Tag: writing

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.

Everybody screws up

I was a bit embarrassed about my little digging-related miscalculation in A Throne of Bones.  I felt a little better about it after encountering a mistake in Isaac Asimov’s Forward the Foundation, in which a
highly improbable nightly murder rate was asserted on Trantor.  And
given the level of attention to detail for which David Foster Wallace,
supposedly one of the greatest novelists of the last 30 years, is
rightly lauded, I feel downright positive about my own blunder after catching the following error in this passage from Infinite Jest.  Apparently, the longer the book, the more likely it is that the possibility of a basic error approaches certainty.

1610h.
E.T.A. Weight Room. Freestyle circuits. The clank and click of various
resistance-systems. Lyle on the towel dispenser conferring with an
extremely moist Graham Rader. Schacht doing sit-ups, the board almost
vertical, his face purple and forehead pulsing. Troeltsch by the squat
rack blowing his nose into a towel. Coyle doing military presses with a
bare bar. Carol Spodek curling, intent on the mirror. Rader nodding as
Lyle bends and leans in. Hal up on the spotter-shelf in back of the
incline-bench in the shadow of the monster copper beech through the west
window doing single-leg toe-raises, for the ankle. Ingersoll at the
shoulder-pull, steadily upping the weight against Lyle’s advice. Keith
(‘The Viking’) Freer 68 and the steroidic fifteen-year-old Eliot
Kornspan spotting each other on massive barbell-curls next to the water
cooler’s bench, taking turns bellowing encouragement. Hal keeps pausing
to lean down and spit into an old NASA glass on the floor by the little
shelf. E.T.A. Trainer Barry Loach walking around with a clipboard he
doesn’t write anything down on, but watching people intently and nodding
a lot. Axford with one shoe off in the corner, doing something to his
bare foot. Michael Pemulis seated cross-legged on the cooler’s bench
just off Kornspan’s left hip, doing facial isometrics, trying to
eavesdrop on Lyle and Rader, wincing whenever Kornspan and Freer roar at
each other.
‘Three more! Get it up there!’
‘Hoooowaaaaa.’
‘Get that shit up there man!’
‘Gwwwhoooooowaaaaa!’
‘It raped your sister! It killed your fucking mother man!’
‘Huhl huhl huhl huhl gwwwww.’
‘Do it!’
Pemulis
makes his face very long for a while and then very short and broad,
then all sort of hollow and distended like one of Bacon’s popes.
‘Well
suppose’ — Pemulis can just make out Lyle — ‘Suppose I were to give you
a key ring with ten keys. With, no, with a hundred keys, and I were to
tell you that one of these keys will unlock it, this door we’re
imagining opening in onto all you want to be, as a player. How many of
the keys would you be willing to try?’
Troeltsch calls over to
Pemulis, ‘Do the deLint-jerking-off face again!’ Pemulis for a second
lets his mouth gape slackly and his eyes roll way up and flutters his
lids, moving his fist.
‘Well I’d try every darn one,’ Rader tells Lyle.
‘Huhl. Huhl. Gwwwwwwww.’
‘Motherfucker! Fucker!’
Pemulis’s wince looks like a type of facial isometric.
‘Do Bridget having a tantrum! Do Schacht in a stall!’
Pemulis makes a shush-finger.
Lyle
never whispers, but it’s just about the same. ‘Then you are willing to
make mistakes, you see. You are saying you will accept 99% error. The
paralyzed perfectionist you say you are would stand there before that
door. Jingling the keys. Afraid to try the first key.’
Pemulis pulls
his lower lip down as far as it will go and contracts his cheek muscles.
Cords stand out on Freer’s neck as he screams at Kornspan. There’s a
little hanging mist of spittle and sweat. Kornspan looks like he’s about
to have a stroke. There are 90 kg. on the bar, which itself is 20 kg.
‘One more you fuck. Fucking take it.’
‘Fuck me. Fuck meyou fuck. Gwwwwww.’
‘Take the pain.’
Freer has one finger under the bar, barely helping. Kornspan’s red face is leaping around on his skull.
Carol Spodek’s smaller bar goes silently up and down.
Troeltsch
comes over and sits down and saws at the back of his neck with the
towel, looking up at Kornspan. ‘I don’t think all the curls I’ve ever
done all together add up to 110,’ he said.
Kornspan’s making sounds that don’t sound like they’re coming from his throat.
‘Yes!
Yiiissss!’ roars Freer. The bar crashes to the rubber floor, making
Pemulis wince. Every vein on Kornspan stands out and pulses. His stomach
looks pregnant. He puts his hands on his thighs and leans forward, a
string of something hanging from his mouth.
‘Way to fucking take it
baby,’ Freer says, going over to the box on the dispenser to get rosin
for his hands, watching himself walk toward the mirror.
Pemulis
starts very slowly to lean over toward Kornspan, looking around
confidentially. He gets so his face is right up near the side of
Kornspan’s mesomorphic head and whispers. ‘Hey. Eliot. Hey.’
Kornspan, bent over, chest heaving, rolls his head a little his way. Pemulis whispers: ‘Pussy.’

