Robert Jackson Bennett's Blog, page 14

Book Chick City Review

Wow. I was completely stunned to find out today that Book Chick City has given THE TROUPE a huge 5 star review.

It is almost impossible to adequately describe THE TROUPE without giving too much away. This is a novel that is bleak yet heartwarming, gruesome yet loving, full of hope yet burdened with despair. In the final chapters there is a myriad of emotions that grow through the pages that it takes at least a second read through to thoroughly appreciate Bennett’s message.

This novel was a surprise as I wasn’t expecting it to be as harrowing as it was. The final chapters were so gruesome they were borderline horror and as the reader you weren’t really sure what was happening or how the story was going to play out. I was certain there wasn’t going to be a truly happy ending and had this happened I would have felt cheated. THE TROUPE is a love story but not like any other love story I have ever read as the love is steeped in grief and betrayal. THE TROUPE isn’t for the feint hearted, but for those who want a truly spectacular and mind blowing read I highly recommend it.

Very good things indeed.

I suppose the reason I’m so stunned is that, back when Mr. Shivers came out a whole – what, three years ago? More? Jesus. – Book Chick City’s review was the first bad review I ever got in my career as an author.

I honestly don’t dispute the review, nor do I harbor any ill will about it, since I did not and do not think the book was or is their type of thing – it’s a nasty, spare, dark book that moves quite slowly – but I don’t think authors ever really forget their first reviews, good or bad, justified or unjustified. (Well, justification doesn’t honestly have place in an assessment of a review – a review is a snapshot of how someone feels about a thing. You don’t have to justify it, really. You feel how you feel.)

Anyways, while it’s not the same reviewer as I first got at Book Chick City, I’ve been saying for a while that I think THE TROUPE is quite a bit different from everything I’ve ever done before, and it’s nice to get a suggestion that I’m right about that. Her assessment of the book is exactly what I was trying to accomplish. So while it’s most excellent to see a good review, it’s even better to hear in the review that they received the message you were trying to broadcast.

Likeable, understandable, compelling…

I’ve always personally detested the criticism, “I didn’t find this character likeable,” because it tells me more about the critic than the story. It’s a statement not about the book, but about you, and it doesn’t speak to whether or not the character or the story actually works. And some of the most popular characters in existence are wildly unlikeable.

So over at the Mad Hatter’s Bookshelf, I’ve laid out my feelings on three ways characters can work. This is a bit like trying to take a river and assign one overall color to its waters, and stubbornly refusing to admit that it ever rains or people throw things in the river or a clay shelf might dissolve upstream. But if it makes you think about ways characters work in stories, and if it makes you consider that it might be perfectly fine, if not the point, to disagree with characters, and that this does not affect the success of those characters, then I’m fine saying this fucking river is brown.

I try not to make this blog political

But!

Subterranean Press – To Be Read Upon Your Waking

My novella To Be Read Upon Your Waking can be read for free (possibly upon your waking) over here, at Subterranean Press.

A quote:

I will start with good news. After several weeks of work, I have successfully excavated the entirety of the foundation of the abbey. It is almost exactly as small and rectangular as I’d originally estimated. Bit dull, shape-wise. I have also cleared away much of the door in the floor behind the dais.

 

It is stairs, Laurence. But I have never quite seen stairs like this before. They are very steep, with each stair being nearly two feet tall. It makes no sense to me. The average human heights were much smaller back then, due to malnourishment. They were tiny people, really. But these stairs, which are very much man-made, of course, appear to be made for legs so long I can’t imagine them. Certainly not the stumpy little things they’d have been running around with.

 

And then there are the carvings in the walls of the staircase. I have seen a lot of Medieval Christian carvings, and I have seen no precedence for what I’m finding here. I mean, Christ should show up in at least a couple of these carvings, right? Christ, or Mary, or some saint. But no. They are carvings of the moon, and the stars, and a great endless forest (I think) with huge trees that stretch on and on. And one bas-relief shows there is a house in the center of the forest, a huge, low, wooden thing you imagine pagan kings lived in, with big bonefires bonfires all around it.

