Honey, GRRRRL, this guy would love you:

But — you say — the Nebulas aren’t about ruling the world, only proving that women can write science fiction.  And that they’re as good as men and stuff.  Women won totally on merit.  Because they’re just that great at writing.

(It’s very easy, btw, to kick white patriarchy in the balls.  Now, try to do that to the tan patriarchy of the Middle East — which is real patriarchy — and you might find yourself stoned to death.  And we don’t mean with pot.)

Actually, if you had voted for stories, not what was between the legs of the writers, you wouldn’t have engaged in end-zone victory dances about how cool it is that women won all the Nebulas.

You wouldn’t have done that, because it wouldn’t matter.  (And if you knew anything of the history OF YOUR OWN FIELD you wouldn’t think women have ever been kept out of it — and you’d realize they certainly aren’t kept out of it now!  Most editors/agents AND writers are women.  The bad old days of patriarchal oppression are a myth in your own head.  Geek guys always fawned over geek girls.  Oh, and speaking of oppression, try writing an action character who is a straight male, and watch what you get called!)

It might warrant a passing mention “Oh yeah, it’s all women.  Cool.”  But it wouldn’t be a full flutter party with the most important thing celebrated being that the writers are women.  Which means you couldn’t care less what they wrote, provided they have the magical vagina.  Because vaginas are all important.  And not having them makes you evil and bad and oppressive and also a bad writer.

And frankly ladies — oh, sorry, this is offensive, right? — frankly bitches and hos, Sluts, after the tantrums you’ve been throwing, disgusting half the people (male and female) who used to be part of the association that controls the voting, (Only members of SFWA vote for the Nebulas)  you don’t even look like that KKK rally.  What you look like is this:

 

You seem to have forgotten that writing isn’t about social work, or affirmation, or feeling good and it certainly isn’t about curing your inferiority complex towards males. (And why you should have one is beyond me. Some males are better than I.  Some females too. What do you think is the magic of penis, that I should feel inferior to it, and try to put down those who have one?)  Well, it can be about all that, if what you’re writing is inspirational chicken soup for the feminist soul stuff.  But if you’re writing fiction, the purpose is telling an interesting story, which entertains the public, which will then buy the story and give you money.

If you can sneakily hide a message in the story they buy, so that you convey something that’s important to you, yay.  But no one buys writers that hit them over the head and tell them they’re inferior because they have a penis.

An award which is supposed to mean that the story is entertaining, and serve as an assurance of quality to the buying public.  Half of which have icky penises.

NOTE I’M NOT THE ONE SAYING THAT THESE STORIES DIDN’T DESERVE TO WIN AND ONLY WON BECAUSE THE WRITERS ARE WOMEN.  YOU ARE.

You are saying it over and over with your incessant crowing not about the quality of the stories or even how the stories express some essence of femaleness, but about “Yay, only women won.”

CONGRATULATIONS LADIES BITCHES AND HOS, sluts, you poor Marxist-Leninist dupes!  You won.  You won an award which those who voted are ensuring means nothing but that people voted for you because you had lady parts!  Are you proud of yourself?

Carry on you crazy Social Justice Warriors Whiners, you!  If you try really hard, there are other things you can make meaningless by disregarding all quality and awarding it to people because of what’s between their legs!

The rest of us are pretty much like this:

But consider that to the public at large it all looks like this:

 UPDATE: Welcome Instapundit Readers and thank you to Glenn Reynolds for the link!

When I was six, I went into elementary school. I understand this is a common trauma we inflict on our kids. As trauma goes, it was probably lighter than going to a “real school” because this was a village school, and they didn’t really pay much attention if you were an hour or so late, provided you kept up with the work.

I had an advantage because I could read and a huge disadvantage because I couldn’t write with a quill pen, having learned to write with a ball point.

I remember those early days of school as utter boredom – when the teacher was explaining the sound words made – combined with extreme terror, when she actually wanted to look at my notebook, which was a collection of interesting blots. (I later developed the ability to drop a blot at will. Very useful in dictation as my spelling was even more wretched than it is now.)

Another moment stands out from my early days in school. I’d early on realized the dialect of Portuguese I spoke wasn’t exactly… the common one, not even in the village. Mom was raised in a slum and still speaks oddly. But even at home, we had words we used… Take “retrete” for instance. I suppose it’s from the French for retreat, but that’s how we referred to the bathroom. It’s not an uncommon word but neither is it a delicate one. It’s most often associated with “outhouse.”

So, the first time I stood up and raised my hand asked to go to the “retrete” the entire class laughed aloud, and my teacher informed me the school didn’t have them, it had “casas de banho” – bathrooms, out back.

