Tag: writing

Mailvox: mea maxima culpa

Mudz isn’t terribly happy about one of my past blunders:

Does this mean what I think it means? I hope it doesn’t, because that means you have got a lot to answer for, and the questions ain’t pretty. I was scrolling through looking up some Stalin posts, and then I came across THIS:

“For example, was it the right thing to write The War in Heaven instead of Blizzard’s first Starcraft novel? Almost surely not.”

WANKER. That’s right, I said it.

Do you know how much I love Starcraft, and how much fail I credit Blizzard with, not just with the SC2 game, but with every single novel I’ve tried to read so far, despite the blood it tears from every pulsing artery to my brain?

For failing to inhibit such a great offense against the khala, I now charge you with the mission to at least tell those Blizzard goons not to fuck the Protoss up in LotV. No offense to them, but may they die in a thousand fires for what they did to Starcraft, Jim, Fenix, and all the others that got between them and their mad quest for money. And bullshit.

Just sayin’ man, you could have stopped a tragedy.

Yep. This is one of the many reasons why I laugh when people attempt to rub what they perceive as my failures in my face.  In every circumstance, the “failures” to which they point are so minor, so trivial, so miniscule in comparison with my more serious failures that it is simply amusing.

The Starcraft debacle was without question the worst judgment call of my writing career.  But the decision seemed sensible at the time.  What happened was that Pocket Books, who had successfully published Rebel Moon as a media tie-in novel and recently signed me to the two-book contract that resulted in The War in Heaven and The World in Shadow, called me up to see if I was interested in writing the first Starcraft novel.

I was, since I knew Allen Adham and Patrick Wyatt, both very good guys, and I was a fan of the Warcraft series.  I wasn’t quite as impressed with Starcraft, but there was enough there that I felt I could do something interesting with it.  For me, the Zerg presented the interesting challenge; what would affect a human woman like Kerrigan enough to cause her transformation into the Queen of Blades?  What would that transformation be like?  What was it like to be a member of the Zerg?

My angle, I decided, would be portraying the Zerg as existing in a sort of religious ecstasy, a joyous, quasi-sexual bonding with the Overmind that would serve as a counterpoint to the colder, more analytic element brought by the Protoss.  One thing that science fiction has never done well, in books, movies, or games, is to portray the experience of an element of a hive mind.  Mindless insects and a queen bee is the usual model, used by everyone from Orson Scott Card on down. I thought this would be a good opportunity to do something more intelligent and interesting.

My friend Scott at Pocket set up a call between me and the guy at Blizzard responsible for the books, and it was a disaster.  Not that we didn’t get along or anything, but the gulf between my ideas and his were, to put it mildly, vast.  After I explained what I was thinking, he yeah-yeah-yeahed the concept, and then added: “But you know what would be really cool?  If, at the end, Kerrigan reveals that she is the Queen of Blades and then, you know, vanishes with this really evil laugh!”

Right.  Now, these days, I know better.  These days, I would have said, “oh, that’s a great idea”, signed the contract, and proceeded to write what I was planning to write anyhow.  But back then, however, I was naive enough to take the opinion of mid-level functionaries without a creative bone in their bodies seriously.  I didn’t see any way to bridge the gap between what I wanted to do and the unrestrained cliched crap the Blizzard guy clearly wanted.

Also, at the time, I was aware that Pocket was in the running to nab the rights to the Star Wars books.  They already had Star Trek, and I was one of the writers slated to do one… but I couldn’t do my own books, the Starcraft book, and a Star Wars book at the same time.  And remember, back in the late 90’s, media tie-in novels were not the dominant force they are today.  They were really looked down upon; they were seen as a way to reach the point I had already reached.  So, the idea of putting my own books on hold in order to write both Starcraft and Star Wars never occurred to me, nor to Pocket, for that matter.

So, I turned down the Starcraft books with the expectation that I’d be doing a Star Wars novel or two instead.  Unfortunately, Pocket didn’t obtain the rights, so I didn’t get the chance to play in the Lucas universe.  I ended up writing the three Eternal Warriors novels for Pocket as well as providing an outline for Stalking the Beast, the first of two thrillers that one of their other novelists was to write.  But that is a story for another day.

Anyhow, I haven’t read the Starcraft novels.  But if they aren’t worthy of the game, it’s true, I do bear at least a modicum of responsibility for that.

The One Million month

Thanks very much to everyone who visited here in April, especially those who took the time to get involved in the various discussions in the comments.  I remember scoffing when ten years ago a reader predicted that this blog would one day have a million pageviews in a year, so it seems incredible to me that VP and AG now see that level of traffic in a single month. 

With a few notable exceptions, most blogs hide their traffic reports these days, but I think this is a tactical blunder.  The primary problem with doing so is that it allows the Left to dishonestly attempt to marginalize right-wing blogs in the eyes of others.  Recall that I have been portrayed for ten years as an extremist whack-job whose writing no one ever read even as the readership steadily grew, and I was regularly reminded that PZ Myers, John Scalzi, and a number of other left-wing bloggers had much bigger blog readerships than I did… until it was revealed late last year that the traffic here alone, (never mind that of the  WND columns that those bloggers were reading and attacking), passed up some of those blogs almost two years ago!  Never forget, the Left is heavily dependent upon lies, and one of their biggest lies, perhaps the one to which they resort the most readily, concerns their pretense that their opinions enjoy much more popularity than they actually do.  Therefore, the more metrics that are visible to everyone, the less they can get away with it.

That is why I make my Sitemeter and Google Analytics statistics public.  (VP uses the old template, which is why there is no monthly traffic widget in the sidebar as is the case with AG.) That’s why I’ve begun a quarterly Top 10 Game blogs report that I expect to expand to a Top 25 report in the second quarter. That’s why I encourage everyone who is in any way sympathetic to the neoreactionary traditional Relightenment to be open and public with their statistics. The truth is on our side. Victory through data!

Let’s face it, it is very difficult for the rabbits of Whatever to continue to claim that the Chief Gamma Rabbit of their warren is a vastly influential individual, or that their sick transquax-gendered view of human intersexual relations is the mainstream perspective, when everyone now realizes that Whatever has only two-thirds the traffic of my blogs and one-quarter that of the Great Prophet of the Crimson Arts.  Open metrics make it clear that it is the influential Cathedralites such as Jim Hines (Alexa Rank 729,110) and Making Light (375,254), who are actually the marginal ones. Despite their artificially elevated positions in the field of SF/F, they cannot maintain sizable blog readerships, not even with the benefit of occasional puffing by their ideological allies in the mainstream media.  They may be big fish, but they are big fish in a much smaller pond than the ocean they try to claim.

It’s not that their opinions aren’t relevant or that no one shares them, it is merely that their perspective is nowhere nearly as dominant as they are desperate to have you believe.  They can run from debate, they can refuse to permit substantive criticism, they can wield their banhammers to hide from even semblance of genuine discourse on their sites, but the one thing they cannot avoid is the harsh light of statistical reality exposing their pretensions.

It is ludicrous to imagine that it is popular writers such as Sarah Hoyt and Larry Correia who are the societal outsiders when their influence is an order of magnitude or more larger than most of the supposed “big names” in modern SF/F.   Sure, the Cathredralites sell more books and appear more often in the mainstream media, for the time being, because their capture of the genre’s gatekeepers means they control access to its media and distribution channels. But what we are seeing now is the early stages of a Fox News-style transformation in the SF/F industry, as new media outlets and new transmission channels is in the process of seriously upending the tilted playing field.  The cultural battle in SF/F isn’t over, as the self-appointed winners would have you believe, the heavy cavalry is just beginning to enter the field and the unarmored footmen without shields are quaking.

