Tag Archives: fantasy

The co-opting of the Nerds

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The Great Nerd Summit (also known as San Diego Comic-Con International, or SDCC) of 2013 has just happened.

I have only attended once, back in the mid-80s when attendance was a mere 6000 people. Yes, I said “mere.” Last year’s attendance was more than 130,000 people. I don’t believe that official figures are out, yet, for this year. While the convention (called the Golden State Comic Book Convention when it was founded in 1970) originally was about Comics, and the word “comic” is still in its name, it had expanded far beyond that realm to embrace sci fi/fantasy books, movies with any sci fi or superhero connection what-so-ever, and gaming back when I was there.

Of course, comics is a style or medium of storytelling. I grew up reading both Donald Duck/Uncle Scrooge comics and X-men and the like, so even I knew that as a child. Yes, I said grew up. My mom was an X-men fan in the mid-sixties. I have mentioned before that I’m a second generation fan, right? My point being that you can conceivably tell any kind of story in comic form. And there have been the extremely interesting and well done examples of memoirs, biographies, and other kinds of story that don’t fit the comic book stereotype.

That said, SDCC has gotten to the point where it is the trade show for just about the entire entertainment industry. I understand why there are events highlighting upcoming movies such as sequels to The Avengers, Captain America, and Thor, as they’re all based on comics. And I understand why there are events rolling out teasers for My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. It’s a cartoon, not a graphic story (there are comics, but those are spin-offs, and the official MLP events were all about the cartoon), but animated cartoons are an allied artform of comics. I even understand all the video game stuff that happens at the con.

But, much as I love Benedict Cumberbatch and the current BBC Sherlock series, I think that Sherlock events at SDCC is stretching the definition a bit. Whereas the fact that there were events for How I Met Your Mother, Veronica Mars, and Community is just insane.

The official SDCC award (as opposed to Awards sponsored by other organization which are simply presented at SDCC), the Inkpot, is given out for “outstanding achievement in the Popular Arts industry.” Which makes me think the event should more properly be called the San Diego Popular Arts Con.

I’ve gotten into arguments with fellow nerds about why Sherlock Holmes, as in the original character and stories by Arthur Conan Doyle, has often been included in science fiction events. I have defended the inclusion because Holmes could be argued to be an archetype of a particular kind of nerd: hyper observant, possessed of encyclopedic knowledge of a vast range of topics, an uncanny ability to find relationships between the most minute details, and infamously incapable of relating to people empathically. Serious articles have been published in psychological journals debating (pro and con) whether the fictional Holmes had Aspergers syndrome, for goodness sake! The Holmes stories may not be sci fi, but both the character and the methodology by which he solves his mysteries are highly identifiable to a significant portion of the fan community.

While I have made that argument, and will continue to do so, I’m also the first to admit that all it provides is a reasonable rationale for stretching the envelope to include Holmes as an allied creation. It’s a stretch, and I admit it.

A sort of similar argument can be made for the specific television show, Community, because its ensemble includes some nerds. But it’s a much more tenuous connection to make based on a couple of supporting characters, as opposed to the main character and his primary activity.

I can think of even more tenuous (and ludicrous) arguments that might be made for shows such as How I Met Your Mother, but all of them would be a smoke screen. The truth is that, as I mentioned, SDCC is a trade show, not a fan convention. Its purpose is to advertise, generate buzz, and fan the flames of enthusiasm for any popular art property that can shoehorn itself into the convention. That isn’t a bad thing, per se. Certainly no one is forcing fans to get online at a particular time on the final day of the convention so that the entirety of the next year’s memberships can be sold out in less than two hours. No one is forcing people such as myself to track down stories and videos of the events to get some ideas of what movies and shows I should be looking for in the future.

If you want to fan the flames of enthusiasm, there is no better place than the heart or mind of a nerd or geek. We’re more politely called fans, which is short for fanatic. The one trait that most distinguishes us from the mundanes is how incredibly, obsessively enthusiastic we get about the things we like. So even though some of us are primarily enthusiastic about science and science fiction, if you can get us interested in your show— even one that doesn’t have any discernible science-y aspects—we’ll talk about it. We’ll set our DVRs to catch your premiere. We’ll mention that it’s coming out to our less nerdy friends. We’ll make and post fan art or create and share silly memes based on photos from your show.

We will be your viral marketing campaign. And because tens of thousands of us are willing to buy memberships at SDCC each year, that means some of us are paying for the privilege.

Apart from other branding considerations, I think that’s why for the foreseeable future they won’t be replacing the “Comic” part of the name.

Theory and practice

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I’ve described before how I hear conversations in my head between various fictitious characters, and that’s where a lot of my story ideas come from. The other night, while listening to a friend’s band playing at their album release party, I suddenly heard one of my characters, the Mathemagician, explaining to someone:

“Zombies can be manifest in several different ways, though almost all of the spells or rituals that create them call upon the same principles of magic: Induced Cognition, the Principle of Correspondence, Induced Thaumaturgic Recapitulation–”

Then he was interrupted by his partner, Mier of the Tam Clan: “Oh, you’re over complicating it. All you need to make a zombie is: a corpse, a bell, a fresh egg, a pinch of tea, and most importantly, a drummer who can keep a beat.”

