Tag: writing

Mailvox: writing sociosexuality

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.

  • Alpha. The protagonist is in charge. He seeks out, takes on, and conquers various challenges, many of whom are other Alphas. He also defeats the occasional Gamma who tries to stab him in the back. Deltas follow him gladly. Hmmm, sounds familiar, doesn’t it, Mr. Howard?
  • Beta. The good lieutenant is given great responsibility by his Alpha. Loyally serves the Alpha and accompanies him through thick and thin. At times, his loyalty is tested, the enemy even tries to tempt him into betraying his Alpha by offering him a crown of his own, but he resists, he perseveres, and his Alpha is triumphant in the end, at which point he publicly credits the Beta and tells everyone how he could never have done it without the Beta.
  • Delta. He’s just a guy, like any other guy. Larger events swirl around him, but the Delta gradually finds his place in the team, which comes to respect each other and learns how to work together as a unit. His side wins after much turmoil and suffering, although he doesn’t have much to do with that. But he knows he did his part and has the satisfaction of knowing he has the respect and approval of the others. His captain tells him that he was the glue who held it all together. He gets a medal and wins the love of a good woman in the end. They have nice healthy children and make a nice modest home together.
  • Gamma. No one knows how special he is. The Alphas unfairly rule and keep him down by trickery. Even the girl he loves in a way no woman has ever been loved before doesn’t realize how special he is or how happy he would make her if only she would let him. Bad people treat him badly and unfairly. But through his clever wit, the Gamma makes fools of everyone through always having the perfect thing to say, culminating when he totally humiliates the Alpha and reveals him to be an unworthy paper tiger in a brilliant verbal exchange front of everyone, including the girl. The Gamma is finally recognized as the true First Man in Rome by everyone as the girl shyly confesses that she has always seen and admired his specialness. He calls her “milady” and roguishly offers her his arm as everyone looks on enviously and applauds the smoothness of his style.
  • Omega. REVENGE.
  • Sigma. He is dragged from his solitary sanctuary by the desperate need of friends he hasn’t seen in years, but whom he can hardly deny. Conflict abounds, mostly between posturing idiots concerning nonsensical trivialities that no one with more than half a brain could ever possibly care about. The Sigma contemptuously dispatches three foes in succession, one by utilizing superior logic, one by seducing her, and one by physical combat, before finally ending all the conflict with a brilliant masterstroke that convinces the blithering idiots to knock it off once and for all. Everyone agrees that the ultimate solution is for the Sigma to marry the beautiful princess and be crowned king. On the day of the wedding, it is discovered that the Sigma has vanished, as have two of the prettiest and most morally flexible ladies-in-waiting. A note is found rejecting both princess and crown, and inviting everyone in the realm to either fuck off or die, as they please.
  • Lambda. He always knew he was different. He exchanging longing looks with another boy once, but nothing happened. Mean boys called him names and beat him up for being too sensitive. Then he went to the big city. There he discovered discos and bathhouses and true love. Then his true love died of AIDS/was gay-bashed to death. So he went back to the discos and bathhouses and did too many drugs until meeting a rich, successful, and previously straight Alpha who is won over by his sob story of his tragic true love and helps him kick his drug habit. He and the formerly straight Alpha travel to Mexico where they pick up a pair of hot Latin twins at a gay strip club.

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.

The danger of fantasy

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.

The SJW reader challenge

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 – POC

and 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?

Men in women suits

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.

The pride of the self-gelded

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.

An interview with John C. Wright

A Castalia House blogger interviews the leading Castalia House author at Castalia House:

Q: Your conversion story from atheism to Christianity is remarkable.  Some critics have been surprised to discover which of your books were written as a Christian, and which were written as an atheist.  You have said that in each case you simply followed the internal logic of the story to its conclusion.  How much has your faith influenced your fiction, if at all?

A: This is a very difficult question, because my firm resolution when first I converted was to simply tell stories to entertain.

I am often annoyed by stories that preach, even when they preach a sermon with which I wholly agree, such as Philip Pullman’s THE GOLDEN COMPASS. I was an atheist when I read it, a full-throat anti-Christian zealous in my love of godlessness, and even I could not stand the obtrusive excrescence of the preaching in that miserable book.

