C.I.T.O.K.A.T.E.

Brandon Sanderson, a Mormon, a fantasy author (I'll leave off the easy joke), and Penguicon's Author Guest of Honor, recently took a position similar to mine; that the government should get out of the marriage business. Everyone should just get a civil union, and if you want to also get married, you can get that in any ceremony of your choice. If you're religious, you get it through whatever ceremony your religion involves.

He also claimed that homosexuality is sin; but only a minor impediment to spiritual growth, like littering. We see this all the time these days. "I have to say homosex is a minor speed bump on the path of spiritual growth, I guess?" *SHRUG* I think it should be called the Shrug Maneuver. Or maybe the Palms Upturned Shoulder Shrug Evasive Equivocation. I remember being in the same place. I give it ten years, and he'll have changed his mind about this too.

Then there's the second classic maneuver: "But the gays are not nearly as bad as I am! If I call myself bad too, then it's OK!" (Imagine the equivalent: "I think blacks smell funny, but I'm not racist, because smelling bad is not some great evil, and because I think I smell terrible!") It's just not a fact.

No matter how milquetoast and apologetic he is about it, he himself would be outraged at the very thought of such a position if it weren't for his faith shoving this baloney down his reluctant, gagging throat.

He describes the tough place one is in when trying to reconcile tradition. There is a unique irony in this. It's kind of like the way he was chosen to finish Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series. How many pages long was it when he got it? Like the Book of Mormon, it must have landed on his desk with a thud. Here, Brandon! You're stuck with thousands and thousands of Robert Jordan's judgements and decisions and have to figure out how to work around it. Most of them are pretty good, but none of them perfect, and some of them atrocious. but they're canon now, and you've got to act like God gave the Wheel of Time series to Robert Jordan on gold tablets.

Now, you might think it is consistent with an iconoclastic style to say "screw the Wheel of Time canon" or "Star Trek is better in J.J. Abrams' reboot" or "I like the new Battlestar Galactica". Actually no. I'm just advocating for original work. At the risk of stretching this metaphor too far, atheism means original work. Which is why you can't get atheists to agree on very much.

Trying to retcon stupid doctrines basically constitutes fanservice. In a long history of bad ideas, the idea of a god's perfect word through a prophet is the worst idea this species has ever had. Gods do not hand down perfection to man, whether it's Joseph Smith or anyone else. That just gets in the way of correcting mistakes. God had some good characters but seemed to get lost in a cult of personality bigger than Heinlein, lost the plot, and vanished up his own ass somewhere around Leviticus, when he wasn't even four books into the series. The reboots made some improvements, but not near enough.

There are two ways in which the high quality of writing has become a problem for readers.

The first way is that there are too many good books to read, and editors are telling us they don't want to filter any more narrowly than that. Let us be candid. Many of us do not care enough about books to read that many, so we ask magazine editors to narrow down the field for us to those that match our tastes. Instead, Mike Resnick tells us that as editor of Jim Baen's Universe he'll give us any fiction he thinks possesses generic goodness. In today's information overload, we wish for more specific literary filters in the torrent of work that has already passed through the "is it generically good?" filter.

This is far too broad a criteria given that different works of fiction provide different mental experiences for which we might have a hankering at various times. Examples include:

• Tear-jerking sentimentality.
• Romantic feelings.
• Intellectual stimulation about philosophy, business, politics, science, engineering, or other ideas.
• Laughter.
• Exciting action.
• Mythopoeia.
• Feelings of horror.
• A puzzle to be solved.

A murder and a detective are just a setting, but the puzzle is the reading experience you have in your head. Fantasy and science fiction are also just settings, and can provide any of those experiences, although there are good reasons that they tend to specialize. I think mental experiences make more useful categories than settings. When fans complain to Escape Pod that Mike Resnick's well-written tear-jerkers are "not Science Fiction", they are complaining wrong. They really were dissatisfied because they were expecting something else which is either on the above list, or belongs there and is missing due to my oversight. (Given that they named SF, good odds are that it's the intellectual one.) Hence Mr. Resnick hears them wrong and doesn't know what they want. People don't need one magazine full of detectives and murders, another full of outer space, and another full of swords and sorcery. Those are settings. Readers need a filter based on the mental experiences they find rewarding. How much does a work trigger fear, humor, tears, romance, intellectual stimulation, or let us work out whodunit? Those are happening in the reader's head independent of props like wands and rayguns.

