Tag: books

Interview with John Derbyshire

Vox Day interviewed John Derbyshire, the National Review contributor and author of We Are Doomed: Reclaiming Conservative Pessimism, on March 23, 2010.

Who is this “we” of whom you speak? Are you speaking of America, the West, conservatism, or the human race?

Primarily conservatism. But touching in a larger way on Western civilization.

You’re a fairly serious student of science. Isn’t your theme of doom somewhat in opposition to the usual notion of inevitable progress towards a shiny, sexy, science fiction future?

No, I don’t think so. Science is neutral so far as optimism or pessimism is concerned. Indeed, it is neutral so far as all the affairs of the heart are concerned. As I said in the book, the universe doesn’t care what we think of it, it just goes on its way. I understand what you mean, that sort of H.G. Wells breezy optimism about the prospects for the future based on our understanding more and more about the world is commonplace, although not as commonplace as it was when H.G. Wells was alive. But it’s not founded in any solid principles.

Of the various issues you address directly, from politics, diversity, and culture to immigration, empire, and economy, which do you consider to be the most responsible for this doom?

Let’s see. Probably nature. Most of the truths about the world are contained in the world and they are contained in the nature of reality. It’s that that drives everything. I’m more and more inclined, and this is an odd sort of thing for a conservative to say, perhaps, but particularly this last few days, I’m more and more tempted to the old Marxian idea of impersonal forces driving our affairs, with we ourselves having very little to say about it. That’s actually an awful thing to say and I’d like to qualify it at length, but that would take about 45 minutes, which of course we don’t have. But that’s the mood that’s coming on me, I’m afraid.

Fortunately, we have no word limits on the blog. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Robert Prechter and Elliott Wave theory, which applies primarily to the financial markets but can be utilized for purposes well beyond them. Dating back to Tolstoy, there have been a number of non-Marxian thinkers who have reached similar conclusions about larger forces, waves of mass human emotion rather than individual decisions as per Great Man theory dictating events.

It’s a naughty business and obviously one wouldn’t want to discard altogether the possibility that things can be decisively turned this way or that by a single personality, by a Napoleon or an Alexander. But possibly those turnings are just harmonics imposed on a bigger, deeper wave form driven by very cold natural forces.

What do you think some of those forces might be? I mentioned waves of mass human emotion already, but do you have any other candidates in mind?

That’s fairly appealing. I think so far as human history is concerned that in some way that we are not currently even close to understanding, somehow a kind of vector sum of individual human drives and emotions, a sum that is of hundreds of millions of such drives. There probably are some kind of underlying laws there, if only we could discern them.

One of the most terrifying things I have ever read was Paul Krugman’s statement that he decided to become an economist after reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation novels.

Yeah, we’re veering a bit close to that here, aren’t we? It was Hari Seldon and psychohistory, wasn’t it? I think if you think we’re close to understanding anything like that, you’re in the zone of what is called misplaced concreteness. I think that’s far beyond our grasp at the moment. But it’s very suggestive. There are great forces and great tides at work, ebbing and flowing. Perhaps we’ll understand them, though I doubt we’ll ever reduce them to mathematics as Hari Seldon did. It’s a strong temptation for economists, and one reason to keep economists at arms-length. They do tend to do this kind of thing. You know, if it’s not Hari Seldon, it’s Ayn Rand, one of these other mechanistic thinkers. We’re not even close to understanding any of those dynamics, but that doesn’t mean they might not be impersonal dynamics.

I am somewhat in awe of your prediction in the book that we shall all be Icelanders, given recent events of that island nation and our own debt/GDP ratio. How was it that you so accurately foresaw the collapse into debt-servitude of the Icelandic economy?

(Chuckles) Yes, yes. Do you know the joke that was going around? What’s the capital of Iceland? About $45. That was just fortuitous. That was in my chapter on religion and when I spoke of us being Icelanders I was saying that even in the least religious nation in the world, where only two percent of the population attend church regularly, if you poll them you get big majorities believing in life after death, supernatural powers, and so on. Just by way of illustrating the fact that you can have these diffuse spiritual longings, human beings do have them in the generality, without much in the way of organized religion. It wasn’t actually related to the economics; although I would have liked to have predicted the economic crash in Iceland, but no, I didn’t.

