#Arkhaven INFOGALACTIC #Castalia House
The eight steps of SJW Attack:
Step 4 means when they reject the apology offered and transform it into evidence for the prosecution. Obviously not every SJW attack involves each and every step, as a resignation at step 3 or step 5 will jump right to step 8, but that’s what the full process looks like.
For fans of my writing.
First, the bad news: Book Two of Arts of Dark and Light, A SEA OF SKULLS, will not be published this year. The cover is done and it is awesome, the story is proceeding well and I’m told that it is better than A THRONE OF BONES, but I’m only 200k words in and there is no way I can finish it and still publish the other books Castalia is committed to publish this year, such as the three books of THE STARS CAME BACK, THE 4GW HANDBOOK, and RIDING THE RED HORSE Vol. 2, among others. It’s just not possible, as there aren’t enough hours in the day. I am still working on it, however, and my reasonable estimate is March next year.
The good news. I will publish a book this fall, most likely in September, and it will be a non-fiction book entitled SJWS ALWAYS LIE: How to Defend Yourself From the Thought Police. The meme is rapidly spreading, more and more people are understanding that the First Law of SJW is both a truism and a reliable metric, and everyone needs to know how to defend themselves against an SJW swarm. And based on who is writing it, the Foreword may well be the best part.
Since nearly everyone here is either on the anti-SJW front lines or is an observer to action on that front, I’ll be interested to know what elements you think need to be there in order for SJWS ALWAYS LIE to be reasonably comprehensive.
One wonders how many more excellent SF juvenile novels Robert Heinlein might have written for Scribner had it not been for his editor Alice Dalgliesh’s determination to meddle, in true SJW fashion, with the political ideology expressed in Red Planet. This was the first serious crack in the relationship between Heinlein and Scribner’s, which eventually culminated in Scribner’s rejecting Starship Troopers for publication. From Grumbles From the Grave.
April 19, 1949: Robert A. Heinlein to Alice Dalgliesh
The manuscript of Red Planet is being returned, through Mr. Blassingame.
You will find that I have meticulously followed all of your directions, from your letter, from your written notes, and from your notations on the manuscript, whether I agreed with them or not. I have made a wholehearted attempt to make the changes smoothly and acceptably and thereby to make the story hang together. I am not satisfied with the result, but you are free to make any additional changes you wish wherever you see an opportunity to accomplish your purposes more smoothly than I have been able to do.
Most of the changes have been made by excising what you objected to, or by minor inclusions and variations in dialog. However, on the matter of guns, I have written in a subscene in which the matter of gun licensing is referred to in sufficient explanatory detail to satisfy you, I think.
The balance of this letter is side discussion and is in no sense an attempt to get you to change your mind about any of your decisions concerning the book. I simply want to state my point of view on one matter and to correct a couple of points….
You and I have strongly different evaluations as to the best way in which to handle the problem of deadly weapons in a society. We do not seem to disagree in any important fashion as to the legitimate ways in which deadly weapons may be used, but we disagree strongly as to socially useful regulations concerning deadly weapons. I will first cite two points which sharply illustrate the disagreement. I have one of my characters say that the right to bear arms is the basis of all human freedom. I strongly believe that, but you required me to blue-pencil it. The second point concerns licensing guns. I had such licensing in the story, but I had one character strongly object to it as a piece of buttinsky bureaucracy, subversive of liberty—and I had no one defending it. You required me to remove the protest, then build up the licensing into a complicated ritual, involving codes, oaths, etc.—a complete reversal of evaluation. I have made great effort to remove my viewpoint from the book and to incorporate yours, convincingly—but in so doing I have been writing from reasons of economic necessity something that I do not believe. I do not like having to do that.
