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Why Pink SF is doomed

John C. Wright continues his series on Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters. In the sixth part, he explains why Pink SF is intrinsically bound to suck, how some Pink SF authors have attempted to get around the dramatic limits they have imposed on themselves, and points out that Urban Fantasy has done little more than recreate the very sexual dynamic it was supposed to subvert:

The logic of Political Correctness requires that men and women not be complimentary because the concept of complementary strengths and weakness is not a concept that Political Correctness can admit, lest it be destroyed. The concept of complimentary virtues undermines the concept of envy, and Political Correctness is nothing but politicized fury based on politicized envy. We can define Political Correctness as the attempt to express fury and envy via radical changes to legal and social institutions.

Hence, the Politically Correct writer attempting to make the female ‘strong’ cannot make her strong in the particular feminine way of, for example, Nausicaa, because that would be the same as admitting that there is a particular nature of male and female, which are different and complimentary, which, as I said above, undermines the envy-fury on which Political Correctness is based.

So the logic of Political Correctness directly defies the logic of drama. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

The more Political Correctness you have, the less Science Fiction you have, because Politically Correct science is Junk Science.

Political Correctness requires the women not to be of complimentary strength to men, that is, not strong in a feminine way, because that would legitimize femininity. Remember, feminism is the foe of femininity, hence of love and romance.

Instead, Political Correctness requires the female to be as strong as a man, as good as a man, in the very areas men are good at and want to be good at. It is a deliberately unnatural pose. The women character have to be portrayed as the types of character female readers, by and large, do not want to be like or read about, and the female character have to do things women by and large do not create a big thrill or many bragging rights about doing, and the male characters are basically extraneous.

Can it be done? Sure. Writers are endlessly inventive, and we get to set the situation and the plot and, in science fiction, we get to set the laws of nature, too. So the basic physical limitations of the female physique in real life need not hinder us in science fiction situations, because your heroine can be from Krypton, or armed with a phaser weapon, or have cat-girl genes spliced into her DNA, or be an Amazon. Second, the writer gets to set the period and the genre. No one can claim that Hermione Grangier is in any way a second class citizen of Hogwarts, because, like a detective in a detective novel, physical strength and fighting prowess are not the main point of a magical school-chums novel.

Third, if your superheroine is stronger than any normal man, and does not need Prince Charming to settle the hash of the evil dragon, but can wield the sword herself, you can either leave out your male love interest, or you can, Anita Blake style, make him superhuman also. This, of course, is a sly cheat, because it put the girl back in the position of being allured to a dangerous male figure who is more powerful than she, so your vampire huntress falling for a fallen angel (or whatever) is in the same dainty shoes as the spitfire Irish lass kidnapped by the ruthless but devilishly handsome pirate Black Jamie (or whatever) which we all see in the Bodice Ripper racks at the paperback bookstore.

Paranormal Romance, in other words, is an example of the logic of drama subverting (or perhaps superverting) the logic of Political Correctness. It allows the writer to eat her cake and have it too: she can make her warrior-princess or vampire huntress as tough and strong in any way she likes, as tough as Scarlet O’Hara vowing as God is her witness never to go hungry again, and then also bring in a supernatural version of Rhett Butler, and she can retell the story of Beauty and the Beast while retelling GONE WITH THE WIND, and make her man a human being.

VPFL Week 13

127 Bane Sidhe (8-5)
50 RR Redbeards (8-5)

60 Fromundah Cheezheads (10-3)
44 Suburban Churchians (5-8)

73 Mounds View Meerkats (6-7)
67 Bradford Gamma Rays (5-8)

71 Bailout Banksters (6-7)
69 Greenfield Grizzlies (9-4)

86 Boot Hill Hangmen (4-9)
68 Mercury Marauders (4-9)

The playoff teams are set, all that remains to be settled is who plays where.  Right now, no one wants to face the defending champions, Bane Sidhe, who appear to be rounding into late-season form. And curb-stomping Nate? Well, let’s just say the old Weeper was smiling that day.

I’m not discontent with my performance this season. Losing both Rodgers and Foster knocked me out of contention, but I still managed to score more points than two of the four playoff teams.

