Even the weird ones can find a home

A while back, I wrote a 2000-word second-person present-tense story about filling out an
application form. Having done so, I stared at it and wondered where the hell I would ever
sell it.

The answer, it turns out, is Electric
Velocipede, a quirky and well-respected magazine edited by John Klima. Glancing at
their fiction, I can see a story by Scott William Carter that’s in the second person and
present tense, so maybe it’s not much of a surprise, eh? I’m very happy to see it placed so
well — oh, let’s admit it; I’m happy to see it placed at all. It’s a weird enough story that
I had very few ideas about where to send it that wouldn’t just be a random shot in the
dark.

I will, as always, give people a heads-up when it actually goes into print.

Inaugural random thought for the new year

The playing of a Bjork song (“Human Behaviour”) at the dance party tonight inspired me to
come up with a genre system for music based on parts of the body. That’s a thigh song, you
see, where “thigh song” is defined as “a song where you plant your feet wide apart and sink
down, knees bent, so your thighs will be very unhappy at you later if you don’t normally do
things like that or have fallen out of the habit.”

Thigh songs may perhaps be subdivided into stompy songs (self-explanatory) and thigh-hip
songs, which blur over into those hip songs where you’re not sunk down while swinging your
butt around. There are also toe songs (bouncing a lot on the tips of your toes) and feet
songs, not to be confused with the former category — feet songs involve both heel and toe,
doing fun footworky things. Also arm songs, though you don’t find a lot of those in what
people normally think of as “dance music.” (My definition of music worth dancing to is . . .
idiosyncratic.)

And wow, spelling that word took way too many tries, so I’m going to bed.

Happy New Year, all.

Another year of recs

With a day to spare (why do I always leave these so late, even when I know what I’m going to be writing about?), I’ve finished and posted the last of my recommendations for this year. As advertised, it’s the last of the classical “primary sources” recommendations: Virgil’s Aeneid, rounding out the set begun with the Iliad and the Oydssey.

*click*

When you have a worldbuilding problem for a story you’re not really
working on at present, to which your mind returns periodically to niggle
at it in search of an answer, it is very satisfying to find oneself
niggling at it once again and this time having the answer fall into one’s
lap. And while it may not be satisfying to realize your failure to see
said answer before came about because you let yourself fall into a rather
stereotypical trap of perception, it’s somewhat nice to also realize that
means you’ll have an opportunity to make a quiet demonstration of a point
to which you have always spoken in support.

In other words, most hunter-gatherer caloric intake comes from the
gathering, not the hunting. And I’d forgotten that.

Go about your business. All is well with the world now — or at least
with that world.

Apocalypto

Grar.

So very nearly good. I can forgive it things like architectural features apparently drawn
from about 1500 years of Mayan history. I can, if I try very hard, dig up a Mayan city still
occupied around, y’know, that time. (Though they could have made my life far simpler
in that respect by filming in Nahuatl instead of Yucatec. Then I wouldn’t have spent five
minutes after the credits snarling and flailing about Aztecs.) I could maybe even let go of
the weirdness of a large Mayan city apparently being surrounded by hunter-gatherers at no more
than two days’ distance. (What, did they all survive off that one cornfield?) And hey, some
of the things I thought were inaccuracies turned out not to be!

But grar.

I debated long and hard whether or not I wanted to see this movie, given Mel Gibson’s
personal disagreeability to me, given the potential (and, I’m afraid, actual) colonialist
overtones of the story. In the end I went because I’m a Mesoamerican geek, and because I
wanted to tell Hollywood there’s at least one more person in the world who will happily watch
movies in obscure Central American languages with actors nobody’s ever heard of. And I don’t
regret going, and I really almost like the movie. But it isn’t what you’d call the best
representation of Mayan culture; the aforementioned hunter-gatherers make it look more
primitive than it needed to, and it doesn’t give the context that human sacrifice
needs. (Okay, so my article is Nonfiction Lite, but it sums up much of what I would
otherwise have to repeat here.) Few people watching that movie will know or care about the
cosmological framework in which sacrifice generally fit, nor the ways in which the epidemics
that appear to have preceded the physical arrival of Europeans on the mainland sent
people into a frenzy that was to normal behavior as the apocalyptic cults and flagellant
societies of plague-era Europe were to normal Christianity before everybody started dying.
Few people will think to make that comparison to our own history, and therefore to understand
how Europeans wouldn’t come off so well were we to make this kind of movie about them during
the Black Death. Instead, we get Noble Savages (the hunter-gatherers, whom I actually quite
liked aside from their anachronistic subsistence strategy) fleeing the pointless sadism of the
Evil City Folk. Things lack context, and sometimes sport inaccuracies while doing so. It isn’t a great combination.