Let me say that your viewpoint and evaluation in this matter is quite orthodox; you will find many to agree with you. But there is another and older orthodoxy imbedded in the history of this country and to which I hold. I have no intention nor any expectation of changing your mind, but I do want to make you aware that there is another viewpoint that is held by a great many respectable people, and that it is quite old. It is summed up in the statement that I am opposed to all attempts to license or restrict the arming of individuals, such as the Sullivan Act of the State of New York. I consider such laws a violation of civil liberty, subversive of democratic political institutions, and self-defeating in their purpose. You will find that the American Rifle Association has the same policy and has had for many years.
France had Sullivan-type laws. When the Nazis came, the invaders had only to consult the registration lists at the local gendarmerie in order to round up all the weapons in a district. Whether the authorities be invaders or merely local tyrants, the effect of such laws is to place the individual at the mercy of the state, unable to resist. In the story Red Planet it would be all too easy for the type of licensing you insist on to make the revolution of the colonists not simply unsuccessful, but impossible.
As to such laws being self-defeating, the avowed purpose of such laws as the Sullivan Act is to keep weapons out of the hands of potential criminals. You are surely aware that the Sullivan Act and similar acts have never accomplished anything of the sort? That gangsterism ruled New York while this act was already in force? That Murder, Inc. flourished under this act? Criminals are never materially handicapped by such rules; the only effect is to disarm the peaceful citizen and put him fully at the mercy of the lawless. Such rules look very pretty on paper; in practice they are as foolish and footless as the attempt of the mice to bell the cat.
Such is my thesis, that the licensing of weapons is subversive of liberty and self-defeating in its pious purpose. I could elaborate the arguments suggested above at great length, but my intention is not to convince, but merely to show that there is another viewpoint. I am aware, too, that even if I did by some chance convince you, there remains the unanswerable argument that you have to sell to librarians and schoolteachers who believe the contrary.
Heinlein knuckled under, but he was not happy about it. He was so unhappy about the forced change that he even tried to get Scribner’s to put Dalgliesh’s name on the cover as Red Planet’s co-author, but the publishing house refused, as they believed it would hurt sales.
May 9, 1949: Robert A. Heinlein to Lurton Blassingame
As to the name on Red Planet ms., no, I’m not adamant; I’ll always listen to your advice and I’ll lose a lot of sleep before I will go directly against your advice. But I feel rather sticky about this point, as I hate like the deuce to see anything go out under my own name, without even sharing responsibility with Miss Dalgliesh, when said item includes propositions in which I do not believe. The matter of style, plot, and the effect on my literary reputation, if any, I am not adamant about, even though I am not happy about the changes—if you say to shut up and forget it, I’ll shut up. It’s the “Sullivan-Act-in-a-Martian-frontier-colony” feature that I find hard to swallow; from my point of view I am being required to support publicly a doctrine which I believe to be subversive of human liberty and political freedom.
The whole situation bothered Heinlein so much that when Dalgliesh’s successor pitched Heinlein on returning to Scribner’s, Heinlein flat-out refused to work with them again. Which is not terribly surprising, considering how he took the rejection of Starship Troopers, which involved not only the entire editorial board, but Charles Scribner himself.
“I do not know as yet whether I will do another juvenile book or not. If I decide to do another one, I do not know that I wish it to be submitted to Scribner’s. I have taken great pride in being a Scribner’s author, but that pride is all gone now that I have discovered that they are not proud of me.”
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
In which examples are requested:
Normally I try to improve my writing by reading lots of good quality writing, hoping that will come out in my own. But I’m wondering if any sort of list of bad, “don’t do this” examples (I mean in terms of writing quality, not ideological leanings) would come easily to mind for you that would be instructive for those of us who want to improve our own writing.
It would be very helpful, for me at least, to then see if any of those bad writing habits or tendencies reveal themselves in my own work, and train myself out of them.
I go back to the four elements of a book: CSSC. Characters, Story, Style, and Concepts. In decreasing order of importance, those are the most important elements.
Characters come first. The huge success of Rowling, Tolkien, Lewis, and Cooper stem from their heightened ability to create characters about whom we care. Therefore, the first example of what not to do should be those that suffer from poor characterization.
