Tag: writing

The translation challenge

Mint Wilson, the lady responsible for the Indonesian translation of Mantra yang Rusak, which was published today in epub format since Amazon does not sell books published in Bahasa Indonesia, has been maintaining a blog about the translation process. It makes for interesting reading for anyone with an interest in languages:

As I translated A Magic Broken, I tried to translate VD’s word choices as close to Indonesian root words as possible. It’s not hard but it is sure often to find that I translated words into its Indonesian form only to realized Indonesian has borrowed it from English word. For example:

 With the precision born of many hours of practice, the sleeve knife slid into his hand as he stepped behind the man rushing past him.

precision – presisi
practice – praktik

It will be all right using these loan words to translate the English ones, but Bahasa Indonesia also has some of the same meaning words that are not any where close enough in form to their English counterparts. Though I suspect they are also loan words.

precision- presisi- ketepatan
practice – praktik- latihan

Bahasa Indonesia has many loan words from other languages. The origin of Bahasa Indonesia is Malay Polynesian that has been used as lingua franca in the Indonesian archipelago for centuries.  Bahasa Indonesia underwent several developmental process before becoming a modern language; the most influential of these was it’s contact with other languages. Such language contact influence language system lexically, phonologically, and grammatically.

The languages that influence Bahasa Indonesia are :

  • Sanskrit, Hindu and Buddhist kingdoms that reigned in Indonesian archipelago brought by Indian results in many Sanskrit words in Bahasa Indonesia.
  • Arabic, Persian and Arabic traders introduced the religion and as Indonesia became the country with largest muslim population in the world, over the centuries results in an extensive Arabic loan words.
  • Dutch, Dutch colonization and administration, lasting from the 17th century to the 20th, had an extensive impact on the vocabulary.
  • Portuguese, The Portuguese were among the first westerners to sail eastwards to the “Spice Islands” in the 16th century as they traded and then colonized later.
  • Chinese, Chinese traders and significant number of immigrants made their contributions on Bahasa Indonesia vocabulary.

Some interesting fact: for ‘god’ Bahasa Indonesia Bible translate it with 4 loan words: ‘Tuhan’, ‘dewa’, ‘ilah ‘and ‘Allah’. I think ‘Tuhan’ and ‘dewa’ are from Sanskrit, ‘ilah’ and ‘Allah’ are from Arabic. For God Creator Bahasa Indonesia bible translate ‘God’ into TUHAN (when the origin mention Jehova or Yahwe) and Allah (when the original word might be ‘ADONAI’). ‘Dewa’ and ‘ilah’ are for lesser gods.

There is a scene in A Magic Broken, where the word ‘gods’ appear when Nicolas the main character trying to get pass the gate guard:

 The friendly smile suddenly disappeared from the man’s face, and the guide was staring at him as if he’d suddenly turned into an orc. “You some sort’o wizard?” the guard demanded, even as he stepped back a pace and put a hand on his sword handle.

 “Gods, no, I’m a soldier,”Nicolas lied easily. The guard wasn’t the problem. It was the red robe he had to worry about.

Here, I translated the word into ‘dewa’ as I don’t think ‘Allah’ will fit nor the original meaning permit ‘Allah’ in a plural form.

In addition to publishing Mint’s first translation, I’m pleased to be able to say that Castalia House has another 11 translations currently in progress. The Blue SF revolution continues.

Imaginary women in the military

It’s not the article at Tor that is of interest here, but rather the discussion between Tom Kratman and a small collection of Pink SF enthusiasts who do not permit their complete ignorance of all things military affect their ability to express some strong opinions on future war: 

“Sexual attraction may be innate, but it’s not universal. See asexual, people who identify as.”

Do you really think the occasional fluke has a whole lot to say about mass armies? If so, why?

How people act on sexual attraction is learned behaviour.

Only in minor details. The love, lust, favoritism, demoralization, and de facto prostitution are fairly universal within any armed force that sees integrated sexes or integrated sexually compatible people unless extraordinary structural provisions are made. Those structural provision include segregation. Here’s an interesting quote from very liberal, very politically correct Canada’s PPCLI battle school: “Male/female attraction will not go away because we tell it to; and soldiers will court considerable risk to pursue the obvious.”

What you really seem to be saying is we can control it. Forget it; we can’t.

What you should not forget is the ability of an army, any army, to make a terrible idea look good through sheer weight of effort and duplicity practiced on an heroic scale. Think Vietnam…or Project 100,000.

“can’t be controlled.” Tom, man. What’re you saying, dude? That people use sex to game the system? (Some people use anything to game systems.) And somehow that’s what, especially unfair? Or you’re saying, what, the act of sex is so inherently super-special it has in itself some peculiarly distorting effect on hierarchies? (Or maybe you’re saying something about sexual coercion, but I’m not going there.) I say to this: grow some imagination. I’m tired of hearing “the future can’t be different because [argument which boils down to “I don’t want to think about what would have to change”].” Like I said, these may not be stories you want to read or tell? But don’t pretend they can’t be told, or that other people may not find your futures as implausible – and even unpleasant – as you might theirs, on good grounds. From where I stand, your futures do live in Opposite World. And unless you bring a more SFnal imagination to our present interaction, my opinion of your wrongheadedness isn’t likely to change.