And yet. And yet. The cenote outside the village, the jade in the nobles’ teeth, the
atlatl. The murals with elements taken from a site my sophomore
tutorial leader excavated. The actor whose profile is about the closest you can get to
Mayan without practicing cranial modification on an infant and then waiting twenty years for
him to grow up. There were so many details that were good, and Gibson filmed the movie in
freakin’ Yucatec. It came so close to being a film that would make me melt in geeky glee.
I just wish I didn’t have to feel so ambivalent about it.

A Life in Music

December is my month for nostalgia, for making at least one retrospective post about
something. I keep feeling like it should be about writing, since my first novels came out
this year, but my heart isn’t really in it; I’ve been talking about writing a fair bit all
year, so I don’t feel like I’ve got something I really need to say and haven’t.

So instead, this post is about gaming, and specifically about two interrelated bits of
nostalgia. Last night I finished making the last soundtrack for Ree, and wanted to post the
full track listing for anybody who’s interested — mostly for those who have copies and might
want to know what the songs are; if you don’t know the character or the game, a random list of
songs probably won’t mean much. Page down for the actual nostalgia, and an explanation of why
it ran to five CDs in the end.

Track listing . . . .

I’ll be a real teacher!

Just got official notice that my course proposal for Collins, the honors dorm here on
campus, has been accepted. Next fall I’ll be teaching “Fairy Tales in the Modern World,” a
class on contemporary retellings of folktales. It’s mostly literature-based, but I’m slipping
in what I can about movies, role-playing games, and the like.

I’m both very excited and a little nervous. I’ve got four years of teaching experience
under my belt, but it’s all as an assistant to a professor, so this will be my first time
running my own course. The cool thing is, enrollment is limited to 20, so it will also be my
first chance to really get to know my students personally, give detailed feedback on papers,
etc, rather than plowing through sixty student assignments and teaching three sections. Since
a lot of the students are going to be freshman and sophomores, this means I have a shot at
actually influencing how they approach their college education. (Yeah, yeah, delusions of
grandeur, I know. But I have hopes.)

old ghosts

There’s something deeply odd about revisiting a text you wrote when you were fifteen, with
an eye toward revising it into something worthy to see the light of day now. (I might have
been sixteen, but I don’t think so. Certainly I was in high school.) It’s not purely
craptastic, though it comes close; large chunks of it are getting deleted without a second
thought. But I had a few worthwhile turns of phrase, buried in amongst the chaff. And the
idea still has some compelling force, which is why I’m revisiting it in the first place.

Should this end up seeing the light of day, it will displace Doppelganger as my
earliest idea to successfully reach print. I can only think of one other thing that stands
even a faint chance of defeating this for that title, and that one thing will be so heavily
modified by the time it does so that it would only barely qualify as the same idea I had when
I was fourteen.

Still. Kee-rist. I was fifteen when I thought this up. If I thought it was weird
admitting I wrote Doppelganger when I was nineteen, this would be substantially
worse.

Magic versus Science

Occasionally I write essays for my website, and I decided a while ago that I would start posting them here in first-draft form, thereby to get any commentary people feel like providing, before putting them up on the site permanently. So here’s the first attempt at that.

At the World Fantasy Convention this year, there was one panel titled “The God or the Machine?,” which addressed the division (or non-division) of magic or science. It was, hands-down, the best panel I went to that weekend, because it got me thinking, and left me with useful thoughts. I like entertaining panels as much as the next person, but this kind’s even better.

Let me start with the things that I don’t think usefully distinguish magic and science from one another. (Top of the list is Frazier’s approach, where you’ve got magic when you’re a primitive society, religion when you get a little more advanced, and science when you reach the top. But enough about nineteenth-century armchair anthropology.)

I don’t think it’s useful to say that science works within the laws of nature, while magic violates them. Whose laws? What nature? This view takes modern, rationalist Western science as the default, which is problematic not just on our own planet (where there are plenty of people with other opinions) but in invented worlds, where the laws of nature may be whatever the author pleases. “The supernatural” isn’t a word I particularly like; if it exists, how is it not a part of nature, in the non-environmentalist sense? If it doesn’t exist, then doesn’t “the supernatural” really mean “the fake”? Bleh. Sure, magic may violate the laws of scientific nature, but you could just as easily say science violates the laws of magical nature. A dead-end, to my way of thinking.

Then there’s the idea that magic operates by/is a manifestation of will. While there’s some truth to this, I can poke two holes in it. First, a lot of magic systems require more than just will; even David Eddings’ Belgariad is based on the Will and the Word. Usually you need to do something. Second, isn’t there an element of will involved in science, too? “It is by will alone I set my mind in motion,” Piter de Vries says in Dune, but Mentats are human computers more than magicians. I’m also reminded of Apollo 13, when Jim Lovell says, “From now on, we live in a world where man has walked on the moon. And it’s not a miracle; we just decided to go.” Sure, they had to do more than just make the decision; they had to build things and develop technologies and work out mathematical equations. But so do magicians, much of the time. It may not take as many people, as much time and money and experimentation as the space program did, but both of them are based on an element of deciding you want to do something, and then doing what you have to in order to make it happen.

