I Have Held Back No Water In Its Season

So the latest wave of Racefail, centering around Wrede’s new novel and currently being documented by naraht, has led one of my favorite authors to leave the virtual house without her pants. I am appalled that Bujold has let herself do this. To be sure, racial issues have never been one of her strengths. Ethnic and national issues, yes, but everyone in her books tends to be white. Except when they’re heretical invaders who are especially repressive of women and queer people, which, um… yeah, not a shining moment given the isolation in which it stands.

Contemplating this, however, made me think about a few white authors who did manage to get something right and keep their awareness live. And I wanted to document them as examples and possibly useful starting points for authors who wish to likewise learn to keep their pants up. I am in no way suggesting that any of them Got It Right, since I don’t think any author ever manages that on any issue, but these are a few who got something right.

( Hambly, Weber and Clayton, oh my )

So what about you? Are there any authors you would point to who get something right?

So, here’s the thing. I’m all in favor of having books that are id-candy, brain-fluff, that demand nothing from your intellect and instead go straight on to punch your emoporn joybuttons.

This is, after all, why I own three quarters of everything Mercedes Lackey has ever published.

But, first off, id-candy is a different thing from good writing. The joybuttons don’t care about bad grammar or triteness or slop, they just resonate to the character shapes that hit one’s kinks. Kinks are often trite and cliche, when you think about it. Id-candy is enjoyable exactly because it doesn’t make your brain engage, it doesn’t deal in subtleties, it doesn’t make you do any work. To get enjoyment out of genuinely artful prose, you generally have to think, to ponder even, to put in some work.

Saying that you enjoy your id-candy immensely and saying that your id-candy is great writing are very different statements. Among other things, the first is true and the second generally isn’t. (Unless you’re using a completely Utilitarian definition of “good”, and when people try to compare Rowling and Tolkien it is unfortunately clear that they are not employing such a definition at all.)

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with enjoying the hell out of trite, cliched slop, of course.

Let us consider Misty, for example. She’s the Queen of Exposition, has a tendency to extremely moralistic and preachy narrative, and drives home her morals with a ten pound sledge. She is guilty of the most egregious cultural flattening and caricaturization and the only thing that comforts me even minutely is that she does it to everyone, whitebread, ‘noble savage’ and orientalist alike. (I maintain that Ancient Egypt should take out a restraining order on the woman.) Her characters are flat, their angst is repetitive, and half the time the stories read like SCA handbooks instead of novels.

Nevertheless–three quarters, right there on my shelf, and I reread handfuls of them at fairly regular intervals. This is because they are excellent brain-fluff emoporn.

Also because they are not toxic. Her moralism can get wearing awfully fast, but at least they are morals I can agree with. Mostly.

That’s the second thing. You have to be careful of the id-candy that uses a moral framework that’s harmful to you.

The Twilight books are a prime example of this. The writing is no worse than most id-candy, but the value system those books are hung on is poison. It’s misogynist, racist, deterministic, conflates obsession and stalking with love, and runs the mobius strip of nihilism and femininity myths at full speed with special emphasis on death by/for childbirth. (I would not want to be this woman’s therapist, not without hazard pay). This id-candy has a razor blade in it.

Some people probably bemoan the loss of innocent fun now that we chop up Halloween candy before eating it to make sure there aren’t any evil surprises in it. I expect some people feel the same about their id-candy. But, you know, I’d much rather take the time to chop and evaluate than swallow a needle.

One of the benefits of being a friend of the author is: sometimes you get free books.

And this was quite a good free book, so I’m reviewing it. Not in hopes of getting a copy of the next one at all, of course. I’m much too high-minded for that kind of thing. *looks suitably virtuous*

( So let us consider The Stepsister Scheme, by Jim Hines. )

Continuing on with the What I Like series, I have been reflecting on where my genre fiction tastes intersect with my Literature tastes.

I enjoy a good deal of 19th C lit of all sorts, but the authors I am very especially fond of are Herman Melville and Virginia Woolf. Comparing them to my genre fic favorites and considering just what it is I enjoy, not just about reading them, but about analyzing them, I have concluded that I like authors who turn their brains inside out on the page.

But, and this is an important caveat, I also require a modicum of poetry to really hold my attention. That was my problem with Heinlein–well, one of my problems, to go along with my disgust for his rampant misogyny. His stories read as though he turned his brain inside out, indeed, and then just shook it over the page, squashed the pages together, and sent that off to the publisher like some kind of verbal Rorschach blot.

