Sign up for my newsletter to receive news and updates!

Posts Tagged ‘linkage’

thinky thoughts on magic

superversive has a lengthy and thought-provoking post up, asking why we hanker for magic. It’s many things in passing, including a deconstruction of ceremonial magic and a literary analysis of several founding fathers of fantasy, but for me, the two most interesting bits are further in.

First is the summary of Steven D. Greydanus’ “seven hedges” which “serve to divide the magic of fantasy from the magic of curses and occult powers.” I find these fascinating, honestly, because they seem to arise out of a set of concerns that, well, don’t concern me. Greydanus (and superversive) are writing in the context of Catholic theology, and more broadly Christian theology; it’s the same context Tolkien was writing in, and he, too, had to address those concerns. What does it mean to write about magic when you believe magic is either real and bad (because then you are circumventing God) or fake and bad (because then you are wasting your time on a delusion)?

And I find that I’m not concerned with that question. Maybe I should be, and it’s a failure on my part to ponder the deeper implications of fantasy. I read the summary of the seven hedges, and found myself irritated by them. Why should I limit magic to non-human, already-trained wizardly supporting characters in another world where magic is entirely known, and lard the tale with cautionary road signs? I don’t think superversive thinks I should, but it might be that Greydanus does. (I didn’t have the enthusiasm to read his piece myself.) But those restrictions are predicated on a certain assumption of the connection between magic-in-fiction and magic-in-life, and while I haven’t thought through all my feelings on that matter, off the cuff, I’m fairly sure my feelings are not his.

Anyway, that’s one thing I’m chewing on. The other is the excellent Old English proverb superversive quotes: Man deþ swa he byþ þonne he mot swa he wile. “A man does what he is when he can do what he wants.” Magic as a means of dipping human will in myth . . . that’s a mode of thought I can get behind. Looking at my own writing, I can see how some of the magic-facilitated turning points in my stories are expressive of the characters’ inner selves, more directly than mundane action could show. (In fact, I’m tempted to write an essay explicating some examples of that, but it would be spoilery as hell — especially since one is drawn from Midnight Never Come.)

So. Thinky thoughts on magic. Go forth and think!

three links, and some thoughts

It is apparently Feminism Day in the internets. (I know why, actually — it’s a particular stage of ripples from an earlier much-discussed incident — but I’m not going to try to trace the lineage; I’m just here to provide the links.)

First up, something most of my personal friends understand, but worth spreading as a public service: “A Straight Geek Male’s Guide to Interaction with Females.” It’s the basics, nothing more, but it never hurts to remind people of them.

Second: the L.A. Times on, well, one of the fastest ways to piss me off royally, aka Men Who Explain Things. You know, the patronizing jackasses who presume they know more about Topic X than you do, even when they don’t. Bonus rage points for the fact that, while some of them sometimes do it to other men, it is frequently directed at women. (Includes a fabulous anecdote of the best shut-down possible. Alas, it is not often possible — but it must have been satisfying when it happened.)

Third: a lengthy post from synecdochic on “Don’t Be That Guy.” Very long, but useful not just in identifying the male behaviors that put women off, but offering suggestions for how “allies” (other guys who notice the problem) can help out. I’m sure somewhere in the three pages and counting of comments, multiple somebodies have pointed out that the suggestions do often involve a man speaking on a woman’s behalf because she won’t be listened to, but — as I believe the poster acknowledges — sometimes that’s regrettably necessary. Ultimately no woman should ever need a man to step in and speak for her, but if him doing so gets us a step closer to that day, I won’t discourage it.

. . . but you know, it’s odd. Many of the experiences that last post talks about, I just, well, haven’t experienced. Not often, anyway. And I can’t help but ponder the confluence of factors that makes that so.

Partly, no doubt, it’s causal factors. I’m not curvy and I don’t tend to dress in anything remotely resembling a revealing fashion (LARPS notwithstanding), ergo I’m not as likely to have the “my eyes are up HERE” problem. I associate mostly with guys who are legitimately Good Guys, and therefore unlikely to patronize or dismiss me. (Half of them are better feminists than I am.) Etc.