(Curiously, though both were outside the building, likely for the same reason – because the tech at the time had trouble piercing three foot thick stone walls – grandma’s was a bathroom, with a shower, a sink and a toilet, while the school’s vaunted bathroom was an outhouse, of the format beloved throughout the Middle east, with a hole in the middle of the floor, and no running water. After my first look at them (do you know how good elementary school students are at aiming?) I risked utis by holding it in until I got home.)

There were other instances of this – innocently using a word that made them all jeer and point.

Weirdly I survived intact. I didn’t like it. I really didn’t like it. It annoyed me no end. BUT I survived it, learned to use the words they expected, and eventually became one of the “accepted leaders of recess” where I de-facto invented LARPGs based on whatever book I’d just read.

Other instances of very hurtful words, when I was too young to build up any protection involved a friend of my dad’s who liked getting in political arguments with me – stupid ones – and tried to end run me and prove how much brighter he was than the eleven year old. Since all his arguments boiled down to “being rich proves I’m superior” (and since he’d gotten rich on some morally dubious speculation game) it shouldn’t have been hard to demolish, but I was a kid, and got confused having an adult argue with me. So then he’d call me a dummy and a communist (!) and say that I only had book learning and nothing more. (Again, I was eleven. Yes, the man had issues. Yes, they eventually caught up with him.)

I used to dread his visits. (There were other reasons too, but we won’t go into that.) But, you know what, I survived his jeering put downs remarkably unscathed.

Add to that that I was the youngest – the much youngest. My brother was the next youngest, at ten years older, and the next after that was four years older than him – of a very large extended family that ran in a pack. It should be normal/make sense for my cousins to realize I was younger and pull punches. But since in the structure of the family I was an “equal” – i.e. same generation – they didn’t pull punches. Some of their good natured (mostly) teasing stuck and I really thought I was stupid for a long time.

Is this an extended whine? Does it mean that I was hurt – hurt, I tell you – and that I suffered like no one else ever has?

I very much doubt it. We’ve now found out self-esteem education is basically a crock. Believing you’re great without having the achievements to back it up doesn’t make you supercalifragilisticespialidosous. It makes you a brittle and touchy person.

Well, I had anti-self-esteem education, through a variety of factors.  It didn’t hurt — much.  Not long term.

Sure some of it sticks – but it’s due to other things, actually, like the long slog to break into print, and how I was treated for a long time afterwards – and when I go into a new group, I’m awkward and timid (some of that might be innate, mind.)  And I have trouble er… making a big deal of my accomplishments. And I HATE being called names.

But for the first, it has given me unusual flexibility. Since elementary, I’ve learned to pick up dialects and see how people behave, and hit the right note. If I’d never had to adapt, I probably wouldn’t know. As for bragging about my accomplishments, yes, it’s cost me in an age when tooting your own horn (as in the publishing I came into. Publishers believed it when writers said how wonderful they were. No, really.) was effective. Now… it’s not so important. I’d rather have achievements than the touting of them. Both, sure, if possible, but if others can do the touting, yay. (Hey, I have come to terms with the fact I’ll have to do some of that myself. Yes. But I’d rather be writing.)

And as for not liking to be called names… really… which of us loves it?

My weird reaction – and it’s a problem mostly when I get beta critiques – is that because of my cousins and because they were so much better/brighter than I (being older), my first reaction when someone says “you did this wrong” is to believe them. It takes me time away and a lot of thought to get past that and say “no, this is right, this is wrong.” It is as damaging as thinking all my words are sacred – but different.

In the same way when someone says “you just said the most stupid thing in the world” I check my work, automatically, because, hey, maybe I did. But I’m unfortunately (of course unfortunately – because if you stop checking you could spin into the nut zone) getting used to the idea that in fact when I get called names by someone on twitter who disagrees with me politically and whose entire rebuttal is “Aahhhhh she’s so stupid.” Or of course “She makes me sick, I want to change my gender.” they don’t in fact have anything to contribute and their opinions are worth as much as monkey flinging poo. Less, actually, since monkeys at least make their area more sanitary, while these people might do otherwise.

So, what is this in the name of? I found myself in the comment section of one of Brad Torgersen’s post, (I think) where a woman was maintaining that saying things about her, even expressed in a polite way, was “an attack.” More specifically to say that she was ignorant of history and being immature was “an attack.” (Even though both were demonstrably true, and people were using examples.)

I found the idea jaw-droppingly insane. Someone might be completely wrong in what they say of you – I’ve been called both stupid and ignorant, and ignorant in my particular areas of knowledge, such as when the precious flower who took offense to my SFWA post said I was a “typical American” who’d “never been out of the country.” I found this annoying, but also very funny, because… well… No contact with reality.

Another example of lack of contact with reality was when someone who used to comment here told us all that in A Few Good Men only the gay guys and women were good. Thereby relegating the uber-father of the plot, Sam, and Mr. Long to “bad guy status” which annoyed me because I couldn’t imagine how someone could have read that book and got that. But it was also funny, because… how could someone have read my book and got that? (And at least two gay guys are not good.  Well, three.  The gay couple who pulls a gun on them, and Royce, though Royce isn’t bad, he just annoys Luce.)