The second way good writing can be a problem is when it gets out of its place and becomes an exclusionary idolatry. It's a little awkward and uncomfortable to say this, but some of us are unwashed ruffians who read prose fiction specifically to find out the fiddly details and explanations, rather than for the right reasons preached to us by Real Literature. We are the kind of readers who can be educated to appreciate the prose fiction writer's craftmanship, but who unapologetically continue to enjoy reading encyclopedic recountings in a GURPS Transhuman Space setting sourcebook.

It's understandable that many prose fiction authors become obsessed with wordcraft and dramacraft to the point that they can no longer see the rewards of a more polymath set of mental experiences. They wouldn't have gone into the job if they didn't love literature's particular subset of rewards. They're specialists, after all, and reading their livejournals about their writing process, I'm amazed at the depth of their insight into how it works. I just don't care as much as they do. Of course I don't... that's why they're writers and I'm not. Hey, somebody's got to read the stuff.

A polymath, such as a hard science fiction writer, is a jack of at least two trades. His or her work is divided in its loyalties, between the joy of narrative and the stimulation of ideas about our empirical world. Each enriches the other.

That's what fans of specifically science fiction like about it. Slavish totalistic loyalty to literary values like plot and characterization are an artificial limitation on written SF in a way comparable to film's prosthetic makeup limitations and gravity on the set. Carry it too far and pretty soon everybody's writing Dandelion Wine and Farewell Summer just because that sort of book is "well-written" by a supposed universal standard we are all supposed to appreciate.

When it reaches the point that good writing and good books have been set up in opposition to the polymath's enjoyment-- not only ignoring but denigrating-- good writing and good books lose that fight. Readers don't cease to exist when we put the book down. Some of us value other things in the life of the active mind in addition to wordcraft and dramacraft. Philosophy, politics, business, engineering, science. That's why when we go to the bookshelf with the limited time we have allotted for fiction, we specifically pull science fiction off the shelf.

A minority of authors love their skill set so much that it is difficult for them to fit this concept into their world. They find it necessary to narrowly denigrate enjoyment of cleverness more than emotional depth, or denigrate enjoyment of imaginative and fully-realized setting. Loyalty must be given over to literary values wholly. They can tell when an author, and by extension a reader, is serving two masters, enjoying a book for reasons not entirely related to books. For them the Good Book is a jealous god.

Insulting enjoyment is counterproductive. The reaction will not be to properly balance emotional depth. It will be to devalue prose fiction as not interested in giving them what they want, and simply read Popular Science, WIRED Magazine, or Ray Kurzweil instead. That is not necessary, as there can be rapprochement and coexistence on their bookshelves.

Go ahead, write a good book. But please, when you're done writing a book that's good by book standards, release a supplement for the dunces in which you tell-- not show-- the implications we didn't catch. Then we will ooh and aah along with the literary sophisticates.

The countless blog entries and emails that seem to nominate the recently deceased Mike Ford for the fannish equivalent of sainthood show few signs of stopping. More tears are being shed even today. So I looked up his Wikipedia entry.

I'm interested in Klingon and chess variants. Apparently so was Mike Ford. I didn't know this until I read the Wikipedia entry on him, but he invented the Klingon chess-like game klin zha, which I was given a copy of by Klingon costumers.

I know Mike Ford was in the category of Pro, but in the time since his death alerted me to his having existed, I have read relatively few descriptions of his paid writing achievements (which were considerable) from his legion of personal friends and acquaintances. It's as if it were incidental to the force of nature that was John Milo "Mike" Ford. What he did at science fiction conventions and on internet forums immortalized him.