I’m not sure what caused that to pop into my head. It’s possible that a band member (or someone in the crowd near me) had made a comment about the drummer. Or not. Who knows how anyone’s subconscious works?

The exchange itself was interesting to me on several levels. First, it’s perfectly in character. The Mathemagician approaches magic from the perspective of rules and patterns. He’s big on futzing with theory, and he will tinker and fiddle with the theory until he needs to apply it. He’s an academic-style wizard. Meir is a shaman. He thinks in terms of analogy and intuition. He’s more concerned with getting things done than worrying too much about why things work.

Those two modes of thinking apply to all sorts of things, not just the world of fictional wizards. When I try to explain about the craft of writing, sometimes I feel as if I’m being the Mathemagician: what I’m explaining is true, but it might only be understood by people who already know it.

On the other hand, Mier’s style of explanation seems simpler and more practical. Yet one realizes, after a moment, that all he’s given is a list of ingredients. The recipe—instructions for how to use those things to create your very own unliving servant—has been left as an exercise for the reader.

Storytelling is more than a bit of a mysterious process. It isn’t a matter of following a simple recipe. But it’s more than understanding theory.

My third observation is, that I have no idea who they were explaining this to, nor do I know whether this scene belongs in any story which I’m currently working on that includes these characters. Yes, there is an evil necromancer and an army of undead in the novel I’m currently working on, but I’m not sure there is any reason, within the story, for these two characters to explain to someone else how zombies are made.

But I typed it up and saved it, just in case. You never know when it might come in handy.

Even a young earth is older than you think

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So, a few days ago I posted about one of my pet peeves in fantasy world-building, the writer who thinks 600-years ago is the dawn of time. A friend who read my post raised an interesting point. “If the series you’re talking about is the one I think it is, I understand that the author comes from a conservative Baptist background. Maybe she built her world, consciously or not, on the assumption of a Young Earth.”

We are talking about fantasy world-building, and an author is free to choose any premise they wish to build from. Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series assumes that the world is a disc balanced on the backs of four giant elephants who stand atop a gigantic sea turtle that swims through space, for instance. It’s one of my favorite series of books, so I certainly can’t say a writer isn’t free to use some notions of Fundamentalist Creationism as the basis for their fantasy world.

However…

If the premise is that the Literalistic1 Interpretation of the Bible describes the physical origin of your fantasy world, it is absolutely impossible for the “first witch ever to exist” to have been born a mere 600 or so years ago.

In the book of First Samuel, chapter 28, one finds the story of the Witch of Endor. The Prophet Samuel has recently died, and things are going extremely badly for King Saul. Eventually, Saul goes to a famous witch in Endor, who raises the ghost of Samuel. Samuel’s spirit proceeds to tell Saul that God is tired of Saul’s disobedience, and that Saul will lose the battle the very next day, and that Saul and his sons will be joining Samuel in the land of the dead shortly thereafter. Saul leaves, understandably dismayed and devastated. He loses the battle the next day and kills himself.

So right there, in the Bible, we see a witch who has actual magic powers to raise the dead thousands of years ago, rather than 600 years ago.

Not only that, before Saul goes to this witch, he tried turning to prophets, to a couple of scrying devices the priests kept, and to dream interpreters to find out what he should do. In an earlier incident, while the Prophet Samuel was still alive, Saul drove all the magicians and necromancers from the kingdom of Isreal, clearly implying that there were a lot of them already in existence, so even the Witch of Endor isn’t the first witch ever on the Young Earth.

1. My Old Testament Professor at University insisted (and could quickly demonstrate) that none of the people who say they take the Bible literally actually do so. Instead, he argued, they use a form of filtered literalism, where some passages are taken literally, contradictory ones are ignored2, and other sections have imposed upon them notions that are not evident anywhere in the text.

2. The story of Samuel and King Saul is a particularly amusing example of this. Later passages refer to Saul as God’s chosen leader of Israel, but in the beginning of Saul’s story, the people of Israel keep asking Samuel to ask God to give them a king. Samuel keeps telling them that God doesn’t want them to have a king. Eventually, apparently tired of being pestered, God appears to relent (though the original text makes it unclear whether it is really God who relents, or if Samuel just picks someone and tells them that God has relented), and proclaims Saul King. Then, when a foreign power assembles an army and marches toward Israel, Samuel tells Saul to gather his own army, go to a specific spot, and wait seven days, at which point Samuel would arrive (presumably with God’s battle plans), and they could begin. Seven days came and went, Samuel didn’t arrive. More days passed, no Samuel. The army was growing restless, so Saul decided something must have happened to Samuel, and he ordered the army to make prayers and sacrifices, then prepare for battle. As soon as Saul had completed the sacrifice, Samuel suddenly appeared3, admonished Saul for taking on the role of the priest, and tells him God doesn’t want him to be king any longer. But, in the very next chapter King Saul is leading the battle, Samuel is giving him instructions, Saul wins, everyone (including Samuel) rejoice in the king’s victory. Samuel tells Saul that God wants him to slaughter not just the defeated soldiers, but every man, woman, child, and even the livestock of the defeated Amalekites. While doing so, Saul decides to spare some another tribe of people living among the Amalekites4 and doesn’t slaughter every woman and child of the Kenites. Samuel throws another hissy fit, and says God regrets making Saul King, and that Saul’s kingdom will soon be torn apart. Except in the previous chapter Samuel had already said Saul was no longer king, so nothing in this chapter should even have happened, least of all Samuel advising Saul, et cetera5.