However, the fact that the Left is wrong about equality, wrong about economics, wrong about the past, and wrong about the future does not mean there is nothing that we of the Right cannot learn from them.  The one thing the Left does very, very well is the force-multiplication of its various assets, no matter how small and insignificant they truly are, and that is something that the neoreactionary Right will have to learn in order to mitigate the damage our progressive counterparts have inflicted upon us and upon themselves.  That’s why I’ve created the Standout Authors and Friends of Narnia, and I encourage other writers and bloggers of the Right to devote at least some effort to building up others of the Right even as they continue to pursue their own diverse and independent ambitions.

Consider that Prospect Magazine declared the top World Thinkers of 2013 on the basis of 10,000 votes.  10,000 votes!   That’s nothing, and yet the Left will gravely – and absurdly – pretend, on that basis, that Richard Dawkins is widely considered to be the greatest intellectual of our time. 

We can do better. We should do better. We will do better.

Who, When, How: the unique nature of SF

John C. Wright contemplates what separates SF from all other forms of fiction, and in doing so, helps delineate the intrinsic difference between science fiction and fantasy as well as why science fiction has increasingly been transformed into fantasy as more women entered the field:

Aliens are unique to science fiction.

In no story about detectives solving a murder or heiresses wondering
what baron to wed will you find anything told from the point of view of a
nonhuman intelligent creature. All other genres, from Westerns to War
Stories to Historical drama to mainstream tales about college professors
cheating on their wives, are told from within the human realm of human
nature and can never leave it. In science fiction and in science fiction
alone is there an opportunity to step outside the human realm, and
turn, and look, and to see the mask of man from the outside.  Only in
science fiction can we speculate on what humans look like to intelligent
nonhumans….

If the task is feasible then science fiction is the only place to go, the only vantage where to stand, to look at mankind, because it and it alone steps away and turns and looks at humanity from the outside.

Before we address that broader question, the gentle reader may be contemplating at least two objections to the bold statement that examining man from a viewpoint outside man is unique to science fiction.

The first is that fantasy stories, myths, fairytales, Aesop’s fables and stories about animals, from Lassie to Black Beauty to Bambi, involve imagining what human beings might look like seen from the viewpoint of gods or sprites, ghosts or talking animals, or dumb animals. It would be odd indeed to classify BAMBI or FINDING NEMO or HAPPY FEET as “science fiction” and yet the audience for those tales sees human beings only from the beast’s-eye view. In the oldest poem in the West, THE ILIAD, many a scene is told from the coign of vantage of the Olympian gods. The far-famed Wagner’s Ring Cycle is told mostly from the point of view of gods and dark elves, giants and river nymphs, valkyries and so on: Indeed, in the first opera of the cycle, DAS RHEINGOLD, there is not a single human character on stage at any time.  The first objection, then, is simply that the statement is not true: many stories look at man from outside.

The second objection is subtler: all stories by their nature take the reader out from his own personal viewpoint. That is the core of what the story-telling imagination is, and what it does. Reading GONE WITH THE WIND as if by magic transforms the reader into the rich and willful daughter of a slaveholding Irish plantation owner; WAR AND PEACE transforms the reader into any number of Russian nobles and serfs in the midst of the Napoleonic wars; in SIEGFRIED, we become a young hero raised by a treacherous dwarf, destined to forge his father’s sword to slay a dire dragon, and win the love of an exiled goddess and the gold the world craves; in BAMBI, we become a deer; in WATERSHIP DOWN, a rabbit.

The second objection, in other words, is that science fiction is not only not unique in taking us outside our own viewpoint, but that this act of imaginative self-departure is ubiquitous and essential to all story-telling. If the reader can look at the world from another set of eyes, what does it matter whether the reader is transformed for an hour into a Southern Planter, a Russian Boyar, a Germanic Hero, or an English Hare?

Science fiction (so the objection runs) is doing something no different from any other genre, and indeed, does something less useful, because, unlike Southern Planters and Russian Nobles, the Vulcan scientist or Klingon warrior or green-skinned Orion slavegirl simply does not exist.

Imaging life from the point of view of a stranger or an enemy may have the benevolent real-world side effect of increasing my sympathy and brotherly love for him, and affirming our common humanity. Whether or not there is any common humanity with the Mollusk Men of Mars, or the Sorns, or the Tharks, or the Old Ones, there is little point in the reader learning how to step by an act of imagination into the shoes of these inhabitants of the Red Planet, because neither do they exist, and even did they, none of them wears shoes.

In sum, the second objection is that looking at ourselves from outside is what all story telling does, so science fiction is not unique; and looking at ourselves from the point of view of characters who resemble real people serves a useful real world purpose of engendering empathy with others.

The answer to the second objection is simple: Empathy is engendered by the care and skill of the portrayal, no matter who is portrayed. Whether or not the person portrayed is real or unreal means nothing.

Scarlet O’Hara of Tara is no more nor less real than Thweel the Martian. Both exist in the imagination only. Both have a relation to reality that is symbolic or emotional. When the nonhuman creature of the Genii in Disney’s ALADDIN yearns for the manacles to be struck from his wrists, and his bondage to end, all spirits longing for liberty understands precisely how he feels, because the emotion is the same in the real as in the unreal circumstances. When the completely unrealistic Siegfried, raised by a magical dwarf in a cave, yearns for the mother he has never known, it is not less poignant than the similar yearning by Oliver Twist, because both are orphans. When Bambi suffers the same loss and longing when his mother is shot by hunters, no skeptic is so foolish as to object that this scene is not moving and melancholy on the grounds that, unlike Siegfried and Oliver, deer cannot put their emotions of filial love for their mother into words, nor can they weep tears.

The answer to the second objection, in other words, is that it is the act of exercising the imagination which is the beauty and the justification for story-telling.

By the nature of imagination, the thing imagined is not real. It can be closer to reality or less close, more realistic or more fanciful, but this degree of realism has little or nothing to do with how well the scene draws the reader out of himself, and how firmly he finds himself planted in the shoes of an orphaned boy or, for that matter, an orphaned fawn.

A realistic scene portrayed without craft or genius does not engage the imagination and therefore fails as an exercise of the story-telling art; an unrealistic scene, even one involving magical beings or talking animals, which is told with craft and skill does indeed engage the imagination, and does indeed accomplish the feat that story-tellers are commanded by the muses to attempt.

The answer to the first objection is not so simple, for it involves a subtle distinction between what seem to be twins.

How is a Martian different from a Dark Elf?

People often attempt to distinguish SF from F on the basis of one being a literature of technology and ideas versus the other being a literature of magic and people, but I think Wright’s point about the dividing line being the one between intellect and emotion is cogent and arguably the more convincing.  While there are intellectual strains in many fantasy novels, such as the financial struggles in Westeros(1) or the military logistics in Selenoth, at the end of the day, the focus in these books is as every bit as emotional as the average urban fantasy featuring a necro-bestial love triangle.  The primary appeal of A Song of Ice and Fire, Arts of Dark and Light, and every fantasy since Narnia and Middle Earth is the emotional one of experiencing what it might be like to dwell in those imaginary lands.  It is the appeal of the What and the Why.