I require some linguistic artistry to go along with the brain-guts, otherwise I just get bored.

On reflection, this is often my problem with science fiction in general, at least the kind written by actual scientists and science associates, who, as a general rule, cannot write poetry to save their souls. Limericks, yes; poetry, not so much.

On a similar note, not only is brevity the soul of wit, it is the soul of keeping me reading. I have about the same tolerance for reading minute descriptions of machines as I do for reading minute descriptions of buildings and clothing, which is to say, very little. Jane Austin and David Brin both win on this score. Issac Asimov frequently loses and the less said of James Fenimore Cooper the better.

It’s really too bad there isn’t some kind of litmus test I can do on new books, a carefully calibrated metaphorical strip I could dip between the covers to see what colors it turned–whether I’d get that turquoise tinge that means poetry plus brain-guts or the flat indigo of just poetry. Which interests me about as much as just brain-guts, which is to say, yawn.  Jacket blurbs are worthless for this purpose.

Oh, well. I guess I’m stuck with standing in the aisle flipping through my prospective books and hoping for a bit of nicely turned gut phrasing to catch my eye.

I think I have identified one of the things that leads me to like an author’s writing: when they write in several genres at once.

I knew Bujold did this, and Pratchett. But they’re both the kind of writers it’s easy to think of as simply exceptional. What I just realized, recently, is that some of my other favorites do this too. Barbara Hambly, for example.

Hambly writes science-fiction and fantasy. She writes horror. She writes historicals. She writes romance. And the thing is, she writes all of them at once. While any book of hers may lean toward one more than the rest, you can pretty much count on all those genre threads being in every book.

Of course, this means that she doesn’t usually follow most genre conventions of any of them.

Take the horror, for instance. Hambly’s books have plenty of it, whether gruesome and unknowable creatures from beyond the stars or the depths of human depravity and cruelty. But it’s never the point. It’s just there, and the characters have to deal with it. Which means she can’t be easily categorized as “dark fantasy” either, because the fantasy elements generally contribute to a very optimistic story, overall.

Or take the romance. Her books do generally feature multi-verse spanning, life altering love found at long odds. But her characters deal with it as one would expect people in the middle of deadly crises to do: “Wow, this is incredible! If we live, let’s have a good snog/marriage/deathless bond, okay? Now duck!”

As for the historical aspect, well even without her biographical blurb I’d have guessed she had either an advanced degree or an advanced hobby in history. Her narratives are chock full of little details that unmistakably set the stories in place and time. But it’s still the characters who are the point, not the details, and a lot of the books are set in places and times that didn’t actually exist, which makes it hard to call them historical fiction.

She writes against the genre grain, which I find charming. Also something I should probably keep in mind when next browsing the library or bookstore shelves.

I find myself torn every time I go back and read Janny Wurts, especially any of the volumes of Wars of Light and Shadow.

On the one hand, I like her characters very much. I like the texture of the world she’s made. I like the story itself.

When I can winkle it out of the thicket of adjectives, that is.

And that’s the first sticking point. Wurts is a good storyteller but not a skillful writer. It makes me tear my hair. She’s in love with descriptive phrases, especially ones that make no actual sense. Now that can be done well, and I’m very fond of the way Barbara Hambly, for example, makes occasional use of it, but Wurts takes it way, way too far. It’s lot like her italics, which some kind person should take away from her before she hurts herself. Her crises tend to be very artificial, and, really, there’s only so much Cosmic Misunderstanding I can take before I throw up my hands with frustration. The stories have a lot of pathos, but the narrative renders it all plastic.

That isn’t the part that makes me twitch the most, though. No, the part that makes me twitch the most is the Sledgehammer of Scary Morality. That’s the real other hand.

Wurts has created a world in which humans have no right to exist. While humans have much vaunted free will, there, if they screw up they’ll be wiped out of existence. Screwing up is defined pretty much as any interference with unsullied Nature–so, eg, entering an industrial age and gaining any technology beyond muscle-power, because this would, of course, Blight The Land.

Corollary to this, she has created a world in which technology is explicitly identified with humanity’s downfall and self-destruction. Back to the land for the humans, because that’s the only salvation! Of course, when humans are biddable there’s magic which, despite not being of any use in daily life, somehow makes up for everything. Just by, you know, existing.