Umberto Eco on the death of William Weaver

Umberto Eco eulogized his translator and friend, William Weaver, in an article that was published on 3 December, 2013 in L’Espresso.
After ninety years, the last ten of them reduced to a quasi-vegetable state, William Weaver is no more. He was
a great translator, and one could say that it was primarily through his merits
that our contemporary literature is known and loved in the
Anglo-Saxon countries. Born in Virginia, a conscientious objector but
unable to ignore the grand conflict that was underway, he enlisted in the Second
World War as an ambulance driver. He served with the
English forces throughout the entire Italian campaign, facing danger without ever holding a rifle in his hands. From Naples to Rome, he
made friends with many Italian writers of the era, and from then on,
he never left our country.
Thus it was that he came to translate Pirandello (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and The
Late Mattia Pascal), Zeno’s Conscience by Svevo, That
Awful Mess and Acquainted with Grief
by Gadda, two-thirds of
Calvino’s works, The Monkey’s Wrench
and If Not Now, When?
by Primo Levi, The Sunday Woman
by Fruttero and Lucentini,
History and Aracoeli
by Elsa Morante, Incubus
by Berto, A Violent Life
by Pasolini, as well as Cassola, Calasso, De Carlo, Malerba, La
Capria, Parise, Soldati, Alba de Cespedes, Festa Campanile. He also
translated A Man and
Inshallah by Oriana
Fallaci.

In addition, from 1981 to 2003 he translated
four of my novels and many of my essays. For twenty intense years, it
was a splendid collaboration, in which we could spend afternoons, or
exchange two or three letters, on a single word. If the culture has
lost a great writer, I have lost a friend. Weaver was a great
translator, not only because he sought to accurately render the
fluidity, the rhythm, the lexical richness, and the sound of the text. (From my
perspective, he sometimes improved upon my original.) He was a great
translator because he also knew that to translate the meaning, one must
dare to reject the literal translation in order to conserve the
effect or the deeper sense of the text. For reasons of space, I am
limited to relating one amusing memory, of a time in which we tore the text apart in order to render a simple play on words, a wordplay that was already
difficult for Italian readers.

Bill was translating my Foucault’s
Pendulum. He arrived at a
point in which two protagonists, obsessed with the world of the
occult, found a mysterious symbol tied to the transmission system in
automobiles. To demonstrate, in an ironic manner, their propensity to
think that every aspect of the world, every word written or spoken,
does not have the sense it appears, an allusion to the axle of
the Sephirot of the Kabbalah was made.
For
the English translator
this allusion presented difficulties from the start, because in English
there is a difference between a “tree” (vegetable and
cabalistic), and the axle (automobile), but after foraging through
the dictionary, Weaver discovered that the expression “axle-tree”
was legitimate. Nevertheless,
he found himself in a predicament when the two characters then
engaged in a certain word play that involved
the gnostic pneumatics, (the spirits opposite the somatics, that are
immaterial), and the pneumatics of a car. It was a joke, but the
protagonists were simply making jokes.
However, in English, the rubber upon
which an automobile’s wheels roll are not “pneumatics”, but
rather, “tires”. What to do? Weaver, as he recounts in his
translation diary, Pendulum Diary, was struck by a brilliant notion when he remembered the name of a celebrated brand of tires: Firestone. It occurred to him that one might draw an association
between that name and the English expression “philosopher’s stone”
of alchemic lore. The solution was found and the English text therefore
describes how the sightless occultists did not succeed in finding the
true connection between the philosopher’s stone and Firestone.
As one can see, he turned the gag into
something different than the original. The translator must render
the deeper sense of the text, one that is not “the protagonists
speak of tires”, but rather, “the protagonists are students who
play foolishly with the universal knowledge”.
As the Prince of Laughter once said,
translators are born. And Bill was a born translator.

This is not only an affectionate tribute to a great translator, but wonderful advice that I hope everyone who is translating one of my books into another language will keep in mind. It is always il senso profondo del testo that comes first, not il testo literale.

