Tag: writing

John C. Wright considers the questions of literature as propaganda in “Writing with an Axe to Grind”:

A propagandist, like an attorney loyal only to his client, will argue his client’s case, and does not bring up any points helpful to the opposition. An artist, if he is honestly presenting an image of the world as it is or as it should be, will give both sides of the argument, because in nature there are two sides to each question, if not more. An artist may be indeed quite loyal to his burning vision of the world, but an attorney is a partisan loyal to a cause, not to a vision.

The attorney is trying to get a result, that is, to persuade a jury; whereas the poet is trying capture a in a web of words a reality somehow more real than reality itself, as strange as Norse gods catching Fenrir in a gossamer strand make of nine impossible things.

A propagandist is even less honest: he does not actually argue the case nor even tell the jurors that there are two sides to the case. He uses rhetoric rather than logic, uses appeals to emotion and uses other fundamentally indirect and dishonest tactics. The perfect propagandist changes his victim’s mind without the victim even being aware of the operation.

Contrariwise, philosophy confronts a judge with two opposite view points and calls on his to use his dispassionate reasoning to render a verdict.  Propaganda is the mere opposite of this. Propaganda lulls rather than awakens the judgment….

There are two dimensions of propaganda to keep in mind. One is the depth of the message being preached, and the other is the frequency.

To measure the depth, use the following rule of thumb: if the message were removed, would the rest of the story still stand? For example, in STARSHIP TROOPERS the answer is clearly a resounding No. It is not a war story. The fighting scenes are few and far between and sketchy to the point of zenlike reductionism. It is a story about the pragmatic morality of fighting, the patriotic duty to fight. Remove the speeches and everything in the tale uses to buttress or exemplify the points made in the speeches, and the entire story is gone.

Again, try to imagine ATLAS SHRUGGED without the struggle between the productive and archrational supermen and the vampiric irrational socialists, and there is no story. I suppose there is sort of a harsh and angular love story between Dagny and Reardon, but since the ultimate resolution of that plotline is forced by the author’s peculiar theories of the metaphysical foundations of love and romance, even that would have to be dropped.

Likewise again, while parts of THE GOLDEN COMPASS or THE SUBTLE KNIFE might be preserved without the anticlerical message, there is no story in AMBER SPYGLASS aside from the struggle between the good freethinking atheists and the Evil Church of Evil and their clownlike god who evaporates upon exposure to air.

Frequency is another thing. It is common enough in movies and books to hide a Leftwing ‘sucker punch’ beneath what otherwise seems and innocent story, or whip out an anti-Bush joke in the third act that has nothing to do with the story, or suddenly make an old wizard or a comedy relief viking a sodomite, in order to make the homosexual disorder seems harmless and unremarkable. These are called sucker punches because they are the opposite of deep propaganda: their whole effect comes from them being unexpected to the point of being extraneous.

So imagine listening to a comedian telling ninety nine jokes about his mother in law, and one remark that is not a joke at all to the effect that everyone who regards homosexual acts as sinful, or even imprudent, is a hateful bigot with no right to a polite hearing: and Christ was evil for preaching sexual purity, and the Antichrist is Our Master.

In this case, the ninety nine jokes was nothing more than the patter of a confidence trickster, a con job to get you to lower your guard, to lull your suspicions, so he could punch you while you were nodding, you sucker.

This is an interesting perspective and it further demonstrates the difference between Pink and Blue SF. While there is, without question, propaganda being written on both sides, one of the hallmarks of Pink SF/F is the observable fact that in most cases, the personal is the political and the propaganda is the story.

Remove the Christian propaganda from Narnia and you still have an astonishingly compelling set of fantasy stories. Remove the feminist propaganda from the average Pink SF/F novel and you’ve got nothing but a bog standard romance novel.

Wright’s latest work, CITY BEYOND TIME, could technically be labeled a brief, except for the fact that it is so masterfully presented, so deeply philosophical, and so perfectly woven into the story that very few will be aware of the book on that level. It is not, however, propaganda.

Stross’s THE RHESUS CHART, on the other hand, is neither a brief nor propaganda by Wright’s definition, as the expected anti-Christian asides fall squarely into Exception (1): “a part of the author’s world view integral to him”. By a happy coincidence (or was it prescience), I bookmarked a few passages last week that nicely demonstrate this.