A science fiction novel, on the other hand, concerns the intellectual appeal of posing and answering questions that do not involve feeling. It is the appeal of the Who, the When, and the How.  Which is how it is possible to insist, with a straight face, that one can write a science fiction novel about angels as well as a fantasy novel about scientists.

Wright says it all considerably better than I possibly can, so just go there and read the entire thing.  And perhaps unintentionally, he implicitly explains why reading chick lit can, to the average man, very nearly approach the experience of reading science fiction.

(1) In watching A Game of Thrones the other night, I suddenly found myself getting mildly irritated BECAUSE of the financial verisimilitude involved in Tyrion’s attempt to pay for the royal wedding.  While I appreciated the practical realism of the problem as well as the impact it had on the plot, it suddenly occurred to me that Martin engages in a certain amount of handwaving with regards to the economies of the great families.  The Lannisters are unthinkably rich because they have a gold mine and collect taxes in Lannisport and the Westerlands?  Marcus Licinius Crassus laughed. And House Tyrell is very nearly as rich because they have a large quantity of farmland?  Both families are wealthy, to be sure, but the sources of their wealth are not nearly sufficient in historical terms to fund the size of the military activities in which they are engaged.

From SF/F to R(SF/F)

A female SF/F writer explains the mediocrity of the modern female SF/F writers:

New York Publishing by definition has got the rat of Marxism in their
heads.  They always treated writers as widgets anyway.  Round the mid
seventies, early eighties they realized that they had more widgets with
outies than innies, and they decided to correct it the usual way.  “Buy
more women” the cry went out.  And in came not only a barrage of women
who had an easier time breaking in than men, but of women who were told
what kept them out had been discrimination.  And who, therefore, hated
the field they were getting into, because those meanies had kept them
out.  Out came an outpouring of “poor me female” writing.  Which in the
early nineties caused me to snarl at a Barnes & Noble, “I wish
someone would pass a law forbidding women from writing.” After I’d
walked up and down a fantasy shelf and found NOT ONE novel that wasn’t
about some abused high-magic chick whose father was a monster.

Here we digress from writing in general to genre writing.  It will
shock you to realize that different genres appeal to different people,
right?  In general romance – by and far the blockbuster of genres –
appeals to women.  I know this shocks you, since women are not at all by
evolution designed for being fascinated with relationships.  This
doesn’t mean men don’t read it.  I know several men who read Romance
(and no, it has nothing to do with their orientation) but the
proportions are so grossly skewed that if you see someone in public with
a romance novel and can’t see what gender they are, you can take a safe
bet it’s a woman.  At the other end of this, military fiction is read
mostly by men.
Fiction is no different than anything else. If one artificially lowers the barriers to entry, one is going automatically to reduce the quality of entrants one accepts. When it was decided, presumably by female editors and executives, that an insufficient number of female authors were being published in the SF/F genre, many women were given publishing contracts primarily on the sole basis of their being better writers than other female wannabes.

Now, I disagree with Sarah in that I don’t believe the female writers who entered the genre hated the field or even necessarily wanted to change it much.  I think, to the contrary, that they loved fantasy and science fiction, they merely wanted to “improve” it and make it just a little bit more to their liking.  Hence the shifting focus from ideas, plots, and worldbuilding towards characters and relationships… and romance!

This shifting focus didn’t have to be a bad thing. It wasn’t an intrinsic negative. There was certainly some room for considerable improvement with regards to characters, relationships, and style; one cannot read Asimov, Heinlein, Vance, or any of the lesser SF/F authors from the 1950s through the 1970s without being conscious of a certain clunkiness to the prose and a shallowness to the characters.

The problem was that in far too many cases, the ideas, plot, and worldbuilding aspects were simply thrown out, to such an extent that now, the average “fantasy” novel is little more than a thinly disguised romance novel. In many cases, the “SF/F” publishers aren’t even bothering to disguise it any longer. What is broadly described as “paranormal” fiction actually belongs to the romance genre, not the SF/F genre, as any reasonable examination of its tropes will swiftly reveal.  And the romantic transformation isn’t limited to the necro-bestial sub-genre of fantasy either. Consider the cover of Mary Robinette Kowal’s new novel, Without A Summer. Kowal is the current VP of SFWA. She’s nice, she’s talented, and she’s an award-winning writer. She was even nominated for the Best Novel Nebula in 2010.

What she isn’t is an SF/F writer.  She’s a romance writer. The marketing department at Tor Books clearly knows that. Both the Handsome Prince and the Pretty Princess with her bluebirds on the cover are straight out of Disney.  Giving a Nebula award to a book like this would be akin to giving Joe Abercrombie the Golden Tea Cosy or whatever award it is the RWA gives out because one of his mentally unstable killers happens to tenderly rape a female captive during a momentary interlude between bloody battles.

As for me, the last female writer I read was Dr. Helen Smith and her forthcoming book Men on Strike.  The last female novelist I read was Naomi Novik, whose fantasy novels, as should surprise absolutely no one, manage to reduce the broad human tragedy of the Napoleonic Wars to a pretty good tale about a relationship between a man and his accidentally acquired dragon.

It is due to this transformation from SF/F to R(SF/F) that despite there being more female “SF/F” authors than ever before, none of them compare favorably with the likes of Madeleine L’Engle, Susan Cooper, Ann McCaffrey, Tanith Lee and Lois McMaster Bujold, women who were always more than capable of competing with the men on pure merit alone.

The Future of the Future

John C. Wright predicts where SF/F is heading on the basis of its primary purposes:

Like all fiction, Science Fiction is an oasis of rest amid the wasteland of mundane life, a time between toil to lift our eyes to distant mountains and wonder what is beyond them, or to lift our eyes further, to the stars, and wonder.

Unlike other fiction, which contains imaginary places and events, science fiction also contains an imaginary cosmos that operates by different rules, perhaps one where men can be invisible, or fly to the moon in antigravity spheres, or suffer an invasion by hunger and superior beings from Mars. The bridge between the real cosmos and the science fictional cosmos is the speculation, either rigorous or lax, of scientific plausibility that connects them. If you have invisible man in a science fiction story, he must perhaps walk unclothed, for example, because that is a realistic extrapolation from the unrealistic premise; or if you have invaders from Mars, they must have physiology evolved by Martian conditions, they perhaps will be swiftly poisoned by the diseases their more advanced civilization long ago abolished from their sterile world, because again this is a realistic extrapolation from an unreal premise.

Fantasy also postulates a different cosmos with different rules, but the bridge that reaches to the perilous realm of Elfland from our world is one of dream-logic. If the wicked witch says love’s first kiss will wake the sleeping beauty, only the prince who did not die on the enchanted thorns hedging the haunting castle may kiss and wake her, and not Doctor McCoy with a hypospray of stimulant. Because that is the way dream logic works, or fairy tales, or myths: the arbitrary rules of Elfland can be trespassed only with draconian retaliation, and the rewards achieved by the bold or the cunning performance of the twelve terrible tasks or the answer of the riddle of the sphinx. These are the dreamlike implications of the unreal premise, based on the rules of a realm no man has seen, but which we somehow always greet with a start of recognition.

Why do we need dreams to come from a cosmos other than this one?

