Matthew Buscemi's Blog, page 29

Review: The Scar by China Miéville

Embassytown and The City and the City had already sold me on Miéville for life. Few authors alive or dead approach his wildly wonderful imagination. Perdido Street Station had merely reinforced this view. Knowing that The Scar also took place in the same world as Perdido had me anticipating perhaps a subtle diminishment in the weird.

Such anticipations were wholly unwarranted.

Bellis Coldwine is a New Crobuzon citizen who finds herself wanted by the authorities due to her tangential relationship to Isaac Dan der Grimnebulin, protagonist of Perdido Street Station. She flees New Crobuzon and boards a ship bound from Nova Esperium, a satellite city on a distant continent, thinking she we wait out her pursuers. However, her plans are thwarted when her ship is boarded and raided by pirates, and she is taken captive by the entirely seaborne renegade nation Armada.

Though it possesses all the bureacratic apparatuses of a country, physically, Armada is a collection of ships that have been roped together and traverse the sea as one. The crews of captured vessels are either assimilated into their society or slaughtered. Determined not to end up in the latter category, Bellis feigns allegiance, but secretly harbors the desire to return to her native city. Meanwhile, Armada's leaders have plans of their own.

The Scar contains examples of everything that is wonderful about Miéville's writing. Unique races join the ranks of peoples introduced in Perdido, such as the ocean-dwelling Cray as well as mosquito beings with unique social problems, but don't worry, besides the humanoids, there are a fair number of monstrous entities lurking in the depths of these pages as well.

I discovered my favorite Miéville villain of all time within The Scar. He is capable of vomiting space-destroying void at his enemies. There is a scene in which he goes on a rampage, and it is absolutely gorgeous prose. Let me put that in no uncertain terms: Miéville has rendered the horror a creature vomiting void at his enemies in stunningly beautiful prose. Only Miéville.

Okay, so it's super imaginative and it's Miéville's typically gorgeous writing style, but is there a theme at the core of this thing to justify the enormous word count? Yup. Look no further than the title itself. The novel is riddled with characters choosing poorly and paying the price for those mistakes, often in ways which leave indelible marks on their bodies and on in their hearts. Even the center of Armada's power structure plays a role in this theme, as well as the very nature of the world the characters inhabit.

So, in short, great characterization, strong thematic core, and Miéville's typically brilliant narrative stylistics all combine to make this yet another awesome novel from a master of weird science fiction. A must read for anyone serious about their speculative fiction.

Art and Profit

(This article was first published on zacharybonelli.com on December 16, 2014. It has been revised with only minor editorial changes.)

“Despite reporting a net loss on the tour, Conte doesn’t come off as bitter or upset, and he’s not shaking the hat to cover his losses. He’s mostly just saying, ‘Hey, touring isn’t exactly a huge windfall, even when you’re doing objectively well.’

“There’s been backlash, of course, saying that they shouldn’t have slept in hotels, shouldn’t have paid the backing band a salary, etc. I wonder if these are the very same people who complained that Amanda Palmer wasn’t paying volunteers she invited to join them onstage. Certainly, the same websites took these contradictory opinions. Of course, it seems that many of those people think that musicians and other artists shouldn’t care about money. It should be purely out of love and devotion to art as an abstract concept; rent and food be damned.”

Marshall Ryan Maresca, The Cost of Art and the Calculus of Value via his blog

Society indeed seems to hold artists up to two contradictory standards: on the one hand, we're supposed to toil away lonely and unrewarded, because the creation of that which is truly meaningful and beautiful should be its own reward; yet on the other, society aggrandizes the success of the few lucky artists whose work gets validated, as though its selections in the popularity game were inevitable, the result of some intrinsic quality of the work (see my previous post, Tunnel Vision). When the reward for such efforts is artificially distorted, and that distortion is visible within the public sphere, backlash is inevitable.

I find both of these standards socially toxic.