Despite the fact that he was Pro, not Fan, his death has provided me with another reason that the practice at ConFusion and ConClave of having a Fan Guest Of Honor is a good thing, so that more of us can find out about beloved personalities-- not just works-- before it's too late.

Conventions frequently promote themselves with room parties in hotel suites at other conventions. Cafe Penguicon and the ConVersation party were both great successes at ConClave.
Both conventions got many pre-registrations at their room parties, and a great time was had by all. We partied Friday and Saturday nights. In addition to the whole-bean freshly-ground coffee and espresso, Cafe Penguicon served the home-made fudge for which Kimba "The Fudge Goddess" is renowned. In honor of the latest addition to our guest of honor list, we featured a new flavor, "Google Fudge"!

ConClave has been going thirty years, and despite the definition of the word "conclave" has never elected a pope. This year the ConVersation room party had an event in which we did so. Sadly for palindromeg33k, who wanted the position very much, he came in a distant second to the door of the hotel room. The door was the way to... to... The Door was The Way. Since the pope costume and hat was unable to fit on the door, we gave them to palindromeg33k, who was dubbed AntiPope and blessed the balloon herding event as a huge cloud of balloons were pushed out of the ConSuite, down the hall, into the elevators, and into the ballroom for the dance.

Tux the Penguin put in a brief appearance. Tux wanted to meet Dr. Kage because of the "furry" connection, and although I (as Tux's agent and co-ordinator) am not into that, I felt it was appropriate. But due to poor timing that meeting was fated not to be.

I loved the panel "Fun With Liquid Nitrogen." After that event I got a pair of volunteers to bring liquid nitrogen to Penguicon and make liquid nitrogen ice cream in the consuite! Another panel I enjoyed very much was the discussion of Disney by Bill "Aksel" Kuehl and paranthropus. I knew paranthropus was a fantastically talented animator but until I looked through his portfolios it had not quite sunk in how stunningly accomplished he has been.

It's a three-year tradition for me after paying for the hotel room on Sunday to buy a book in the dealer's room at ConClave. But this year I didn't have cash. The minimum purchase to use credit was absurdly high, so I went completely overboard on cosette_valjean's credit card. In my insane, giddy spree I actually had nine or ten science fiction novels on the checkout pile, until she pointed out I already had enough. I culled the list down to Ventus by Karl Schroeder, Iron Sunrise by Charlie Stross (antipope), and two Robert Sawyer novels, Hominids and Calculating God. I owe cosette_valjean lots of money. With apologies to the Popeye character Wimpy, "I'd gladly pay you Friday for a library today." Fortunately cosette_valjean is only too happy for me to get mind-bending science fiction novels because I'll either tell her the complete story or actually read it aloud to her.

I like being with a rare woman who is interested in that. :)

( Thoughts about Karl Schroeder's Ventus. Spoiler warning. )

Read this hilarious blog entry by Nick Lowe from a 1986 issue of Ansible. I call it a "blog entry from 1986", because Ansible is a fanzine. This is an ancient form of communication between fans from before there was blogging, using dead trees and shoe rubber that transmit blogs to you at .0000000000000001 megabytes per minute. Twenty years later this essay has been put on a webpage and got hundreds of thousands of readers by getting on the most popular bookmarks list on del.icio.us.

Read it right now. I nearly fell over laughing. Some choice excerpts:

---

"While this Thing rested in the possession of the Divine Dynasty" (ie. the good guys) "the favour of the Gods shone upon Atlantis. No Emperor could hold the throne unless he also held the Black Star...." which means that the wicked Trotskyite rebels that have temporarily overrun the kingdom will be overcome so long as the goodies retain the Black Star. Notice that the only causal connection between possession of the Black Star and victory is that enforced by "the Gods", for whom of course read "the author", and you perhaps begin to see why I like to term this kind of thing Collect-the-Coupons plotting. It would be much too complicated to have three goodies overcome the whole usurping army... So what you do instead is write into the scenario one or more Plot Coupons which happen to be "supernaturally" linked to the outcome of the larger action; ... the hapless goodies have to run down no fewer than nine different plot tokens before they can send off to the author for the ending.