It’s an amusing scene, but first
of all, no 15-year old boys, with or without steroids, have ever done a
single 110 kg curl, let alone more than four.  That’s nearly 250
pounds. Even at my most bulked up, when I was benching 325 pounds, I never curled more than four reps at 150.  These days, I usually top out with 4×52 kg, which is only a bit more than 115 pounds.

Based on the fact
that Wallace mentions 90 kg being on the bar, it’s pretty clear that he actually meant
90 pounds, which is one 45-pound plate per side.  Still impressive, as with
the bar, (another 45 pounds), it is 135 pounds.  Which is readily doable, although still not reasonably conceivable for 15-year old tennis players who are described as having one arm more developed than the other.

Striking back, ineptly

Darth Vader’s failure at the Battle of Hoth:

How did the Galactic Empire ever cement its hold on the Star Wars Universe? The war machine built by Emperor Palpatine and run by Darth Vader is a spectacularly bad fighting force, as evidenced by all of the pieces of Death Star littering space. But of all the Empire’s failures, none is a more spectacular military fiasco than the Battle of Hoth at the beginning of The Empire Strikes Back.

From a military perspective, Hoth should have been a total debacle for the Rebel Alliance. Overconfident that they can evade Imperial surveillance, they hole up on unforgiving frigid terrain at the far end of the cosmos. Huddled into the lone Echo Base are all their major players: politically crucial Princess Leia; ace pilot Han Solo; and their game-changer, Luke Skywalker, who isn’t even a Jedi yet.

The defenses the Alliance constructed on Hoth could not be more favorable to Vader if the villain constructed them himself. The single Rebel base (!) is defended by a few artillery pieces on its north slope, protecting its main power generator. An ion cannon is its main anti-aircraft/spacecraft defense. Its outermost perimeter defense is an energy shield that can deflect Imperial laser bombardment. But the shield has two huge flaws: It can’t stop an Imperial landing force from entering the atmosphere, and it can only open in a discrete place for a limited time so the Rebels’ Ion Cannon can protect an evacuation. In essence, the Rebels built a shield that can’t keep an invader out and complicates their own escape.

When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, he’s holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.

I’ve probably given the art of attempting to describe fictional battles in a realistic manner a little more thought than most, given the heavy military elements in my current series.  What I find interesting is how little thought goes into most such portrayals, and how obviously unfamiliar with the various military strategists most authors and filmmakers are.  Now, obviously some things are just there because they look cool or allow the hero to do something heroic; the Imperial Walkers are totally ridiculous in literally every single way.

Most “military” science fiction shows no sign of having ever encountered even the most basic military concepts such as unit cohesion, leadership, and morale.  This is fine in today’s SyFy world, where the readers are inordinately female and more interested in the vicissitudes of the romances of the beautiful and tactically brilliant United Nations of Earth major with naturally curly hair, who has never lost a sporting competition, a fight, or a battle, and is torn between her attraction to the handsome enemy general with executive hair and her affection for her rugged, loyal, African company commander.

The amusing thing is how these “military” writers don’t even pay attention to the most fundamental facts of militaries in the real world.  For example, over 10 percent of the women in the U.S. Navy have to be shifted to shore leave every year due to pregnancy, and then receive a one-year reprieve from ship deployments or combat zone assignments after giving birth.  But when is the last time you saw or read about a single female warrior getting pregnant in order to escape a deployment?

The worst example of pseudo-military action I can recall seeing was in The Return of the King, when Faramir leads a cavalry charge against Osgiliath.  Now, as a general rule, even the charge of the Rohirrim against Saruman’s Uruk-Hai at Helm’s Deep was more than a little dubious, since horses resist charging towards disciplined bodies of infantry bristling with long pointy objects.  But horsemen charging towards archers safely ensconced in a fortified position could only be topped by a naval invasion of Topeka by the Imperial Japanese Navy.  In military history terms, it is a straightforward category error.