Firstly, artists should not suffer. Neither should we be pampered. But our work is meaningful enough to be socially subsidized within reason. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that the creation of art is the most important activity a human can engage in—and that goes for all of its forms: poety, prose, music, painting, sculpture, and so on. I don't deny that society would collapse if everyone spent all of their time being artists, but to me the argument is hyperbolic. Take climbing trees, for example. Yes, I agree that society would collapse if we let everyone climb trees with all of their time. But not everyone is going to spend all their time climbing trees. In all likelihood, many people will find themselves in contexts where climbing trees is impractical (like deserts). Some might not like it very much, and would rather build houses or pave streets or maintain social order or run for political office instead. I'm fairly certain most artists don't want to art with all their available time. Most will occupy themselves with a variety of activities. Not to mention, real artists are somewhat rare.

The idea that artists should suffer stems from the very true sentiment that art created for the sake of profit or popularity is generally inferior in quality to art created to express the artist's vision or experience of living in the world. But saying that artists should be creating art for its own sake is quite a different thing from saying that we should forego food and shelter in order to achieve our vision. This is, in my opinion, utilitarianism's biggest drawback. Taken to its extreme, it ends up as either 1984 or Brave New World, in which the self is completely subsumed to meet the whims of a callous and omnipotent social order.

Secondly, as for the distortion of monetary rewards, my society in particular needs to wake up and realize that its collective choices in popular culture are far from superb. An artifact's popularity is a self-reinforcing mechanism. Exceptionally successful products can be of any quality, from very poor to very high, and produce steady revenue for years if they manage to be the first to find and exploit a niche. Copycats trying to replicate that effect are doomed to failure, even if they execute upon the idea better than the original, because the original has already captured and stolen all of the available attention.

I find it less offensive that society should engage in this behavior, than that it should view the rising stars as non-random. Entitlement and self-congratulatory pomp inevitably follow a massive success, as if that success happened because of qualities inherent to either the product or its creators, rather than pure dumb luck. The celebration of this luck diminishes the potential for real art, as the means for creation (ie. money, which subsidizes human work hours) become channeled more and more toward product confabulators and away from artistic visionaries. The worship of successful outliers seems to have gotten worse over the course of my lifetime, though I once again fully admit that this could be my rosy, decades-past goggles at work.

The way out of this quagmire, in my opinion, is to develop better literacy in society as a whole. The more self-aware an individual is, the more likely she is to judge a popular cultural artifact with a more critical eye, rather than assume its quality from its popularity, or what her friends tell her. Developing such a sense helps the individual pay closer attention to the signs of quality in a novel artifact. Sadly, and I know from personal experience, that an individual with a less analytically, emotionally, and socially developed mind is more likely to turn a blind eye to the elements of art that make it great. Such an individual falls back on what's easy and accessible: what generates simplistic feelings of pleasure, excitement, or validation, as well as those things which are similar to other things the individual already knows she likes.

I once thought that the key to the world of authorship and publishing was printers, distributors, and bookstores. I was wrong. The key is readers. Make readers more aware, more sensitive, more attentive, more knowledgeable, and you will have an age of unprecedented artistic flourishing because artists will be empowered in the only way that has ever mattered for us: we will receive the attention and support of individuals who respond to the perspectives and emotions with which we imbue our work.

Review: The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber

Could you not get enough of C. S. Lewis's Space trilogy? Do you feel that there isn't enough theologically-infused science fiction in the world? Well then, do I have a book recommendation for you!

Peter lives with his wife Bea in England of the not too distant future. Very suddenly, Peter is approached by an American corporation to join an interplanetary expedition to planet Oasis. Apparently the natives have asked, nay demanded, the presence of a Christian priest on their planet. Deciding that the exorbitant salary Peter would be paid is enough offset the hardship of being a separated from Bea, Peter agrees to the journey.

The novel functions well on two levels in particular. Peter and Bea are extraordinarily well-developed characters, and Faber deftly shows their relationship struggle through the protracted separation while deftly weaving in bits of its formation. Any person who has struggled through being connected to their loved one only via email during a period of separation will relate to Peter and Bea's trials.

The plot is also well constructed. The setup suggests a number of questions, the answers to which are appropriately hinted at as the novel progresses: Why are the aliens on Oasis demanding the presence of a Christian preacher? Are USIC corporation's motives wholly altruistic, or are they up to something more malign? The resolution to these conundrums satisfied this reader.

