Tag: writing

A candidacy is announced

Yesterday, I sent a notice to the SFWA’s head of the election committee, announcing that I am running for the office of president of the organization.  It is highly unlikely that I will win, of course, but I would like to be able to say that I at least attempted to do my part to salvage an organization that is speeding rapidly into irrelevance.

One reason I am running is to restore the independence of what appears to have become a captive house award that Tor Books authors give themselves on an annual basis.  This may not be the case, but the statistical evidence suggests that there has been considerable corruption in the awards process in the past and that the 2010 rules changes have actually made the problem worse.

The other reason can be seen in these two quotes by its current president, the Tor Books author John Scalzi.  He condemned himself in the very words with which he criticized his predecessor, Michael Capobianco back in 2007.

“Simply put, the professional organization of speculative fiction should
not be headed by people who believe their job is to hold back the
future. I believe strongly that Michael Capobianco sees it as his role
to hold back the future and to maintain the status quo in publishing and
in speculative fiction. That battle has already been lost; the
publishing world has already irrevocably changed from when Mr.
Capobianco last published. It’s time that SFWA moves forward with
leadership who understands this….  


[T]he answer to whether I support membership in SFWA for people who are
not published writers is no.* That’s not going to change. I don’t think
it’s useful and I don’t think it’s needed. SFWA should certainly make
itself useful in helping aspiring SFWAns make the transition into
published status, and to a good extent, it does that now. But at the end
of the day it’s an organization for professional writers, and needs to
be composed of professional writers.” 

Scalzi is a dinosaur.  He fails to understand that “professionally published” has been rendered a meaningless term by technological development and that science fiction writing now goes well beyond the simple medium of printed books.  The most influential science fiction writers don’t even write books, they write games.  Scalzi should know this, considering that he very recently got involved working for a company in the industry in which I have been active for 22 years.  And under the current qualification requirements, some bestselling SF/F novelists, whose work outsells most SFWA members, cannot qualify.

Scalzi is also a fascist ideologue who actively attempts to shut down all debate he personally finds distressing at every opportunity.  Consider the way in which he proudly declared that in 2012, he managed to avoid permitting anyone to present facts or arguments that might have disturbed the tender sensitivities of the rabbity readers at Whatever.


This year I also managed to arouse the ire of a whole stack of racist, sexist, homophobic dipshits with the above posts as well as several others. If I did nothing else with my year, this would have made it delightful to me. They also gave the Mallet of Loving Correction plenty of use when they would drop by the site and learn to their surprise that the sort of smug trollery that passes for thought in the land of epistemic closure doesn’t get past the door here. This is not a delight to me — trolls are always irritating — but whacking them so that the conversational level here remains high has its own grim level of satisfaction.


There is something deeply amusing about a man who claims that people pointing and laughing at him in contempt somehow translates to “ire”.  But it is deeply problematic for an organization to have someone who actively prides himself on the overt and intentional silencing of dissent – and is either delusional or dishonest enough to project his own closed-minded perspective on his critics – as its head.


As proof that it is John Scalzi who dwells in the land of epistemic closure and not those who disagree with him, I note the subsequent comment from one of his readers: “Thanks again for making this a safe place to visit and comment.”  Whatever is a safe place for the Rabbit People to visit and comment precisely because Scalzi practices the very epistemic closure that he feigns to decry. The quoted statement is virtually a textbook illustration of psychological projection.  He sees ire on the part of those who feel none because he is angry with them.  He sees closed minds and smugness in others because he is smug and his mind is closed to competing ideas.  He can’t conceive of honest dissent because he is himself dishonest and inclined towards conformity.

Now, it should be made clear that John Scalzi is not the problem with the SFWA, he is merely one of the symptoms of the ideological disease that has been gradually killing science fiction and fantasy in the print world for the last thirty years.  Thanks to technology, SF/F will survive, but not in its traditional form if its self-appointed gatekeepers continue to stress mediocrity and ideological conformity over the dangerous new visions that once characterized it.


It is unlikely that I will win the election; even if I win it is unlikely that I can do anything to salvage the situation.  The myopic Neo-Luddism and anti-intellectual ideology in the organization appears to be both deep and wide.  But I will present my platform to the membership on February 1st so that at least no one will be able to say that things could not have been different if the organization, and the literary genre, continues its downward spiral.