No, you are presupposing that things which cannot be changed can. Worse, you have no obvious basis for believing it except that you want to. Do you have any expertise in the matter of combat? I do. What you’re demanding isn’t SF; it’s fantasy. The mere fact that you can so lightly dismiss the effect of using sex to game the system, and as if that were all of it, indicates that anything that interferes with your particular fantasy has to be rejected.

Yes, the effect of sex has distorting effects in hierarchies. Perhaps it doesn’t matter at any given corporation, but combat units are not corporations. The next time Bill Gates has to worry about a near ambush or artillery strike on his way to the office will be the first.

In this particular, no, the future cannot be different unless you write away what men and women are, how they think and act, what they care about, and what they’ll take risks for.

Tom’s response is brilliant because it highlights the essential inhumanity of Pink SF. If great fiction speaks to the human condition, the great flaw of Pink SF is that it specifically and overtly rejects the human elements of the human condition. While I defer to Tom Kratman on what he insists is the legitimate possibility, given a considerable quantity of extreme and particular training, of women serving in an effective military unit, I remain extremely dubious that even the conventional notions of superstrength and mandatory reversible birth control could begin to permit women to become even mediocre soldiers. (4-3-6), in ASL terms, would be a best case scenario.

While I am not a military veteran, I am both a student of military history and a former martial arts fighter. As the former, I am aware that what settles battles is not who can kill the other side more effectively, but rather, who can cause the other side to run away or otherwise quit fighting first. As the latter, I have observed that women quit fighting as soon as they take a single damaging strike and not infrequently before then.

I have seen many men fight with broken bones; I myself once won a ringfight after having my nose broken in the initial exchange. I have never seen a woman get up off the ground after being flattened or bloodied and continue fighting except when she is in training with someone she trusts not to intentionally hurt her. In fact, when a woman isn’t hurt but simply gets frightened while sparring, she tends to turn her back on the opponent and literally cringe.

So, my conclusion is that women in combat will either surrender or run like rabbits as soon as they get sufficiently frightened or their unit takes a few casualties.

This comment, in particular, amused me:

Then again, on the other hand, we have John Scalzi, against whom I can
levy no such complaint. Scalzi, unlike Ringo, Kratman, or Williamson,
doesn’t have a military background of his own. Yet I find his future
military more convincingly science-fictional than those of the aforementioned authors. Why is that?

I would think the answer is entirely obvious. Because you know nothing about war or the military and you prefer your weird non-science fantasies about old people’s orgies and men exchanging sexual favors to anything that can be reasonably extrapolated from the last 8,000 years of recorded military history.

The militaries in the science fiction world of QUANTUM MORTIS do not utilize female soldiers for the obvious reason that they are actually expected to engage in combat. The science fiction elements there involve physical augmentation, targeting-assisted weaponry, artificial intelligence, and interstellar mercenary corporations. They do not involve silly fantasies about strong, independent warrior women, which by rights should be classified as women’s erotic fiction rather than science fiction because it is quite literally anti-science.

The suicidal irrelevance of the scifterati

M-Zed, as I like to call him, calls out the posers and literary pretenders of SF’s extreme left:

Okay, I have to respond to this horseshit: “To get your friends into SF, show them a whole bunch of shit that no one gives a crap about, along with a few classics that aren’t really good for neophytes, and some hysteria-inducing leftism. And if that doesn’t work, go with a 2nd previous generation’s failed attempt at literary greatness.”

I’d like to destroy the prejudicial notion that the entire future is leftist, and that this is normal, desirable and believable. Near as I can tell, not a single “expert” they asked is within a standard deviation of center, and they’re all on the left.  The only one with reasonably good recommendations was John Scalzi.  When he’s your moderate, you may have a bit of a bias.

Heinlein’s YA? Neal Stephenson? Lois Bujold? Larry Niven? Sci fi with, you know, actual science? Drake for any veterans.  Hell, Ben Bova has lots of very good near future SF.  Mercedes Lackey is both liberal (since that obviously matters to them) and a good writer, with some decent present-day urban fantasy.

I’ve read close to 10K SF books and written a few, and I’ve never even heard of most of those choices. That by itself proves nothing, except that they’re not recommending anything anyone center, conservative or libertarian is going to be interested in, which is 75% of the population.

One thing you have to understand about the literate Left is that they are parasites who exist on nothing more than whatever they can leech from the productive populace in addition to each other’s farts. They are a breed unto themselves, homo fartsnifferus, for how else could one explain a movie – a freaking MOVIE – being made about a guy who killed himself because he was a mediocre novelist who everyone on the New York literary circuit erroneously believed was a literary genius.

