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Superversive Blog: Life, Carbon, and the Tao — Part Two!

Today we have Part Two of our Superversive Literary Movement Anniversary essay by Mr. Superversive himself, essayist extraordinaire, Tom Simon!

Snarky essays on the art of writing fantasy

 

Life, Carbon, and the Tao

by

Tom Simon

 

Part One is available here.

And now, to the second question: What’s so special about the Tao?

Here I am using the term Tao the way C. S. Lewis used it in The Abolition of Man: meaning the basic principles of morality on which all civilized peoples have generally agreed. Here are some of the perennials: Don’t murder your neighbour, don’t steal from your neighbour, don’t mess around with your neighbour’s wife, don’t perjure yourself. Men have differed on the definition of neighbour, and some of the wide variation in human cultures is accounted for by that difference. Some peoples apply the Tao only to members of one’s own tribe, or one’s own nation. Some try to apply it to every human being without exception. And of course there are differences of detail, such as whether a man should marry one wife or four. But every culture that survives is based on the Tao, just as every life form is based on carbon; and the reasons, at bottom, are similar.

What the Tao does is to establish a minimum basis for safe dealings between human beings. If, every time you went into Starbucks, you had to seriously question whether the barrista would sell you a cup of coffee or shoot you on sight, I fancy that Starbucks, as a business, would not have lasted long. Fortunately, both you and the barrista subscribe to the Tao. Even if you don’t understand the reasons for the rules, you obey the rules, at least most of the time, because that is the only way that you can get along and do business together. Even to live together in a community requires the Tao. My neighbours lock their doors when they go out, it is true. But if I did not accept the Tao, locks would do them no good; I would smash the doors with an axe and help myself to their belongings. And if they did not accept the Tao, they would have no grounds to complain. No human being can live as a solo army, at war with the whole world. We are born weak and helpless, and most of us are weak and helpless again before we die; and we all have to sleep in between. The Tao literally keeps us alive when we cannot defend ourselves.

The basis of the Tao, in one word, is reciprocity. ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.’ Or if that is too strong for you, take the formula of Confucius: ‘Never do to others what you would not like them to do to you.’ Over tens of thousands of years, in the laboratory of daily life, in tribes and villages, cities and nations, we have boiled down the art of reciprocity; we have codified the things that none of us (when sane and healthy) wish done to us, and we agree not to do them to others. In almost every culture, this code is reinforced by the prevailing religion; but it is quite possible to accept the Tao without any religion at all. It is the common moral currency of humanity, and with the caveat noted above, it passes everywhere. Societies that reject the Tao do not hang together; and individuals who reject the Tao soon find themselves without any society.

A tale of quests, strange magics, and ancient wars!

 

When I turn from real life to fiction, I find a curious difference. In the stories of the past – in nearly all fiction before, say, the late nineteenth century, and all popular fiction until a much later date – the Tao is taken for granted; only there is a class of people who do not observe the Tao. These people are called criminals, or outlaws, or villains. In the older kind of fiction, the villain upsets the Tao to take advantage of a weaker party, and the hero restores the Tao by avenging the victim.

Consider the Odyssey. Odysseus was a sharp operator, maybe, but still a hero; he restored the Tao. Old Polyphemus, the Cyclops, violated the Tao in a pretty straightforward way: he ate his house guests. The Greeks set great store by the laws of xenia, or hospitality; and even we degenerate moderns, when our friends invite us to dinner, do not expect to be the dinner. Later, he restored the Tao in the matter of adultery, dealing with his wife’s suitors in a brusque but exemplary manner. (No, he could not have called the police. Odysseus was the King of Ithaca; he was the police.)

It is only we moderns, for the most part, who try to write fiction without the Tao. This may be partly because of our exceptionally urbanized life. For the first time in history, the majority of human beings now live in cities. It is easier to reject the Tao in a city. In a small village, a psychopath will soon make himself odious to his neighbours. They will drive him out with sticks and stones, or tar and feather him; at the very least, they will not do business with him anymore. In a large city, where everybody does not know everybody else, a psychopath can always look for fresh victims – until he reaches the point of actually being infamous. At that point, his reputation precedes him, and people who have never even met him know that he is not a man to deal with. About that time, or a little after, they generally kick him out of town, or throw him into prison. This means that even a psychopath has to be careful where and how often he breaks the Tao, so that he does not make too many enemies at once.

But there is a kind of fiction in which breaking the Tao is a rule in itself. This was considered brave and bold and groundbreaking among the Decadents a century ago; it was a good way to shock the bourgeoisie and annoy one’s parents. For it is always cheaper to talk trash against the Tao than actually to break it oneself. Most of the people who read this kind of fiction have not got the guts, or perhaps the opportunity, to do any serious lawbreaking themselves. The stories are harmful in a more subtle way. By degrees, they create a habit of thought – a habit of regarding the Tao as optional; and if this habit is fed and encouraged, it becomes a habit of regarding the Tao as a stupid tribal taboo, and those who obey it as superstitious fools. People can really come to believe this, and act accordingly (when not afraid of being caught); it is a sort of psychopathic infection, and the patients degenerate by degrees. The first thrill of being ‘transgressive’ – cheering for the robbers instead of the cops – does not last; the addict returns for stronger and stronger doses. And our own generation has raised a bumper crop of such addicts.

Epic fantasy, a century ago, began with cautionary tales, dealing with the negative parts of the Tao. The grandfathers of the genre were authors like Lord Dunsany, E. R. Eddison, and Robert E. Howard, whose heroes were often ambivalent and never spotless; there are no Sir Galahads in their work. But they were never mistaken about their villains. Conan’s morals were pretty loose, but the wicked kings and sorcerers that he slew generally needed slaying. This has sometimes been called ‘Grey vs. Black’ morality. The feeling – it is no more than that – is that the White Hats, if there are any, are too clean to beat the Black Hats in a straight fight. You need to bring in a specialist, a Conan, or four Lords of Witchland, or Seven Samurai, who are on the ragged edge of the Tao themselves, and have often been in trouble, and are experts at getting out of it. The ‘rules of engagement’ for a Conan are very simple: No holds barred, and Crom favours the strongest.

In the next generation, the Inklings and their immediate heirs raised the moral tone. Tolkien is often criticized for his ‘simplistic’ approach to morality; but it is his critics who are simplistic. Frodo does not destroy the One Ring because his purity gives him the strength of ten. He, in fact, does not destroy it at all, but actually succumbs to its temptation. But because he stays within the Tao, and serves it faithfully as long as his strength and sanity last, the Tao serves him also. He has the help of all peoples of good will, Elves, Men and Dwarves, Wizards and Hobbits: not just the other members of the Company, but Galadriel and Faramir, and the whole armed strength of Rohan and Gondor. Even Gollum helps him, for a while; and in the end it is Gollum who fulfils the Quest. The really simplistic morality belongs to Sauron, who only counts his enemies by spear-points, and takes no notice of the Tao. Sauron would have been genuinely afraid if Conan had come after him with the Ring; he thought Aragorn was going to do exactly that. He simply overlooked the damage that many small hands could do in co-operation, because co-operation was not in his moral vocabulary; and that damage turned out to be fatal.

Nowadays, in epic fantasy above all, but to a lesser extent in the other imaginative genres, we are faced with a full-throated reaction against the Tao. Even Conan is too moral for the modern epic writer. The new standard, if we may call it that, is exemplified by A Game of Thrones. There are still good characters and evil ones, and to that extent the Tao is recognized; but the evil ones always win. The quickest way to get yourself killed, if you are a nobleman in Westeros, is to do a good turn for somebody else. In George R. R. Martin’s invented world, the Tao really is a tribal superstition, and those who follow it are chumps – and then they are dead. The mortal sin of the Starks is to be too good for the world they are living in, and they pay for it in blood.

