S. Andrew Swann's Blog, page 8

Speaking of the 80’s. . .

I just finished the 1987 apocalyptic doorstopper of a novel, Swan Song by Robert McCammon.

My first thought:

As 80s as Chuck Norris stabbing a dirty commie.

If any one piece of literature embodied the pop-culture zeitgeist of a particular decade, it is this novel. This book could not be more eighties if it was sporting a mullet and fronting for Van Halen. It’s eighties like a block of government cheese, leg warmers, and slasher movies on VHS. Don’t believe me? Let me list some of the elements we’re introduced to:

The homeless bag lady.
The pro wrestler.
The crazy ‘Nam veteran.
The computer nerd who’s into gaming so much he has trouble distinguishing the game from reality.
A fleet of homemade armor-plated cars straight out of the Road Warrior.
The Cold War, natch.
At least one Rubik’s cube.

My second thought:

The book is enjoyable, but I suspect those with a more sfnal bent may have some substantial problems with it. It works as an apocalyptic fever-dream, or an extended allegory, but if you try to bring any real-world logic to the proceedings after the bombs drop, your brain will hurt. (Example: If you know anything about dressing game, the wolf-hunting scene makes about as much sense as the turkey dinner scene in Eraserhead, and has a similar effect on the audience. ) One of the points to the book seems to be the nuclear war creates a literal hell-on-earth, and everything from physics to biology seems to be twisted to this purpose. In this sense, it may almost qualify as a proto work of bizarro fiction.

Weekend of the Pooka

This coming weekend I will be participating along with other local authors Saturday & Sunday 1:00pm to 5:00pm at the annual Bedford, Ohio “Weekend of the Pooka.” at the Bedford Commons. (730 Broadway Avenue, Bedford, Ohio.)

In addition to myself, attending authors will include Vince McKee, Michael Heaton, Jonathan Knight, James Renner, Gail Bellamy, Kelley Grealis, Laura Peskin, DM Pulley, Les Roberts, Shelley Bloomfield Costa, Irv Korman, Charles Cassidy & Wendy Koile.

In addition to the authors, there will be art and wine

Hope to see you there.

Choice of Games update

My effort on the “Welcome to Moreytown” game proceeds apace. I am currently finishing up chapter seven of twelve, and hope to have eight completed by the end of the month.  Entirely coincidentally, a member of my writing workshop had her game critiqued, which prompted a discussion with yet another member  of the group who teaches game design… (As an aside; is it me, or is there much more overlap between the gaming and SF communities nowadays than there was five or ten years ago?)

Anyway, that discussion brought home what a different mode of writing this actually is, and not just because of the amount of coding that is involved.  It’s almost the inverse of script-writing.  With a script, as a writer, you must leave stuff out.  A lot of stuff.  As a novelist, it can feel like most of the stuff.  Most of the visuals, costuming, stage business, all relies on other people.  That’s why scripts are so lean vs. prose, a feature film script can run about 100 pages, and if there’s more than a couple hundred words a page it’s probably too dense.

With this type of gaming script, you end up writing a lot more than you would with comparable prose.  Code aside, it’s possible for a player to go through the entire thing and only read about half of what you’ve written.  Also, given the permutations, it will be a very rare pair of players who end up reading the exact same portions of it.

Also, what a computer can do, opposed to the old choose-your-own-adventure games, is allow choices that change narrative elements other than the story’s plot progression.  An obvious example, if you play one of Choice of Games’ free sample games, is the swapping of gender.  In the “Choice of Broadsides” game, your gender selection affects the entire navy. But there are other interesting things you can do.  An example from the WiP “Welcome to Moreytown,” is the choice of PC species comes with choosing a primary sense (vision, hearing, smell) that doesn’t do a lot to affect the story, but changes the descriptions of various scenes throughout the game.  Another example, the PC meets an NPC and the player chooses how they see that NPC: irritating, ridiculous, creepy or interesting.  the encounter proceeds roughly the same way for each choice, but the descriptions provided to the PC differ according to that first impression, and it colors every time that NPC is refrenced or encountered through the game.

Needless to say, a much different experience.

 

So why are things so nasty?

You know what I mean. From the presidential election down to what stupid little award our geeky niche genre decides to award itself, we cannot seem to have anything like a polite disagreement anymore.  Everyone gets up in arms about everything from who’s using what bathroom, to who’s cast in what part in a movie no one wanted rebooted anyway. It’s reached the point where it’s necessary to write articles like this.  WTF happened?

The obvious answer is, “the Internet happened.” So now everyone goes on-line, withdraws into their little confirmation bias bubble, consumes all the news that conforms to their worldview only to pop out of their hole to virtue-signal to their tribe, troll the enemy, and block people on Facebook.