She has created a world with a biologically determined ruling class, in which heredity infallibly produces enlightenment. This ruling class currently lives as Noble Savages with, as an added bonus, a racial past that includes castles and courtliness and probably roses. Two for the price of one.

And just to round things out, she has produced a world in which the wizardly guardians of God’s Natural And Unsullied Order are seven old men while the group of Misguided, Selfishly Humanocentric And Arrogant magicians are exclusively women. This seriously undermines the gender equality she allows those characters in less critical walks of life.

Those, and not the italic melodrama, are the real things that make it impossible for me to read a whole volume without putting it down and reading something with less species-and-gender self-hate in it for a bit. Wurts is a perfect example of one of fantasy’s Really Bad Habits: the pretense that the absence of technology can somehow redeem humanity’s ravening nature.

The only thing that can redeem humanity’s ravening nature is for humanity to knock it off. The presence or absence of technology may well speed the process of whatever we’re doing, but we can’t shove responsibility for our actions off onto our tools. That just obscures the real issues.

Kind of like Wurts’ adjectives.

Review of copperbadge‘s fic series, the Stealing Harryverse.

Stealing Harry (multi-part)
Tales from the River House (scattered shorts)
Laocoon’s Children, Year One, Year Two, Year Three (multi-parts, Three still in progress)

I rarely review fic, but I’ve been wanting some good HP fic to soothe me, and Em pointed out this author and ‘verse in particular, and it’s so lovely I wanted to share with anyone who might have missed it.

The entire ‘verse is a What If AU. What if Sirius had stopped to pick up Remus before he went looking for Peter, and Voldemort’s side (extremely suspicious and ticked off, to be sure) found Peter first?

From that one moment, the Stealing Harryverse spins onto a different path that runs parallel to the canon books and covers many of the same events but has all sorts of fascinating differences.

Stealing Harry covers much of Harry’s childhood. Laocoon’s Children matches stride with the books, going year by year.

One of the things I find most delightful about these stories is that the characters are still themselves. Harry is too impulsive for his own good; Snape is a bastard; Sirius needs a leash for his temper; Remus is living with hell once a month; Draco doesn’t like confrontation but has a vindictive streak; Ron is casually kind and constantly awkward. But they are these things in a world turned about fifty degrees on its axis, and, most importantly to me, they are these things in a consistent, emotionally logical fashion.

Sam clearly intends to take Laocoon’s Children through all seven years. I, for one, will be looking forward to reading it.

( Some spoilers re pairings and who are focal characters for those who want to know before reading )

Personal HP worldbuilding ahead, which may or may not go toward fic. This is mostly just reading some of copperbadge‘s fic and frustration talking.

Becuse, good grief Rowling, could you be sketchier or more illogical if you tried with both hands?

Known: Hogwarts is the only secondary school for wizards in the country.

Known: Rowling says there is no University for wizards in Britain.

Personally known: It is not feasible for such things as research or skilled professions like the medical profession to go on without more intensive education in specific fields than is shown at Hogwarts.

Extrapolation: The population of wizards in comparison to non-wizards must be very small if the entire secondary-schooled population fits in one castle with a mere score of teachers. The population of those who wish to go on to careers requiring tertiary education may, then, be too small to support a university that has sufficient diversity and resources to serve them all. Nevertheless, they must be trained, lest they all kill themselves and each other.

Possibility One: Tertiary education is on the apprenticeship model. Each profession has its own training system and takes care of its own fledglings. Auror’s Academy and medical internships, that sort of thing.

Possibility Two: Wizards who require further education in experimental and research procedure share facilities with one or more non-wizard universities, simply ‘borrowing’ rooms, buildings, libraries and the like, modifying or hiding them as required.

Corollary for Two: Passing the NEWT in Muggle Studies is absolutely required of wizards going on to tertiary studies in such fields.

Possibility Three: British wizards must go abroad to universities that are on the continent in order to get tertiary education.

Conclusion: If Rowling wanted to roll back time in the wizard culture a few hundred years, then she should never have also included institutions such as a ministry offices dedicated to research or a medical profession that appears effective enough to require advanced education and certification.

In addition, the lack of centers for advanced learning implies a certain lack of emphasis or value, in the wizard culture, placed on the study of things that are not immediately useful to a specific vocation. Such study is precisely where a good many advances in understanding the workings of the world around us come from. Particle physics, for instance, is not often immediately useful, but discoveries in that field have the potential to eventually accomplish things that are purely imagination right now, and so people study it. Wizard culture does not appear to value that kind of forward drive, witness the antiquated educational system under discussion and their astonishing ignorance of the far larger non-magic culture in which they are lodged.

