Tag: books

Review of Anathem by Neal Stephenson

It is really not correct to describe Anathem as science fiction. It is actually science fantasy in its purest form, a fantasy about science that blatantly panders to almost every cherished assumption, heartfelt belief, and wishful desire possessed by those who make a literal fetish of science. In Anathem, Stephenson presents a world in which Science and Philosophy dwell apart from the rest of the world, secure in elite monkish conclaves and protected, for the most part, from the vile and vulgar mysteries of the common herd who occupy themselves with such distasteful pastimes such as sports, television, politics, and religion. The scientific elite and the rest of the world have essentially realized that their relationship is no longer symbiotic, but have managed to arrange for a reasonably amicable breakup in which the science-monks get the nuclear power plants and the unwanted smart kids in return for leaving the rest of the world free to go its own way and life life without finger-waving lectures from the science monks about how illogical their behavior is, or more importantly, living with the risk of the science monks blowing up the entire world at the behest of the Saecular Power.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.

Publishing update

First, The Deported has been accepted for publication in the Halloween edition of Stupefying Stories. This actually marks my third-ever submission of a short story for publication and my first-ever acceptance, as I had a (dreadful) story rejected by Asimov’s in 1989 and a (pretty good) novella rejected by Black Gate in 2009. (In fairness to John O’Neill, it was a bit of a stretch for BG.) Ten points to the first one to guess what literary lion’s style is being imitated in the story; if you are one of the few who happen to know already, do keep your mouth shut!

Second, I’ve been informed by a publisher that they would like to publish the first book in the Arts of Dark and Light series. I sent them a sample and they particularly liked what they termed the rich depth of the world. Nothing is final yet, but I see no reason we won’t be able to work things out shortly; I was completely surprised to hear they were interested in publishing such a monster. Arts of Dark and Light is set in the same world as Summa Elvetica: A Casuistry of the Elvish Controversy, but is more accessible and vastly larger in scope. Translation I: No more untranslated Latin or structural limits set by 700-year old theological treatises. Translation II: we shall see if I can do any better in producing a work of epic fantasy than the authors of the various works I have criticized in the last few months.

So, if it turns out well, I shall owe a debt of gratitude to Messrs. Abercrombie, Bakker, Erikson, and Martin, as it was reading their work that first caused me to begin thinking “Sweet Silmarillion, I could do better than this.” And by Martin, I expect you understand that I am referring to the last two books only, which are significantly inferior to the first three. Robert Jordan doesn’t count, as I would rather read Jack Torrance’s epic seven times than subject myself again to the deplorable Wheel of Time. I like to think that the name was a result of Jordan being a sadist who gave fair warning; that series should have been listed in an addendum to the Geneva Convention.

Anyhow, if nothing else, we already know Arts of Dark and Light will have a gorgeous cover. So we have that going for us….

The Wangst that Comes After

I am beginning to conclude that SFWA President-For-Life John Scalzi needs to sit Mr. R.S. Bakker down for a remedial lesson in handling criticism. I’m not saying Bakker is quite as wangsty as the hapless Laurell K. Hamilton, as was most famously exhibited in her post-Incubus Dreams meltdown, but he’s definitely beginning to show serious indications of having the potential to go critical.

Consider, compare, and contrast the two.

Hamilton: I’m sure there are other books out there that will make you happier than mine. There are books with less sex in them, God knows. There are books that don’t make you think that hard. Books that don’t push you past that comfortable envelope of the mundane. If you want to be comforted, don’t read my books. They aren’t comfortable books. They are books that push my character and me to the edge and beyond of our comfort zones. If that’s not want you want, then stop reading. Put my books away with other things that frighten and confuse or just piss you off.

Bakker: (1) “These guys are strictly bush league in comparison. There’s nothing anybody’s said that has prickled enough to jarr me from my experimental mindset–yet…. And as far as the books go, I actually think this stuff demonstrates that my writing, for better or worse, is rich enough to support a wild, wild variety of competing interpretations. And most important of all, that it’s actually reaching people who can be outraged.”