3. My professor said, “As if he had been hiding in the bushes watching and waiting for Saul to screw up.”

4. God said “kill the Amalekites,” he didn’t say to kill the Amelekites and Kenites. Seems like a reasonable distinction, right? Certainly if you think that it’s reasonable for the same God who said “Thou shall not kill” without any qualifications, turns around and orders you to murder babies.

5. Reading the entire saga of Saul and Samuel, and taking every passage literally, it is hard to interpret the whole thing as anything other than either God or Samuel thinking of new ways to dick Saul around, giving him contradictory orders, impossible orders, and downright evil orders. Saul tries to follow all of them, and gets yelled at for disobedience again and again. On the other hand, David (the shepherd who defeats Goliath in battle and eventually becomes king after Saul dies), as King never obeys anything that God’s messengers tell him to do. He blatantly disregards commandments and instructions, but again and again the priests and prophets proclaim him beloved of God and a good king.

History is longer than you think

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I have complained before1 about fantasy authors whose world-building includes statements like, “the peace didn’t last long, because 400 years later…” because history isn’t just a time line, it’s also the way people perceive it. 400 years of peace would never be thought of as a brief interval, but rather the Great Golden Age or something.

Certain fantasy authors make the opposite mistake, of not understanding how long human history actually is. A particularly egregious example was a series which used as a plot point the characters needing to find a spell that was developed by “the first witch to ever exist,” and when they finally find it, it is revealed that this witch lived 600 years ago.

Bear in mind that this happened in a fantasy world where magic works and invariably that magic is invoked with drawing symbols, lighting candles, and chanting. That means that in this fantasy world there are unseen forces which respond to symbols and sounds and thoughts. That clearly means that these unseen forces could be tapped by any being capable of employing symbolism, making noise, and thinking. Presumably the first witches did this sort of thing by accident, but that’s how we learn everything in life.

These sorts of fantasy worlds always have some low level of magic use that is considered safe and does not rely about calling on demons or gods for power. There is usually some scene where a character is either being taught magic by someone else, or who is simply in a desperate situation, where simply by wishing something really hard, they are able to light that candle, or move the key, or pull that weapon which is just out of reach into their hand when the monster is dragging them to their doom. If you think logically from these situations, at least some of magic is simply mentally manipulating some form of energy that is freely available everywhere.

The earliest people who had the cognitive ability to imagine something that isn’t there were the earliest tool makers. This isn’t just a monkey picking up a convenient rock. These people had some tasks they needed doing, realized if they had an object with this kind of shape, hard enough to withstand the force when pressed this way into the that leg of mammoth, they can do this a lot faster than just using teeth and fingernails.

The first people capable of doing that weren’t technically human. They were hominids living in the Olduvai Gorge region of Africa 2.4 million years ago.

Not six hundred (600) years ago.

Not six thousand (6,000) years ago.

But 2.4 million (2,400,000) years ago.

Millions of years ago.

We’re not sure which of the different hominid species living back then made the tools we’ve found—Australopithecus garhi, Homo habilis, or Homo ergaster—but they were making choppers, scrapers, awls, and burins. That last one is especially important while thinking about the cognitive abilities of the brains that thought them up. A burin is for engraving. They were doing more than chopping, cutting, scraping, and making holes in things. They were engraving or carving shapes into wood and bone.

The tools were still very simple, so these pre-humans probably weren’t capable of really in-depth abstract thought that would seem to be required to imagine and enact the really complicated magical effects you sometimes see wizards and sorceresses throwing around in those fantasy novels, but that “pull a weapon to my hand in an emergency” level of magic, they would surely be capable of, in a magical world.

There is anatomical indication that Homo ergaster, at least, possessed verbal communication abilities much more complex than apes. We don’t know how complicated it was, but language indicates another level of abstract thinking2.

I could keep charting what we know about the development of other activities often involved in magic rituals of those sorts of fantasy stories—cave painting, carved figures, musical instruments (surely predated by a huge period of time by simply singing and chanting), and even dance3, but the point is that, if magic exists in the universe and can be manipulated by thoughts, symbols, chanting, et cetera, people will have been doing some forms of it long, long before the beginning of recorded history, (approximately 5,000 years ago—still a lot more than 600).

Even if you don’t want to think about hominid sorcerers, you have to realize that witches, sorcerers, and priests who could perform miracles exist in the very oldest written human records. So if you’re writing a magickal universe that is more or less based on ours, whether it’s a modern urban fantasy, something in a historical setting, or an alternate historical setting, some sort of magic tradition in your world stretches back much, much, much further than a mere six centuries ago.