I propose that while somewhere, on some dark and moonless world of inky seas beneath a blood-colored sun, some Coleopterous race of pitiless logic and soulless energy toil and travail nakedly without joy, copulate without love, live without dreams and perish without regret, their corpses left to rot where they fall, or are eaten by their larvae, that these insectiod swarms are the true heirs to this cosmos, and, unlike Man, feel no discomfort at existence here. Birth is no miracle to them and death no tragedy, because they are at home here, and their emotions exactly suit and match the contours of the world.

Not Man. We are exiles.

Wright identifies the intrinsic flaw in mainstream secular science fiction and fantasy. Rejecting, as it does, the fundamentally religious foundation of fantasy, (for Wright is incorrect and George MacDonald, not William Morris, is the father of fantasy), modern fantasy cannot serve its primary purpose because it cannot slake a thirst its writers do not even realize exists.  This is why there so often feels like something missing from even the best modern fantasy, why it is lifeless, soulless, and limited to portraying shades of grey in the place of the full color spectrum.

Mainstream science fiction is affected by these problems too, but to a much lesser extent because it has a different purpose. If fantasy is meant to provide the exile with dreams of home, science fiction is supposed to provide a technological vision of the future. The problem is that science is increasingly beyond the comprehension of the science fiction writer to grasp its implications, has settled many of the questions to which science fiction once proposed answers, (and often in a way that renders more abstract the various possibilities of wonder), and is increasingly written by writers who have no interest in technology and can’t explain how their television’s remote control worked, much less present a technologically credible vision of the future.  Even as less science fiction is being published, there is less and less science to be found in what purports to remain of it.

It is hard to dispute Wright’s conclusion: “So look for a growth of darker fantasies in the future as the scientific
world view slowly gives way to a world view that does not believe in
science, nor in any over-arching narrative, nor in truth, nor in beauty,
nor in virtue.”

But that is neither fantasy nor science fiction.  What we are witnessing is the lingering death of two literary genres. What we are seeing is the subsumption of fantasy and science fiction by romance and horror.

The ideology war in science fiction

Sarah Hoyt tries to convince science fiction’s left wing mainstream to come to grips with the new publishing reality before the ability of the right wing to bypass the gatekeepers does to them what Fox News has done to the ABCNNBCBS media cabal.

At its inception science fiction gave free rein to all thoughts of weird thoughts.  To this day science fiction allows a great leeway to personal behavior.  If there is a place on Earth you can show up wearing a live duck and have people ask you about the technical details of the costume, it’s science fiction.  To that extent, fans and other authors are “my people” and it’s a place I can decompress.  Like gays in the bad closet days finding a place they could be themselves, science fiction conventions allow me to be my own weird self without people shying away from me.  As a friend of mine puts it “we are the plaid sheep of our families.”  And the best place to hide is the flock.

The problem is that any community – ANY community – but particularly an excluded community (see what I did there?) will tend to try to form cohesion along the lines of common thought and common belief.  You might think that Odds would not try to enforce a rigid conformity, but you would be wrong.

It happened gradually.  Part of it is that most of us are used to be looked at askance and treated like abnormal.  A stunning number of us were bullied as children.  This means we tend to have an over developed empathy with any group identified as “victims.”  That, plus the fact that the publishing gatekeepers are the result of the long march and are – no, this is not under dispute – varying shades of red going from slightly to the right of Lenin to slightly to the left of Stalin. (Why is this not under dispute?  Because of the number of authors who identify themselves as communist.  Because there is in Science Fiction a young communist authors group.  People OPENLY identify as communist, and there’s no repercussion in their careers.  People don’t openly identify as conservative UNLESS they came in at a different time and their careers are secure.  If you think that’s because only leftists are creative or that this means the community is becoming more enlightened, you are part of the problem.  Go to the corner and meditate how identifying with a regime responsible for the death of a hundred million is “enlightened.  Or how any community EVER has achieved uniformity of opinion, unless it is EXTERNAL and enforced by authorities.  Good Lord, even today we have flat Earthers.  BUT you think that everyone who writes science fiction just is magically “left”?  I hope you are a fantasy author.)

I swear the eighties was a long slog of abused women in science fiction and fantasy books.  They were always abused by their fathers, too, who were tyrannical evil sobs.  The idea that mothers can be horrible parents too, never seemed to occur to these female writers. There was always a sisterhood of women.  As someone who has known any number of ‘orrible mothers, and who went to an all girls’ school the whole “sisterhood of those who possess vaginas” made me want to shred kittens.  (Shuddup.  I didn’t do it.  I’m just saying how mad it made me.  You know how I feel about cats.)  Even when the books were somewhat acceptable otherwise, it annoyed me to the point a lot of them went unread.

Then came the every woman a hero every man a wimp movement.  (Yes, Athena is more than normal.  Yes, she is strong. She is also hotheaded and foolish and, btw, Kit is far more than a match for her.)  And then…

Well, every fad of the left falls into science fiction and fantasy books, even the patently, absurdly ridiculous.  Like, oh, for instance, the idea that all male sexuality is dangerous, the idea that a society of women would be peaceful forever, the idea–  Too much to go on.  Suffice it to say the most awarded short story in our history – receiving every award in the field – posits that life in an American Suburb is more exclusionary and worse than life during China’s cultural revolution.

HOWEVER commentary by someone otherwise respected in the field, in a CHURCH magazine to the extent that homosexuals might have conflicts with being good LDS members occasions cries of “kill the witch.”

Oh, my people!  Not only are you trying to enforce conformity, but you’re trying to enforce a conformity so out of touch with the rest of society that what you think is right and worthy to publish strikes most people as “OMG, kill.”  Which probably explains the spiraling down print runs.  Those of us already fans and writers yawn, the rest of the world backs away screaming….

News for my colleagues on the left: For years we’ve put up with
whatever you dished out.  We had to.  We didn’t scream, we didn’t
complain.  We are even tolerant enough to like your books and admire
your artistry, EVEN when we think what you’re proposing is wrong and
perhaps evil (a world of all women.  Communitarian worldwide
societies.)  We understand the difference between ideas and those who
have them.

It’s harder for you.  Politics is your religion.

Up till now given a limited output, already pre-vetted, it was easy for
you to freeze out anyone who outraged you.  But indie has opened the
sluice gates.  You might (for all I know.  Again, when a community is
excluded, it goes underground) be a majority in sf writers now for all I
know.  I GUARANTEE you’re a tiny minority in the population.  Now that
the gates have opened and anyone can write SF and sell well and be
admired, it probably won’t be long before you’re a minority in sf/f
writing.

However, I URGE you to come to terms as soon as possible.

I have to say that I don’t think Sarah’s warning is going to make any difference at all.  As a result of my campaign for SFWA president, I have spent the last two months in the bowels of the SFWA forums. What I have seen is that the writers who make up the SF/F community are, to an almost unbelievable extent, delusional.  They genuinely believe they are faster when they have been winning races because a vast quantity of other runners have been barred from even lining up in the blocks to run against them.  They genuinely believe that they are special beings with a superior morality, and at the same time, assert that their ideological views are shared by all the decent members of civil society. And they are very nasty pieces of work, bitter from their long experience of social exclusion and their lowly positions on the socio-sexual totem pole.  They are full of hatred themselves, which is why they see hate in even the most genuine and harmless differences of opinion. 