Some of it, though, has to be perceptual. In other words, I do encounter such things, but I don’t notice them. I’ve said before that I must have run into more than two or three sexist teachers in my educational career, but I guess I just steamrollered over the others without noticing. Because on the one hand I can’t think of more, but on the other, I can’t find much evidence in my life of sexist assumptions and behavior holding me back. I’m having a hard time articulating what I mean by that; I don’t mean I’m immune. Situations where I was hampered externally, sure, those no doubt have happened. But I have rarely felt inferior, inadequate, what have you, as a result of my gender. I actually believe it’s true when I say that I went from Great At Math to Sucking At Math, not because I felt like I couldn’t do it, but because I didn’t feel like doing it. And sure, my loss of interest partially coincided with one of the identifiably sexist teachers — but only partially. I never felt incapable. (Nor was I, if I managed to pass AP Calculus by doing all the homework the night before the test.)

At cons? I suppose many of the writers I hang out with there are women. If I tally up a mental list of the people I anticipate seeing when I go, it’s definitely skewed female. Then again, this is more likely to be a problem of interaction with strangers or new acquaintances than with established friends. But if there have been room parties/dinners/whatever where a guy was checking me out or behaving like he had a right to something from me or dismissing my words, I just . . . haven’t noticed. And have not, so far as I can tell, let it affect me.

And you know, I have mixed feelings about that. On the one hand, yay me! I can haz self-esteem. On the other, maybe I’m missing out on opportunities to push for change, to make a difference, to call people on their bullshit instead of ignoring it. (Or maybe it is undermining me after all. You can be oppressed without noticing your oppression.) How much can I trust my own perception? How much good do I do in a broader sense by shrugging this stuff off?

I don’t particularly know. But at the very least, chewing on these questions is good for me.

It’s the 16th, and that means I’m posting over at SF Novelists, this time about my decision to leave grad school.

***

Also, I did find another review of Midnight Never Come recently. That’s right, folks, I’ve been Klausnered.

I knew it was coming sooner or later. What fascinates me is that her review reads kind of as if she cribbed it from the Publishers Weekly review. (Only less grammatical.) The resemblance isn’t overwhelming, but the structure of the two is very similar.

What’s that you say? You want me to link to it? I’m not going to, for the simple reason that, while it’s hardly the most spoiler-ridden review Harriet Klausner has produced, it does say a few things I’d rather it didn’t. Take my word for it: she doesn’t say anything in particular that you haven’t heard elsewhere, with better grammar.

two important things

One is funny-important, the other is real-important.

Funny first: Uwe Boll has said he’ll stop making movies if a million people ask him to. Last I checked, we were up to 134,679. Spread the word.

Now the real: Joss Whedon posted an impassioned essay some time back, about the “honor killing” of Du’a Khalil Aswad, and the still-pervasive problem of misogyny and violence against women. This inspired a group of people to create the anthology Nothing But Red, a set of works responding to those issues. The color pdf is $5.95, and the b&w trade paperback $15.95, with profits going toward Equality Now. Spread the word about this, too. To quote Joss: “Because it’s no longer enough to be a decent person. It’s no longer enough to shake our heads and make concerned grimaces at the news. True enlightened activism is the only thing that can save humanity from itself.”

two bits of fun linkery

Remarkably effective: Albert Einstein’s Theory of Relativity in Words of Four Letters or Less. Worth it just for the mental image of Albert Einstein saying “Feh. Read this and weep.” And it manages to be a pretty lucid explanation of Relativity, though there are definitely points where you can see the author struggling to get around some ordinary word that happens to be five or six letters long. (It reminded me a bit of “Uncleftish Beholding”, Poul Anderson’s discussion of atomic theory in Ander-Saxon — that is to say, English purged of all non-Germanic words. That one’s way harder to process, but it’s eye-opening as to how many technical words we’ve borrowed from Latin and Greek.)

More on the funny side: the reason why we never hear about time travelers changing history. One of those bits of parody that would have been inconceivable ten years ago, but painfully, painfully plausible now. (Via my brother, from the online magazine Abyss & Apex.)

