Sarah Monette's Blog, page 20

Audio book!

The Goblin Emperor is now available as an audio book from Tantor Audio.

(I am SUPER EXCITED. This is the first time any of my books has been made into an audio book, and it's something I've lusted after for years.)

Please help spread the word, as I know many people find audio books fit better into their lives than text-on-paper/screen books.

UBC: Nickel

Nickel, Steven. Torso: The Story of Eliot Ness and the Search for a Pyschopathic Killer. Winston-Salem, NC: John F. Blair, 1989.

About half of what's wrong with this book is that it was written in 1989. So the book that would actually have been extremely interesting, about the ways that racism, classism, and homophobia shaped the police response to, the press response to, the investigation of, and the failure to find the Cleveland Torso Murderer, is not the book that is actually present. (To be fair, I don't know that any of those things is the reason the Cleveland Torso Murderer was never caught. He seems to have been both extraordinarily lucky and extraordinarily careful. But even in Nickel's account, I can see prejudice shaping the questions being asked, and if you don't ask the right questions, you are highly unlikely to get the right answers.)

The other half of what's wrong with this book is all there in the subtitle. Nickel wants to write a book about Eliot Ness and the Cleveland Torso Murderer, specifically then way that the failure to catch the guy was part of Ness's slow fall from grace. But his own account makes it perfectly clear that that story is nonsense. Ness was barely involved in the hunt (except for, granted, one absolutely absymal clusterfuck), and his fall from grace has everything to do with some very poor life choices on his part. Yes, the raid on the encampment of homeless people that was Ness's best answer to the problem was a PR disaster, but it's not what destroyed his career as Cleveland's Safety Director. (Being the perpetrator in a alcohol-related hit-and-run accident? Yeah, that'd be the kiss of death. And the rest of Ness's downward slide looks to me, from Nickel's sketchy account, like what happens when a guy who's very very good at one thing stops doing it and then just doesn't even know who he is anymore.)

Essentially, it's a coincidence that in the years that the Cleveland Torso Murderer was preying on the homeless and destitute in Cleveland the city's Safety Director was a guy who happens to be extremely famous for his campaign against Al Capone. Nickel's efforts to make it look like something more (including the desperate grab at Ness's (equally desperate) claim to have found the murderer, even though he couldn't convict him or arrest him or even, apparently, investigate him--kind of creepily like Sir Robert Anderson's similar claim about Jack the Ripper) would need a lot more research to make them convincing.

That's the other problem. This is a dilettante's book. (And, yes, I know. Pot. Kettle.) Compared to something like And the Dead Shall Rise (649 p., 56 double-columned pages of citations, 4 double-columned pages of bibliography) it is painfully obvious how Torso (224 p., no citations, maybe a page and a half of bibliography) is barely even a swipe at the subject--either subject, since this is no more a biography of Eliot Ness than it is a study of the Cleveland Torso Murderer.

In memoriam: Jay Lake

Jay Lake, 1964-2014

I know it's a cliche to quote this poem, but Dylan Thomas was right, goddammit. Rage, rage, against the dying of the light.

Live forever, Jay.

this is the post I was writing in my head at 4 this morning when I should have been asleep

I watched two movies recently that were worse than they had to be: Cowboys & Aliens (2011) and X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009). There are all kinds of reasons for this (I could write a book on the things that are wrong with Cowboys & Aliens), but there's one that was thrown into sharp relief by a third movie I've watched recently: High Noon (1952--that would be the ACTUAL Gary Cooper High Noon, not the remake from 2000, which frankly I can't imagine why you'd watch when you've got Gary Cooper and Katy Jurado RIGHT THERE). Because what High Noon does stunningly well, and what both Cowboys & Aliens and Wolverine flounder and fail at, is structure.

I never used to understand structure. (I still bitterly remember the only C I've ever gotten on an English paper, which was a paper on the structure of Emerson's "American Scholar." To this day, I have no idea what that structure was or what I was supposed to say about it.) But apparently somewhere along the line, I've picked up at least some opinions about it, and the thing I want to talk about has been nagging me and nagging me to write it down.