The problem with that hypothesis is, when people actually study the issue, the whole “self-contained political bubble theory” tends to leak a little. According to a Pew Research study:

These cleavages can be overstated. The study also suggests that in America today, it is virtually impossible to live in an ideological bubble. Most Americans rely on an array of outlets – with varying audience profiles – for political news. And many consistent conservatives and liberals hear dissenting political views in their everyday lives.

Frankly, political bubbles are probably a lot more permeable nowadays than they were in the good/bad old days of three networks when a kid had to join the army or go to college to be exposed to a political point of view different from wherever they grew up. So what gives? After all, actually interacting with different folks is supposed to be a good way to promote tolerance.

I have a theory, and the Internet and confirmation bias do play a role, but not due to any bubbling.

In fact, I think the opposite is happening.  In days of yore, were you to hear an alien political opinion, chances are the voice of that opinion would have been tested by prior debate, the message honed, practiced and tempered by experience.  In the days before instant viral communications, a political message had to pass through many gatekeepers and face many opponents before it reached you, either on the campaign stump, via the printed word, or over a broadcast network. Ideas from the crackpots, the insane, and the stupid rarely reached beyond their own street corner, and when they did, it was after their message had been polished so shiny that people couldn’t see the crazy for the gleam.

This is no longer the case.

Everyone has a political opinion, and almost everyone feels obligated to share it.  Today they all can.  Nowadays, when someone wishes to rail against conservatives, their opponent isn’t a William F. Buckley Jr. or a William Safire or even their local alderman— it’s “RedneckJesus66” on some YouTube comment thread.  Someone trashes liberals, they aren’t arguing with Adlai Stevenson or John Maynard Keynes— it’s “MoonshineUnicorn37” on Tumblr.

The great evil of the Internet is the unleashing of an army of actual living, breathing straw-men to feed the fires of all political debate.  Everyone’s core conviction that they’re the smart ones and all their political opponents are stupid is now fueled by the fact that any idiot can now publish any screwball idea, and have it carry the same weight as the New York Times.  This means that no one needs a coherent argument anymore, because there’s always some poor sod on the other side that’s published something stupider than they ever will. Nowadays on the Internet, and increasingly in real life, political discourse is always punching down. Everyone now eschews the engagement of ideas, preferring instead, the easy fight against the most idiotic comments from the opposition.

That’s why we can’t have nice things anymore.

Five Favorite Covers

I mentioned on Facebook that the best cover songs are ones that bring something new to the table. There’s something magical when an artist takes an existing song, does something radically different with it, and makes it work. In the following cases, I think the result surpasses the original.

Half Century

Yep, I hit the big 50 today and pretty much the most exciting thing I did today so far was renew my plates and driver’s license. Now I need to dig up that AARP card they sent me.

Pointing at a problem is not the same as identifying it

Late to this party, but apparently science fiction publishing has a major race problem.  The study does the requisite bean counting and discovers, as if it was some sort of surprise, that black authors are underrepresented in traditional SF publishing.  The problem is that’s all it discovers.  When your survey finds only 63 stories by black authors out of 2,093, you really don’t need the survey in the first place.  One would hope that with the effort came some data about causes.  Unfortunately, we don’t get any real insight as to why this is the case. Saying “systemic racism” is simply naming the cause without actually specifying anything, certainly not anything actionable.

Instead, we have data (showing a problem that was obvious beforehand) given in support of anecdotal information. Even the article itself is a little confused about what it’s talking about ; “The advice to write ‘what the market wants’ is code for white characters and white stories.” Which may be an accurate observation, but is conflating two separate issues of representation, that of authors and that of characters. The other examples of “subtle bias” fall into the category of anecdotal data and strongly suggest a confusion between correlation and causation.

This all seems to simply be an exercise to justify attacks on those “subtle biases.”  That’s probably a valid goal in itself, but the problem is there are no particular data here that suggest that addressing those anecdotal issues will significantly alter the demographic issues being reported, and that’s arguably the point of the exercise.  If these anecdotal issues are simply due to the field being dominated by white people, then you might fix every single one and just end up with a field dominated by nicer white people with the exact same demographic breakdown.

If you want to address the issue of author demographics, I can think of a few questions you really need to ask:

Do black people consume SF at the same rate as whites, or are the black/white ratios for readers similar to the ratios of published authors? (The same way the male/female ratio of Romance readers and writers are probably similar.)
Is SF somehow unique in this, or is there a similar demographic breakdown in other genres such as Mysteries, Horror, or Literary Fiction? (And are ratios for writers vs. readers similar?)
Is the racial makeup of published stories the same, more representative or less representative than the racial makeup of submissions?
How many blacks are writing, published or unpublished, vs. how many whites?
How successfully in comparison?
Is there any difference in the number of rejections white authors receive vs. black authors before they’re either published or give up?
Do the numbers for Indie publishing reflect the anecdotal assertion that it is more representative demographically?
What about the success rate for black Indie authors vs. white Indie authors?

Until those are answered in some degree, the only solution people are going to propose is “just publish more black authors,” which would make the particular symptom they’re pointing at go away without addressing whatever fundamental problem is actually going on.