Free will and fiction

Mike Duran lists the top five cliches of the Christian writer:

Having frequented Christian writing circles for some time now, I’ve
heard all the spiritualized slogans we believers like to regurgitate. Here’s my Top 5 clichés that Christian writers use.

5.) “God’s called me to write.” — Funny
how God never “calls” Christians to be sales assistants, lay reviewers,
work in circulation, be an advertising manager, or write obituaries for
the local newspaper. You’d think that writing novels was the top of the
Christian publishing holiness hierarchy.
4.) “It just wasn’t God’s will that I… (fill in the blank).” –
“God’s will” is a favorite “out” for Christian writers. Most often, the
saying is followed by things like “find an agent,” “sell a lot of
books,” “finish the manuscript,” or “advertize aggressively.” Poor God. I
wish He’d get His act together so your career can finally flourish.

I find the public profession of “God’s call” to be about as credible, in most circumstances, as the way in which people who recall their past lives always seem to have been some Egyptian princess or European queen; no one ever used to be a peasant girl who died of malnutrition and smallpox at the age of twelve.  It’s remarkable how often God is said to call people to do what they quite clearly want to do of their own accord.

As for God’s will, in this, as in so many things, we see the idea of divine omniderigence tends to remove both agency and accountability from the individual. 

Writing fiction is, in its own small way, an act of creation.  The author is the god of his own little world, which may be why the idea of writing fiction is so much more appealing to many would-be novelists than the actual act of writing it.  And yet, even the human author, who has complete and total control over his characters, often finds his control constricted by the desire to make them behave in a self-consistent manner.

In like manner, perhaps an all-powerful God might find Himself constrained, not by any external limits on His power, but rather by His desire for artistic consistency and aesthetic integrity.

The pig, she flies!

In which I actually agree with Ed Brayton for once:

I tend to bristle at the idea of judging a blog by its
comment section. As Jamie Kilstein said a few months ago, the comment
section at PZ’s blog is the 7th circle of hell. The one here is often
scarcely better. Even I cringe at what is clearly — yes — tribalism that
goes on in the comments section. It’s just the nature of the beast and
it’s happened to me on both ends. A quick story:

A few years ago I criticized Richard Dawkins for signing a petition
that would make it illegal for parents to teach their kids about
religion. The comment section was descended upon by hundreds of his
acolytes, saving me up one side and down the other. I was
misinterpreting the petition, they said, and how dare I criticize
someone who had done so much for atheism when I was just a lowly
blogger, and so forth. After a while Dawkins himself showed up and said I
was right, that he hadn’t read the petition closely enough, that he did
not favor such a law and he’d asked them to remove his name from the
petition. Even after that, many of his followers continued to excoriate
me.

I’ve had the same thing happen here on the other side, where someone
has shown up in the comments and criticized something I wrote. They were
hammered like mad by many of my readers and I had to jump in and say,
“Wait a minute, he’s actually got a point.” That makes me even more
uncomfortable than being on the receiving end of it. We are all prone to
tribalism and to shallow thinking, including those who regard ourselves
as skeptics who are above that sort of thing.

I’m not keen on judging a blog by its comment section either, except in that one can judge the character and self-confidence of the blogger by how he manages his comment section.  Here at VP, for example, there is actual debate among people who disagree with each other and with me.  In the posts this week alone, there are numerous regulars disagreeing with me about the limits of the Constitution’s ability to guarantee God-given rights as well as a vigorous debate on the permissibility of gun control between commenters.

PZ, as far as I have seen, is actually quite good about permitting critics to comment freely at Pharyngula, the problem there is not that he cannot bear dissension, but rather that his commenters are such a clueless collection of mid-witted ideologues that most critics stop uselessly banging their head against the wall of idiocy there before long.  I actually respect him much more than many other bloggers in that particular regard.

But Brayton is entirely correct to point out that the self-styled skeptics are every bit as tribal and superficial as those they make a habit of denigrating.  This is a point I have been making for literally years, and it is good to see that some of the more vocal members of the skeptic community are willing to openly acknowledge it.