I was aware of that, I just thought you might like to take the credit. You know, one of the interesting data points in one of the Barna religion surveys was that half of the self-identified atheists surveyed believed in Heaven and Hell.

Oh yes, you get all kinds of things. Way back when I was a student, I read Marghanita Laski’s very fine book, Ecstasy in Secular and Religious Experience. It was an inquiry into the religious experience. She found as many people she could who had claimed to have had a religious experience and asked them to describe it in order to draw out the common elements in the experiences, and some striking proportion of her respondents, something like 30 percent, were atheists! Religious experiences for everyone!

Now, you’re not a religious man, but it seems to me there is a certain Voltairean theme in your book. It is customary among the scientific cognoscenti to consider religion a sign of backwardness, however, in We Are Doomed, one of the things you cite as evidence of our doom is this rising tide of unbelief. How do you balance that in terms of where you stand between Voltaire on one side and Sam Harris on the other?

Well, there’s a tragic element there, always. As a number of commentators have pointed out, if you survey the human race dispassionately, it’s hard not to come to the conclusion that a) human beings are better off with religion, and yet, b) religion is ultimately a wishful fantasy. So that the kind of adherence to cold realism that you would want people to have in spheres like scientific inquiry and jurisprudence doesn’t serve the human race well if it is taken up in all aspects of life. Probably people who are not very reflective – Hazlitt had a phrase that I liked very much, “the reflective portion of humanity” amongst which he of course included himself – the reflective portion of humanity is probably only a quarter or a third of the human race at best. And the rest, ordinary people who just want to go about their lives and raise their families and do some type of useful work, I doubt they can be sustained in life without some sort of supernatural beliefs. So, yeah, there’s a tragic element there. What one might wish human beings to be like and what they’re actually like is an unbridgeable gap. That’s the tragic dimension. But the Voltairean optimism is not apt, certainly not in our present circumstances. I think we will lose our faith. I think we’re losing it visibly. I’ve been living in America since 1973 and this is a much less religious country now than it was then. I give the example in the book of the countries I grew up adjacent to, Ireland and Wales, which were then deeply religious in the 1950s and are now completely irreligious. They’re as irreligious as Iceland now, Ireland not quite, but Wales is there already. I don’t know why this wouldn’t happen to any other Western country. The cause is the same and the basic genetic stock is much the same.

Speaking of the change of nations, recent studies have shown that immigrants tend to lean heavily Democrat. You’ve got a chapter devoted to immigration in the book, so how do you explain the continued enthusiasm for immigration into the USA among conservatives and the Republican Party?

It’s based in a heady optimism about American exceptionalism. What I was really arguing about in my chapter in religion is American exceptionalism draining away. The great exceptionalism that America has amongst Western nations is its religiosity. That’s draining away. I think a lot of American conservatives are very much attached to this notion of exceptionalism. Patriotism is one of the half-dozen core features of conservatism, the belief that one’s own country is special and has some sort of special mission in the world. That’s been a core feature, not just of American conservatism but every kind of conservatism. Even the much older, European, Throne-and-Altar conservatism, the Squire Weston type in 18th century England. The exceptionalism of “our King, our Church, our Nation”. That’s a core feature, so in what does American exceptionalism consist? And one of the things it consists of is this having been a nation populated in very recent times. Most of the populating of American has taken place just in the last 400 years; that’s a very exceptional thing. It makes us a new country, structurally, and American conservatives would like to feel that’s going to go on, that we’re going to go on populating ourselves. I think that’s the main pull there. But of course, it’s an illusion. It’s a fantasy. We already have far more people than we can reasonably support. The ideal population for the continental USA is probably about 100 million, I should think. It doesn’t make any sense in terms of economics or demographics. But there’s the pull of wanting to be that unusual nation, wanting to maintain the things that made us what we are, one of those things having been occasional waves of mass immigration. But you know, conservatives aren’t very knowledgeable here. Peter Brimelow likes to point out that the New England states had practically zero immigration for 200 years, from the mid-17th century to the mid-19th century, from the last of the Pilgrims to the first of the Irish. There was essentially no inflow into New England and the population increased naturally. So, these spells of immigration were few and far between, but they caught the imagination of conservatives because they speak to our exceptionalism.