Now, Martin is careful, when speaking of this matter outside of his fiction, to point at all the historical examples of evil rulers, and claim that he is only portraying the world as it is. But he is not; he is portraying a ‘Crapsack World’ in which all the evils are pooled together, without any of the good that enabled them to survive in reality.

One model for Westeros is England during the Wars of the Roses; but those wars, it happens, were exceptionally bloodless even by the standards of mediaeval Europe. There were no more than about twenty battles all told, spread over a period of about thirty years. Even in those battles, casualties were light, seldom more than ten percent of the relatively small forces engaged. And the contending armies took considerable care not to kill civilians, destroy crops, or sack towns, because those things were precisely what they were fighting to control. Moreover, both the Lancastrians and the Yorkists were devout Catholics. True, they each believed that their respective contender for the throne had a divine mandate to rule; but they also believed that a king could forfeit that mandate by evil-doing, and in fact, each side believed that the other side’s contender had done just that. Richard III lost the battle of Bosworth Field because many of his own supporters believed he had lost the right to rule, and deserted to Henry Tudor.

Again, Martin can point to the web of intrigues and assassinations in Renaissance Italy. The Lannisters bear strong points of resemblance to the Borgias. But the Borgias were a disease, a passing phenomenon. They had no genuine power base of their own; they were a Spanish family that became powerful in Italian politics when one of them manoeuvred his way into the Papacy. Control of the Church gave him almost unlimited funds with which to buy temporal power over the Italian cities, and he tried to set up his illegitimate son as ruler of the whole country. But the Borgia power was parasitic; it had no roots in the country; it depended on foreign money, and when the Pope died, the family’s power faded away in just a few years. We are supposed to believe that the Lannisters have been a power for generations, when they routinely exercise that power in ways that would destroy its very basis in a short time.

In fact, no ruler can stay in power for long without substantially accepting the Tao. Consider the ‘Red Wedding’. One noble family proposes an alliance by marriage with another: well and good. But the bride’s family, which proposed the alliance, massacres the groom and his whole family at the wedding itself. This is not a violation of Christian morals only, but of the core of the Tao as recognized by all civilizations. The pagan Greeks would have been outraged by the violation of xenia. The pagan Romans would have been outraged by the abuse of amicitia, and would never have married into that family again. A Confucian would decry the breach of familial impiety, and say that the offenders had lost the Mandate of Heaven. It is not just that the act would have been swiftly and thoroughly punished. It could never have been organized on such a scale in any society where the Tao was taken seriously. The troops who carried out the butchery would have refused to obey their orders; or else (being outside the Tao themselves) they would have turned their swords against their own masters, and massacred both sides for their own profit.

In fact, we do see factions and cabals that wield power in something like the way that Martin describes. We see it in organized crime; but as Ben Kingsley said to Robert Redford in Sneakers, ‘Don’t kid yourself. It’s not that organized.’ In Martin’s view, those who follow the Tao are sheep, those who don’t are wolves; and the wolves, always and everywhere, prey upon the sheep. The evil preferentially destroy the good, and evil always wins. But this is not what we observe in life. Organized crime employs hit men, but nearly always to kill other criminals. Crime families and syndicates go to war against one another; they cannot go to war against society, just as a parasite cannot afford to kill its host. And society, being under the Tao, has resources that the criminals cannot draw upon. For there are not only sheep and wolves; there are also sheepdogs. The wolves may try to corrupt the sheepdogs, and sometimes they succeed. But they have neither the numbers nor the unity to attack them directly.

In effect, the ruling classes of Westeros, and many others like them in recent fantasy, are crime syndicates in a world without law. But it is the law that makes the crime possible. The vast majority of the people need the Tao to do business with one another, and to make the whole society function. Part of that function is enforcing the Tao through laws, and resolving disputes between people when reciprocity breaks down. This is not a function that we ever see the epic gangsters performing. They are too busy planning murders and rebellions. Real criminal gangs are only able to function because someone else does the hard work of holding society together. They never exist as a ruling class; and when they do temporarily become rulers, as with the Barbary pirates of the eighteenth century, or the Somali warlords of our own time, the society breaks down, the people perish, and the profits of crime disappear. Without the Tao, there is no trust between people; without trust, nobody can work and create wealth; and without wealth, there is nobody for the criminals to rob.

Why, then, does this kind of fiction remain popular? I believe it is significant that A Game of Thrones was adapted for television by HBO – that is, by the same network that brought the world a series called Cathouse. It is the pornography of violence and illegality, combined with some relatively mild pornography of the plain old sexual kind; and it caters to a thoroughly jaded and desensitized audience. At bottom, it is a kind of adolescent power-fantasy: the fantasy of the teenaged Viking, turned loose on a metropolis full of easy loot and nubile women, from which all the forces of law have magically disappeared. We see a pretty straightforward version in the Sin City comics. Of course this can only ever be a fantasy, because the forces of law never do disappear. The alternative to policemen and prisons is not anarchy, but vigilante justice, which is a good deal more dangerous to the would-be Viking.

But there are no vigilantes in the fantasy; the adolescent fancy can glut itself on imaginary killing and looting and rape. It can do so all the more readily when it has no experience of these things in real life: the smells, the blood, the screams, the cries for vengeance – the victims who fight back. Even a sheep has teeth and hooves; even a wolf has a breakable skull. At bottom, this is a fantasy for people who have never lived; whose lives have been so soft that mere hardness, in any form, has the appeal of the exotic. To borrow George Orwell’s phrase, it is a kind of playing with fire by people who don’t even know that fire is hot.

So what can we, as writers, do about all this? The best we can do, I believe, is to quietly teach the Tao in our stories; to show the complexity of human life, as an organic chemist shows the complexity of biological life. But people want stories about violence and criminality? Very well; let us tell them. But let us tell the whole story, with the post-mortems and the blood feuds and the vengeance. And let us contrast it with some instances of actual heroism. Critics and publishers, no doubt, will sneer at our ‘bourgeois morality’, and call us ‘simplistic’; for they – it is an occupational hazard – are the most jaded audience of all. No matter; now we can pass them by. We can go over their heads and deliver our stories directly to our readers; and that may be the decisive weapon in this fight.

There does, I believe, come a revulsion; a point where people are no longer content to be fifteen-year-old rebels even in their fantasies, but want more sustaining food for their imaginations. Let us be there to give it to them. We can produce better effects – better conflicts – with chiaroscuro, with darkness and light, than the nihilists can ever produce by layering darkness upon darkness.

Beyond that, it is a question of access; and that is largely a matter of publicity. If a work of superversive fiction were as well known to the public as A Game of Thrones, it would sell as well or better. We have seen it before: it happened with The Lord of the Rings; it happened with Harry Potter. We have not got the media machinery, or the advertising budgets, to crown a Martin; we cannot conquer Sauron with the Ring. But we have that element that Sauron never took into account; we can co-operate. We can speak up for each other. Those of us who are worst at promoting our own work, it often turns out, are the best at promoting the work of others, because our own egos are not involved. When a man praises his own work, we say, ‘Of course he would do that,’ and ignore nine-tenths of what he says. It is when he praises other people that we take notice.

This, too, is part of the Tao; and it will serve us well, if we consent to serve it. The co-operation of many small hands, or as people say nowadays, crowdsourcing, can move mountains that the old mass media had to let strictly alone. I believe that millions of readers, movie-goers, and TV-watchers are athirst for heroes as well as villains, but at present they are only hearing about the villains, because the big media are braying about villains in unison. Let us raise a chorus of small voices. In the end, I believe we shall drown the villains out. It’s time to speak up for the Tao. For, like carbon, that is where the life is.

 

—

Thank you, Tom. That was brilliant!  

For more of Mr. Simon's work, you can read his works, which are showcased between the two posts, or visit his blog.

Superversive Literary Movement Anniversary Essay!

Those of you who have joined us in the last year may not be aware that before the Superversive Literary Movement, there was still Superversiveness. It existed in the form of Mr. Superversive himself, the astute and witty essayist, Tom Simon. 