(2) “Reading Theo’s review, and you would think someone was being raped every other page (rather than every other other page)! Not only did the sex really, really, really stand out for him, but it really, really, really offended him as well, apparently enough to overpower what he did like about the books. Fair enough, I suppose, but given that the first book is called The Darkness that Comes Before (!), and given that the irrational springs of human action are a primary focus of the book, and given that sex is one of those springs (history and appetite are everywhere: if anything there’s far more ‘history porn’ in the books than sexual porn), you would at least think that he would reference this connection… I guess he missed it.”

You really have to have read Incubus Dreams to appreciate the full humor of Hamilton’s rant. How hard does she believe people have to think in order to keep straight who is putting what where? But first, oversensitive, self-important authors, GET OVER YOURSELVES ALREADY! To quote the immortal words of Robert Anton Wilson, “Nietzsche masturbates too much.” Here is an important guideline for the author who is disappointed with a review: if your response to criticism of your work contains the words “comfort zone”, “interpretation”, or “push”, or if you write more words in response to a review than were contained in the actual review, you are officially engaging in authorial wangst. Cease and desist. It is unseemly and neither enhances your reputation nor improves the content of your books.

Second, Bakker is demonstrating an increasing degree of delusion in repeatedly claiming that no one has presented any arguments to him. He has required basic factual correction about nearly everything he assumed about me, all of which was part of a totally irrelevant ad hom response anyway. (One wonders what his response would have been if I’d actually ripped his three books as I have in the cases of Jordan and Goodkind.) Bakker is too parochial – and I mean that in the original sense of the term, as he is quite literally a provincial and for all I know still lives with his mommy in his childhood Canadian home – to grasp that the scope of my international perspective absolutely dwarfs his “I went to grad school in America and my professors told me all this neat stuff” point of view. What Bakker has only imagined and theorized and read about second-hand is part of my actual experience; the most remarkable thing about humanity around the world is how strikingly similar the attitudes of the Japanese rice farmers are to the dialect-speaking mountain clans of northern Italy and the tobacco-growing farmers of southern France. The same holds true for the self-overrated educated classes from Harvard and ToDai to Oxford and the Sorbonne. Seeing a guy who didn’t manage to complete a doctorate at Vanderbilt and can’t tell the difference between a libertarian and a fascist attempt to strike the conventional pose of the latter is simply… well, it’s a little ironic, anyhow.

Two days ago, I was having dinner with a European ambassador to a large South American country and attempting to convince her, and the international hostage negotiator on my other side, that trained, intelligence-enhanced sharks equipped with laser harnesses were the answer to the growing Somali ship-jacking problem being discussed.* Yesterday, I was lifting weights with an unemployed African who lives on social benefits and is hoping to somehow avoid eventual deportation. Today, I’ll go to the recycling center to ask the captain of my calcio team, who is one of the trash men, what time we play our first game of the season. This range of experience does not tend to lend itself to a closed mind. Bakker doesn’t realize that what he decries as “certainty” is actually nothing more than experience-informed probability calculation and pattern recognition. There is no reason one cannot take a logically sound position with confidence without having to assume the total impossibility of error in doing so.

Third, Bakker can afford to pretend – and it is a pretense, nothing more – to be uncertain about everything because he is a fantasy writer and his positions on pretty much everything are inconsequential. Those of us who deal with objective real-world issues such as the current price of gold, the ForEx rates, and the $53-trillion inflation/deflation question on a regular basis understand that there are situations concerning which one must make black-and-white decisions even though any degree of certainty about what will happen tomorrow is utterly impossible. To claim that any sane economist, or any trader, is prone to an unusual degree of epistemic arrogance is not merely stupid, it is profoundly ignorant. Take that most iron-clad law of economics, the Law of Supply and Demand. I can cite multiple exceptions to it, beginning with Veblen and conspicuous consumption, off the top of my head. Even that most closed-minded of economists, Paul Krugman, may sound absolutely certain in his assertive, Nobel Prize-winning pronouncements, but he sounds that way even as he changes his definition of inflation from one column to the next.