After the passage of the Obamacare bill, you made an analogy to a sinking cruise ship. What are some of the issues that you feel have drawn the bilge-pumpers away from the pumps and onto the dance floor over the last two decades?

The temptations of power. There’s always been enough discontent with the way things are going to draw people to vote conservatives into power now and again. When conservatives are in power, then the temptations of power take over and they become statists. They want to do things – they want to do conservative things – but the only way to do things is to use the apparatus of the federal government – so they then become proponents of federal power and are sucked into the abyss like that. We’ve fallen into the trap of active conservatism, conservatism to do something, conservatism to ban something, conservatism to fix something. And that really isn’t conservatism, it certainly isn’t real American conservatism. That’s why I obsess about Calvin Coolidge, who was the quintessential American conservative.

I admired your refusal to end We Are Doomed on an up note. Since you finished the book, have you seen any evidence that you need to alter your conclusions of doom?

Oh, none at all. I think my conclusions stand. I was writing something for NRO this morning and I was going to quote myself, the bit where I say that I fully expect to live the rest of my life without ever seeing any major conservative legislation passed. I stand by that. I think it looks better now than when I wrote it.

There is a lot of talk on National Review and elsewhere that the Obamacare bill is really going to energize the Right, that people are going to react strongly against the Congressional Democrats and Obama as a result of their ramming health care legislation down the collective throat of the country. Do you think this is true and we’re on the verge of a 1994, Contract With America-style revolution or is something else in the cards?

So what if we are? After ’94 came ’95. The forces that are dragging the ship down quickly reasserted themselves after 1994 and they will after 2010. They are irresistible, I’m sure. Thomas Sowell, who in my book is a wise man, has a piece on NRO where he pours cold water on the dreams of 2010 being another 1994. It just may not be like that, it may be a nine-days wonder and now that it’s done, everyone will just breathe a sigh of relief and say “oh, thank goodness we don’t have to talk about that stuff anymore.” I think inertia will settle in. I’m pessimistic. (laughs) So, don’t take it for granted that there’s going to be some huge upheaval in 2010. A lot of politicians will get voted out of office, perhaps the balance of power will even change in the House. But we’ll still have this president, we’ll still have this establishment, we’ll still have this Federal apparatus, we’ll still have a largely torpid general public not willing to concentrate very long on any of the things that matter.

Book review: Makers of Modern Strategy

Makers of Ancient Strategy
Victor Davis Hanson, ed.
Rating: 8 of 10

Victor Davis Hanson is a political pundit and National Review contributor, but he is also a classicist and military historian. His punditry is better than most, but I happen to find his military histories rather more interesting than his political analysis. I very much enjoyed his Carnage and Culture as well as A War Like No Other. His latest book, Makers of Ancient Strategy, is an intriguing look at various aspects of ancient warfare that consists of essays from 10 historians which address everything from Greek fortifications to Roman frontier defense. The essays are loosely tied together by a theme that connects these ancient strategies with the challenges faced by modern strategists engaged in modern warfare, particularly as it relates to the American occupation of Iraq.

It should be understood that this is not, however, the misguided effort of a neocon occupation enthusiast to advocate world democratic revolution in a remarkably esoteric and inefficient manner. Rather, it is a continuation of the approach taken by two similarly named compilations published in the 20th century, both entitled Makers of Modern Strategy, that repeatedly warned how even the radical technological changes that took place during and after World War II had not fundamentally altered the basic nature of military conflict.