Best books of (half of) 2012

THE TROUPE has made Staffer’s Book Reviews Best of 2012 list. I’m told I’ve proooobably been unseated by Joe Abercrombie now, but I’m okay with that, provided I get a fraction of Abercrombie’s sales.

In addition, check out this blog post by Sarah Chorn of Bookworm Blues on disabilities in Speculative Fiction. It’s a doozy.

Vingt-huit

Today is my birthday, apparently. I cannot personally confirm because I was not in anything close to a functioning capacity to observe the date at the time. I am going chiefly by hearsay.

Today I will cook meat and drink wine in great quantities, and spend a lot of time on my porch. It should be fun.

I’m not looking for anything in the way of gifts – the license to throw a party is enough – but a very nice gift, that would be completely free, would be if THE TROUPE got up to 100 ratings on Goodreads. So, as of right now, that’s only 10 more. And it is worth noting that of late, with every new review, the rating keeps crawling back closer to 5 stars.

Have a good weekend, everyone.

Reports of print’s death have been greatly exaggerated

A bunch of fun stuff recently. John H. Stevens has reviewed The Troupe, and got the Great Big Metaphors I was trying to do in it exactly. It’s good thinking-material, for those who wish to think about things.

Rob Bedford has reviewed The Troupe for SFFWorld, and he suggests it might be his favorite book of the year so far, which greatly pleases me.

The new blog Weird Fiction Review has also reviewed The Troupe. I think their estimation of it is mostly positive – I find it a little tough to say. This is one of those cases where I think, “I don’t recall actually trying to do that, but if you think that happened, I’m completely fine with it.” And while they do describe George’s exploits as “boring,” I don’t think it’s in a negative sense, nor do I think they’re wrong: The Troupe is, partially, a workplace story, with characters going their jobs and getting along, and part of that – and a big part of how vaudeville was – is being stuck somewhere waiting for something to happen. So while segments might be boring, I’d at least hope they’re interestingly boring, since George is sitting around being bored with, essentially, a bunch of magical people.

But maybe the biggest win of the past week is that The Troupe got a writeup in The Washington Post.

This is, as you might expect, a pretty big deal. While print may be dead, and while the bloggers have supported The Troupe with great and endearing enthusiasm, at the same time, newspapers still have an enormous amount of clout. And so far, The Troupe has not received a huge amount of print coverage.

Some of you might ask, “Why not? Didn’t your publisher send it to them? And it’s evident people really like the book, so why don’t they review it?” The answer is, yes, my publishers sent my book to newspapers. They send all their books to newspapers. Every publisher sends their books to newspapers. Hence the issue.

It would be nice to be the sort of author where newspapers just run reviews of my stuff by default. Though most people assume that’s the case, it isn’t. Most books get ignored, by newspapers and bloggers. There’s just too many of them. Debuts tend to get a lot more attention: people like new things, they like new voices, they like wunderkinds. They don’t have baggage: they could be anything. Every debut is a potential smash hit. Books and authors with history behind them, less so. (Mr. Shivers is a great example of the sort of attention a debut can get.)

So this is a good sign. If The Washington Post pays attention to it, others might follow. Having a book out – especially if it’s one that doesn’t have an enormous publicity push behind it – is a lot like waging a political campaign. If you get a win, you use that win as leverage to get another one. As such, it never really stops.

Some thoughts on Prometheus

I am glad that Prometheus got made.

I had the chance to see it last night, and the amount of hype, discussion, and thought that it has stirred up has been, I think, very valuable for the SFF community, and the exposure for the SFF community to the mainstream world.

However, Prometheus is still a terribly flawed movie. This has been covered by plenty of folks already. But I thought it’d be interesting to take the elements of the movie that didn’t work for me, and suggest how I’d personally tweak them to try and make the movie more coherent.

