Tag: books

To everyone’s surprise, Julianna Baggott blames sexism for the fact that women seldom write great or award-winning books:

I could understand Publishers Weekly’s phallocratic list if women were writing only a third of the books published or if women didn’t float the industry as book buyers or if the list were an anomaly. In fact, Publishers Weekly is in sync with Pulitzer Prize statistics. In the past 30 years, only 11 prizes have gone to women. Amazon recently announced its 100 best books of 2009 — in the top 10, there are two women. Top 20? Four….

What are the stereotypes that drive these biases? Over the years, I’ve developed many theories. Let me offer one here.

I often hear people exclaiming that they’re astonished that a particular book was written by a man. They seem stunned by the notion that a man could write with emotional intelligence and honesty about our human frailties. Women, on the other hand, are supposed to be experts on emotion. I’ve never heard anyone remark that they were surprised that a book of psychological depth was written by a woman.

That last sentence summarizes the writer’s problem; psychological depth != literary greatness. That being said, one wonders who she would propose as the female equivalent of Dostoevsky, or even Poe. Now, it’s worth pointing out that female writers often win awards in SF/F, but that’s partly because there are some very good authoresses such as Lois McMaster Bujold, Theresa Edgerton, and Tanith Lee active in the genre, and partly because the SFWA’s Nebula Award has a propensity to devolve into a popularity contest, (see Catharine Asaro, 2001). But I suspect the main reason women write fewer great books is because they simply don’t make the effort to do so.

There’s nothing wrong with rewriting Tom Brown in a fantasy setting, but greatness does not lie that way even if massive sales success does. There’s nothing wrong with writing silly vampire pre-porn for silly teenage girls either – although it would be illegal on aesthetic grounds and punishable by death by sugar overdose if I were ruling the universe – but it’s readily apparent that literary greatness is not on your list of objectives if you’re writing about sexy dead and/or furry things.

The problem isn’t that women don’t write “write with emotional intelligence and honesty about our human frailties”, it is that they don’t tend to write about much else. While there are an increasing number of 40-something male writers who are making a career of doing this sort of narcissistic writing – Dave Eggers and stunt writer A.J. Jacobs spring to mind – the fact is that great literature requires more than navel-gazing, sexual daydreaming and gossip, no matter how well written that navel-gazing, daydreaming and gossip might be.

In any event, the only award that truly matters is the one that time conveys upon an author. No amount of awards or sales are going to turn Harry Potter and the Banquet of Boredom, The Picasso Crossword into works of literary greatness. If you try to accomplish something original, you will probably fail to reach the heights, but if you don’t even try then you definitely will. Summa Elvetica probably hasn’t sold one-tenth as many copies as the worst-selling novel published by Tor last year; it didn’t win a single award or even receive a single review in any literary publication. Given the limitations of the author, it may not even be as good a novel as any of those published by Tor. On the other hand, can anyone argue with a straight face that any of those books attempted to do even half of what was accomplished, let alone attempted, in SE?

Now, note that I’m not complaining in the slightest. As evidence, I will point out that one can’t give a book a title like “A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy” without knowing that practically no one is going to want to read it, to say nothing of throwing in all the untranslated Latin. I could not possibly care less what a literary world of readers who consider Dan Brown to have produced the best of the year’s best happens to think. I am simply observing the industry realities, not arguing that anything should be changed in order to accomodate my idiosyncratic preferences. The industry has already changed enough over the last three decades, as its increasing bias towards various elements preferred by female editors and readers continues to drive young men away from books and towards computer games that still respect the heroic tropes.

Baggott’s article indicates that we should expect to see the same pattern at work in literary awards that we are presently seeing in the awarding of university degrees. Female writers will eventually get their statistical due and make up the majority of literary award winners in time, but no one outside what will have then become a female-dominated literary ghetto will give a damn because the substantive value of the awards will have been destroyed by the very process of the desired transformation. As I predicted back in 1995 (this 2007 Ben Bella piece was simply a reworking of a proposed article for CGW that editor Chris Lombardi described as the most insane piece he’d ever read for the magazine), the next great art will not come from academia, Hollywood, or literature, but from the game industry. Imagine, for example, if Rob Pardo had been a genuine intellectual in the Tolkein mode and harbored ambitions of doing more than Warhammer Fantasy Battle meets Everquest.

I still like fantasy. I still write fantasy. In fact, SE fans may be pleased to learn that I’m presently working on a map for the next book. But I read very little of it these days because so much of it is derivative, predictable, trivial, and boring. There is more astonishment and daring in a single Call of Duty mission – and every MW2 player knows to which mission I’m referring – than there is in any twenty SF/F books published today.