When John and I conceived of the idea of the Superversive Literary Movement, we inquired of Mr. Simon as to whether he would be willing to allow us to use his LiveJournal handle for our new flegling lit movement. Not only did he kindly agree, but he graced this blog with our very first article, back in October of 2014.

Now, a year later, Mr. Simon strikes again with another excellent article. The first part of it, the scientific analogy, appears today. The second portion, the meat (or Tao) of the essay, will appear next week.

 

A collection of Mr. Simons excellent essays on Tolkien and our craft.

 

Life, Carbon, and the Tao

by

Tom Simon

A year has gone by since the Superversive blog officially kicked off, and during that time, as they say, life has happened. As writers, we always need to go back to that. Part of the deep malaise that afflicts our art form (and many others) is that it is too easy to be influenced. It becomes fatally easy to reuse tropes and characters and ideas from other stories, or other art forms; it takes an effort of will to go back to reality and look at it with fresh eyes. There is, I suspect, no such thing as strict realism in fiction – reality is too complex, too big, too un-story-like – but every story needs to be rooted in reality at some point. Not reality as we would like it to be – that is part of the flight of fancy on which the story takes us – but just as it is.

Today, as I look at reality, I find myself thinking of two questions, which, if answered badly, can lead our field up a blind alley. The first one arose in Golden Age science fiction, and led a lot of writers astray on a technical point. The second one arises in every form of fiction, and leads whole cultures astray. But there is a curious resemblance between them, and the answer to the first question, I find, sheds light on the second.

Mr. Simon also produces high quality fiction.

 

The first question:

What's so special about carbon?

There used to be a recurring trope in science fiction about ‘carbon-based life forms’, as distinguished from all the other kinds of life forms based on other elements. Silicon was the most popular, for good and plausible reasons; plausible, but alas, not sufficient.

Life requires complexity. The simplest microbe is a pullulating chemical factory in which thousands of types of complex molecules interact and collaborate to produce the delicate balance of stability and change that we refer to as ‘being alive’. There are good reasons, grounded in information theory, to suppose that life cannot be supported by a system much simpler than that.

There are three ways of joining atoms together, and two of them are not helpful for our purpose. Ionic bonds only form simple molecules. Metallic bonds don’t really form molecules at all, but masses of solid metal, with the same simple pattern repeated over and over. Covalent bonds are where the action is. Some elements don’t form covalent bonds at all, and we can scratch them off our list. Others form anywhere from one to four bonds per atom, and clearly, the more bonds an atom has, the more complex structures it can participate in. We could build molecules as complex as we liked out of atoms with a valency of 3; but the real winners are the carbon group elements, the only ones with a valency of 4. If we form a chain or ring of carbon-group atoms, we have plenty of free bonds left over, on which we can hang any number of other atoms; and this gives us the complexity that we require.

There are six elements in the carbon group: carbon, silicon, germanium, tin, lead, and flerovium. Tin and lead behave as metals, and germanium as a semi-metal: that is, they normally combine by metallic bonds. An atom of lead, tin, or germanium may form covalent bonds with other elements, but not, as a general thing, with other atoms of the same element; so we can cross those three off the list. Flerovium is an artificial element, never found in nature, with a half-life of a few seconds, and only a few dozen atoms of it have ever been observed. Scratch flerovium.

That leaves carbon and silicon; and to SF writers of the Golden Age and thereabouts, silicon looked like a good candidate for the formation of life. It is abundant, it readily forms covalent bonds, it has a valency of 4. In theory, every kind of carbon-based atom has a silicon-based analogue, and we could readily imagine a whole biology built up with silico-proteins and silico-nucleic acids. But in practice, those analogues never form. Silicon bonds with silicon easily enough, but much more readily with either hydrogen or oxygen. In nature, we never see one silicon atom bonded to another. Even the silicone compounds have oxygen atoms alternating with the silicon: Si–O–Si–O, never Si–Si. The Earth’s crust contains an enormous amount of silicon, but all of it is combined with oxygen, usually in the form of silica.

Carbon, too, combines more readily with oxygen or hydrogen than it does with carbon, but the difference of bonding energies is much smaller. So a plant, for instance, can invest the energy it receives from the sun to break apart carbon-oxygen bonds in CO2, and get most of that energy back by linking the carbon atoms together to form the backbone of carbohydrates or proteins. It would take much more energy to break up SiO2 and link the silicon atoms together, and even then, the silicon chains would be very unstable, and would go poof in the presence of either oxygen or hydrogen. Since hydrogen is the most common element in the universe, and oxygen is the most common element in rocky bodies like the Earth, it’s safe to say that silicon-based life is a non-starter. One still hears of it occasionally in ‘soft’ science fiction, but it has no place in hard SF, any more than the canals of Mars, the oceans of Venus, or for that matter, H. G. Wells’ gravity-proof mineral, Cavorite.

We speak of organic chemistry and inorganic chemistry, as if it were an equal division; but this is not so. We call a compound organic if it contains carbon, and inorganic if it does not. Even though carbon is only one element out of a hundred-odd, inorganic compounds are vastly outnumbered by organic ones, and all new discoveries in chemistry can only increase the odds still further. If you look at the molecules that are complex enough to serve as the building blocks of life, whether Earth life uses them or not, they all contain carbon – every single one. One day, we may discover a kind of life that does not depend on chemical bonds at all; a life form, perhaps, that relies entirely on the direct interactions of high-energy fields in a plasma medium, to which it would not matter what kind of atoms the plasma itself is made of. We cannot say that such a thing is impossible; but we can say that silicon-based life is impossible. On Earth, or in any kind of planetary or deep-space environment, carbon is where the life is.

Next week: Question Two: What is the Tao?

Tom's essays also appear in Sci Phi Journal 

(This one with a story by John as well.)

 

For other writings by Tom Simon, visit his blog.

Comments

HMS Mangled Treasure: or The Rescue of Mr. Spaghetti

I don't think I explained earlier why I like Sci Phi Journal so much. Yes, it has great stories. Yes, it has published John and I. Yes, it is open to Superversive featuers (Folks have asked where to publish Superversive stories. Sci Phi Journal may be the answer–if it can stay afloat.)

But those, while great, are not the thing I like best. 

What I like best about Sci Phi Journal is: the opportunity it has granted to some young up and coming authors, like Josh Young, Brian Niemeyer, and Ben Zwychy (Look! Not a single vowel! Cool name, eh?) There are not many venues today that are open to launching new writers. Sci Phi Journal, however, was devoted to choosing stories based on merit, whether the author was old and established or young and new.

In an effort to encourage folks to try the magazine, here is the opening of my story in Issue #5. (Picture below from the story.)

HMS Mangled Treasure

Or

The Rescue of Mr. Spaghetti

[Though I did not put this in the magazine, this story is dedicated to my friend Anna Hall and her grandson. What a brave, brave woman she is!]

 

“Pirates, you say?” asked the detective who stood on Clara’s front stoop. At least Clara thought he was a detective, since he wore a fedora and a trench coat and looked disturbingly like a Humphrey Bogart clone. He could have been the claims adjuster, however. She had talked to so many people, she had lost track.

Clara put her fists on her hips. “Listen here, Buster. Maybe you want me to lie to you – like that punk of an ex of mine did last time this happen. Tell you some comfortable story about car thieves and let it go at that. But that ain’t gonna happened!” She shook her head for emphasis,  sending her many cornrows flying and wagged a finger at him.  “I’m one woman who respects the truth, and that. Is. Not. Going. To. Change!”

Usually, this was the place where they shot her the “you should be locked away” look. This guy just nodded calmly, like he was on the set of Dragnet or something. Cool as a cucumber, he was.