From which I further conclude that Rowling’s wizards actually have good cause to fear discovery by non-wizards, because, magic or no, at this point the Muggles would roll them all up in a few months, if there ever appeared to be a reason to do so. Vandalism, attacks and wanton interference with people’s minds would probably provide that reason, should it ever come to light for the population at large.

So, here’s what I don’t like about that epilogue.

( Spoilers, needless to say. )

And that is why I don’t believe in this epilogue, any more than I believe in the Digimon Adventure 02 epilogue. Not plausible + regression = just disgusted.

It puzzles me when I come across one of the, increasingly frequent, references to fanfic as a genre that portrays/employs/is hospitable toward/valorizes pedophelia.

Pedophelia is defined, both in dictionaries and in psych manuals as sexual desire harbored by an adult toward children. That is, it is specifically the physical (and possibly mental/emotional) immaturity of the child that is the focus of the adult’s sexual desire.

So, if, to take a nice loaded example, a given story features a sexual relationship between Harry Potter‘s Harry and Snape before Harry turns sixteen, and the story spends all its time focusing on Harry’s surprising strength and maturity, and none of its time showing Snape aroused by Harry’s childish body, and barely gives a wave, if that, to their age and/or status difference… that’s not pedophelia. That’s denial. That’s a story that willfully ignores the social dynamics one might ordinarily expect between a child and an adult entering a sexual situation–quite possibly because the author is fascinated enough by how those two character shapes might bounce off each other, erotically, to suspend her and her readers’ disbelief like the Brooklyn Bridge.

A story that lingered on those dynamics, that focused on Harry’s immaturity and the ways that immaturity might arouse Snape, that would be a story about pedophelia. And, if the story was written in a manner intended to titillate, as well, that’s when I, for one, would entertain the argument that the story is not only portraying, but encouraging criminal behavior.

I would really say that a lot of the unreflective fic out there is saved from any accusation of pedophelia by it’s very lack of realism. The adult-child issue is not an issue, because it simply isn’t there. The age difference may be stated, but it’s numbers without a scrap of supporting behavioral evidence. The characters interact exactly as if they were of a similar age, and any descriptions of erotic or aroused moments use age-neutral images.

Anime fandoms have another twist on the whole thing, since the majority of the source texts participate in the idealization of cuteness, which includes infantilization. The girl who is the epitome of Cute behaves very childishly, and she reflects and supports a strong subculture of the eroticization of childishness. The most (in)famous signifier in that subculture is probably the sailor-style school-girl uniform. Victimizability is strongly encoded as erotic, and this translates into the male/male productions as well. In any mass-directed story that features two men in a sexual relationship, one will be very specifically coded as victimizable (small, soft, yielding, weak, submissive, either physically, emotionally or both) in comparison to the other (big, sharp, hard, dominant, aggressive, you get the idea). In good stories, the various signifiers of strength and control may be crossed and mixed between the partners to produce a complex relationship.

This tendency in the source texts lends itself to very pedophilic set-ups, even in unreflective fic.

Even so… let’s take another example that occasioned debate on the whole pedophelia issue. Ed and Roy of Hagane no Renkinjutsushi. Precisely because the source text did not set out to establish these two as sexual partners, nearly all of the victimizable traits are missing from both. The one outstanding one that remains, Ed’s small size, is such a focus of humorous defensiveness and overcompensation in the source text that making it an erotic focus would take some work. (Which is not to say that J-art wasn’t doing it every time I turned around, but my first reaction to those pictures was often “who’s the little blond chick, and why’s she got a metal arm like Ed’s?”)

Again, if the fic focused on Ed’s strength and determination and brilliance, and did not focus on Roy-as-seducer-of-innocence, and ignored or reversed the dependency aspects of their relationship, that’s denial. Not pedophelia. Technically, even if the fic didn’t ignore those things, it still wouldn’t be pedophelia (assuming that Amestris is sort-of Germany, and that Germany’s age of consent is fourteen, and that, in the probable time-frame, the dependent-relationships clause would not yet have been added to the legal canon). But, given the disparity in ages, I’m willing to agree that a fic which did suppose that Ed’s emotional immaturity was arousing to Roy and that Roy employed his rank/experience/knowledge to maneuver or coerce Ed into bed should, indeed, count as pedophelia.