Speaking of translations, I’ve translated eleven or twelve of Eco’s online articles that aren’t otherwise available in English. If you are a fan of his, you can find them here.

Saudi Arabia performs the “impossible”

Isn’t it amazing how other countries routinely appear to be able to do what we are informed is not only impossible, but outright unthinkable?

Teodros Adhanom, the Ethiopian foreign minister, has turned to
Twitter almost every night for the last three weeks to tersely report
the number of his countrymen expelled from Saudi Arabia.“Last night arrivals from Saudi reached 100,620,” he wrote on Friday,
describing a fraction of one of the largest deportations in recent
Middle East history. Riyadh has said it wants to forcibly expel as many as 2m of the foreign workers, including hundreds of thousands of Ethiopians, Somalis, Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis, who make up around a third of the country’s 30m population.

At home, the exodus of illegal workers is being seen as the kingdom’s
most radical labour market experiment yet. With one in four young Saudi
males out of work, analysts applaud Riyadh’s determination to tackle the
problem, but doubt the crackdown will achieve its objective, as Saudi
nationals are unlikely to apply for menial jobs.

What a fascinating way to solve the unemployment problem! Get rid of the excess labor supply. Why, the next thing you know, someone will discover that the Law of Supply and Demand applies to the labor market! And if a country with a 30m population can expel 2m illegal workers in a civilized manner, then surely a country with 300m population is capable of expelling 20m of them.  Minnesota could be Somali-free within 15 days if they contracted the job out to the Saudis.

It’s not a coincidence that after importing tens of millions of immigrants, the USA has gone into economic and demographic decline. The same is true of the UK and Western Europe. The facts are in. Mass immigration does not boost mature economies. It only speeds up their decline by reducing wages and forcing native workers to go into debt in order to try to maintain their standard of living until the debt limits are reached.

As for the unwillingness of Saudi nationals to apply for menial jobs, the Saudis might consider raising the wages and eliminating the subsidized unemployment.

The cost of superficial metrics

It’s no wonder that academia has been on the intellectual decline for decades. Publish or perish is a ludicrous way to judge people, especially when there is absolutely no quality control for publishing other than a mutual back-scratching system.

Peter Higgs, the British physicist who gave his name to the Higgs boson, believes no university would employ him in today’s academic system because he would not be considered “productive” enough.

The emeritus professor at Edinburgh University, who says he has never sent an email, browsed the internet or even made a mobile phone call, published fewer than 10 papers after his groundbreaking work, which identified the mechanism by which subatomic material acquires mass, was published in 1964.

He doubts a similar breakthrough could be achieved in today’s academic culture, because of the expectations on academics to collaborate and keep churning out papers. He said: “It’s difficult to imagine how I would ever have enough peace and quiet in the present sort of climate to do what I did in 1964.”

Speaking to the Guardian en route to Stockholm to receive the 2013 Nobel prize for science, Higgs, 84, said he would almost certainly have been sacked had he not been nominated for the Nobel in 1980.

Edinburgh University’s authorities then took the view, he later learned, that he “might get a Nobel prize – and if he doesn’t we can always get rid of him”.

Furthermore, think about what sort of people are perfectly happy to spend their time jumping through stupid, irrelevant hoops in the place of doing anything substantial.  Credentialism and monolithic left-wing bias are not the only problems plaguing the intellectual world today.

On the other hand, Higgs does sound rather like a lazy, nasty old man, so perhaps getting rid of him after he published in 1964 paper wouldn’t have been the worst idea.

An institution begins the slide

I suppose there are many who will lament the first step in the demise of New York magazine. I tend to see it more as reason for good cheer:

This week’s announcement that New York magazine was becoming a biweekly was greeted, in my profession, with the sort of cheer that might herald the announcement of a sewer line backup or a mid-honeymoon appendectomy.

New York magazine is very successful. Its editor is very well regarded, and it wins lots of awards. It gets scads of Web traffic. It publishes magazine features that win the admiration of fellow journalists and has also become practically ubiquitous on social media. And, apparently, it still can’t pay the bills as a weekly publication. Hearing that New York magazine can’t make it as a weekly is, for a professional journalist, rather like being told that your teddy bear has cancer. How is that even possible?