This is why Bakker’s entire attempt to respond to the Black Gate review in the form of an ad hominem attack is not only irrelevant and pointless, it is also incorrect. Note that Bakker’s pretentious blathering about “epistemic arrogance” is simply a variation on the left-wing meme du saison, epistemic closure. I would venture to bet, as Nate has already noted, that I have publicly changed my mind about more intellectually significant issues than Bakker ever has about anything. That’s a verifiable claim of fact: has Bakker ever a) changed his public position on the legitimacy of a war, b) changed his public position on a core element of his philosophy as I have with regards to Ricardian free trade, the core mechanism for the Austrian business cycle, and before that, Chicago School monetarism or c) actually made a substantive case for any of his ideological assumptions such as human equality, female suffrage, or what he describes as “moral realism”? Should Bakker’s fanboys be able to demonstrate otherwise, I will readily admit I am wrong… but if they cannot, will they admit that Bakker is?

The primary difference between Bakker and me is that he insists on operating in relative ignorance while avoiding the use of objective metrics that can be verified by third parties. I do not. I read his books before I reached any conclusions about them. He merely scanned my blog before retreating to his fainting couch. La, such fascism , such conservatism, among the radical libertarians – Mussolini wept! I tend to doubt Bakker has ever given as serious credence to someone whose foundational assumptions fundamentally challenge his own as I did in my recent interview with the Post-Keynesian economist Steve Keen. I suggest Mr. Bakker should listen to that interview before he further embarrasses himself with more idiotic accusations concerning my “epistemic arrogance”; even if he doesn’t understand economics well enough to comprehend the vast gulf that separates the Austrian from the Post-Keynesian, he is intelligent enough to be aware that there is a substantive difference between the two competing viewpoints.

The fact is that Bakker’s books, while intelligent and laudably ambitious, are nowhere nearly as deep and complex and sophisticated as he would apparently like to believe. The fact that the reader does not pick up one aspect or another doesn’t make a book brilliant or render its review incorrect; the Black Gate reviewer of Summa Elvetica erroneously, and rather hilariously, concluded that the philosophical arguments for the Elvish soul that were presented in the structural form of the arguments from the Summa Theologica were actually written by Thomas Aquinas, and yet his review was a fair and judicious one that managed to precisely identify the primary flaw in the book.

Bakker needs to grow up, both intellectually and emotionally. He’s not a misunderstood genius whose transgressive work outrages the morally repressed plebs even as it opens their conservative eyes to astonishing new philosophical insights. Hell, judging by the Internet reaction, my WND columns are far more outrageous and eye-opening than anything Bakker has ever written. The concepts he is utilizing are neither new nor difficult for anyone with a +1SD IQ to grasp. His inclination for sockpuppetry is childish and misguided, his sensitivity rivals that of an emo chick, and his philosophy is juvenile. And yet, he has genuine talent for writing intelligent fantasy. So, there is still hope for him, as he certainly wouldn’t be the first writer to look back on what he once considered deep and meaningful brilliance with a mortified shudder.

Any idiot can be uncertain. “I dunno” is not an indicator of superior intelligence and there is nothing intrinsically intelligent about doubt. The imperative is to learn enough to be able to ask the relevant questions, which then provide a solid foundation for ascertaining the highest-probability answers.

*Much hilarity ensued when the hostage negotiator pointed out the fatal flaw in my plan. He expressed a certain disinclination to find himself 20 years from now wearing an armored scuba suit while negotiating underwater with superintelligent, laser-armed sharks in order to get his client’s ships back.

UPDATE – Sweet Friedrich Nietzsche, but R. Scott Bakker really can be a wangsty little girl. Now he’s whining that I have “lot’s and lot’s of theories” about him, which is ironic considering the amount of erroneous psychobabble he has been directing in my direction from the start. I have no theories, I have merely read his books and observed his behavior. But, since I make a practice of answering questions, I’ll go ahead and answer the one he wrongly imagines I have been avoiding.

“What makes him think he’s won the Magical Belief and Identity Lottery?”

Oh, I don’t know. Out of nearly 7 billion people, I’m fortunate to be in the top 1% in the planet with regards to health, wealth, looks, brains, athleticism, and nationality. My wife is slender, beautiful, lovable, loyal, fertile, and funny. I meet good people who seem to enjoy my company everywhere I go. That all seems pretty lucky to me, considering that my entire contribution to the situation was choosing my parents well. I am grateful and I thank God every day for the ticket He has dealt me. If I’m not a birth lottery winner, then who is? The kid in the Congo who just got his hands chopped off and is getting raped for the fourth time today? To paraphrase the immortal parental wisdom of PJ O’Rourke, anyone in my position had damn well better get down on their knees and pray that life does not become fair.