I don’t read my reviews, as a rule, but when I do, I’m often very amused by both good and bad reviews that refer to a completely different novel. For instance, my first book got a five star review from someone who said it was “Silverdawn’s book. Silverdawn is the best character.” The only problem is that I didn’t then, and I don’t now have a character named Silverdawn.

Now, the reviews that are “true” and critical (even those that are good overall, but hit on one of the flaws of the book) hurt. Badly. This is why I don’t read them, because they can stop an entire book for six months, because I will obsess.

Look, I know my books have flaws. All books have flaws. It’s just at the point of writing them, I didn’t know how to do it better and (we can argue but it’s true) it’s better to put out a few flawed books than to work at the same book thirty yers and never finish. So, Darkship Thieves is really three novellas, and one of the transitions is shaky. Is it a bad book? No. I had to read it recently to get the mind back in the universe, and it’s good (I can say this as it’s far enough it no longer feels mine, if that makes sense) but it is still three novellas crammed into a book and the first transition (the time in Eden until the spaceship theft) is shaky. No more shaky than some Heinlein transitions, but if I were doing it now, I’d know better how to do it.

Older books, like the Magical British Empire (first book, author’s edition, being edited) are more problematic, as I had pacing problems. I knew I had them then, I just didn’t know how to solve them. Now I know how to, but I get very confused on how to integrate the new patches with the old.

Still, what I mean is, I know they have flaws and having them pointed out hurts, because I either don’t know how to fix them, or it’s much too late to do so.

BUT do they hurt me – I mean leave scars at the level of the soul? Oh, for crying out loud. No. would I prefer not hearing them? Sure. Nothing but praise would be great, thank you.  (Can we arrange that?  Yes?) BUT hearing that my writing started out very slow paced has yet to kill me.

Being called to account for things I’ve done (like when I rebutted an article and called the author Michael instead of Mark) is humiliating but not scarring.

And being called things I’m not – neo-nazi, really? Because Nazis want to make governments miniscule and leave people alone. Yep. Little known fact, Hitler really wanted the state to not intrude in private lives, and left the free market unfettered. Oh, wait, no he didn’t. He arrested people for private behavior (and genetics) and eliminated vast swaths of his country’s population while confiscating their wealth and choosing winners and losers in the economic arena. Sorry, guys. I don’t see what that has to do with small l libertarian me – certainly doesn’t scar me for life. Depending on how ridiculous they are they might make me laugh. Sometimes, if I think that’s what the general public will hear, it will make me worry about sales. BUT scar me for life? Oh, please.

Guys, I’ve been in real fights. I’ve had guns pointed at me. The first time was kind of scarring, but the others are a blur. And unless people were shot near me (or trampled to death in one case, as the crowd panicked. I didn’t see it, but knowing I was there, and it could have been me, if mom hadn’t grabbed me and flattened me against the building doesn’t help) it left no lasting scars.

Am I some kind of special? Oh, please. Life goes on in places where people witness – daily – some sort of horror that’s much worse than any words could be. People who live in Israel and have endured random rocket attacks for years don’t curl in the fetal position and refuse to go on with life.

People in terrible places – like during the civil war in Lebanon or in Detroit today or… — don’t just get scarred for life and become quivering bowls of jelly unable to function.

No, this ability to be “destroyed by words” exists only in the most sheltered of places: academia, the confines of a certain type of NYC publishing, the circles of radical chic when your “speaking truth to power” ultimately amounts to echoing the received wisdom everyone around you echoes.

In a way these people screaming that, oh, when Larry makes fun of them it’s an “aggression” remind me of hyper protected and very young upper class Victorian girls. Or of royalty who were never corrected and never allowed to hear they were wrong. Or perhaps of certain members of the more prudish cults. We used to know a family who was so hyper religious they had decided that THINKING about sin was a sin, even in the sense of knowing sin existed was a sin. So their fourteen year old had never heard the WORD “rape” and didn’t know what it was. They didn’t know anyone in the present day committed murder. The parents protected them from the news (this is one of those worst cases of homeschooling.)

I’m sure that when those poor kids left the house and heard how the world really was it shattered their minds. A similar situation is supposed to have led to the Buddha’s enlightenment.

So when I hear people complain that they were – sniffle, sob – called a name and it destroyed their entire self image/conception of the world/view of men/you name it, my thought is that they too were raised in cult-like protection, and likely the cult was of their own personality. In the misguided idea that building up their self-esteem made them strong, parents and teachers cooperated in making them hot-house plants.

Look, no one likes being called names, being out of step, feeling stupid. I don’t anymore than anyone else does. And I’m not going to say it makes you stronger.