“Pirates towed your car, Ma’am. Is that right?” he asked again. He spoke with a Bronx drawl, so that his “that” sounded like “dat”. Clara had never heard a Bronx accent in real life. She kept expecting him to drop it and talk like a real human being.

“Yes!” she snapped.

“That’s all right, Ma’am. I believe you.”

 “You…you do.”

“Sure thing, Ma’am. These pirates have been towing cars all over town.”

Clara sighed. It felt good to have someone believe her for a change. It had been a while since anyone had believed her about anything. Still, it took all the fight out of her.

“Any idea who’s behind it?” she asked as nicely as she was able.

The detective nodded solemnly. “A pack of the worst supernatural scum in Fairydom.”

Just great. It would be that the guy who finally believed her was three crayons short of a box. Clara she cocked her head and fixed him with the look that her miserable excuse of an ex used to call the Hairy Eye.

“Faeries towed my car?”

The detective met her gaze square on, completely unfazed by the Hairy Eye. That in itself was amazing.

“Ma’am,” he drawled. “you just told me that Pirates stole your car and sailed away – in the middle of Chicago, and I believed you. Common etiquette dictates you should extend to me the same courtesy.”

Clara frowned. The guy seemed calm and reasonable. Not what she expected from a crazy, but then she had been an ER doc, not a psychiatrist. Maybe real crazies were as cool as cucumbers. It would certainly explain why he dressed and talked as if he had walked out of a 1940s movie.

 “Look here, Mr. Spade-wanna-be. Pirates is one thing…” Clara froze, her mouth wide open, because at that moment, she remembered something.

A terrible sensation spread through her body, much like what she imagined it might feel like to be stung by scorpions. Tears pricked threateningly at her eyes. She let out a low warble of a moan.

“Mr. Spaghetti!” she wailed. “He’s locked in the car!”

“Is that your dog, Ma’am?” the detective asked.

Clara shook her head, nearly whipping him with her cornrows. Next time, she would stand a little closer and wap him good.

“No. A doll. My son’s favorite doll.” It shamed her that her voice broke. “He’s going to be inconsolable.”

“Children lose dolls all the time, Ma’am. Part of life.”

Clara turned on the poor man, showing her teeth like a wolf. “Is that so? Why don’t you come home and explain it to my son. He’s eight years old, weighs nearly seventy pounds, and has the language capacity of a delayed two year old. You come over to my house tonight, and you explain to Sammy what happened to his Mr. Spaghetti!”

The detective lowered the brim of his fedora. “I’ll get your car back, Ma’am.”

You can find the rest here.             

Comments

Sci Phi Mag Needs Us!

Sci Phi Journal needs help! 

For those who are not familiar with Sci Phi Journal, it offers science fiction stories that have a philosophy. Sci Phi offers a venue for the very kinds of stories that we all want to read but seldom get to see. It features some of the best new authors, like Josh Young and Brian Niemeyer, and a number of others. Both John and I have had stories appear in its pages.

It would be a real shame if it folded!

What can you all do to help?

If you should feel moved to make a donation, you can do so here. (The donate button is on the right. You may need to page down.)

Or, if you would like to help a good cause AND get some high quality fiction, you can buy the issue with John's story:

http://www.amazon.com/Sci-Phi-Journal...

My story, "HMS Mangled Treasure: The Rescue of Mr. Spaghetti", takes place in the background of my Prospero series. It features Prospero Inc. foremost detective, Mab, facing car-stealing fairy pirates in Chicago. 

You can get it here.

Other issues available here.

Also, prayers for Jason Rennie, the editor and publisher of Sci Phi Journal, would be really wonderful!

Thanks!

Superversive Blog: If You Had Introverted Intuition, My Dinosaur

Third in our ongoing series of articles of Speculative Fiction meets Jung as remodeled through the work of Ruth Johnston in her new book: Re-modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance

 

 

SF Culture Posts 

 

Part One: What Forces Drive the SF Culture War?

Part Two: Optimistic in the Night Land

 

Part Three: If You Had Introverted Intuition, My Dinosaur

Q: Welcome back, everyone. Ruth, can you give our readers a quick reminder of where we are?

In the last two articles, we talked about a way that Sensing and Intuition can be paired in personality, and for ease of discussion in the interview, I called them A and B. Let's look now at the B pairing and how it might influence the worldview presented in someone's fiction.

 

Q: In our last installment we spoke about John's Night Land stories, and the type of ideas and images produced by what you have dubbed the A combination. Now let's look at a story that shows the B combination: " If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love,"  by Rachel Swirsky. How do you see it as an example of the personality patterns you're talking about?

A: I think this story is a wonderful example of the hardest to explain, most mysterious mental function we can observe in personality: Introverted Intuition. Both kinds of Intuition are involved in a search for meaning, but Introverted Intuition is particularly intent on finding cloaked, disguised, suppressed truth.

I think that's what this story is about. Of course, it isn't really a story; it's a scene that poses questions about meaning. There isn't any movement in plot, rather the motion consists of a gradual revealing of the speaker's state of mind. The scene: A woman sits by a hospital bed, where her fiancé, an archeologist, is in a coma. He was beaten by five drunken men for unknown reasons. The only dinosaur in the story is in her imagination, of course, as she envisions what would have been different if he had been even a small carnivore. The title poses the question: what if, instead of being who you are, you had been something else?

I think the key to the story is that she feels a small Tyrannosaurus Rex would have been a truer form for the soul of the man she loves. It would reveal his true nature, whereas his powerless natural appearance forms a kind of mask that makes him look like he ought to be a victim. The exercise in imagining is pointless if being a dinosaur wasn't somehow a truer truth than the natural one; otherwise we could ask what if he were a Mack truck or an onion. By emphasizing that the dinosaur would be the same size as the human, she is making it clear that she sees the transformation as revelation, not random change. "If you actually looked like your true inner nature, my love, then people would see that you are strong and this would be a deterrent to getting hurt."

When you posit that the appearance of a human being might be a disguise, a false archetype that covers truth, you are deep into Introverted Intuition's territory.

 

Q: There are many fascinating ideas in your new book, but the one that I found the most revolutionary of all was your redefining of Jung’s terns Introverted and Extroverted. Could you tell us a little more about this?

"Introverted" is so often used to mean shy or unsociable, but when I use it, I mean that it's connected to an inborn knowledge that's much like animal instinct. I often compare it to a rabbit's inborn sense of what the sky should look like, sort of a template for normal safety. The template includes clouds, trees, and fluttery songbirds. Anything that moves like a hawk is not in the template, and the rabbit should not give it the benefit of the doubt, even if it turns out to be just the neighbor kid's RC airplane. Introverted parts of personality are idealistic, inflexible, and usually a bit negative.

Part of each personality is rooted in this inborn instinct, while the other part is flexible, exploring, pragmatic, optimistic and open to new ideas. That's why I mean by "Extroverted," and I probably annoy half your readers by capitalizing the word, but it's to remind of the novel meaning. I don't mean liking to go to parties, I mean the opposite of the rabbit scanning the sky. Things are going to be okay, change is fine, learn as you go, take things as they come.

These new meanings for Introverted and Extroverted are of key importance because they explain why everyone has certain things that they simply cannot accept as true or real, even when the evidence is staring right at them. Their inner Introverted template excludes those possibilities, and the template is actually stronger than the facts. People can be rigid and idealistic about appearances, relationships, logic, and–this is the weird one I'll try to explain–a sense of meaning.

 

Q:  A sense of meaning? That sounds quite interesting but hard to put into words. Please do continue.

In the last article, we talked about how Introverted Sensing is idealistic about human social roles, thinking strongly in archetypes like mother, father, child, knight, or villain. By contrast, Introverted Intuition actually suspects archetypal roles of being nothing but masks or Potemkin villages to fool us, concealing true meaning from our searching eyes. This doesn't mean that everyone whose personality includes Introverted Intuition dislikes stories about knights! But there's a pervasive sense of suspicion about appearances. When they see a row of presidential candidates, they suspect that the ones who look "out of central casting" may be quite different from what they seem.