1. “As non sequiturs go Pete has heard worse. In parish work you periodically have to deal with young, slightly alienated gay teens whose overly concerned parents drag them in for a talking-to by the vicar—there’s something strange about Harry. Part of Pete’s job (as he sees it) is to talk them down from the ramparts of militant anti-Christianism, explain that no, the entire Church does not hate them, and then point them at the nearest LGBT youth counseling service. With luck, in a few years’ time they’ll be happy and stable, and remember you when the last of the reactionary ’phobes have finally flounced out of the General Synod.”
2.  “Oh good god.” Mo doesn’t believe in any gods other than the ones I believe in, but the expostulation comes instinctively.
3.  “Oh, that’s easy!” He looks up. “Would you believe that, of forty-six parishioners informally polled, thirty-six of them believe in the existence of evil incarnate, in the person of the Devil?” He sighs. “Well, their average age was somewhere north of sixty, and they’re self-selected for being frequent attendees at religious services, so there was bound to be an element of literal-mindedness to them. But, taking the Devil as a baseline, the really interesting thing is that forty of them believe in vampires. Over 85 percent! Vampires are out-polling Satan in the bogeyman charts this decade.” He takes a mouthful of fizz. “Mind you, I added a couple of control questions. I said they were a self-selected sample? 52 percent of them think gays are going to hell, and 39 percent think the Earth was created late one Saturday night in October of 4004 BC.” He looks pained. “I can see I have some sermons to write on the subject of metaphor and creation myths. And tolerance.”

In fairness, these little jabs can’t really be described as sucker punches when they are telegraphed so obviously. But however ineptly they are administered, their intent is clearly to inform (unnecessarily as it happens) the reader of Mr. Stross’s worldview (to the extent it can be described as a coherent and singular entity as opposed to a dynamic collection of externally imposed politically correct opinions) rather than “manipulate the reader into adherence to an ideology”.

One of the interesting things THE RHESUS CHART caused me to reflect upon was the way atheists writing vampire novels resolutely stick to certain conventional aspects of the vampire myth, such as being undead, blood-drinking, superhuman strength, quasi-immortality, and a vulnerability to silver, stakes, and beheading, while just happening to remove the power of the Cross over vampires. I think this may reflect an element of anti-Christian propaganda, as well as a certain moral confusion about the intrinsically evil nature of the monsters.

And it shows how these biases can structurally weaken a story. Because, quite often, the very writer who has removed the power of the Cross (to say nothing of the Name of Jesus Christ) over the monsters subsequently decides that it would be very useful if there was a centuries-old organization that either knows about the monsters or hunts them, and then promptly attempts to introduce some element of the Catholic Church despite the fact that the Church has no more ability to deal with them than any Fortune 500 corporation.

One thing I have learned over time is that the literary pinkshirts’ notion that they are superior wordsmiths and all right wing SF authors are inept third-rate hacks is about as legitimate and founded in reality as the Left’s self-serving insistence that they are highly intelligent and all right wing people are stupid:

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
A future in which right wing SF authors actually influence the future. Horrific.

Charlie Stross ‏@cstross
@damiengwalter Like the Gernsback Continuum, only in degenerate mongrel second-hander form, right?

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
@cstross A future entirely composed of poorly composed sentences.
Expand

Vox Day ‏@voxday
@damiengwalter @cstross As opposed to a future broken up by parentheses? (3.2 per page on average.) Why yes, I did read THE RHESUS CHART!

As it happens, I recently read two entertaining SF novels: MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS by Larry Correia and THE RHESUS CHART by Charles Stross. Both were good books, entertaining, and worth the read. However, if you read them both in quick succession, you will have no choice but to conclude that Larry Correia is not merely the better writer overall (taking into account plot, characters, depth, and original ideas as well as style), he is actually the better prose stylist of the two.

Now, keep in mind that I am a genuine fan of Stross’s Laundry books, of which THE RHESUS CHART is the latest. But Stross cannot manage to maintain a consistent narrative voice, he even violates the “show, don’t tell” rule in a literal manner. I mean, forget the usual “as you know, Bob” for which neophytes are so often criticized, I’m talking about an actual multi-page aside from the narrator addressed directly to the reader in order to explain what was happening elsewhere during the events previously described. Stross doesn’t so much tell a story as explain it; it is only because his stories are so interesting and his ideas are so clever that most people fail to recognize that his literary ability is mediocre at best.

And then there are the parentheses. Oh, sweet Mark Twain on methamphetamine, the parentheses! I don’t know if Stross’s editor was killed in some sort of terrible accident involving brackets and this is some sort of bizarre grammatical tribute to her or what, but regardless, he frequently insists on delivering what apparently is supposed to be additional comic detail via parentheses SEVERAL TIMES PER PAGE. (Seriously, on one page I counted FIVE SETS of them and there are no less than 371 sets in a 368-page book!) Lest you think I exaggerate, here is one of the examples I bookmarked in incredulity. Just to highlight this unusual case of Tourette’s Grammar, I have put the parenthesized text in bold:

Mhari was one of my learning experiences.

(I’m not sure what I was, from her side of the looking glass: roadkill, perhaps. Or a useful idiot. Something like that. But let’s not go there . . .)