From what I know of readers interested in “hard” science fiction (which I decidedly am not), I imagine that The Book of Strange New Things will offer up a bevy of nits to pick. Details of plant and animal life on planet Oasis, as well as the convenient elision of the details of interplanetary travel without time dilation, and on and on. Such elements do not bother me, especially in a book where science is meant to take a backseat to philosophical and theological concerns.

What did bother me was when the Oasis-as-heaven metaphor became heavy handed. Toward the end of the book, Bea begins openly referring to Oasis as being “up there” in her emails to Peter. I also found the behavior of the human inhabitants of the Oasis space station somewhat questionable. Some credibility may have been sacrificed for this metaphor as well.

All in all, The Book of Strange New Things is a strong novel with rich characters and which explores vibrant ethical, philosophical, and theological concerns. I highly recommend it.

Review: The Book of Strange New Things by Michael Faber

Could you not get enough of C. S. Lewis's Space trilogy? Do you feel that there isn't enough theologically-infused science fiction in the world? Well then, do I have a book recommendation for you!

Peter lives with his wife Bea in England of the not too distant future. Very suddenly, Peter is approached by an American corporation to join an interplanetary expedition to planet Oasis. Apparently the natives have asked, nay demanded, the presence of a Christian priest on their planet. Deciding that the exorbitant salary Peter would be paid is enough offset the hardship of being a separated from Bea, Peter agrees to the journey.

The novel functions well on two levels in particular. Peter and Bea are extraordinarily well-developed characters, and Faber deftly shows their relationship struggle through the protracted separation while deftly weaving in bits of its formation. Any person who has struggled through being connected to their loved one only via email during a period of separation will relate to Peter and Bea's trials.

The plot is also well constructed. The setup suggests a number of questions, the answers to which are appropriately hinted at as the novel progresses: Why are the aliens on Oasis demanding the presence of a Christian preacher? Are USIC corporation's motives wholly altruistic, or are they up to something more malign? The resolution to these conundrums satisfied this reader.

From what I know of readers interested in “hard” science fiction (which I decidedly am not), I imagine that The Book of Strange New Things will offer up a bevy of nits to pick. Details of plant and animal life on planet Oasis, as well as the convenient elision of the details of interplanetary travel without time dilation, and on and on. Such elements do not bother me, especially in a book where science is meant to take a backseat to philosophical and theological concerns.

What did bother me was when the Oasis-as-heaven metaphor became heavy handed. Toward the end of the book, Bea begins openly referring to Oasis as being “up there” in her emails to Peter. I also found the behavior of the human inhabitants of the Oasis space station somewhat questionable. Some credibility may have been sacrificed for this metaphor as well.

All in all, The Book of Strange New Things is a strong novel with rich characters and which explores vibrant ethical, philosophical, and theological concerns. I highly recommend it.

Tunnel Vision

(This article was first published on zacharybonelli.com on December 11, 2014. It has been revised with only minor editorial changes.)

“There is an underlying meaning to it all, but it lies in the reactions to the book rather than the book itself. Just look at the reviews, which are more enjoyable to read than the story, but could not have existed without the story having been written. The mere fact that it is successful has meaning and appeal. It’s the Kardashian of crappy erotica.”

Phronk A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay – The Review, via Damien G Walter’s blog

I have written previously about the effects of our hyper-consumerist culture on art and literature, specifically from the perspective of a mission-driven independent publisher trying to make it in a profit-driven world. Today, I’d like to take on this same issue from a different angle: how the lens of hyper-consumerism changes attitudes toward literature to such an extent that sane, intelligent individuals end up drawing nonsensical and bizarre conclusions.

The quote above comes from a guest post by Phronk on the blog of Damien G Walter, a science fiction columnist for The Guardian. It concerns the popular title A Billionaire Dinosaur Forced Me Gay (I refuse to hyperlink it). At the time of this writing, it sits at the Amazon ranking of 25, though Phronk tells us that it once achieved at least 15. If you are unaware of how Amazon sales rankings work, these numbers indicate very high popularity and visibility. Few books will ever break the top one hundred, let alone the top twenty. The vast majority of books have rankings in the thousands, hundreds of thousands, or even millions.