But in a way it does. Being told you’re not right, or you’re not brilliant, or even that you’re fat might not make you stronger. I know – and the rest of you know – it hurts. But it causes no lasting damage. Not if you are a properly functioning adult.  And you learn to accept that the universe doesn’t revolve around your belly button and sometimes you’re wrong or doing something wrong.

It might hurt like hell, particularly if there’s a grain of truth in it. And if you’re subjected to nothing but that morning noon and night, it will leave traces (particularly if you’re a child) but that takes an intimate, family abusive situation. Not a passing stranger saying “you’re ugly and your mother dresses you funny.” (This was fairly normal in Portugal from what I call “three guys outside the tavern” – they thought it was a conversation-opener.)

But don’t go thinking you’ve been “assaulted” or that the person who disagreed with you or beat you at a game (apparently an article now disappeared accused people who beat girls at games of “rape.” No, seriously, and if I can find the cache, I’ll link it.) or even made fun of you for no reason is an ogre and monstrous. They might be right, they might be stupid themselves, or they might lack in social skills. Only in one of those instances should their words even begin to concern you.

So if the worst thing that ever happened to you was being told that your cozy, comfortable worldview was wrong or that some of us disagreed with it, and this led to a shattering of your world and to declaring Larry Correia an evil villain who “hates women” (Oh, please) and Kate and I “the world’s worst people” perhaps you’ve been too sheltered. Perhaps you should join humanity and consider that people who lived through wars famines and plagues had it worse than you. And yet they went on to function fully and to find in themselves nuggets of hope, love and charity which they left us in their work and in the children they reared and who reared our ancestors.

Maybe sticks and stones can break your bones, but words won’t ever hurt you.

Just a thought. And I know it’s crazy. But maybe if you let those who oppose you speak, and meet them in the open marketplace of ideas without seeking to silence them or calling them names, you might find your perfect theories have some holes. Or they’ll find theirs do.

But this requires not screaming assault when the other side gives half as good as they get.  This requires not feeding your own paranoia with talk of patriarchy and microaggressions.  It requires considering that perhaps maybe that thing in your belly button is just lint, and not the answer to the essence of life.

I know, I know. It’s a crazy idea. But it might just work.

The Last Frontier – By Amanda Green

I’ve spent the last couple of days trying to figure out what to write about. It would be easy to go the political route. With run-off elections about to happen, and some of the candidates going to extreme measures to garner enough votes to win their nominations, it would be easy to do. That’s especially true when you live in Texas and have candidates who have no problems bringing up their opponent’s distant history of psychological problems or, much worse, making public criminal charges that had been expunged from a candidate’s record – which puts the revealing party in trouble in the state where the charges were initially filed. Add in the mayor of San Antonio, a rising star in the Democratic Party, about to be named to Obama’s cabinet, a governor’s race where headlines talk about candidates running out of the state for campaign financing and, well, it’s Texas politics as usual.

But none of that really called to me. Maybe it’s because I’m politicked out for the moment and know that, come the Fall, it will all start over again. Maybe it’s because I’m in the middle of writing my second science fiction novel. Maybe it’s because I grew up with the Gemini and Apollo missions and dreamed of where our space program would be once we entered the new century. Whatever the reason, the topic that called t me this morning was our space program – or perhaps I should say our lack of one.

Some time ago, Sarah asked where her aircar was. I want to know where our space exploration program is. That’s been especially true of late when I’ve seen more and more stories about whether or not Putin would try to claim the Moon for Mother Russia. Then there was the article – and I can’t find the link to it right now – about someone actually selling advertising on the Moon.

Articles like the one in this morning’s Dallas Morning News about SpaceX Dragon returning from the International Space Station, bringing with it equipment and experiments, remind me of the excitement I felt as a kid, sitting in the den and watching the rockets take off from Cape Canaveral. Seeing the picture of Dragon returning to earth, parachute open as it nears splashdown, brought a smile of excitement to my lips.

It also brought memories. I don’t remember President Kennedy promising back in 1961 that we would have a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. But I do remember taking the small TV my grandmother had given me to elementary school so the class could watch the latest blast off or splash down. I remember sitting with my grandmother in the den of our home on July 20, 1969 when Apollo 11 touched down on the Moon. President Kennedy’s promise to have a man on the Moon had been fulfilled and the solar system and beyond lay before us.

Somewhere along the line, our priorities changed. The space race turned into a crawl. Our government was suddenly more interested in studying the sex life of a tree frog than it was in continuing the space program. There are times it seems clear that the politicians who are supposed to have our country’s best interest at heart have forgotten the advantages of being the first in the space race. I’m not talking about just the cache of being “first”. There are the defense advantages as well as the potential economic and scientific advantages as well.