Go ahead, name three.
Story is the second most important element. You can have a pretty good book where the story makes no sense, so long as the characters are of sufficient interest. An even worse book would have poor characters and a generic or nonexistent story.
Name three more.
Style comes third. This is where we tend to most notably part company with the Pink SF crowd. They put style first, except when they put message above that. (Note: I did not say concept, but message. The latter is a subset of the former.)
But if you’ve got poor characters, a generic or nonexistent story, and bad style, now it’s getting pretty grim.
And three more.
Concept includes everything from Very Important Message to worldbuilding. And if you’ve got poor characters, a generic or nonexistent story, bad style, and a Very Important Message in a generic world, you’re approaching the nadir, which in my opinion is best represented by Mercedes Lackey.
Read Arrows of the Queen if you want to know how best not to do it.
Talia, a young runaway, is made a herald at the royal court after she
rescues one of the legendary Companions. When she uncovers a plot to
seize the throne, Talia must use her empathic powers to save the queen.
Cogitans Iuvenis was the first of several to ask:
So how would you classify each character in Throne of Bones.
My own work tends to illustrate the intrinsic challenge of writing outside one’s rank. Let’s look at the perspective characters first:
Marcus Valerius: too soon to tell. Either Alpha or Sigma.
Valerius Corvus: Alpha, but less Alpha than his brother Magnus
Valerius Fortex: Alpha
Severus Aulan: Beta
Theuderic: Sigma
Lodi: Beta
Meerfin: Delta
Non-perspective characters:
Valerius Magnus: Alpha
Severus Patronus: Alpha
Charles-Philippe de Mirid: Alpha
Skuli Skullbreaker: Alpha
Now, considering that it is a book that concerns a considerable quantity of kings, aristocrats, and generals, it is entirely appropriate that the characters should be weighted towards the Alpha rank. But I think the book would be better, and more interesting, if a broader range of characters were portrayed, so long as they were portrayed accurately according to their socio-sexual profile.
The challenge is that it is no easier for an Alpha to convincingly write a Gamma than vice-versa. Or for the Delta to write a Sigma, etc. Just as the Gamma writes paper Alphas, the Alpha is likely to write excessively sniveling Gammas that don’t do justice to either the observable exterior or the rich, self-centered interior.
Stan Hai isn’t sure how to go about doing it:
How can I write blue-shirt SF if I’m barely a Delta myself? Writing Alpha characters always turns out unrealistic for me, because I don’t know what I’m talking about. I finally quit writing Gamma & Omega characters, but when it comes to a hero, I’ve got three choices: Superman/James Bond/Neo (i.e. Alpha Mary Sues who never lose), Beta who’s competent in one thing (which I can’t write about because that’s not me) and Gamma Special (whom everyone is sick of.) The thing I’m working now is about a Gamma who becomes a Delta. He’s offered Special Power, and rejects it. Thoughts?
Stan has already taken the first step, which is to understand that sociosexuality exists and that it affects how people think, act, and react. Rather like the process of learning a language, he finally is beginning to understand how much he doesn’t know. This is true for EVERY man, of every rank. Women, unsurprisingly, tend to do a better job of writing two very different types of male characters, Alpha and Delta. They even occasionally delve into a very extreme form of smothering Gamma when they want to creep their female readers out.
It is harder for men to differentiate between the different male classes as we tend to gravitate towards writing our own perspective large on all the male characters. The one thing Louis L’Amour and Neal Stephenson have in common is that they both base all the male protagonists on their own sociosexuality. They are both significant authors, but L’Amour’s protagonists are all Alphas, brimming with self-confidence, laconic, proactive, and utterly certain of female interest in them, which is not at all surprising if you know his life story. Stephenson’s are all Gammas, insecure, diffident, reactive, and forever bewildered as to why the woman with whom they are involved has any interest in them at all.