The three best essays are contributed by Donald Kagan, John W.I. Lee, and Hanson himself. Kagan’s essay, entitled “Pericles, Thucydides, and the Defense of Empire” is an apt warning of the intrinsic difficulty in maintaining a democratic empire even with the advantages of wealth, a talented ruling class, and military superiority. His conclusion, that empire is tenable so long as it is led by an extraordinary leader like Pericles, should chill the blood of anyone who has spent any time observing the Bush, Clinton, or Obama administrations, much less the House and Senate.

Lee’s essay, “Urban Warfare in the Classic Greek World” is a reminder that what we think we know often does not bear close scrutiny. While one tends to think of the Greek warfare as consisting of phalanxes of armored hoplites colliding together, Lee reminds us that two-thirds of the battles recorded by Thucydides actually took place inside various city walls. What is often described as 4th generation warfare and takes place in urban Iraq today has a surprisingly close relationship to ancient warfare circa 450 BC. Hanson’s essay, on the other hand, focuses on an individual, Epaminonides the Theban, who crushed Sparta in what could be seen as a precursor of 20th and 21st century wars of democratic liberation. I found “Epaminonides the Theban and the Doctrine of Preemptive War” to be much more convincing with regards to the Roman opinion of Epaminonides, who Plutarch ranked as a greater man than most of the Athenians and Spartans that we remember today, than as a coherent establishment of a preemptive doctrine. But Hanson’s perceptions are keen, as always, and he is careful to point out the inherent risks of Epaminonides’s preemptive war. He writes:

While successful preemptive war may result in an immediate strategic advantage, the dividends of such a risky enterprise are squandered if there is not a well-planned effort to incorporate military success into a larger political framework that results in some sort of advantageous peace. By its very definition, an optional preemptive war must be short, a sort of decapitation of enemy power that stuns it into paralysis and forces it to grat political concessions. In democratic states, sucha controversial gamble cannot garner continued domestic political support if the attack instead leads to a drawn-out, deracinating struggle, the very sort of quagmire that the preemption was originally intended to preclude. Like it or not, when successful and followed by a period of quiet, preemption is often ultimately considered moral, justified, and defensive; when costly and unsuccessful in securing peace, in hindsight it always looks optional, foolhardy, and aggressive.”

I also enjoyed Tom Holland’s essay on the Persian view of the fractious Greek city-states and Peter Heather’s essay on the approach to frontier defense in the later Roman empire. The only weak essay was Barry Holland’s “Slave Wars of Greece and Rome”, which didn’t go into much detail of any of the aforementioned slave wars, didn’t provide any useful statistics, and didn’t relate the ancient slave wars to modern insurgencies in any meaningful manner. Even so, it was interesting to read of the near-complete absence of any doctrine of abolitionism in the ancient world, barring one of the early Church Fathers, Gregory of Nyssa.

Makers of Ancient Strategy is well worth reading by any armchair historian with an interest in the Greco-Roman world, and wargamers in particular will find it five or six of the essays to be fascinating. And speaking as one of the commentators who drew upon the example of the Sicilian Expedition to criticize the Iraqi occupation, I have to admit that VDH provides an effective rebuttal to that analogy in this volume. Not necessarily a conclusive one, mind you, and perhaps even one that could be viewed as contradicting some of the lessons he draws in the Epaminonides essay. But it is certainly not one that the fair observer can reasonably ignore.

The essays are all well-sourced and in some cases the notes are nearly as interesting to read as the essays themselves. I highly recommend it for historically literate readers with an interest in Greco-Roman history, military history, or the politics of the current military occupations.

Reading in the real world

While I admire the generous purpose behind John Scalzi’s The Big Idea posts, in which he provides space to an author to explain The Big Idea underlying his newly published book, I have to admit that I have tended to have little interest in most of books that have been featured there because I simply don’t read much SF/F anymore. I increasingly find that I’d rather play it.

Since John doesn’t do much the way of non-fiction at Whatever and because the Ilk tend to be more interested in exposure to more serious subjects than the latest attempt to adultize angst-filled teen vampire/wereseal novels, it occurs to me that a similar feature might be welcome here, especially in light of how Mr. Rockwell was kind enough to provide me with space at his site to introduce RGD the week it was published. So, if you are the author of a non-fiction book in the field of history, politics, economics, or science that has been published since August 2009, I’d like to invite you to email me a 500 to 2,000-word account of what you believe to be worthy of note about your new book accompanied by a link to an image of the cover.

