Tag: writing

A Den of Literary Lions

Ideas stand on their own, they are not tainted by the individual who happens to produce them.  McRapey may be a creepy little gamma male who can’t argue his way out of a paper bag or produce an original idea for a book to save his life, but he is an unusually talented self-promoter from whom better writers can draw useful examples.

One thing that I initially liked was his Big Idea series, in which McRapey permits various authors to market their books to the Whatever warren.  I’d even considered doing something similar a few years ago, but the problem is that most of the Big Ideas I’d read, conceived as they were by modern SF/F writers, were trite, obvious, derivative, and sometimes downright embarrassing.

“I thought, you know, I should just TOTALLY make this female protagonist, only she’d be, like, strong and independent and she wouldn’t take ANY crap from ANYBODY.  And she’d be just SOOO snarky, you know, and like, she’d have this total dilemma, you know, because, like, all the men are totally in love with her, but she has to, like, choose, you know, but here’s the twist.  Instead of choosing between a white male werewolf and a white male vampire who are both in love with her, she’d be, like, forced to choose between an Asian werewolf and, like, a black FEMALE vampire!  My editor’s head just about exploded when she heard that, she was like, WHOAH, it’s like a whole new science fiction GENRE!”

Anyhow, the Ideas were anything but Big and they usually left me considerably less interested in the book than I had been before. I therefore abandoned the idea.

However, I have been receiving an increasing number of requests from various writers to read their works and comment upon them, requests I simply do not have the bandwidth to accommodate.  It occurred to me that there are both a goodly number of writers as well as well-read and sophisticated readers here.  As far as exposure goes, this blog sees about 40 percent more traffic than Whatever.  So, it should be possible to take the Big Idea concept and improve upon it in a
manner that would be both useful to the writers and entertaining for the
readers

My thought is that every two weeks, a writer will have the opportunity to present his book via a post dedicated to it here.  That post can focus on the central idea behind the book, it can focus on a particular aspect of the book, or it can focus on something that inspired the book.  The book can be conventionally published, self-published or even a work in progress with a complete first draft.  In addition to sending me a link to the cover and the text for the post, the author will send me the epub.

When the book is posted, if the author is interested, I will ask for three volunteers to read and review the book.  I’ll provide a template which will inform us a) if they enjoyed the book, b) what they felt were its strongest technical elements, c) what they felt was a typical writing sample, and, d) if the author requests, where they felt there was room for improvement.  The reviews can be short, but they should be substantive.  Between two and three weeks after the author’s post, I will post the reviews here.

Think of it as three parts marketing and one part writer’s workshop.

The review aspect won’t be required; if an author merely wishes to publicize his work by talking about it here and doesn’t want it to be reviewed, that’s certainly fine.  But if there are those who express an interest in reviewing the book in the comments, I would encourage the authors to take advantage of the opportunity to receive some constructive criticism.  That is, after all, the best way to improve.

Anyhow, if you’re a writer, you’ve got a book to publicize or polish, and you’re interested in a slot, please let me know via email.  If you consider yourself a potential reviewer, please mention as much in the comments.  And if you’re a reader, feel free to throw out any suggestions you might have to improve the process.  And if it’s a dumb idea in which no one has any interest, then we simply won’t bother with it.

Ideology of the gatekeepers

Amanda at the Mad Genius Club notes the connection between the rise of the Left’s ideological gatekeepers in publishing and the alarming discovery that boys no longer read books:

I’m happy with just writing stories folks want to read. After all, isn’t that really what we’re supposed to be doing? Writing
stories that entertain? If a story doesn’t entertain, folks aren’t
going to read it — or at least not finish it. If they don’t read it,
then what good is any message we might put into it? That message will be
lost because it was never read.

But that isn’t enough for the literati, for all too many editors and,
unfortunately, for the boards of too many professional organizations
these days. No, you have to be socially relevant and enlightened in your
writing. You have to promote what is “right” — as is defined by those
who have the loudest voice. Heaven help you if you write something that
might offend someone else, especially if you are a male of a certain
age.

Maybe I’m old-fashioned (and I know that means I have the wrong
beliefs and should probably be silenced now. Sorry, I’m a loud-mouthed
woman who isn’t afraid to exercise my First Amendment rights). But I
still feel that the story is the thing we should be concerned with and
not the message. As I said earlier, folks won’t read the message if they
don’t read the story. The corollary to this is: why is publishing in
trouble? Because it forgot that readers, on the whole, read to be
entertained and to forget about their troubles….