(I speak, of course, of David Foster Wallace. A talented writer, yes, but a terrible novelist who couldn’t even rise to the level of Harold Robbins, let alone John Irving. I don’t condone suicide, but the only more explicable suicide in recent years was the Republican Senate staffer who was caught with kiddy porn.)

The whole point behind the Left’s endless babbling about social justice and gender equity and the entire catalog of pseudo-intellectual jabber is to conceal the fact that they have little talent and even less to say.

Larry Correia adds his own considerable weight to a related issue:

Okay, aspiring author types, you will see lots of things like this, and part of you may think you need to incorporate these helpful suggestions into your work. After all, this is on Tor.com so it must be legit.  Just don’t. When you write with the goal of checking off boxes, it is usually crap. This article is great advice for writers who want to win awards but never actually be read by anyone.

Now do yourself a favor and read the comments… I’ll wait… Yeah… You know how when my Sad Puppies posts talk about the “typical WorldCon voter”? Those comments are a good snapshot of one subtype right there.

I also know from that Facebook thread that a lot of people tried to comment and disagree for various reasons, but their posts were deleted. (and some of them even swore that they were polite!). But like most modern lefty crusades, disagreement, in fact, anything less than cheerleading, is “intolerance” and won’t be tolerated. Meanwhile, my FB thread had lots of comments and an actual intelligent discussion of the pros and cons from both sides (and even transsexual communists who actually like to enjoy their fiction thought this Tor.com post was silly), so remember that the next time a snooty troll calls my fans a “right wing echo chamber.”

If you can’t stomach the comments long enough to hear what a typical WorldCon voter sounds like, let me paraphrase: “Fantastic! I’m so sick of people actually enjoying books that are fun! Let’s shove more message fiction down their throats! My cause comes before their enjoyment! Diversity! Gay polar bears are being murdered by greedy corporations! Only smart people who think correct thoughts like I do should read books and I won’t be happy until my genre dies a horrible death! Yay!”  (and if there is beeping noise in the background, that’s because they’re backing up their mobility scooter).

So let’s break this pile of Gender Studies 101 mush down into its component bits and see just why some sci-fi writers won’t be happy until their genre dies completely.

Don’t write for a living

I’ve pointed this out many times in the past, but this article on how writers earn less than you think should put it into perspective. I write solely as a hobby, I am persona non grata in most publishing circles, and even so my writing income puts me in the top 10 percent of traditionally published authors. That will go up in the coming year as I shift increasingly into Hybrid mode, but even so, I think I’d rather work a minimum wage job and spend all the money earned on lottery tickets than gamble on making $100,000 from writing for five consecutive years. Remember, unlike a salaried job, you are only as good as your last book, even if ebook sales extends the viability of your backlist.

This is not to discourage anyone from writing. To the contrary, I actively encourage anyone with an interest in writing to do so. Just don’t do it as a career. You don’t lift weights because you think you’re going to be a professional powerlifter, you don’t play softball because you think you’re going to make the major leagues, and you shouldn’t write because you think you’re going to be the next Stephen King or JK Rowling.

Tedious remakes

I don’t usually find myself agreeing with third world Marxists who natter on about “neo-imperialist fantasies of power and domination”, but I have to admit, the man isn’t entirely wrong when he points out how taking a fictional work out of its historical milieu often means sacrificing part of its heart and soul:

Shorn of their historical context, sequels and remakes today seem no
more than rebranding exercises in an age of socioeconomic crisis,
widespread uncertainty and creative stasis. Unlike most novelists, those
refurbishing James Bond or Philip Marlowe can count on a ready-made
store of readerly understanding and good will. As they do with the
numerous renderings of the Ramayana and Mahabharata in India and
Indonesia, audiences respond to familiarity spiced with the right
measure of novelty and strangeness. Such tickling of the mass
unconscious can be remunerative too: Unfocused nostalgia has a powerful
lure in postindustrial cultures that seem to have a recurrent present
but few clear traces of the past nor an avid anticipation of the future.

Naming the recent remakes of Bond  in his witty book “The Man Who Saved
Britain,” Simon Winder blurts out, “I’m sorry: I just can’t go on it’s
all so terrible. They’re roughly the same, come out at irregular
intervals and tend to have the word ‘Die’ in the title.” The
increasingly pained-looking Bond played by Daniel Craig seems to concur.

Britain is geopolitically too insignificant, and non-Western markets —
as well as political sensitivities — matter too much now for 007 to be
able to fulfill neo-imperialist fantasies of power and domination. The
artless seducer of women with names like Pussy Galore and Octopussy, a
man who once charmingly hoped for sex to have “the sweet tang of rape,”
also risks driving away a crucial demographic from the theaters. It is
surely a sign of the times that in “Skyfall” a non-misogynist Bond
retreats to his family estate in secession-minded Scotland, improbably
preoccupied with a childhood trauma after what seems to have been a
wholly unexamined life.