On a barely tangential note, this afternoon I had what I thought to be a fantastic idea for my next non-fiction book. Reflecting on the missing Life of Epaminondas, I completely cracked up over the thought of writing Godwin’s Lives, which would be a set of parallel Lives ala Plutarch purporting to compare one classic historical figure with a modern one, albeit every classic figure would be compared to Hitler. Needless to say, this is why Spacebunny seldom asks me to share what I’m thinking.

And to return to the subject, more or less, I’m presently reading Makers of Ancient Strategy, edited by Victor Davis Hanson. It’s a very good collection of essays and I will post a review of the book next week. However, it was a little startling to encounter VDH’s brief rebuttal – a fairly effective one, to be honest – addressed to the “many commenters” who had referenced the Athenian attack on Syracuse in criticizing the American invasion of Iraq. I suspect he may have had this column in particular in mind.

RGD for $4.95

If you were interested in picking up a copy of The Return of the Great Depression but hadn’t gotten around to it for one reason or another, WND is offering it for only $4.95 today. A hardcover for what used to be a paperback price, not a bad deal.

Lomborg returns fire

Bjorn Lomborg responds to what appears to be an incompetent, would-be hatchet job on his climate books:

Howard Friel’s book The Lomborg Deception (LD) focuses on two of my books, The Skeptical Environmentalist (TSE) and the U.S. edition of Cool It (CIUS). It is heartening to write books that engage others, and I welcome his critique.
Unfortunately, it is obvious that Friel has no interest in fair-minded criticism or honest disagreement. Rather, he seems determined to portray me as devious, deceptive, and intellectually dishonest. Ironically, in his zeal to do so, he repeatedly commits the very sins he accuses me of – selective or incomplete quotation, misrepresentation of source material, and even outright fabrication. Rather than engaging with my books on their own terms, he caricatures my work and then attacks it.

Friel makes his intent clear in an author’s note at the beginning of his book, in which he identifies what he calls “Lomborg’s Theorem”: the idea that “global warming is no catastrophe” (p. xi).1 His aim, he says, is to discredit this idea—“to show that Lomborg’s Theorem is grounded in highly questionable data and analysis, and that there is little if any factual or analytic basis for the theorem” (p. xi). Fair enough. This is the stuff of academic debate: are my data accurate and is my analysis valid? I have no problem with anyone questioning the basis of my work, provided the questions are honest and fair-minded. But as I will document below, what Friel does in The Lomborg Deception is something else entirely. In his attempt to prove that my data and analysis are misleading and/or dishonest, he quotes source material out of context, mangles source figures and tables, misrepresents my text and source material, relies more on news reports than on peer-reviewed research, and consistently avoids engaging with the central arguments of my work.

Having written a book that is a response to the arguments of other individuals, I can testify that it is vitally important to attack the target’s strongest arguments rather than sniping away at the trivial and peripheral issues and attempting to portray them in a false light. The fact that I directly addressed the New Atheists’ most important arguments – Harris’s Extinction Equation, Dawkins’s Ultimate 747, and Dennett’s Division of Doxastic Labor – meant that it was impossible for their defenders to get away with their false accusations of strawmen construction. Not that that prevented a few of the less intelligent ones from trying, of course….

Another reason that it is always a mistake to address the side issues in lieu of the central ones and fail to give your target a reasonable benefit of the doubt is that even when you have correctly addressed the relative trivialities, it is usually possible for people to play the interpretation game in an attempt to circumvent a solid rebuttal. For example, it was only because I directly corresponded with Sam Harris that I was able to explode several excuses manufactured for him by his defenders. In this case, after reading Lombjorg’s response, it would appear that Friel chose rather poorly in selecting a target who is clearly not afraid to stand by his works and present a detailed defense of them.