In light of Dinosaur Billionaire’s success, many have posed the question of how something so ludicrously and obviously vile, something for which the term “pedestrian” is an insult to persons of average intelligence, has become so popular. Perhaps I am a relatively young person looking back on the adult world around the time of my birth and before with rosy goggles, but I feel as though in the past, the answer would have been simple: the popularity of the item in question would indicate a dysfunction or lack of critical reasoning in a disturbingly large number of people in our society, and some effort (however nominal) might have been made to improve literature education, reign in the market, etc. etc.

However, in our modern hyper-consumerist culture, rather than the onus being on society to check and monitor itself, the onus is on society’s individuals and institutions to validate, comfort, and reinforce the happiness of every other individual. Brave New World comes to mind, wherein John the Savage tells Lenina regarding a feelie movie, “It was base. It was ignoble.” I wonder what descriptors Huxley might conjure up, were he alive today, for Billionaire Dinosaur. I imagine he would find stronger words than “base” and “ignoble.”

It’s not that the proponents of consumer culture lack the intelligence to resist the draw of such insipid drivel, it’s that their reason has been hijacked by their ideology, a condition all humans are susceptible to. Each person’s existing beliefs (and everyone has beliefs, whether or not they admit as much) circumscribe the area for further potential mental exploration. To put it another way, you can only consider as a possibility those conclusions which naturally derive from the other conclusions you’ve already drawn. Individuals who are critical of their own beliefs can draw bigger circles, but every human being suffers from this same intellectual “tunnel vision.”

Occasionally, something like Billionaire Dinosaur will happen and it will be hilarious to watch people struggle to justify its popularity and the scope of its reach. Phronk and Damien Walter seem like reasonably intelligent individuals, but both have bought heavily into consumer culture. And if you believe in consumer culture, you must believe that people getting what they want is inherently good for them. All the time. No exceptions.

To my mind, there is no paradox when it comes to Billionaire Dinosaur’s popularity. My natural conclusion: a significant number of individuals in the Western world are so philosophically and intellectually weak (due to poor education and the omnipresence of manipulative market systems) that they blissfully and mindlessly consume harmfully insipid entertainment. Those who have bought into the central tenets of consumerism cannot draw this conclusion. It does not fit with any consumerist system of thought about how the world works. Hence, the quote that began this post; Phronk eventually throws up his hands and declares that, since he can find nothing of substance or quality in the writing or the publication of Billionaire Dinosaur, its quality must lie in its effect on others, because if it’s popular, then it must generate quality somewhere and somehow. I find this conclusion not so much laughable as lamentable, akin to a person watching people die of a plague, but being so ideologically certain that viruses are good and wonderful things, that he mutters to others privileged with immunity, “Well, at least the world’s not as overpopulated anymore.”

Let’s stop glorifying and making excuses for exploitative writing, and let’s stop pretending that quality is a function of popularity. Yes, it means we have to reevaluate both consumerism and capitalism, but so be it. Those socioeconomic systems are far from perfect, and there remains much room for improvement if only our culture would explore the available options for growth and change.

Damien Walter writes in the comments of his blog, “At a certain point you have to give in to the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, who ultimately decide what gets reviewed.” I humbly suggest that the “wisdom” he purports is, in fact, the exact opposite quality.

Review: Eye in the Sky by Philip K. Dick

How do our perceptions of reality shape reality? Is there any objective reality external to our individual experiences? Of course, in a Philip K. Dick book, the answer is, “sort of, maybe.”

A freak accident at a particle accelerator causes a tour group to fall from a walkway into the center of the chamber. When they awaken, they find themselves in an altered world. Scientists have become monks, religious zealotry runs amok, and everyone worships a god called the Second Bab. The members of the tour group soon realize that it is only they who remember things as they should be. Except for one member of their group, who seems remarkably at home in this new world.

It is then that the members of the tour group realize that are in the world generated from the perceptions of one of their members—the world as he sees and experiences it, a world of Old Testament morality. But escaping that world does not free them from the experience. Instead, they find themselves in a new world is merely generated from yet another member of their party.

