Tag: writing

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!

The need for “sexism” in literature

In which I address a common complaint concerning female roles in fantasy literature at Alpha Game:

The problem with what Wohl advocates is that by putting modern views
on sexual roles and intersexual relations into the minds, mouths, and
worse, structures of an imaginary historical society, it destroys the
very structural foundations that make the society historical and the dramatic storylines credible – in some cases, even possible.  It’s problem similar to the one faced by secular writers,
who wish to simultaneously eliminate religion from their fictional medieval societies,
and yet retain the dramatic conflict created by the divine right of
kings.  However, it is more severe because the sexual aspect touches upon the
most concrete basis of every society: its ability to sustain itself
through the propagation of its members.

The “sexism” of
which Wohl and many of his commenters complain isn’t cultural, it is
simply the logical consequences of biological and martial imperatives.

Mailvox: the ideas, they spread

CG sounds a little offended upon my behalf:

Did you read this article? It’s a pretty blatant TIA rip-off. Sorry you
don’t receive any credit. 

Despite being taken directly from TIA, this may actually be less of a “rip-off” than another article I saw recently in a mainstream news article that read as if had come right out of a recent WND column.  But this doesn’t bother me in the slightest, in fact, I regard it as in some ways being the ultimate compliment.

What such citations mean is that it the ideas rather than the personality are making their way into the mainstream.  We’re seeing this with Roissy and Game, and we’re also seeing this in a lesser way with various concepts that I’ve been banging on for years now.  Since I’m not pursuing a career as a talking head, it doesn’t really matter if I get the ego boost from seeing my name in print or not, and let’s face it, of all the egos in the world, mine must be among the least in need of boosting.

It’s a good thing that the ideas are able to be transmitted in places where their attachment to my identity may handicap them.  The most influential thinkers are not always those whose names are most recognizable; Paris Hilton and Richard Dawkins are both famous, which examples I trust underline the complete lack of intellectual significance of fame.

The missing seven

I sent out 30 review copies on Friday, so by my count, at least seven reviewers have not yet completed either their reading or their review.  Now, I understand more reviews might seem superfluous, especially of such a relatively small book, but believe it or not, the number of reviews has been observed to make a significant amount of difference in the willingness of Amazon customers to give a book a chance. 

Now, if you absolutely hated the novella and are simply being gracious by neglecting to share your opinion with the reading public, it’s perfectly fine with me if you choose not to favor the world with your verdict.  I have been known to be circumspect in similar circumstances myself, so if that’s the case, please feel free to ignore this reminder.  But if you are one of the reviewers who did read it and just haven’t gotten around to writing your review yet, it would be great if you would see about posting it at your earliest convenience.

And for the 23 of you who did read and review the book on such short notice, I really appreciated your time and effort, and I’m very pleased to see that so many of you enjoyed it.  Also, thanks very much to those who purchased A MAGIC BROKEN, and for a brief while, turned it into a top 25 book in the Epic category.  It was rather fun to see my name in between George R.R. Martin and Neal Stephenson instead of Michael Lewis and FA von Hayek.

Requesting reviewers

I will be announcing two new works of fiction on Monday, both set in the world of Summa Elvetica.  I’d like to get some reviews of the first one up on Amazon over the weekend, so I’m giving away 30 electronic review copies of the forthcoming 50-page(1) novella to those who are a) interested in my fiction, b) willing and able to post reviews on Amazon, and, c) not the Anklebiter of Many Names.

I’m not asking for mindless puffery or anything like that, just your honest perspective on the novella.  So, if you’re interested, please fire off an email to me and I’ll send you the same epub that will be available Monday from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Kobo.  If you don’t have an eReader, that’s not a problem, you can use Calibre to read it on your computer.

UPDATE: Okay, the thirty review copies are all spoken for.  Thanks very much to everyone who responded so readily.

(1)  Page count isn’t really meaningful for an ebook, but the novella is 20,000 words.  At the standard 400-word page of a trade paperback, that’s about 50 pages.

On closing comments

Walter Russell Mead shuts down comments at The American Interest:

After almost three years and well more than 40,000 published reader comments (and half a million spam comments that either we or our spam filter managed to identify and trash), Via Meadia is joining the ranks of non-comment blogs. We’re grateful to readers over those years who have shared their reactions to what they read here, and hope to develop new ways to interact with readers even as we continue to benefit from their thoughts and responses, but the traditional comments section no longer seems like the right way to go. To make the comments section work in its present form we would have to edit and curate much more aggressively than we do now and in our current judgment the effort needed to do that is better spent improving other features of the blog.

One uncomfortable truth I have observed over time is that most bloggers really don’t want “to interact with readers”. What they appear to really want is to be admired, to be praised and to see their opinions echoed back to them. The primary reason they permit comments in the first place is because comments serve as a metric of both status and success; one of the hallmarks of a successful blog is a plethora of comments following every post. In most cases, even if they claim to value discourse and diversity of opinion, the spectrum of permissible discourse is quite strictly limited, regardless of the blogger’s place on the ideological spectrum.

