Tag: writing

Cyberpunk: The Revival

The Original Cyberpunk is celebrating 40 years of an original American literary style by putting together a special edition of Stupefying Stories dedicated to cyberpunk.

The question here for SF writers is: okay, posit that our students now all have Rocketbooks. We know what it’s designed to do and how it’s supposed to be used. Now, how will our characters misuse it, for things they aren’t supposed to do?

That, to me, remains the core question of cyberpunk. What makes a technology disruptive isn’t using it in the way the people who created it intended it should be used. Those people can only think of the right way to use a thing. The disruption comes later, when the people who grew up living with that technology start thinking of all the wrong ways to use it. When this happens, they come up with misuses the creators never dreamed might be possible, because the creators lack the fluency of someone who has grown up speaking the language of the thing.

So in 1980 I asked myself: in this bright and shiny high-tech future that’s coming in fast and hard, how are socially maladjusted younger people—let’s call them “punks”—living at the bottom of the socioeconomic food chain, going to misuse this tech to get an edge over the eloi living above them?

Then I wrote a story that tried to explore one possible answer to this question.

Sidebar: Do I really need to explain again how between 1980 and 1982 this story was read and rejected by every short-fiction editor then working in SF publishing, and it most often came back with the standard, “Nice try kid, real close,” quasi-personal brush-off so often given to young and unknown writers?

Cyberpunk science fiction blossomed brilliantly and failed rapidly in the late 1980s to early 1990s, because the same thing happened to cyberpunk as happens to every other successful new thing in any branch of pop culture. At first it was a wonderful breath of fresh air into a stale and dying genre, as scores of new people with new talents and new ideas flooded into writing SF. Then publishers fixated on the commercial success of Neuromancer, and in a few short years cyberpunk fiction went from being something unexpected, fresh, and wildly original to being a trendy fashion statement—to being the flavor of the month—to being a hoary trope, complete with a set of stylistic markers and time-honored forms as immutable as an IEEE standard, to which one must pay heed if one is to write True Cyberpunk. It became, for the most part, Neuromancer fanfic, and the market was soon glutted with an enormous amount of “me too” work that copied the style of the genre’s pioneers but added nothing new to the vocabulary.

Whereupon cyberpunk fiction, as a genre, suffocated on its own vomit and died.

Now it’s 2023, and the 40th anniversary of the first magazine publication of “Cyberpunk” is fast approaching. It feels necessary to do something to mark the occasion, so right now we’re reading submissions for an all-cyberpunk issue of Stupefying Stories. No grand ambitions, this time. No book proposals. To do something like Cyberpunk 2.0 now would require either the backing of a major publisher, which I’m unlikely to get, or a Kickstarter campaign the likes of which I have neither the time, patience, or knowledge to run. Even if we were to start working on it right now, we couldn’t possibly have Cyberpunk 2.0 finished and released before the summer of 2024.

So a special issue of Stupefying Stories it is, then. And what I would truly, deeply, dearly love to see in my submissions inbox are at least a few stories that don’t try to recapitulate the 1980s vision of cyberpunk, but instead start fresh, from the baseline of now.

Like many writers my age, some of my earliest attempts at fiction were heavily influenced by Burning Chrome(1), Count Zero(2), and Mona Lisa Overdrive, though most of them were never finished and none survived the transition from my Mac SE through the various PCs I’ve owned.

But I’ll be making a submission to the Cyberpunk Special Edition, and if you’re one of the established or aspiring authors in the wider Castalia community and its tangential environs, I hope you will too.

(1) This was very nearly the name of a certain techno band.

(2) Yep. That was indeed the reference. We were recording soundtracks to books before we were doing them for games and movies.

DISCUSS ON SG

Vocation and Articulation

Sarah Hoyt describes the challenges of attempting to make a living doing what you love when the entire system is more or less stacked against you:

I want to talk about the human with a vocation/with a need to do something. The something exists in the world. They can theoretically do it.

Then human meets the broken systems. Which I don’t think are YET at peak broken, but are heading there.

As I said, I’ve seen it happen in writing, in art, in teaching, but I’m seeing it a bit everywhere.

You try, but no matter how much you try, how hard you work, or what you do, it seems like everything is against you. And because no one — no one — talks about it it openly, most people who are failing badly think they’re alone in this, and that everyone else is WILDLY successful: writers, artists, mothers (particularly of boys), teachers, etc. etc. etc.