Just to be clear, I read Cool It and was unimpressed by it, albeit not for the reasons that Friel manufactures. I was unimpressed mostly because it is obvious that global warming is not taking place, therefore Man is not causing it, and I have little interest in the alternative “save people from themselves” schemes which Lomborg would prefer to tax people in order to fund.

Mailvox: correcting TIA

In which we are treated to a history lesson that corrects my description of the multiverse theory mentioned in TIA. In the chapter titled “Darwin’s Judas”, I wrote: “Those indisposed to accept the anthropic principle attempt to get around the massive improbability problem it presents by imagining that there are billions and billions of universes, for all things are possible through the scientist who postulates very large numbers. Only by postulating a potentially infinite number of universes can our wildly improbable universe become mathematically probable. Of course, there are no signs of any of these other universes, nor did science ever take the idea of parallel universes seriously until the alternative was accepting the apparent evidence for a universal designer. But not only is multiverse theory every bit as unfalsifiable and untestable as the God Hypothesis, it is demonstrably more improbable. If we accept Dawkins’s naked assertion that a universal designer is more complex than the one known universe, a designer is probably less complex than any two universes and infinitely less complex than an infinity of them.”

However, it appears I am entirely wrong about the multiverse concept being developed as a reaction to the anthropic principle. The gentleman writes:

One point that I think I should mention, though…. the “many worlds” interpretation of what’s going on was not invented by Darwinists in a desperate attempt to widen the playing field and give chance a chance–although they may well have seized upon it. The proposition actually predated the present debate by many years as the 1957 doctoral dissertation of Hugh Everett III at Princeton, who took the scientifically impeccable approach of accepting the mathematical formalism of quantum theory as meaning what it said. Collapsing wave functions and the assignment of statistical weights to the possible outcomes do not follow from anything inherent in the theory itself, but are consequences of the conventional imposed interpretation. Everett’s treatment effectively denies the existence of a separate classical realm, as distinct from a ghostlike superposition of potentialities, and asserts the existence of a universal wave function which never collapses, but decomposes naturally into a multitude of mutually unobserved but equally real worlds, each evolving in time, and in which the familiar statistical quantum laws will be found to apply.

I stand corrected. And, to be honest, also a little shocked that one of my favorite living authors, whose books rank highly in my personal top 100, actually happened to read one of my books. This is an excellent lesson in the importance of doing all of the tangentially relevant research; I researched the anthropic principle, but only bothered to read up on the various anti-theological attacks on it rather than investigating the multiverse theory itself.

Three book reviews

A new Summa Elvetica review by JS on Amazon:

In any other fantasy novel the question of whether elves have souls would be silly, but in Beale’s world it is profound question which has lasting repercussions. The question works because the medieval Roman Catholic Church is the one asking.  Most fantasy worlds have a facsimile of the Roman Catholic Church without the Roman and Catholic part. Outside of the addition of the RCC the fantasy world is very familiar to anyone who knows the genre. Tough, taciturn, stoic dwarfs and tall, beautiful, arrogant, magical elves live a world with orcs, goblins, lycanthropes, and demons. Beale succeeds in combing these elements into a lively and believable land.

Jason Clark reviews RGD on Amazon:

When considering the matter of how the world went into its economic meltdown people have many explanations, and many solutions.  In this informative and easily digested book, World Net Daily columnist, blogger and Austrian economist Vox Day applies his own expertise to analysing the problem and offering his solution.  Vox introduces us to the different economic schools that have weighed in on this issue, and details how their take on the matter generally fails to address the issue, and how their solutions will only make matters worse.

Bart Fuller reviews RGD on his blog, Liberty vs Leviathan and adds “It’s a most excellent book and joins Hazlitt and Bastiat on my short list of recommendations to friends wanting to learn about economics.”

This is a book for anyone and everyone wanting to make sense of the economic turmoil of the last two years.

One of my minor goals for 2010 will be to finish the sequel to Summa Elvetica. If I’m fortunate, it’s even possible that it might be published in 2010. But I’m not promising anything, as there are other projects which demand priority.

Creating a literary ghetto

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.

Summa Elvetica on Kindle

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?

“Magnificent Failure”

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.