At my request, Marcher Lord has graciously decided to price the Kindle edition of Summa Elvetica at only $1.99. On a related note, in working on the sequel, I’ve had to develop some of the things that were left out when I accelerated the pace towards the end. Originally, I’d intended there to be two or three chapters set in the Elven High City which would be largely devoted to telling more about the elves and delving further into the intellectual issues. So here’s the question: if I happen to write those chapters in the course of writing the new book, does it make any sense to add them to a revised edition of SE or not? And if you already own a copy of SE, would this be something you would appreciate or simply find annoying?

Fred of Analytical Mind reviews Summa Elvetica on Amazon:

It is generally a good idea to read any Author’s Note one comes across, but in this case it is absolutely critical to understanding what you have just read, which turns out to be all that was salvaged from a planned epic philosophical trilogy that apparently couldn’t be made to work. Given such a genesis, it is amazing just how good it turns out to be!

Theodore Beale has arguably returned high fantasy to its origins, which was a medieval world dominated by a rich and powerful Roman Catholic Church. The utter separation of church from most modern fantasy has resulted in a number of idiocies that fail to withstand scrutiny: Divine Right of Kings without a Divine, priests without gods, etc. The result is one of the most fascinating fantasy worlds I’ve ever visited, and one I’d like to revisit again in future sequels. Mr. Beale has also given us a fascinating cast of characters that I’d like to hear more from: Marcus Valerius the still-wet-behind-the-ears scholar, Lodi the dwarf, Caitlys the Lady Shadowsong, Brother Grimfang the you-won’t-believe-it-until-you-read-it, and especially Bessarias the convert. One hopes that with time Mr. Beale will see his way to producing a sequel or two, perhaps with a bit less philosophy and a bit more adventure.

It has taken me a while and two false starts that will probably turn into short stories or novellas, but I finally have a handle on how the sequel to Summa Elvetica is going to go. I’m not going to rush it or commit to a publishing date before it’s complete, so I don’t know when it will be finished, but I have been scribbling away at it in a desultory manner. The main problem was figuring out who was going to be the protagonist and how that character would relate to Marcus’s continuing development.

But when I realized I was blithely following the model of the my previous books – something I tend to dislike in other authors – and that it would be pointless and unimaginative to repeat the Aquinas fireworks, the possibilities opened up and led to a concept that I think will work out better in the end.

I can’t honestly say I dislike Malcolm Gladwell’s books or even Gladwell himself.  How can you possibly develop a dislike for a genuinely curious dilettante who writes entertaining pop social science?  But to call him even a minor genius is to considerably overrate the man:

The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures….  An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The ironic thing is that mass popularity of the sort that Gladwell enjoys is not only not evidence of surpassing brilliance, it is almost always precisely the opposite.  To be able to belabor the obvious to the clueless masses in an interesting manner is a useful gift, to be sure, but it helps to be closer to their average level of intelligence, not farther away.  I find it very strange that most people intuitively understand there tends to be an inverse relationship between brilliance and mass popularity when it comes to popular music and popular television shows, but not popular books.  Regardless of whether one is talking about Gladwell, Dawkins, Rowling, or Brown, their appearances on the bestseller lists is no more indicative of literary accomplishment than the consistent chart-topping of Britney Spears or 50 Cent is indicative of musical greatness.

Don’t get me wrong and think this is some sort of sour grapes or something based on the failure of my latest book to make its mark on the bestseller lists.  (It won’t, so long as the recovery theme remains in effect throughout the mainstream media.  In fact, I suggest that we can track the public perception of the state of the economy by how well the book is selling.)  Now, I love the Sports Guy and I’m delighted that The Book of Basketball actually hit #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list.  But as much as I happen to enjoy the Sports Guy’s writings and find them entertaining,  don’t believe that BoB or any of the present #1 bestsellers written by Mitch Albom, John Grisham, or Joel Osteen are particularly well-written or brilliant books.

Returning to Gladwell, Steve Sailer twists the knife: “Should I pause before I publish and apply reality tests to Dr. Frink’s theory … Nah! Dr. Frink is a wonderful genius! This time I’m clearly not overlooking any problems with the basic idea of my article.”  The amusing thing is that as with Paul Krugman and his claim that half of all U.S. banks failed in 1931, the error is a long-standing one.  In this case, Gladwell first introduced the concept of the Igon Value to an unsuspecting world six years ago.

As one of Sailer’s commenters notes, a Bertrand Russell quote would appear to be more than a little applicable here: “A stupid man’s report of what a clever man says is never accurate because he unconsciously translates what he hears into something he can understand.”