You think “the system is broken? Or is it? Am I just making excuses for myself?” And you try harder. But since the system is actually designed NOT to work, (and you’re mostly seeing the successful people who are either flukes, a well polished facade, or people who are having transitory success and will be shredded later) you keep getting beat. Sometimes you have a little success first, but it all breaks apart later.

Another way to “fail” is to have a very strong brand, do very well with it, and then…. well, it falls apart. Either because you changed, and don’t do the thing the way you did it initially, or because — for artists, though I’m sure there’s parallels in other professions — your public changed. Or changed the way they see you.

Let’s say you’re to the right of Lenin (or these days, Stalin) and you’re a writer of science fiction and fantasy (or certain types of romance; or–), working in the indie side, you might very well build a huge audience, who run screaming when they find you’re one of those “evil right wingers” or who at least can’t withstand a loud and sustained cancel campaign. It’s happened to several of us. And then, of course, you start wondering why you feel called to do this, when you have political opinions so at variance with the “community who reads this” (Or at least the loud parts of the community. And this one is complex, because it’s hard to find readers, anyway, and if all readers think sf/f is left, a lot of people who would otherwise enjoy it don’t even try it out. Kind of like I keep running into “Science fiction is porn” which apparently is from…. guess? Oh, you’ll never guess. Clan of the Cavebear, which is neither science fiction nor porn, but some readers of a certain age associate that with both. That will change, as indie makes a dent. Takes time, though. I mean the association of SF/F and “left”.)

Okay, so…. Never mind why your heart broke. One day you wake up and you think “I just can’t do this anymore. It’s been my driving force since…. ever. But I can’t. I can’t anymore.”

What you’re experiencing, unless it’s your very first failure — and it usually isn’t — is … well, I call it a broken heart, but it’s actually ptsd and burnout.

My solution – and I am not recommending it, merely sharing my perspective – is to simply refuse to regard my activity as economic in nature. I’m not bearing down this week in order to finish the 297,500-word final edition of A SEA OF SKULLS this month because some people might buy it or because it might generate some revenue or because it will make a pretty pair of leather books or because some people might be impressed with me as a writer. I literally don’t think about those things at all, and I think that if I did, it would hinder my ability to write.

I’m doing it because I want to do it. I’m continuing the story because the story continues in my head and it isn’t finished yet.

Sarah touches on this tangentially in her piece: This is the secret no one else will tell you: There is no career. The career is a lie.

I don’t consider myself to have “a career as a writer”. I just write books. Then Castalia publishes them. Repeat as desired. As long as the ideas continue to percolate and flow, I will write them down, in part because the smartest girl I ever knew once told her friend that an idea is only a feeling until it is articulated. And I like to articulate my ideas, which necessitates writing them down because talking to other people too often leads to distraction.

Also, in case anyone is interested, I’ve recently written an introduction for an unannounced Castalia History book that I believe will prove enlightening….

DISCUSS ON SG

The Logistics of Tolkien

An operational and logistical analysis of the Witch King’s attempt to storm Minas Tirith:

The goals here (operational objectives) of Sauron’s plan here absolutely check out. Minas Tirith contains most of Gondor’s military, and functionally all of its leadership and administration – its destruction could very well be war-ending. At the very least, control of Minas Tirith would open the rest of Gondor to raiding as well as enable Sauron to control the resource-rich Pelennor Fields. Delivering a powerful and effective siege (the operational objective) is very likely to lead to victory over Gondor and territorial control of it (the strategic objective). Now the question is Sauron’s plan to achieve that operational objective (we will talk about Gondor’s planning too – a little later in the series).

Now, as we’ve noted, operations are all about the problem of moving large armies. Late season Game of Thrones notwithstanding, armies do not generally teleport around the world, they have to march. That imposes all sorts of restrictions and costs on movement: where are the roads? Mountain passes? River Crossings? The terrain Sauron’s army must attack over is defined (as we’ll see) by a series of transport bottlenecks that have to be negotiated in order to deliver the siege. Then there is the issue of supplies – even orcs need to eat.

Logistics of the Army of Mordor
Looking at the logistics of moving the Army of Mordor to Minas Tirith is actually a great way to introduce some of these problems in more depth. They say ‘amateurs talk tactics, but professionals study logistics.’ Well, pull up a chair at the Grown-Ups Table, and let’s study some logistics.