Two years ago, I made the conscious decision that I was going to read through all of Philip K. Dick's novels in order of publication. Eye in the Sky, first published in 1957, is the sixth Dick novel on my list. While his first novel, Vulcan's Hammer, impressed me, I was less enamored with the others, particularly Solar Lottery and Dr. Futurity, which held little substance beyond action spectacle, and The World Jones Made, while a good attempt, was too ramshackle and haphazard in its execution.

Eye in the Sky is the first Philip K. Dick novel I read that demonstrated an awareness of characterization and a coherent (not to mention compelling) theme. There is something both humorous and horrifying about witnessing a world filtered through the lens of a single psyche, and Dick executes on that well.

The writing style still grates as much as his first five novels, but the core of a solid literary contribution is here: realized characters and coherent theme. The characters, admittedly, fall into cliché and even stereotype, but for an early Dick novel, it represents increasing awareness, and it was also exceptional by the standards of American science fiction in the 1950’s.

A low to middling Dick novel, but probably the novel I would recommend most of his 1950’s oeuvre.

Responsible Authorship, Responsible Publishing

(This article was first published on zacharybonelli.com on December 10, 2014. It has been revised with only minor editorial changes.)

“Right now, I think we need writers who know the difference between the production of a market commodity and the practice of an art. Developing written material to suit sales strategies in order to maximize corporate profit and advertising revenue is not quite the same thing as responsible book publishing or authorship.”

Ursula K Le Guin

Le Guin’s speech is incredible, hence the embedded video above. I highly recommend watching the entire thing, which runs only six minutes long (or you can read the full transcript). Eloquent and succinct, Le Guin describes the challenges facing literature today. The above quote summarizes exactly my goals in founding Fuzzy Hedgehog Press. I wanted responsible publishing to come first.

I thought that my only major hurdle would be convincing the other professionals in my network of this view. However, over time, it has also become clear that profit-for-profit’s-sake has become a self-reinforcing and self-perpetuating system in our society. The emergence of a generation that values “literary” works solely on their ability to titillate reinforces the consumer machine from the other side. It’s not just about convincing bookstores to carry more diverse titles, or showing distributors that independents have something valuable to contribute. No, in our consumer society, people must be willing to buy it. And when those people have been trained their entire lives to prefer dopamine hits to introspection and narrative texture, there’s no hope for a literary experience in the market. It will inevitably be evaluated as a “product,” and a product that does not titillate, whatever its other value, will be labeled a failure.

Any for-profit corporation (well, one started in my country, anyway) is pretty much conjoined to profit. Profit limits anything and everything a corporation can achieve.

So, how do we fix this problem? And I don’t mean for one individual publisher. How do we fix this problem on a societal scale? Another great quote from Le Guin: “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” The manifestation of consumerism that pervades modern society is not absolute, though many seem to believe it is.

Despite this unfortunate state of affairs, I remain optimistic. Progress might be slow, but good people who want to make the world a better place still can. For my part, I’ll be taking a close look at the structure of non-profit corporations in the coming months.

Le Guin has always been a hero of mine. She states that she would hate “to watch American literature get sold down the river.” For whatever it’s worth, I’m doing my best, with my small sphere of influence, with my meager voice, to resist the oft inevitable-seeming wave.

Review: We by Yevgeny Zamyatin

Written on the eve of the Bolshevik revolution, Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We, a novel who social prescience astounds. In the same way that Brave New World depicts a society that seems to have mostly come true as a result of mass consumer culture, Zamyatin's We depicts a society eerily similar to the autocratic, communistic world of Soviet Russia.

In the One State there are no people, only numbers. All structures have glass walls, so that everyone can see everything everyone else does. Nature has been utterly subjugated, and what remains of it is cordoned off behind the Green Wall. Science rules, and mathematical-philosophy dictates society's mores. Control is so omnipresent, that there is even a Table of Hours, which dictates how every “number” must spend his or her time. Now, with humanity on the eve of its space age, all that remains is for mankind to reach to the stars and impose that glorious order upon whatever creatures he finds beyond.