High Noon is beautifully structured. Every single damn thing in that movie points either forwards or backwards, to something that did happen or something that will happen. (And of course, the clocks, the terrible relentless clocks.) Chekhov's Gun applies with vindictive precision. Nothing is wasted; nothing is thrown in as a set-piece or "comic relief" or any of the other things a movie can stupidly choose to clutter itself up with. And the single point I really want to talk about is that the movie knows where to begin.

(I'm going to pretend the hairshirt penance that is the soundtrack and the insipid vacuity of its shockingly successful title song (Oscar for Best Original Song? Seriously?) simply do not exist. I'd actually love to see a version with the music stripped out, because that awful awful song is intrusive like whoa.)

High Noon begins with a cowboy waiting for something, him and his horse and a picturesque tree. Turns out he's waiting for his friends, and once they meet up, they ride down to the Hadleyville train station. And only at that point, in the terrified reaction of the station master, do we learn that these three friends (and even more to the point, the man they're waiting for) are the villains. (Given that part of the problem Will Kane is going to face is the waffling of the citizens of Hadleyville about these same villains, the ambiguity in the opening is neither accidental nor inappropriate.) The camera follows the station master as he sneaks out the back and books it hell for leather into town, and then jumps to introduce our hero, Will Kane, just at the moment of his marriage to Amy Fowler and his concommitant resignation as the marshal of Hadleyville. (Not sheriff. Sheriffs are for counties. Marshalls are for towns.) Nothing that happens in that wedding scene is accidental or pointless either, because Carl Foreman wrote the damn movie like a perfectly balanced pocketwatch. But the opening draws us in from a romantic view of a cowboy on a ridge to the town of Hadleyville. It makes us work to get our bearings, which, as I said, is thematically like a warning shot fired across our bows. It establishes the threat--Frank Miller is arriving on the noon train, and he's going to be out for blood--and it establishes with beautiful economy both our hero and the ugly bind he's caught in. We learn about the past only in what the characters say to each other (and I love the way that we barely learn anything about the relationship between Kane and Helen Ramirez EXCEPT WHAT WE NEED TO KNOW, which is how it affects them now in this last hour before the train arrives).

Okay. Keep that in mind while I turn my attention to the next contestant.Wolverine made a earnest, literal-minded decision to tell an origin story and therefore start at the beginning, with sickly seven-year-old Logan and the first manifestation of his claws. Very traumatic, with shocking revelations and murder and Freudian family romance, blah blah blah, ending with Logan and his half brother Victor racing off into a muddy montage of war after war, to establish that (a) they both apparently stop aging at 40 and (b) Victor's a bit of a psychopath, to go along with the mutant fingernails and genuinely creepy four-legged run. (Of all the things that are wrong with this movie, I should add, Hugh Jackman and Liev Schreiber are not among them. Ditto Ryan Reynolds, Dominic Monaghan, Kevin Durand, Daniel Henney, and the entirely awesome Will.i.am. Killing off John Wraith was a rookie mistake, guys.) They get recruited in to Stryker's team of mutants, we have a mission to estabilsh everybody's powers, and then Logan gives them a well earned fuck-you-all and walks off to his romantic shack in the Canadian wilderness with his pointless romantic interest.

(Kayla and Ella in Cowboys & Aliens, come to think of it, are the only romantic interests I can think of so enduringly, unvanquishably pointless that they have to be killed twice.)