As will become clear in the near future, I’m not intrinsically opposed to remakes. The new Star Trek movies are better than the originals in many ways, in fact, some of their worst aspects are their determination to insert callbacks to their predecessors. No doubt Trekkies found it totally sweet when whoever it was shouted “KHAAAAAAN” just like the other guy did in the movie before him. I just rolled my eyes.

Speaking as one who has created a new detective, (to the extent that Graven Tower can properly be considered a detective as opposed to a law enforcer who applies Arnaud Amalric’s approach to the detective arts), it’s understandable that many writers prefer to simply borrow existing characters. It’s much easier to lean on an existing store of known and well-loved characteristics than to try to create new ones.

One could even make a logical case for encouraging those who are better with plot and style to mine the public domain rather than inflict their cardboard creations on us. The problem is that many of those who are already characterization-challenged can’t seem to resist putting their inept skills to use, thereby transforming the characters we know and love into cheap parodies of themselves.

Sure, it’s not uninteresting to imagine what Holmes might be like if he lived today. But instead, we’re presented with alternative concepts, and asked to imagine what a character might be like if he wasn’t that character at all, but merely happened to be prone to utilizing the same catchphrases. Thus we have Watson transformed into an Asian woman and Holmes depicted as a gay vampire and all the deplorable host of modern politically correct(1) cliches that render most modern fiction so bloody tedious and unreadable.

(1) “People forget that political correctness used to be called spastic gay talk.” – Frankie Boyle

Traffic Report 2013

At this time last year I wrote the following: “By the end of 2013, I wouldn’t be terribly surprised to see the
occasional month pushing somewhere between 800k and 900k Google
pageviews.  And if the Alpha Game traffic eventually surpasses Vox
Popoli’s as I have always assumed it would, given the higher level of
interest in intersexual relations than in economics, SF/F, and my
personal ideosyncracies, the two blogs may well surpass 1.1
million/month next year without requiring any well-linked monster posts.”

As it turned out, the blogs surpassed 1.1 million pageviews per month by June. However, this wasn’t the result of Alpha Game surpassing Vox Popoli, as both blogs steadily gained readers even prior to the SFWA kerfluffle that led to more than 1.3 million pageviews in August. Traffic leveled off a bit once that situation was resolved, but remained strong as December marked the ninth straight month of more than one million combined Google pageviews.

In 2013, Vox Popoli had 9,340,663 pageviews and Alpha Game had 3,771,032 for a grand total of 13,111,695 Google pageviews. To the left is a chart showing the monthly traffic for both blogs for the last three years. It’s fascinating to look back and see that in five years, Vox Popoli has picked up an additional six million annual pageviews without Alpha Game. And with Alpha Game included, the annual total is nearly ten million higher. Alexa ranks also improved considerably in 2013: Vox Popoli from 29,426
(153,650) to 5,227 (41,452) and Alpha Game from 73,183 (215,234) to
11,851 (78,888). This tends to confirm my skepticism of the survey
methodology and helps demonstrate why I prefer to track historical traffic in pageviews.

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

I would be remiss if I did not, for no particular reason at all, 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 blog. I find it both amusing, and all too typical, that while this comparison was originally cited as evidence of my inferiority, now that the comparison happens to have turned in my favor it is cited as evidence of my supposed insecurity and/or the number of evil people on the Internet. In any event, the following chart shows the comparative blog traffic over the last five years as measured in Google Pageviews.

Having done my part for charity and having successfully exposed the myth of Whatever’s claimed “50,000 daily readers”, I assume there won’t be as much occasion to reference Mr. Scalzi in 2014 as there was in 2013. I could certainly be wrong, of course, as who can possibly predict what surprises the Chief Rabbit of the Whatever Warren will have in store for us in the coming year. One way or another, I expect we will be provided with at least a modicum of continued entertainment on that front.

Whether you often agree with me or not, I appreciate that so many of you continue to take the time to stop by and peruse my idiosyncratic observations on various and sundry matters. I am also pleased that many of you take such an active part in the ongoing discourse here. We have lost some legends along the way, but the river of comments flows ever on. When I started this blog ten years and two months ago as a mailbag for my WND column, I had absolutely no idea that one day it would outlive the column. And yet, the column is gone and no one appears to have even blinked an eye, let alone missed it.

Considering my complete inability to foresee a 69 percent increase in traffic for the two blogs in 2013, I see little point in attempting to forecast anything. That being said, given the increased interest in economics in a slowing economy, in HBD in an unraveling society, and my continued expectation of AG eventually surpassing VP, it is not entirely unthinkable to imagine that next year could see a 2-million pageview month. But whether there are ten people or ten million people reading, this blog will continue to be here for your amusement and mine.