D-503 is the chief architect of the One State's first spaceship, the Integral. For the benefit of historians and the species that will be reigned in under mathematical-philosophy, D-503 decided to record a journal of thoughts in the days leading up to the Integral's launch. However, a chance encounter with I-330 causes D-503 to discover the existence of a world within himself, the presence of the ancient disease that the One State thought they had stomped out: the human soul.

The dystopian novels of the twentieth century that get the most attention in the United States are Orwell's 1984 and Huxley's Brave New World. I have never heard of We being assigned reading in high school, and that's too bad, as it is probably far more approachable for teenagers than either Orwell or Huxley. 1984 is problematic in that we have yet avoided the dilemma it describes, and Brave New World, I imagine, if I'd read it as a teenager, would have left entirely the wrong impression. I imagine my teenage self finishing Brave New World and thinking something to the effect of, "Huh. No pain or suffering, people are always entertained, and sex is easy. That world sounds great! Sign me up. What the hell were the main characters complaining about?"

We, on the other hand, is both frighteningly real, and chilling in the intimacy the reader must maintain with D-503 through his journal entries. The reader must watch as his perspective on his world slowly strays from One State dogma and must reconcile the presence of his inner world with the horrific world around him, and he must come to realize that horror bit by bit. Even my younger self would have had a hard time writing that off.

I highly recommend We. The characterization, world building, and pacing alone make it an easy sell, but there is so much more here—a powerful and poignant critique on modernity and the all too human drive to order the less desirable parts of our humanity out of ourselves.

The Conundrum of Beauty

(This article was first published on zacharybonelli.com on March 18, 2014. It has been revised with only minor editorial changes.)

At 7:51 AM on January 12, 2007, a man walked into a subway station in Washington D.C. carrying a violin. For forty-odd minutes, he performed classical music as busy commuters rushed past him. Twenty-seven of those commuters gave him money, coming to a total of $32. Over one thousand people hurried past, either too busy to listen or not caring for the performance.

Why is this event at all remarkable?

Because the performer was a man named Joshua Bell, a Grammy Award-winning violinist and conductor. And also because the violin he was playing on was a Stradivarius, an extremely valuable type of violin from the eighteenth century whose sound is widely considered superior. For a lengthy account of the entire experiment, complete with video, see this article from the Washington Post.

According to the article, Joshua Bell has played at prestigious concert halls and for prestigious people, and can command a salary on the order of “a thousand dollars a minute” for his work. And yet, when put in a Washington D.C. subway wearing unassuming clothes, with an open violin case begging for spare change, social recognition evaporates without a trace. He recounts, after the fact, emotions that will undoubtedly resonate with independent authors and publishers:

“At the beginning, I was just concentrating on playing the music. I wasn’t really watching what was happening around me. … When you play a violin piece, you are a storyteller, and you’re telling a story. … It was a strange feeling, that people were actually, ah, ignoring me. … At a music hall, I’ll get upset if someone coughs or if someone’s cellphone goes off. But here, my expectations quickly diminished. I started to appreciate any acknowledgment, even a slight glance up. I was oddly grateful when someone threw in a dollar instead of change. … It wasn’t exactly stage fright, but there were butterflies. I was stressing a little. … When you play for ticket-holders, you are already validated. I have no sense that I need to be accepted. I’m already accepted. Here, there was this thought: What if they don’t like me? What if they resent my presence?”

Joshua Bell, Pearls Before Breakfast, The Washington Post

Philosophers have been arguing about the source of “beauty” since the beginning of time. Leibnitz takes the modular, deconstructionist approach: beauty is an inherent property of things. We perceive beautiful things as such because that quality is buried somewhere in their structure. Hume takes the reverse stance. To him, beauty is a social construct, a kind of "mass sentimentality" based on opinion rather than measurable fact. It is Kant who has created the most enduring definition, a complex theory of aesthetics. In a nutshell, Kant argues that both sides are right—mass sentiment and culture shape individuals who, when put into the right contexts, will recognize the inherent beauty of those things with inherent beauty to be revealed.

And therein lies the solution to our problem of Joshua Bell only making only $32 for forty minutes of some of the most beautiful music of all time, played on one of the most beautiful sounding instruments in existence: the situation he was put into created a context that encouraged people to make incorrect snap judgments about the quality of his work.