As for belief, I don’t concern myself in the slightest with the perfect correspondence of my beliefs with What Is So or not. They either do or they don’t, but regardless, the Absolute Truth of Creation doesn’t depend upon what I happen to believe it to be at the moment and I don’t think such correspondence is even theoretically possible. Bakker simply doesn’t understand that I don’t believe his opinion, my opinion, or anyone else’s opinion matters in the least, except in how they happen to affect our decisions and subsequent actions. See Human Action for details. If Bakker genuinely wanted to figure out my core outlook on life, he should have simply listened to Sunyata in the first place rather than waste his time on perusing the blog.

Mailvox: book assistance

AA is searching for a book:

In the 1970s, I read a dystopian novel that I’d like to find again. It was one of the First wave of “Eco-Disaster” novels, I think. The only things I remember are everybody wearing filters on their mouths, so they could avoid breathing in (and possibly killing) gnats and bugs, and a version of the Model T Ford being the only “allowed” form of transport.

The Characters used the Model T to get to and from some “Quasi-Religious” meetings that took place in the forest. Thin info, I know. I remember it as being a depressing, and sad book. That said, I’d really like to find it and read it again.

Do you have any Idea what it might be. Maybe someone in the Dread Ilk might have a Clue?

No clue. I’m sure I never read anything like that. Anyone among the Dread Ilk recognize his description?

Perhaps I was wrong

A few days ago, I mentioned that I am working on a “maxi-sequel” to Summa Elvetica entitled Arts of Dark and Light. Because it is going to be sizable, I was under the impression that Marcher Lord would have little interest in it and that I would have to publish it as an ebook. Which, of course, is completely fine with me.

However, it turns out that SE’s publisher, Marcher Lord, has recently published an 1,100-page omnibus edition of a trilogy written by Kathy Tyers. And it also turns out the main man at MLP is actually more than a little interested in AoDaL, so there is a reasonable possibility that it will be conventionally published when it is finished after all. We haven’t worked out any of the details yet, and nothing is set in stone, but I thought some of you would be interested to know that there is a decent chance the next book set in Selenoth will be available on dead tree as well as digital.

The 50 best SF/F books and/or series

After much discussion of NPR’s 100 greatest science fiction and fantasy works, I was moved to construct my own list of what I consider to be the top 50. As with all such lists this is somewhat arbitrary, nevertheless it should be taken as the complete, definitive, and conclusive final word on the matter. I see no purpose in honoring innovation for innovation’s sake when others have subsequently done it better, for example, John Polidori’s The Vampyre and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein have both been long surpassed as examples of their type, whereas the same is not true for Tolkien’s oft-imitated The Lord of the Rings or Orwell’s Animal Farm. In some cases, I have chosen to highlight a single book, Dune, for example, whereas in others I have chosen to judge a series as a whole. Night Watch is easily the best of Terry Pratchett’s books, but it cannot be judged fairly in isolation as one has to have a fuller understanding of Ankh-Morpork to fully appreciate the novel. I have paid zero attention to book sales or authorial reputation, I have read all of the books on the list, and I have tended to rate genuinely amusing books more highly than others might due to the additional degree of difficulty involved.

I further note that if you happen to disagree with the reverence shown to Mr. Ray Bradbury, you are clearly inhuman, possess no soul, and should consider returning to your home planet. If you have not read or heard of Tanith Lee, people should throw rocks at you on the street until you rectify the error. On the other hand, if you have not read Hesse, that is understandable since he’s not traditionally considered a genre author. But do yourself a favor and read the book anyhow. And yes, Edgar Allen Poe should by rights be on here somewhere near the top, but the metric is books and/or series, not authors and/or short stories.