In this, Stephenson is all-too-typical of modern male SF writers. And as Hai implies, when the average Pink SF writer tries to address sociosexuality, even unconsciously, he makes a hash of it. Patrick Rothfuss’s Kvothe is probably the best example, as it is hard to imagine a better, or more hilariously mistaken, Alpha-through-a-Gamma’s eyes ever being written.
The way to do it is to first understand your own social rank and grasp that you should use it for characters of that social rank. Second, seek to understand the perspective of the others. The recent series on Gamma, which features current and ex-Gammas talking about their feelings and thought processes, has been INVALUABLE to me as a writer. I now have a much better understanding of what makes them tick; had I tried to write a Gamma protagonist before this I would have likely failed almost as spectacularly as Rothfuss fails with his Alpha. I had no idea, none, that the key to writing Gamma is a man at the bottom of the totem pole who knows he should, by rights, be at the top because Special.
However, keep in mind that you may, instead, wish to flatter various socio-sexual ranks rather than describe them. Gammas like Stephenson and Scalzi do a good job of appealing to Gammas because what appeals to them naturally appeals to other Gammas. But if a sociosexual-aware writer were to focus on flattering the various social ranks, he might have even more success.
Which of those seven stories deeply appeals to you? Which of these fit the plots, protagonists and perspectives of books you know? See if you can identify a popular book or series that fits each of these sociosexual themes. Understand where you fit, then work to apply these basic filters in the way you describe your characters, and you will produce works that are more psychologically real to your readers, because you are reflecting the real psychological world back to them.
I’ve long wondered why the science fiction ranks were so littered with gamma males, both on the supply and the demand sides. I’d theorized it was because it was an escape for unathletic people; at my first group book-signing, about every third person commented how little like a “science fiction author” I looked. I didn’t understand what they meant until I looked at my fellow authors, most of whom were at least 100 pounds overweight and looked as if the only adventure upon which they’d ever embarked was Cheetoh Quest.
However, the recent discussion at Alpha Game concerning Graduating Gamma and Diagnosis: Gamma has opened my eyes to the real connection between the Gamma male and fantasy fiction. And, in answer to a question that someone asked earlier, I do think science fiction and fantasy, particularly modern Pink SF, is psychosocially dangerous for young men of the Gamma persuasion.
Consider this comment from JW, whose situation we’ve been analyzing at his request.
I’ve got this over-inflated sense of self, and that external things haven’t burst that. A combination of parents being too soft and a relatively forgiving and facilitating world/state/government/society/community/family has allowed this ego in me to survive. In a more challenging environment it would be broken down.
I’ve maintained this self from adolescence, and whereas for many people their parents “knock” that out of them Ive got this “tantrum-like child” in my head. Whats happening is I’m protecting this child in my head (which is objectively me, not an external body) and running away or avoiding anything that challenges the beliefs or ideas of this child-like persona. One of which would be “I’m special”….
Seeing myself within an objective social hierarchy using the conceptual
framework you have makes it much clearer. I’m wannabee alpha, in my head
I’m special and therefore deserving of alphaness, I’ll lead, I’ll get
the girl, I’ll be the hero, but the reality of what I am bursts that
bubble every time. Once I’m challenged by objectively superior men I
crumble and/or avoid run away. And yet I yearn for that while doing
nothing to either deserve it or try to get it.
This is the danger posed by the Pugs, the Rand al’Thors, the Harry Potters and so forth. In many ways, they are the precise opposites of the Frodos, the Conans, and the Marcus Valeriuses. (In the middle would be the Aragorns, the Tarans, and the Luke Skywalkers.) They are Special, with a capital S, but not due to anything they have ever done. They have Special powers and are innately recognized as superior beings with a right to lead, initially by the astute, but eventually by everyone.
Most importantly, they don’t have to do much more than show up in order to have leadership handed to them on a silver platter, nor do they have to do much beyond be a figurehead and occasionally make Difficult Decisions. If you think about it, they are essentially what the average millennial thinks a CEO is, and they are handed that quasi-CEO status for nothing more than being Special.