Kayla's really only there to be the Girl in the Refrigerator and motivate Logan's transformation into Wolverine, and it's at this point that the movie actually, FINALLY begins. Everything heretofore, before the push that sets Logan in motion, is backstory. A lot of it we don't need, or would even be better off without. (Frankly, if the movie started cold with the murder of Chris Bradley, aside from being an absolutely classic X-Files teaser, we would be informationally no worse off--and we would benefit from the tension of wondering why Logan has this weird relationship with Victor the psychopath, instead of already knowing.) The only necessary thing all that backstory does is to give us a good look at Wade Wilson, because when he shows up again, we do genuinely need to have met the smartaleck with the swords to understand just how horrible this thing that Stryker has done is. Everything else could be conveyed (as High Noon conveys its backstory) in the dialogue between the characters. And if you have to do flashbacks, it occurred to me that they would actually work brilliantly in REVERSE order, so that the moment you learn what Logan and Victor really mean to each other is paired with the moment when Victor says to Logan, "Nobody gets to kill you but me."

The story the movie is telling doesn't begin with child!Logan, so the fact that the movie begins there is one of the reasons the movie doesn't work very well.

Cowboys & Aliens, on the other hand, doesn't work at all.

The reasons for this are basically endless, but the one I want to focus on is, again, the beginning. And I want to focus on the beginning because in some ways, it's very like the beginning of High Noon: the transition from the man alone in the hills to the town and the lives of its inhabitants. We start with a man in a picturesque landscape. We don't know anything about him--as it turns out, he doesn't know anything about him--except that he's got a weird, obviously not-Earth-made cuff on his wrist that won't come off. And is a weapon. (The damn thing might as well have a label on it reading PLOT DEVICE, honestly.) Lonergan emerges victorious from his encounter with the villainous Claibornes, leaving the bodies of his enemies behind him, and rides down into Absolution, where he encounters the Dolarhydes, father and son, the sheriff (who's probably also actually a marshal), and the rest of the cast of stereotypes who populate the town.

And then the aliens attack.

Now here's the problem, and why Cowboys & Aliens is wrong, and High Noon is right. Partly it's that High Noon is about the change that Miller, Pierce, and Colby bring with them into the town of Hadleyville. They're the pebble that starts the avalanche. But it's also an even bigger problem. The basic premise of Cowboys & Aliens, to rephrase it, is that the cast of a generic Western find themselves forced to fight for their lives against equally generic aliens. That being the case, there's a serious scale imbalance between the hero and the threat. Whereas Kane is facing men (and his real problem isn't Frank Miller, it's the way that everybody in Hadleyville decides to surrender before Miller even gets there--as he himself says, he beat Miller before, when he had the deputies and posse to back him up), Lonergan is facing capital-A Aliens, and by the time we get to Absolution and the tired character arcs of the people there, we already know that. We have NO REASON to invest in these characters' concerns because we already know that the movie has no investment in them either.

Lonergan is a bad viewpoint character to begin the movie with. Sheriff Taggert would be a much better one, because this isn't a movie about the outsider who comes into a community and changes/is changed by it. This is a movie about a community being invaded by outsiders. What we want is to establish the community first, make the audience care about the sheriff and his grandson, the bartender and his Mexican wife (compare her to Helen Ramirez, and a full hand of the other things that are wrong with this movie deal themselves out like magic), the cattle baron and his wastrel son. Give some weight to the Western, to the lives of the people of Absolution. THEN have the bleeding amnesiac stranger come stumbling into town, upsetting everybody's arcs and bringing chaos in his wake. THEN have the aliens attack.

Establish the microcosm of Absolution before the reveal of the hostile macrocosm, because otherwise neither side has any weight, and the story becomes a kind of shallow sludge.

Again, I compare back to the sharp, relentless precision of High Noon, which is a simple story told in an elegantly complicated way. It's a little overly facile to say that Wolverine and Cowboys & Aliens are complicated stories told in overly simple ways, but it's also not entirely wrong. Certainly, they are stories that would have benefitted from some elegance in their telling.

An Open Letter to Jay Lake

Dear Jay,

I hate your cancer with all my heart.

We have never been close friends, but I have always liked and admired you, for your kindness; your generosity; your passion; your mindfulness and devotion to your responsibilities as a parent; your sense of humor and your unerring eye for the ridiculous; your unflagging love of our genre; the courage with which you aver your convictions and engage with those who disagree with you; the way that you make rooms brighter and warmer just by being in them.