Head’s up: free book

Now that A Throne of Bones is out, Marcher Lord Hinterlands has enrolled A Magic Broken in Amazon’s Kindle Select program, which allows a publisher to give books away for free for a limited period of time.  So, starting tomorrow, on December 24th and 25th, Kindle users will be able to download the novella for free.  If you’ve been curious about my fiction but hesitant to pay the necessary price for one reason or another, tomorrow would be an excellent time to do it.

If you’ve already read AMB but hadn’t quite gotten around to reviewing it on Amazon, this would also be a very good time to pop your review up there.  In related news, if you’re willing to commit to reviewing The Wardog’s Coin when it comes out, most likely towards the end of January, please let me know via email.  I’ll be sending out review copies to the first 50 respondents upon the book’s release.  This will consist of two short stories, one of which features a character who is likely to be a new perspective character in the second book of Arts of Dark and Light.

Theories of collapse

Three rival theories seek to explain the decline and fall of GRR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire.  If you haven’t read the five books yet and are concerned about spoilers, don’t read this.  The first book has been out for 16 years now, so I think it can safely be discussed in detail.

  1. Martin simply lost the plot and is unable to handle all of his characters and stories.
  2. The seed of Martin’s nihilistic amorality finally blossomed into full flower.
  3. Martin made a foolish decision to change his approach to the story in mid-series and the structural changes that resulted have proven more than he can handle.

There is at least some truth to all three of these statements.  But which is the primary causal factor.  With regards to (1), that is more of an observation than an explanation.  He has lost the plot.  He is unable to successfully juggle all of his characters and stories.  But it doesn’t explain why.  Is it his age?  Is it his health?  Is it simple lack of interest?  Perhaps, but authors in mental decline usually produce work that is simpler and shorter; Agatha Christie’s last book has a vocabulary that contains 20 percent fewer words than her average novel.  NB: Christie cunningly avoided this being her last word on the subject by writing the final Poirot novel, and one of her best, Curtain, years ahead of time.  Since Dragons shows the same meandering bloat that first appeared in Crows, and since there are still flashes of excellence in both novels, I think a decline in Martin’s mental acuity can be ruled out.

What about the idea that Martin’s nihilistic amorality, always apparent, finally overtook the story, as per (2)?  There is some evidence of this.  The nihilism and amorality has certainly continued to increase as Martin kills off well-meaning Starks and replaces them with vicious new characters.  One reader claimed that the theory can’t be true because it was the nihilistic amorality that made the first three books appealing in the first place.  Even if that is what set them apart, (and there is an element of truth to that; no one will forget the scene where Jaime chucks Bran out the window… for love), that appeal can’t possibly explain the decline in the latter two books because Martin has undeniably cranked up the depravity in comparison with the preceding three.

The real problem with this idea is that we know all of this pointless viciousness is just a sideshow, filler for the events of the real story.  While it might explain why the filler is so nasty, it doesn’t explain why it exists in the first place.  And that brings us to theory (3).

As most Martin readers know, the books were originally supposed to be a trilogy.  Then, after the first book turned into three, Martin faced a five-year gap, during which time the dragons would grow and Daenerys would gather the forces necessary to challenge for the throne of Westeros.  (One would think a wedding between Daenerys and Joffrey would have been the obvious solution to the situation inspired by the historical example of Stephen and Maude, but never mind that.)  Instead of simply writing 10 pages of “here’s what happened in the intervening years”, Martin went back to write what was intended as one book, then became two, and has thus created an even more difficult challenge for himself by adding all of the new characters, many of whose stories are of little to no interest to the fans of the first three books.

Instead of proceeding with the 9 living perspective characters from A Storm of Swords, Martin now finds himself saddled with 21.  This is a structural challenge, and if Martin somehow surmounts it to produce books that are on par with the first three, it will be an epic literary feat indeed.  But the very fact that Martin faces it tends to indicate that he is not up to the challenge of defeating it.

Unlike many Martin readers, I very much doubt that Winds and Dream will be as bad as Feast and Dragons.  After all, Martin is now returning to the story that he originally intended to tell, so he probably has a much better idea of what he wants to do.  However, the unnecessary structural challenge created by all the additional characters and their stories likely means the last two – or three – books will not be as good as they would have been had he not given in to the temptation to go back and fill in the blanks of the required five-year gap.  And that is an excellent object lesson for all writers: don’t give in to prequelitis.  Look forward, not backward.  And don’t hesitate to leave some historical blanks unfilled; indulge the reader’s imagination rather than attempt to leave no stone unturned in explaining everything about everyone.