This is arrogant, yeah, but I can’t resist because this movie had elements of such enormous potential. Its bones were solid: the end product just wound up jumbled. This could have been the 2001 for a new generation: instead, it is a basic horror/action movie with some mild philosophical pretensions.

So let’s go over what didn’t work, shall we? As a note, spoilers abound.

THE MAIN CHARACTER

Problem: Noomi Rapace’s main character, like nearly all the characters in this movie, suffers from a total lack of agency. (You can find my definition of character agency here.) The characters’ primary action is solely to show up on this alien planet: exactly what they want to do, or are supposed to do, is ill-defined, and they spend the rest of the movie acting as pinballs, bouncing from horror to horror. They’ve showed up, and that’s all the movie asks of them.

Rapace’s motivations are abstract from the beginning, which can work quite well for an abstract, cerebral sci-fi movie. As I saw it, her motivations are:

She wishes to find out more about mankind’s creation, because
Her father, a devout man, died tragically, and
She wants an explanation for why the world is the way it is, and she thinks the alien “engineers” can provide it.

Please note that number 3 is never made clear in the movie. That’s my own assumption: the movie just barely suggests this.

But, her motivations get further watered down when she reveals she’s barren, and is incapable of “creating life” like the alien engineers. How this is connected to her desire to see the alien engineers is never much explored. But the way it is suggested puts a very bad taste in my mouth, because this, I think, is a pretty poor character motivation: she has inspired a trillion-dollar space expedition to explore the roots of mankind’s history in order to make up for her own perceived failure to be a mother? This is not a strong rallying point for the character. (Note: adoption costs significantly less than 1 trillion dollars, usually, and gives a home to a child in need.)

But what’s really worth noting is that, poor as some of these motivations are, they are all only relevant up until Prometheus actually lands on the alien moon. Because from there on out, the driving forces of the character become irrelevant. Her process is:

Need to find answers.
Show up on moon.
Poke alien shit.
OH MY GOD MONSTERS

And that’s really it. Her actions have no bearing on the remainder of the plot, and her goals are completely unclear. This problem applies to nearly all of the characters in the movie.

What’s more, her character’s big moment – the “caesarean” (or abortion) scene – adds absolutely nothing to the character, plot, or theme. It’s almost as if the “forced pregnancy” trope was required for this movie because hey, it’s part of the Alien universe, and that’s kind of their thing. But her pregnancy and abortion contribute nothing except for a “gotcha” moment at the end of the movie.

It’s worth comparing Rapace’s character to Ripley from the original Alien movies. The contrast is startling: Rapace is powered by insecurities, fear, anxieties, and uncertainties. She accomplishes very little in the movie. She has no concrete motivations or goals: she does not act, she is acted upon. Ripley, however, was confident, shrewd, and brutally pragmatic, and always had very clear objectives in Alien and Aliens. She wasn’t willing to put up with the bureaucratic bullshit of the company (Weyland-Yutani) or the military: if something needed to be done, by God, she was going to do it.

So Rapace’s Elizabeth Shaw, more or less, fails as a main character, due to her own poor motivations, and the failure for those motivations to connect to the overall theme and aspirations of the movie.

And having a douchebag dumbass boyfriend certainly doesn’t help, “babe.”

Possible solution: Make Vickers the main character.

Vickers, played by Charlize Theron, is another character whose presence and actions seem more or less superfluous, unfortunately. She’s the corporate stooge there to look over the space expedition, but what she’s there to do is not specific, besides pick a random point in time to care about alien bioweapons infecting the ship (more on that later) and fuck Idris Elba (good for her?). However, she’s also the daughter of Peter Weyland, trillionaire owner of the company, with whom she has a contentious relationship.