You introduced me to the term "faith-based reasoning," which is such a useful and paradigm-shifting cognitive tool I cannot even tell you.

I have the Campbell nomination pin because you decided the Campbell nomination pin should exist and made it be so, and I am grateful.

My life is better because I know you.

Fuck cancer.

Love,
Sarah

UBC: Bergen

Bergen, Doris. Twisted Cross: The German Christian Movement in the Third Reich. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1996.


So, I have a new theory, which is that the Treaty of Versailles caused a psychotic break in almost the entirety of the "Aryan" population of Germany. Given how egregiously they were being gaslighted by the leaders of the German armed forces, it's not entirely surprisiing. The Nazis didn't cause the psychosis; they were a manifestation of the psychosis--as were the German Christians, the subject of this book. But this psychotic moral reversal, having been encouraged for at least half a century beforehand (Bergen describes one example, the Protestant League, founded in 1887, as "foster[ing] a climate of hatred within German Protestant circles that both encouraged and legitimized collective resentments" (114)), was endemic to "Aryan" German culture in the twenties and thirties. Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners, although problematic, I think makes, and hammers home, the point that the dominant culture of Germany was ready to hear what Hitler had to say, because all the pieces of Hitler's ideology were already available to them.

(Hitler was stunningly unoriginal; he basically just assembled all the unconnected pieces of hatred, entitlement, and bigotry lying around in "Aryan" German culture in the twenties into something that could be focused, aimed, and deployed for maximum destruction.)

In this context "German Christian" ("Deutsche Christen") means a specific movement in the Protestant German church, as opposed to, say, "Christian Germans," meaning everyone of Christian faith living in Germany--or Christians outside Germany who claimed or were claimed to be "ethnically German." (Bergen is one of the few writers on Nazi Germany and the Holocaust that I've read who recognizes how dangerous and slippery using the Nazi terminology of race is:

Labels are always tricky, but students of Nazi Germany face particular challenges. To describe National Socialism, we depend on the same words and phrases that Nazi propaganda appropriated and infused with particular meanings: words like race, blood, Aryan, German, and Jew.
(4)

It is vanishingly rare to find a historian who acknowledges this problem, and I appreciate it in Bergen as much as I appreciate her careful attention to nuances of meaning in over-determined German words (i.e., Volk).) The German Christians, who described themselves as "storm troopers of Christ," are pretty much exactly what you would imagine if you set out to imagine a way of reconciling Christianity and Nazism. They were anti-doctrinal, anti-clerical, anti-theological, anti-Semitic, misogynist, repellantly proud of their own ignorance, and capable of some of the most incredibly clusterfucked logical fallacies I have had the dubious pleasure of reading. I shall quote an example:

Most frequently, German Christians based negation of Jesus's Jewishness on their presumption of his antisemitism. Jesus, they asserted, could not have been a Jew because he opposed the Jews. . . . In late 1933 on German Christian offered citations from the Gospels that, he claimed, revealed Jesus' attitude tward Judaism . . . In places, he admitted, the Gospels seemed to suggest the opposite. But those were not the words of Christ, he contended; they were "lies," "Jewishness," the "voice of the Old Testament."
(156)

The German Christians were fanatically devoted to the idea of making the Protestant Church palatable to National Socialism. They were utterly, utterly doomed to failure, since the Nazi high command was pretty much equally committed to the idea of eradicating Christianity from Germany, which makes Bergen's account of their gyrations and contortions pathetic as well as infuriating. But Bergen's research makes it clear that they also represent a inchoate, badly articulated desire prevalaent among many more Germans than those who joined the mvement, to have their cake and eat it, too: to have the comforting, familiar trappings of the Church, the ritual and sense of community, without any of the uncomfortable rules and restrictions and moral accountability for one's actions. This same desire is visible in many other aspects of interbellum "Aryan" German culture; Bergen has found an articulation of it that is mind-boggling in its on-the-nose, epic failure of self-awareness:

In a 1934 declaration, the Protestant faculty of theology in Breslau denounced emphasis on sin as inimical to the needs of the people's church. Blasting Barthian theology, Judaism, and foreign foes in one rancorous breath, the Breslau group announced that Germans could not tolerate a religion based on the concept of sin. "A people," the statement argued, "who, like our own, has a war behind them that they did not want, that they lost, and for which they were declared guilty, cannot bear it, when their sinfulness is constantly pointed out to them in an exaggerated way." The Treaty of Versailles, the Breslauers maintained, made an emphasis on sin untenable. "Our people has suffered so much under the lie of war guilt that it is the task and duty of the church and of theology to use Christianity to give courage to our people, and not to pull them down into political humiliation."
(158)

The German Christians were prepared to mutiliate Christianity, its sacred texts, and everything that makes it a coherent body of thought, in order to make it what they declared the German people wanted.

The German Christians are as horrifying and fascinating as the Nazis themselves, and they follow very much the same trajectory, even extending to the aftermath of World War II, in which, just as "de-Nazification" is highly problematic, the German Christian movement, being disbanded, became a convenient scapegoat for the rest of the Christian Germans (the better to distract attention from their own participation in Germany's psychotic break), but the vast majority of individual German Christians, particularly the rank and file, escaped without being held accountable, without any alteration in their thinking, and without remorse.

ATTENTION WISCON plus BONUS MYSTERY OBJECT

ATTENTION WISCON: I will be in the dealers' room Saturday, pretty much from 10-6. You can find me behind elisem 's table. Please feel free to stop by, say hello, and/or get me to sign books. WHICH I WILL BE HAPPY--NAY, DELIGHTED!--TO DO.

BONUS MYSTERY OBJECT: I have no idea what this is. It was moving against the current, so I'm guessing it's alive, but educated guesses and wild speculations are all welcome. (And, yes, I am the world's worst (possibly)wildlife photographer.






I mean, yes, turtle, if it is alive. But a kind of peculiar looking turtle if so.

Final guest post

The last of my guest posts is live at Bibliosanctum, on the court intrigues of the elves and the goblisn.

ICYMI, the master list of all the guest posts and interviews I did for The Goblin Emperor is here.

Also, thank you to everyone who invited me to write something for them!

Guest Post Round-Up: The Final Chapter

Barring other invitations, I've finished doing interviews and posts for The Goblin Emperor. This post is to get all the links in one place, for my benefit primarily, but also for anybody else who's trying to find something.

Between Dreams and Reality interview
Bibliosanctum post on court intrigue in The Goblin Emperor (will provide link when the post goes up)
The Big Idea post on fantasy and technology (on John Scalzi's blog)
Bitten by Books interivew and chat
The Book Plank interview
Bookshelf Bombshells post on thwarting genre conventions
The Booksmugglers post on grimdark
A Dribble of Ink post on hope in fantasy
Dungeon Crawlers Radio interview (podcast)
Fantasy Cafe's Women in SFF Month post on women in Tolkien
Forces of Geek post on inventing languages
Functional Nerds, episode 190 (podcast)
Intellectus Speculativus (formerly Daniel Libris) post on worldbuilding
Q&A on Marissa Lingen's blog
My Bookish Ways interview
My Favorite Bit (on Mary Robinette Kowal's site)
No More Grumpy Bookseller post on The Goblin Emperor and Elizabeth I
The Pop Quiz at the End of the Universe
Riffle Q&A
SF Signal post on The Goblin Emperor and genre conventions
SF Signal: Special Needs in Strange Worlds post on albinism
Speculative Book Review post on The Goblin Emperor and the Wars of the Roses
That Was Awesome about the awesomeness of Scott Lynch
Tor-dot-com post on quests and bildungsromans
Tor/Forge Blog post on the reification of conventions in fantasy

I believe that's the lot.

Bitten By Books event is LIVE!

Come ask me questions & enter the giveaway for the book!