Asserting anything else is simply dumb.

And don’t even get me started on the incredible stupidity of always having really ancient lore being far superior to anything that has come about now. Because that violates the thing that actually makes humans different than animals… but that’s a rant for another day.

1. Time doesn’t work that way. Think of today’s post as another in a series.

2. And this is just limiting ourselves to the hominids. Dolphins and whales aren’t generally thought of as tool makers, but they certainly have the raw brain power to do the thinking part. And there are other species outside the primates who use really simple tools, create games, plan and execute complicated group activities, including pulling practical jokes. This isn’t to suggest that a magic universe has to have animal mystics, but it could be an interesting alternative way to think about familiars and other animals that seem to respond to magic or enhance magic in folklore.

3. There is some fascinating work being done about the anthropology and evolution of dance (rhythmic, coordinated moving), including an interesting notion that rhythmical synchronized movement could make a group of small hominids appear to be one much larger creature, and thus not easy prey. It’s fascinating stuff. It’s very speculative, and difficult to find physical evidence to support, but still a very interesting topic to think about.

Skipping the convention

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This will be the first time in 26 years that I have not attended NorWesCon (the Northwest Science Fiction Convention). Technically, the first one1 I actually attended was not NorWesCon, but was called Alternacon (the notorious NorWesCon IX2 having had so many disasters3 that the hotel canceled the next year’s contract, forcing the con into a smaller hotel, and a limited membership.

I’ve been to every one since. a couple of them I only attended for a day or a part of a day6.

Seventeen years ago at a NorWesCon I met Michael7. We didn’t see each other again until the next NorWesCon. It was a couple months after that that we started hanging out, and nine months after that before we went on our first official date. The next NorWesCon after that was the first we shared a room, and we’ve been to all of them since.

So while I think of the anniversary of our first date as our official anniversary8, he always considered NorWesCon as our anniversary9.

All of which leads to why I’m feeling a bit odd and sentimental about skipping NorWesCon this year. There are a few reasons—most of them just personal timing things, though also we haven’t really enjoyed ourselves as much as we used to the last couple of years. Certainly we both had a lot more fun at EverfreeNW last year.

Maybe we just need to take a year off.

I was shocked to realized today that the convention is this next weekend. Just a few days away10.

This also means that this is the first time in many, many years that we will be home for Easter. I should probably make some plans for that.

Of course, it is the first time that this particular anniversary has not happened while we were at a convention. Maybe we should just celebrate by ourselves…

Notes:

1. I had been wanting to attend the con for a few years before that, having several friends who regularly attended. It sometimes feels as if I vicariously attended a few earlier than my first.

2. When NorWesCon IX rolled around I was attending college nearby, but I couldn’t afford to chip in on a hotel room and so forth. The con happened during Spring Break, so I was back at my Mom’s (after spending a few days with friends caravanning down; it was a strange week). When we arrived at Mom’s place, she barely let us get unloaded before she and my step-dad were loading us in the car and dragged us to a nearby Community College. They wouldn’t say why, just that it was a surprise. The Guest of Honor at NorWesCon that year was Anne McAffrey, and she had flown into Portland to visit friends before going up to Seatac for the convention. And she was doing a reading and book signing that night. So I got to see the Guest of Honor that year, in addition to hearing about all the experiences of my friends who attended the con.

3. In addition to the stories from my friends attending, and people I’ve since met who attended or were staff for that convention, I also got to hear about the con from a classmate who, at the time he was telling me about it, didn’t realize I was one of those “freaks.” He was a fundamentalist, and his wife worked in the management office at the hotel. She was also a fundamentalist, as were many of the employees there, because the Assistant Manager was a member of a very large nearby church, and had heavily recruited among the congregation for his hiring. When the Assistant Manager saw some of the costumes and pagan imagery on t-shirts and such early in the con, he had become convinced that the attendees were all Satanists (not to mention all those godless atheist science types, et cetera), and had instructed the employees who he trusted to go out of their way to document any bad incident that happened, because he was determined that those sinful freaks would never come back to their hotel.

The organizers of the convention were unaware of this. They were too busy dealing with about a thousand more attendees than their wildest dreams had expected, and they were woefully understaffed to deal with them. The physical layout of the hotel (it’s really a complex of several buildings interconnected with enclosed walkways, rather than one building), made patrolling difficult for con security4.

A bunch of bad things happened, such as damage to the rooms, people sleeping in the hallways, drunk people making a lot of noise very late at night, et cetera.

4. There are always some people attending any type of convention5 who do stupid and/or very inappropriate things. Sometimes it’s just being thoughtless. Sometimes it’s because they’re drinking. Sometimes it’s just because they are in their late teens and this is the first time they’ve been that far from parental supervision.

5. I can tell you stories from a high school journalism conference that will make your toes curl. And equally disturbing ones from a Bible conference I once attended.

6. While I was going through my divorce, a friend who had been through a few more serious breakups than I had advised that sometimes it best to let your ex “have custody” of fandom for a while, so that mutual acquaintances don’t feel awkward, if nothing else. So for at least two years I only made those brief appearances, rather than attending for the entire convention.