---

I've changed just one word throughout; see if you can spot what it is.

Covenant saw. The Staff of Plot. Destroyed. For the Staff of Plot had been formed by Berek Halfhand as a tool to serve and uphold the Plot. He had fashioned the Staff from a limb of the One Tree as a way to wield Earthpower in defence of the health of the Land, in support of the natural order of life. And because Earthpower was the strength of mystery and spirit, the Staff became the thing it served. It was the Plot; the Plot was incarnate in the Staff. The tool and its purpose were one. And the Staff had been destroyed. That loss had weakened the very fibre of the Plot. A crucial support was withdrawn, and the Plot faltered.

Of course, the word "Plot" in all this replaces Donaldson's "Law" (with one of those significant initial capitals), and of course all Covenant has to do now, in a Lensmanesque escalation of the same basic routine he went through in previous volumes, is go chugging off to cut himself a new Staff of Plot from the jolly old One Tree.
( Read more... )

http://www.nemorathwald.com/SFandF.htm


Now that the website of the Mundane SF Manifesto is no longer down I have finally read the real thing instead of a representation from its critics. I've been looking forward to getting to the bottom of it ever since the storm came down from Ian MacDonald, Charlie Stross, Lou Anders, Patrick Neilsen Hayden and Gabe Chouinard (whose mostly empty post started with listless ennui and morphed into an embarassing tantrum), and others.

Ian McDonald writes, "If we confine ourselves only to the most likely near-future, does MSF run the risk of becoming almost a shared-world anthology, a future history?" No, given how much people disagree over the parameters of what's real; but yes, with freak luck we might finally have one of those. Fat chance, but be still my heart! I'd drool to get my hands on a copy of that. Don't worry though! In that unlikely event there would still be other fiction written!

Sorry, but the plain fact is the Mundanes are pointing out something of value. It doesn't have to be of value to you-- genre fiction is a big Venn diagram. They are identifying a demographic. PNH says, "SF isn’t futurology, although futurology is one of its several methods." Mundane SF could be interpreted as saying, "where is that method being used, why isn't there more of it, and have you noticed why it's great?"

Notice how the movement's critics generally don't address this. Complaints range from the immaterial: "manifestos are pretentious" or "it forbids flaws X and Y but not flaw Z" or "bad choice of name," to the incorrect: "they think it's not OK to have fun," "they're trying to control what we produce like fascists." Not really. At the bottom of it, they're really telling you what they, and a lot of us, want to read, and why. As I frequently repeat on this blog, they are figuring out the headspace of why certain people go to the bookshelf. I don't like not being able to find the books I like, and sometimes as we search through Fictionwise.com or another source, we find the existing labels are not a useful guide, so we wish for a new one. Literary movements are like recommendation lists; they are publishing's rough equivalent to web tagging, or "folksonomy." Infernokrusher is not just a gag SF movement, it's a perfectly viable tag, if anybody writes something to apply it to.

A humorous comparison is that all of the above criticisms remind me very much of what I experience whenever I'm involved in new secularist manifestos and movements like Universism. Those who pay enough attention to take up arms against it are rarely in disagreement with the actual content. Many have noticed that they often committed Mundane SF in their own work. In fact, if I had read the manifesto before the detractors, I would have thought back on the science fiction I read and concluded that a signifigant segment of SF authors and publishers (at least serious ones who don't just write TV tie-ins and movie novelizations) already unconsciously held and practiced the basic principles as an unspoken understanding.

OK, we've all taken the shots at Mundane SF that every movement should be subjected to. Now let's also recognize its worth.

As reported by BoingBoing.net, Science fiction author Charlie Stross has started a Wiki called Singularity! A tough guide to the rapture of the nerds. The stated intent is to learn about the Singularity, but this would only be true in roughly the same sense that QuackWatch is a site to "learn about" alternative medicine. What Stross has written in his wiki so far is pretty funny, but it's difficult to interpret his intent as anything but debunking and ridicule. I recommmend Eliezer Yudkowski's mind-bending Shock Level 4 Wiki to those interested in learning about the Singularity.