The answer is that the circulation of print magazines is declining, while advertising revenue has taken a suicidal plunge. Companies who wanted to inform people about their firm’s activities used to have basically three choices: print media, television or radio. (OK, four if you count billboards.) These were all media companies, and they used the money corporations gave them to produce news.

What I find remarkable is how many of these institutions will glumly permit themselves to sink into oblivion without ever doing anything to significantly address the core issues. CNN is going to try to compete with every other network showing reality shows rather than make any attempt to appeal to the other half of the ideological spectrum. New York magazine has gone to a biweekly rather than attempt to broaden its appeal beyond liberals who live in New York and liberals who wish they did.

As technology gradually kills the liberal media’s ability to maintain its monopoly, it becomes ever more obvious that media was never first and foremost a business, but rather a giant propaganda machine wherein profit was an incidental bonus rather than its fundamental rationale.

The scouring of The Hobbit

This review of the second part of Peter Jackson’s second trilogy does not sound at all promising:

There is, in short, an awful lot of Desolation to wade through before we arrive, weary and panting, on Smaug’s rocky porch. But that was always going to be the drawback of spinning out a 276-page children’s story into more than eight hours of blockbuster movie, particularly when the director is keener to build a prequel trilogy to his own operatic Lord of the Rings films than do justice to Tolkien’s original playful, uncluttered vision.

The tone is one hundred percent Jackson – a kind of thundering gloominess, cut with the occasional glint of Discworld mischief. Jackson and his co-writers, Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens, have decapitated bodies twitching on the ground, and a captured dwarf leering at a female elf: “Aren’t you going to search me? I could have anything down my trousers.” Maybe this really is what a lot of people want to see from a film version of The Hobbit, but let’s at least accept that Tolkien would probably not have been among them….

There is also an extended cameo for Orlando Bloom’s Legolas, with jokes
foreshadowing his Lord of the Rings role, and the creation of a new, female
elf warrior called Tauriel (Evangeline Lilly), whose main purpose is to be
the third leg in an inter-species love triangle. Will she end up with the
dishy elf or the hunky dwarf?

Ye cats. It is becoming abundantly clear that Jackson’s biggest blunder was choosing his co-writers. Seriously, he couldn’t find anyone better than HIS FREAKING WIFE AND HER FRIEND?

This is rapidly approaching Star Wars prequel-levels of absurdity. Permitting Pink SF to invade MIDDLE EARTH is a crime against literature. It’s a crime against HUMANITY. I wasn’t exaggerating when I said Pink SF is a cancer. It is an infectious disease that ruins everything it touches. Defiling the literary grave of Tolkien goes well beyond girls doing their usual shitting in the boys’ sandbox, this is the Pink SF equivalent of suicide bombers.

Why not throw in an orc-human romance while he’s at it? Why not lasers and lectures on global warming? Or, even better, an UNDEAD ORC-human-werewarg love triangle!

The irrelevance of SFWA

Well, I think this should suffice to explode any remaining vestiges of the perceived importance of the SFWA concerning one’s prospective career in writing science fiction. Barely one week after the release of QUANTUM MORTIS: A Man Disrupted, Amazon has ranked me as the ~1* author in Science Fiction. First time that’s ever happened.

It also demonstrates, to a certain extent, the lack of an absolute need to distribute books through bookstores. As it happens, the 96 94 ranking applies to all books; the ebook-only ranking is 77. Conventional print distribution is still desirable, of course, but it isn’t absolutely necessary anymore. And it is going to become even less important when Barnes & Noble finally goes the way of Waldenbooks, Borders, and B. Dalton.

The punchline is that in addition to relative nobodies like me cracking the top 100 Most Popular Books in Science Fiction, the #1 author in the category is someone nearly as well-beloved by the SFWA pinkshirts, Orson Scott Card. And the #3 author in Fantasy? None other than the SFWA-spurning master Monster Hunter himself, Larry Correia. Note that the SF author listed just above me, Aaron Johnston, is playing in Orson Scott Card’s universe.

