Tag: writing

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.

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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.

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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.

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The SDL Replies

From SG:

Larry Correia responds to a 2⭐ review with his signature style. One wonders how the SDL would reply?

What Larry said, the abridged version:

What an incredibly fucking stupid point to make in an incredibly fucking stupid review. You aren’t reviewing my book. You’re reviewing your own fucking hubris and hang ups.

And fuckers like you don’t just post this bullshit to me. You post it to all fantasy authors. Only I’m fine. I make good money off my fans who aren’t entitled little shits. I’ve got shooting Flight Control money. The people who get fucked by people like you are all the up and comer and newbie authors who can’t afford to eat nothing but Ramen Noodle for the years it takes to finish an epic fantasy series before cheap fucks like you gamble on the first book.

That’s the real legacy of Rothfuss and Martin, fucking over an entire generation of up and coming fantasy authors because entitled shit heads like this got their expectations hurt.

MY ACTUAL REPLY: There are a large number of people who don’t read me for a considerable panoply of different reasons. I suppose that’s as good a reason as any. Anyhow, it will be done when it is done. In leather. Glorious, supple Italian goatskin leather.

Let’s face it, Larry is simply more entertaining than I am.

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You Wanted Conan

And The Legend Chuck Dixon gave you Conan. The real Conan, the barbarian Conan, the Cimmerian Conan, the public domain Conan, the Conan about whom Robert E. Howard wrote, not the latter-day copyrighted Conan created by L. Sprague de Camp Conan, about whom one critic wrote: “L. Sprague de Camp is an insufferable hack and his choices both in writing his own criticism and curating this collection are baffling”, and most definitely not the Hollywood Conan.

Now you have multiple options to get your hands on Chuck Dixon’s Conan, but keep in mind that only the Arkhaven store will provide you the ebook along with the paperback edition. We’ll be placing our order for shipment to the fulfillment center tomorrow, so this is a good time to take action if you’re interested.

Bounding Into Comics interviewed The Legend about his latest novel.

Speaking with Bounding Into Comics, Dixon explained why he wanted to write this story, “I wanted to write a straight up war story of Conan’s time as a mercenary. But I also wanted to throw in a Lovecraftian monster as well as a depiction of dark sorcery in the Hyperborean Age with all its dire consequences.”

Dixon also relished the challenge to write in what he describes as Howard’s bravura style, “I was totally immersed in Howard’s bravura writing style as an adolescent. I liked the challenge of creating a new Conan story written in that style.”

He added, “So much of Howard’s prose relied on the reader to create vivid images in their own imaginations as they read. I really wanted to see if I could inspire that same brand of wild visuals.”

Meanwhile, the Dark Herald reviewed THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL at Arkhaven.

During the 1980s, Baen Books decided to do the world a massive favor and publish a huge library of Robert Howard stories in their original un-De Camped form. I was struck by the unexpected quality of Howard’s work. I’d heard a lot of criticism of Howard’s original stories by De Camp, Stephen King, and several others. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now. It had nothing at all to do with Howard’s prose and everything to do with politics. Although in King’s case, it could have been opinions generated by the mountains of coke he was snorting back then.

Howard was more than capable of subtly and subtext; his Conan was a complex hero. While taciturn and stoic, he would never leave a helpless innocent to the hands of those who found joy in cruelty.

Robert Howard had a great respect and indeed love for ancient history. He wanted to tell stories set in remote antiquity, but he also wanted them to be accurate to period. This presented him with a fundamental problem. In his hometown of Cross Plains, the resources of the Texas oil boom town’s library were it and they were obviously insufficient for his needs. So, he did the next best thing and created a completely fictional world from whole cloth. One that was a reflection of the ancient world but was not constrained by it. In so doing, Robert Howard invented an entire genre called Sword and Sorcery by Fritz Lieber.

Think about that for a second, this pulp writer in a small Texas boon town created an entirely new category of fiction and he’s been despised by all right-thinking people for it ever since.

Who in this modern world could hope to do justice to the works of a man born at the turn of the last century that venerated the purity and strength of the barbarous?

The Legend Chuck Dixon, that’s who.