7. We have different recollections of where we met. I remember meeting him at a room party on the Saturday afternoon. He remembers meeting me at a specific panel on Friday morning. I remember participating in the panel, I just didn’t recall him being one of the other people there.

8. I can never remember the date of our commitment ceremony. For one thing, it was extremely informal. If you insist, I can go dig around in the filing cabinet and find our paperwork.

9. Of course, now that we’re officially married, rather than domestic partnered, I suppose our official anniversary should be December 9. Or maybe we should just celebrate all three.

10. Which means that a whole bunch of our friends will all be gone this weekend.

Abyss gazing

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It was 1986 and I was twenty-six years old, attending a regional science fiction convention with a bunch of my friends. One of the guests of honor was an author (we’ll call him Mr. C) that two of my friends were very fond of. I had read a couple of his short stories and thought they were good, but he hadn’t really wowed me.

But hearing Mr. C talk about the writing process, his influences, and so forth, made me much more intrigued. It didn’t hurt that when another panelist made a disparaging joke about my favorite science fiction author (who was not in attendance), Mr. C rather emphatically jumped to the defense of my favorite author.

After that panel, one of my friends commented that Mr. C’s takedown of the other panelist had been mean. It was true. Mr. C had ended the rebuttal with something along the lines, “…and it infuriates me when writers who don’t have a fraction of his understanding of how to write or a sliver of his talent make thoughtless critiques.” But, she had called my favorite author a fossil, I pointed out. Once one makes an ad hominem attack, you invite something similar in return. Since it was my favorite author being defended, I was more than a bit prejudiced.

So I wound up standing in line with one of my friends, clutching a pair of just-purchased books of Mr. C’s work, waiting for his autograph. That is the one and only time I have met Mr. C in person. He was pleasant enough, despite having had to smile, listen, and sign however hundreds of times.

After the convention, I tried to read one of the books. It was a collection of his short stories, which included the couple I had read before. They weren’t bad by any means, but after reading a few in a row, an unsatisfying feeling was developing. I sat the book down, not quite sure why I wasn’t enjoying the reading.

A few weeks later, I picked it up again and started on the next story. Again, the story itself was well written and interesting. I read another, then started on the next after that and, well, a few paragraphs in I realized that same feeling of wrongness was building up.

I did eventually finish the collection, but it took a few months, reading only a few stories at a time. And by the end I couldn’t really say that I’d enjoyed them all, but I also couldn’t put my finger on their shortcomings.

The other book was a novel. A novel for which he had won a lot of awards. It was based on one of the short stories in the previous collection. And the short story in question had been one of those I had enjoyed more than the others. Plus, I had friends who swore this book was a masterpiece. And it had garnered all those awards, so it had to be good, right?

I couldn’t finish it. I don’t think I’d even gotten a quarter of the way through before I found myself intensely disliking it.

I tried explaining what I didn’t like about it to one of my friends who loved it. As we were talking, I kept finding myself talking about abstract concepts, rather than actual events in the story. My friend said it sounded more like my baggage than the story. So I started explaining how a similar philosophical assumption underpinned one of the short stories. And that’s when I finally managed to connect the dots and say what was bothering me about all of the stories.

There was a fundamental notion forming the foundation of all the tales: if you don’t know your place and stay in it, horrible things will happen to you. A corrollary was that if you prevented someone else from achieving what was “rightfully” theirs, even more horrible things would happen to you.

When I articulated that, my friend began to argue. That wasn’t what was going on at all, he said. So then I made a guess at how the book I hadn’t finished would end. Specifically what would happen to certain characters.

My friend blinked. “How did you know?”

“Because, if you don’t know your place and stay there, forces, whether they be social, cultural, or fate, will strike you down. And if you stand in the way of someone else’s destiny—”

My friend grinned and interrupted. “Oh, wow! You’re right! That’s so messed up, because it’s like the opposite of what the main character says, but it’s really what happens!”

“Mr. C believes in hierarchical, patriarchic societies in which you behave according to societal expectations, and people who have the temerity to want to choose their own way of living are evil,” I said.

My friend shrugged and said, “You’re probably right. But I still love the stories.”

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you” — Friedrich Nietzsche

Just a few years later, a controversy erupted in a forum dedicated to Mr C on the (now long defunct) Prodigy network. The controversy was about a protagonist in another of Mr. C’s novels who experimented with gay sex midway through the book. Some people were angry Mr. C had included an “abomination” as a sympathetic character. Others thought people who thought gay people were abominations were bigots.

As the arguments raged, Mr. C waded in with a rather long discussion about the sin of homosexuality, why he felt he had to include it in the book (his reasoning, as I recall, was that in any community where people amass power there will be people who must dominate, possess, and destroy others, and of course homosexuality is all about dominating and destroying each other), and then had the gall to claim that anyone who called him homophobic were themselves bigots. Because he didn’t hate any gay people. They were just sinners, and if they refused to repent and stop being gay, well, they would face consequences.

