According To Hoyt

I’m tired. It’s been a long day, and I was writing and doing battle with formatting, and I’m exhausted.

If we’re going to cast this blog post in the context of yesterday’s example of a really cool status report, the forces of evil are definitely in the ascendant this week.   Oh, I’m battling them and getting work done, but it’s taking its toll on me.

This being spring break, on Monday we went to see the elephant – no, nothing metaphorical about it. I took older son to see the elephant. He likes elephants. I think they’re related or something.

It was cold and a little strange, because all the animals were either asleep or eating. But it was fun because it was the first time in… oh, a good year, that the Hoyts were out all together, all at the same time. There is nothing that isn’t fun when we go out anywhere. Our life tends to take a really odd turn when we start talking. What I mean is, I sometimes think our kids view life upside and sideways and we… we aid and abet them.

When they were very little, they used to play a “spaceship game.” Being the children of science fiction writers, their game was a little more coherent than the average children’s game. That is, as older son conceived of it, and younger son added to it, when he started talking, there was an actual bit of world building, and they kept logs or our expeditions.

The conceit was that the house was a spaceship, piloted by a family (ours) which, with a lot of other families, went out and explored new planets and reported back to an explorer corps.

If you can’t see how this made every day life a continuous adventure, you’re not my kids.

If we were under a severe ail storm, it was fire from the native planet the spaceship was orbiting. The car was the away-pod. Trips to the grocery store were sample collecting. Trips to museums/parks/amusement parks were formal visits to other planets.

Our writers’ group meetings were encounters among the explorer families.

And there was a pseudo military structure and a path of promotion. I suspect Robert still has – somewhere – a list of every rank and the colors associated with it. Sometimes I was informed I’d been promoted or disciplined, but mostly we just went about every day in a cloud of the kids talking about the strange and exciting other world they created where we went.

Sometimes I wonder what other people thought was happening – but I didn’t care, because, unless I was driving and they got in a fight over something stupid – I enjoyed the stories they told.

When we moved out of our last house, they wrote decommissioning papers for the spaceship and stuck it through a crack between a closet and a wall. I wonder if some future remodeler will find it and be utterly puzzled.

The game died shortly thereafter, because they were when we moved 8 and 13 and starting to write, and well… living in a live role playing game gets old, I guess, even if it’s your family.

But we still can’t go out without coming up with ten ideas for stories.

It’s an odd way to live.

Sometimes I feel a little guilty. I wonder if we’ve twisted them out of all normal intercourse. We weren’t trying to. We were just living.

And sometimes… sometimes I think that there is an innate need for a rich fantasy life in humans, and that it’s the other people, who can’t create their own, who are deficient. Those of us who can live half-immersed in dream rarely feel a need to destroy other people or tell them how to live. We can make our own music.

The bad side, of course, if that – as they’ve found – there is an edge between dream and reality. For the kids to become writers – or really active in anything – they had to leave the Live Rople Playing Game behind. I miss it, and I know the do too, but the imaginary world intruded on the real world, and as they wanted to learn about the real world, they had to push the imaginary one back and make it less prominent.

Weirdly, a lot of the people I find who are truly embittered or who feel like the world is totally unfair, have never to that. Not really. They live in the world as they wish it were, superimposing it on reality by an effort of will, and if reality deviates, it is reality that is wrong and must adapt, not them.

I feel a lot of what we see, particularly weird arguments – I read on a blog that China is not socialist. It’s a mixture of communism and capitalism. In other words, hot ice and strangely warm snow. (Rolls eyes.) China is of course socialist with a strong component of state-capitalism. Or in other words, fascist, which is a crappy regimen but marginally more stable than communism. (They go poor slower. Though since China like Germany has a racial component… never mind.) – and defensive maneuvers including calling someone the worst person in the world for not agreeing with them, it’s an attempt to keep that game going, to keep the imagined world safe and cozy and unmixed with any harsh reality.

The thing is that it’s possible now – more than at any other time – for large portions of the population to live in that sort of dream. It’s not just that all their friends believe the same but that we’re a rich enough society that a vast part of it is insulated from the realities of life as expressed by Heinlein “Root, hog or die.”

Or even from the reality that the balmy lack of wars we’ve been experiencing these last 50 years or so (we’ve had little wars, but no world wide conflagration) is a result of the Pax Americana, and of us being the major superpower. The idea that the rest of the world will be peaceful and happy the moment we withdraw is more of a fantasy than my kids’ old space game. (This doesn’t mean I advocate foreign adventurism, though at times it is inevitable, but that I believe we should be bolstering our defenses, not tearing them donw.)

Or from the – harsh – facts that books, games, stories of all sorts, even reports of news are not a way to “change the world” or “make the world a better place” (which at any rate brings up the questions “change into what?” “Why?” “Make it a better place for whom?” “how?”) but ways to entertain people and to provide them with the sort of ludic interludes they enjoyed as children.