This is pure poison for the Gamma soul. It not only justifies his failure to act or to self-improve, but flatters his delusions about himself. Those who fail to recognize his Special status, those men who fail to fall in line to follow him and those women who fail to offer their hearts to him, are either evil or foolish and blind, just like the antagonists in the book. And one day, just like those antagonists, they will get their comeuppance! It is inevitable, it is fated.
No wonder the Farmboy’s Journey is so popular. It’s basically psychological reinforcement for the Gamma mind. And, writers take note, the less the protagonist has to actually do, the more that his accomplishments revolve around his being rather than his deeds, the more popular it is likely to be with the Gamma crowd because it flatters their desire to lead, get the girl, and be the hero.
Contrast this with Frodo. He is the hero, but he leads nothing and he gets no girl. All he does is shatter the power of Mordor and save the People of the West. Conan is the hero, wins a crown, and gets numerous girls, but he does it all through his deeds; he is the opposite of Special, being frequently dismissed as a mere barbarian. Marcus Valerius is an aristocrat, but for him it is as much burden as benefit, and while his Valerian blood provides him with leadership of the House legion, it doesn’t offer him anything more than the opportunity to fail.
I think one can tell a lot about a boy by learning who his favorite characters from various books are. For example, my favorites from The Lord of the Rings were always Eomer and Faramir, which in itself is telling in retrospect. Both were men who were content to be overshadowed, but proved to be competent leaders when the burden was thrust upon them, and both were stubbornly loyal to the point of endangering themselves. My guess is that neither of them likely held much appeal to the Gamma crowd, who would be more drawn to the hidden Specialness of Aragorn, and even more drawn to the likes of the infuriating Rand al’Thor and the insipid Harry Potter.
It’s an interesting field that remains largely unfurrowed, the psychosociality of literature. But one thing that is already clear is that if you’ve got a young Gamma on your hands, you might want to consider pushing more Louis L’amour, Robert E. Howard, and Jack London on him than permit him to indulge himself in repeated reinforcements of his delusional Specialness.
Larry Correia fisks Teapot Bradford’s call to not read straight white male authors while Superversive SF takes her SJW reader challenge:
In the spirit of taking this challenge seriously, I will be making an effort to avoid such writers and see what it does for my outlook. So I guess I should make a list of authors that are “acceptable” to read because they aren’t “cis white het males” to make it easier for anybody that wants to join me.
So lets see what is in?
Sarah A. Hoyt – POC Womyn
Larry Correia – POC
L. Jagi Lamplighter – Womyn
Kate Paulk – Womyn
Amanda Green – Womyn
Vox Day – POCand out
John Scalzi – Cis Het White Male
Jim Hines – Cis Het White Male
It really is time that Native American literature finally found its place in fantasy and science fiction after all. It is, frankly, shocking how white women like Catherynne M. Valente are shamelessly appropriating our culture and our legends. I can only applaud Ms. Bradford for encouraging her readers and followers to read my work and I hope they will enjoy it.
Meanwhile, another SJW at File 770 warns about the consequences of the cultural war in SF in light of the attempt to ban Adam Baldwin from a convention in Australia:
This isn’t going to end any better than the rest of these discussions.
Let me ask a question based on two possible thought experiments. Those who want to can ban Adam Baldwin if they want. The right get to ban a person of their choice from an event of their choice. Are we all happier and better people?
Alternatively we allow this sort if banning but to stop people using it capriciously we say you have to pay some amount of money which is not easy to raise in order to do it. The ‘other side’ get to donate it to a non political charity of their choice. In this case I’d guess it would be between a quarter and a half million dollars. Is this issue really that important to people if it comes down to real effort, not just arguing online?
Think up your own method if you like but remember that your opponents get to use the same rulebook.