And most people, especially busy people with a lot on their minds, will not dig too hard to form a nuanced view of a work or art. They will jump to conclusions.

What about writing, then? Do the same principles apply?

I would argue that they do.

Below is the first paragraph of William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury:

Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting. They were coming toward where the flag was and I went along the fence. Luster was hunting in the grass by the flower tree. They took the flag out, and they were hitting. Then they put the flag back and they went to the table, and he hit and the other hit. Then they went on, and I went along the fence. Luster came away from the flower tree and we went along the fence and they stopped and we stopped and I looked through the fence while Luster was hunting in the grass.

You and I both grew up in a world where William Faulkner is, far and away, considered to be one of the greatest English language writers of all time. We had teachers tell us this in high school. We had professors tell us this in college. We go online, and scores of literary people will sing the praises of William Faulkner.

Some people will argue that the beauty of this paragraph is inherent. They think that if you were able to rewind time and play through history over and over again, Faulkner would become a great literary master each and every time. Because there is something about him that makes him and his work amazing.

Let’s pretend for a moment that we have a parallel universe similar to our own. Let’s suppose an existential literary movement happened in this universe, and that there was a Virginia Woolf and a James Joyce. But let’s say that Faulker was never born. He never wrote anything. No one heard of him.

Now, suppose we were to drop a manuscript of The Sound and the Fury into this universe with Faulkner’s name on it. But remember: in this hypothetical universe, his name means nothing. No associations whatsoever.

I think most editors would stop reading after about the second or third sentence, citing a critique roughly like this: “Hitting is a transitive verb. You have to hit something, you can’t just hit; Stylistically, this paragraph is a mess. The sentence structure is repetitive and juvenile. The phrases ‘the fence’ and ‘hitting’ are repeated often enough and in close enough proximity as to be annoying; It is completely unclear who the characters are. Who are ‘they’? Why is the narrator obsessed with them? Is Luster a hunting dog or a human being? What is he hunting? How?”

In my opinion, the real beauty of The Sound and the Fury only becomes apparent when you can witness the novel as a whole. The reason that most readers see beauty in this first paragraph is because they are trained to believe that it should be there, or they are approaching the work for the nth time with the context of the entire novel in tow.

In music, the context is the location. Prestigious concert halls give musicians credibility. In the case of visual art, it is also the location. Prestigious galleries give painters and sculptors credibility. In writing, things are a little trickier. Publishers used to have a lot more power than they now do over an author’s credibility. But even decades ago, a publisher didn’t make or break an author (to put it a different way: some books that big publishers put out remain unpopular and unremarked upon). In writing, the context is neither a location nor an organization.

It is the writer’s own name.

In this universe, in this culture, when we see the name William Faulkner attached to a novel, the vast majority of readers will arrive immediately and implicitly at the assumption that the novel is good.

The reverse is also true. The reason it is so hard to break out as a writer is because until you have successfully seeded the implicit assumption that your writing is worthwhile, you must fight the opposite implicit assumption: people will see your name on a book and, lacking any association at all, are likely to jump to the conclusion that your writing sucks. You will then be fighting an uphill battle for the entire novel. Minor, trivial details will become validation for a presupposed conclusion—that the writing is inherently flawed.

Now, allow me to play my own devil’s advocate.

For all its surface naiveté, repetition, and simplicity, there is an elegance to the opening lines of The Sound and the Fury. The narrative structure speaks droves about the mentality of the narrator. The characters who are hitting one another are clearly present to drive some larger conflict—the coming pages will certainly make their role clear, and the narrator is clearly frightened of them.

The author has employed a difficult style in a way that is undeniably skillful. Truly bad writing looks very different. There is, for example, no question as to whether the author of the sentence, “Theres a stranger laying in my bed.” is using style to show us something interesting about the human condition, or if he’s unskilled at forming written words from his thoughts.

So, as authors, how do we proceed? Why even bother, if this is simply ‘the way things are?’ What can we do to stand out?