1. The Lord of the Rings, JRR Tolkien
2. Dune, Frank Herbert
3. Dandelion Wine, Ray Bradbury
4. The Chronicles of Narnia, CS Lewis
5. The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse
6. Watership Down, Richard Adams
7. The Dark is Rising, Susan Cooper
8. The Secret Books of Paradys, Tanith Lee
9. The Sprawl Trilogy, William Gibson
10. The Cthulhu Mythos, HP Lovecraft

Read the rest of the list at the Black Gate.

You CANNOT be serious!

The NPR readership’s top 100 SF/F novels:

1. The Lord of the Rings
2. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
3. Ender’s Game
4. Dune
5. A Song of Fire and Ice
6. 1984
7. Fahrenheit 451
8. The Foundation trilogy
9. Brave New World
10. American Gods

It’s a reasonable start, as you can list the top ten without having to bother mentioning the authors. But which one of these is not like the others? Neil Gaiman is good, but American Gods does not merit inclusion at that level. And either Dandelion Wine or The Illustrated Man should be in Fahrenheit 451‘s place. I think A Song of Fire and Ice is also overrated, especially in light of the way the series has declined over the last two books. Top 100 yes, top 10, no way. So is Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy; it’s top 50 material, not top 10. I quite like Douglas Adams, but I don’t see how anyone can possibly argue that Hitchhiker’s is better, in any way except that it is funnier, than Watership Down. In fact, I don’t even consider Hitchhiker’s to be Douglas Adams’s best work; his Dirk Gently novels are much superior.

The astonishing omissions, not from the top 10, but from the entire list, are The Chronicles of Narnia – absolute top 10, if not top 5 – Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising and Lloyd Alexander’s The Chronicles of Prydain. Piers Anthony’s Xanth is far too low, and while Terry Pratchett shows up twice with two Discworld novels – why, when every other series is listed by series – the best Discworld novel by far is Night Watch. And no Lovecraft? Madness. No Silverberg? A little more explicable, but still. No Guy Gavriel Kay? Understandable, but still a serious omission. It was good to see Zelazny there, but I would rank his Lord of Light higher than Amber.

It was interesting to see both the Harry Potter and Twilight series missing from the list. I very much agree with leaving them off it, but I was still surprised they weren’t there. I was, however, mystified to see Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera on the list while The Dresden Files was omitted. I enjoyed the former, but there is no question that the latter is the better series. And how does The Silmarillion make the list while The Hobbit doesn’t? And finally, there is no way Robert Jordan’s ghastly The Wheel of Time series should be on the list at all, much less ranked at #12.

The Prince of Porn

That title isn’t even remotely fair. But who can be expected to resist such a perfect conjunction of rhetoric and alliteration? R. Scott Bakker’s The Prince of Nothing is not an erotic trilogy, it is an interesting, original, large-scale fantasy series that happens to incorporate, to its detriment, some pornographic elements and an amount of inept philosophizing. But since my review sparked a relatively lively debate over whether this is a fair and accurate characterization of the three novels concerned, I thought it would be sensible to appeal to the judgment of an esteemed intellectual who has provided us with a fail-proof method of determining whether a movie is pornographic or not.

I speak, of course, of Umberto Eco and his famous essay “How to Recognize a Porn Movie”:

Pornographic movies are full of people who climb into cars and drive for miles and miles, couples who waste incredible amounts of time signing in at hotel desks, gentlemen who spend many minutes in elevators before reaching their rooms, girls who sip various drinks and who fiddle interminably with laces and blouses before confessing to each other that they prefer Sappho to Don Juan. To put it simply, crudely, in porn movies, before you can see a healthy screw you have to put up with a documentary that could be sponsored by the Traffic Bureau.

There are obvious reasons. A movie in which Gilbert did nothing but rape Gilbertina, front, back, and sideways, would be intolerable. Physically, for the actors, and economically, for the producer. And it would also be, psychologically, intolerable for the spectator: for the transgression to work, it must be played out against a background of normality. To depict normality is one of the most difficult things for any artist – whereas portraying deviation, crime, rape, torture, is very easy.

Therefore the pornographic movie must present normality – essential if the transgression is to have interest – in the way that every spectator conceives it. Therefore, if Gilbert has to take the bus and go from A to B, we will see Gilbert taking the bus and then the bus proceeding from A to B.