The point being, there are certainly fics which do portray pedophelia, and even fics that romanticize and/or valorize it. But I think it dilutes the seriousness of the accusation to automatically apply it to any fic that features one participant over the age of sixteen and a five year or greater age difference.

It’s common for textual purists to disparage fanon, and I have certainly done that before. But it struck me, today, that fanon is, in it’s own way, a venerable institution and deserves recognition for its tenacity, if not its precision.

Consider, for example, Gensis. Specifically, consider Eden, and the go-round with the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil. The serpent incites rebellion (by, I might note, telling nothing but the truth) and all parties get a really raw deal out of it, including labor pains, limblessness, and species enmity. There is not a scrap of textual indication that Satan or Lucifer, or any incarnation of the Devil at all, is present in any way.

The idea that the serpent was the Devil is fanon.

It’s an extrapolation with no direct textual basis, running, I suspect, via Milton and the Romantics, and their various promethean reading of the Devil and a misconstrual of the name Lucifer (lightbringer being, as best I recall, a psalmic reference to Lucifer being as to Christ as Venus the Morning Star is to the Sun–herald or forerunner of light) whereby the fruit of knowledge is elided with the light of fire.

Not even going into the difference between the figures of Satan and Lucifer, though Satan’s original role of Jehovah’s Prosecutor General does connect to the idea of temptation and form another cross connection to the actions of the serpent.

The thing is, this is what people do. This is what people do with any text at all. They read it and take from it bits that make the most sense and extrapolate those bits into whatever form has the most meaning and accessibility to them. There’s nothing heinously evil about this activity.

It’s only when fanon becomes the basis for attempted textual explication that the perpetrator needs to be whacked one.

I’m reading David Brin’s essay collection Tomorrow Happens. Brin’s vision of technology and its possible effects interests me. On top of that, I consider his views both practical and optimistic, which is a rare combination.

It even makes me willing to mostly forgive his total and utter inability to plot out his stories if they’re longer than one volume. I won’t buy another trilogy from him, but neither will I excoriate him for making such a mess of the one he’s already published. Very often.

I can’t help wondering, though, what would happen if he spent a year or two in, say, Japan.

You see, his practicality and optimism are both extremely, almost archetypally, Western. His vision of what would be a good world tries to balance individuality with community, but starts out from the basic assumption that individuality is privileged and cannot, under any circumstances, be sacrificed. The one short story of his I’ve read that was set in Japan was a caricature of suicidal overachiever-ness in a society prone to drone-ness.

So I kind of wonder whether he would actually manage to grok wa, or just spend a year or two feeling uncomfortable and vaguely smug.

He says he wants a culturally neutral philosophy/politics/psychology. And I can’t help but consider that a bit naive, because I can’t quite bring myself to believe such a thing could exist. And if it did, I think it would have to abrogate his other desire for a philosophy/politics/psychology that honors and celebrates diversity. I really think the best we could do is an awareness of the differences from one culture to the next, and an ability to switch around among them.

(Tangentially, I’d forgotten what a pain it is to type “philosophy” on a QWERTY keyboard.)

Brin doesn’t like cultural relativity, and I can sympathize. Often it becomes an excuse not to take action or make judgments. But I think he’s lost sight of the fact that, yes, all ethical systems and politics and so forth really are completely relative. We are all situated somewhere. Someone wrote those stone tablets, they didn’t just appear hand delivered by the Universal Truth. People don’t seem to think very often about the reasons behind the easy right and wrongs, like “it’s wrong to murder someone” (a perennial favorite among the disputationally challenged, because it seems so self-evident). But I think we should. Why is it wrong to murder someone? “Just because” is not a useful answer. Neither is “because God/my mother/the government said so”, at least not for an adult who can presumably make her own decisions. “Because I wouldn’t want people to do it to me” is better, and that’s often what this one comes down to if you push people on it. On the other hand, that is more or less the basis, as far as I can tell, for anti-homosexual legislation. That’s relativity in a nutshell for you. And I think that is what Brin’s optimism leads him to overlook.

He’d like for all of us to understand one another, which would, ideally, lead to all of us having the same basic moral system. What I’m not sure he’s capable of seeing is the way in which that desire leads him straight to Japan. Because, of course, when you get right down to it, the moral system he wants everyone to have is basically his own, which differs from the more prominent Japanese sets. And around and around we go.

And that’s humanity in a nutshell for you.