In my writers groups is a gentleman who is writing a self-help book that centers around trailblazers. That is what this country used to be about. If we could think about something, we’d find a way to do it. There was a sense of adventure and determination that is becoming harder and harder to find. Instead, we are faced with criticism if we don’t fit in with the current trend of the day. Colleges are talking about requiring “trigger warnings” on anything that might, on some day in some distant future in someone’s alternative universe, offend or upset someone else.

Of course, those same rules don’t apply to the other side. Imagine the howls of outrage that would have gone up if a bunch of people had banded together to make sure only men won on a slate of literary nominees. Now consider the fact that no one seems to be too upset with all the self-congratulatory tweets about how the SJWs made sure only women won the Nebulas.

We now find ourselves in a country where it is more important to make sure no one feels they might not be as good as the next person than it is to nurture a pioneering spirit or an inquisitive mind. We are dumbing down our schools, and doing our children a great disservice, by not pushing our kids to do their best. Instead of trying to push students to raise the bar, we instead go to the lowest common denominator. Consequences are no longer of any, well, consequence. Bullies know they can get away with their actions because the bullied kids will think twice before fighting back because they don’t want to be suspended. Parents don’t put consequences on their kids in too many situations and, as a result, we now have the affluenza defense.

Where are our dreamers? Where are those inquisitive minds that put a man on the Moon?

Fortunately, there are companies like SpaceX who have taken up the cause of the space race. But how long will they be allowed to do so before the government starts putting so many regulations on them that it is no longer financially viable for them to continue operating? How long will it be before the governmental infighting, not just between our government and others but within the government itself, finds the US tossed out of the ISS?

I want my aircar. I want my grandchildren to have the possibility of leaving the Earth on a rocket, whether it is to go to DisneyMars or to be part of a deep space exploration team. But, when I look at what is going on – and not going on – in the space program and within our government, I find it hard to believe any of that will ever happen. While other countries, and private businesses, are moving forward, I can’t help thinking that we are moving backwards. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to go back to that surrey with the fringe on top.

Space is the final frontier. I don’t want to be the last to the exploration party.

 

MESSAGE FROM SARAH: Oh, yeah, while you’re at it, buy Amanda’s novel, under the pen name Sam Schall

 

Rant on Primary Source Reading — Mary Catelli

An aspiring writer ought to read history. Lots of it.   Even if — perhaps especially if — he intends to write SF or fantasy and build societies of his own. And the most important thing he should read is primary source, which is to say, stuff that was actually written at the time. Jane’s letter to her Aunt Hortensia. Esmeralda Doe’s diary. The cook book, the book about the Rules of Love, philosophical dialogs. Even fiction. Or as Chesterton put it:

“We should not read historians, but history. Let us read the actual text of the times. Let us, for a year, or a month, or a fortnight, refuse to read anything about Oliver Cromwell except what was written while he was alive. There is plenty of material; from my own memory (which is all I have to rely on in the place where I write) I could mention offhand many long and famous efforts of English literature that cover the period. Clarendon’s History, Evelyn’s Diary, the Life of Colonel Hutchinson. Above all let us read all Cromwell’s own letters and speeches, as Carlyle published them. But before we read them let us carefully paste pieces of stamp-paper over every sentence written by Carlyle. Let us blot out in every memoir every critical note and every modern paragraph. For a time let us cease altogether to read the living men on their dead topics. Let us read only the dead men on their living topics.”

This isn’t to do research, though you may find it useful later. It’s to expand your horizons. And knock your block off. To learn things you didn’t even know you didn’t know. You will read things in which people will casually take for granted something you never even dreamed that other people could think. It will let you in the possibilities. And you will learn that even if people thought the way you did, they could talk about it, and reason about it, very differently. It lets you get inside the heads of people different from you. This is why reading a lot of works from societies you have no interest in is still a help. Even if the exact facts you learn do not prove useful, they will remind you not to assume, so deeply you don’t even notice it, that things are the way you are familiar with.

It also helps avert the opposite fault: thinking, “The past is a different country. They do things differently there,” and cheerfully attributing to them behavior that fits the most modern stereotypes about the era, because it’s different. Even on the simplest level — I once read a writer discussing world-building, who asserted that a medieval king would never have been called the Sun King because the term would have had no meaning in a geocentric universe. groan. Plenty of ancient and medieval kings used solar imagery. “Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this son of York” is predicated on the actual use of the sun in War of the Roses heraldry. For one thing, the center of the universe was a bad place to be in the Ptolemaic universe, because it was the bottom of the universe.

As a sideline of this, it also gives an idea of how varied views can be while still fitting in the framework of a very different society. When Millais exhibited The Order of Release, one reviewer denounced the woman in it as “the hardest looking creature you can imagine,” but another praised her as “firm of purpose, sheds no tear” — which was, actually, the common view, since for the first time, they had to put not only a railing but also a guard at the exhibit.