Most of all, they have no ability to conceive of the mere possibility of separating the personal from the political. They attempt to destroy those who disagree with them or cause them to suffer embarrassment; recall that McRapey’s charity campaign wasn’t an attempt to stop me from trolling his blog or to advance any racist, sexist, or homophobic causes, it was to try to stop me from simply mentioning him because I dared to directly quote him and taunt him for his eminently tauntable words. I did nothing more than do to him what he prides himself on doing to others; you all know what resulted from that.

Nearly two decades ago, a member of the SFWA told me that the battles within science fiction were so bitter because the stakes were so small. But I think he was wrong. It’s more than that. The battles are so bitter because SF/F is largely comprised of gamma males and unattractive women who are very bitter people.  They are openly bitter about their lots in life. They are deeply angry with the world as they have experienced it. The books they write, for the most part, are their wish fulfillment fantasies, places where they finally have the chance to say what they didn’t have the wit to say when it mattered and be the people they couldn’t manage to become in real life. This is why, despite being technically more proficient in some ways, their work is so observably inferior to the science fiction and fantasy of earlier ages that concerned itself with ideas of more grandeur and societal import than the retro-adolescent daydreams of socio-sexually unsuccessful former junior high school students.

I commend Sarah for her graciousness in attempting to warn those who have repeatedly done their best to professionally shun her and undermine her career. But I can tell her that it will not work; I attempted to do something similar in my current campaign for SFWA President. But my warnings about the coming collapse of the traditional professional publishing business of SF/F – which you will note preceded the failure of Night Shade Books – was met with little more than the usual sneers and rabbits shrieking “not-rabbit, not-rabbit”!

So leave them to their fate.  Let the rabbits panic as books prices continue to decline, their royalties continue to fall and their publishers stop paying advances before finally going the way of Borders and Night Shade Books. Let them learn if they are able to compete on a playing field that is not heavily tilted in their favor by like-minded ideologues. Let the obese, unhealthy moral degenerates struggle to pay for the increased costs of their health care under the Obamacare regime for which they clamored.

It’s not our fault. It’s not our concern. And it’s not our problem. The gatekeepers are failing, the gates are swinging open, and the right-wing horde is rapidly approaching the citadel. It won’t be long before the sneering writers of SF/F cease their endless snarking and start crying out for mercy.

At that point, it will fall to us, we established writers of the right who have somehow managed to surmount every obstacle and survive every stone and missile hurled our way throughout what passes for our literary careers, to remind them that it was their decision to declare “no quarter”. We didn’t make the rules, we are merely playing by the ones they established.  I won’t take any pleasure in their suffering, but neither will I shed any tears.

I’ve put a list of standout authors on the right sidebar.  Authors like Sarah and Orson Scott Card, genre writers who have been willing, in some manner of speaking, to stand up against the fascists of science fiction and tell them, no, you don’t own science fiction, you don’t own fantasy, you are interlopers and intellectual parasites, and you have polluted the very literature you claimed to love.  I encourage those fans of the genre who are of the right themselves to support those writers who don’t insult you, who don’t despise you, who don’t hate you for your religious faith or your political beliefs.

Give their books a shot. You won’t like all of them.  I don’t myself.  I will still read China Mieville although he is a Communist lunatic and adore Umberto Eco’s work despite the incoherence of his left-leaning humanism.  But to the extent that I can utilize whatever influence has been granted to me by those who choose to read this blog and support my writing, I will use it to assist those who stand up for Western civilization and human liberty, rather than those who, intentionally or unintentionally, are seeking to destroy it.

Make no mistake.  The John Scalzis of the science fiction world desperately want to see Western civilization destroyed. They despise it and the conceptual aspects of their work largely consists of their dreams of its demise. But what they fail to realize is that the end of all the things they hate, the end of racism, sexism, morality, religion, and inequality, requires nothing less than the end of humanity itself, and that the end of Western civilization will not be the sexy secular scientopia of their dreams, but a two thousand-year relapse into depravity and pagan darkness.

The cancer in SF/F, part I

Adam Roberts asks who owns the political soul of science fiction

I make no apologies for writing science fiction.
I love the genre with a deep and geeky love. Becoming professor of
19th-century literature at the University of London has done nothing to
diminish my capacity for that mode of enthusiasm that fans call “squee”.

Being
a literature professor means, in effect, the government pays me to read
books; and, taking my job seriously, I read a lot, in and out of genre.
I think the novel is most alive today as a literature of the fantastic:
at their worst, SF, fantasy and magic realist novels can be very bad;
while at their best, they’re by far the most exciting kinds of writing
being published.

But here’s the thing: my genre divides
politically in a manner unlike others. Writers of historical or crime
fiction might be rightwing or leftwing, but few would attempt to define
those genres as intrinsically left- or right-leaning. SF is different:
the genre defines itself according to two diametrically opposed
ideological stances.

Roberts didn’t have to tell us which side he is on: his use of the word “squee” was all that was necessary to let us know that he was of the enscalzied left wing of science fiction.  But his question is more interesting than it might first appear, because although the answer is obvious to anyone who has paid even a modicum of attention to the world of professional, published science fiction over the last 20 years, there is more to it than simply looking at who is getting published, who is winning awards, and who has been running SFWA for the last decade.

There is no question who presently owns what would be best termed “the trappings” of science fiction.  It is the scalzied manboobs, the cisgendered queers, the obese cat collectors, the Red Diaper socialists, the female imperativists, and the professional race whiners who presently dominate science fiction, not because they have more talent to offer than those on the right, but due to a) science fiction’s longtime affiliation with the secular humanist, sciencistic left and b) the long march through the publishing institutions that has gradually and methodically gone about excluding every editor and author even remotely suspected of harboring views that have been, or may be, deemed ideologically undesirable.

The long march isn’t the product of my imagination. I first became aware of it when Pocket Books, to their credit, thought it would be a good idea to assign an editor who had at least a modicum of religious awareness to my Eternal Warriors novels, but couldn’t find a single religious individual in house.  They finally had to hire an external editor, a Jewish woman, because the organization’s collective theological knowledge amounted to zero.

So much for the heirs of the Western intellectual tradition; the reviewer at Black Gate who reviewed Summa Elvetica genuinely believed that the argument presented therein was a real one written by Thomas Aquinas.  However, having read the Summa Theologica, I can assure everyone that while the Angelic Doctor contemplated many issues, the question of whether elves have souls naturally united to them or not was not one of them.

One need only look at the increasingly mediocre works that have been nominated for, and in some cases even won, science fiction’s highest prizes to realize that the genre is dominated by the ideological left and is in severe decline from both the literary and revenue perspectives.  When six of the top 10-selling SF books in 2012 are either ripped off from an Xbox game or were first published more than a decade ago, it shouldn’t be difficult to observe that there is a very serious problem with the science fiction that is presently being published.

Now, some will wish to dismiss my observations as the embittered rantings of a fourth-rate fantasy author, even though the sales of one of my books, at around 41,000, would have put me at number three on the 2012 list of bestsellers.  But even if one dismisses me, the problem is that I am far from the only former Asimov and Analog subscriber who no longer bothers to even pirate, let alone buy, The Year’s Best Science Fiction collections because so little of it is worth reading anymore. As an SFWA member, I have a vote for the Nebula, but at least in the case of the Best Novel category, there is simply nothing for which one can credibly vote.

It is simply impossible to call any of the novels presently up for this year’s Nebula or Hugo the best novel in SF/F with a straight face. And if one of them truly does merit the description, then the genre is in even worse shape than I have observed.  It should not be controversial to suggest that it is highly unlikely that anyone from this year’s class will one day be named a Grandmaster of Science Fiction.

CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, HP Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, and Robert Heinlein could not get published in today’s SF/F publishing environment, which has ironically turned Harlan Ellison’s concept of SF being a place for “dangerous visions” on its head. The fact that the Guardian chose to head the linked article with a picture of Iain M. Banks was particularly apt, as science fiction is today in much the same position as the unfortunate Scottish author, who recently announced that he was terminal with a cancer that had developed unbeknownst to him. (One has to respect his mordant wit; in response to the bad news he asked his longtime girlfriend if she would do him the honor of becoming his widow.) Science fiction is not only terminal, its professional community is still largely ignorant of that readily observable fact.

Science fiction is dying because it has been invaded by a parasitical and hostile ideology that has metastasized and spread throughout the genre. This ideology is opposed to science because science is weakening the assumptions on which it is founded. It is opposed to heroism because heroism is intrinsically anti-egalitarian. It is opposed to masculinity because its adherents are women and feminized gamma males. It is opposed to Western civilization because Western civilization is Christian.  It is opposed to free discourse because free discourse reveals its many incoherencies, contradictions, and complete flights of fantasy.

Roberts’s summary of the difference between left and right is accurate, but incomplete: “Heinlein’s imagined interstellar future is an environment designed to
valorise the skill sets (self-reliance, engineering competence,
willpower, bravery and manliness) that Heinlein prized. Left-leaning
Iain M Banks’s Culture novels posit a high-tech geek utopia in which the
particular skill sets, ethics and wit‑discourse of SF nerds turn out to
be the gold standard of pan-galactic multi-species civilisation.”

But it is more than that. Roberts omits to mention that feminism, equalitarianism, cultural relativism, massive central government, unrestrained sexual adventurism, and ideological strawmen are de rigueur for the science fiction of the left.  And that is when it is more than simple romance novels in space or rewritten Regency romances with a modest sprinkling of magic.

The fact that Roberts considers the genre’s greatest writers to be “Ursula K Le Guin, Octavia Butler, James Tiptree Jr, Margaret Atwood, Karen Joy Fowler, Pat Cadigan, Justina Robson” shows that he is speaking only of the genre’s left and also suffices to show the inferiority of the works produced by that side of the genre. With the exception of Le Guin and Sheldon, no science fiction fan would trade a single Herbert or Heinlein novel for the complete collected works of all the others… well, perhaps some of the later Heinleins.

The fate that awaits the world of professional published science fiction is that which ultimately befell the art of Socialist Realism. Because it is imposed by a small, centralized group that happened to seize the relevant power, it will collapse and fade away once the group’s power ceases to be relevant.  As it so often does, economic and technological changes have eroded the power of the gatekeeper’s, which is why we can watch the collapse of Nightshade Books and anticipate the coming closure of other publishers and imprints which are infested with the ideological cancer.

SF/F’s left-wing gatekeepers made the same error that the ABCNNBCBS cabal made when instead of simply reporting the nation’s news, it attempted to turn itself into the propaganda wing of the Democratic Party. But there will be no singular Fox News prison-raping its competitors in the case of SF/F, instead, there will be Glenn Reynold’s army of a thousand Davids, with successful independent authors like Larry Correia and Marko Kloos demonstrating to every other writer deemed politically incorrect and/or unpublishable by the gatekeepers that the gates have been torn down. They no longer exist.

More on why the ongoing collapse of the gatekeepers is not reason for despair, but promises to be very good news for fans of traditional SF/F in part II.

Liberals giving awards to each other

Justin Landon of Staffer’s Book Review appears to be about as impressed with the Hugo Awards as I am with the SFWA’s Nebula Awards:

The Hugos are utter twaddle.

Although the Hugos present the image of something more cosmopolitan
or representative than the standard convention award, it’s becoming
increasingly apparent every year that, despite being the most
recognizable award in science fiction and fantasy cultural awareness,
the Hugos are nothing more than an amalgamation of like minded WorldCon
members, or agendized voting blocs, bent on vociferous back patting. I
apply that statement broadly, although it is most obviously associated
with the down ballot. Before I get too far into that rabbit
hole, let me first place ‘best novel’ squarely in my sites where the
only explanation is that the average Hugo voter reads somewhere been
four and six novels a year.

Often when critics rail against the Hugo’s best novel category it’s
to attack lack of sophistication. The Clarke Award, British Science
Fiction Award, the Kitschies, Tiptree Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and
others spend some time examining science fiction and fantasy literature
through a critical lens. Anyone expecting that from the Hugo Award isn’t
just off the mark, they might as well be trying to stick ‘it’ in the
sarlacc.

No, the Hugo voter has a certain style it looks for in its
fiction. Hugo-style, if you will, is like Gangnam-style only without the
distracting Korean guy riding a horse, replaced with Charles Stross and
Connie Willis on a podium holding a. . . rocket ship. I admit
Gangnam-style doesn’t have nearly as much sex appeal. In other words,
Hugo nominated books tend to be recognizable. On the one hand because
they are mostly written by Stross, Willis, John Scalzi, China Miéville,
Robert Charles Wilson, Lois McMaster Bujold, Ian MacDonald, and active
members of the Live Journal community, but also because they fit a
certain motif that’s difficult to pin down. I’ll fall back on the old
pornography argument, ‘I know it when I see it.”

I have to admit, I don’t pay any more attention to the Hugo Awards than I do the the Dove Awards, the Christie Awards, the Academy Awards, the Emmy Awards, or the Tony Awards. The only reason I care about the Nebula Awards is because I am a Lifetime member of the organization that gives them out and I find it embarrassing that the SFWA so often honors mediocre novels at the expense of much more worthy ones.

The only award I’ve truly cared about in the last few years was Adrian Peterson’s MVP award for his heroic performance this past season; yes, it’s a quarterbacks’ league now but if the NFL MVP is only going to go to quarterbacks, then simply rename it the MVQ and be done with it.

And when I say I don’t care about awards, I mean it quite literally. I didn’t even know that Summa Elvetica had been nominated for an award until I saw it on Wikipedia a few years later, and when Marcher Lord was warned that A Throne of Bones would not be eligible for a certain award if I did not edit some of its more offensive bits, I cheerfully told them to go ahead and disqualify it.  I’m with Raymond Feist on this, who knows perfectly well that he’ll never win an award until he is declared an SFWA Grandmaster, probably after he is safely dead.  He is, quite simply, too successful to merit them.

Everyone has different goals. Rabbits need the group affirmation that these sorts of political awards offer them. Not-rabbits don’t. Psykosonik once beat out Prince for Best Dance Record at the Minnesota Music Awards for a song I wrote; I didn’t know we’d won until months later because not only did I not bother going, my bandmates who did didn’t even see fit to mention it because they knew I didn’t care. I didn’t even know I had been a three-time Billboard top 40 recording artist for about 16 years until I looked it up a few months ago when I was pointing out the dirty laundry of  the “New York Times bestselling” authors.

When you are fortunate enough to experience success, you learn to value certain aspects of it and to disvalue others.  My objective is to write a great epic fantasy series that is capable of creating the same feeling in its readers as Dune once created in me. That’s why I simply laugh when people claim I’m jealous of McRapey, or I’m imitating George Martin, or my feelings are wounded that A Throne of Bones wasn’t nominated for any awards.  Because in the game I’m playing, those things don’t even enter into it. They’re not relevant to my metric for success.