One of the things I’m enjoying about writing A Rash of Blings is exploring the different military doctrines, especially in light of how the availability of magic and other elements affects them.  The Amorrans were obviously based on Vegetius, with just a dash of Maurice, but I will be very impressed indeed if anyone is able to identify the historical model upon which the elvish doctrine has been built.

Cartooning the controversy

I’ve been pleased to see that most of those who have taken on the task of slogging all the way through A THRONE OF BONES appear to think rather well of it.  And while my publisher suffered an understandable amount of angst prior to publication, I’m not terribly surprised that there haven’t been too many serious objections to the presence of vulgar language, graphic violence, and sexual scenes in the novel.  I think this is because most of the individuals prone to thoughtless knee-jerk reactions aren’t going to go to the trouble of wading through an 850-page book in order to go through their fainting couch routine.  Not when there are so many shorter books available about which they can more easily complain. 

Those who take the requisite time to read through the book tend to see that the inclusion of these less-family friendly elements adds to the verisimilitude of the reader’s experience.  None of us may have experienced an arrow grazing our cheek or piercing our arm, but we have all had that moment when we misapply the hammer or slip with the knife, and we all know what tends to come out of our mouths at such moments.  It is seldom hosannas of praise to our Maker or calm and reasoned discourses on the manifold wonders of Science.

In like manner, many of us have been away from our wives for a month or more, and we all know the intense combination of desire and hunger that we feel upon seeing them, smelling them, and touching them.  To omit such aspects of the human experience is to deny reality, it is to deny a vital element of God’s Creation, and it is to make the fiction even more of a lie than it already is.  I don’t criticize those authors who choose to omit these more mature elements, as I am sure they have their reasons for making such compromises, but I am staunchly opposed to those readers and publishers who would deny authors the ability to make such decisions for themselves.

What the SFWA writers who have mocked me for preferring, (and know that it is a choice on my part), to be published by a small and independent press fail to understand is that freedom is now more important than advances, marketing muscle and retail distribution.  The beauty of Hinterlands is that I can not only write exactly what I want to write, but I also have the freedom to use my books however I see fit.  By the end of this year, the significance of that should become obvious in a way that has implications that go far beyond with whom I happen to publish.

The cartoon makes a valid point.  Many of those who question or condemn the vulgar legionaries in A THRONE OF BONES don’t hesitate to watch NCIS or read A DANCE WITH DRAGONS.  I’m entirely willing to accept criticism from those who limit their media consumption to 50-year old Disney movies and Christian bonnet fiction, but not from anyone who betrays even the slightest familiarity with secular entertainment.

I know I’m not the ideal standard bearer for the cause of historical and intellectual verisimilitude in science fiction and fantasy, much less the cause of behavioral realism in Christian fiction.  I’m too outlandish, too controversial, too vulgar, and too intellectual.  I’m also insufficiently talented as a wordsmith; the primary role of my prose is to simply stay out of the way of the story and the reader’s experience of the world and the characters.  The problem is that there doesn’t appear to be anyone else who is willing and able to point out the observable problems, provide the counterexamples, and then face the inevitable criticism.

So we’re left with a literary movement that consists of one writer, of limited literary abilities, who is published by a small press that doesn’t sell to the retail chains.  It shouldn’t have a chance in Hell of making any difference whatsoever, and yet, it has one key thing going for it.  It is aligned with the truth, and the truth always wins out in the end.

That settles that

The month-long experiment has come to an end.  The results are in.  I was more than a little curious about what sort of effect the end of my WND column would have on the blog.  After all, the blog only began as a sort of permanent mailbag to replace the little mailbags at the end of the column, and it initially became useful to me as a means of responding to multiple emails about the same column at once.  It was so effective in this regard that the numbers of emails I received about the current column eventually dropped from dozens per day to only a few per week despite the fact that the column readership grew considerably over the same period.

It seemed to make sense that because a lot of people originally first came to visit VP by way of WND, we would see a noticeable decline in the traffic here without my column there.  That didn’t bother me, as traffic has never been a priority here and I assumed all the regulars would likely continue to swing by.  I was more than a little tired of fruitlessly attempting to advocate liberty to a crowd that was much less interested in it, on average, than in being in a position to dictate to the other half of the country.  That is why, at the end of the experiment yesterday, I was surprised to learn that after retiring my column on December 31, VP traffic not only did not decline last month, but increased to 630,860 Google pageviews, (895,311 combined with AG), up nearly 20 percent from the previous month. 