Charlie Stross has written serious fiction that is fascinating and enjoyable for those interested in the Singularity, such as the delightful "Toast: A Con Report." But from a self-marketing perspective, what effect does he expect to have on his readership by expressing off-handed contempt for them in this site? Consider how his sometimes-collaborator Cory Doctorow gains readership and sells books by positioning himself as the champion of our media consumer rights, thus shaping the actual future. Both of these self-marketing strategies-- Doctorow's brilliant one and Stross' apparent lack of one-- are unrelated to the writing talent of the author, and of course both of these authors would not have succeeded unless they were talented, but it's a fact of life that attracting the necessary attention to succeed in media is about understanding who is making what entertainment choices and the psychology behind it.

For instance, I used to read Orson Scott Card voraciously until he turned the center of his public platform into his religious views, instead of his fiction. (Homosexuals and secular humanists did not do that, he did. Those who want to keep their private religious views from affecting their sales are wise, and don't write newspaper editorials about it.) These days I shrug and "ho-hum" over his novels even though they are no less brilliant. It's natural for authors to prioritize writing talent over all other concerns, but do they understand that not all their fans are like that? We're not just "the readers," we continue to exist after we put the book down. That means we don't care about quality fiction as much as we care about our own passions, from which our reading choices stem.

Charlie Stross could take a lesson from the approach of Matthew Woodring Stover's interview with The SF Site. Stover criticizes problems with the fantasy genre as currently seen on store shelves, but unlike Stross he does not have fun at the expense of those who enjoy it, he flatters them with having a craving for better. His criticism is in earnest, he cares enough to repair fantasy rather than discard it, and he describes how he does so. As a result, this interview was the first time I felt a real interest in reading fantasy, and if I do it will be Matthew Woodring Stover.

This is the correct approach to pointing out problems (of which there are many) with the Singularity meme for anyone who wants to be an SF author. Point out issues with Eric K. Drexler and Ray Kurzweil in that way and we will flock to you; if the best you can do when we are introduced to you is call us goobers for having taken them seriously, we will not be motivated to read you. As Eliezer Yudkowsky has said about certain Singularity fiction authors in a conversation with Damien Broderick, "The Singularity is not an ironic commentary on the rate of change." As that rare creature, a science fiction fan who still actually believes in the future, I know what it's like to thoughtfully ponder outrageous possibilities, with an eye that is critical without being an antagonistic outsider. I want to read an author only when I can tell that she or he knows what that is like.

Cory Doctorow asked to present a panel at Penguicon about "The Hidden Totalitarian Assumptions of I, Robot." I've been curious ever since he told me this.

Now it turns out he's published a new story about it on the Infinite Matrix website titled I, Robot. After the story he writes, "Last spring, in the wake of Ray Bradbury pitching a tantrum over Michael Moore appropriating the title of 'Fahrenheit 451' to make Fahrenheit 9/11, I conceived of a plan to write a series of stories with the same titles as famous sf shorts, which would pick apart the toalitarian assumptions underpinning some of sf's classic narratives."

It's an excellent story but I still don't get the point. The money quote is probably this from a Eurasian missionary/secret agent to a Canadian cop: "You live in a country where it is illegal to express certain mathematics in software, where state apparatchiks regulate all innovation, where inconvenient science is criminalized, where whole avenues of experimentation and research are shut down in the service of a half-baked superstition about the moral qualities of your three laws, and you call my home corrupt?" But as far as I can tell, some characters decided to be totalitarian dictators, and other characters in their society allowed them to be, for reasons which I can only dimly connect to the three laws or to Asimov's book, probably because it's been years since I read it. (The movie, which was a script called Hard Wired until they slapped the I, Robot name on it for no good reason, doesn't count.) Why don't the Eurasian robots, who are not "3 Laws Safe," run amok and take over the world? The story does not say. In asking that question, am I making one of the totalitarian assumptions of I, Robot?