Looking at both economic and international news, I very much feel the need to escape. And I know I’m not alone.

Will some of these things have a component of utopia or prescription? Almost always. We write what we are.

BUT would following sf writers’ ideas lead to a “better tomorrow?” Oh, please. Sometimes I think from the UN to nuclear disarmament, to Obamacare and not forgetting both the new ice-age and anthropogenic global warming, the surest way to make a good decision is to go against what my people advise.

This is because what makes a good book, or a good immersive reality, is much simpler than the real world. If you factored in everything that works in a real world, you’d not have a novel, you’d have soup.

Take the kids space game – it was lots of fun, and I liked hearing them – but who was that central authority? And why were they dispatching families with kids to dangerous areas. I don’t think it was an utopia, Toto.

So it’s easier to simply, to fasten onto an idea as a plot device.

The problem is that a lot of my colleagues, and a lot of the fans, and a lot of people who live in the world of ideas become blinkered by the fantasy reality and unable to see the real world.

Even I have to fight against it, to remind myself that no, unlike the Bradbury story Almost the End of The World, a collapse won’t take us back to a simpler time, and simpler abilities won’t be in demand. Collapses don’t usually subtract tech, they just make the real world unreliable.

And are we headed for one? Almost for sure. What I mean is, the way we’re printing currency, we’ll pay for it.

OTOH something could happen. A miracle. We could discover the equivalent of Heinlein’s shipstone, that is, free, unlimited energy. Or… something else. History could take a side turn. And we might escape the worst.

We can’t tell. This is why making predictions about the future is so difficult.

And why the dream is so easy.

The dream is fine, as an amusement, and I depend on making a living from it, and I read for escape, just like the rest of you.

But it’s not real.

Sometimes, like Terry Pratchett’s Tiffany Aching, you need to open your eyes, then open your eyes again, and make an effort to keep seeing reality, even when it hurts.

It’s not a comfortable thing to do. But it’s the only way to stay one step ahead of the future and survive it.  More importantly, it’s the only way to make sure we have some control over our own fate and the fates of those we love, instead of letting things come out of nowhere — like my promotions and demotions in the space game.

It’s very important to remember what’s reality and what’s fantasy, even when we feel the need to escape to stay sane.

*Oh, this will tell you how sleepy I was when I wrote this two hours ago — I forgot to announce — A Few Good men is one of five finalists for the Prometheus Award.*

Years ago my husband worked for a company where the maintenance department put out the most hilarious weekly reports I’ve ever read. I don’t remember what the department is called but let’s say it was Systems Engineering. The reports were called Systems Engineering Versus The Forces of Evil and then had subtitles, along the lines of “The Week We Were Almost Eaten By Dragons.”

Then the entire report was written as though it were a superhero adventure and usually finished with the line “and so, holding hands and skipping all the way we defeated X” with X being whatever the menace for the week was.

Needless to say, being possibly the world’s least techy person, I had zero interest in the actual technical issues of the company, but I loved those reports. They were written like a rousing adventure story and – more importantly – they told the story of a team fighting continuous menaces and prevailing.

Besides the fact that this teaches us that writing is not a matter of “come up with a good story” but of how well you tell the story you have, even if normally it would glaze the eyes of an hyperactive dragon, there is another thing there: the idea of the team that works together against a well-nigh insurmountable challenge.

Which is a prevailing myth and desire of mankind.

Leading to us getting people in here telling us that “socialism” is any cooperation/group work and therefore extolling the virtues of a system that at best leads to the sort of soft/slow decay we see in Europe and at worst… well, at worst it fills mass graves. (It needs only for them to say that socialism is just another name for the things we choose to do together – I’m sure they believe it, which is why it’s important to set things straight.)

In between lies the enforced group work of schools which is in fact more akin to socialism than voluntary cooperation.

I’m tired of the confusion between voluntary teams and forced teams (including but not limited to government-enforced and school-authority enforced.)

I was about to say the two are as akin as ice cream and spackle, but it’s worse than that. The two are as akin as lemonade and anti-freeze.

In all the years I had to do group work in school, it worked exactly once. I was in a form where I had four friends, and where we were more or less inseparable. We were also the sort of dream team that companies, governments and, yes, schools, keep trying to assemble, in that one of us was good at math, and one at art, and one at writing, and one at real-world horse sense, and one at presentations.

Now, we were all fairly good at all of those – it was that sort of form – but each of us, naturally and by inclination, preferred one of the other of the specialties. When group work was announced we immediately claimed our group as a group and we were well known to be an unit, so teachers rarely tried to break us up.

Was that work more fun/less onerous/better results than learning individually? You bet. We routinely astonished both the teachers and ourselves with what we could achieve in terms of both content and presentation.