Rewind to the late nineties/early noughties. There’s me, Bob Howard, working on a postgrad CS degree. This means I’m putting in roughly eighty hours a week on the books and in front of the computer screen, in a field where the proportion of women is roughly what you’d expect of a sixteenth-century Benedictine monastery. I was, not to put too fine a point on it, single. I then managed to bring myself to the attention of the Laundry by means too embarrassing to relate. (Well, okay: I nearly landscaped Wolverhampton by accident, because that’s what happens when your funky new realtime rendering algorithm that uses a really neat logical shortcut you can’t believe nobody invented before turns out to be an open and ungrounded summoning grid. Which is the extradimensional equivalent of a fast food joint with a buzzing neon sign that says: GOOD EATS HERE. Can we move on, please?)

So, the organization made me a job offer I couldn’t—wasn’t allowed to—refuse. And then they stuck me behind a desk to rot for a few years, or at least until I’d been thoroughly studied and quantified and got sufficiently bored to ask for something more interesting to do instead. During which period I found myself working elbow-to-elbow with a whole raft of people I wouldn’t otherwise have met, mostly in similar straits (they saw something uncanny, heard something go bump in the night, and got swept up in the dragnet when they were found to be useful), some of whom had no Y chromosomes and were also single.

Like I said, Mhari was a learning experience for me. Do you really want to hear about our doomed on-again/off-again car-crash relationship? The immediate nature of the teachable moment for little old twenty-something me was, as a drunken friend of mine questionably phrased it sometime later, “Do not stick your dick in the bad crazy.” It took a lot longer, and a whole lot more perspective (not to mention being married for several years to someone who most certainly was not the “bad crazy”) for me to work out what was actually going on in our dysfunctional relationship, which alternated between bouts of hot primal monkey sex and screaming pan-throwing arguments. What I think was happening was that the “me” that Mhari was alternately fucking and throwing things at was not me, but some sort of demented, revenge-rebound placeholder for a previous boyfriend of many years and some commitment. She’d split up with him acrimoniously less than six months before we first so much as snogged, and he’d done a beautiful gaslight number on her in the process. (Either that or she was bipolar with a topping of psycho special sauce: but resentful rebound relationships are a hell of a lot commoner, and I’ll go with Occam’s razor this time.) The net result was that she was a walking bomb, primed to take out all her existential resentment on whatever man she next took up with, because Bill (I think he was a Bill) had convinced her that all men were fundamentally untrustworthy bastards who would lie to her at the drop of a hat. And I, having recently emerged blinking into the light from a quasi-monastic existence, was simply a convenient cuddly punchbag.

Now, I don’t know about you, but I don’t think any writer (or, to be more specific, novelist), who insists on inserting no less than THREE (3!) parentheses in a single paragraph has any business criticizing the prose of other authors, particularly on the sole basis of their political affiliations. (Unless, of course, his primary metric for literary quality is an exotic, but objective one based on the ratio of grouping symbols to words.)

What’s interesting, however, is that Larry and Charlie are essentially flip sides of the same coin. They both write what might be termed bureaucratic urban fantasy, they both rely heavily on combining Lovecraft with original takes on traditional monsters, (vampires in the most recent Stross, Frankenstein’s monster in the most recent Correia), they both utilize Mary Sues as protagonists in their trademark series, and they both have strong, easily recognizable voices that are casual to the point of occasionally sounding like college students. They are also both masters of detail concerning their areas of expertise. But the chief literary difference between them doesn’t stem from their political differences, their different nationalities, or even their religious differences, but from their different socio-sexual ranks.

Correia’s Owen Pitt is an accountant. Stross’s Bob Howard is an IT guy. Neither one is a conventional handsome hero naturally beloved by women. But whereas Pitt is brave, confident in his abilities, aggressive, loves weaponry, and pursues the hot girl even if she seems to be out of his league, Howard is cowardly, insecure, passive, fears weaponry, and considers himself lucky that an older, more experienced woman deigns to take an interest in him. Pitt is a lesser Alpha, Howard is a high Gamma. And in these two specific cases, the protagonists directly reflect the socio-sexuality of their creators, which consequently shapes the paths that their stories take as well as the literary style they use to tell them.

Contrast with the Stross sample the following one from Correia’s. Notice that while Stross is too insecure to make a straightforward statement without modifying it and is afraid to cite a common saying (which he quotes incorrectly anyhow) without signifying his awareness of potential feminist disapproval, Correia cheerfully embraces his honest masculine enthusiasm without feeling any need to apologize for it. Stross frequently talks about what is happening whereas Correia prefers to simply show it. Two different approaches, both valid, but bound to primarily appeal to very different audiences.

“Check this thing out. We can still hit the range while there is a little bit of light left.” He led me to a workbench where a strange-looking gun was mounted in a vise.

“Saiga?” I asked. That was a Russian shotgun that was based upon the action of an AK.