Introverted Intuition gets balanced by Extroverted Sensing, which is carefree about appearances, willing to take them as they come. Depending on the role it plays in personality, it can really make an "anything goes" attitude. A strong sense of Extroverted Sensing finds it easier to accept things and people that don't fit inborn notions. This might mean less discomfort around people from foreign places who look, smell and behave really differently. It usually means more ability to keep up with changing visuals and sounds in real time, perhaps in sports. Most science fiction geeks who have Extroverted Sensing use it in the background, as a subroutine of their neural networks. They might be better at athletics than other geeks, or perhaps not even that. But they often have superior powers of real-time observation; Sherlock Holmes used Extroverted Sensing.

So for the pairing I've called B, what you look like isn't very important, and it can be changed and even twisted a lot. What matters is what you mean.

 

Q. As Spock would say, Fascinating. Moving from the theoretical to the specific, is that where the dinosaur comes in? Changing appearances?

A: Yes, the key is that if he could look like a dinosaur, appearances might change, but meaning would be truer. The writing looks at different aspects of how she'd relate to him as a dinosaur, and it goes into fanciful ideas, like touring Broadway, but underneath the silliness is the sense that if appearances could be shifted to match truth, good things would happen. When the man is a dinosaur, she realizes that she could not marry him, but then human knowledge and skill would move forward and they would both find other kinds of happiness. The emerging truth–that he is powerful and can fight back–would cause loss, but its emergence would also bring gain. Whereas when he looks like a mere man, limited to his body's form, bad things happen.

Here we see the fundamental fear of Introverted Intuition: that a covered, disguised truth will remain unseen. Its Introverted idealism and negativity are directed to this end: that no buried truth will escape discovery.

 

Q: Lol  “That no buried truth will escape discovery.” That sounds like it should be the personal motto of nearly every main character I’ve ever invented. What an excellent phrase!

A: It's certain true of Rachel Griffin!  Her personality is hard to pin down because she's also gifted with perfect visual memory, which for good or ill the rest of us just don't have.

 

Q:  How does this drive to uncover truth apply in this situation?

A:  When Intuition is Extroverted, as in the A pairing discussed last time, it's like a stargazer exploring all the ways stars can be connected as constellations. Extroverted Intuition has unbounded enthusiasm for drawing all possible lines, seeing no connections as meaningless and only concerned lest any be left out. It's confident that some apparently trivial connections will turn out to form very important new shapes.

But when Intuition is Introverted, it's more like an AI robot mapping a vast prairie dog town. On the surface, little is visible, but that appearance is misleading. When the robot starts out, it doesn't know where the tunnels will lead, but it does know that they will lead to certain expected places: sleeping burrows, escape tunnels, and winter food storage rooms. Could we find literally anything? No. But could we find something hidden? Oh yes.

At each point when the robot pauses, it has a choice to turn in any direction and go forward at any speed, but not all choices are equal. Some choices will slam it into a dirt wall, and other choices will rush into a short dead-end. As the robot explores, it learns to ping tunnels and determine whether they're worth going down. It maps as it goes, and eventually it can pause at a tunnel mouth and guess–nay, know–that this new tunnel connects to another well-explored section. After some time, the robot probe feels free mark some tunnels briefly but not explore them. It already skips the option of ramming into dirt walls, and now it skips some tunnels and rooms as well.

So the mood and attitude of this type of Intuition is more restricted, less expansive and optimistic, than the Extroverted kind in "A." It feels like it's tracking down something that's already somehow known in a gut-feeling way. It's much more like a detective than like a stargazer.

 

Q: You mentioned that you had taken the time to read some of Rachel Swirsky’s other works. Do you see similiar traits in them?Q: Do you see the same traits in Rachel Swirsky's other work?

In "All That Fairy Tale Crap," her Cinderella narrator explicitly states that "we are all escaping from archetypes." The prince is a drag queen, the glass slipper is part of a kinky fetish, and the stepsisters may be ugly but they're as sympathetic as anyone else presented in the sketch. The story's main (and perhaps only) point is to show how every folk-story image is a false front.

In the poem "Black, White, Red," another fairy-tale girl is a bride in white, but soon everything turns ugly as the best man drugs and rapes her. "Her prince was a mirage/ dreamed between bloodthirsty men." But it's not just the prince archetype the poem is debunking; "huntsman, dwarf, neglectful father" are also (archetypal) images involved in hurting this girl. In the last lines, literature is posed as a deceitful escape, a kind of death, that the girl can run into: where maybe colors will be less stark and bad things won't happen. She seems to suggest that stories themselves are a kind of archetypal disguise. Further, the poem's violence suggests that discovering truth in its gore (red, black, white) is better than hiding behind a story concept (pink, gray, beige). This message is the core of the B polarity (of Introverted Intuition and Extroverted Sensing). Use vivid observation to strip away false appearances and discover truth: the only important archetype.

 

Q: I can see from your examples that Ms. Swirsky and I are on opposite pages when it comes to our philosophy of writing. I am guessing that these personality qualities you are identifying probably tie into the distance between our world views. How confident are you in the ability to make a direct connection between someone's personality and writing?

A: Reading someone's mind is always pretty dicey. What I can say with confidence is that written work definitely presents a worldview that can be described in my personality terms, and that in the cases where I can check, usually the actual personality matches. I'm sure there are super examples within science fiction, but I'll have to step outside of SFF. Take George Orwell. We have a large body of material about him: essays, books, and personal letters, as well as descriptions by people who knew him well. It's not hard to get a sense of who he was, and I'm confident in tagging his personality type as INFJ, which is one with Introverted Intuition—with the whole "B" polarity in fact. His works do tend to project various aspects of the B combination.

Orwell's 1984 is a great example of Introverted Intuition at work. He posits an idealized society in which every apparent archetypal appearance is covering something completely opposite. Not only that, but part of uncovering truth is to exercise Extroverted Sensing through sights, sounds, tastes and the sensual pleasure of sex. In Re-Modeling the Mind, I used a passage from one of Orwell's other works to illustrate the observational powers of Extroverted Sensing. He really does seem to have a close match of human personality and Perceiving worldview in his writing. This may not always be the case, but so far I keep finding it. We already talked about John's match between personality and work, and I think we can say the same for you, that you also have the "A" combination of flexible Intuition with strong preference for archetypal human images.

 

Q:  What about readers? Do reader preferences always match their own personalities?

A: That's a really tough question, and I think the answer is no, but with a qualification. When we find a work of fiction that presents a world we recognize as somehow ours, we're probably feeling the resonance of writing that does harmonize with our Perceiving worldview. These may be the books we go back to or continue to think about. Like John with the Night Land world. We can also fall in love with aspects of the artistry used in works that don't have the same resonance. My personality has the "A" combination like yours and John's, and not at all like George Orwell's, but I love his writing very much. I've read all of his novels, many of his letters and essays. I admire him profoundly. However, the message and world of 1984 don't resonate with me in the way that the message and world of Eliot's Middlemarch do. Eliot's personality was very similar to mine.

It's an important distinction because it would be too simplistic to see this series of articles as pinning down the personalities of readers. I am absolutely sure that there are people with both Perceiving polarities on both sides of the controversy. I still see a way that the issues line up, but it's not in a direct one-to-one correspondence way.

 

Q: When we were first discussing these ideas, we touched upon Eric S. Raymond's idea of literary status envy. His article had suggested that some folks in the speculative fiction field wished for the same kind of respect that literary writers received from the intelligentsia? Can you tell us what you make of his theory and whether it ties into your take on the B polarity?

A: Yes, I think this is a critically important piece that can only be understood by first understanding the fundamental goal of Introverted Intuition: using language to carry out the revelation of hidden truth. First let's stipulate that all good writing uses language to reveal truth.