This puts her in conflict with who everyone more or less agrees to be the most interesting character in the movie: David, the android played by Michael Fassbender. Weyland thinks of David as his surrogate son, despite being created and programmed for purely functional purposes. David both revels in his relationship with Weyland, and resents it: Weyland is, after all, his creator and master, forcing David to heed his beck and call while also doting on his not-real boy. And Vickers, while a “real” child, appears to desire the affection Weyland gives to David, but is denied.

There is a hell of a lot more meat on these bones than those of Elizabeth Shaw’s. I mean, there’s just naturally some seriously Freudian shit going on here! And you can see how this ties in perfectly to the plot: the rejection of children, the inaccessibility of the progenitor (an old man, of course – we’re tied down to that image of God, I suppose), the creation of children for functional purposes, etc. When the humans arrive on the moon, and discover they were manufactured creatures possibly engineered as bioweapons, that dovetails beautifully with the idea of Vickers and David both being marvelous creatures whose efforts and aspirations totally disinterest their creator.

And while Vickers is primarily featured as something of an antagonist – her actions, like those of everyone in the movie, are not coherent enough for me to pin down as either good or bad – if the plot were retooled to her taking up this huge quest to try and make her “father” happy, I think the way her actions in the movie are perceived would shift accordingly. She is, at the very least, a much more confident and concrete character than Shaw, with much more confident and concrete aspirations.

PACING/STRUCTURE

Problem: Discoveries and revelations lose their impact if they happen immediately, without consequence.

So the crew of the Prometheus thinks alien engineers live on this moon. They fly to this moon. Within around an hour of penetrating the sky, the immediately find alien ruins. “Yay!” they say. “We were immediately and obviously right!” They run inside the ruins, also immediately, and begin making huge revelations about the engineer race.

This saps the movie of its energy, especially later on. There is no build up: they think they are right, and are immediately proven right, and immediately begin causing problems, touching everything alien in sight. Nothing is gradual: there is no slow reveal, and thus no tension. Pandora’s Box is opened before they even read the label.

Solution: This story has actually been done before, and better: H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness set the mold for these “exploring alien ancients” tales. 2001: A Space Odyssey followed the same format: you don’t open Pandora’s Box before the first half of the movie. Your characters don’t even know they’re handling Pandora’s Box until halfway through the movie, at least.

Delay. Always delay until you don’t have to. Small revelations should lead to big ones. The second half of this movie is devoted chiefly to random horror-movie happenings, rather than shedding light on the questions the movie initially poses: there are no further revelations, because it is suggested there is nothing worth understanding.

THE BIG REVELATION

Problem: The one big revelation – that this is a military installation filled with ships and weapons, not a beacon for other life – is really underplayed. It’s a tossed-off line by Idris Elba. And the revelation that there’s a ship underground is not terribly surprising, considering we’ve seen almost the sum total of the underground installation already.

What’s worse is that this is the big revelation, and not the “we can actually meet one of our creators” moment. This moment is reduced to a pure stupid horror movie moment: the alien engineer wakes up, looks at them, then HULK SMASH, like an asshole.

It sheds light on nothing. The engineer’s actions are bewildering, inexplicable. The engineer totally refuses to examine its environment: it does not even notice that its four shipmates are, apparently, dead. We do not know what he thinks of us, or why he does what he does.

Solution: Cavalorn has written some really smart stuff upon the Christian themes sort of forced into this movie. This was totally surprising for me to read about after seeing it. Because, having seen Alien and Aliens, the view of the universe and space presented in those movies is that the universe is cold, uncaring, and what life there is is interested solely in self-preservation and reproduction. And what’s worse, I came into this movie aware of that, and thus aware that the engineers are the people who created the Xenomorphs, the incredibly devastating bio-weapons that, as suggested in Alien, eventually wound up overcoming their creators.

This is undeniable. This is exactly how things were presented in Alien. Scott can’t argue his way out of that.