“At first. On this one I mounted an adjustable ACE stock, with recoil pad of course, FAL pistol grip, holographic sight system, EOTech in particular, night vision compatible. Full rail system, so you can mount lights or IR illuminators, or as you can see here, a Tula 6G15 40mm grenade launcher, front-loading, single-shot. The barrel has been cut down to twelve inches, modified choke, gave it the Vang comp treatment also so the patterns are good and tight and recoil is softer. I modified the trigger group, so top position is safe, middle is full, bottom is semi. I’ve got the gas adjusted so you are looking at about 700 RPM on full.”

He was speaking my language. “Don’t these only come with five-shot magazines?”

“I’ve got a bunch of nine-round box mags, and two twenty-round drums. I’ve tested them all, all are reliable, but on full you can run through the nine rounder in a second, so use it sparingly. Go ahead, check it out.”

I gently picked up the massive weapon. It was short, but it was thick and heavy, and that was while it was empty. Add almost a box of shells and a grenade and it would be even more so. I worked the action. The bolt was slick and the spring was powerful. Milo had thoughtfully added a shelf to the safety so that it could be operated with the trigger finger. It pointed better than it looked when I snapped it into position.

“What about specialty munitions?”

“There is a gas regulator at the end of the hand guard. I machined a new one so that it now has three positions. If you have the regulator in the right spot for the right ammo, it isn’t going to malfunction.”

I ran my finger along the regulator, and found detents for the different power levels. There was also a mystery button. When I pushed it a hinge unlocked, and an eight-inch, heavy-duty bayonet was released. The blade was absurdly sharp and thick. With a flick of the muzzle it locked into place with a snap. It was not the world’s best-balanced spear, but I wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of it.

“No freaking way. That is awesome.”

“I got the idea off the Czech CZ52, but I improved it. It folds to the side, out of the way of the grenade launcher. You don’t hardly even know it’s there until you need it. Bottom edge is good cutting steel, on the top edge is a silver inlay. You stick this in a lycanthrope and it’s going to know it.”

“Why did you paint it brown?” I asked as I slowly turned the monstrous weapon over in my hands. It felt good. I realized I was grinning like an idiot.

He shrugged. “I’m tired of black guns. Everybody has black guns. I wanted this to be a little different. Plus black gets hot in the sun. I tried to give it kind of a desert-tiger-stripe thing. So do you like it?”

“Milo… This is the coolest gun I have ever seen in my life. And I’ve seen a lot of guns. How does it shoot?”

“Let’s go find out. From what I’ve seen from you in practice, and from what Julie told me about your shooting on the freighter, I have been waiting for somebody worthy of Abomination.”

Abomination? That was just too cool. Milo handed me a sack of loaded magazines. “Okay, just one more question. Exactly how many gun laws does this break?”

Milo’s red eyebrows scrunched together in thought. He started to count on his fingers, and then thought better of it.

“All of them.”

Flawless style? No. But effective? Indubitably. Better than Stross’s interminable internal monologuing? Without question. Whereas a good editor might wish to tweak a word or two in the Correia text, he’d want a chainsaw for the Stross sample. It is true that one cannot always judge the writer by the book. But, by the same token, in some cases it is not difficult for the observant reader to discern when a writer is not only writing what he knows, but who he is.

John C. Wright answers a question concerning whether books can contain messages concerning politics, religion, or philosophy without being propaganda:

I am a Christian, hence I regard God as the ultimate floor of reality, the one necessary being from which all contingent beings flow. If I am a faithful Christian, this one ultimate reality influences all lesser realities, and there is no neutral ground. Even something as lighthearted as a fight scene, I must decide if the characters act like pagan warriors or chivalrous knights, that is, with the romance of Christendom. Even a love scene must show love to be romantic, as a Christian sees love, or as situation of shameful weakness, erotic madness, or mutual exploitation, as various pagan and secular worldviews see love.

The Leftist for whom politics is the ultimate floor of being is an idolater, and makes power arrangements his personal little crappy god. It influences everything in his thought and life, and if left unchecked will eventually ruin his writing.

The Leftist who is a faithful Leftist only on their sabbath days, and otherwise ignores the business (and that would be the majority of Leftists) can write a perfectly passable story about space pirates kidnapping space princesses without any hint of politics, to the satisfaction of all involved. He will write his love scenes with romance and his fight scenes with chivalry without noticing or caring about the origin of these Christian cultural artifacts. He will not think of them as particularly Christian, merely as part of the moral atmosphere and cultural background of his society. He will not notice the incongruity between his art and his philosophy.

The distinction Wright is making can be seen very clearly in the difference between Larry Correia’s MONSTER HUNTER NEMESIS and Greg Bear’s DARWIN’S RADIO, both of which I recently finished reading. Now, Bear is much more highly regarded in the science fiction community. DARWIN’S RADIO won the Nebula Award for best novel and was nominated for the Hugo, Locus SF, and John W. Campbell awards. Bear is a multiple award-winner who is described as a hard SF writer “who often addresses major questions in contemporary science and culture with fictional solutions.”