What happened?  It wasn’t the SFWA presidential campaign that made the difference; there aren’t that many SF/F writers in the first place and most of them don’t pay any attention to the election.  A fair number of rabbits did come by the one day to show how they could hop on one foot and shake their fluffy little cottontails on command, but less than appear from a single Instalink.  Nor were there any Instalinks to VP in January to skew things upward, though there was one to AG.  What happened was that two weeks after seeing there were no negative effects on traffic from the end of the column, I added a link to VP from AG for the first time.  The unexpected increase in January almost entirely comes from that little modification to the AG layout.  Go figure.

What I learned is that while there is a significant amount of overlap between the two blogs, as anyone who recognizes the regular commenter names can tell, there is rather less than I assumed.  I never bothered linking the one from the other because I thought that everyone who went to AG was already a VP reader.  That was initially the case, I’m sure, but it is clearly no longer true, especially in light of the emails I’ve received from AG readers who were clearly surprised to discover the existence of this blog.  I’ve said from the start that because the human interest in all things socio-sexual is considerably greater than in pretty much anything else, AG would eventually surpass VP.  That hasn’t happened yet, but at the present rate, it should take place within two years even though, as the chart shows, VP is still growing at a reasonable pace itself.

So, it would appear that I was wrong and those of you who said WND was no longer doing anything material for me from a readership perspective were correct.  I admit it.  You may commence the crowing now.

While the sole purpose of this blog remains the Amusement Imperative, which concerns entertaining myself in whatever manner happens to strike me at the moment, I do appreciate the way in which the Dread Ilk continue to contribute to the discourse here in their inimitable manner.  It’s remarkable how even the class of anklebiters has gradually improved over the years.  They may still be nipping at the sweet, sweet taste of my ankles, but at least they are aware they are doing so and not operating under the illusion they are gnawing through the foundations of Western Civilization or the last remaining supports of the Patriarchy.

Warning: spoilers ahead

Since there has been so much discussion of reviewing A THRONE OF BONES of late, I’ve decided that enough time has passed to permit a Q&A about the book with those who have read it.  If you have not yet read the novel, but intend to do so, I strongly recommend that you not read the comments.  And if you have, this is your place to ask me questions concerning the events and characters of the existing book and the novellas, NOT the one that I am currently writing.

On a related note, A Wardog’s Coin won’t be out until next month because I have been occupied with working on Book Two as well as a Selenoth-related social game that is going to be a fantasy epic in its own right.

Of language versus substance

Let me be first perfectly clear about one thing.  I could not care less about the so-called “Christian” market.  I have never been a CBA author, I will never be a CBA author, and while I am an evangelical Christian, I am not of the evangelical Christian culture.  I am almost entirely unfamiliar with the works of the modern authors who are popular within that world, and as a writer, I consider my peers to be George R. R. Martin, Brandon Sanderson, and Steven Erikson, not Jerry Jenkins, Ted Dekker, or whoever happens to be writing the books du jour in that market.

To me, a Christian novel is one that is written from a worldview perspective that contains the idea that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of Man in some form.  It doesn’t matter if the idea is overt or an analogy.  That’s it. The Lord of the Rings and The Chronicles of Narnia are clearly Christian works, as is Ray Bradbury’s excellent short story, “The Man”.  And yet, none of these three works ever so much as mention the words “Jesus Christ” or even portray various Christian activities such as baptism or communion.

My view is clearly not the most common opinion.  And while I certainly respect the right of my fellow Christians to place a more stringent series of requirements on what they believe is, or is not, Christian fiction, I really don’t care in the slightest what their opinion happens to be.  To a certain extent, I suspect that the divide centers on the idea that a Chinese novel must be either a) written by a Chinese man and set, at least in part, in China, or b) written in the Chinese language.

Now, I am a Christian, and the various books and stories in the Arts of Dark and Light series overtly utilize something that is clearly recognizable as Christianity in a manner that is historically consistent with the medieval milieu.  Some characters are observably “Christian”, others are pagan, others are simply… something else.  But I don’t write in what could be described as the contemporary Christian language.  And therein lies the difference.

I hadn’t intended to say anything about what happened right before A THRONE OF BONES was published, but as it happens, my publisher at Hinterlands has broached the subject in a surprisingly candid article about his decision to publish the book on the Speculative Faith Blog.  He writes:

Things were going along pretty well until two days before the book was to release. I got a note from the folks at a prominent Christian fiction writers group in America saying that if we released this book, they would take MLP off their list of approved publishers. That meant that all MLP books would not be eligible for their annual award.