Kind of like the department at my husband’s company, we faced the forces of evil hand in hand and skipping all the way, and we won every time. (BTW, that department, not coincidentally, had hit one of those happy situations, where everyone got along.)

Beyond those two happy years, after which my friends and I fell apart/left for different courses, etc, before and after there were “tolerable” group works. This is where you all have roughly the same goal, and you are more or less evenly matched, and so you can pull in the same direction, give or take a few inches either way.

This work is rarely more efficient than doing everything on your own, but to be fair it’s not less efficient. And if you’re a gregarious soul, or at least if you don’t dislike your team mates, it will be pleasant enough. I think all of us have been in teams like that, in school and work. It works. And sometimes you keep the friendships for years after – but it adds nothing to the product over just having each of you break out a piece of the project and do it on his/her own.

And then there is what most group-work/socialism is. An authority set above you will assign groups, sometimes according to the authority’s idea of what you can/should do, and sometimes utterly at random.

One favorite method when I was in school was to go by alphabetic order. As in socialism, you are not allowed to say “No, thank you, I will undertake to provide for myself if you stop stealing my time/property/individual effort.” You have to play.

Often too, just in socialism, teachers do it with an eye to redistribution. If you’re the class’s best pupil, you find the teacher’s “random” assignment sets you in a group with dullards, laggards and incurable bums. And since their result is yours, you have to work three times as hard so that the result is what it would have been if you’d all pulled. In the end you feel like Horse in animal farm, and should just be glad that they can’t send you to the glue factory.

It is from this last method that most smart/hard working students learn their “group work” method, which is to say “Please don’t help me. I’ll do the work, we’ll divide the results.”

Of course, this often leads to resentment, because humans are like that, and you often get the least capable student trying to “help”—by which you should read wresting the project in the most moronic possible direction.

But none of this equates state-imposed group work, aka socialism. Since societies don’t have teachers, whether benevolent or malevolent, and since politicians tend to be people who rarely have the ability to do anything else, we end up in a situation where the state has the vague idea that groups are good and that cooperation is good and that we should all look after each other. And then it tries to assign it, just like the teacher with a political agenda assigns group work by combining the hard-working and the incurably lazy in one group.

Oh, sure, it might start out – often does, and in Scandinavian countries this sort of worked for decades – with the most capable saying “Here, let me do the work. Just get out of my way.”

But first that is as akin to true cooperation and the benefits thereof as … poison is to food. And second, the most capable members sooner or later get tired of pulling the whole load. On top of which that resentment that the least capable members of the group feel? Yeah, in a society-wide group that becomes a true resentment. Even if the material difference is very little, those who are willing to work hard can make much out of that little. They will use their resources better and live better lives. And the resentment explodes into envy. There is no socialist state that ever achieves perfect “equality” and therefore class strife can always be invoked to bring about more “equality.”

What is broken here (and in the work in assigned groups, incidentally) is treating humans as interchangeable widgets. Since humans aren’t interchangeable widgets (they can be equal in dignity and before the law – and imho should be – but they will never be EQUAL. Even my sons, children of the same mother and the same father, with the same rough education, have almost diametrically opposite abilities and very divergent interests) this comes to grief, over and over and over again. Inequality is always present because humans aren’t perfectly equal. And when you hold to the ideal that all humans should be alike and work in this homogeneous group, you are making envy a virtue. Because if we’re all supposed to be alike, to be envious is to “resent inequality.” You are justifying the most vile feelings in a human being and, incidentally, removing all incentive to do better.

Just as in group work, when you pair people of widely different abilities and expect each to do an equal share and thereby you justify the “hurt” feelings of those who aren’t allowed to contribute their “idea” – I once had to fight tooth and nail against a group member in a class translation project, who not only refused to believe the term for fried sticks of potato in the US is French Fries, but who had decided to die on the hill of calling them “Friend Potatoes.” (no, not fried. Friend. Because it was his opinion, and his opinion was as good as mine, and it was far less ludicrous sounding than French Fries, and never mind if I had lived in the US for a year.) – in socialism you justify the “hurt” feelings and the feeling of exploitation (enhanced by the whole concept of finite pie) of a lot of people who don’t know how to utilize the resources they do have.

The surprise is not that it ends in soft decay. It is a testimony to the essential goodness of mankind that – at least in this more benign and less authoritarian form, what I’d call smiley-face socialism – it doesn’t always result in open and violent massacres, at least until it slides one way or the other into authoritarianism. (The least said about the soft massacre of denied opportunity, of destroyed lives, of dwindling resources and of denied treatment for less useful members of society, the better – but one must admit it’s much better than the shot in the back of the head and the mass grave.)

But at the heart of it, it is a dehumanizing ideology which bears no resemblance to voluntary cooperation. In voluntary cooperation, even if your skills are widely different, or at vastly different levels, each member chooses to come in and do the best he/she can. It is assumed they’re not all going to do the same and they’re not interchangeable.