 

How You Aren’t Helping Online

I was pondering making comment on the SF kurfuffle du jour, but many obvious predictable people are making the obvious predictable points, all biases are being confirmed, and if anyone’s going to change their minds on the Internet it will only be upon facial contact with the hard cold unyielding surface of reality, and not by reading my hot take on the matter. So instead of launching into a tirade at what a sorry state it is that things have come to this, I’ve decided to mock how passionate people insist on making fools of themselves complaining about things online. Facebook users take note.

Not knowing what the hell you’re talking about: When you launch into a screed about anything, getting basic facts wrong (such as what is or is not illegal, what is or is not part of a code of conduct) will make you come across as a moron. An order of magnitude worse is saying “I don’t know [X] but I think [Y].” At that point you’re just making crap up, and not in a good way.

Putting the ad hominem before the horse: If there is a debate that person [Z]’s actions are just, right, advisable, problematic or a war crime, starting said argument by stating person [Z] is a known dumpster-fire douchbag coprophagic kitten eater is not doing you any favors. This statement insures that you will only be taken seriously by people who a) know who the hell [Z] is, and b) agree with your assessment. This is a smaller number of people than you imagine, leaving the vast majority of the population to view you as an unreliable nitwit with more axe to grind than argument to make.

The Amazing Kreskin: A combination of the prior two, this is where by the power of ultimate insight you divine the true motives of [Z]. “We know that [Z] is an evil person because they obviously did [Y] because of [X].” This basically translates to “We know that [Z] is an evil person because they obviously did [Y] because of their desire to do evil.” If you state that [Z] “wants” to do something problematic without a direct indication of [Z] expressing that particular desire, you’re at best inferring something that you have no direct evidence for. At worst, it makes it appear that you enjoy libeling people to support your own biases.

Goal-post moving: One great way to broadcast the fact you have a weak argument, few facts, and an inability to let go of a pre-conceived outcome is the following— “Well I heard that [Z] did [X], isn’t that awful?” “Actually [X] never happened, we have a recording, ten eye witnesses, sworn testimony and a major newspaper. . .” “But what about [Y]?”

But they said: If your only argument about [Z] is that [Y] said this or that about them, why are you even in the debate? Just shut up and let [Y] make their own arguments. They can certainly do better than you, since you can’t even come up with any of your own.

Confusing means and ends: “I support the children by pounding kitten skulls into the pavement.” “I don’t think that’s a good idea.” “Why do you hate the children?” “Crushing kitten skulls doesn’t help. . .” “Your critique is an attack meant to keep me from helping children.” “Are you even listening?” “Unleash the kitten stompers on the child hater!”

And this makes me happy.

If you follow me at all, you know I’ve been at this for quite a while now. I’ve written about my first novel, Forests of the Night a couple of times now, but in both cases I talk more about the story than how it was published.  Back in the early nineties I was still in my twenties and still in college.  Instead of a brag shelf, I had a bulletin board covered with rejection slips.  (Do people still do that?)  I had written one execrable fantasy novel that was 120,000 words of learning experience, which, to my credit, I knew was unsalvageable.  Forests was different though.  It was the first writing I’d ever workshopped, and while I received a lot of criticism, I got enough feedback to produce something I thought was publishable.  As one did in days of yore, I sent queries to many, many literary agents. And, upon finding representation, my new agent, Jane Butler (who retired some time ago now) sent Forests off to Sheila Gilbert at DAW.

In 1992, Sheila bought my first novel about an anthropomorphic tiger detective and started my career as a novelist.  I’ve been working with her ever since.  For nearly a quarter century and 23 subsequent novels she has worked with me and supported even some of my more insane story ideas.  Her late husband contributed the map of the planet Bakunin in the front of the Hostile Takeover books.  In addition to giving me editorial notes on my books, she’s asked for input on cover ideas, and some of the suggestions she’s accepted have resulted in some of my favorite cover art. Perhaps most important for my career, and my fans, she’s kept most of those 23 novels in print, including that first one with the anthropomorphic tiger detective. For paperback original genre fiction, that’s not just rare, it’s practically unheard of.

This past weekend, at Worldcon, Sheila got the kind of recognition she deserves. As much as she’s supported me, and all her other authors, it’s gratifying to see the SF community supporting her with a well deserved (and overdue) Hugo.  Congrats, Sheila!

Two random thoughts.

A couple of things to file under, “what the future might look like.”

First, what is the most significant thing the Internet has done to political communication, or communication in general? You know the answer, though it wasn’t the answer you just thought of.  Consider the MediaGlyph, and how it is both the natural product of the sound bite, and a compelling explanation for the state of the current political landscape.

Second, what is the most significant consequence of introducing self-driving cars?  If you didn’t answer “an increase in capacity utilization resulting in a crash of demand for new vehicles,” you may want to read this Zero Hedge article and think about unintended consequences.