The fearful fatted cows

Even if the pinkshirts in the SFWA are too dense and short-sighted to see the truck about to run them over, it appears the Author’s Guild isn’t quite so clueless. In much the same vein as James Patterson’s appeal for federal protection, they’re mooing and seeking safety in numbers. And it’s just delightful to see those who have been protected by the gatekeepers for decades openly fretting about being forced to compete on even terms with those they have so long despised.  This would seem to be just a little strange, in light of how they so often claimed that the reason they were chosen for publication was because their writing was so much better than the writing of those not permitted past the gatekeepers: 

An Open Letter to My Fellow Authors

 It’s
all changing, right before our eyes. Not just publishing, but the
writing life itself, our ability to make a living from authorship. Even
in the best of times, which these are not, most writers have to
supplement their writing incomes by teaching, or throwing up sheet-rock,
or cage fighting. It wasn’t always so, but for the last two decades
I’ve lived the life most writers dream of: I write novels and stories,
as well as the occasional screenplay, and every now and then I hit the
road for a week or two and give talks. In short, I’m one of the blessed,
and not just in terms of my occupation. My health is good, my children
grown, their educations paid for. I’m sixty-four, which sucks, but
it also means that nothing that happens in publishing—for good or ill—is
going to affect me nearly as much as it affects younger writers,
especially those who haven’t made their names yet. Even if the e-price
of my next novel is $1.99, I won’t have to go back to cage fighting.

Still, if it turns out that I’ve enjoyed the best the writing life
has to offer, that those who follow, even the most brilliant, will have
to settle for less, that won’t make me happy and I suspect it won’t
cheer other writers who’ve been as fortunate as I. It’s these writers,
in particular, that I’m addressing here. Not everyone believes, as I do,
that the writing life is endangered by the downward pressure of e-book
pricing, by the relentless, ongoing erosion of copyright protection, by
the scorched-earth capitalism of companies like Google and Amazon, by
spineless publishers who won’t stand up to them, by the “information
wants to be free” crowd who believe that art should be cheap or free and
treated as a commodity, by internet
search engines who are all too happy to direct people to on-line sites
that sell pirated (read “stolen”) books, and even by militant librarians
who see no reason why they shouldn’t be able to “lend” our e-books
without restriction. But those of us who are alarmed by these
trends have a duty, I think, to defend and protect the writing life
that’s been good to us, not just on behalf of younger writers who will
not have our advantages if we don’t, but also on behalf of readers,
whose imaginative lives will be diminished if authorship becomes
untenable as a profession.

I know, I know. Some insist that there’s never been a better time to
be an author. Self-publishing has democratized the process, they argue,
and authors can now
earn royalties of up to seventy percent, where once we had to settle for
what traditional publishers told us was our share. Anecdotal evidence
is marshaled in support of this view (statistical evidence to follow).
Those of us who are alarmed, we’re told, are, well, alarmists. Time will
tell who’s right, but surely it can’t be a good idea for writers to
stand on the sidelines while our collective fate is decided by others.
Especially when we consider who those others are. Entities like Google
and Apple and Amazon are rich and powerful enough to influence
governments, and every day they demonstrate their willingness to wield
that enormous power. Books and authors are a tiny but not insignificant
part of the larger battle being waged between these companies, a
battleground
that includes the movie, music, and newspaper industries. I think it’s
fair to say that to a greater or lesser degree, those other industries
have all gotten their asses kicked, just as we’re getting ours kicked
now. And not just in the courts. Somehow, we’re even losing the war for
hearts and minds. When we defend copyright, we’re seen as greedy. When
we justly sue, we’re seen as litigious. When we attempt to defend the
physical book and stores that sell them, we’re seen as Luddites. Our
altruism, when we’re able to summon it, is too often seen as
self-serving.

But here’s the thing. What the Apples and Googles and Amazons and
Netflixes of the world all have in common (in addition to their quest
for world domination), is that
they’re all starved for content, and for that they need us. Which means
we have a say in all this. Everything in the digital age may feel new
and may seem to operate under new rules, but the conversation about the
relationship between art and commerce is age-old, and artists must be
part of it. To that end we’d do well to speak with one voice, though
it’s here we demonstrate our greatest weakness. Writers are notoriously
independent cusses, hard to wrangle. We spend our mostly solitary days
filling up blank pieces of paper with words. We must like it that way,
or we wouldn’t do it. But while it’s pretty to think that our odd way of
life will endure, there’s no guarantee. The writing life is ours to
defend. Protecting it also happens to be the mission of
the Authors Guild, which I myself did not join until last year, when the
light switch in my cave finally got tripped. Are you a member? If not,
please consider becoming one. We’re badly outgunned and in need of
reinforcements. If the writing life has done well by you, as it has by
me, here’s your chance to return the favor. Do it now, because there’s
such a thing as being too late.