Contra the assertion above, it is really not very much work keeping comments from getting out of hand. Mr. Mead purports to be overwhelmed by the difficulty of managing 40,000 comments in three years, whereas there have been 33,494 comments here at VP in the last five months alone. During that time, precisely one person had to be banned and that one person was only banned after first making dozens of comments and even having multiple posts dedicated to directly responding to him. The reality is that if you have a few good commenters capable of defending their own arguments and criticizing the overtly nonsensical arguments presented by others, there is very little that the blogger has to do himself. In nine years of this blog, which began in October 2003, I don’t think there have been more than 20 people banned out of the thousands who have left a comment here at one point or another.

Granted, a few of those 20 or so people have been banned repeatedly under an impressively long list of pseudonyms. Who, after all, can remember all of the various identities belonging to the infamous Jefferson or that would-be literary critic, Dimwit Dan? However, the true troll is both rare and very easy to identify. As a general rule, the sort of individual who doesn’t have the self-control to avoid getting banned in a comparatively relaxed environment also lacks the self-awareness to stop doing what got him previously banned.

Now, please note that I’m not criticizing Mr. Mead’s decision to shut down comments, any more than I have criticized John Scalzi’s decision to aggressively delete all comments from all sources that he so elegantly labels “assbags”, or Instapundit’s decision not to permit comments in the first place. Every blogger has a perfect right to run things however he happens to see fit and I can’t see that comments would actually suit Instapundit’s quick-hit, news-breaking format anyhow.

What I am criticizing in both the Mead and Scalzi situations is the pretense involved. In the former case, it is provably untrue that it is a lot of work to permit comments. In the case of the latter, it is provably untrue that differences of opinion on many subjects are permitted. As a blogger, one should do what one wants, but one should also be honest about what that is. If you want a one-way megaphone or you only want to permit dissent within certain parameters, that’s not a problem.

But in such cases, you cannot try to claim that you also value the sort of open discourse and competitive exchange of ideas that takes place on a regular basis here at Vox Popoli. That is simply false advertising. What John Scalzi describes as “a feculent miasma” is actually the rich and pungent aroma of intellectual freedom. But his description is extremely informative. Only a man who spends his days with his nose up his own ass could mistake the scent of freedom for bullshit.

Vox Popoli is not, and will never be, an echo chamber. There are not, and will never be, any topics that are definitively outside the scope of permissible intellectual discourse. If, for whatever reason, you wish to defend racism, sexism, cannibalism, the Holocaust, the designated hitter, the nonexistence of God, or even the novels of Robert Jordan, you can certainly do so here provided that you do so on-topic – I’ll even create a topic for you if necessary – and in an intellectually honest manner. The only commenters whose participation I will not tolerate is those who repeatedly lie, who demonstrate proven intellectual dishonesty, and who simply refuse to admit it when someone else has publicly shown them to be wrong. If you are not at least capable of acknowledging that you could be wrong about an idea, no matter how near and dear it is to you, then you will probably be better served commenting at a place where your ideas will not be questioned or criticized.

This may not be the best blog on the Internet, but I do hope that it is at least among the most open to ideas, however crazy they might be, and to genuine debate and discussion. I know I have changed my mind on numerous topics, from universal suffrage to free trade, as a direct result of the discussions that have taken place here, and I suspect I am not the only one.

Mailvox: on flaming swords

Kickass wonders about a well-known image:

Could I get an explanation on the flaming sword picture? I thought it was a joke but googled it.

I’ve  explained this before, but for those who didn’t know, this picture was one of many from a Star Tribune photoshoot for an article one of its writers was doing about my Eternal Warriors novels. He moved onto one of the big New York papers before he’d finished the piece, if I recall correctly, so it never ran, but the photographer liked them so much that he emailed a few of them to me.

I still remember laughing when he called me up after the interview with the writer and asked if “my characters, like, did anything interesting?”  I mean, what was I supposed to say, no, they all sit around and discuss their boring lives?  He got really excited when I mentioned that there were these angels and they got in big battles with flaming swords, until he realized that he was, after all, dealing with a writer.  Which led to his next question: “You’re not, like, fat or anything, are you?”  When I reassured him that I was not the pudgy little novelist he was expecting, he asked me to come down to the Star Tribune building in Minneapolis the next week and bring a sword if I happened to have one.

I didn’t, but there was one at the house at which I was staying – we’d already moved to Europe  at this point – which led to the funniest part of the whole thing.  It was winter, so it was cold, but it was also a bright sunny day, which led to my walking into the Star Tribune reception wearing a long black overcoat, black gloves, black shades, with a shaved head and carrying a katana.  The two female receptionists freaked out and called security, at which point I explained the situation and the guards had a good laugh.

We didn’t end up using the katana, however, as the photographer obtained a few swords from a nearby theatre as well as some flame-paste, so he just picked out a rather Conanesque sword, gave it a quick coat of paste, then set it on fire while I held it.  It was a little trickier than it looked because the burning paste tended to drip off, so I had to try to hold still for the photo while dodging the dripping flames at the same time.  It was more fun than the usual photo shoot and I shared the photographer’s disappointment that the piece never ran.  The reaction to the photo, however mockingly it may be intended, only tends to show that his instincts were correct as it made for a much more interesting author’s photo than most.