Larry, on the other hand, can’t get nominated for the Hugo without being accused of rape, child abuse, and sexual deviancy… no, wait, that was Marion Zimmer Bradley. Or was it Samuel Delany? Anyhow, the point is that his books are generally considered little more than pulp urban fantasy that is popular among right-wing mouth breathers due to its heavy gun-porn content. And that’s not an entirely unfair characterization, if one looks solely at the early Monster Hunter books.

But here is the interesting thing. I will come right out and say that NEMESIS will hold up much better over time than DARWIN’S RADIO, and eventually will be seen to be a deeper, more serious novel, because, under the skin of its hellacious action-fury, the former contains the significant examination of some long-contemplated philosophical questions, whereas despite its erudite flights of scientific fancy, the latter contains nothing deeper than cheap atheist propaganda.

I’ll explain the philosophical questions of NEMESIS on Monday, when I review the book that is easily the best of the Monster Hunter series to date. And as for the propagandistic elements running so strong within DARWIN’S RADIO, the book is almost startling for its contempt for the unwashed, easily frightened masses, with a lack of faith in humanity surpassed only by Isaac Asimov’s “Nightfall”.

The core idea is a response to the fossil and DNA dichotomies that falsify the models supporting the theory of evolution by natural selection: evolution doesn’t merely punctuate its equilibrium, but occurs instantaneously across a broad spectrum of a species under stress because [long complicated theory concerning viruses I couldn’t possibly explain on the basis of a single reading.] Informed? Highly. Ingenious? Absolutely. But then recall that the “major question” he’s nominally addressing (despite never expressing any serious doubts about the consensus dogma), is “why doesn’t the evidence support the conventional neo-Darwinian synthesis?”

And his answer is absurd. Magic Science Elves or Alien Uplifters or even a bored, sadistic Creator God would have been considerably more plausible than the Magic Ancient Virus-Program, which raises far more questions than it purports to answer. The real question underlying the nominal one is: “just how terribly would those awful little people who are too ignorant to place blind faith in scientistry react if they found themselves in a situation where living as a traditional married couple would cause them to a) believe that the wife was unfaithful, and, b) humanity was on the verge of becoming extinct through miscarriages.

As you can probably imagine, it isn’t long before we are treated to riots, televangelists, thousands of women being murdered by their husbands, the president and several governors being assassinated by a bomb, and even a ritual lampooning of Pat Robertson.

“They’re calling it ‘original sin,’ you know that?”

“I hadn’t heard that,” Augustine said.

“Tune in the Christian Broadcasting Network. They’re splitting constituencies all across America. Pat Robertson is telling his audience these monsters are God’s final test before the arrival of the new Kingdom of Heaven. He says our DNA is trying to purge itself of all our accumulated sins, to…what was his phrase, Ted?”

The aide said, “Clean up our records before God calls Judgment Day.”

“That was it.”

“We still don’t control the airwaves, Frank,” Augustine said. “I can’t be held responsible…”

“Half a dozen other televangelists say these unborn children are the devil’s spawn,” Shawbeck continued, building up steam. “Born with the mark of Satan, one-eyed and hare-lipped. Some are even saying they have cloven hooves.”

Augustine shook his head sadly.

“They’re your support group now,” Shawbeck said, and waved his arm for the aide to step forward. He struggled to his feet, shoved the crutches into his armpits. “I’m tendering my resignation tomorrow morning. From the Taskforce and from the NIH. I’m burned out. I can’t take any more of this ignorance—my own or anybody else’s. Just thought you should be the first to know. Maybe you can consolidate all the power.”

Oh, that dreadful ignorance! Oh, those awful violence-prone Christians! Only turning to science and giving unlimited power to politicians wise enough to unhesitatingly accept the untested and unproven assertions of scientists can save Man! With only superficial changes, this could have just as easily been a book about global warming, or nuclear disarmament, or an unexpected attack by rapidly evolving salamanders.

That’s what Wright means when he talks about the leftist ruining his own writing. I found myself putting down DARWIN’S RADIO twice, and had to force myself to finish it once it became clear that the philosophical message was not merely an integral part of the story, the message WAS the story. The characters, the plot, even the “major questions addressed” were only there to serve the all-important Message: Evolution by natural selection is real despite the appearance of the evidence and only Scientists can save you from the blind fury of the ignorant masses.

So, it’s not terribly surprising to discover that despite its scientific erudition and its panoply of literary awards, DARWIN’S RADIO is presently ranked #731,269 on Amazon and Greg Bear is now reduced to writing game tie-in novels for an Xbox game. This leads me to conclude it might be interesting, and more than a little informative in this regard, to compare Bear’s CITY AT THE END OF TIME to John C. Wright’s CITY BEYOND TIME.