Now that I am in the other camp of the endless war between light and darkness, I confess I am still nonplussed and unamused by preaching disguised as entertainment, whether it supports my side or not. The idea of ‘Christian entertainment’ is a sound one, as long as it is entertaining as well as being Christian. There is an odor of self satisfied smugness and piety which is as repellant as the musk of a skunk clinging to much Christian entries into the literary world, which one never finds in older works, such as Milton or Dante, and never in the works of masters even in so humble as genre as science fiction. I challenge anyone to find anything nakedly and blandly pious or preachy in the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, R.A. Lafferty, Gene Wolfe or Tim Powers, but there is clearly a spiritual dimension to all their works.

So I vowed a great vow never to let my personal feelings creep into my books, but merely to tell a tale for the sake of the tale, keeping faith with my readers. I am not their teacher, nor their preacher, nor their father confessor, and I have no duty to instruct them, and no qualifications to do so, no more than the jester in a King’s court has the authority to criticize the laws and policies of the King. My customers are my kings, and my job is to do pratfalls and take pies to the face to amuse them.

In the space of a single hour my great vow was overthrown when a reader, practically in tears, so deeply and thoughtfully praised the vision of spiritual reality presented in one of my short stories, the wholesomeness of the moral atmosphere portrayed there, that the reader likened it to a man trapped on some alien world of chlorine gas and sulfurous clouds being allowed to step on the fair, green fields of Earth for a single breath of wholesome, springtime air.

The reader was talking about my Christian faith, and the strength and firmness and clarity it lent to my writing. If I can wax lyrical about Ricardo’s Theory of Comparative Advantage, as I did in THE GOLDEN AGE, then surely I can wax lyrical about truth, virtue, and beauty.

The king is sad, and the jester needs to bring him comfort, for I know tales of a country where these sad things do not reign, but a king kindlier and mightier than any mortal king. As a jester, I owe it to my kings here on Earth and the King of Kings in heaven not to hide or waste my talents.

You’ll definitely want to read the whole thing. And afterwards, if you happen to find yourself still failing to be in possession of excellent books by the interviewee such as THE GOLDEN AGE, AWAKE IN THE NIGHT LAND, ONE BRIGHT STAR TO GUIDE THEM, and THE BOOK OF FEASTS & SEASONS, I find it impossible to imagine that you will not want to swiftly rectify the situation.

It’s an excellent interview with a fascinating author. Scooter did an excellent job of formulating much deeper questions than one generally sees in the SF genre, in addition to demonstrating that he was actually very familiar with the author’s material.

Traffic report 2014

The growth in site traffic was less spectacular than in 2013, and we saw a 1.5-million pageview month instead of the two-million one that I speculated might be possible, but traffic was nevertheless solid and both VP and AG continued to enjoy increased readership, with an overall 19.7 percent increase in pageviews over the course of the year. And, if anything, it’s picking up, as December 2014 was up 38 percent in comparison with December 2013.

In 2014, Vox Popoli had 11,236,085 pageviews and Alpha Game 4,457,537 for a total of 15,693,622 Google pageviews. To the left is a
chart showing the monthly traffic for both blogs over the last four
years; even without Alpha Game, VP has grown from 11,383 to 34,809 average daily pageviews. Combined, Vox Popoli and Alpha Game are now running at a average rate of 47,343 daily pageviews. Not quite 50k, I’m afraid, not even if they are converted to the slightly more generous WordPress metric. As for the running annual totals, they are as follows:

2008: 3,496,757
2009: 4,414,801
2010: 4,827,183
2011: 5,969,066
2012: 7,774,074
2013: 13,111,695
2014: 15,693,622

I doubt we’ll be able to maintain a 2-year doubling rate for a third straight year, since that would require nearly 11 million more pageviews in 2015, but one never knows. And speaking of nearly 50k daily pageviews, I would be remiss if, for no particular reason at all, I did not continue with a certain comparison
that was repeatedly brought to my attention in previous years. This is,
of course, the comparison with the hugely famous and massively popular
Whatever, formerly the biggest and best-known site in science fiction. The following chart shows the comparative
blog traffic over the last six years as measured in Google Pageviews.
 

Interesting, is it not, that Whatever’s traffic has now declined below the point that mine was when it was declared irrelevant on the basis of its paltry traffic by McRapey’s fans? So, have we seen Peak McRapey? It’s hard to say, as he’s increasingly moved to Twitter, an ideal medium for his unique combination of fabrication, snark, and self-promotion.

I found the 2014 totals to be particularly amusing in light of this clueless post by an SF Pinkshirt named Nalini Haynes who went public with her strategy to starve the Supreme Dark Lord: “My website averages well over 600 visits a day. Based on comments from
other fanzine people, I’m guessing that’s more readers than VD’s blog
would get even when he provokes a shit storm. Let’s deprive him of the
traffic.”