Answers are going to vary per author. I don’t purport these to be a definitive. These are merely how I resolve the conundrum for myself:

My writing is about expressing something. Even if a majority of other people don’t find meaning in my work, I can at least say that I whole-heartedly made the attempt, and I work on honing the communication of my message with each and every piece. I don’t want to play the “writing the lotto” game, where the goal is to craft the piece of fiction that will be the golden ticket to fame. I don’t find that compelling or productive. If my work has meaning to me, it will have value for me no matter what its net monetary profit ends up being.I forge relationships with readers and other authors. I find the people who show an interest in my work and nurture an actual relationship with them, rather than treat them as a source of popularity or money.I promise respect for other authors and humility for my own work from the start. Joshua Bell described the humbling emotions that overcame him when he realized that most people in that subway station were actively ignoring him. The attitude of demanding more than basic human decency on account of one’s position is all too human, and also unavoidable. But, should any monetary or social status benefits ever come my way, I will perpetually recognize them as serendipitous (i.e. that I got lucky). Hard work does not necessitate such rewards, though it is a pre-requisite. And I will work to shine the spotlight on unknown authors whose work I feel deserves a fighting chance.

Review: The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.

When I pulled my copy of Seven Beauties off of the shelf to write this review, I was struck by just how many marker tags protruded from between its pages. Seven Beauties is an exploration of where the genre of science fiction has been, where it is going, and where it might proceed as our society continues its forward hurtle through waves ceaseless technological innovation.

In order to do that, Csicsery-Ronay Jr. tackles the genre's perennial struggle: how to define its boundaries. In other words, how do we tell whether a given work is or isn't science fiction? Does it need aliens? If so, then what of time-travel stories? Does it need to be set in the future? If so, then what of alternate realities? For every “obvious” measure one might choose, a bevy of works stand up in defiance, and which individuals well-versed in science fiction will unanimously agree belongs within the genre.

Hence, the title of Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s book. The seven “beauties” of science fiction together form a series of litmus tests. It’s okay for a work to lack one or two of the beauties, but it can still be science fiction if it’s strong in three or four or five of the others. I also found the use of the term “beauty” fitting. Instead of decrying what is wrong with genre, as so much literary criticism seems to do, this framework instead celebrates the elements that make speculative fiction wonderful.

The seven beauties are:

Neology, the invention of words, phrases, and even alternative grammars that pull the reader out of their reality and into the story’s alternate world.The novum, a fictive element that is not present in the reader’s reality, the presence of which signifies to the reader that the fictive world an altered form of the reader's.Future history, the presence of an imaginary history that proceeds from the reader’s present. In other words, the work is set in the future.Imaginary science, the presence of scientific discoveries, principles, or apparatuses, which are not present in the reader’s reality. How plausibly the imaginary science extends from the science of the day in which the story was written determines its “hardness.” Fiction with highly plausible imaginary science is considered “hard,” while implausible or pseudo-magical science makes the fiction “soft.”The sublime, fictive elements which invoke awe.The grotesque, fictive elements which invoke revulsion.The technologiade, a narrative mode in which the advancement of science and technology play a strong role in shaping the text’s themes and motifs.

The text of Seven Beauties is extremely dense, but also loaded with great food for the speculative fiction writer’s thought. I have found myself reflecting on these criteria in my own works. The sublime and the grotesque were especially compelling chapters, which I have revisited since my first readthrough. I was also able to add a large number of authors to my reading list because of this book, Stanislaw Lem and James Tiptree Jr. among them. I consider the technologiade a must-read for authors who wish to become self-conscious of ways in which their writing might be subtly invoking the nasty politics of colonialism, albeit with a futuristic veneer.

Some might find the text to be too dense or the language too overwrought, but I would remind such individuals that this is an academic book. Csicsery-Ronay Jr. has, in fact, used the language appropriate for his target audience. It was a very small price for this reader to pay for entry into the theoretical model Csicsery-Ronay Jr. has introduced.

In the aftermath of 2014, I found myself adrift, as all my previous guideposts and metrics for how I understand what I write and why I write as I do had been invalidated. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction did an excellent job of setting up a new framework for me to understand the genre I love. If, as a writer, you want to understand the depth and character of your beloved genre better, Seven Beauties is a great place to start.