 So the idea that we, the creation of the engineers, had done something wrong, which caused things to fall apart for the engineers, seems fairly preposterous. They were the ones who had fucked up: they are the ones who chose to make monsters for their own ends. They aren’t angels, or gods: they made mistakes, and got hurt by those mistakes. So I don’t feel humanity should cast itself at their feet and beg for judgment. David, I bet, would get my feeling.

And to hear Ripley Scott suggest Jesus was an engineer, well… I didn’t see it. I’m glad I didn’t see that. It’s quite dumb. It’s vain, assuming that a hugely advanced species could possibly care about us in this way, and wish to punish us for our actions. We behaved like animals because we were and are animals, geez.

Solution: Now. What I expected to see in the movie was to discover that the engineers were clones.

Yes, clones. This might be because it’s a common trope in sci-fi movies about deep space travel: I mean, really, if you’re sending ships on voyages so far that you might not ever see them again, it’d be best if the crewmembers were strictly functional, thus, androids or clones. That, and the engineers all looked alike, and seemed fairly expendable (though I think the whole “required self-sacrifice for creating life” thing to be quite dumb), and their muscles and size suggests a functional, durable aspect to their lives.

So I was anticipating finding out that humanity was the creation of a creation, just like David is the creation of a creation. I was anticipating a satisfying frustration, in other words: the progenitor, the Creator, remains inaccessible. We do not get to sit at the right hand of God and hear His words. God remains worlds away. We get nothing.  And the ending, in which one human flies off to the Homeworld to ask the question directly, would be a continuation of our neverending struggle for truth, and it would be a lot more satisfying than it was in the movie, where I kept wondering, “Why does she want to keep bothering with these assholes?”

This ending would be a lot better than finding out after the fact that these guys, who had created so many monsters (and remember that the Xenomorphs in Alien appear to have been created independent of humanity, so yeah, the engineers made them, rather than us making them), were also supposed to be Space Jesus.

That does not work. I am glad I did not see it in this movie. I am mighty tired of the self-flagellation some Abrahamic interpretations require of us.

GENDER ROLES

Alien and Aliens had a very definite gender agenda: the xenomorphs were a blend of vaginal, ovoid, and phallic imagery, already blurring our usual conception of procreation. The process itself is labyrinthine and savage: queen lays eggs, the eggs hatch into a creature both phallic and vaginal, the creature lays eggs inside of whatever flesh is available, which then hatches into the xenomorph, with its phallic head, vaginal mouth, and skeletal body.

More importantly, anyone or anything in the Alien universe can become “pregnant.” You don’t have to be a man or a woman: the aliens don’t give a shit about how your gender and sex is “supposed” to work. You’re functional. You’re just meat they need to lay eggs inside.

This is a profoundly dehumanizing and dispiriting suggestion. It totally upends our normal concept of reproduction, our concept of life as male/female, of willing partners and “contributors” to new life. Life, it suggests, acts as a disease, self-interested and willing to proliferate through any means possible. Our gender assignments are cursory, matter-of-fact, or even accidental. This is what the Alien universe suggests. It’s more about species than about gender itself.

Prometheus has some unclear stuff going on with gender. I will say I did not get the impression that the creators of this movie thought about gender at all. Its attitudes toward them were incoherent, like a lot of things in this movie. As such, I am not quite sure if it’s even worth talking about, though I would direct you here for another take on it.

It is totally bizarre to me that the man who made Alien could possibly create a science fiction movie so aligned with what appears to be Abrahamic gender roles: the paternal creator, the father handing down life. And though both men and women get “impregnated” in this movie, it’s only the woman’s that has any consequence on the rest of the movie – and even then it comes across as a cheap scare moment, no matter what symbolic meaning Scott is attempting to tack onto it.

Say what you like about the horrible universe presented in Alien, but at least it was equal. I wish he’d kept this angle rather than ditching it for the usual god-stuff.