And the results are often sublime. And can’t be forced.  No matter what teacher, bureaucrat or petty tyrant thinks they could and should be.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Abuse Science — A guest post by Kate Paulk

The weekend before last was Lunacon, where one of my panels was about science, ignorance and power. It turned into a fascinating discussion of the issues raised by the often breathtaking ignorance of science in this country (the USA if anyone is asking) as well as suggestions on improving the situation. The latter were few and far between because, well… it’s systemic.

 

Some of the problems include teachers who know next to nothing about how science works, a near-complete lack of a requirement for teacher trainees to learn science, journalists who are equally misinformed so any reporting reads more like the Hollywood version (and the ignorance there is equally impressive), politicians who are damn near universally lawyers and have no problems lying to their constituents to keep getting elected and of course bureaucrats who are much more concerned with keeping their position than with anything related to science. Not that this is a complete list. There isn’t space for that in a single post.

 

As for solutions, well, buggered if I know. And I am a scientist, if rather out of practice (geologist, if you’re wondering, although technically my software engineering degree also counts. I’ve had an… interesting worklife).

 

See, possibly the biggest problem isn’t the obvious one. It’s that scientist use words everyone else uses, but they have their own special meanings for them. Or – and this is more common – the scientific meanings got broadened into other things when they leaked out into general use. This isn’t a bad thing per se. It’s going to happen in a living language. But it means that people have to be taught how to translate between science-speak and regular-speak.

 

Simple, yes?

 

Well, no. See, there’s a hell of a lot of people claiming to be scientists who don’t act like it, because underneath everything else, science isn’t a body of knowledge or a set of defined facts and rules (although of course science has plenty of those and they’re important). It’s a way of thinking and one which both heads of the power-hungry hydra that is the modern American two party system abuse shamelessly.

 

The first important thing is that science is never “settled”. Science is about observing facts, searching for patterns, making predictions from those patterns and then trying to disprove the predictions. If – to take an example – the pro-Global Warming faction was actually engaging in science, they would be searching for data that disproved their theories.

 

Oh, and a “theory” in science does not mean the same thing as a theory in general discourse. To be a scientific theory, it has to be mathematically rigorous and disprovable. Otherwise it’s a hypothesis (aka educated guess). Scientific laws describe behavior that is sufficiently well understood nobody expects to ever see it disproved – although since Einstein published the Theory of Relativity, it’s become clear that laws need to also specify the environment in which they apply, since Newton’s laws break down under conditions that you won’t find in normal life.

 

Of course, this is an idealized view, but it’s the ideal that all scientists should be aiming for. Government money – particularly large amounts of Government money – tends to shut down the desire to reach the ideals. So does corporate money, but corporate entities usually don’t have the amount of power a government wields. At the same time, this stuff is expensive, but without it you don’t have things like antibiotics, flushing toilets, internets and so on. It’s not particularly glamorous either, and usually doesn’t look at all like you see on TV. It’s more like Dirty Jobs visiting Mythbusters (the Mythbusters team does good, sound science, but they don’t show the hours of tedium that goes behind what they do screen).

 

So… some of the science abuse I’ve seen from politicians of all stripes:

 

• cherrypicking while claiming to be “reality-based”. This happens a lot and all of them do it. There are leftist politics who mock conservatives who deny that evolution is possible while ignoring the very real biological differences between male and female and between various ethnic groups. There are rightist politics who have no problems with antibiotics and flu shots while claiming that evolution is impossible. And a whole range of equally ignorant nonsense.
• ignoring evidence that doesn’t fit the favored theory/ideology. Again, all the bastards do it. Repeatedly. Of course, they do it with everything else, not just science – probably because they’re mostly lawyers, and that’s part of what lawyers are supposed to do. Unfortunately, it means that instead of any kind of sensible behavior our political wannabe masters lurch erratically from idiot position to idiot position making total asses of themselves. Not that they care as long as they get reelected.
• faking the evidence. Of course this is another traditional lawyerly activity, since the goal is to win without getting caught (yes, I’m a little bit cynical. Deal.)
• mathematical illiteracy. Dear god the mathematical illiteracy. We have a Congress, a Senate, an Executive, and a Judiciary stuffed to the gills with people who do not /do/ math. Is it any wonder they can’t tell the difference between debt and deficit? And of course, with all the branches of science, math underlies it somewhere. The relationship is pretty clear with physics, but there’s plenty to be found in geology, chemistry, biology, and such. You just need to know where to look. (Here’s a clue. If it gets called a science and the most important parts don’t have any math? It’s not a science no matter what it calls itself. Ditto if there’s no observation or extrapolation and testing against predictions from observations.).
• selective blindness. This isn’t quite the same as cherrypicking – it’s more ignoring certain areas because they’ll be too controversial. This is, for instance, why there is buggerall real research into ethnic group IQ score differentials. Those concerned (and again, all sides of politics have failures here) are terrified that they might find something biological in the difference and that would be raaaaaaacist (no it wouldn’t. Facts are not biased. They are what they are. If there is an ethnicity based component to intelligence, then that’s how it works). This particular example is a long and controversial post all by itself, so I’ll leave the matter there, but remember, that’s just one area of selective blindness. There are many, many others.