The Legend has already completed the second book, THE CARAVAN OF THE DAMNED, and is now working on a third. Both of these books will be illustrated by Ademir Leal, the cover artist for THE SIEGE OF THE BLACK CITADEL.

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You Had One Job

And you didn’t do it. Ursule K. Le Guin’s son and literary executor explains why he is revising her work in order to bring it more in line with modern social justice sensibilities:

My job is to bring my mother’s work to new generations of readers, not to revise it. People who adore a book are often eager to transform it, through screen adaptation, fan fiction or critical reinterpretation. Sometimes this works well; often it doesn’t. I tend to start from the position that Ursula’s words are sacred, so my initial reaction to the editor’s request was that of a strict constructivist.

After deep breaths, and with Ursula’s own revisionism in mind, I contacted a disability rights attorney, a youth literature consultant, a racial educator, and some kids. My advisory group leaned toward change but was not in consensus. I genuinely didn’t know what my mother would have decided. But she left me a clue: a note over her desk asking, “Is it true? Is it necessary or at least useful? Is it compassionate or at least unharmful?”

I like to think that truth and compassion are immutable even as the language we use to express them changes. But cultural constructs of harm are mutable; we frequently revise our definition of what’s harmful to whom, how it is spoken of, and who gets to do the speaking. My mother’s note tipped me toward changing her words. I found substitutes that would retain the original meaning and cadence, and stipulated to the publisher that the new editions would note that the text had been revised.

Criticism of changes to Dahl’s books can just as well be leveled at my own decision. Closest to my anxiety is the reaction of Susanne Nossel, of PEN America, who counsels us to “consider how the power to rewrite books might be used in the hands of those who do not share their values and sensibilities.” Although this haunts me, people who don’t share my sensibilities about artistic freedom seem to prefer to ban or burn books, usually without having read them.

In other words, literature must be defaced in order to make it acceptable to the lowest-common denominator, thereby turning books, which preserve human knowledge, into a form of ephemeral entertainment akin to television.

We really do need to see about getting that Castalia History subscription going before it’s too late.

This is why successful authors are well-advised to formally place their work into the public domain rather than trust their children, and especially, their grandchildren, to be faithful to their work and to protect their historical words. With the exception of a few loyal souls like Christopher Tolkien, most literary heirs are far more concerned with how their predecessor’s works are perceived by their friends and acquaintances than they are with doing their one job of preserving the family literary legacy.

I’ve personally witnessed this myself, where the literary heirs would rather see their predecessor’s work continue vanishing unread into history than risk embarrassing them with a revival of its historical appeal.

This is another reason why current copyright law is downright evil; it tends to destroy an author’s legacy rather than preserve it. Life of the author is a sufficient period for copyright, with an additional 10-year period to benefit the heirs and provide a foundation for providing a literary legacy for those heirs genuinely interested in doing so.

And it is, of course, amusing that he attempts to justify his decision to modify his mother’s works by appealing to the belief that others won’t take similar liberties. But once one accepts the principle that texts can be deemed unacceptable to the public in their original state, one has already justified their burning. And it’s just a matter of time before someone who doesn’t approve of that work for one reason or another comes to power.

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Overwhelmed by AI

Live by the sword, die by the sword. Clarkesworld science fiction magazine is forced to close to submissions by a flood of ChatGTP entries.

Submissions are currently closed. It shouldn’t be hard to guess why.

  1. We aren’t closing the magazine. Closing submissions means that we aren’t considering stories from authors at this time. We will reopen, but have not set a date.
  2. We don’t have a solution for the problem. We have some ideas for minimizing it, but the problem isn’t going away. Detectors are unreliable. Pay-to-submit sacrifices too many legit authors. Print submissions are not viable for us.
  3. Various third-party tools for identity confirmation are more expensive than magazines can afford and tend to have regional holes. Adopting them would be the same as banning entire countries.
  4. We could easily implement a system that only allowed authors that had previously submitted work to us. That would effectively ban new authors, which is not acceptable. They are an essential part of this ecosystem and our future.
  5. The people causing the problem are from outside the SF/F community. Largely driven in by “side hustle” experts making claims of easy money with ChatGPT. They are driving this and deserve some of the disdain shown to the AI developers.
  6. Our guidelines already state that we don’t want “AI” written or assisted works. They don’t care. A checkbox on a form won’t stop them. They just lie.