Apparently it didn’t work so well. Anyhow, 2015 promises to be an interesting year at VP and hopefully a much better one than 2014 was. While the Hugo debacle was entertaining and the Castalia launch went much better than anticipated, I didn’t finish Book Two, Alpenwolf didn’t finish First Sword, and there were some very difficult situations being experienced behind the scenes by friends and family. If, at any point last year, you sensed I didn’t give even the smallest damn about the various public contretemps, you were correct.

But we’ve got two new partners and an exciting new project in the works at Alpenwolf, both First Sword and Book Two will be out this year, and we’ve got a number of new writers, new bloggers, and new books to announce in the next few months at Castalia. So, thank you for your interest (even if it is no more than morbid curiosity), thank you for your support, and I hope you will come along for the ride in the new year.

Harry Potter and Game

I’ve written many times about how the Gamma males who write SF/F have absolutely no grasp of human socio-sexuality. Interestingly enough, aside from those writing in the Romance ghetto, the same is largely true of female genre writers:

In her latest Pottermore update, Rowling writes how she’s often forced
to crush the dreams of fans who nurse strange feelings for Hogwarts’s
sexiest Slytherin. 

Read the rest at Alpha Game, although beware, there is a Woman Defending All Women Against All Implied or Perceived Criticism on the premises.

In other news, Our Friend Damien is having trouble letting go. Unfortunately, writing about me appears to be the only fiction he can manage. This will certainly amuse the Evil Legion of Evil, who are probably the only ones who truly understand exactly how much winning a Hugo Award means to me.

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
Theodore Beale / Vox Day being told the news he came 6th in a field of 5 at the Hugo awards.

MikeBrendan ‏@MikeBrendango
That was just beautiful…

Damien Walter ‏@damiengwalter
the definition of poetic justice.

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
.@damiengwalter blocks @voxday, but can’t stop talking about him. So typical of sad #SJW s #lol

John Scalzi ‏@scalzi
Everything is a victory!

Space Bunny ‏@Spacebunnyday
I can only assume that @damiengwalter’s latest writing grant didn’t come through.@voxday

Tim Wood ‏@Magister_Wood
It’s how the rabbits deal with unrequited love. #SJW #lol

Mark Fox ‏@swiftfoxmark2
Wouldn’t have anything to do with not doing what he said he would, right?

I understand it intellectually, of course, but I don’t think I will ever truly grasp the inability of rabbits to understand that not-rabbits genuinely don’t think like they do. I very much doubt that they will ever understand that my finishing 6th of 5 was the best possible outcome short of actually winning, which was never going to happen.

And it’s informative to see @SFReviewsnet favoriting this tweet. It appears we’ll know where not to bother sending books for review. But at least if you’re looking for Pink SF/F, you’ll know exactly where to go.

On the periphery of Pink SF

I have been a fan of William Gibson ever since reading how Johnny was a very technical boy. Even as his novels have gotten more literary, and less coherent, I’ve always enjoyed reading them. So, I was quite pleased when The Peripheral came out recently; a new William Gibson novel is always something to be celebrated in my book.

And it’s good. The novel well-written, the plot is intricate, the sensibilities are cool (if perhaps indicative of being influenced by Hollywood’s new fascination with the rural American South), and, as always, Gibson presents a vision of the future that is somehow more plausible than the average science fiction writer’s. His skill, I think, is to present something between dystopia and the present; perhaps one might describe his perspective as dystrendic. Or in this case, dystrendic to catastrophically dystrendic, as the book spans a small spectrum of futures for reasons I would find difficult to describe even if it wasn’t a spoiler of sorts.

Gibson’s style, never florid, has become increasingly sparse as his disinclination to provide detailed description has now stripped down his dialogue. While this has the effect of making the conversations flow more realistically, the combination of the two frequently leaves the reader slightly confused as to what is going on. It’s very important to pay attention to even small details, because that’s all you’re going to get; he’s not going to go back and explain things for you. And while I rather like this approach, it’s perhaps not optimal for a book with a plot that would already be challenging to follow.

The story is about a young woman who witnesses a real murder while in a virtual environment. The story expands considerably from there, and since there is no way to reasonably do it justice in less than two or three pages, I won’t even try. As is often his wont, Gibson bring in elements of technology, art, and shadowy corporations in a sophisticated manner.

However, after a year of confronting the growing divide between Pink SF and Blue SF, it is readily apparent that Gibson is of the Pink school, and to his detriment. He is among the best of the Pink school, to be sure, but The Peripheral wind up being shortchanged by Gibson’s resort to several Pink SF conventions.