 

So. What to do? The politicians and their media friends need to be called out on their ignorance and abuse of science every time. No matter what. Mock them. Show them facts. Hell, shove the facts up their noses and down their throats. If they choke, so much the better (metaphorically speaking. I don’t advocate actually choking the bastards. You might get a worse one as a replacement).

*No, not abandoning Elf Blood, but I might have to take a week, after I finish Through Fire, race through it, write it through, then post it in installments — I might even be evil and offer you advance peek for a couple of dollars ;) — I find that writing a novel in my work a day and two chapters of two different novels a weekend is driving me NUTS.  It’s like having one arm too many, if that makes any sense.  Anyway, I don’t expect to be absent for more than a week or two, but DO indulge me.*

Yesterday I answered a series of interview questions for Literary Lunes Magazine. This happened with a lot of other “business catching up” which had to be done before I go to Portugal, since there I’ll only have intermittent internet access, when I visit my brother’s house. My mom appears to think the internet is the work of the devil or something.

Anyway, among those interviews there was one I’ve never been asked, and which UTTERLY baffled me. “What is you muse?”

I had no idea how to answer that, so I went flip – which, you know, is what I do when I have no clue what people are talking about. I said if I had a muse, she’d wear a toga and lift aloft a clothes iron, because I do most of my ideation while ironing or doing other boring, routine tasks.

I’m still bothered by what they mean. Perhaps they asked “who” (I don’t remember) but that only makes it more baffling. When I wrote poetry, this was easy, since I usually wrote series of poems to someone, normally my crush of the time. (Sigh. Time is the enemy of us all. The young man I wrote 200 sonnets for between the ages of 14 and 18 is now completely bald and looks… well, nothing like he used to. This hurts more than aging personally. Who was it who said something about time making a mockery of our loves?)

But I don’t write poetry and I don’t write straight romance (I don’t write gay romance, either – I mean, as you know very well that I don’t write romance on its own, not as part of a bigger plot.) So the question of a muse doesn’t arise. Or does it?

Of course I fall a little in love with my characters, but not that sort of love. It’s more the love of parent for child, or the love of creator for creation.

Sometimes a book does center around one character, though. It’s not – I think – so much a matter of “love” or even “muse” but more a matter of following the pain. I write to the pain. I go where the pain is.

I think this is because I write to resolve pain – to resolve conflicts within myself that can’t be resolved any other way, starting, inevitably, with the fight between mind and body, but twisting to a lot of other things. And if you’re scratching your head and wondering what I mean by pain – to take an example, I know that I’m not the only one who left her native land behind. Half the members of the Mad Genius Club have. And I’ll admit I wanted to be here, and I’m happy where I live and with my family and friends here. But at the same time, every time I go back, I remember I severed a piece of myself and left it behind – a whole parallel history that was more likely to happen, the person I’d be if I’d married someone there and lived there. It hurts a little not to be able to be in two places at once, no matter how much you love where you are.

But I’m not alone. Even if you never left your birth place and your birth family, I bet the world has changed so much around you that your childhood is as irretrievably lost as my own. It’s part of being a physical, mortal creature caught in the coils of advancing time. No human being deserves that, and all of us live through it. And there’s no way to resolve it, to come to terms with it. Except through art. At least for me. And my art is mostly my writing (the rest being on the lines of a hobby.)

So I go where the pain is. I find the pain in the character, the situation, the world, and the tension that comes from that pain, and I go in and wind the plot around the pain till catharsis happens.

This is the closest thing to a “muse” I can admit to, and it makes me sound like I keep a closet full of whips and chains. (I don’t, though the cats sometimes make me wish for a whip and a chair. Yeah, I know they’d just play with the leather strips.)

So what do you think they meant by “muse”? It made me feel completely out of step, like there was an entire world of writing out there that I not only didn’t know, but couldn’t fathom. After twenty six years of writing, that is a pretty scary idea.

Does everyone but me have a muse? What is a muse in this context? Do you have one?