As for the theories of collapse, they may all be true and help explain each other.  The unfortunate decision to go back and fill in the blanks led to a long submersion into the depths of pointless nihilism, which ultimately proved as uninteresting to Martin as it did to his readers.

Mailvox: illumination and shadow

A physicist notes the way in which Tolkien explicated the distinction between the illuminating fairy tale and the dark deceit of the retrophobic modern fantasy:

I was intrigued by the discussion on retrophobia in fantasy literature, and it made me recall a relevant passage from Professor Wood’s The Gospel According to Tolkien:

The essence of fairy-stories is that they satisfy our heart’s deepest desire: to know a world other than our own, a world that has not been flattened and shrunk and emptied of mystery. To enter this other world, the fairy tale resorts to fantasy in the literal sense. It deals with phantasms or representations of things not generally believed to exist in our primary world: elves (the older word for faires), hobbits, wizards, dwarves, Ringwraiths, wargs, orcs, and the like. Far from being unreal or fantastic in the popular sense, these creatures embody the invisible qualities of the eternal world — love and death, courage and cowardice, terror and hope — that always impinge on our own visible universe. Fairy-stories “open as door on Other Time” Tolkien writes, “and if we pass through, though only for a moment, we stand outside our own time, outside Time itself, perhaps.” Hence Tolkien’s insistence that all fantasy-creations must have the mythic character of the supernatural world as well as the historical consistency of the natural world. The question to be posed for fantasy as also for many of the biblical narratives is not, therefore, “Did these things literally happen?” but “Does their happening reveal the truth?”

This ties into your discussion of the modern Wormtongues, as well. Wood and Tolkien are essentially saying what you’re saying: modern fantasy fails, because important elements of the narrative do not reveal the truth, and readers know it.

The reason so much modern fantasy fails so spectacularly is not because it is soulless and derivative, although it is, but because it quite literally hates the heart.  It is written out of hatred, it is based on lies, and it is designed to obscure rather than reveal.  Take R. Scott Bakker’s series, The Prince of Nothing.  The events chronicled within it did not literally happen, but their happening, quite intentionally, obscures the truth, indeed, it claims that there is no such thing as truth.  The ugliness of the disgusting Face Dancers is an apt metaphor for the ugly incoherence at the core of the modernist vision for the series.

This is why GRR Martin will never be the American JRR Tolkien.  What are the truths revealed by A Song of Ice and Fire?  That people of good will are stupid?  That everyone is pointlessly sadistic? That no good deed goes unpunished?  That sex is either rape, incest, or prostitution?  The only truths to be found in Martin are negative; there is nothing beautiful or mythic about Westeros.  There is death, cowardice, and terror, but where is the love, courage, and hope?  When viewed from this perspective, it becomes apparent that decline of the series observed in the two most recent books are merely the flowering of a retrophobic seed that was planted at the start.

My point is not that those who write in the older tradition are better writers.  If anything, it is remarkable that those who handicap their narratives so severely with their moral blindness and ideological retrophobia manage to produce works that are still compelling in some way.  The problem is that, no matter how highly skilled they are, genuine greatness will always elude them and their works, despite their merits, will rapidly fade into the forgotten dust of history because they do not speak to the eternal truths at the heart of Man.

A GoodReads review

D.M. Dutcher reviews A THRONE OF BONES:

It’s hard to sum it up since so much goes on in the book. At 800854 pages,
it’s long, and the first MLP hardcover release. The length doesn’t feel
too tedious though, with only the start of the book dragging a bit. Once
it gets past discussing the upcoming goblin fight, it gets much better,
as each new character has their own story and part to play.

The
world is very interesting too. It’s sort of a fusion of Rome and
medieval Europe-imagine Rome with its legionnaires and patricians with a
church like in Thomist times and Vikings mingling with supernatural
creatures like elves and werewolves. The main focus is on Rome though,
and it adds a lot to the book by setting it apart from the generic
fantasy land it could be. It’s not just the gladiators and phalanxes,
but he gets the ethos of each nation and group right. You get inside
their heads, and it’s well done indeed.