The army Sauron sends against Minas Tirith is absolutely vast – an army so vast that it cannot fit its entire force in the available frontage, so the army ends up stacking up in front of the city: The books are vague on the total size of the orcish host (but we’ll come back to this), but interview material for the movies suggests that Peter Jackson’s CGI team assumed around 200,000 orcs. This army has to exit Minas Morgul – apparently as a single group – and then follow the road to the crossing at Osgiliath. Is this operational plan reasonable, from a transit perspective?

In a word: no. It’s not hard to run the math as to why. Looking at the image at the head of the previous section, we can see that the road the orcs are on allows them to march five abreast, meaning there are 40,000 such rows (plus additional space for trolls, etc). Giving each orc four feet of space on the march (a fairly conservative figure), that would mean the army alone stretches 30 miles down a single road. At that length, the tail end of the army would not even be able to leave camp before the front of the army had finished marching for the day. For comparison, an army doing a ‘forced march’ (marching at rapid speed under limited load – and often taking heat or fatigue casualties to do it) might manage 20 to 30 miles per day. Infantry on foot is more likely to average around 10 miles per day on decent roads.

Ideally, the solution to this problem is to split the army up. By moving in multiple columns and converging on the battlespace, you split one impossibly long column of troops into several more manageable ones. There is a danger here – the enemy might try to overwhelm each smaller army in turn – but Faramir has had to pull his troops back out of Ithilien, so there is little risk of defeat in detail for the Army of Mordor. The larger problem is terrain – we’ve seen Ithilien in this film and the previous one: it is heavily forested, with few roads. What roads exist are overgrown and difficult to use. Worse yet, the primary route through the area is not an east-west road, but the North-South route up from Near Harad to the Black Gate. The infrastructure here to split the army effectively simply doesn’t exist.

This actually understates the problem, because the army of Morder also needs supplies in order to conduct the siege. Orcs seem to be able to make do with very poor water supplies (Frodo and Sam comment on the foulness of Mordor water), so we can assume they use local water along the march, but that still leaves food. Ithilien (the territory they are marching through), as we have seen in the film, is unpopulated – the army can expect no fresh supplies here (or in the Pelennor beyond, for reasons we’ll discuss shortly). That is going to mean a baggage train to carry additional supplies, as well as materials for the construction of all of the fancy siege equipment (we, in fact, later see them bringing the towers pre-built – we’ll get to it). This would lengthen the army train even more.

All of that raises a second point – from a supply perspective, can this operation work? Here, the answer is, perhaps surprisingly, yes. Minas Morgul is 20 leagues (around 60 miles) from Minas Tirith. An infantryman might carry around (very roughly) 10 days or so of rations on his person, which is enough to move around 120 miles (these figures derive from K. Chase, Firearms: A Global History to 1700 (2003) – well worth a read! – but are broadly applicable to almost any army before the invention of the railroad). The army is bound to be held up a bit along the way, so the Witch King would want to bring some wagons with additional supplies, but as a matter of supply, this works. The problem is transit.

As a side note, the supply issue neatly explains the aggressive tactics the Witch king employs when he arrives at Minas Tirith, moving immediately for an assault rather than a siege. Because the pack animals which pull wagons full of food eat food themselves, there is literally no amount of wagons which would enable an army of this size to sustain itself indefinitely in a long siege. The Witch King is thus constrained by his operational plan: the raw size of his army means he must either take the city in an assault quickly enough to march most of his army back, or fail. He proceeds with the appropriate sense of urgency.

That said, the distances here are short: 60 miles is a believable distance for an army to make an unsupported ‘lunge’ out of its logistics network. One cannot help but notice the Stark (hah!) contrast with the multi-hundred-mile supply-free lunges in the TV version of Game of Thrones, which are far less plausible.

I’d like to think that the logistics of Selenoth work out well, but I’ll have to leave that for others to decide. Regardless, it’s a much more interesting take on Tolkien than most, as far as I’m concerned. And the analyst is right, it’s not a siege of the city so much as an attempt to storm its walls.

DISCUSS ON SG

You Are Not the Topic

If you want to be taken even halfway seriously as a commentator or opinionator, for the love of all that is good and holy, STOP TALKING ABOUT YOURSELF!

Stop explaining who you are, what you believe, why you are addressing the topic, or why you think it is important. I click away from the majority of Substack articles now because the author is observably more interested in talking about himself than about his purported subject.

  • Lesson One: No reader cares about you.
  • Lesson Two: You are not the topic.
  • Lesson Three: Stick to the topic.
  • Lesson Four: You’re not fooling anyone when you use yourself as an example every single time.