*Crossposted at According To Hoyt *

*This post of course should have gone up yesterday, but the mollusc tribe had a medical emergency (an unfortunate lot of that going around.  Please, if you’re the praying kind, say a prayer for the health of the molluscs.)  And then last night I mentioned to the husband and kids that the Keira Knightly movie that calls itself Price and Prejudice was not actually the worst violation to canon.  Of course I had to prove this — so we watched the 1940s version with Lawrence Olivier who, mind you, made an admirable Darcy but the plotcostumesaccentssettingdialogue!  Oh, NO!  I’m not sure older son will ever forgive me making him see it.  (He’s almost as much of a Jane Austen aficionado as I am.) So, of course, the Chattering Hoyts TM were talking to the wee hours, I didn’t put promo post up, and I woke up late this morning.  Eh.-SAH*

Greetings, oh mighty Huns! My deepest apologies for the delay. In contrition, I bring you a collection of marvelous adventure stories this week! Accompany super heroes, lawmen, and soldiers as they protect truth and justice and their creators try to make a buck! In the interests of full disclosure*, I should note that I was involved in the production of In Time of Peril, though I am not the author. As always, future entries can (and should!) be sent to my email. Happy reading!
Jason Dyck, AKA The Free Range Oyster
Lord of the Oysterhaus, Mercenary Wordsmith, and Celebrated Healbot

* Once more, the FTC can bite my shiny metal tuchis.

C.J. Carella

New Olympus: The Armageddon Girl Companion

Welcome to a world where superheroes are real! Venture into Earth Alpha, the alternate history first featured in the novel Armageddon Girl. New Olympus features eight short stories set in different times and places.

“Deguello” – an American volunteer in the Spanish Civil War is caught between two dueling Neolympians.
“Visionary” – in 1938, a budding super-villain threatens the city of New York and only the efforts of several legendary heroes (and one pesky reporter) can stop him.
“The Red Baron’s Last Flight” – set during the last days of the Third Reich, Neo pilot Manfred Von Richthofen undertakes a desperate mission against the Allies.
“Golden Horde” – a group of young and inexperienced Neos find themselves cut off and surrounded during the First Asian War.
“Tripping” – four counterculture druggies go on one really bad trip.
“Hungry Love” – wherein college dropout Patricia Dark and the Lurker meet and conceive the future Armageddon Girl.
“Freshman Class” – a group of candidates to the Freedom Legion face a deadly threat – from within their own ranks.
“Death At A Con” – a fanboy, a secret agent and a HeroiCon 2010 Guest Of Honor face a deadly Neo with the power to kill with his mind.

In addition to the stories, New Olympus has a history of Earth Alpha, an overview of the world, and notes on using the setting for roleplaying games.

JL Curtis

The Grey Man: -Vignettes-

The Bad Guys Don’t Stand a Chance
Texas rancher and lawman John Cronin knows what it means to be tough. A decorated Vietnam vet with connections to law enforcement agencies all around the world, he’s thwarted smugglers and drug plots across the globe with more than a few narrow escapes. Whether it’s a sniper competition or teaching the feds a thing or two about police work, Cronin doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger. Of course, this slow-talking lawman’s biggest challenge yet might be when his granddaughter Jesse falls in love with a Marine. When drug smugglers stir up trouble in Cronin’s backyard and try to kill Jesse and her new beau, all hell breaks loose, and Cronin and his granddaughter are just the people to set things right.

T.K. Naliaka

In Time of Peril (The Decaturs)

Raised most of his life in the challenging expanses of West Africa, young Chris Decatur has returned to the United States for college, leaving behind dunes and nomads for the quiet halls of academia. Studying the American Revolution, Chris and his classmates embark on a reenactment trip to Upstate New York and New England. A week of hiking and learning, accompanied by a few reenactment volunteers and Chris’s knowledgeable father, Robert, should be an entertaining excursion.

But even the backwoods are no refuge from the dangers of the world. The group stumbles on a terrorist plot in the works and the students are taken hostage as the mysterious plan unfurls. As Chris faces an ordeal of brutal fighters, uncooperative classmates, deadly threats and a battle of wits against ruthless foes, Robert Decatur risks everything in a daring pursuit to rescue his son from the hands of evil.

In Time of Peril is a face-paced tale of adventure, loyalty, faith and courage, and is the first in a series of fiction novels following the adventures of the tenacious and unconventional Decatur family. This gripping novel was inspired by the likes of Louis L’Amour, Alistair McLean, and the heroism of Stephen Decatur.

*Sorry to be late.  WordPress kept crashing while I was trying to put this post up.*

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

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

When It All Crashes Down

Wolfe Merritt, supervisor of Manufactories for Jonathan Blythe, Earl of Savage.

I didn’t like the looks of it.  Look, to be bluntly honest, if I had not been in fairyland before, I’d think I’d been plunged headfirst into hell.  Sometimes I wonder if the theological difference between the two is so much that it would admit of inserting a definition as thin as a paragraph between the two.

I read in an old book of my grandmothers that in the old days, before magic was properly systematized and rationalized, people thought that the people of the hills were same as the souls of the dead.  This to my purpose sounded about right.  Except that I hated to think of any mortal souls captured eternally in this land.  And also, considering how often humans – and I myself – mated with inhabitants of fairyland, it bore the unpleasant feel of necrophilia.