Don’t believe me, ask yourself why so many in publishing are trying
to convince us that boys don’t read….

Then we have those publishers and editors and writers who feel that
we must address all of society’s ills with our writing and “educate” our
readers so there will never be any racism or sexism or any other ism
they don’t approve of ever again.

She’s merely pointing out the readily apparent, but in light of how some writers have nevertheless attempted to deny there is any ideological bias in the SFWA and in SF/F publishing, and it is either a) one’s imagination, or, b) just a complete coincidence to observe that the field is now policed by gatekeepers who assiduously work to prevent the publication of any makehurt or crimethink, I think it is useful to have a look at what sort of works the publishers are actively seeking:

Here is an informative example from one publishing house that freely admits it is “of a progressive bent”:

What are we looking for?

As mentioned above, we’re now considering submissions within any
genres. We’re specifically looking for novels or collections which
demonstrate a significant crossover between genres – as the name or our
press suggests. CGP has always been a press with a progressive bent. Bearing that in mind, here are some things we want to see MORE of:

  • Queer Main Characters
  • MC’s of Color
  • Women MC’s
  • Disabled MC’s
  • Science saves the day!
  • Far future
  • Stories set outside North America

Beyond that, there is no hard-and-fast rule; any story that follows the above guidelines will be considered.

What are we NOT looking for?

  • Stories based off the assumption that any particular religion’s beliefs are real
  • Weak women being rescued by macho guys
  • “Science-as-villain”
  • Vampires, zombies, werewolves, Arthurian retellings, Eurocentric faeries, or ghost stories
  • Time travel

Though it should go without saying, any submissions promoting
discrimination, misogyny, bigotry, and/or hatred will be deleted without
notice or consideration.

Now, consider how many works of the Golden Age are unpublishable by these standards, particularly in light of the opinion of the majority of SFWA members that using the term “lady” as an adjective is competely unacceptable misogyny. And notice how the publisher is not only expressly anti-religious and anti-American, but is actively looking to publish secular science propaganda.  Religion can be the villain – so long as its tenets are shown to be false – but science cannot be.

Obviously, this is a small publisher, but don’t deceive yourself.  The major genre publishers may be much more open to vampires, zombies, and time travel than this one, but their standards, the books they have been publishing, and the books they are looking to publish, are all based on the same ideological standard even though they are less open about it.

Speaking of gatekeepers, if you’re submitting for ing-game publication, please keep in mind that we’re focused on action and story uber alles; the objective is most certainly NOT to become the mirror image of the conventional gatekeepers.

Showcase

The Original Cyberpunk introduces SHOWCASE, which will feature free access to some of the stories by the authors being published in STUPEFYING STORIES magazine.

Welcome to Issue #2 of SHOWCASE, the free weekly webzine companion to STUPEFYING STORIES magazine and the STUPEFYING STORIES PRESENTS anthology series. Each week in SHOWCASE
we’ll be offering up previews of coming attractions, samples of what
we’re working on, reviews and comments, and of course,
new stories by some of our favorite authors—and
we hope, by writers who soon will become some of your favorite authors, too
If you saw Issue #1, you’ve no doubt already noticed some big changes
for Issue #2. We’re still working on the banner—and as of the time I’m
writing this, I still don’t know whether the new banner will be ready in
time for tomorrow’s release—but most importantly, with this issue SHOWCASE moves to it’s new permanent home,
StupefyingStoriesSHOWCASE.com.

Let’s face it, any publication that features a story entitled “Elves are Douchebags” more than merits a look-see.

Mailvox: the shortest genre

Phony is convinced he has evidence lending support to the myth of the Woman Warrior:

“The amusing thing is that throughout the comments, no one even stops to realize that the entire premise of women attempting to fight with swords is physically ridiculous. “

Nusaybah bint Ka’ab.

Dipshit.

Very well, let’s examine the military career of this famous female warrior, which is recounted on Wikipedia:

“Initially, Nusaybah was attending the Battle of Uhud like other women, and her intention was to bring water to the soldiers, while her husband and two sons fought. But after the Muslim archers disobeyed their orders and began deserting their high ground believing victory was at hand, the tide of the battle changed, and it appeared that defeat was imminent. When this occurred, Nusaybah entered the battle, carrying a sword and shield.