Oh, boo-freaking-hoo. Just get a real job like everyone else and write when you can. And “altruism” my fourth point of contact. I’ve lived on three continents and the only people I’ve met who are more self-serving than professional writers are international bankers. Although I slipped past the gatekeepers myself and was treated very well by the good people at Simon & Schuster, I very much disliked a lot of what I saw on the other side of the gates. Now I’m happily on the outs, surrounded by a blue-painted gang of Vandals and Visigoths, and very much looking forward to the slaughter of the fatted cows and shambling shoggoths that is about to begin. It does rather look like they’re getting their asses kicked now, and I, for one, expect to do some of the kicking next year.

Now that the playing field is being leveled by technology, it appears they’re suddenly not so confident that they’re markedly better than the competition. Amusing, is it not? In any event, with all due respect, I believe I shall politely decline the author’s invitation to join the Guild, continue to proudly fly the flag of an independent Blue SF/F author, and let my books sink or swim on their own merits.

In case you’re in any doubt about how the fatted cows really thought about the competition before they realized they were about to be overrun by it, here are just a few of their unvarnished thoughts about the unwashed and “unprofessional” masses of independent writers, which I cite here for the purposes of commentary and criticism.

“I don’t think SFWA should extend a full membership option to
self-published writers. It seems to me that the organization cannot
exist as an organization for professional writers if our doors are open
to writers who don’t meet any professional standards.”

“SFWA members cringe a bit at the idea of admitting self-published writers without some form of screening, no matter what we think about the changing realities of publishing.”


“Why would a self-publishing writer want to be a member of SFWA, assuming
they were self-publishing exclusively”


“It seems to me that the SFWA is on solid, rational, defensible ground
when it says that self-published writers are operating outside the world
that the SFWA was created to police, and thus their membership in the
organization doesn’t make sense.”


“I am categorically opposed to accepting self-published writers as SFWA
members at any level IF that is the only cedit(s) they have…. there’s a significant difference between Joe Wannabe offering his
“novel” to potential readers from his website without the benefit of any
professional-level editorial oversight and someone who’s had the chance
to run hers past an established and well-regarded author.”


“the great majority of self-published work is simply bad”


“I do not want to become an organization of aspiring writers”


“I for one am worried that if we follow your suggestion and double,
triple, or quadruple our membership by allowing self-published authors
to join, we’ll wind up with either (1) an organization that’s so divided
it can’t function or (2) two groups of members whose needs and
interests conflict as often as they overlap.”

Needless to say, I opposed this widespread anti-self publishing attitude as a part of my campaign for SFWA president. This was in direct opposition to the vociferously anti-self publishing position taken by the organization’s previous three-term president.

Why Pink SF is doomed

John C. Wright continues his series on Saving Science Fiction from Strong Female Characters. In the sixth part, he explains why Pink SF is intrinsically bound to suck, how some Pink SF authors have attempted to get around the dramatic limits they have imposed on themselves, and points out that Urban Fantasy has done little more than recreate the very sexual dynamic it was supposed to subvert:

The logic of Political Correctness requires that men and women not be complimentary because the concept of complementary strengths and weakness is not a concept that Political Correctness can admit, lest it be destroyed. The concept of complimentary virtues undermines the concept of envy, and Political Correctness is nothing but politicized fury based on politicized envy. We can define Political Correctness as the attempt to express fury and envy via radical changes to legal and social institutions.

Hence, the Politically Correct writer attempting to make the female ‘strong’ cannot make her strong in the particular feminine way of, for example, Nausicaa, because that would be the same as admitting that there is a particular nature of male and female, which are different and complimentary, which, as I said above, undermines the envy-fury on which Political Correctness is based.

So the logic of Political Correctness directly defies the logic of drama. The more you have of one, the less you have of the other.

The more Political Correctness you have, the less Science Fiction you have, because Politically Correct science is Junk Science.

Political Correctness requires the women not to be of complimentary strength to men, that is, not strong in a feminine way, because that would legitimize femininity. Remember, feminism is the foe of femininity, hence of love and romance.

Instead, Political Correctness requires the female to be as strong as a man, as good as a man, in the very areas men are good at and want to be good at. It is a deliberately unnatural pose. The women character have to be portrayed as the types of character female readers, by and large, do not want to be like or read about, and the female character have to do things women by and large do not create a big thrill or many bragging rights about doing, and the male characters are basically extraneous.

Can it be done? Sure. Writers are endlessly inventive, and we get to set the situation and the plot and, in science fiction, we get to set the laws of nature, too. So the basic physical limitations of the female physique in real life need not hinder us in science fiction situations, because your heroine can be from Krypton, or armed with a phaser weapon, or have cat-girl genes spliced into her DNA, or be an Amazon. Second, the writer gets to set the period and the genre. No one can claim that Hermione Grangier is in any way a second class citizen of Hogwarts, because, like a detective in a detective novel, physical strength and fighting prowess are not the main point of a magical school-chums novel.