This often irritates the spectators, because they think they would like the unspeakable scenes to be continuous. But this is an illusion on their part. They couldn’t bear a full hour and a half of unspeakable scenes. So the passages of the wasted time are essential.

I repeat. Go into a movie theater. If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you would like, then the film you are seeing is pornographic.

Since both the excruciating crusade to Shimeh and Prince Kellhus’s journey to find his father bordered on the interminable, with the only relief being the occasional battle, philosophical pontification, penetration of the prostitute Esmenet by various parties, or the torture of a Tleilaxu Face Dancer(1), the matter can clearly be regarded as settled. It is also worth noting that in his essay, Eco points out how “portraying deviation, crime, rape, torture, is very easy”. Ergo, reliance upon them in a literary work is not evidence of a work’s brilliance or greatness or realism, but rather testifies to the author’s incapacity, laziness, deviancy, or limited moral palette.

We know that Bakker is neither incapable nor lazy. Aside from his fictional meanderings, we have no reason to believe Bakker is any more deviant than anyone else. He’s Canadian, not Japanese, after all.(2) So, we can safely conclude on the basis of last February’s discourse on uncertainty and amorality that it is his limited moral palette, which stems from the affectation(3) that uncertainty is the highest moral good, that is responsible for Bakker’s frequent resort to pornographic elements in The Prince of Nothing.(4) There is, after all, little room to appeal to the reader’s emotions or moral sensibilities on the basis of a character’s insufficient uncertainty, indeed, the limitations of this peculiar moral palette is such that it is difficult to even justify any action at all on the part of any character intended to be presented as heroic or ideal.

(1) Consult skin-spy, whatever.
(2) True fact: 95% of all the world’s weirdness comes from Japan. You’ll see more deviance on a public bus in Tokyo than in a Toronto S&M dungeon.
(3) And it is an affectation, nothing more. It’s always amusing to see how rapidly a post-moralist devolves into vulgar morality when forced to choose between his steadfast disapproval of a traditional moral judgment and his professed uncertainty.
(4) Note that I wrote the following months BEFORE reading any of Bakker’s fiction: “Let a hundred nihilistic anti-heroes blossom into the murderous child rapists of their creators’ moralblind fantasies.” That’s how perfectly predictable his “creatively transgressive” attempts to shock the reader into perceiving black amid a thousand shades of grey were.

I am the anti-hero

I certainly would have made a point of reviewing R. Scott Bakker’s books sooner if I had any idea that his response to my review would prove so vastly amusing:

This brings me to what I was most curious about, back when: What would Theo make of the thematics of the trilogy. To be honest, I thought this was where he would spill the most pixilated ink. Why? Because reading his blog, I realized that in many respects I had written the trilogy for him, for people who really, really, really think they’ve won the Magical Belief-and-Identity Lottery.

And this, if Vox Day is to be believed, is Theo in a nutshell. The Grand Prize Winner. Reading his blog, I had the impression of drawing circles inside of circles:

Fiscal conservatives…

Social and fiscal conservatives…

White, social and fiscal conservatives…

White, male, social and fiscal conservatives…

White, male, English-descended, social and fiscal conservatives…

White, male, English-descended, Anglican, social and fiscal conservatives…

I’m sure the list goes on, but this was as far as I was able to go. What began as snobbish hilarity quickly turned into consternation and a kind of baffled, dare I say? disgust. Discussions of partitioning America along more ‘rational’ identity-driven lines, of the ‘behavioural profile of African-Americans,’ of the ‘proper place of women,’ of the forced resettlement of immigrants, of the ‘flaws of democracy’ made me realize that Theo had more than a few fascistic leanings. I’m still shaking my head.

While I always appreciate a proper Genetic Fallacy, even more amusing is an inept one. I had no idea that I was a socially conservative Anglican, but now that I have been apprised of this I shall certainly do my best to acquire a Book of Common Prayer and start writing regular paeans to Sarah Palin and Rick Perry. I’m not precisely sure what “fiscal conservative” is supposed to mean nowadays, as this tends to sound rather like “gravity conservative” or “knows how to use an Excel spreadsheet” in light of the recent events in political economy. But I am white, male, and of English descent, to be sure. He could have even quite reasonably added “arrogant bastard” and “chick magnet” if he felt that would help his case somehow.