“She shielded Muhammad from the arrows of the enemy, and received several wounds while fighting.

“When a horse-mounted Quraish attacked her, she pulled on the horse’s bridle and plunged her sword into its neck, toppling the horse on top of its rider. Witnessing this, Muhammad then yelled for Abdullah to help his mother and the pair dispatched the struggling rider. The pair then circled around Muhammad, throwing stones at the advancing Quraish troops, until Muhammad noticed Nusaybah’s wounds and ordered her son to bandage them, and praised their heroism. Abdullah was wounded himself, as a Quraish cut across his left arm, and Nusaybah treated him and told him not to lose courage. Picking her sword back up, she was complimented by Muhammad on her own courage and he pointed out the man who had wounded her son. Advancing to him, she cut his leg off with a blow of her sword, and he fell to the ground where he was killed by other fighters.

“Nusaybah’s twelfth wound, cut across her shoulder by a Quraish named Ibn Qumiah, left her unconscious on the battlefield. When she awoke after the battle, her first inquiry was whether Muhammad had survived.”

So, this most exemplary of all women warriors managed to unhorse one rider and cripple one man in a tribal skirmish while trying to defend her family in a desperate situation.  If we are to take Nusaybah as sufficient justification for the plethora of female Conans that presently litter bad fantasy, we should also believe that it is perfectly realistic to have your average suburban mother throwing around Chevrolets.  This is akin to asserting that because a middle-aged woman shot a home intruder once, it’s perfectly realistic to write about female SEALs.

And note that this fearsome woman warrior took no less than twelve wounds, very nearly got herself killed, and never took arms again.  Courageous? Indubitably. A warrior? No. Not in the slightest. If this is the historical basis for women warriors, the genre is going to consist of a series of very slim volumes indeed.

Has Phony ever hit a woman?  Has he ever seen a woman’s head snap back, seen her knees buckle, and stood over her as she lays crumpled on the floor?  Has he ever bloodied a woman’s nose or blackened a woman’s eyes?  Has he ever toyed with a woman desperately trying to lay a hand on him before stepping forward and flattening her with a single jab?

I have. It wasn’t even amusing because it was so easy.  I had a harder time fighting a well-trained eleven year old boy.  I wasn’t even throwing any combinations or throwing my strikes at more than half-force, and that was still enough to lay them out. If you are a man who hasn’t ever hit a woman in the face, or if you are a woman who hasn’t ever been beaten up by a man, your opinion on the subject is guaranteed to be irrelevant. The cumulative difference in speed, strength, and mass simply has to be experienced to be believed.

I sincerely encourage anyone who wishes to write about women warriors to visit a full-contact dojo and ask to spar a few rounds with the opposite sex.  They will accommodate you and it will be an eye-opening experience.

Now he’s just screwing with everyone

George Martin announces a new book in time for Christmas.  And a Westeros book, no less!

George R R Martin fans will have a new book for Christmas, with HarperVoyager releasing The Wit and Wisdom of Tyrion Lannister. The book was announced at HarperCollins’ showcase of autumn titles to retailers, held on Wednesday evening (1st May). The small, gift-format hardback title will gather together “clever and naughty quips” from the popular character from the A Song of Ice and Fire series, played in the HBO series by actor Peter Dinklage.

At this point, our best hope for ever seeing the series resolved may be for him to kick off sometime after Book Two is released, somehow leading to me being asked to finish the series by Harper Collins.  I’ll have to think about how I’d go about fixing all the unnecessary loose ends he created in tying the Mereen Knot, but I think the first thing I would do is kill off Reek and the Bastard of Bolton in an unfortunate accident involving chicken bones, a rich cheese sauce, and a sadistic feast-orgy.

The first fifty pages would make the Red Wedding look like a meeting of the small council to discuss regularizing the issuance of tax-farming licenses, as I methodically removed every tedious and extraneous perspective character added in the last two books from the mix.  Basically, I’d take the approach that David Brin took to the Second Foundation trilogy built upon the flimsy framework of the two Gregs, Benford and Bear, and do my best to quickly paper over the mess of the previous two books in order to get on with the story.

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.