A few months ago I bought it the e-book from Fictionwise.com, but from this LJ entry you might recall how Digital Rights Management screwed me out of my property. I don't know if I'd call that totalitarian though.

0wnzored is from Cory Doctorow's collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More. I love it because it expresses the direct connection between the hacker culture and transhumanism. For that matter, depending how far you want to take the "root-level superuser of your own body" idea and extend it to the mind, it expresses the potential connection between those two and technopaganism.

Though the story is fiction, "Honorable Computing," described in 0wnz0red as "your basic Bond-villain world-domination horseshit," is real. The characters talk about "the Senator from Disney who wants to make computers illegal"-- this is Fritz Hollings, as the story says, but it could also be Orrin Hatch. Hatch believes in creating legislation allowing content providers to do malicious computer intrusion to spy on any computer that they think has copyrighted content. With no oversight, no due-process. Just the company deciding behind closed doors in a smoky room. Another idea Hatch supports is to allow corporations to decide (again with no oversight) to destroy the computers of people caught stealing music. World-Domination Bond Villian? Yes. In the vision of the entertainment industries and the legislators who they've bought and own, all computers would have to become like DVD players, where the industry has their proprietary code built in so that they are in total control over what you do with your property-- your computer becomes the entertainment industry's property. The industry is going into exactly the same conniptions that they did when VCRs came out and they nearly killed videotape then.

0wnz0red is published under the Creative Commons license, so the author and publisher want it to be copied far and wide. Please do so!

I've been a loyal customer of Fictionwise for years, and am a big promoter of the science fiction short stories they sell as e-books. The short stories have no copy protection, but the novels are sold in secure formats such as Secure Palm Reader. I've always been leery of digital rights management, but hearing Karl Schroeder at last year's (2004) ConFusion describe his novel Permanence was what first tempted me to venture slowly into them. I found it ironic that this was a book about digital rights management being encoded with nanotags and micropayment radio frequencies into all the physical property in the society. For instance, if you stop paying royalties for the door on your house, the door stops opening for you. This has just happened to me with my secure e-books, and I do not plan to purchase secure digital formats in the foreseeable future. For that matter, I'm incapable of doing so now that I don't have credit cards. DRM apparently doesn't care for the business of those who pay on Fictionwise only with micropayments sent through Paypal.

At ConFusion I asked Robert Sawyer when he would be putting more work on Fictionwise, and he said he had just recently done so. I went home and bought several of his short stories (which are not DRM, they work just fine) and a Secure Palm Reader e-book, Hominids. Years ago I entered a credit card with Fictionwise, but I lost all my credit cards last year during my layoff. I only use Paypal online. When I downloaded Hominids and went to read it, the secure software on my Palm asked me for that old credit card number as copyright protection. I discovered that the old secure e-books such as Permanence are now asking me for it too because they're on a new device. But I cut up that old card and no longer have the number. I tried switching credit cards on my Fictionwise account but they submitted it to the credit card company-- despite the fact that I've already paid for my books-- and of course it was declined. I have no valid credit cards to use.

I own these books. I have paid for them. I am not willing to go out and buy a paper copy of Hominids now that I've already paid for it and can never read the one I paid for. I'm pissed. I don't know how it must feel to be an author. I don't blame them and I'm not in their shoes. But I know how it feels to be in my situation, and it's wrong, wrong, wrong. Cory Doctorow is a smart self-marketer-- he has positioned himself as the champion of my consumer rights. I'll go out and buy another paper copy of his free books (Eastern Standard Tribe, this time) tonight on my way to the M.O.F.O. meeting, just to reward Cory for pioneering with his own intellectual property. Lots of people write about the future-- Cory is creating it. I can't wait to meet him at Penguicon this year. Download his TOTALLY free Hugo-winning, Nebula-pre-nominated e-books and read them! Try before you buy!