S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 24

Ways Not To Promote Your Book, Presidential Edition

In the annals of book promotion, this has got to be up there with the all time bad ideas.

A paperback book was hurled towards President Obama seconds after he completed a Democratic rally in Philadelphia on Sunday, but aides say the incident in no way affected the event.

[...]

The US Secret Service found and interviewed the man who threw the book onstage. He was deemed to be an "overexhuberant" supporter who wanted the President to have a copy of a book he had written, according the Special Agent Edwin Donovan of the Secret Service in Washington. "He was deemed not to be a threat and was not arrested," Donovan told ABC News.

We Can Has Kick-ass Cover?

Why we need fair use

Via here.

Two Bloggers twig onto the dark side of Utopianism

So Scalzi opines on Atlas Shrugged (which I'm currently reading for the first time, via a 64-hour long audiobook.  If you're curious, the book that filled the Atlas Shrugged slot in my teenage-reader political awakening was the Illuminatus! Trilogy.  Yeah, I'm weird that way.) and while I don't have a lot to say about his analysis of the book itself, since I'm just reading it for the first time, I know enough of the plot I haven't read to come up with a bit of a meta-commentary.  Quoth Scalzi:

All of this is fine, if one recognizes that the idealized world Ayn Rand has created to facilitate her wishful theorizing has no more logical connection to our real one than a world in which an author has imagined humanity ruled by intelligent cups of yogurt.  This is most obviously revealed by the fact that in Ayn Rand's world, a man who self-righteously instigates the collapse of society, thereby inevitably killing millions if not billions of people, is portrayed as a messiah figure rather than as a genocidal prick, which is what he'd be anywhere else. Yes, he's a genocidal prick with excellent engineering skills. Good for him. He's still a genocidal prick.

Which is quite right. The dystopia in Atlas Shrugged is as frighteningly plausible as the one in 1984 and Brave New World, since it is based, in large part, on applying Soviet-classic modes of thinking to the US political system. If Rand had written a dystopia like Orwell and had Dagny Taggart broken by the system ala Winston Smith, I doubt Scalzi would have found the premise nearly as ridiculous. The problem comes when we place a set of characters into the crapsack world who know exactly what to do to fix it.

In a novel, that can work. John Galt can shut off production to the rest of the world (in an ironic echo of Stalin and Mao inducing famines through state control of agriculture) because he is RIGHT! He has the revealed knowledge that millions of people must die in order for the world to be saved from disaster.

That brings us to blog number two, which was inspired by this horrid little video:

From Shannon Love's reaction on Chicago Boyz:

However, these kinds of thought experiments do demonstrate how absolute certitude makes it easy for anyone, no matter how humane and compassionate, to calmly rationalize the deaths of billions. At the extremities of events and the associated moral choices, the ends do definitely justify the means.

As a corollary, ideas that claim to predict extreme events with great certainty create the justifications for associated extreme acts. These types of ideas turn abstract moral thought experiments into concrete realities on which people feel compelled to act.

Notice a theme? Maybe we can make it a little more specific:

Those early members of the French Revolution who created The Declaration of the Rights of Man believed that reason could absolutely replace tradition They would never have believed their ideas could possibly lead to the Great Terror, Empire and contienent wide war.

The geneticists who created the idea of eugenics used the best available science of their day. With the imprimatur of science, eugenics became widely accepted by all educated, secular individuals across the political spectrum. It was considered "settled science". No eugenist envisioned their idea would justify the greatest of wars and the Holocaust.

Marxists the world over who rushed to join the newly formed Communist party in 1917 sincerely believed they were contributing to a world free of want, ignorance, oppression and inequality. They did not imagine in the least that the ideas they promulgated would create totalitarian, megacidal regimes that would push humanity to the precipice of extinction more than once.

Or, to put a fine point on it, as soon as some ideology decides that an abstraction is more important than an individual human life, you have established a moral framework for mass murder on an industrial scale.  All Utopias are based on the idea of eliminating the undesirables.