It also develops a sense of how a society fits together. An instinct that alerts you to whether you really can throw together a society from bits of another. A society with a strict hereditary hierarchy is not one in which your oldest son can go gallivanting off on a merchant expedition and then return with a baseborn bride without consequence.

Of course, there’s an art to reading primary source usefully. Lots of reading will give you practice at that, but some pointers:

No one writes anything without a purpose, and that purpose will dictate what they write. Even those who write to illuminate their own time for future generations will illuminate it according to their own lights. Once you learn to glean their purpose, it may be the most valuable thing about them. Even works of history can be primary source for the era in which they are written because they are written with a purpose; Victorian folklorists cheerfully writing of the origin of folklore and fairy tales are often horrible at everything except the mindset of Victorian folklorists, on which they are superb. (Sleeping Beauty is a solar myth, and Hansel and Gretel, and The Frog King — and Napoleon Bonaparte. The writer who gravely proved the last according to the same logic that the folklorists were using on fairy tales probably did the most to ensure that the theory lost currency.)

Not that you can’t take anything at face value. Metaphors are usually safe — which is to say, because a work of St. Augustine’s has the casual statement that something was like a bethrothal, which lasted a year or two, I think it’s safe to say that in his time betrothals generally lasted a year or two before the wedding proper. Aelfric of Eynsham is beloved of Anglo-Saxon scholars because he wrote a work, the Colloquy, to teach his students conversational Latin, and the subject matter was trades and occupations, so he didn’t have an ax to grind about them.

But other than that. . . .

Where most writers go astray, I think, is in confusing prescriptive with descriptive writing. Whether an etiquette book or a law, people saying what people ought to do are not therefore describing what they do do — necessarily. Some people go overboard there, too, and say that rules are only laid down when a behavior is widely practiced, even if disapproved of. This I would think certain only for rules that are argued about and defended. A rule that is off-handedly mentioned may actually be the rule, too widely accepted to get into a frenzy about. OTOH, it can also be a dead letter.

And then, you often have to reconstruct the other side. Wide reading can only do so much — especially in eras when reading everything that exists doesn’t really make it wide. But with, say Andreas Capullanus’s Art of Love, you can read that love is impossible between a married couple — and note that he argues for it at length and presents it as a case settled by a Court of Love. Someone argued against it, even then.

 

Plus, you can fall off a cliff chasing someone’s purpose. You can miss irony. The classic example being the readers who assume that “A Modest Proposal” is serious. On the other hand, you can impute irony when it’s not intended. You can hypothesize that Juvenal wasn’t really satirizing the decadence of Rome, but the stuffy old-guard who minded. John Milton — some people argue that Satan’s arguing for liberty and equality. They miss that Satan interrupts his own argument to point out that the offense against him doesn’t annul degree and position, because he only wants to revolt against God, not have his own angels revolt against him.

There is also the aspect that people tend to write about the extraordinary, not the usual. You get more dramatic effects when you read reports of how horrific a certain noble was. Not only do you have deal with the agenda of the person writing about him, which would probably give motives to blacken him, you also have to deal with the issue that the noble (because he is being written about) is probably an outlier. Or the story of the ancien regime French nobleman whose son said that he had heard his father intended to marry him to a certain mademoiselle and was it true — and who retorted that his son should mind his own business. Not the sort of incident that would occur in a society with more freedom for the young people to make their own matches, but that the story was told at all is evidence that the nobleman had gone — a little far.

A traveler would notice more than the person on the spot, but when reading travelers’ tales, it is wise to remember that he may have misunderstood what was going on. Also, he probably would suffer no repercussions whatsoever if he embellished his account — not only his place in it, but with details that underscore how shockingly barbaric the barbarians are, or just prurient or violent details. So travelers’ tales have their upsides and downsides as well.

Actually, reading good scholarly secondary source is an aid to it, because they discuss their evidence and so afford a good example. But there’s no substitute to reading lots.

 

*Yes, why, I do know the meaning of “sinfully late” — sorry.  I wish I could say I was in a writing fog all day, but no.  The day got eaten by domestic stuff and shopping — not for anything exciting, no.  Just… food, because we were fairly out.  Sorry.  At least the stupid sinus headache is gone.*

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

 

 

Wolfe Merrrit, Manager of Manufactories for the Earl of Savage:

 

There are things you can do and things you can’t. And there are bargains you are offered in earnest, and bargains which you are offered but which the other side has no intention of following.

Most of the later bargains you are offered by normal human beings. Look, it’s not that fairyland won’t cheat you. You could say its very nature is deceptive, though I suspect you’d be wrong.

I think by their lights they deal perfectly fair. It’s just their lights aren’t ours, and we’re really very different sorts of creatures.