Now I'll draw from Annie Dillar's 1981 work Living by Fiction, which distinguishes between "plain" and "fancy" writing. Plain writing is what Orwell meant when he said, "Good writing is like a windowpane." It doesn't distract the eye from its object. Fancy writing, on the other hand, creates a beautiful surface; if it were a window, it would be wavy or colored glass.

"If You Were a Dinosaur, My Love" uses what Dillard would call fancy language, and there's a philosophical purpose. When we're writing about plain things, we use plain language. The same hospital room (in the story) could be described so that the words didn't call attention to themselves. Like a clear window, it would show us the bed with its coarse sheets and shiny rails, and the squeak of a nurse's shoes as she walks past. In plain language, the story would tell more of the story. It might end with the idea, "I wish you had been a dinosaur so that you'd have killed the men." But the story, written this way, would not explore the hidden true meaning of who the man was. It would present what Extroverted Sensing sees as an accurately-modeled appearance, but that wasn't the writer's purpose. The purpose was to meditate on the reality of identity and unreality of appearances. In order to present the inner-identity truth as primary, the story had to use "fancy" language.

There's a close link between abstract ideas and figurative language. When we present ideas, we can't describe them as if they were things. We convey them by making the surface of our art depict the ideas, so that the surface calls attention to itself instead of moving the "eye" directly to the things. Here's what Dillard said in her book:

" We have seen in twentieth-century painting that the art of mind and the art of surface go together. When painters abandoned narrative deep space, their canvases became abstract and intellectualized. With its multiple metaphors and colliding images, and embellished language actually abstracts the world's objects. Such language wrests objects from their familiar contexts. We do not enter deep space; we do not enter rounded characters; we contemplate them as objects."

Introverted Intuition is deeply interested in wresting objects from their familiar contexts so that we're not fooled into regarding the familiar appearances as their whole truth. Writers who have Introverted Intuition in their personalities may use plain, direct language: George Orwell is a great example of one who did. But when their purpose is to create verbal art that "wrests objects from their familiar contexts," they will be strongly drawn toward language that directs the eye away from the thing, and toward the new way it's being presented.

 

Q: That is an interesting and somewhat subtle concept.  Can you give us another example to help us grasp it more completely?

A: Yes, here's another good example of the same phenomenon, Eugie Foster's 2009 Nebula-winning story, "Sinner, Baker, Fabulist, Priest; Red Mask, Black Mask, Gentleman, Beast." In this story, a utopian/dystopian city ruled by a queen has one main law: every morning, you have to put on one of the masks that will control your identity for that day. The story's events first establish how this works, then depict the narrator's bitter discovery of truth. First, the concept of the story is a perfect fit with the B polarity: Introverted Intuition has two anti-mask revelations at once. The narrator learns the truth of how the techno-masks control them, but the story itself also suggests the extent to which roles we play are masks that control us. Second, the story's language is very sophisticated and beautiful, even as it describes at times ugly things. In drawing the reader's attention to the masks, it also draws attention to the words as they mask or reveal ideas.

 

Q: In the next article, we'll talk about how these ideas may explain some of the current controversy. Can you give us just a brief preview of what is to come?

A: I think that the gradual introduction of a different set of standards, and perhaps a different kind of "speculation" in "speculative fiction," is creating some identity crisis in science fiction. Both of the personality combinations I've described have always been part of the SF world, both in its writers and in its readers. But I think that Introverted Intuition has previously been caught up in logical questions about science and technology. It's been hunting down the hidden meaning of how we relate to rapidly-developing new abilities. Extroverted Intuition (in the "A" polarity) has generally used a what-if scenario to set in motion a wild adventure, while Introverted Intuition has most often presented scenarios of withheld truth that must be diligent sought, layer by layer. In exploring how human archetypes may be masks, it often showed corruption in government or a reversal of expectations: the ugly alien turns out to be morally good. Much of the interest in "transhumanism" may come from Introverted Intuition too, as it explores the ways an individual can cross over boundaries of appearance-archetypes, like how a robot may become somewhat human. Gradually, "speculation" about "identity" is moving away from this narrow vein of technology and logic, and this shift is materially aided by the introduction of new literary standards, ones that directly support the goals of the "B" worldview. Together, they support a shift away from technology and toward questions of persons. And then political identities invade and the Galactic War is on.

 

Thank you, Ruth! Another great installment in our ongoing series!

Comments

For more of Ruth’s work:

Re-modeling the Mind: Personality in Balance

Ruth’s extremely interesting site on the Middle Ages: All Things Medieval

Ruth’s excellent book on Beowulf

 

 

Guest Post: Is This The Golden Age of Publishing?

A Golden Age Of Publishing?

by

Jonathan Moeller

 

Is this a golden age for publishing? I would answer with this statement:

In the past eight years, Amazon and the Kindle (and other ebook platforms) have done more for readers and writers than traditional publishing has in the last thirty.

Why?

For writers, the biggest challenge in getting published has always been the vast power differential between new writers and publishers. This phenomenon was easily noticeable. Writers’ message boards and writers’ websites were full of discussions about how to craft the perfect query letter, how best to format a manuscript for submission, how to approach agents, and so on. Writers who received a request for a full manuscript or an agency contract rejoiced, despite the fact that no money had actually changed hands. Once blogs became common, a well-known blog featured an anonymous agent mocking submissions that did not met her exacting standards while commenters cheered her acerbic wit.

So for most writers, Getting Published was the Holy Grail. Unfortunately, conditions for writers inside the walled garden of Getting Published were just as bad as those outside the walls. It takes only a very little research to find abundant tales of editorial incompetence or malice, publisher indifference, and royalty payments magically vanishing through the conjuring tricks of impenetrable accounting. Even as recently as the end of September 2015, veteran writer Dean Wesley Smith noticed a new accounting trick publishers were using to withhold royalty payments from writers. (See http://www.deanwesleysmith.com/17-mil....) In short, publishers seemed at best incompetent and at worst actively malicious. There were exceptions, of course, but writers who were happy with their publishers for a long time were likely the exception rather than the rule.

The reason was for this state of affairs was simple. Writers needed publishers. Publishers did not need writers, and would prefer to deal with them as little as possible. Most of the money came from the big bestsellers, and if a new writer did not like the contract terms, well, there were a hundred others to replace him. Like any relationship with an extreme power differential, it was easy for publishers to abuse their power and become convinced that it was just the way things were done.

The ebook revolution and the widespread adoption of devices capable of displaying ebooks (smartphones and tablets, primarily) changed all this drastically. To paraphrase the writer Clay Shirky, publishing has gone from being a job or an industry or a profession to a button in a web browser. Previously, publishing had been a set of difficult-to-acquire skills – typesetting, printing, and so forth – in addition to the warehouses and retail outlets and distribution channels required to sell printed books. Now all it takes is a properly formatted file and a functioning internet connection to click on the “publish” button.

To put it simply, publishing had become democratized. The power differential had been distributed down to the writers. In other words, a writer no longer needed to seek a publisher. He could become his own publisher without needing any of the cumbersome infrastructure or skills needed to distribute paper books. The old cliché of the self-published writer with a garage full of moldering hardcovers had just become obsolete. Allegedly, it was said of Samuel Colt’s guns that “God made some men small, and some men large; but Colt made them all equal.” To restate that for the topic of our discussion, God might have made some writers large and some writers small, but ebooks could make every writer into a publisher.

The benefits to the writer are enormous. No longer is it necessary to spend years on the futile treadmill of agent and publisher hunting. A writer is completely free to succeed or fail on his own terms. Attracting an audience for one’s work, of course, is just as difficult for the self-published writer as it is for the traditionally published. But with the ability to completely control one’s own work come powerful tools for marketing it – new covers, new categories, new names, giveaways, and so on. For every complaint that a traditionally published writer has about a publisher’s behavior, a self-published writer can fix by himself.