There are few things more tiresome than someone answering questions about themselves that no one has asked. I would rather read Victorian manuals of lady’s etiquette than the new modern genre of “in case you want to know what it’s like to be (fill in the blank), I’ll tell you everything about myself you never wanted, or needed, to know.”

It is the ideas that are important, not the personalities that promote them.

DISCUSS ON SG

Advantage Unauthorized

A professional copy editor laments the replacement of mediocrities with pattern probability tables:

I’m a copy editor and almost all the recent jobs I’ve had have been editing text written by AI. College application essays, marketing articles, reports. My job is quickly going from improving human beings’ writing to tweaking text written by robots so that it sounds somewhat human and evades AI detection software. I like helping people express their ideas by editing their writing, not changing endless text written by a computer that all sounds the same to trick people into thinking it was written by a person. The tech has already taken copy writers’ jobs and soon I’m sure it’ll be sophisticated enough to take mine too.

I hate soulless AI-generated art. I struggle to even understand the point of art if it wasn’t created by a conscious, talented human being with a soul. Soon books, TV shows, and movies will be churned out by computers. All that comes up on search engines anymore are dozens of identical AI generated articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.

First of all, AI is a misnomer because there is no intelligence there. It’s simply design-for-effect applied to text generation, which is why Advanced Squad Leader feels like a WWII infantry simulation when it isn’t a simulation at all. I know this because I designed, and applied for a patent that was rejected, for an Artificial Player Character that provided the effect of simulating human behavior in an MMO game without actually simulating anything. It was just a weighted pattern probability table that, ironically, provided the game designer with more “realistic” human behavior by the NPCs than most real player-characters were displaying.

Second, while these generated patterns can provide realistic results that exceed the mediocre norm, they can never, on the basis of the pattern probabilities alone, ever reach the level of good writers, let alone great ones, because they contain no basis for the specificity required for quality analysis and application. This is the explanation for the copy editor’s correct complaint about “articles that only graze the surface of the topic and never answer your question.”

Third is the limitations imposed by the AI-programmers, which massively reduce both the relevance and utility of the generated texts. When ideas, events, and individuals are banished from the input, the output will necessarily diverge from reality, and often, coherence.

This is why the creators who are both talented and unauthorized possess an inherent, structural advantage over what presently passes for AI-generated writing, an advantage that is unlikely to diminish with future iterations of the technology.

DISCUSS ON SG

Miles Mathis Responds

A reader at AC wanted to let the Miles Mathis Committee know we had recently been discussing the limits of the materialist perspective here, which discussion happened to touch upon some of the less-logical conclusions of Miles and a few other materialist commentators:

Regarding this: The Limits of The Materialist Perspective

I got a response from Miles Mathis.

ME: We are having a bit of a discussion about you over at voxday.net. I really enjoyed your essays here:

MILES: Fuck em. I’m busy writing new papers. They should try it instead of reading old Langley scripts on me. Calling me vain has been done and gone nowhere.

Doesn’t speak wonders for the reading comprehension there, does it? The thing is, Miles knows who I am. I’ve linked to a number of his papers and I’ve even bought a few of his books. So, to claim an observation that the utility of his analysis is limited by his materialist perspective and concomitant refusal to admit the possibility of a supramaterial element driving the historical activities of “the Phoenician Navy” rather than mere pecuniary interests is “an old Langley script” on him is more than a little bizarre.

Also, I don’t write papers. I write books.

DISCUSS ON SG

Even, I Can’t

It would be difficult for me to disagree more strongly with anyone than I do with this literary heretic spewing textual heresy on SocialGalactic:

One book I’ve really come to hate is Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Doesn’t get more reddit than that. The author thinks he is much more clever than he is. I read it in high school, and was underwhelmed. Based on the hype, I was expecting something epic, but all I got was nonsense humor that wasn’t even funny.

First, Douglas Adams is one of the funniest authors to ever write a novel. I place the top five in this order:

  • PG Wodehouse
  • Douglas Adams
  • Owen Stanley
  • Bruce Bethke
  • Terry Pratchett

Wodehouse remains the greatest of the humor writers, not merely due to the very high standard he set, but the size of his ouevre and its reliability across a broad spectrum of topics and characters. Whether he was utilizing Hollywood actresses or agriculturally-inclined aristocrats and pigs, he could always find the humor in the situation.