His comments were quoted far and wide. And he got angrier and angrier as people “mischaracterized” his comments. He repeated, again and again, that he didn’t hate gay people. He wound up writing (in 1990) a long essay and getting it published in a magazine that catered to the members of the church Mr. C had been raised in, in order to explain his side in context.

While the essay repeatedly said that he did not condone violence against sinful people, it talked about how just as children must be punished in order to learn right from wrong, then adults will face greater penalties when they continue to act outside the bounds of propriety. He talked abstractly about the “day of grief” that each homosexual would eventually experience if they did not repent. He talked about the horrible consequences homosexuals face if they refuse to adhere to propriety. But he was not advocating violence even then, he said. If the faithful, such as himself, had been compassionate but firm in condemning the sin, they would “keep ourselves unspotted by the blood of this generation.”

It’s an old lie that bigots of a religious persuasion tell themselves all the time. They don’t advocate or condone violence, it’s just that god’s law causes these things. And when it happens, they pretend that the people who did resort to violence never took all the words of condemnation as permission to commit violence.

Think about it: if it’s god’s will that homosexuals should experience a “day of grief”; if god’s law demands that “blood of this generation” must be shed, then the person who inflicts the violence is doing god’s will. They are a special tool of god!

Heck, it isn’t just permission to commit violence: it’s encouragement!

I had already guessed most of this about Mr. C before he began writing publicly about his reasons for opposing the decriminalization of gay sex and other topics back in 1990. And so I had already made my decision not to buy any more of his books. I didn’t post rants about him, nor try to organize boycotts of his work. If I was asked, I would say that I disagreed with what I perceived to be the underlying philosophy espoused by his work.

Once he did make his very public statements, I felt it was appropriate to go a step further and point out that Mr. C was a hypocrite and a bigot who advocated against the rights of myself and others. I would suggest that perhaps there were other writers whose works were more deserving of people’s money, but wouldn’t go further.

In the years since, he has continued to write and speak out against gay rights of all sorts, eventually becoming an officer for a large organization that says it is out to protect “traditional marriage.” They try to portray themselves as narrowly focused on marriage, but anyone paying attention to their rhetoric and some of the other causes they support, can see that they want to roll back the few rights gay people have won. He donates his own money to the cause, he has organized efforts that have raised millions of dollars for the cause. He has claimed victory for every anti-gay amendment, law, proposition, or initiative that has been passed in the last ten years.

He has, now, gone far beyond the point of simply stating his opinion and trying to persuade others to it. He has gone beyond that disingenuous tactic of saying he was opposed to violence while providing double-speak that actually encouraged it. He has helped spread distortions and outright lies about all gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender persons. His organization has refused to obey public disclosure laws regarding their election activities in several states. He continues to fight to prevent gays, lesbians, trans people, and bisexuals full equality before the law. He continues to put forward arguments to take away what rights have been extended.

So, for that reason, yes, I agree with the people who have been disappointed that DC Comics hired him to write a prominent new Superman series. Yes, I support the comic book shop owners who have said they will not sell comics written by him. I support the artist who decided not to illustrate his stories after learning of Mr C’s views and activities. I urge everyone I know not to buy things he writes, not to go see the movie that is being made of his most famous novel.

I re-iterate: this isn’t just about a difference of opinion regarding marriage equality. For over 20 years he has advocated for restoring laws that made it a crime for consenting adults to have gay sex in the privacy of their own homes, and against laws that protect people from being fired, evicted, or denied medical care just because they are gay. And he has done more than just advocate those things, he has taken action to make them happen. It is not hypocritical of us to advocate a voluntary boycott of his work, it is hypocritical of him and his apologists to decry a voluntary boycott while they are campaigning for laws that will take away jobs, housing, health care, and more from entire classes of people.

Orson Scott Card is a hypocrite and a bigot who uses distortions and outright lies to hurt innocent people. Those are the facts.

This time it’s (not so) personal

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When I wrote about how people process history and, more specifically, how believable character motivation in fiction is when based upon distant historical events, a few people pointed to ethnic conflicts which have gone on for generations as a counterexample. I had almost talked about that in the original post, but decided that might be one digression too many.

It’s certainly true that such conflicts have raged on for many generations, sometimes spanning centuries. The key here, I think, is that word “spanning.” People aren’t just holding a grudge about the injustice visited upon an ancestor 11 centuries ago, they are holding a grudge about indignities and atrocities they have witnessed themselves (or experienced the aftereffects of themselves), which they perceive to be a continuation of hundreds of other injustices going all of the way back to that original one.

For instance, a young man may grow up hearing tales from a very young age about how his father was killed by those evil Freedonians when he was just a babe, just as a couple of uncles, great-aunts and great-uncles, and so on where unjustly arrested, or tortured, or raped, or killed previously. The Freedonians have always hated the Sylvanians, he is told. Since he is a Sylvanian, they must hate him, too. Everything bad that happens to him in his life, he blames on the Freedonians, either directly because a Freedonian is present, or indirectly because he believes his hardships would be fewer if they hadn’t taken his father from him.

The historical narrative of the many past conflicts between Freedonia and Sylvania provide a context to his personal frustrations and disappointments. Tales of particularly egregious atrocities from the past serve as a rationalization for any actions against Freedonians he takes. Or excuses for any atrocities that others may point out Sylvania inflicted upon Freedonia.