John C. Wright has the EXCLUSIVE details:

Before I left SWFA, the last sight I saw of the SWFA Mansion in New Jersey was the sight of Mr Martin diligently at work, his eyes red with lack of sleep, his typewriter smoking, steaming, and emitting sparks, nine ashtrays filled with cigarette and cigar butts and broken hoohaks heaped about it, bags of Frito chips not only empty but ripped open and the chip-dust licked dry, drained bottles of cheap claret smashed in the hearth in a glittering pile, dead elfs on the doorstep, wounded muses with threadbare wings struggling to escape the chimney, and meanwhile a horde of medical technicians from the ninth planet of Etamin inserting a needle into the major veins of his arm so that much needed nutriment and saline could reach his brain, since in his fury he had forgotten all mortal food or perhaps foresworn it.

I saw a lonely and hooded traveler on the road walking away from the SFWA Mansion (at first I took this to be someone disgusted by news that the writers guild now protected with their silence the filth and perversions of pederasts, but who, unlike me, could make no public denunciation), and, running after the silent, looming shape, asked in wonder if George RR Martin was hard at work writing the next book in his much-loved series.

Let the fans rejoice! At last!

A former gatekeeper laments the publishing revolution:

The idea of writers being able to bring their creations directly to readers is widely touted as a radical advance in authorial control and a revolution in the creative process. Its popularity has soared and its champions, such as the writer and founder of the Alliance of Independent Authors, Orna Ross, proclaim it as something “radical, really revolutionary within my world”.. Self-publishing is the revolution du jour, the change that will liberate writers and democratise publishing.

Unfortunately, self-publishing is neither radical nor liberating. And, as revolutions go, it is rather short on revolutionaries. It is actually reactionary, a contracted version of the traditional publishing model in which companies, who produce for a wide range of tastes and preferences, are replaced by individual producers each catering to very narrow range.

Self-publishing is supposed to democratise publishing. For Nicholas Lovell, writing in the Bookseller, “publishers no longer have an ability to determine which books get published and which books don’t.” In other words, democratisation is nothing more than the expansion of the publishing process from the few to the many. But this both overestimates the barriers to traditional publication – the vetting and selection process may be deeply flawed, but every writer can submit a manuscript – and underestimates the constraints of the marketplace. It also fails to consider whether the democratisation of publishing produces a similar democratisation for the reader by making literary culture more open.

By definition, self-publishing is an individualistic pursuit in which each writer is both publisher and market adventurer, with every other writer a potential competitor and the reader reduced to the status of consumer. Publishing then becomes timid, fearing to be adventurous and revolutionary lest it betray the expectations of its market. This is a natural tendency in traditional publishing but it is one restrained by the voices of its authors who are free to put their work first and entrepreneurship a distant second. With authorship and entrepreneurship now equal partners, the new authorpreneurs have thrown off the dictatorship of the editor to replace it with the tyranny of the market.

Gatekeepers are liberators! The freedom of the market is tyranny! War is peace! Black is white! Evil is good!

These people lie as automatically as they breathe. How absurd is it to say that traditional publishing is not as restricted as it appears because “every writer can submit a manuscript”? This article didn’t convince me that self-publishing is a bad thing, it convinced me that in addition to being outdated, the traditional publishers are outright evil.

The ironic icing on the cake is the fact that the author, a former publisher, “has self-published his last three novels”. His best-selling book ranks #700,264 on Amazon. Little wonder he despises “the tyranny of the market”.

Since some people, most of them of the binary-thinking variety, appear to be somewhat confused by what is meant by Pink SF/F, it may be be helpful to provide a concise definition of it. Let’s begin by listing its attributes:

1. It is written in conscious reaction to, and rejection of, the classic genre canon.
2. It is politically correct.
3. It consciously elevates current progressive ideology above story, plot, and characterization. The personal is the political and the propaganda is the plot.
4. It rejects Christianity and traditional Western morality.
5. It subscribes to the anti-scientific myth of human equality.
6. It exhibits a superficial multiculturalism.
7. It utilizes racial and sexual checkboxes.
8. It inclines heavily to the political Left.
9. It celebrates and normalizes sexual deviancy.
10. It is structured in the conventional form of a romance novel rather than a science fiction or fantasy novel.

From these observable characteristics, we can derive a useful definition: Pink SF/F is a Left-wing literary subgenre written as racial, sexual, and ideological propaganda in order to subvert traditional literature, religion, and society.

This should make it easier to see why David Weber and Jim Butcher, for all their risible gamma male socio-sexuality, are not writing Pink SF/F, whereas Arthur C. Clarke and Marion Zimmer Bradley observably were. Any work of fiction that checks five or more of the ten attributes listed above can be safely designated and dismissed as Pink SF/F.

I appreciate the HBO version of A GAME OF THRONES. Unlike most screen adaptations, it has actually improved upon the books in many ways, and it is likely to continue doing so now that it has reached the second-rate material of the later books. But in this recap of the recent episode in which the Red Viper and the Mountain fight their duel, Andy Greenwald pinpoints the fundamental flaw in the SF/F genre’s nihilism.