Sure, the pinkshirts have still got George R.R. Martin to top the fantasy list and Tor will continue dutifully trying to push its dreadful Pink SF on everyone, but how long will that last? While it is still easier to make obeisance to the pinkshirts and their ever-changing PC standards, the point is that their approval is no longer necessary and will eventually become undesirable. By way of example, look at how rapidly and completely McRapey changed his tune with regards to self-publishers. Were we not all creators last year too? Now that the gatekeepers are crumbling and people are given a broader range from which they can choose what sort of science fiction and fantasy they prefer, I expect Blue SF to absolutely foxnews the hell out of Pink SF.

And setting aside new distribution models, just wait until the effects from the new shared revenue translation model begin to come into play. There are already no less than 10 translations in the works from Latin to Bahasa Indonesia; here is a short selection from one of them:

Vuonna 2810 ensimmäisen kerran asutettu ja terraformoitu Rhysalan kehittyi nopeasti tärkeäksi planeetaksi Kantillonin alasektorissa Terran Laajemman Keskusvallan reunamilla. Strategisen sijaintinsa vuoksi planeetta oli kiivaan sotilaallisen toiminnan kohteena ja vaihtoi haltijaa useita kertoja ennen kuin lopulta vakiinnutti asemansa itsenäisenä planeettana vuonna 2935 Keskusvallan 21. laivueen amiraalin Beze Davenantin, ensimmäisen Rhysalan Herttuan, alaisuudessa.
— Thucidean Marc, ”Rhysalan Herttuoiden historia”

It was certainly a fascinating discussion trying to determine whether ‘valtapiiri’, ‘valtakunta’, ‘imperiumi’ or ‘keskuvallan’ was the best way to translate ‘Ascendancy’. As you can see, we went with the latter. Also, if you’re ever being chased by a Finn, just tell him he’s got an extra umlaut in a word and be sure not to tell him which one. It’s like scattering salt in front of a leprechaun. If the Russians had only known this trick back in the days of the Talvisota, they would have captured Helsinki in a week.

As one translator wrote: “I’m interested in being an active part in the Blue SF Revolution”. There are no shortage of languages still unaddressed, so if you’re a native speaker of one of them and you want to take an active part too, get in touch.

*For varying quantities of ~. To be more specific, No. 94.

A surreal presidency

While the Obama presidency has proven to be an even more amusing comedy of errors than I expected it to be, it’s starting to get a little weird. Mr. Obama has fallen from being the Lightbringer capable of commanding the oceans to lying about crashing at his uncle’s pad in college. And now, we’re informed that he is beyond criticism because movie.

With “12 Years a Slave” petering out at the box office after a decent
but unspectacular run (currently $34 million and losing screens),
liberals are increasingly angry that the well-filmed, erratically-acted, and poorly-scripted biopic remake has failed to shut down criticism of President Obama. 

Pity George W. Bush never thought of that. How can you criticize me?  Did you not see “Lord of the Rings’? The problem most people have with Obama isn’t that he’s an uppity Negro. They simply dislike that he’s a narcissistic fraud of modest intelligence.

~1 on Amazon

McRapey simply never stops self-promoting:

If you’re a non-traditionally pubbed author, today’s the day to tell my ~50k daily readers about your book.

It strikes me that if scientists could simply figure out how to harness the little man’s internal self-promotion engine, we wouldn’t need green energy or nuclear reactors.

In related news, I’m very pleased to announce that Quantum Mortis: A Man Disrupted is now the ~1-selling science fiction book on Amazon! To celebrate that, I’m posting the corrected high-resolution version of JartStar’s Quantum Mortis: Gravity Kills wallpaper here for download. Just click on the image to see the whole thing; right click and Save As to save it. Because it is pretty.

As for ~50k DAILY READERS… why not just go straight to ~ONE MILLION DAILY READERS? Believe it or not, that’s a closer multiple to 50,000 than 50,000 is to his current number of average daily readers.

In any event, thanks to a little help from the Master Monster Hunter, it turns out that I am also the ~1 author in Science Fiction today.  Hey, this self-promotion stuff is easy!