Of course, the Dread Ilk will no doubt see the humor inherent in the idea that the author of The Morality of Rape could possibly be “really, really, really offended” by its fictional depiction. Apparently Bakker didn’t get the “rape apologist” alert.

For all that he attempts to strike a contemplative pose, Bakker reveals a parochial and Panglossian view of the world as well as an ironic failure to contemplate its harsh and brutal reality even while attempting to portray it. And it is entertaining indeed to see the erstwhile champion of a thousand shades of grey proving my previous point about his adherence to a conventional substitute morality; on what basis could an amoralist possibly justify consternation and disgust? Aesthetics? As for the idea that a quad-lingual expatriate who has lived everywhere from Japan to Italy is an extreme example of parochialism, well, I can’t say I’m terribly concerned about what a Canadian who grew up in Ontario, went to university in Ontario, did grad school at Vanderbilt, and then moved back to Ontario happens to think on the matter….

His ideological ignorance is as nonsensical as his failure to understand the difference between diagnosis and prescription. Being one of the better-known libertarians in the media, #25 at the last ranking if I recall correctly, I am much, much farther away from any sort of fascist leanings than Bakker, whose politics appear to be fairly similar to those of the historical Italian Fascisti. And I should very much like to see Bakker attempt to defend ideas such as democracy being flawless, material sexual equality, and so forth, as it would likely prove even more entertaining than his inability to understand the aesthetic value of morality in fiction.

But all of this is beside the point. Either my criticism of his work stands or it does not. Is my review fair? Of course it is. I wouldn’t sacrifice my critical integrity simply to slam someone I disliked intensely and I don’t dislike Bakker. I don’t even know him. The more significant question is if my review of The Prince of Nothing is more accurate and relevant than those that have attempted to lionize Bakker as the third coming of George R.R. Martin. That, I leave to the readers to decide.

Bakker is a talented wordsmith. He is a very good world builder. He is more intelligent than the average genre writer, historically literate, and reasonably well-educated. Unfortunately, he is also an incompetent and juvenile philosopher who subscribes to an outmoded view of art. The latter tends to insert itself in the way of the stronger elements of his writing, particularly when it comes to the characters. Preaching no more lends itself to secular fiction than it does to religious fiction and should Bakker ever decide to control his instinctive desires to lecture and transgress, he will be the better writer for it.

But that is no concern of mine. It makes absolutely no difference to me if Bakker chooses to heed the criticism I have offered or not. I didn’t write the Black Gate review for his benefit and I am quite accustomed to most people ignoring me, regardless of whether I publicly advise them to buy gold at 323.30 (2002) or predict a $43,300 fall in housing prices (2008). I don’t expect Bakker to agree. I don’t even expect him to understand.

Instead of resorting to an ineffective ad hominem response, it would have been much more interesting if Bakker had simply explained why he felt it was so vital to show so much of the sex and rapine that fills his work, what it adds to the story, and why he feels his philosophical meanderings add to the story rather than detracting from it. However, give Bakker credit for correctly anticipating that I would like his work. I did. Being a fan of epic fantasy, I merely find it to be disappointing that he refuses to aim higher.

Review: The Prînce of Nöthing

About twenty years ago, I was at a used bookstore and I picked up what looked like an interesting medieval spin on James Bond.  It was set during the period of the Crusades, but appeared to be conceived as an action-thriller series rather like The Executioner, Mack Bolan.  I started reading it, but around page 30, when the slave girl sent by Saladin to spy on the Crusaders was in full throat enjoying her third rape at the hands of her captors, I suddenly realized that the book was not a historical novel but rather one of those strange 70’s porn novels with a thin veneer of historical fiction.  A little research indicates that the book was probably the fifth book in the Crusader series, Saladin’s Spy (1986), written by an author very familiar to Black Gate readers, although he published it under the pen name “John Cleve” rather than Andrew J. Offutt.  I hadn’t thought about that book for years, until I was casting about for a way to explain the epic fantasy of R. Scott Bakker’s series entitled The Prince of Nothing.

Read the rest at the Black Gate.