There is also a sort of compound-interest effect. The young man was raised by people who had internalized their own victimization until it metastasized. People brimming over with hatred are not very good at nurturing. The more generations in a row this happens, the less likely each new generation is going to be to empathize with people they perceive as “other.”

The problem is that anyone who has not been raised in the same culture, has not witnessed similar injustices, has not experienced first hand the animosity between the two groups, has a very hard time understanding what the fuss is all about. I can’t count the number of times I’ve read or heard someone ask about troubles in the Middle East, or Subsaharan Africa, or Eastern Europe, “Why can’t they just come to a reasonable settlement?”

Which gets us back to the author’s difficulty.

In order to make a reader care as much about the injustices inflicted by the Freedonians as your Sylvanian protagonist, you have to put the reader in your protagonist’s shoes. It’s not enough to have one of your characters lecture another, “As you know, Bob, the Freedonians are a merciless, hateful people.” You have to show them being merciless. You have to show your protagonist suffering at their hands.

That requires telling the story of how these sorts of age-old hatred are perpetuated because they are renewed again and again with each new generation. Even then, most readers are going to see all those past actions as abstractions. They may sympathize with your protagonist, but they’ll also wonder why he can’t see how odd it is to hold a person living now responsible for actions that took place hundreds of years before that person was born.

Which is a good question to raise. There’s a lot of good drama you can wring out of that sort of situation. If that’s the kind of story you want to tell, go for it! But that means going all in. No half-measures. No long expository dump where one character lectures another about the 1200 year history of mutual failed (but not for lack of trying) genocide between Freedonia and Sylvania.

Show it, don’t tell it.

Nothing wrong with history

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When I wrote about the problematic way some fantasy authors treat time, I alluded to some historic events from 1100 years ago in the real world in order to make my point. Since one of the points I was making was that events hundreds or thousands of years in the past are poor choices for motivating your characters, my allusion might appear to be a contradiction.

But there’s a difference between using history and misusing it.

In the previous post, while I alluded to historical events, I tried to do so in such a way that a reader who knew nothing about the events would still get the point. I happen to be one of those people who is interested in history, so I knew a little bit about Alfred the Great, King of Wessex, who happens to be an ancestor of the current English Royal Family. So I could make the allusion.

Whether you are writing epic fantasy, far future science fiction, or even contemporary fiction, some of your characters will know a lot about the history of their world. But a lot of them won’t. And even the ones who do, aren’t likely to make day-to-day decisions based on that distant historical data.

In the fantasy novel I’m currently working on, for instance, some plot points hinge on something which happened 70 years prior to the current date. At that time, a supernatural creature bent on conquest was thwarted. The creature is trying again, but most of the characters in the current plot don’t know about those past events. For instance, one of the main characters begins the story being accused of murdering someone just a few days before the novel begins. His motivation is to find out who actually killed the other guy and why. And since the victim was his former mentor, he’s probably going to want to exact some revenge when he finds them. As the plot unfolds, as he learns why the victim was killed, he becomes aware of those events 70 years prior, but when he resolves his plot at the end of the story, his motivation will be avenging his friend and clearing his own name.

Because it is a fantasy novel (I usually describe it as a light fantasy in an epic fantasy wrapper), some of the characters are longer-lived than a typical human. One of the other main characters is old enough that she was actually involved in the events 70 years ago. She provides most of the link to those events for the reader. But even so, her motivation in this story is to try to recover a holy relic which has recently been stolen, and figure out whether an old friend who has been implicated is responsible or not.

There are a few other characters who are aware of the events either because they are history buffs or, like the one mentioned above, they are old enough to have experienced them. Those include a couple of supernatural beings who are also aware of somewhat related events going back much further in time. Most of those things are never going to be mentioned in the story. The few that are, will be mentioned in passing to provide a bit of verisimilitude. Or to set up a joke (it is a light fantasy, so humor drives a lot of my decisions as the author).

As the author, I have to be aware of the history of the characters in order to write them. But sometimes that awareness is in broad outline. The Mother of All Dragons, who is a peripheral character in this novel, obviously is extremely old and has a memory spanning back millennia. I haven’t written down an extended timeline of her life spanning all those centuries. There are a few key events in her life that I have nailed down, but the rest is left open. In part, because the more time I spend figuring that out and writing it down, the less time I spend telling the story I want to tell. I don’t need all the rest of that detail for this story.

And the needs of the story must trump everything else.

Many tasks facing a storyteller are similar to tightrope walking: one must strike a balance while moving forward. While it’s perfectly true to tell someone attempting to walk across a tightrope of the dangers of leaning too far to the left, that does not mean there is no danger in leaning too far the other way.

Not all reasons are reasonable

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Several years ago I was browsing in a bookstore.

Now that I think of it, a lot more of my personal anecdotes probably ought to begin with that line than usually do. But I digress…

I picked up a paperback that had an interesting title. The back cover description gave the impression that the book was a parody of noir detective novels such as The Maltese Falcon or The Big Sleep, but with demons and faeries and werewolves and the like. I’ve been a fan of both science fiction/fantasy and detective stories for longer than I can remember, so this could be right up my alley.