So what are you left with, at this point? Most of the time, we make the distinction based on trappings. If you chalk a circle on the floor, burn herbs, chant arcane mantras, et cetera, then you’re doing magic. If you take measurements and draw graphs and solve equations, then you’re doing science. Or we distinguish them by their effects: demon-summoning and fireball-throwing are magic, while genetic engineering and lasers are science. But I think we can agree that this is a pretty sloppy way to separate the two.

I never had a good answer to the question until Ted Chiang made a comment, during the WFC panel, that turned on the proverbial light-bulb over my head. He was talking about alchemy, which is a classic case of fuzzy distinction between magic and science; it has elements of both, and sort of slipped from one to the other over the course of centuries. What he pointed out was the idea, once common in alchemy (but lost by the time alchemy turned into chemistry), that the process of alchemical transformation was also a transformation of the alchemist, that the creation of the Philosopher’s Stone was also a process of spiritual refinement.

I thought through the real-world magical systems I have any familiarity with, since I’m of the opinion that any division between magic and science ought to hold true in our reality, not just made-up ones. And it seemed to me that every one I could think of includes some kind of element — call it spiritual, call it moral, call it personal — some element that influences the act based on the actor. Who is performing the steps matters, not just based on their knowledge (whether they do things correctly), but based on some more intangible quality. People are born with magical talent. People undergo spiritual training to acquire magical talent. People can only work magic if their hearts are pure (or foul). People form contracts with other entities which grant them the power to work magic.

Science, on the other hand, will work for anybody who knows what they’re doing and has the right equipment.

If you remove that personal element, making the procedure something anyone can do, then you have science, not magic. Even if it doesn’t obey the laws of science as we know them, it’s imaginary or invented science, not magic. Some parts of alchemy didn’t work in the slightest, but that didn’t stop them from being scientific in their approach. And you could write a very passable world where they do work.

I tend to be utilitarian when it comes to theoretical constructs; for me, the test of an idea is whether or not it clarifies things for me that were muddy before. And in this case, it does. I’ve always had an odd relationship to China Mièville’s Bas-Lag novels; theoretically they’re fantasy, and he says things in various places about thaumaturgical energy and the like, but it never felt quite right to me. I like my fantasy, my magic, to have a numinous quality — but lacking a way to codify what I meant about “the numinous,” it was hard for me to say how and why I found it absent in that setting. Looking at it in this light, I can see exactly what I was missing. When parts of Armada are mining ore that they refine to produce that thaumaturgical energy, when the process can be automated and industrialized, divorced from the people involved, then you can call it by magical terms all you like, but it feels like science to me, not magic.

(Whether or not that means I think his novels are SF instead of fantasy is a complicated question, and one for another post.)

This still doesn’t make the line between the two absolutely clear; alchemy, as I’ve said before, is a good example of something that is neither fish nor fowl. It holds more water, though, than any of the approaches I’ve heard bandied about before.

Re-Mused

I know many of my readers on this journal are interested in fairy tales, ballads, myths,
and the way people play around with same, so you might want to check out Re-Mused, a new LJ community I’ve joined
that is made up of writers who have published retellings of traditional material. Membership
is restricted, but anybody can watch it and comment, and it looks like we’re warming up to
some pretty good discussions. Check out the profile to see who the current
members are.

just short

I don’t need another fairy-tale retelling with a side order of unspeakable horror. Not
when I’m already trying to market three other stories like that.

But even less do I need another fairy-tale retelling with a side order of unspeakable
horror that is stubbornly quitting on me two sentences short of the end.

updatery

World Fantasy was good. Got to see (read: stay with) Khet; got to socialize with many
friends from previous cons and make some new ones. The con itself wasn’t the best I’ve ever
been to — thin programming, too heavily focused on the topic du jour (the Robert E. Howard
Centennial), and most of the panels I went to were okay at best — but that’s only one of the
reasons I go, and not even the most important one, so I’m not upset.

Voted this afternoon. Most of my time was spent waiting for them to figure out what to do
with the two women in front of me who had both moved and therefore needed to jump through
administrative hoops. Link of interest: the Vote
by Mail Project is pushing the model of voting Oregon uses, which appears to be vastly
preferable on every front you can imagine. Worth taking a look at.

Also, started wading through my school e-mail that had built up over the weekend, and found
I’ve made it through the first round of cuts for my Collins course proposal. Now I have a
half-hour interview/presentation to go through, with some adjustments to be made to my
syllabus. Not sure when I’ll have the time to prep for that between now and Thursday, but I’d
better find some, as it appears I stand an actual chance of getting this through.

packy packy

After a week or so of fighting myself into a stalemate against the forces of entropy in my
life (read: trying to clean, trying to finish projects, trying to catch up on e-mail, feeling
generally like a hamster on a treadmill), I’m abandoning the battle and flying off to warmer
climes for a few days.

See some of y’all at World Fantasy.