Perhaps I’ll succeed.  Perhaps I’ll fail. Most people would probably, and quite reasonably, bet on the latter. But regardless, talking about how people are performing in the shotput or the pole vault and who is winning those events means absolutely nothing to me over here in the blocks with Frank Herbert, Lloyd Alexander, Susan Cooper, Richard Adams, and Neal Stephenson.

Nocturne: a novel

Sometimes, you just know something is going to turn out a certain way, but even when it does, the fact that it turns out that way doesn’t prevent it from being every bit as deliciously and delightfully funny as you imagined.  As some of you are aware, an anklebiting troll by the name of Will aka Dan aka Dimwit Dan aka Luscinia Hâfez aka Yama the Spacefish has made a habit of denigrating my fiction at every opportunity for years, marks every positive review of my books on Amazon as “unhelpful”, and now claims “give me one minute and I can write a sentence better than anything in The War In Heaven.” 

Fortunately, we can put this hypothesis to the test thanks to the astonishing act of literatury greatness he has committed and graciously made available to the public.  And so, with not inconsiderable pleasure, I am deeply honored to present to you a selection of text from the next great American novel, Nocturne, by Will aka Dan aka Yama etc.

A young woman with close-cropped hair, dark at the roots and bleached
almost white at their tips, held with a band and a gold disk pendant
amongst silver chains, dressed in black clothes under a white wool
cardigan and midnight blue coat came out of the building. “Spies?” she
said, momentarily puzzled and starry-eyed, pushing the door shut. Snow
fell in flurries, the flakes were melting on our hair. “No matter,” she
said, unsheathing a blade. She sighed, and ran after me, stopping and
slashing. I blocked it with my pipe. “You don’t have your patron
Cleisourarch to help you. He’s dead by Red hands, impaled with a stake
and paraded naked and flayed open through the streets of Mediolanum and
dumped in the river. You face me alone. Me, the greatest swordswoman in
all of Carantania.”
“Marciana, can you support me?” Adrenaline warmed my body.
“I don’t know. I’ll try.”
“Good.”
“Stop! I know them,“ another woman cried.
“Anysia?” I asked.
“Yeah.”
“Uh, I’m terribly sorry,” the woman who attacked us said, her voice
languid and melodic. The gold disk on her neck was inset with a large
red stone with a carving of an eye at the center of a star and six
cabochons of varying tones of green at the points, actually
light-emitting diodes. A bead of amber with a fly, like Ava’s, hung from
the side of the headband, wrapped in fine gold chains. A sardonyx
brooch with a cameo was pinned to her coat. “I heard you walking around
up there, and I couldn’t really see you. Thought you were Selinian, or
worse, Pannonian agents. I’m Cantianilla, by the way. Cantianilla
Vasilescu, if you were wondering. Veridiana told me to wear it with
pride because it’s part of who we are, for better and worse. I’m not
sure but for what it’s worth, there’s a lot of people with that kind of
family name, Vasilescu and Gavrilescu and Stefanescu and a bunch of
other people with -escu at the end. Mine reminds me of basilisks. Do you
know what a basilisk is? There’s a folktale about a feathered lizard
that can turn a man to stone with its gaze. But maybe I’m mixing them up
with dinosaurs. Those were real, but they didn’t have a petrifying
glare or anything. I see you know Anysia. So, what are your names,
wayfarers?”
“I’m Marciana. And only Marciana.”
“I’m Nicasius
Patrescu. Ava calls me Nica. It’s nice, but a little feminine.
Marciana’s been my friend ever since we were small children. Are any of
the others here?” I asked.
“Yes, I heard you say that. It was a bit
comforting, since Pannonians think we’re idolators and don’t have names
like yours and keep their women in the home as a mandate, but who knows?
Nobody really knows who the Synod is. Rumors abound that the Synod
members wander the streets of Vindobona as vagrants, that the
Magisterium funding the Pannonian Revolutionary Front as a lure for
potential traitors to the Church and Nation. Should I believe it? It
seems more like an old story than reality, but you know what they say
about stories and half-truths. I understand that there are Saugumas, I
mean, agents of the Synod in the Pannonian Revolutionary Front, and thus
they decentralized it, and everyone can name only the members of their
cell. You must forgive me for not trusting you. Eight others are all
with us,” Cantianilla said. “Veridiana’s heartbroken. She’s with Ava
now. They’re in the basement.”
“What happened?” Marciana asked.
“Theopemptus happened,” Anysia said.
“Curse the house Daubresse until the sun goes bloated and rotten and
the stars are shaken from the heavens. Mansuetus died in an attack on
the Cleiousarch’s soldiers a day after you left. They had some kind of
warmech with them, and I don’t know where they got it, maybe a blue-gray
alliance of sorts. A mortar tore him apart. I witnessed it, oh, oh,”
Cantianilla said. She seemed less brash once she knew we were friendly.
“I’m sorry,” Marciana said. “I know all too well the pain of loss.”
“There’s nothing you could do. I mean, we won in the conflict against
the Blues, but victory has a price and many of us wondered if it was
worth it. There’s a stela on the demesne with fifty names on it. If you
could ever go back, you’d notice the number of Pannonian names on it.
They fought valiantly, and their sacrifice for a free Carantania was not
in vain.”

Great stuff.  FREEDOM!  I particularly enjoyed this line: “Me, the greatest swordswoman in
all of Carantania.” That’s QUALITY literature.  Look out, Doestoevsky!  Now, what do you think the odds are that Cantianillawafer
Vasilfawltytowerescu’s starry eyes are purple?  Five-to-one?  Ten-to-one?

The Secret Names of Selenoth

Daniel reviews A Throne of Bones from a literary perspective:

Subtext flows fast through the story, providing a skeleton that never
shows through the story’s skirts. However, if you want elegant critiques
on the distancing effects of television, the nature of cruelty, the
excellence of warfare, the culture of the Church, the narrowness of
postmodern expectation, the daft inner workings of pseudoscience, the
shortcomings of theory versus application, the invisible nature of
Modalism, or the psychological impact of human flight you’ll find them,
like a rake in his prime, waiting, ready and rich.

But this is a
book designed with a single primary purpose, to revive epic fantasy as a
rooted form, and most readers of fantasy are going to receive this
story as such.

They will not be disappointed.

Names are
important in A Throne of Bones, and I’ll highlight two: Selenoth, the
continent upon which the action takes is, a nod, I believe, to the
element selenium, which occurs naturally in volcanic areas. Considering
the photosensitivity of the material, it seems natural that the land
provides an elemental basis to the development of Selenoth’s primeval
magic.

Even more interesting, however is the name of the main
country: Amorr. Yes, it is a play on the legendary “secret name” of
Rome, which provides a clever signal that this strange society will in
some way mirror the Roman republic. However, more deeply, it is also a
direct tip to the Latin word for “love” and this is where, if the magic
of Selenoth draws the bow, the arrow of Amorr strikes the heart.

Day
is, after all, an incorrigible romantic, and not of the hopeless
variety. The nostalgia, realism and richness of Selenoth is crystalized
through the lens of Amorr, and, to put a fine point on it, love is all
around. Love in degraded, if happy, form in the camp followers and
brothels among the soldiery. Love between sibling reavers on a mission
to draw former victim states into an alliance against certain doom. In a
scene stunning, dreadful, long-coming but still shocking scene, love
grips in stoic, complex anguish.*

The raw and needful love
between man and wife. Long-distance love between the clever (yet
earnest) and the cruel (yet sympathetic). Love of complex relational
intrigues. Love of language. Love of order. Love of family, of honor, of
duty.