We can’t go on doing this. It has just about destroyed the gaming community and it could do the same to the SF community. The politics don’t matter. The same situation will crop up sooner or later with different politics. The problem is that neither side respects the process. Whoever amasses the most angry tweets wins but nobody believes that is either just or fair. Nobody has their thinking chaged, simply reinforced. The losers just retreat to reorganise and swear to be more vicious next time.
And now, the punchline, from the same SJW, Martin Easterbrook:
At Loncon last year we had many fans from the Ukraine and Russia, two countries who are effectively at war and who go out of the way to humiliate each others POWs. There were no problems with any of them. They stuck to the fan tradition that, as far as we can, we “leave our guns at the door”. This has become unfashionable lately but for some of us it remains something that is part of the core of being a fan.
Some decisions are difficult, for instance I’ve personally suggested to a convention that they exclude Vox Day because I believe he has personally insulted another author to the point where she would be justified in punching him on the nose if she met him. I would not want to attend a convention that had Orson Scott Card as a goh but neither would I want to go to a convention that excluded him completely.
As I pointed out, by Mr. Easterbrook’s standard, John Scalzi is due enough punches in the nose that he’s effectively given me permission to beat the little creep to death. I wonder, how many insults does Larry Correia have to take before he is justified in playing Mountain to Scalzi’s Viper?
Silvia Moreno-Garcia says no to strong female characters:
I was not a fan of The Book of Life. I will not elaborate too much on this point except to mention that when I watched it I recalled a bit from an article by Sophia McDougall published in The New Statesman:
I remember watching Shrek with my mother.
“The Princess knew kung-fu! That was nice,” I said. And yet I had a vague sense of unease, a sense that I was saying it because it was what I was supposed to say.
She rolled her eyes. “All the princesses know kung-fu now.”
I thought the same thing about the heroine of The Book of Life. She knows kung-fu and she spews the kind of “feisty” attitude we must associate with heroines and she is therefore strong and everything is kosher.
In an effort to get a wider variety of women in movies and books, we have often heard the mantra that we need more strong female characters. However, as some commentators have noted “strong” has often become a code word for a very specific kind of character. The kind that must demonstrate her chops via feats of physical strength. So, for example, in Pirates of the Caribbean 2 the heroine Elizabeth Swann has now acquired fencing skills. This serves as a credential for her “strength” even though the character had demonstrated “strength” of another type already in the first movie: she was smart, even devious, managing to wriggle her way out of more than one situation.
Shana Mlawski did an interesting study of male and female characters a few years ago. The main question she wanted to answer was whether male characters are more immediately likeable than female characters. Her conclusion:
All of the above data suggest to me that we (or at least the critics at EW) like a wide variety of male character types but prefer our women to be two-dimensionally “badass” and/or evil.
That means that badasses like Sarah Connor and villains like Catherine Trammell could be palatable to audiences. Male characters, however, were allowed to come in a wider range and still deemed likeable. Men, Mlwaski, writes, could be “passive” characters. Women? They could blow stuff up or kill people….
In fact, a couple of weeks ago I watched the 1980s adaptation of Flash Gordon and
was mildly delighted to see that Dale Arden was “strong” too! Despite
the cheesiness and bubbly sexism Dale kicked ass! She was for the
duration of the film most interested in exclaiming FLASH! but at one
point she took off her heels and beat about half a dozen guards. Strong
woman, indeed.And that, I guess, is my point. We really haven’t gotten that far from Dale and her display of 1980s strength.
Sarah Hoyt says much the same thing in passing while writing about Portugal:
In the same way the ten-thousandth Empowered Woman Defeats Evil Males saga might posibly contribute to the self-esteem of some severely battered woman who SOMEHOW managed to avoid all other identical tomes rolling off the presses for the last twenty years at least. For me they are just a “oh, heck, yeah. Go sisterrrr. YAWN” as I toss the book aside.