As much as I believed in this book and its author and our goals, I was not prepared to let one book sabotage the chances of all my other authors receiving an award I think has value.

Oh, the drama. Was I going to cancel the book? Was I going to go through and remove everything this organization found objectionable? Was I going to hurt all my other authors? Was I going to succumb to what some folks said amounted to blackmail? (I didn’t think it was blackmail, by the way. I saw it as them adhering to their guidelines.) Remember, this was all happening 36 hours before the book was set to release.

I finally asked the organization if it would change anything if I created a new imprint and released the book under that imprint. They said, “Oh, yeah. If you did that, the problem would go away.”

“Really?” sez I. “All my other books would still be eligible for the award?”

“Sure.”

And thus, Marcher Lord Hinterlands was born, a brand new imprint for one book (so far).

A Throne of Bones by Vox Day released on December 1, 2012. It weighed in at just under 300,000 words and over 850 pages in hardcover. It is currently our overwhelming bestseller both in hardcover and in e-book.

I am one of those who saw the situation as something uncomfortably akin to blackmail.

Now, I should also mention that I am entirely happy with the solution; what author wouldn’t like having their own personal imprint?  Nor did I have a problem with the organization telling Jeff that my book would not be eligible for any of the awards they give out.  I also think that the way in which the situation was speedily resolved to everyone’s satisfaction was a testimony to the way that Christians with strongly differing opinions can come and reason together to find a way past their differences.

However, having been blackballed on at least two occasions at different publishing houses, (I’m not being paranoid, I was told as much by the individuals within the publishers who originally approached me and asked to publish my work; on more than one occasion I’ve been paid to NOT write a book), I think it is unwise for Christian organizations to be seen appearing to practice the same sort of blackballing, and worse, guilt by association, that I’ve seen in certain secular publishers.  On the one hand, I think it is wrong for secular publishers to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing their specific left-wing ideology on the market, on the other, I think it is wrong for Christian publishers and other professional organizations to act as gatekeepers relentlessly pushing a highly antiseptic view of what is, and is not, Christian, particularly when that view appears to be based more on cultural values than upon genuine spiritual or doctrinal issues.

The most problematic aspect of the situation, in my opinion, was that the organization asked to see the manuscript before it was published, thereby causing it to look as if they were behaving in an inappropriately censorious manner.  While they certainly have the right to act in whatever manner they see fit ex post facto, the attempt to intervene prior to publication was, in my opinion, totally unacceptable and amounted to the same sort of ideological policing that I have criticized in the SF/F market.  I tend to suspect that they were merely trying to anticipate a potential problem and head it off at the pass, which is what ultimately happened, but nevertheless, I don’t think that anyone except the author and the publisher should be addressing these sorts of issues prior to publication.

I leave it to the readers to decide whether my books are Christian fiction or not.  I don’t care.  I consider them to be epic fantasy, written in the tradition begun by George MacDonald and exemplified by J.R.R. Tolkien.  And to those who will roll their eyes at the idea of “a Christian answer to George Martin” and imagine it is meant in the Stryper sense, let me hasten to disabuse you of that notion.  A THRONE OF BONES is neither an homage nor an imitation, it is a challenge.  It is intended as a literary rebuke.

I believe Martin and some of the other authors of epic fantasy have not extended the sub-genre so much as they have betrayed it.  And in doing so, even as they have attempted to make their works more “realistic” than those of their epic predecessors, they have actually made them much smaller in terms of the human experience.  In their colorblind rejection of what they suppose to be “black and white” morality in favor of their beloved “balance” and “shades of gray”, they have inadvertently turned their backs on the full rainbow spectrum of colors.  They paint ugliness, but no beauty.  They sketch images of hate, but none of love.  Their sex isn’t erotic, it merely the slaking of appetites.  Their work, for the most part, is quite literally and intentionally soulless.

I’m not at all interested in attempting to become their polar opposite, as some erroneously see it.  Still less am I trying to write some saccharine, watered-down version of their works.  Instead, I’m attempting to embrace the whole.  Good and evil.  Love and hate.  Joy and sorrow.  Beauty and ugliness.  Art and philosophy.  I am not saying that I have been, or will be, successful in this, I am merely pointing out that to claim that A THRONE OF BONES is an imitation of Martin, or any other author, is not only to miss the point, it is missing the entire conversation.