The financial benefit is also excellent. Wringing royalties from a publisher is a legendarily Sisyphean task. Most of the major ebook retailers pay either monthly or quarterly, and the results are usually neatly totaled in an Excel spreadsheet. Compared to the cryptic twice-yearly (if that!) royalty statements from a traditional publisher, the monthly sales spreadsheets of most ebook retailers are models of crystalline clarity.

The creative freedom is also splendid. In April I had an idea for a new urban fantasy series. In the old days, it would have taken years for the series to find a publisher, even if it ever did. In the new world of self-publishing, I released the first book in the new CLOAK GAMES series in August, and will announce the second book on October 2nd, with a third book planned to follow in December.

For readers, the benefits are also superb. Price is one of the main ones. Why on earth should a new hardback book cost $28? Why should a new ebook cost $13.99 or $14.99? Recently publishers gained the ability to insist upon their own ebook prices and have raised them to protect print distribution. This seems roughly akin to Henry Ford’s competitors raising the prices on their cars to prohibitive levels in order to protect their horse and carriage business. Most self-published novels are priced between $2.99 and $6.99. To use myself as an example, my THE GHOSTS series contains fifteen full-length novels, all them between 80,000 and 100,000 words. Right now the entire series of fifteen books can be purchased for $53.86. By contrast, $53.86 would by three new traditionally published novels.

The ebook revolution has led to a creative explosion as well. Previously, traditional publishing had considered several genres to be dead – westerns, urban fantasy, military science fiction, certain romance genres, and others – and save for a few bestsellers had stopped publishing them. Now numerous writers are working in each of these genres. Still-publishing genres saw an upswing of new books as well. For years, science fiction and fantasy publishers have complained of gradually declining sales, but the self-publishing revolution has breathed new life into them. I have received emails from several people who have begun reading again after getting tired of the offerings from traditional publishers, and I am certain there are many people of similar mind out there.

Finally, the portability of ebooks cannot be overestimated as a benefit. So much of life is spent in waiting – in line at the DMV, in waiting rooms at hospitals or doctors’ offices, in transit on planes, in appointment rooms waiting for meetings to start. Lugging a hardcover book or even a mass-market paperback to all these places is impractical. But as smartphones grow more ubiquitous, nearly everyone carries a phone at all times, and is trivial to install an ereader application on a smartphone. Most even come with bundled ereading applications. How splendid it is to have an entire library at one’s fingertips to fill the otherwise wasted hours of waiting in lines and waiting rooms! I have read novels on my phone while waiting for relatives to emerge from doctors’ offices, and as before I very much doubt that I am the only one.

To sum up, this is indeed a golden age of publishing, and there has never been a better time to be a writer or a reader.

 

For more by Jonathan Moelller, here is his Amazon page.

 

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Live Chat! Superversive SF

Live chat today: 3:30 pm ETA

Come hear us chat about the Golden Age of Publishing:

http://superversivesf.com/2015/10/04/...

Happy Birthday, Superversive Literary Movement!!!

As of today, we are one year old. 

Coming soon: Special anniversary article by Tom Simon, Mr. Superversive himself!

 

 

 

 

Third Repost: The Goals of the Superversive

Here is the third of our reposts, gearing up to October 1st, the first anniversary of the Superversive Literary Movement.

Any new venture needs a mission statement. So, what are the goals of the Superversive Literary Movement?

Well…let me tell you a brief story.

As a child, I distained Cliffsnotes. I insisted on actually reading the book. I would like to instill the same virtue in my children. But recently, I made my first exception.

My daughter had to read Steinbeck’s The Pearl for class. We read it together. She read part. I read part. The writing was just gorgeous. The life of the people involved drawn so lovingly. The dreams the young man had for his baby son were so poignant, so touching.

Worried about what kind of book this  might be, I read the end first. It looked okay. So, we read the book together.

Turns out, I had missed something—the part where the baby got shot.

Not a happy story.

Next, she brought home Of Mice and Men. We started it together. What a gorgeous and beautifully writing—the descriptions of nature, the interaction between the two characters. A man named George, who could be off doing well on his own, is taking care of a big and simple man named Lennie, who accidentally kills the mice he loves because of his awkward big strength. In George, despite his gruff manner and his bad language, we see a glimpse of what is best in the human spirit, a glimpse of light in a benighted world.

The scene of the two camping out and discussing their hopes of someday owning their own little farm, where Lennie could tend rabbits, was so touching and hopeful, so filled with pathos and sorrow, and so beautifully written. Steinbeck is clearly one of the great masters of word use.

But I remembered The Pearl.  I glanced ahead, but this time, I looked more carefully.

On the next to last page, while discussing how their hoped-for little farm with rabbits is almost within their grasp, George presses a pistol against the back of Lennie’s head and shoots.

Now, in the story, he does it with a terribly heavy heart. He does it for “a good reason”—Lennie accidentally killed someone, but…

That doesn’t make it better.

I sat there holding the remains of my heart, which Steinbeck had just ripped out and stamped on. The devotion of this good man George had led to nothing. All their golden hopes turned to dross, sand.

And it wasn’t just the end. The book was full of examples of “the ends justify the means” type of thinking – such as a man killing four of nine puppies, so that the other five will have a chance.

Very realistic? Check. Very down to earth? Check. Very “the way of the world”? Check.

Why give a book like this to children to read? What are we trying to teach them? That life is difficult and meaningless? That sometimes its okay to kill something we love for a “good reason”? That life is pointless? That dreams and hopes are a sham? That no matter how you try, you cannot improve upon your circumstance, so it’s better not to even hope? (That was what The Pearl was about.)

What possible good is such a message doing our children?

Maybe if a child grew up in posh circumstances and had never seen hardship—maybe then, there would be a good reason for letting them know that “out there” it can get hard.

But this was my daughter—whose youth resembles that of Hansel and Gretel, and not the fun parts about candy houses and witches. There are many things she needs in life—but pathos-filled reminders of how harsh life can be is not one of them.

The book was also full of cursing. I’m not sure I would have noticed, but my daughter kept complaining.

I closed the book and refused to read any more of it. I told her we’d find the answers online. She ended up getting help with it from her brother (who had been forced to read the book at school the previous year) and from a friend.

I’ve seen some of the other books on the school curriculum. Many of them are like this. In the name of “realism,” these works preach hopelessness and darkness.

They are lies!

So, you might ask, why does it matter if our children are being fed lies? They’re just stories, right?

What do stories matter?

Stores teach us about how the world is. They teach us despair, or they teach us hope. In particular, they teach us about the nature of hope and when it is appropriate to have it.

So why is hope—that fragile, little flutter at the bottom of Pandora’s jar—so important?

Because hope needs to be hoped before miracles can be requested.

In life, some things will go badly. True. Some things will go well. But what about everything in between? What about those moments when hope, trust, dare I say, faith, is required to make the difference between a dark ending and a happy one?

If we have been taught that hope and dreams are a pointless fantasy, a waste of time, we might never take the step of faith necessary to turn a dark ending into a joyful one.

Think I am being unrealistic, and my head’s in the clouds? Let me give a few examples.

Example One:

I heard a story on the radio the other day. A woman named Trisha is dying of cancer. She has an eight year old son named Wesley and no one else. No close friends. No relatives. No hope for her son.

Trisha met another Trisha…the angel who ministered to her in the hospital in the form of her nurse. When the news came that her illness was terminal, Trisha worked up the courage to do something astonishing. She asked her nurse: “When I die, will you take my son?”

The nurse went home and spoke to her husband and her four children. They said yes. They not only agreed to take Wesley, they took both Wesley and Trisha into their home, caring for them both as Trisha’s illness grows worse.

What if Trisha, laying in her bed in pain, had not had the faith, the hope, to ask her nurse this question? What would have become of her little boy?

If Trish believed the “realism” preached by Steinbeck and other “realists”, she would never have had the courage to ask her nurse for help.