It was all quite thrilling, for a time, with the Red Viper leaping balletically through the summery air and Alex Graves’s camera swooping vertiginously to catch him. Game of Thrones has often punched me in the heart, but it’s rarely had it fluttering so mightily in my throat. But then, just as Tyrion was getting his hopes up and Cersei was reaching for her Big Gulp of merlot, Oberyn spiked the ball at the 1-yard line. Rather than finish off the Mountain, Oberyn was just getting warmed up, demanding much more than an improbable victory. Instead, like Tyrion in the garden all those years ago, Oberyn demanded logic and an answer. And we all know what happened next. Kung. Kung. Kung.

Actually, the sound of Oberyn’s head exploding was much more terrible than that. The defanging — and defacing — of the Red Viper was among the worst things I’ve ever seen on a screen, but it was definitely the worst thing I’ve ever heard: It somehow managed to remind me both of my own mortality and of Gallagher. (Trust me when I say I’m not sure which was more unbearable.) And in that gruesome, hideous moment I realized that the real takeaway from Tyrion’s story isn’t that he’s a fool for wanting order when there is only chaos. It’s that we just might be for greedily tuning in to the Orson Hour every week and expecting the same thing.

Look, contra Ramsay Snow, I have been paying attention. I harbor no illusions of a happy ending. But even in the midst of an epic, excellent season that has provided more wit, resonance, and emotion than I had previously thought possible, I am growing slightly weary of being taught the same merciless lesson again and again. I’d like to think that Charlie Brown had some grudging respect for Lucy the first time she pulled away the football. But the fifth? What happened to dashing Prince Oberyn was gripping, horrifying television. But, unlike his skull, it was also rather hollow. Few authors could introduce such a fantastic character with such economy and skill (and fewer showrunners could do the same on television, with even more of both). But only George R.R. Martin would so sadistically run that character into the buzz saw of disappointment and plot that is Game of Thrones just to prove a point — and, I suppose, to tighten the noose a bit more around Tyrion’s neck. Like a beetle, Oberyn was born to die, and in the most gruesome, splattery way possible. And to what end? Shocking us isn’t the same thing as challenging us. A simpleton with a rock might not need to explain himself, but a writer usually does. At this point, the most radical thing Game of Thrones could do is to make the audience exhale in relief.

But it isn’t only George R.R. Martin who is obsessed with making the same point over and over and over. In his excellent collection of essays on science fiction, TRANSHUMAN AND SUBHUMAN, John C. Wright makes the vital distinction between a good story and a well-written one:

An artist can draw a picture of the rotting skull of a dead dog on a dungheap with maggots and blind worms crawling on its exposed brains with perfect perspective, shading, composition, and balance of light and dark, and yet it is still a picture of a dead dog.

Lest you think Wright exaggerates the depths to which the nihilistic authors of SF/F habitually descend, consider this, which is the conclusion of the highly regarded, and recently deceased, literary SF author Iain M. Banks’s novel WALKING ON GLASS.

In the grass he saw a magazine lying, torn. He looked more closely at it, saw a woman’s buttocks, over a pair of hairy knees. The woman’s bottom was reddened slightly; there was a hand poised, too obviously posed, not in motion, over her. A small breeze ruffled the pages of the magazine for him as he looked, as obligingly as any Hollywood wind-machine stripping a calendar between scenes. The pictures in the rest of the magazine were almost all identical.

He turned away, disgusted with something other than the pathetic but relatively harmless fetish of the magazine, and saw a flurry of flies swirl into the air from something dark in the grass; it looked like an animal’s leg.

He closed his eyes, willing tears to come, some final part of him giving in only now, wanting the surrender to animal emotion which until now he had fought against, but as he stood there he could feel no tears coming, only a son of resigned, ugly bitterness, a comprehensive revulsion for everything around him, for all the people and their artefacts and thoughts, all their stupid ways and pointless aims. He opened his smarting eyes, blinking angrily.

Here it was; this was what it all really meant; here was your civilisation, your billion years of evolution, right here; a soiled and tattered wanking-mag and chopped domestic animal.

Sex and violence, writ small like all our standard fantasies.

The pain in his belly which had afflicted him earlier returned, sharp and fierce as a rusty blade.

It swelled in him then, like some wildfire cancer; a rapid disgust, a total allergy syndrome directed at everything around him; at the filthy, eviscerated mundanity of it all, the sheer crawling awful-ness of existence; all the lies and the pain, the legalized murder, the privileged theft, the genocides and the hatreds and the stupefying human cruelties, all the starveling beauty of the burgeoning poor and the crippled in body and brain, all the life-defying squalor of the cities and the camps, all the sweltering frenetics of the creeds and the faiths, all the torturingly ingenious, carefully civilised savagery of the technology of pain and the economies of greed; all the hollow, ringing, bullshitting words used to justify and explain the utter howling grief of our own cruelty and stupidity; it piled on him, in him, like a weight of atmosphere, that awful mass of air above for those moments no longer balanced by a pressure within, so that he felt at once crushed, smashed inside, but swollen too; bursting with the sickening burden of a cheap and tumid revelation.