I thought I had a third amusing link, but it seems to have gone away. Here, have a detailed explanation of what goes on in a routine autopsy instead. ‘Cause that’s a barrel of laughs.

This won’t be as argumentative as the last time I linked to a Mind Meld, but there’s some argumentation here.

The question posed in the Mind Meld is this: “Is science fiction antithetical to religion?”

There are some good answers behind that link. (Also some long answers.) They expose, among other things, the vagueness of that question. You can take it in the sense implied by the lines that precede it: “Two of the most highly regarded fantasy authors – Tolkien and Lewis – were also Christians, whereas the fathers of science fiction were atheists, and SF itself, it could be argued, grew out of Darwinism and other notions of deep time.” In that sense, it seems to be asking whether you can write science fiction while also being religious, and the subsequent answers have comprehensively blown the “SF was founded by atheists” premise out of the water.

But there are other aspects to the question. Are the aims of science fiction incompatible with those of religion? That depends on how one views the aims of both; there are both “yes” and “no” answers at various points in the discussion. Adam Roberts almost seems to equate SF with Protestantism and fantasy with Catholicism. ??? James Wallace Harris’s answer reminds me uncomfortably of the things I was ranting about in “Frazer’s Goddamned Golden Bough” — that you can create that kind of pseudo-evolutionary path for human thought. (At least he allows for the transgression of his categories, instead of assuming we outgrow the older ones.) Several people touch on fundamentalism versus other approaches to religion, and how that relates to religious thought.

Almost all of them, though, assume “religion” = “Christianity” — or, at most, the Religions of the Book. On the one hand, this is fair; most of our genre tradition has been written by Westerners. On the other hand, if we want to talk about the compatibility or lack thereof between SF and religion, we should address the existence of other faiths. John C. Wright’s the only one who really does so (in an answer that is also the longest there, since he discusses three or four novels along the way). He talks about Ursula LeGuin’s Taoist influences and the Zen Buddhism in Spider Robinson’s Variable Star, and speculates interestingly on our different attitudes toward Eastern and Western religion. I’d love to see more discussion of that, especially since I disagree with Wright that swapping out a Buddhist for a Catholic priest is a change of “one detail.” But that kind of discussion requires a good working knowledge of Buddhist theology (or Hindu, or any other non-Book religion) that I don’t pretend to have. (Heck, I wouldn’t even claim my Catholic theology is up to snuff.)

Interesting stuff any way you slice it. And it successfully got my brain to work shortly after waking up, which is in its own right nearly a miracle sufficient to prove the existence of God.

linky

This month on SF Novelists, I speculate as to what makes writers dream of movie adaptations, in “Stars in Our Eyes.”

Also, Daryl Gregory had a fantastic post yesterday about the process by which book covers happen, using the example of his own upcoming novel Pandemonium.

While I’m at it, too, I should mention that I when I posted recommending Goblin Quest by Jim Hines, I was under the mistaken impression that Goblin War, the third book of the series, was already out. It just hit the shelves recently, so now’s a good time to go looking if you were thinking of picking the series up. (Maria Snyder also just put out Fire Study, the third book in the series with Poison Study, so there are follow-ups to more than one of my recommendations.)

two historical bits

First of all, since everybody and their brother seems to be sending it to me right now: yes, I am aware of the online version of the 1898-99 Booth Poverty Map of London. (Apparently BoingBoing precipitated this flood?) My thanks to those of you who told me about it, but you can stop now.

(Not pissy; just a little bemused.)

Second: it’s buggy as hell, but Channel 4 in Britain has put up a flash game connected to their TV show, City of Vice. Both focus on the mid-eighteenth century Bow Street Runners, created by the magistrate Henry Fielding and his brother and successor John, who were arguably London’s first police force. I haven’t seen the show (since it isn’t out on DVD yet or anything, and I’m not the BitTorrent sort), but the first episode of the game is a fun little murder mystery. Unfortunately, the game is prone to hanging at odd points — I discovered a lot of complaints online, when I got frozen during a particular bit — so we’ll have to see if they fix those problems.