An old man I met once was convinced that all power in the lands of men was derived from blood of fairy. I didn’t argue. After all, everyone is entitled to becoming a little odd in his old ae and who was I to dispute with a stranger? But the power of humans and fey is different. Humans are physical beings who can – certain of them, can, at least, at certain times – command the power of magic, the kind of power that must have fueled creation itself. Those human beings who have magic must learn to control it, because it interacts oddly with our all too physical beings, our all too fallible wills.

But for the fey it is different. Some of this I learned through living with my wife, and more, much more of it, I’d learned through coming into fairyland to claim my son, whom she’d taken with her.

Coming into fairyland had been necessary precisely because my son was mostly human and humans in fairyland die or go mad, if they tarry too long. In his case probably he would have gone mad. As it was, from his days in fairyland, something remained not quite human in him. Something had broken.

Because, you see, though we interact with them, and they with us, the fey are not of the same kind of … creature. Oh, sure we can breed with them. We’re similar enough. But we arrived at similarity from different ends of creation. They are, you see, mostly magic. The energy that was present at creation, the burst of power, of will of “this be done” in them is shaped into creatures – creatures that often have trouble holding the same shape for any amount of time.

Humans are made of what the Bible pleases itself to call clay: the common elements of the human world, just like all the animals. Into this common clay the creator infused soul and spirit and a bit of magic, a big of ability to create with our minds and our hearts. At least in our version of the human world.

The fairy world, too, was different – a thing of that same burst of creation – as I thought about it, as I stared at my long-lost wife, I wondered if all the worlds were not only separate in space but in time, if fairyland was all the human worlds combined, as they’d been at the moment of creation, or shortly after.

Some very learned magic experts said that the suns and stars and worlds all had been created in a burst of energy. The big bang, they called it. I wondered if that was what Fairyland was, the moment after the bang, when all the energy, all the magic, was still fluid and ungelled, and all the worlds of men were contained in fairyland in potentia. Which would explain the wildly changing landscape and the different passing of time, and also why they contained so many creatures that had haunted humans at their beginning.
Something in me whispered Careful now. It was as though those thoughts were in themselves dangerous or slippery. I had the feeling a man has, when running in pitch dark, he stops just before pitching headlong into an abyss, and leans back, and takes a breath, and determines to be very careful until he’s safe.

Aloud, I said, “No bargains Feidlimid, and no trades. And the lady Helen is nothing to me, but my employer’s daughter, whom I must protect and get back safe.”

Feidlimid looked at me a long time. Her eyes were emerald and sparkling but they had the feel and the look of something like an insect. There was no human response in them, no human understanding.

This is what I mean when I say we’re made of quite different stuff. She was all the will and the magic, all the strength of a burst of creation.

I didn’t think she was making a bargain with me, or if she was – even if I were willing to trade my son for the lady Helen, which I wasn’t – she wouldn’t keep it. She would keep to the letter of it, but that would be worded in such a way that what I’d get would not be the lady, safe and sound, and I would surely lose both her and my son.

I had no intention of performing in this play. I’d lived with Feidlimid, and I knew her weakness, and I knew her fear. And I had no intention of letting her play me for a fool.

I could feel the fog of fairyland, like a living but cold thing creep around me, and I could feel her glamour wash over me in waves, trying to bend me into her willing slave.

It was not going to happen. I’d fought through layers of delusions before, when I’d been here. Delusions only work when you don’t know they’re there.

There was power to being the mere course stuff of human kind. And more power yet in knowing one had a hold over this glittering creature.

Feidlimid had a little smile playing on her lips. She was doubtless thinking of something interesting to do to me. I sighed. “By the power over you Feidlimid, by the part of you you left buried in the world of men—”

“Stop,” she said. She gave a little scream. “Stop.” Because she hates the thought that part of her was left behind, to become part of our soil. I remembered midnight and burying it beneath the oak tree at the green, just by the crossroads. At the time I was thinking of nothing but keeping the child safe, but I’d done the right thing by blind instinct. The crossroads confused the fair folk and the oak too, ancient and anchoring was a presence she could not wish away. Nor could she get back what she’d given up that night.

“By the part of you left behind in Avalon, I require that you—”

She didn’t let me finish the incantation. I didn’t think she would. There was a scream, and a sound of tearing, and I was standing in a green meadow and heard hooves.

There was an army headed for me. Horsemen.

Then I blinked. No. Centaurs. They were riding towards me, in massed ranks.

*This is Sarah: yeah, I know you all know Witchfinder is out and those of you who read fantasy and can afford it have read it.  So I’m not going to push it at you, because I PRESUME you’re not stupid — I’m just going to ask if you have a blog or a face book page and you ENJOYED Witchfinder (I’m not asking you to lie and say you liked it or push it if you haven’t read it.) would you post about it, with the link from the side of the blog and do a little promo?  I get sales every time I put it on my FB, but it feels like I’m being a bore saying “Hi people.  Here’s my book.  Buy it.”  Just echoing someone who posted and liked it makes it less “Hi, have you seen this?”