I also found that it
fixed something that I didn’t like about Game of Thrones. One of the
issues I had with the first book in that series was that the
supernatural and fantasy aspects felt tacked in, as opposed to purely
human drama. Vox though always makes the fantasy part noticeable if not
prevalent. This isn’t just “let’s make it fantasy because we really want
to tell a historical fiction story and ignore the parts we don’t like,”
but magic and fantasy have as much a part to play as the intricate
machinations between nobles. If anything, you wish there was a bit more
focus on it. The elves in particular….

All in all, it’s a good, epic fantasy novel. It was better than I
expected. If you like more traditional Christian fantasy fare that is
clean and more aggressively spiritual (if not evangelistic) you may not
like this. But people who like well-written fantasy and Christians who
are okay with more realism and edginess to their books will probably
enjoy it quite a bit.  

I’m pleased to see that readers are understanding that THE ARTS OF DARK AND LIGHT series is not traditional Christian fantasy fare.  It was never intended to be, any more than it was intended to be a mindless attempt to do to GRR Martin what Terry Brooks did to JRR Tolkien in his Shannara series.  I’m still amused by the charge that I am simultaneously mimicking Edward Gibbon and R. Scott Bakker(1); while it would still be wrong, one would do significantly better to assert the book is the bastard love-child of J.B. Bury and Joe Abercrombie.  If critics want to claim that I am a derivative writer in the vein of the retrophobes, that is certainly their prerogative, but I would expect they might at least have the perspicacity to get the genuine influences right.

The reviewer is correct.  The ethos of the book is definitely more concerned with the martial values than the Christian ones.  This is the natural result of half the perspective characters either being military officers or what could reasonably be described as military intelligence.  When I write my characters, I always attempt to focus on their current concerns rather using them as a vessel for some larger point.  This is why the Marcus Valerius who is actively engaged with theological matters as part of a Church embassy led by a pair of noted ecclesiastic intellectuals is simply not going to be anywhere nearly as concerned with such elevated matters while commanding a cavalry wing in the middle of a battle involving some 30,000 combatants.

(1) In all seriousness, Bakker would probably be the last of the epic fantasy writers that I would attempt to mimic. Well, no, that would definitely be Jordan.  Then Erikson, simply because I don’t even know how I would go about trying to imitate him. But I can’t mimic the best thing about Bakker, his florid, but absorbing style, and I can’t imagine wanting to imitate any of his plots or his characters.  His worldbuilding is competent and reasonably substantial, but it doesn’t take a form in which I have any interest whatsoever, nor does it have anything in common with mine.  Moreover, a simple look at the publication date of Summa Elvetica should make it obvious that Selenoth(2) is a world I created long before I’d ever heard of R. Scott Bakker.


(2) I will send a free hardcover to the first person who correctly guesses what computer game served as the original inspiration for the name of Selenoth.  This offer will stand for one week.

The modern Wormtongues of SF/F

As one of the readers at Alpha Game suggested, the discussion of retrophobia in the SF/F genre and its observable consequences is better suited for Vox Popoli even though it began at AG due to the intersexual-relations aspect of the matter.  So, I’m going to move it over here, where the majority of the audience interested in the topic is normally found.

As one Amazon reviewer of A Throne of Bones noted, “modern fantasy is a rather ugly place”.  That’s is true, but it’s not the real problem, being merely a logical consequence of the underlying problem of modern fantasy being an incoherent place.  In the first post on the subject, “Sexism” is a literary necessity, I observed how the structural acceptance of sexual inequality and other aspects of historical societies deemed “evil”, (technically inaccurate, but used in the absence of a better word), by the sensibilities presently infesting the literary genre are not only required for historical verisimilitude, but for literary drama as well.

I used the example of a single change to a single character in A Song of Ice and Fire would have totally eviscerate the entire series and eliminated the greater part of its plot.  Consider the consequences of changing Cersei Lannister from an oppressed woman used as a dynastic piece by her father to a strong and independent warrior woman of the sort that is presently ubiquitous in third generation fantasy, science fiction, and paranormal fiction.