I don’t know why this strikes me as particularly funny, but it does. Especially because it won’t be long before SFWA has its first fake member, given the way the most successful clout-chasing con artists think. Wracking up three professional publications wouldn’t be hard, and I don’t think the ever-so-inclusive organization has any specific requirement that its members be human or actually exist.

It has to be admitted. For all its evil and awfulness, Clown World can be amusing sometimes.

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Write More in the Book

This is a great article about Joe Montana that is more about aging, accomplishment, and legacy than it is about football.

“Every player in history wants to write more in the book,” Young says. “I think about that all the time.”

His voice gets softer.

“No matter how much you write,” he says, “you want to write more.”

“The day you retire you fall of a cliff,” he says. “You land in a big pile of nothing. It’s a wreck. But it’s more of a wreck for people who have the biggest book.”

It’s one thing to understand that there is always going to be someone bigger, smarter, faster, richer, more attractive, or more successful. One of my psychological advantages over the course of my life is that I always understood that and was entirely comfortable with it. I’ve never been the best at anything I’ve done; even on the various occasions that I was a champion my accomplishments were overshadowed by the previous champion or by my teammates.

My best friend is smarter. My brothers are better-looking. My bandmate is far more talented and has a much better voice. I wasn’t even the MVP of the conference-winning team for which I was the leading scorer and scored in every game. So be it. Things are precisely what they are, and all any of us can do is the best that we can. Comparisons with others are not only futile, they are irrelevant, because life outside the ring, the track, or the field is not a competition.

But the one desire that everyone who is successful shares is to write more in the record book. Throw one more touchdown pass. Score one more goal. Write one more book.

Unlike Joe Montana and Tom Brady, I can still do what I do. I’ve got about 15 more years to be at the top of my writing game. If I’m very fortunate, 25 more years. Hence my annual writing goal of 365,000 words per year, which as of yesterday was running at 121.5 percent of goal.

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The Five Reasons for Failed Fantasy

The Dark Herald reviews the year in fantasy for 2022 and provides an explanation for why it was so disastrous.

First, everyone wanted their own Game of Thrones, (it wasn’t just Jeff Bezos).

Second, none of these producers knew anything about fantasy and they didn’t want to learn. They just wanted to glom on to something and tell their own version of THE MESSAGE.

Third, neither did the people who ran the studios. They were green-lighting anything that could be accused of being a fantasy franchise with an existing fanbase. And they also wanted to use it to spread THE MESSAGE.

Fourth, Woke. All of these shows were much more interested in contemporary politics than they were ancient worlds, eerie wonders, and glories beyond imagining. They cared more about scoring points in Hollywood than they ever could about fantasy.

Fifth, all of these shows were the result of globalism. Oh, it was Hollywood globalism to be sure, so on top of all of their other failings, they were shallow as a mud puddle. But it was all globalist fantasy. It was something too hopelessly bland to be at all interesting.

“The Shadow that bred them can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own. I don’t think it gave life to the orcs, it only ruined them and twisted them; and if they are to live at all, they have to live like other living creatures.”

I can’t help but find it amusing that all of these producers are casting desperately around for the next A GAME OF THRONES and it will never, ever, occur to them to go to the one epic fantasy series that is fully capable of providing them what they are looking for and more.

But it’s just as well. I have zero desire to see ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT utterly demolished the way that everything from WHEEL OF TIME to SANDMAN have been destroyed.

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Tolstoy on Maupassant

I’m always fascinated by one great mind’s take on another, which is one reason why I chose Machiavelli’s Discourses on the First Ten Books of Titus Livy for the Library subscription over his more famous works. So, this review of the work of one of my favorite writers – Guy de Maupassant – by another of my favorite writers – Leo Tolstoy – is of particular interest to me.

The author was endowed with that particular gift, called talent, which consists in the author’s ability to direct, according to his tastes, his intensified, strained attention to this or that subject, in consequence of which the author who is endowed with this ability sees in those subjects upon which he directs his attention, something new, something which others did not see. Maupassant evidently possessed that gift of seeing in subjects something which others did not see. But, to judge from the small volume which I had read, he was devoid of the chief condition necessary, besides talent, for a truly artistic production.