Now let me explain why — it’s sold pretty well, but since tax day everyone’s sales have been sucky and mine are no exception.  They haven’t stopped — and I do realize 6.99 is high for an indie book, yes, but it’s a massive fat fantasy.  It will come down when it’s been out a year, which seems to be what authors do.  And I’m not going to tell you I need it to eat — I don’t.  We’re going to be a bit tight, meaning nothing special and no impromptu trips to the diner, and no big expenses if we can help it (some of it we can’t.  We have to do a lot of fix-up and dress up on the house before it goes up)  till the house sells and that could be a year or so which means we might or might not make it to Liberty con this year (and if we do it will probably just be Dan and I unless the boys are willing to pay for it out of their own money.  It can’t be just me, because I’ll get lost.)  And I might not make it to Portugal, which is a little worse because Mom seems incapable of understanding “can’t afford it” and seems to think I’m being mean and/or trying to get her to pay for it.  (I’m not.  In fact I turned down her offer to “help” — I know what the downturn has done to their savings — about what it did to all of us.)

But that’s not the issue. The thing is this book is a proof of concept.  I’ve said before, and I’ll say till the end of time, I’ll keep writing for Baen, the shifters and DST and probably/maybe the world war I dragon thing.  And maybe other stuff  that comes up. And there you have it. I’ll necessarily be writing a lot of these on spec.  Which dovetails strangely with how my mind works.

I’ve discovered my writing works weirdly.  It often requires me to write two or three novels at once, just to get one to flow.  This is because I don’t think rationally about writing.  It’s all from the subconscious.  I can shape it in rewrite or shape it as it flows, but the PRIMAL push and work has to come out on its own.

This is the issue, btw, with being under contract, because when I am, I feel I owe money, and the moralizer in the back of my brain won’t let me write anything that’s NOT under contract.  Because I’m in debt, you know.  And so I’ll block and write a 100 words in a month.  Then I get furious at myself…  This is why writing for other houses actually helped me write faster for Baen, because if they were all under contract I could “rotate.”  It wasn’t ideal.  The books I was rotating to weren’t necessarily something I needed or even wanted to do. For instance, when I knew they were dropping musketeers on the floor, I blocked hard on the fifth book. And yet, it still helped.

Anyway, the point is that even just to work for Baen (I think after this I’ll do it without contract) I need to know there’s a place to put the other books, and that means I need to feel indie is worth my time.  Not perhaps on the same level as traditional (well, not up front, though I’ve now made ALMOST as much as I used to get from mystery advances) but not a waste of time, because then the moralist will insist that I’d be better of making the house REALLY clean and the writing stops.

So, it’s important that Witchfinder convince the idiot at the back of my head that indie books CAN work.  And then maybe I can come to a working agreement with it.

So, if you can say anything nice (obviously saying something not-nice won’t work) that I can echo or link and give the thing a little push, it might help you get more free (and otherwise) books in the future.

No pressure of course.  Do it only if you’re okay with it. And now I’ll get out of the way of the Clam who’s got promo.*

Greeting, mammals! Just a couple of entries this week, so go and support your fellow Huns. Don’t forget to leave reviews! As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Bug Hunter , Mercenary Wordsmith, and Producer of Pearlescent Puns

William Lehman

Harvest Of Evil

In much of the world, Lycanthropy or Vampirism is still a death sentence if you are caught; however, as a result of the Civil Rights movements of the 1950’s and ’60’s, it’s legal in the US, Canada, and several other European commonwealth countries. Magic and other metaphysical abilities are more accepted in much of the world, but figuring out what is legal and what is not, requires a lawyer and a half dozen research assistants. Of course, there ain’t no such thing as a free lunch. Doing heavy duty magic takes a LOT of energy, staying in animal form too long, can cause you to get “stuck”, and vampires go through a lot of blood, plus that whole daylight thing… In the US though, ‘Thropes, as they’re known, and vampires have “gone mainstream” and come out of the kennel and the coffin. Were they were promptly recruited by the military. Of course both types had been serving before, it was just kept quiet, now it’s out in the open… And what does a Retired Were cougar do when he hangs up his uniform for the last time? He becomes a Park Ranger of course… John Fisher had been having a normal day at the office… That is if your office is a Federal Park police Durango, and you were a retired SEAL from the infamous “SEAL team 12” who’s members were all some form of Preternatural. But then things got REALLY weird.

Cyn Bagley

In the Shadow of Death: Reflections on a Chronic Illness

In January 2003 I spent two weeks in a German hospital before I was diagnosed with Wegener’s Granulomatosis. This collection contains my journey through a chronic illness. This ebook was written as remembrance for Vasculitis month (May) and to all of those people who have lived with and died from a chronic illness.

Also available from these other fine booksellers:

• Barnes & Noble
• Smashwords