  1. Cersei doesn’t marry Robert Baratheon.  She’s strong and independent like her twin, not a royal brood mare!
  2. House Lannister’s ambitions are reduced from establishing a royal line to finding a wife for Tyrion.
  3. Her children are not bastards.  Robert’s heirs have black hair.
  4. Jon Arryn isn’t murdered to keep a nonexistent secret.  Ned Stark isn’t named to replace him.
  5. Robert doesn’t have an accident coordinated by the Lannisters, who don’t dominate the court and will not benefit from his fall.
  6. Robert’s heirs being legitimate, Stannis and Renly Baratheon remain loyal.
  7. The Starks never come south and never revolt against King’s Landing.  Theon Greyjoy goes home to the Ironborn and never returns to Winterfell.  Jon Snow still goes to the Wall, but Arya remains home and learns to become a lady, not an assassin, whether she wants to or not.

So, what was a war of five kings that spans five continents abruptly becomes a minor debate over whether Robert Baratheon’s black-haired son and heir marries Sansa Stark, a princess of Dorne, or Danerys Targaryen.  This doesn’t remove all of the drama from the book; King Robert could spurn Danerys and thus preserve the Baratheon-Targaryen rivalry and the threat of the Others still lurks north of the Wall.  It’s even possible that the novel which now focuses on the warrior woman Cersei, her lesbian lover, Brienne of Tarth, and their brave journey north of the Wall to discover the secret of the Others might not be entirely dreadful.  One could even argue that it would have a shot at being more interesting than A Dance with Dragons.

But would it be better or more interesting than the complex intrigue and drama filling the first three books?  I very much doubt it.

Now let’s turn it around and throw it out to the readers.  Can you think of a modern fantasy novel in which a single change to a single character would have had the potential to improve the story to a similar degree that the change to Cersei Lannister would alter A Song of Fire and Ice?  Alternatively, what popular SF/F works have been hamstrung by the author’s servile adherence to revisionist modern sensibilities?

What we have seen over the last thirty or forty years in the SF/F genre is metaphorically quite similar to what Tolkien portrayed at the end of The Lord of the Rings in the scouring of the Shire.  The modern Wormtongues have done their best to ruin the once beautiful land of fantasy they invaded, by rejecting the past which they hate and failing to grasp the purpose and significance of societal traditions they do not understand.  These Wormtongues are reduced to cobbling together incoherent and derivative works because their very values work against them, cutting them off from the larger part of the sources of historical conflict and drama, reducing them to coloring with crayons where their predecessors were painting with a full palette that ranged the full width and depth of the human experience.

Retrophobia in SF/F

In which I respond to a John C. Wright essay on what he terms retrophobia and how it has crippled the third generation of fantasy writers:

This theory of literary retrophobia explains why so many mediocre
writers like Terry Brooks, JK Rowling, and John Scalzi, and even
genuinely entertaining writers such as Charles Stross, exhibit such a
powerful inclination for rewriting the works of earlier, more original
writers, not only mimicking their styles, but downright strip-mining
their works for ideas, settings, and even basic plots.

For example, I enjoyed The Sword of Shannara when I was in high
school, for example.  Yes, it was a mediocre imitation of Tolkien, but
it had its moments and it was a preferable alternative to re-reading The Silmarillion for the third time.  But after struggling through The Elfstones of Shannara
and only making it about a chapter into the third book in the series, I
gave it up.  I tried again about twenty years later and didn’t even
make it that far.

The reason, I belatedly realized, was that without the benefit of
working from Tolkien’s template, Brooks simply didn’t know how to write a
fantasy tale capable of holding the reader’s interest.  He’s not a bad
writer; his Demon books weren’t bad.  But he simply didn’t have any of
the deep roots in history or myth that the great genre writers of the
past did, and the shallowness crippled the quality of his storytelling.

Read the rest at Alpha Game.  It’s not related to intersexual relations, but that’s where this got started, so that’s why I posted it there.

Help an author this Christmas

The heart, it bleeds.  I saw the sad plea on John Scalzi’s site, a giant green banner that says “Fuck You. Pay Me.”  It’s tragic that after a short, but glorious career of prostituting himself in a literary manner, he’s been forced to turn to literal prostitution in order to buy his family Christmas Holiday presents this year.

Won’t you please buy a copy of one of his Heinlein derivatives, or his Piper derivative, or his Star Trek derivative?  If enough of us join together and help out, perhaps he’ll not only be able to afford Christmas Holiday presents, but an original idea for a novel too!