Of the three conditions:

1) a correct, that is, a moral relation of the author to the subject,
2) the clearness of exposition, or the beauty of form, which is the same, and
3) sincerity, that is, an undisguised feeling of love or hatred for what the artist describes

Maupassant possessed only the last two, and was entirely devoid of the first. He had no correct, that is, no moral relation to the subjects described. From what I had read, I was convinced that Maupassant possessed talent, that is, the gift of attention, which in the objects and phenomena of life revealed to him those qualities which are not visible to other men; he also possessed a beautiful form, that is, he expressed clearly, simply, and beautifully what he wished to say, and also possessed that condition of the worth of an artistic production, without which it does not produce any effect, — sincerity, — that is, he did not simulate love or hatred, but actually loved and hated what he described. But unfortunately, being devoid of the first, almost the most important condition of the worth of an artistic production, of the correct, moral relation to what he represented, that is, of the knowledge of the difference between good and evil, he loved and represented what it was not right to love and represent, and did not love and did not represent what he ought to have loved and represented. Thus the author in this little volume describes with much detail and love how women tempt men and men tempt women, and even some incomprehensible obscenities, which are represented in La Femme de Paul, and he describes the labouring country people, not only with indifference, but even with contempt, as so many animals.

Particularly striking was that lack of distinction between bad and good in the story Une Partie de Campagne, in which, in the form of a most clever and amusing jest, he gives a detailed account of how two gentlemen with bared arms, rowing in a boat, simultaneously tempted, the one an old mother, and the other a young maiden, her daughter.

The author’s sympathy is during the whole time obviously to such an extent on the side of the two rascals, that he ignores, or, rather, does not see what the tempted mother, the girl, the father, and the young man, evidently the fiance of the daughter, must have suffered, and so we not only get a shocking description of a disgusting crime in the form of an amusing jest, but the event itself is described falsely, because only the most insignificant side of the subject, the pleasure afforded to the rascals, is described.

In the same volume there is a story, Histoire d’une Fille de Ferme, which Turgenev recommended to me more particularly, and which more particularly displeased me on account of the author’s incorrect relation to the subject. The author apparently sees in all the working people whom he describes nothing but animals, who do not rise above sexual and maternal love, and so the description leaves us with an incomplete, artificial impression.

The insufficient comprehension of the lives and interests of the working classes, and the representation of the men from those classes in the form of half-animals, which are moved only by sensuality, malice, and greed, forms one of the chief and most important defects of the majority of the modern French authors, among them Maupassant, not only in this story, but also in all the other stories, in which he touches on the people and always describes them as coarse, dull animals, whom one can only ridicule. Of course, the French authors must know the conditions of their people better than I know them; but, although I am a Russian and have not lived with the French people, I none the less assert that, in describing their masses, the French authors are wrong, and that the French masses cannot be as they are described. If there exists a France as we know it, with her truly great men and with those great contributions which these great men have made to science, art, civil polity, and the moral perfection of humanity, those labouring masses, which have held upon their shoulders this France and her great men, do not consist of animals, but of men with great spiritual qualities; and so I do not believe what I am told in novels like La Terre, and in Maupassant’s stories, just as I should not believe if I were told of the existence of a beautiful house standing on no foundation. It is very possible that the high qualities of the masses are not such as are described in La petit Fadette and in La Mare au Diable, but these qualities exist, that I know for certain, and the writer who describes the masses, as Maupassant does, by telling sympathetically of the “hanches” and “gorges” of Breton domestics, and with contempt and ridicule the life of the labouring people, commits a great error in an artistic sense, because he describes the subject from only one, the most uninteresting, physical side, and completely overlooks the other, the most important, spiritual side, which forms the essence of the subject.

THE WORKS OF GUY DE MAUPASSANT, Leo Tolstoy, 1894

It’s interesting to see that Tolstoy criticizes Maupassant for precisely the same failing exhibited by even the most skilled authors of literature, fantasy, and science fiction today. The absence of a spiritual awareness on the part of the author intrinsically limits their works, and leaves them painting with a palette devoid of true colors, as if they were photographers who possess only monochromatic film.

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