Example Two:

Don Ritchie is an Australian who lives across from a famous suicide spot, a cliff known as The Gap. At least once a week, someone comes to commit suicide there.

Don and his wife keep an eye out the window. If they see someone at the edge, Don strolls out there. He smiles and talks to them. He offers them a cup of tea.

Sometimes, they come in for tea. Sometimes, they just go home. On a few occasions, he’s had to hold someone, while his wife called the police. Sometimes, the person jumps anyway.

Don and his wife figure they’ve saved around a hundred and sixty lives.

What if Don had believed that hopes and dreams are dross, and he never walked out there? What if he had spent the years standing in his living room, shaking his head and cursing the fact that he bought a house in such an unlucky place?

There are people living lives, perhaps children born who would not have been, merely because Don did not give up on those caught by despair.

Example Three:

Andrea Pauline was a student at the University of Colorado. She traveled to Uganda to study microfinancing for a semester. While she was there, she discovered that some of the local orphan children were being abused.

Andrea refused to leave the country until the government did something. She received death threats. She would not back down.

The government of Uganda took the forty-some children away from their caretakers—and gave them to Andrea. She and her sister now run an orphanage in Uganda called Musana (Sunshine). They have over a hundred children. (Matthew West was inspired by her story to write the song Do Something — http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_RjndG0IX8 )

What if Andrea had believed the things preached by Of Mice and Men and The Pearl?

What if she had come home to America and cried into her pillow over the sad plight of those children back in Africa? What if she pent her time putting plaintive posts on Facebook about how the sad state of the world and how blue it made her feel?

Over a hundred children, living a better life, because one teenage girl refused to give up hope.

This is what the Superversive Literary Movement is for—to whisper to the future Trisha’s, Don’s, and Andrea’s that miracles are possible.

That hope is not a cheat.

The goal of the Superversive is to bring hope, where there is no hope; to bring courage, where without courage, hope would never be manifested.

The goal of the Superversive is to be light to a benighted world.

The goal of the Superversive is: 

To tell the truth.

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Repost Two: Holy Godzilla of the Apocalypse!

Second in our series of reposts gearing up for year to of the Superversive Literary Movement:

 

Holy Godzilla of the Apocalypse:

or

How to Identify a Superversive Story

So, you want to be Superversive? Eager to join the new movement but not sure how to tell if you have? This post will, God willing, help sort out a bit of the confusion.

So, without further ado: The Benchmarks of the Superversive:

First and foremost, a Superversive story has to have good storytelling.

By which I do not mean that it has to be well-written. Obviously, it would be great if every story was well-written. It is impossible, however, to define a genre or literary movement as “well-written”, as that would instantly remove the possibility of a beginner striving to join.

What I mean by good storytelling is that the story follows the principles of a good story. That, by the end, the good prosper, the bad stumble, that there is action, motion to the plot, and a reasonable about of sense to the overall structure.

Second, the characters must be heroic.

By this, I do not mean that they cannot have weaknesses. Technically, a character without weaknesses could not be heroic, because nothing would require effort upon his part.

Nor do I mean that a character must avoid despair. A hero is not defined by his inability to wander into the Valley of Despair, but by what he does when he finds himself knee deep in its quagmire. Does he throw in the towel and moan about the unfairness of life? Or does he pull his feet out of the mud with both hands and soldier onward?

Nor do I mean that every character has to be heroic, obviously some might not be. But in general, there should be characters with a heroic, positive attitude toward life.

However, many, many stories have good storytelling and heroic characters. Most decent fantasies are like that.

Are all decent fantasies Superversive?

No.

Because one element of Superversive literature is still missing.

Wonder.

Third, Superversive literature must have an element of wonder

But not ordinary wonder. (Take a moment to parse that out. Go ahead. I’ll still be here. )

Specifically, the kind of wonder that comes from suddenly realizing that there is something greater than yourself in the universe, that the world is a grander place than you had previously envisioned. The kind of wonder that comes from a sudden hint of a Higher Power, a more solid truth.

There might be another word for that kind of wonder: awe.

Specifically, the awe that comes when you are pulled out of your ordinary life by being made aware of the structure of the moral order of the universe.

That kind of awe.

To be Superversive, a story needs that moment when you are going along at a good clip and you suddenly draw back, because you have been lifted outside of yourself by the realization that there is something Bigger.

(And I don’t mean bigger like Godzilla. Just the God part. No zilla. Unless this Godzilla works for God. Godzilla, Holy Monster of the Apocalypse, or something.)

On this blog, I will often talk about Christian Superversive stories. Stories that have that moment, when the greater truths of the Creator of the Universe are suddenly glimpsed by the reader and/or the characters in the story.

If the Superversive Movement is about storming the moral high ground—bringing a moral order into our stories, adding the power of a greater truth. Then, the most effective stories are likely to be the ones that reflect the author’s highest sense of truth. For me, that means the truths of Christianity, as I understand it.

However, I want to make it clear, right from the beginning, that Superversive literature does not have to be Christian. You can write Jewish Superversive or Buddhist Superversive. It does, however, require a moral order and a glimpse of the awareness of this order in the story.

My favorite movie of all time is Winter’s Tale, the movie made from Mark Halprin’s novel. Winter’s Tale is Jewish Superversive.

What makes it so good is these moments I refer to above, moments that take you out of yourself and make you realize that something Bigger is going on. (Again, not Godzilla…except for Holy Godzilla, who most likely lives in a Pokaball on Batman's belt…so Robin can shout out: Holy Godzilla, Batman! And Batman can shout, "Holy Godzilla, I choose you!" and Holy Godzilla can appear and stomp on the Joker (and probably half of New York, too, but…ah well.)

My favorite TV show, Chinese Paladin Three, is Taoist Superversive. You are going along, minding your own business, enjoying this pure fantasy romp, and suddenly, toward the last third, there is this section where the villain tries to convince the Taoist priest of the futility of the human condition.

The story line suddenly becomes so deep and so touching, so insightful and so unexpected. The depth of the moral questions being presented to the priest character and the horror of what he suffers adds a whole vertical dimension to what had previously been a lighthearted adventure.

It brings a sense of awe.

Two questions come to mind:

1) Can you write Wicca or Pagan Superversive?

Possibly, but it would be difficult. Why? Because fantasy…gods, myths, etc…is the matter of Pagans. If the story starts out about such things, adding more of the same is not superversive.

However, if the story were about, say wizards or nymphs and fauns, or any other worldly matter, and the gods made brief unexpected appearances in which they put across moral ideas that lifted the story to a higher level, that might possibly be superversive. (Gene Wolfe’s Solder In The Mist comes to mind.)

2) Can  Christian Fiction (or Jewish Fiction, or Taoist Fiction) be superversive?

Probably not. It certainly could be inspirational, if done well. But if something starts out already being about these matters, then it is not superversive to introduce them. It is just part of the tale. Such a story could be written in a way that would make it enjoyable to those who love superversive stories, but it would not be superversive in and of itself.

An Example:

I don’t want to give too much away about Winter’s Tale, part of the wonder of the story is that everything is so unexpected. But I think I can describe this scene without ruining too much of the joy.

Crime boss Pearly Soames approaches another man in 1915 New York, reminding the second man that he owes Pearly a favor. He asks for help in his plan to kill Beverly Penn. The second man wants nothing to do with it, but Pearly calls the debt and insists.

Then, suddenly, in the midst of this intrigue scene, Pearly says:

I've been wondering.

With all these trying to go up…and you come down.

Was it worth it, becoming human?  Or was it an impulse buy?

You must miss the wings, right?

Oh, come on. You must.

And in that instant, you suddenly realize that something very different is going on that you first thought, and it opens a glimpse into some greater working of the universe, a glimpse that makes you pause and think…about heaven and fallen angels and what it means to be human and whether it is a good thing or no.

And that, my friends, is Superversive.

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