I have three main objections to strong female characters. First, the basic concept is a lie. Barring mystical powers or divine heritage, the strong female character is simply nonsense. They don’t exist, they aren’t convincingly imagined or portrayed, and they’re essentially nothing more than token feminist propaganda devices. Freud would, in this case correctly, put the whole phenomenon down to penis envy.
Second, it is tedious. As both women note, strong female characters are neither new nor interesting. If you’re blindly copying a trope that hasn’t been new for three decades, you’re just boring the reader. And third, it is dreadful writing. Most “strong female” characters observably are not women, they are simply male characters dressed in female suits. They don’t talk like women, they don’t act like women, and when we’re shown their interior monologues, they don’t think like women either. They’re about as convincingly female as those latent serial killers who like to wear those bizarre rubber women suits. They are, in fact, the literary equivalent of those freaks.
I’m not the only one to notice this. Carina Chocano observes: ““Strong female characters,” in other words, are often just female characters with the gendered behavior taken out.” In other words, they’re one-dimensional men in women suits.
Ironically, men tend to write more interesting “strong female characters” because
at least they know what men think like when they are writing about men
in women suits. When women do it, they’re writing what they imagine the
man the female writer is pretending is a woman would think like. It’s
convoluted, it’s insane, and it should be no surprise to anyone that most stories based on
such self-contradictory characters don’t turn out very well.
On a tangential note, McRapey was bragging about how people couldn’t tell if the protagonist of Lock In was male or female throughout the entire book. He even had two separate narrators, one of each sex, for the audio book. Now, not only is that silly stunt-writing, but think about the literary implications. It means the behavior of the character and its interior monologue is so haplessly inept and unrealistically bland that the reader cannot even ascertain something as intrinsically basic to human identity as the mere sex of the character.
Can you imagine if you couldn’t tell from their behavior if Anna Karenina was a woman or if Aragorn was a man? Would that inability improve or detract from the story? Strong female characters are bad enough, but the occluded sex of Lock In marks a new depth in bad science fiction writing.
Guy Gavriel Kay is one of the better fantasy authors writing today. I posted a review of his The Lions of Al-Rassan, which is my favorite of his books, at Recommend. But it is a shame, bordering on a tragedy, that he doesn’t see how his inclination towards atheistic secularism will prevent him from ever approaching literary greatness:
The Canadian author Guy Gavriel Kay has explored the issues of faith and religious intolerance in several of his fantasy books, such as his duology “The Sarantine Mosaic,” set in a world modelled on Byzantium during the time of the Emperor Justinian. Kay’s stories echo the conflict that arose historically between such religions as paganism, Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.
. . . there has been a natural progression from Fionavar, through Tigana and [A Song for] Arbonne, to The Lions of Al-Rassan, away from the mythic and the fantastical, and towards the human and the historical. The progression from myth to religion is another way to describe it, not that the books are religious, but that we move away from what, in Fionavar, I’ve sometimes called a Homeric world; the gods intervene in the affairs of men, they have their own squabbles and feuds amongst themselves, and yet they’re physically present, men can sleep with the goddess, men can battle with words with the gods – the gods are present. In Tigana, magic is still there, but, for the most part, magic and its use was employed as a sustained metaphor for the eradication of culture. The major use of magic in the novel Tigana is the elimination of the name of the country Tigana, which for me was very much metaphorical. In A Song for Arbonne, we’re into a story about how religion, the organized religion, the clergy, manipulates the people with their beliefs about gods and goddesses. By the time we get to The Lions of Al-Rassan, it’s mainly about how organized religion takes away the freedom and the breathing space of individuals. So there is a natural progression, which is not to say that I know where the next book is going, that that progression is necessarily continuing.