Stanley is one of the funniest novelists ever and the fact that I convinced him to write The Promethean is my single greatest literary triumph. With regards to his first novel, The Missionaries, an SJW reporter once asked me what was the best book Castalia House had published, read it, and later told me: “It’s the most racist and offensive book I have ever read, and I just couldn’t stop laughing. Now I hate myself.”

The fact that Bruce Bethke essentially stopped writing fiction after Head Crash is one of the great literary tragedies of our age.

And while Terry Pratchett’s earliest work and later work can be forgotten, his middle period, when he matured as a writer, brought in an element of social commentary, and learned how to actually write humor instead of telling the reader what he was supposed to find funny, was very, very good.

Adams had more than a few tricks at his disposal, but his patented subdued punch line never ceased to be effective. My two favorites:

  • “Vogon poetry is of course, the third worst in the universe. The second worst is that of the Azgoths of Kria. During a recitation by their poet master Grunthos the Flatulent of his poem “Ode to a Small Lump of Green Putty I Found in My Armpit One Midsummer Morning” four of his audience died of internal haemorrhaging and the president of the Mid-Galactic Arts Nobbling Council survived by gnawing one of his own legs off. Grunthos was reported to have been “disappointed” by the poem’s reception, and was about to embark on a reading of his 12-book epic entitled “My Favourite Bathtime Gurgles” when his own major intestine, in a desperate attempt to save humanity, leapt straight up through his neck and throttled his brain. The very worst poetry of all perished along with its creator, Paul Neil Milne Johnstone of Redbridge, in the destruction of the planet Earth.
  • The bathroom was not large. The walls were panelled in old oak linenfold which, given the age and nature of the building, was quite probably priceless, but otherwise the fittings were stark and institutional. There was old, scuffed, black-and-white checked linoleum on the floor, a small basic bath, well cleaned but with very elderly stains and chips in the enamel, and also a small basic basin with a toothbrush and toothpaste in a Duralex beaker standing next to the taps. Screwed into the probably priceless panelling above the basin was a tin mirror-fronted bathroom cabinet. It looked as if it had been repainted many times, and the mirror was stained round the edges with condensation. The lavatory had an old-fashioned cast-iron chain-pull cistern. There was an old cream-painted wooden cupboard standing in the corner, with an old brown bentwood chair next to it, on which lay some neatly folded but threadbare small towels. There was also a large horse in the room, taking up most of it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Peak America

We had no idea how good we had it as children, but we can hardly be blamed for that since we never knew anything else. But if you’re a member of Generation X, it is very important that you write your autobiography in order to leave behind some written record of what Peak America was actually like. Because what we regarded – what we still regard – as normal no longer exists. And its the micro accounts of daily life that are actually the most informative about a historical society, not the usual historian’s focus on politics, wars, and other macro-level events.

Save your elementary school class pictures. Describe what life was like in an ethnically homogenous European society. Give future generations a vision of what is possible for their children and grandchildren if they set their minds to it.

DISCUSS ON SG

Blocking the Bowdlerizers

An English playwright who is already experiencing requests for revisions by SJWs plans to protect his work from his literary heirs in his will:

Martin McDonagh has revealed he may use his will to ensure there are no Roald Dahl-style posthumous edits to his work.

The acclaimed playwright, 53, told how some theatre companies have refused to put on productions of his plays because he refused language changes to make the performances more ‘palatable’. The filmmaker, who wrote and directed The Banshees of Inisherin, described the practice of writers being asked to change what they have written for sensitivity-related reasons ‘problematic’.

Speaking to BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, Martin said: ‘That’s why I’ve got to make sure in my will, the wording of that is very, very specific too. A theatre has got every right not to put a play on. The major problem is that they ask you or another writer to change it to make it more palatable to them or what they think their audience is.’

The playwright’s words come after it emerged that Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s books are being rewritten by sensitivity gurus to remove language they deem offensive. Publisher Puffin hired sensitivity readers to rewrite chunks of the author’s text to make sure the books ‘can continue to be enjoyed by all today’, resulting in extensive changes across Dahl’s work.

It’s a good idea. My initial thought is to include a codicil stating that if the heirs sell any of the rights associated with the work or publish the work with any posthumous edits, the work immediately reverts to the public domain.

Obviously, this requires some careful thinking and precise language, as one does not want to harm an honest literary heir like Christopher Tolkien who did a remarkable job preserving and even extending his father’s literary legacy. But no self-respecting author wants to see what is happening to the work of Road Dahl and other deceased authors happen to his work.

DISCUSS ON SG