So I contented myself with thinking that while fairyland wouldn’t be hell, or at least not hell as we’d learnt about it in church, it shared some uncommonly uncomfortable properties with the mansions of the damned.  Among them that space could change around you while you stood perfectly still, and that the sane rules of reality you’d known your whole life were likely to change with no warning.  If you dropped an object, it was as likely to float up, or to hit you in the face as to fall down.  Unfortunately, it was equally likely to turn into a bird of prey and attack your nose.

I’d often thought that the reason the inhabitants of fairyland were stark raving mad – or appeared to be to humans is that this place was madness incarnate. It was in fact impossible to imagine living in this place for more than a few days and not going insane.  Which might be why it was said if you stayed in fairyland you’d end up belonging to it.  I’d always wondered if the eating or drinking the food of fairyland was any part of it, or if that was just a justification.  After all, if you stayed there long enough, you’d have to eat or perish.

None of which mattered, since on my last visit I’d been very careful to eat and drink nothing, and on this one and I had no intention of eating or drinking anything at all.

But as I stood there, and the landscape moved around me, as though I were running down a road from light to dark, I confess I felt chilled to the bone.  And not just because what had seemed a sunny day changed to dreary overcast, then to snow, and then to a frozen landscape, the trees on either side of the road frozen like penitents, their bare branches stretched out to an indifferent ice-pale sky.

No, what put ice in my gut and fear in my heart was the realization that the last time I’d been here I’d stayed sane for one reason only.  I’d been here to get Jimmy.

I was fully clad in my paternal love and my paternal rights, sure it was not only my duty but my right to get my son back from this infernal place, I might not have made it out.

I’d had a clear purpose and kept it mind, and that had seen me through and out the other side.

But now… I was here against my will and looking for nothing except to get out of here, and to get the lady Helen out of here and safely too.  What her brother would say…

I could imagine that in vivid detail, having been privileged to hear his grandfather rake a tenant over the coals, once.

And on cue, at my thoughts, I heard the lady Helen cry from the roiling darkness beneath the frozen trees, “Save me… Oh, save me!”

I grit my teeth.  You’d think a man my age would not be such a gudgeon, would you not?  First, it was unlikely to be the real Lady Helen, because it had come too pat on the wake of my thoughts about her.  And second, if it were the Lady Helen, how could I save her if I left this path.  More likely to be taken myself.

The path in the fairyland realms is a thing of magic, and it’s not so much a road as a protection.  You can be transported other places, or at least you can be made to believe you’re in other places.  But if you don’t step out of the path willingly, fairyland can’t touch you.

I remembered that and grit my teeth, even as a wind with grit in it blew all around me, ripping my clothes to tatters and abrading my skin.

“You dare intrude again, son of Adam?” a voice asked out of nowhere, a voice that was all breath.

The problem was this: even all breath, even without sound behind it, I could tell whose voice it was.  My wife’s.

“Feidlimid!” I said, which was a bad idea.  I can only say that after being pulled about by magic for so long I was not in my right mind and could not tell what I was doing.

The wind that had been rushing about me, rushed faster, and now the grit carried by its movement was ice crystals, chilling me to the marrow.

My eyes felt abraded and frozen.  I could not keep them open, so I closed them.

And suddenly the wind stopped and I was touched by a warm breeze.

I opened my eyes.  Feidlimid sat in the middle of an airy terrace, with columns all around.  Through the columns, I could glimpse a wide and silvery ocean.

Feidlimid wore a semi-transparent shimmering tunic, and had her wheat gold hair down her back, streaming lightly in the wind, while she combed it with a golden comb.

It was an image out of legends, but if she’d looked like that when I’d first met her, I’d never have brought her home.  It was her pitiful soaked state, under the rain as if she knew not how to shield herself, and the lost look in her wide green eyes that had been my undoing.

If she’d smiled at me, as she did now, then I too would never have been at danger.  Yes, her smile was sweet and beautiful, but she opened her mouth a little and I could see the sharp teeth, like a mouse’s.

“Hello Feidlimid,” I said.

She looked at me.  “Have you come to plead, mortal?”

“Plead?  What for?”

“For your fancy lady’s life.”  She smiled.  “Give my son to me, and I might let her live.”

Hello, this is Sarah, from the command deck. Your chapter will be typed in as soon as this is done. The oyster hasn’t sent promo links, so I’m going to guess none of you scamps sent him books to promote.  If you have any, you might consider it.  They don’t have to be new.

This week, I got a lot of stuff done, but most of it little stuff that had slipped while I was sick, and a bit more (but not enough) on Through Fire.  At least Through Fire isn’t fighting me anymore.  (How can a story fight you?  Are you really going to ask that?  It can fight you by refusing to fall into your plot and then reading stilted and odd.)  I was a little slowed on this though because as much as I’ve typed over the years, my hand decided NOW was the IDEAL time to get carpal tunnel.  At least the thumb, index and middle finger went numb, which is classical of carpal tunnel.