It certainly seems however that the religious dimension is not going to disappear; it’s been very strong in the last two books, and certainly The Fionavar Tapestry has, in a sense, a proto-religion at the heart of it. Can you conceive of writing a book which does not have religion as a factor?Yes, I’m sure I can; I am not a religious man, what I think I am is a person keenly interested in history. When you talk about proto-religion, you’re talking about, as I said, the Homeric idea of gods and goddesses incarnate, and the progression in history away from that. I think that, if I would characterize my interest, it’s very much in the historical and mythical roots of what we have become as cultures. When I say “we”, I mean Western men and women, because that’s the culture that I feel most at home in, it’s the culture that most of us are, to some degree, shaped by. So, in that sense, the four books (treating Fionavar as one) have been incorporating that tension, but it’s not in any huge sense central to my thinking or my own work.
Does that mean you might write a novel about the Enlightenment, about skepticism coming to the fore?I think skepticism comes to the fore in the last two books to a great degree. I think that it’s part of the movement from myth to religion. In The Lions of Al-Rassan, one of the reasons the book is a fantasy, rather than a story about medieval Spain, even though it’s very closely modelled on real history, is that I wanted to see what would happen to people’s preconceptions and prejudices about cultures: Christian, Moslem, Jewish, if the names were changed and if the religious beliefs were rendered virtually banal: one religion worships the Sun, another worships the Moon, and another worships the stars. And out of that relatively banal conflict of ideologies, you have crushingly brutal military and psychological conflict. When you speak of skepticism, it seems to me that The Lions of Al-Rassan should be very clear for the readers: the point that underlies the detaching of these religious conflicts from their real underpinnings is that, if we step back a bit, we can start to see how much violence, how much conflict is generated by something that may be no more complex than whether you worship the Sun rising in the morning or the stars beginning to shine at night.
It’s rather remarkable that such an intelligent and talented man can be so brutally foolish as a result of his anti-religious bias. The sad thing is that he transforms what could have been a great book into one that is merely good, and is dishonest to boot. The amusing thing is that he appears to think that his obvious biases are not readily apparent to the intelligent reader; faithless ecumenicism is the romantic ideal he portrays in the novel.
The mere fact that I could write the following while knowing nothing of the author’s religious faith, or lack there of, demonstrates the intrinsic problem of the irreligious attempting to meaningfully address religious themes.
This surfeit of excellence might have been excused as a stylistic
statement on medieval panegyrics were it not for the author’s
excessively modern take on religion. Despite the plot being dependent
upon the conflict between the star-worshipping Asherites (Muslims),
sun-worshipping Jaddites (Christians) and moon-worshipping Kindath
(Jews), the author’s own apparent lack of religious sensibility prevents
the book from being as rich and moving as it easily could have been. (A
moment’s research confirms that Kay is not, by his own statement, a
religious man; it definitely shows throughout.)
Note that the interview proves that Kay’s portrayal of religion in the book is intentionally false and shallow. He does not recognize that by rendering such a false account of religion, he has undermined his own attempt to make a case against it. By detaching the “religious conflicts” from their real underpinnings, what he proves is that religion doesn’t have much, if anything, to do with violent conflicts that arise from the normal historical reasons of ambition, pride, greed, and the desire for power.
Like most secular writers, Kay fails to grasp that if he wishes to successfully attack religion, he must portray it with absolutely rigorous honesty. Because, in The Lions of Al-Rassan, all he has managed to accomplish in this regard is to reduce the literary value of his own work in order to demolish a strawman of his own construction. In this way, he is the anti-Eco, as Eco, despite his own secular inclinations, does his fictional characters the courtesy of taking their beliefs seriously and at face value, which is why he is the better and more memorable writer.
I have never forgotten the genuine anger in Umberto Eco’s voice when he corrected me concerning a question I asked him about the “villain” of The Name of the Rose: “Jorge is not the villain, he is one of the heroes … He is expressing
certain attitudes of his time, but I don’t consider him a villain. It is
a confrontation between two worldviews, and a worldview is a system of
ideas.”
That is the difference between a great writer and one who is merely a fine literary technician with a bent for storytelling. The great writer is willing to permit his characters to speak for themselves, according to their worldviews. The technician, on the other hand, insists on reducing his characters to puppets intended to express his worldview.