Except, as I said, the description made it seem like a parody. Sometimes parodies are great. Sometimes they are just mediocre. And sometimes they are nothing more than mean-spirited dreck.

The back cover also had a photograph of the author. And the photograph was not encouraging. Everything about the stern-faced man’s pose, expression, and even hairstyle typified a kind of fan or writer I had met far too many times throughout my years in the fandom. They espoused a philosophy of social darwinism that holds most of the human race in contempt. Their idea of humor always involves belittling others while drawing attention to their own superior command of vocabulary, or (alleged) facts, or logic.

The only thing I enjoyed less than having conversations with them was reading anything they wrote. So I was quite certain this guy’s idea of a parody would be all about the mockery, with a healthy slathering of self-importance and self-congratulation at his clever turns of phrases.

The very brief author bio included beside the photo mentioned martial arts.

Every one of those aforementioned unpleasant fans who had been martial arts enthusiasts had been misogynist homophobes who were constantly explaining to people that they weren’t racist, but…

I put the book back on the shelf.

Several years later, through a series of coincidences including recommendations from friends who were the opposite of the kind of person I had inferred the author to be, I found myself downloading some sample chapters of the audiobook version of the first book in the series.

I enjoyed the sample. I found the main character very engaging and I wanted to know how the story ended.

So I bought the entire audiobook and listened to it. It was nothing like I expected the book to be, based on my reading of that back cover.

I was still buying books from the Science Fiction Book Club at the time, and they had some omnibus editions collecting the first seven books in the series into a few volumes, so I bought those. They arrived about a month or so before I was laid off at my previous place of employment.

One day, between contracting gigs, I started reading the first book—a few very short days later I had read all seven that I owned. I couldn’t put them down.

I needed to get more.

Since then, I’ve had the pleasure of seeing the author in person, even spoke to him very briefly in an autograph line. I spoke with his wife for a teensy bit longer. Between reading his books and short stories, reading some of his commentary, hearing him talk about his life and writing, and seeing him interact with his wife, it’s clear that my assessment was completely wrong. For one thing, those douchebags I had incorrectly lumped him with would never, even with a gun pointed at their head, willingly hold hands with their wife in public—let alone do a sneaky-pinky lock with a sidelong glance and a wink while being interviewed on stage

Which shouldn’t be surprising. I had based my assessment on a photograph and a single phrase in the author bio. The stories aren’t parodies, either. So that description from the back of the paperback was just misleading. As many are.

I could laugh the whole thing off as a very amusing case of forgetting the adage about judging books by their covers. But it isn’t that simple.

The assessment came out of personal experience. I can’t count the number of guys I’ve met—mostly in fannish circles, but not exclusively—who shared that particular combination of beliefs and attitudes. In person, the attitude usually manifests fairly quickly. And they usually just as quickly place me into one of the categories of people they hold in contempt. Of course, since they seem to hold most people in contempt, that isn’t surprising.

They aren’t just unpleasant to be around. Whether they are active in politics or not, they spend a lot of their time trying to convince people of the validity of those social darwinist ideas I mentioned above. That means they advocate policies that threaten me and people I love (not to mention society as a whole). So I have really good motivation to identify people with those attitudes, if for no other reason than to minimize the amount of time I have to spend with them.

We make decision like that every day, without even thinking. While walking down the street, or up a grocery aisle, standing in line at the bank, or selecting a seat on a bus, we assess people on a variety of superficial characteristics, then act accordingly. That gut reaction, that ability to put together a bunch of nonverbal cues to identify people we should be cautious around is a valuable survival trait.

But, having spent my entire life fighting for respect and acceptance in a world that rejects gay men (or any one who doesn’t confirm to certain gender expectations), I understand the dangers of misjudging people.

The reasons behind our gut reactions aren’t logical; they don’t conform to the rules of deductive reasoning. That doesn’t mean they are always wrong. Even if they did conform to the tenets of logic and rational analysis, they wouldn’t always be right, either.

The best we can do is keep as close an eye on ourselves as we do strangers we meet throughout our life. When we recognize a mistake, we can correct it, and learn to be a bit less hasty in the future. And when we’re right, we can feel a little less guilty about the times we weren’t.

A fandom is a fandom…

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I’ve recently become involved in another fandom. A new fandom which has sprung up around a television show which has just finished its second season. The fandom is in the early stages, where people are excitedly creating stories, artwork, music, and online communities to enthuse to each other aboutthis new thing they love.

A new thing which I love, too.

But I’ve been having to bite my tongue a lot lately, as I hear–again and again and again–how what’s so wonderful and unique about this fandom is how accepting it is. How it inspires so many people to create all this cool art, these cool videos, these awesome dolls, these incredible web comics, these wonderful stories. “Nothing else has ever done this!!” a 30-something engineer I met recently keeps saying again and again.

He (and the others) could not possibly be more wrong.

Every fandom that has ever existed does this. Every one.

Continue reading A fandom is a fandom… →