Third, if your superheroine is stronger than any normal man, and does not need Prince Charming to settle the hash of the evil dragon, but can wield the sword herself, you can either leave out your male love interest, or you can, Anita Blake style, make him superhuman also. This, of course, is a sly cheat, because it put the girl back in the position of being allured to a dangerous male figure who is more powerful than she, so your vampire huntress falling for a fallen angel (or whatever) is in the same dainty shoes as the spitfire Irish lass kidnapped by the ruthless but devilishly handsome pirate Black Jamie (or whatever) which we all see in the Bodice Ripper racks at the paperback bookstore.

Paranormal Romance, in other words, is an example of the logic of drama subverting (or perhaps superverting) the logic of Political Correctness. It allows the writer to eat her cake and have it too: she can make her warrior-princess or vampire huntress as tough and strong in any way she likes, as tough as Scarlet O’Hara vowing as God is her witness never to go hungry again, and then also bring in a supernatural version of Rhett Butler, and she can retell the story of Beauty and the Beast while retelling GONE WITH THE WIND, and make her man a human being.

Umberto Eco on the death of William Weaver

Umberto Eco eulogized his translator and friend, William Weaver, in an article that was published on 3 December, 2013 in L’Espresso.
After ninety years, the last ten of them reduced to a quasi-vegetable state, William Weaver is no more. He was
a great translator, and one could say that it was primarily through his merits
that our contemporary literature is known and loved in the
Anglo-Saxon countries. Born in Virginia, a conscientious objector but
unable to ignore the grand conflict that was underway, he enlisted in the Second
World War as an ambulance driver. He served with the
English forces throughout the entire Italian campaign, facing danger without ever holding a rifle in his hands. From Naples to Rome, he
made friends with many Italian writers of the era, and from then on,
he never left our country.
Thus it was that he came to translate Pirandello (One, No One, and One Hundred Thousand and The
Late Mattia Pascal), Zeno’s Conscience by Svevo, That
Awful Mess and Acquainted with Grief
by Gadda, two-thirds of
Calvino’s works, The Monkey’s Wrench
and If Not Now, When?
by Primo Levi, The Sunday Woman
by Fruttero and Lucentini,
History and Aracoeli
by Elsa Morante, Incubus
by Berto, A Violent Life
by Pasolini, as well as Cassola, Calasso, De Carlo, Malerba, La
Capria, Parise, Soldati, Alba de Cespedes, Festa Campanile. He also
translated A Man and
Inshallah by Oriana
Fallaci.

In addition, from 1981 to 2003 he translated
four of my novels and many of my essays. For twenty intense years, it
was a splendid collaboration, in which we could spend afternoons, or
exchange two or three letters, on a single word. If the culture has
lost a great writer, I have lost a friend. Weaver was a great
translator, not only because he sought to accurately render the
fluidity, the rhythm, the lexical richness, and the sound of the text. (From my
perspective, he sometimes improved upon my original.) He was a great
translator because he also knew that to translate the meaning, one must
dare to reject the literal translation in order to conserve the
effect or the deeper sense of the text. For reasons of space, I am
limited to relating one amusing memory, of a time in which we tore the text apart in order to render a simple play on words, a wordplay that was already
difficult for Italian readers.

Bill was translating my Foucault’s
Pendulum. He arrived at a
point in which two protagonists, obsessed with the world of the
occult, found a mysterious symbol tied to the transmission system in
automobiles. To demonstrate, in an ironic manner, their propensity to
think that every aspect of the world, every word written or spoken,
does not have the sense it appears, an allusion to the axle of
the Sephirot of the Kabbalah was made.
For
the English translator
this allusion presented difficulties from the start, because in English
there is a difference between a “tree” (vegetable and
cabalistic), and the axle (automobile), but after foraging through
the dictionary, Weaver discovered that the expression “axle-tree”
was legitimate. Nevertheless,
he found himself in a predicament when the two characters then
engaged in a certain word play that involved
the gnostic pneumatics, (the spirits opposite the somatics, that are
immaterial), and the pneumatics of a car. It was a joke, but the
protagonists were simply making jokes.
However, in English, the rubber upon
which an automobile’s wheels roll are not “pneumatics”, but
rather, “tires”. What to do? Weaver, as he recounts in his
translation diary, Pendulum Diary, was struck by a brilliant notion when he remembered the name of a celebrated brand of tires: Firestone. It occurred to him that one might draw an association
between that name and the English expression “philosopher’s stone”
of alchemic lore. The solution was found and the English text therefore
describes how the sightless occultists did not succeed in finding the
true connection between the philosopher’s stone and Firestone.
As one can see, he turned the gag into
something different than the original. The translator must render
the deeper sense of the text, one that is not “the protagonists
speak of tires”, but rather, “the protagonists are students who
play foolishly with the universal knowledge”.
As the Prince of Laughter once said,
translators are born. And Bill was a born translator.