The writing is excellent from a technical perspective. But to the extent that it is more than the picture of a dead dog, the message is poisonous, and, as Greenwald correctly observes, tedious. It is ironic that Banks died as he wrote, of a wildfire cancer that brought a meaningless end to his meaningless life of writing repetitively about the meaninglessness of Man.

But that is the fruit of nihilism: insignificance, boredom, and sooner or later, death.

I’ve been finding the reading of Scott Lynch’s first two “Gentlemen Bastard” books to be more than a little educational because they are such a strange combination of competent writing with flawed and shallow story-telling. As such, they provide a useful perspective on precisely where and how Pink SF/F goes awry as literature.

Take the following quote from Red Seas Under Red Skies, which shows how a desired concept could have been handled well while simultaneously fumbling the execution:

“When you go to sea, there’s two necessities, for luck. First, you’re courting an awful fate if you take a ship to sea without at least one woman officer. It’s the law of the Lord of the Grasping Waters. His mandate. He’s got a fixation for the daughters of the land; he’ll smash any ship that puts to sea without at least one aboard. Plus, it’s plain common sense. They’re good officers. Decent plain sailors, but finer officers than you or I. Just the way the gods made ’em.

“Second, it’s powerful bad luck to put out without cats on board. Not only as they kill the rats, but as they’re the proudest creatures anywhere, wet or dry. Iono admires the little fuckers. Got a ship with women and cats aboard, you’ll have the finest luck you can hope for. Now, our little boat’s so small I reckon we’re fine without no woman. Fishers and harbor boats go out all the time, no worries. But with the pair of you aboard, I’ll be damned if I’m not bringing a cat. A little one suits a little vessel.”

Now, this is a subversion of the urban legend that women were historically considered bad luck on sailing ships. Fair enough, although it doesn’t address the real reason women were not permitted to serve on ships in the past, the fact that they tend to destroy ship morale and provide a major distraction for the male crew in addition to getting pregnant and rendering themselves unfit for service.

Changing the superstition works. But simply declaring, contra literally everything shown in both books before or after the statement, that women are intrinsically better military officers than men, is absurd and indicates either PC preaching or catering to a specific market that enjoys that particular fantasy. The book would have been much more coherent had Lynch simply ended the first necessity before adding the four sentences about “plain common sense”. Instead of getting on with the story, we find ourselves wondering about the mystery of the general absence of these superior female officers. Indeed, how did it come to pass that the Stragos, the naval commander who is a central character in the plot of the second book, is a man?

The ease with which a single throwaway dog-whistle can render the plot nonsensical points to an inevitable problem with SF/F that is both a) derivative of traditional genre works and b) politically correct. It is fractured by the intrinsic conflict of two contradictory logics, and thus forces the resolution of those contradictions by predictable and usually unsatisfactory means. For example, the preponderance of rape and child murder in modern SF/F is not the result of modern SF/F writers being particularly prone to either sexual assault or violence, indeed, the male writers are probably among the least likely men on the planet to have either had sex with a woman or raised a hand in violence to anyone.

But the ubiquity of rape and attempted rape is the result of the forced marriage of the traditional “rescue the woman’s virtue” trope with the PC “a woman has a right to rut like a mink in heat without being criticized for it” concept. When there is no virtue to be lost or saved, there is no shame or drama in it. All that is left is the lesser shame and drama of the potential violation of a woman’s consent.

In the same way, the relentless Herodianism of Pink SF/F is the result of the forced marriage of the traditional “protect the helpless” trope with the PC “women are equal to men” belief. This means that children now make up the entirety of the classes to be protected in Pink SF/F, thereby requiring them to become the only victims who are capable of generating any sympathy in the reader. Unless, of course, a character is victimized solely due to his race or sexual preference.

And those are the restrictions imposed upon the competent Pink SF/F writers, who attempt to intelligently resolve the logical contradictions. The incompetent ones, (and I note that the failed resolution above stuck out precisely because Lynch is an otherwise competent writer), simply lurch from one leap of illogic to the next, never realizing that they are contradicting themselves and presenting the reader with an incoherent imaginary world.

On a tangential note, it’s not hard at all to understand why Lynch’s books are popular among the Pink SF/F-reading crowd, and at least in the case of the first book, beyond. Despite the fact that the books are repetitively circular from a plot perspective, are subject to the aforementioned logical constraints, contain no drama or pathos, and go absolutely nowhere in any deeper sense, they do provide very well indeed for the wish fulfillment of a certain psychology that bastes itself in its belief in its own cleverness.