SOME FINAL THOUGHTS:

Just because the air is breathable, it doesn’t mean it isn’t swimming with alien bacteria against which you have no immune system. Haven’t you read The War of the Worlds?
If you have the head of an alien species, there has to be better ways of inspecting it than stabbing it with a machine and pumping it with electricity.
The amount of touching, stabbing, crushing, and general interference in the ancient ruins is staggering. This cost a trillion dollars? Hire better people.
Any scientist worth his salt would probably report his own infection. This is why we don’t hire scientists based on the quality of their abs.
If you’re on a planet with an atmosphere that can kill you in two minutes, that seems an easier way to go than being doused with a flamethrower.
If a lady comes running in in a bra and panties covered in blood with staples across her gut, you might want to ask, “Hey, what’s up?” rather than just ignore her.

A Reaction to Cultural Imperialism Bingo

This kind of wound up being a manifesto. I didn’t mean it to be, and it’s kind of what I think blogs shouldn’t be for, but, well… I felt like writing it anyway. I also edited the title, because I don’t think my viewpoint is really representative of White Male Westerners, really. ANYWAYS:

So here’s a confession: I have an innate distrust of what people say. About anything.

This goes back a long way. It’s the way I’ve always worked, and it works pretty good to me, first applying a lot of doubt before achieving certainty.

This is because, at the root of my being, I tend to assume people will always be self-motivated, so anything they say is either intended to serve their own interests, or to justify their own positions, usually by cherry-picking or distorting evidence.

Despite this, I consider myself a positive person. I like people: I even have a fondness for how they just can’t help themselves, and always have to edge someone else out. So I like them, and I accept what they are – selfish, short-sighted, and frequently petty, because honestly, what can you do? – I just don’t trust them, especially what they say about themselves.

So I’ve always been deeply distrustful of the concept of “culture.” While to most, the word “culture” has this harmonic resonance to it, a sense of connection and pride and the eternal, to me, I can’t help but distrust it.

For one, it’s important to remember that a culture usually isn’t eternal: it lasts until the people who know it and maintain it leave or abandon it. The lifespan of a culture has been speeding up the more people can shift around in the world, until nowadays a culture – which has no distinct stop or start points – usually doesn’t “feel like” (I put this in quotation marks because this is such an imprecise terminology) it has a strong effect for more than three or four decades. Later cultures might try and hold onto that passed culture through story, ritual, myth, etc, but they aren’t directly recreating the culture, but viewing it through the lens of their own moment, their own experience, their own feelings. They’re making up a new one every time, essentially. And the longer this goes on, or the older the culture being celebrated, the more distorted and disparate things get. Sure, we can celebrate our ancient ancestors, because it makes us feel connected right now – but history can be spotty, so for all we know we might be celebrating a bunch of cannibals and rapists. How do you know you aren’t just projecting what you want to celebrate onto the vast, blank canvas of prehistory?

For another, cultures, like the whole of human action, generally hurt as many people as they help. This is, naturally, a wildly variable and ridiculously subjective call. But we see it everywhere, as people try and hold on to their culture while also admitting, you know, maybe parts of it do allow or even encourage spousal abuse. They might say, “Yeah, maybe my culture didn’t allow women to work, or vote, or own land.” Or, “Maybe my people did encourage men to be violent toward one another – especially men of other cultures.”

There is and will always be a constant conflict between celebrating our roots and also acknowledging that many of the perceptions, morals, and roles our roots maintained were wildly harmful. So what do you do? Do you keep all of it? Do you try and keep just parts of it? And if you do keep parts of it, if you do excise the bits of your culture that you don’t like, are you really still part of that culture, that imprecise and subjective moment in history? Or are you just some pampered kid with pretentious affectations trying to attain a place in history?

The thing that runs through all of this, the thing that really makes me leery of celebrating culture rather than accepting it as an implacable, choiceless force, akin to a natural disaster, is that this is a dialogue we’re having about ourselves. And when people talk about themselves, they prettify themselves. They justify themselves. They explain themselves in their terms. It’s a conversation about ourselves, with ourselves. So, as such, odds are it is rife – and I mean just rife – with bullshit, with assumptions and blindspots and affectations and artifice. It’s just what happens.