This is not only an affectionate tribute to a great translator, but wonderful advice that I hope everyone who is translating one of my books into another language will keep in mind. It is always il senso profondo del testo that comes first, not il testo literale.

Speaking of translations, I’ve translated eleven or twelve of Eco’s online articles that aren’t otherwise available in English. If you are a fan of his, you can find them here.

The state of independent publishing

One-quarter of the top 100 Amazon sellers are independently published:

As many as a quarter of the top 100 Kindle books on Amazon.com are from indie publishers, according to data revealed at a trade presentation by the retailer. A chart detailing the 25 top-selling indie titles in 2012 was passed on by an audience member via Twitter. Though the term indie is broad, covering everything from self-published authors to publishing houses that fall outside the big six, the news has been interpreted as a victory for the go-it-alone author. However in the US the term has come to mean self-published. A spokeswoman for Amazon.com said: “This figure is referring to Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012, with ‘indie’ meaning books self-published via Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). So a quarter of the top 100 bestselling Kindle books on Amazon.com in 2012 were self-published via KDP.”

Amazon is playing a little fast and loose with the term “indie” here. KDP does not require self-publishing; Marcher Lord has multiple Kindle Select titles that are not self-published. I suspect Amazon doesn’t want to rub it in the major publisher’s faces that they are already as much a super-publisher as a retail channel. Indie quite clearly means independent publishers AND self- publishers.

My experience with the both world of conventional mainstream publishing as well as indie ebook publishing may be useful here.  I looked up my old reports from various publishers, which happens to include a few books that were not mine, and found the following numbers for conventionally published books distributed through the the traditional bookstores:

SS1: 12,348
SS2: 43,000
SS3: 8,000
IN1: 4,790
IN2: 3,815
IN3: 3,441
IN4: 2,796

Books in bold are mine. The others are not mine, but the numbers are hard. Now, one year ago today, I published A Throne of Bones with Marcher Lord Hinterlands. In terms of sales, it is basically a pure ebook and it isn’t available in any bookstore.

ATOB: 1,989

Here is where it gets interesting.  Let’s assume, for the simplicity’s sake, that the three novellas and SE are a single ebook called SE+.

SE+ PAID: 2,163
SE+ FREE: 21,681

So, even as a relative nobody, who is primarily known for being hated within the genre, and lacking a single book for sale on a bookshelf anywhere, I am still able to sell nearly as many copies of a book in a single year as a well-established minor conventional publisher managed to sell through traditional channels in a book’s lifetime.  Since IN1 is one of my books, that indicates that I’m only able to sell about half as many books without conventional distribution, but the higher royalty rate balances that out. Conventional publishing will do literally nothing for me unless it is one of the six majors.

That being said, it is clear that even from my non-bestselling experience, the major publishers can still push more books than the same writer can reasonably expect to sell on his own. But since they pay lower royalties, which The Author’s Guild describes as 15% of list on hardcovers and 25% of revenue on ebooks, a major publisher still has to sell twice as many copies just to keep pace with the independent revenues.

But that is far from the only consideration. Pocket signed me to write six books. I only wrote four of them and they only published three of them. Even if you sign a book contract with one of the six major publishers, even if you write and deliver the book, even if the book is edited, accepted, and the second half of the advance is paid, there is still no guarantee that the book will ever be published. Now, it’s not a bad gig, being paid to not write books, but it’s hard to really build on your success that way.

To top it all off, the ability to give ebooks away allows me to reach 10x more readers. I previously worked out that one out of every five free SE+ readers will subsequently buy ATOB. And, most importantly, the primary limiting factor, the publisher’s print run, no longer applies. I could have sold considerably more copies of The War in Heaven and The World in Shadow had they not been limited by the print run; both books sold through their respective print runs, which caused the vice-president to call me up, congratulate me, and promptly signed me to two more books… neither of which were either completed or published due to organizational changes that had nothing to do with me. Hence the absence of Stalking the Beast from my literary oeuvre

Here is how I see the pros and cons of independent publishing:

Pros: higher royalties, no print runs, no 6-18 months publishing delays, guaranteed publication, no gatekeeping, total freedom.

Cons: lower sales numbers, no books in bookstores, no marketing, no advances, no professional validation, no free editing and cover art.

Since print runs and publisher reorgs have been the bane of my publishing history, and since I insist on being heavily involved with my covers, there simply isn’t any doubt that indie publishing is my preference. If, on the other hand, all you’re really looking for is professional validation, then you probably won’t be happy with publishing independently.

I tend to suspect that Hugh Howey has demonstrated the future of the industry for the successful writer, which is to publish the ebooks independently and publish print books through a mainstream publisher.  However, it will be very difficult for established writers to swing this and an independent probably has to sell at least 100k ebooks per year before the major publishers will be seriously interested in that sort of arrangement.