The Frugal Writer

A piece of writing advice I rarely hear, but one that seems appropriate to our digital age, is to never throw any of your work away. Everything you write, finished or unfinished, even the trunk novel that will never see the light of day, is potential material for a future work. Those twenty thousand words you abandoned ten years ago may eventually be the core of a novel proposal next year.

I mean it seriously. Forests of the Night, Hostile Takeover, "The Historian's Apprentice", Prophets. . . all of these stories of mine were the result, at least in part, of resurrecting some piece of fiction I had abandoned, in some cases a decade before. Forests and Hostile Takeover were reworkings of short stories I had written before I was published, I had abandoned the first third of "The Historian's Apprentice" six years before I came back and finished it, and the first chapter of Prophets was written, and ditched, shortly after I finished Hostile Takeover, and long before I had even contracted for a sequel.

And since I am between contracts, I am now eying a project I had initially started for DAW before I abandoned it 20K words in. At the time, around 1998, I was right to switch gears, since I saw no way of really finishing it the way the story had been going. Today, I have a much better handle on my skills as a writer (and after another 12 years writing, one would hope so) and the plot problems that seemed so intractable then actually seem pretty simple now.

So, storage is cheap. Back up everything, and don't throw anything away. You will use it some day.

The next person who says Obama does civil liberties better than Bush deserves a boot to the head

Make that a boot stomping on a human face — forever.

I actually had someone try and pull that on me in a debate, more or less in the sense "BUSH HAZ WORST RECORD ON CIVIL LIBERTIEZ EVAR."

This was true, when he was in office.  But Obama has doubled down on the fascist police state with nary a noise of dissent from the left.  Let us review:

Obama renewed the Patriot Act.
Police now get to place GPS tracking devices on your car without warrants.
X-Ray vans now patrol American streets, and the Feds won't give anyone details where or what they're looking for.
FBI: "All your Internets belong to us."
Obama upps the ante defending Bush's eeevil Warrentless Wiretapping.
Oh, politicizing DoJ law enforcement to give favored groups a pass?  check.
And about Gitmo.
And those military tribunals.
And if you're getting criticized on abusing the power to detain enemy combatants indefinitely?  Stop calling them enemy combatants.
Targeting American citizens by executive order, no due process required.

Yeah, vast improvement.

Unrelated Computer Things to Worry About

Among other things, Google decides there are no Bisexuals.

Computer virus attacks an Iranian nuclear power plant, along with a hefty chunk of the Iranian energy sector.

Trash day at Google?

The Feds want to wiretap your Facebook account.

Elizabeth Moon and the Category Problem of Extremist Islam

Elizabeth Moon upset a lot of people over the week and a half by posting about citizenship, the 9/11 attacks, and the proposed Cordoba cultural center a few blocks from Ground Zero. As she said about building the cultural center, she "should have been able to predict that this would upset a lot of people." There were many folks condemning the perceived nativism and bigotry of her comments, and calls to boot her off her GoH spot at Wiscon. (Wiscon's statement about it here.)

Reading Moon's...

And now for an episode of "what he said."

Over at Mighty God-King we have a critique of the new series, The Event.  Now, I haven't seen the show, and from what I've been reading about it, I don't have any desire to, but MGK's post brings up some very good points that are not just applicable to series television, but to fiction generally.  I can boil it down to a general rule of thumb; in  your book/trilogy/film/TV series, no matter how complex the story is going to become in terms of plot and style and world-building, in the hook—...

Myth and Asshats

So rarely does the universe provide such an enlightening conflation of shallow facile consensus political wisdom, along with elitist literary snobbery as we have in this column by Maureen Dowd.  Dowd has gotten the memo, that Christine O'Donnell is the designated political chew toy for this political cycle.  O'Donnell is the acceptable target.  After all, she was the idiot who spoke aloud some doctrinaire religious ideas about sex on MTV when she was in her twenties, and had the bad sense to ...