So I tend to take culture with a grain of salt. Sure, we love it – we love it like we love our families. But do you really want to live with your parents your whole fucking life? Do you want to only talk to your family, to only know your family, to try and uphold the family traditions, even if grandpa’s traditions involved laying the strap to any girl who tried to go to college? Probably fucking not. But you still love them, and you have to accept them as they are.

And at some point, you have to leave them. You have to go beyond what your family knows, and see the world, and form your own opinions about it. And you have to do so knowing that you’ll be seeing that world through a lens shaped, formed, and affected by your family. You have to know that you are not seeing things as they are – you are seeing things as they are distorted by how you have been shaped by your family, by your culture, by your people.

And that’s what culture really does: it affects, contributes to, and distorts the individual human experience.  Just like any other force in the world: war, death, natural disaster… These are things we can’t stop, but they still decide who we are.

So when I – a privileged, moderately educated, whitest of white dudes – read through the Cultural Imperialism Bingo Card, I get it, and smile. I smile because I understand that a lot of the comments featured are vain proclamations intended only to make those who speak them feel better.

And I do get that the West, by what I feel is pure, random chance, managed to attain a ridiculously lopsided amount of wealth and power in the past couple of centuries (raindrops in the bucket, time-wise), and ran with it, as (and you never know, this might be a Western way of thinking about it) anyone would, because we’re human.

I also get that whenever anyone walks into power, and has the world served up to them on a plate, the first thing they do is assure themselves that they’ve earned this. They need to justify why they’ve got it so good. And usually this means cherry-picking, rearranging the narrative so that they’re the hero, or at least the beneficiary of some kind of impartial, if not benevolent force. Or they claim that they did this themselves, without anyone’s help, or random chance – their position is their accomplishment, so let them bask in it. This, too (and here I note again that this might be a Western conceit, who knows), is just what people do.

But I don’t think I get the conclusion from the Bingo card that most do, or that the creators intended. Maybe it’s just because of how I think about my culture, that of the ones who have it made and assume that that’s the way it should be, but when I think about any culture, it’s usually in terms of, “How is this probably limited, short-sighted bullshit?” Because I do feel that that’s the Default Mode for most human beings, and I think it shows up in every single culture in the world.

My reaction isn’t about culture, really. My reaction is about how people experience the world, as individuals, and how that experience is distorted and marred by a variety of factors, some of which we’re complicit in. Sometimes we choose to see it one way, and often I feel that choice is motivated not by compassion, nor objectivity, but vanity: we want to feel justified in who we are. We want to be the heroes of the story. We want it to be All About Us.

So in the battleground of culture, which is, in a way, a conclusion that draws from a wide breadth of experience and data, be aware that what people say isn’t how things are.

Doubt them. Doubt people. Even if they’re talking about justice, tradition, pride, and identity. Especially if they’re talking about those things. Because in the Intellectual Periodic Table, those are the most volatile and dangerous ideas out there.

And we know that ideas can hurt. Lord, if you’ve learned anything from history, please let it be that ideas can hurt.

Anthony Award, and reviews

Woke up this morning to a delightful surprise: THE COMPANY MAN is nominated for an Anthony Award for Best Original Paperback. This pleases me a lot. I wrote it a long time ago, and was not entirely sure if it worked as a mystery novel, and just assumed it’d have more success as a fantasy novel. I’m pleased to see people commending it as mystery.

In addition, THE TROUPE has gotten some lovely reviews from Eclectic and Eccentric and Dreamworld Books.

So a good start to the week.

I’m currently in between projects, and the dayjob has been pretty demanding recently. I haven’t had much fun stuff to report, or to write. I will when fun things resume existing. In the meantime, you can always check in with me on twitter.