I should be more explicit.  I’ve had the beginnings of carpal tunnel before, though not so bad that I couldn’t walk it back.  This one is at that level too and not as severe as the one I had twelve years ago, where I had to wear a brace and my fingers hurt.  But I had to be a little more careful.  Part of the issue is that for reason of cat, I’ve been typing with no wrist support.  That’s been corrected. I also acquired Dragon Naturally which I’ll endeavor to train.  I told the Mathematician it wasn’t worth it, since well, the last time I managed to train it perfectly it took me twenty hours and then the computer caught fire (long story) and I lost it all, and since  then I haven’t had time to train it so that it compensates for the accent.

BUT he says it’s must better now, and maybe it is and it will work – this was 14 years ago.  And if not, Robert can get it so he can dictate.

Anyway, so that’s on deck for my copious spare time in the coming weeks.  For now I’m just making sure my wrists are supported.

The problem with being sick for a whole year, when you work for yourself and only get paid when you finish the work (even if you occasionally get a generous advance-pay from your boss.) is that it both puts you in dire financial straits AND creates an enormous backlog of work that you have to catch up on.

Not all of this is what you’d think.

Of course my priority is to get three books to Baen, two of which are very late, and the third of which I’d like out next year, to capitalize on the omnibus of the Shifter series – and the first of which is fully paid for.  The first must get to Baen because I owe it, the second because it’s late, fans are waiting, and if we don’t have it out there we’re going to hit bottom on the account, and the third because that will bolster the account enough to move (hopefully.)

But it’s like… Well, if you’re a housewife or ever had charge of a similar task, you’ll get this.  When I was in the hospital for eleven days, when the kids were little, I came back home and of course my greatest priority was to rest and recover and after that to reconnect with the boys.  Except the house smelled…  We’d had rotating teams of babysitters through while Dan stayed with me at the hospital.  And two messy boys, one and four.  So, for my own peace of mind, I had to get out the carpet cleaner and run it.

After which my friends got stern and formed a team to clean the house.  Unfortunately it’s impossible to do that with the reading/writing tasks.

Except for Inheritance, which is waiting for final copyedits because my copyeditor got ill, everything else that needs to be done, from entering changes in Witchfinder to the final go over on the Magical British Empire, to setting things to print depends on me.

Which means I feel frantically guilty over not getting subscribers and people who paid their e-arc (only mine is corrected.  I’m only calling it that because I suspect I’ll get lists of typos as soon as they have it, so the final version two/three weeks later will be cleaner.) the copy of Witchfinder.  And I’m upset over not having got subscribers copies of the books I have out with Goldport.  See, the problem is that rather than mail three copies (e, mobi and RTF) of those to all the subscribers, what I want to do is set up a secret page on my website and tell subscribers how to download their preferred version.  (Or all three of them.)

The problem is that anti-hacking measures prevent my uploading files onto my website.  Which means permissions need to be changed, yadda, yadda, so it hasn’t happened.

On the other hand, the website got done for the first time in a year and a half.  Which is good, because it’s sort of the equivalent of running the carpet cleaner: I couldn’t live with it like that anymore.  There were pointers from various pages, and I kept getting pings from people telling me it was done.  Also, I need to make Hun t-shirts for subscribers, and t-shirts for the various series, and those will have a link to my website underneath… which didn’t work if it wasn’t up.

So, that’s done, and it’s in a format that will be easy for me to maintain.  There are some minor glitches, like its soliciting comments (they won’t show, but it shouldn’t have that line there) but the only way to remove it is to re-code it and that I can’t do.  The boys can and – oh, frabujous day – they have the next week off, so hopefully one of them will find time to do it.

So… frustrating week, but things ARE progressing.  Also for the first time in… eight? Years, I feel like I’m awake and there are no holes in my memory.  Yes, I’m trying a supplement. No, it was nothing sudden – I’ve been taking it for two weeks, and it’s been gradual, but two days ago it felt like that first day the kids let you sleep through the night.  “What is this feeling?  Oh, yeah.  I’m awake.  I didn’t remember what this felt like.”  And there are fewer instances of hitting a total blind spot in my mind and going “there used to be information here.” – this is roughly the equivalent of a 404 error. – I realize such aren’t unusual for a woman at my er… time of life, but for someone who makes her living with her mind they can be devastating.  So I hope this supplement keeps working and it’s not the placebo effect.

So.  Now I go and do the chapter, and leave you with this muddled state of the writer post to er… throw tomatoes at or something.

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Entry-Level Fiction — A Guest Post By Christopher Nuttal

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

I have a terrible confession to make.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thoughts?

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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