Chief among them is a mostly non-portrayal of religion that is retarded to the point of being embarrassing. We are supposed to believe that the complete collection of rural Southerners, including a number of military veterans, are as completely and utterly irreligious as wealthy elite Brits on the future arts scene. Moreover, there isn’t a single mention of football… in the American South of the 2030s. The only nominally religious individuals are the fictional version of the Westboro Baptist Church, although to Gibson’s credit, he recognizes their lawyerly activism for the financial scam it is.

However, even their nominal Christianity leads to an unfortunate demonstration of Gibson’s moral vacuity, as he literally equates silent, public, and entirely legal protest that takes a judgmental position with gassing a large group of people with lethal psychotropic drugs. Because doing the latter would make them “assholes” like the former. This was, to put it mildly, an astonishing ethical metric.

The worst aspect of the book, however, is the phoned-in characters. He gets the military aspects more or less correct, but completely fails on the Southern ones. And the female protagonist doesn’t even rise to the usual level of a man with breasts, she is little more than the book’s Macguffin, a character sans agency to whom things happen, and things more incredible than Cinderella. She is often praised for possessing attributes that she doesn’t show in any way; it’s almost Mary-Sueish at times. Throw in the fact that all the bad guys die instantly whenever shot at by the female superagent, who eventually shows up to absolutely no reader’s surprise and outperforms even the Marine veterans, and the reader occasionally finds himself dismissively rolling his eyes.

I also have to note that happy ending is so prodigiously stupid with regards to the characters that it boggles the mind. It gives absolutely nothing of interest away to note that the entire mixed-sex group, none of whom have shown ANY sexual interest in each other throughout the entire book, abruptly pair up and live happily ever after. Ye cats.

It is a pity that Gibson appears to be unable to turn his keen eye for observation towards the points where his ideological assumptions depart from reality, as it would have made for an objectively better book. if he had been able to do so The Peripheral isn’t a bad science fiction read, but it will be quickly forgotten, and William Gibson could be, and should be, better than that.

Correia on guns, etc

An interview on guns in fiction:

Ryan: What are the common pitfalls in fiction where it’s clear that the author has never held or fired a modern firearm?

Larry: It isn’t just guns, but any topic where the
reader is an expert and the author is clueless. The problem is that when
you write something that the reader knows is terribly wrong, it kicks
them right out of the story and ruins the experience for them. Guns are
especially hard because they are super common in fiction, and there are
tons of readers who know about them.

Most of these really glaring errors can be taken care of with a
little bit of cursory research. Technical things can be taken care of by
a few minutes on the manufacturer’s webpage, which will keep your
characters from dramatically flipping off the safety on a gun that
doesn’t have one.

Beyond that, however, is the actual use of the gun. The character
using it should have a realistic amount of knowledge based on their
skill, knowledge, ability, and training. If you are gong to be writing
about a character who is a professional gunslinger, then you need to do
some research to make sure that person does what a professional
gunslinger would do.

And speaking of Larry Correia, Daniel somehow manages to abuse a writer at the Atlantic even more comprehensively than Larry’s customary prison-raping of various Guardian contributors in The Wrong Corpse and the Highbrow Coroner:

Noah Berlatsky at The Atlantic declares science fiction dead of terminal nostalgia:

    Poor George Orwell wants his panopticon back.

He also quotes an important fresh voice in science fiction that:

“we will be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now and can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine some real grounds for hope.”

Then he spends the rest of the article writing about Marvel comic books and their related movies.

The thesis, that science fiction has lost its way in a retrospective swamp of camp nostalgia for Star Wars, Star Trek and comic books is a bait-and-switch, however:

    Science fiction is everywhere in popular culture, and it seems like it’s managed to be everywhere in the present by largely jettisoning the future.

Berlatsky has switched terms on the reader. He isn’t talking about science fiction as a genre, he’s complaining about pop culture, as if that has anything to do with the core idea factory of science fiction, which, and always has been, books.

It does not.

If the reader needs any more confirmation, the critic’s only example of a “current” science fiction writer whose ideas run counter to the prison of pop culture is…Octavia Butler, a prog-writer who has been dead for nearly a decade, and whose most prominent work is more than thirty years past its publication date.

The ironic thing is that Berlatsky may well have a credible defense in resorting to the example chosen. The corpse of the late Octavia Butler, as it rots and feeds the worms, is arguably producing more interesting, less noxious output than are the Pink SF writers giving each other awards these days.