Love of dragons. Love of gold. Love of knowledge. Love of
good men, of good life, of good death. A love of the hope that all
things, not some or most, will pass away, and yet that all things, not
some or most, will be restored by the hand of the Almighty. Every page,
for its grit and realism, its tragedy, folly and danger, the thwarted
plans, curses, whoredom, brutality, the death of youth, the loss of
ideals, the temporary victory of murder and evil, is an out and out love
letter to the Immaculate. Death, in all its towering, all-consuming
bleakness, is small, and soon to be swallowed by a love so great it lays
its life down, and in defeat, quite literally overcomes all.

A
Throne of Bones is doorstopping fantasy for far more than its physical
dimensions. Metaphysically, it shuts the door to the world we know and
provides an escape to a better reality, and one far more dangerous than
the one in which we now dwell. It expresses longings (to master dragons,
to find treasure, to save the world on a mission from God, to restore
and enjoy the family, to live abundantly and in reality, enjoy and
defend the relationships that matter, and many, many more) in such
richness of detail.

An aside: fantasists are the bastard children
of organized theology. I don’t mean that fantasy is allegory, and
certainly not direct, symbol for symbol theology. Instead due in part to
the fact that every fantasy, from Phantastes to His Dark Materials, are
created worlds that don’t pop into existence at random. They each have
creators who can’t help that they leave traces of themselves in the
handiwork of their model worlds. While science fiction is typically a
practical exercise or applied thought experiment in galactic or atomic
creation, fantasy distinguishes itself by fabricating the middle ground:
the world as it is commonly known. A Throne of Bones expresses a
theology that views an Almighty who is coming to restore all things, and
the things, even in corrupted state, have their origins in good. Evil
is small and dark and nothing, whose major temporary advantage is its
ability to poison hope and occlude the truth.

Ensoulment, the
major theme of the previous novel in the series, Summa Elvetica, gets to
play in A Throne of Bones in a way that was impossible when it was the
primary pack mule for the plot of the previous work. As previously
established, love is not possible without ensoulment. What is most
fascinating is to see the care in which the author has ensouled each of
his own characters, down to the idiotically short-lived and naturally
evil goblin cannon fodder.

Forget if elves might be ensouled. Can goblins win a fight?

The
book has tremendous surf. There are waves of no fewer than seven
chapters that are powerful, climactic, moving: not just great writing,
but great in meaning. I have been surprised to see (more than once)
complaints about dropped plot threads (such as the dragon) which to me
were quite obviously not dropped, characters that do not naturally
develop (such as Severa) who seems to me to very naturally develop and
comparisons to A Song of Ice and Fire where I see very little
resemblance.

A major criticism I have of the book is something I
naturally expected after reading a chapter or two: music. The book
itself is not lyrical, but technical (though elegant in technique), but
the world of Selenoth, especially with its peculiar response to the
Immaculate, simply cries out for various bits of poetry, hymn and common
song to be in greater evidence. Aside from a muscular (and welcome)
public recitation of poetry (during which Corvus, the listener, falls
asleep!) they are not.

I know, I know. Bad form knocking a book
an entire half-star (out of ten) for what it did not include, but it
really was that noticeable. It isn’t like the author hasn’t included
poetics in previous works: the decision had to be conscious, and all I
can say is that I missed the music. The reader gets smells, sights,
sounds, textures and action, but the lack of music is curious. The
lyrics are there, mixed in with more mundane plot-drivers – they are
simply not drawn out and set to music to make it more obvious for the
reader. There are prayers, but no psalms.

On the other hand,
despite an off-hand reference to musicians, there are also no minstrel
bards to be found, and of that I can’t complain.

Despite its
length, A Throne of Bones is a fast read, and perhaps would benefit from
the occasional gear-shifting song cycle or original poem, just to
remind the reader to linger and look around a moment longer.

Of
course, to truly succeed, the series will need to out-do itself until
the penultimate book (where, if the series is to be great, it must peak,
then echo that peak through the final book and achieve an elegant
slight downslope), which will certainly be a challenge, perhaps an epic
one. However, I simply can’t express the joy in knowing this is a
planned set – a part of a larger story (but don’t worry, this one stands
just fine on its own. Though it ends with a satisfying suspense, it is
no annoying cliffhanger. It will build expectation for what comes next,
but also satisfies.) – and that I have only just begun a lifelong escape
into the reality of Selenoth and Amorr: or, as I think of their secret
names – Magic and Love.

A Throne of Bones (Vox Day, Hardcover Edition)
9 out of 10

*One
note on this, yet trying to avoid major spoilers* – the scene of
anguish is subtle and intensely complex, and argues, in a very brief
moment, a detailed theological argument. I view it as a significant
underpinning to the way the world of Selenoth “works” from a creator’s
point of view – a creator who fully intends to restore all things, and
one who therefore allows space for a man to work out many critical and
seemingly impossible choices for himself.

While every author enjoys knowing that his readers enjoy his work and appreciates support, it is a particular pleasure to read substantive reviews written by those readers who not only enjoy the book, but show a deeper understanding of it as well.  Daniel is too generous, I think, in that while there was some development of Severa’s character it was too crude and clumsy due to the time constraints; I tend to find female characters more difficult to write because their motivations and thought processes are so different from my own.  And his criticism concerning the lack of music is well-placed; there is a distinct lack of melody to accompany the constant rhythm of the legions on the march.

I did, however, agree with him concerning how neither dragon story amounted to any sort of dropped plot-thread.  While I freely admit to favoring subtlety and dropping hints to labored explanations of precisely what happened in all circumstances, that’s not the same as simply leaving a plot point unaddressed. My philosophy is to refrain from telling the reader any more than the perspective character can reasonably expect to know, and I’m not going to divert a character’s inner dialogue for the purposes of exposition any more than is absolutely necessary. 

I was impressed that Daniel correctly nailed both meanings of the city’s name; those who thought it was simply a singularly inept attempt to disguise the name of Rome clearly don’t know much about Roman history.  There are various theories concerning what Pliny described as “the other name of Rome which it is held sinful to disclose except during the rites of the mysteries”; some say it was Amor, others Hirpa.  I incline towards the Amor theory myself, thanks to a number of historical plays on words in both Latin and Greek that juxtapose Roma, Amor, and Eros.

Anyhow, I take this sort of review as a challenge to, as Daniel suggests, see each book outdo the next.  I don’t know if my skills are up to the task, but if I fail it will not be through a failure to try.

In related news, I expect Hinterlands to release The Wardog’s Coin in ebook next week, which will consist of the title story and “Qalabi Dawn”.  For those who would like to obtain a physical copy of the ebooks, Hinterlands will be publishing a hardcover version of Summa Elvetica in May, that will possess a newly designed spine to match those of the Arts of Dark and Light series, and in addition to the titular novel, will contain the following stories: “Master of Cats”, “Birth of an Order”, “A Magic Broken”, “The Wardog’s Coin”, “Qalabi Dawn”, “The Hoblets of Wiccam Fensboro”, and “The Last Witchking”.  I don’t know the exact page count yet, but it should be around 450 pages.