Don’t play it without a mouse, though; the bits that require coordination are apparently hell on a trackpad or any other such device.

If I have a daughter, I’m naming her Jael.

From Slacktivist’s list of 7 biblical women’s names that deserve wider usage:

2. Jael. You meet plenty of people named after Mary, the other biblical character praised as “most blessed of women,” but I’ve never met or even heard of anyone named after Jael. Maybe it’s because the name translates, literally, as “mountain goat.” Or maybe it’s because “bad-ass” isn’t what most parents are looking for in a name for their baby girl. Jael was bad-ass. She took out Sisera, the general in charge of the invading army:

Barak came by in pursuit of Sisera, and Jael went out to meet him. “Come,” she said, “I will show you the man you’re looking for.” So he went in with her, and there lay Sisera with the tent peg through his temple — dead.

Don’t mess with Jael.

I need to read the more interesting parts of the Old Testament someday.

This?

Is exactly what I need to keep in my head as I ponder this upcoming Victorian book.

(A book which really needs an icon of its own, and also a title. And that other book over there needs a title too. Why are all the things I’m working on remaining obstinately nameless? “Victorian steampunk faerie fantasy” and “Super Sekrit Project CHS” get old pretty fast.)

SF Novelists launch

Okay, I utterly failed to announce this during the day like I was supposed to; I blame the fact that I spent half my day up in Indy. But anyway, today (or rather, Monday, for those of you who have already gone to bed and will see this tomorrow morning) is (was) the launch of the shiny! new! revamped! SF Novelists website.

It started out as a membership-restricted group for professional science fiction and fantasy novelists — a mailing list for people to ask questions, a website for us to share information. There’s plenty of advice out there for getting started in this field, but once you leap those first few hurdles, you’re often dependent on the assistance of more experienced writer-friends. And sometimes the questions you want to ask are of the sort that shouldn’t be asked publicly.

But we’re growing beyond those humble roots. If you follow that link, you will find our brand spanking new group blog. One of the side columns scrapes the RSS feeds of our own personal journals, but what you see on the left there is original content, written specifically for SF Novelists’ public face. I imagine we’ll range all over the place, from craft- or business-specific topics to things of more general interest to the SF/F community. You can also find free samples of members’ work, so if somebody makes a post that really gets your attention, it’s easy to follow up and see if you want to read their journal or fiction more regularly.

It should be fun, in the vein of Deep Genre or similar endeavours. Take a look, see if you find anything you like!

informative linkage

Since it seems like half the people around me have gone on some kind of health kick since the beginning of the year, I thought I should pass along this link I just came across, to a post analyzing studies of weight-loss dieting.

Money shot: “the more you diet, the harder losing weight becomes over the long term, and the harder your body will fight to retain fat.”

Mind you, I have issues with that post. First and foremost is that the writer doesn’t define what s/he means by “weight-loss dieting” — which lack of clarity makes it easy to hit the end of that post and believe that there’s nothing we can ever do to significantly change our body weight over a long period of time, and even if we do succeed all we’ve accomplished is to increase our risk of mortality.

I doubt that.

I’m going to presume that, by “weight-loss dieting,” the writer means restricted-calorie diets, and/or diets focusing on eating very restricted sorts of foods. (Grapefruit diets, etc.) There’s some good stuff further down about the idea that fat people overeat, and skinny people eat “normally;” I’d love to see a proper statistical analysis on a cross-section of the American population, but the attempted weight-gain study (or rather, its failure) was interesting. Short form is, I’m willing to buy the idea that overweight people are not necessarily overweight because of overeating, and therefore that restricting their eating is not and never will be a successful strategy.

I’m also going to presume that the writer doesn’t mean this information to refer to what we might otherwise call “a healthy diet.” Whether or not reducing refined foods and eating more fruits and vegetables will induce substantial weight loss, I’ve got to believe it’s a good idea for health reasons. Otherwise, we might as well fire the entire medical and nutritional professions en masse, and all go out for ice cream.

My final presumption is that the data there does not apply to an exercise-based weight-loss program. Do you suffer increased risk of heart disease if you lost your twenty pounds by walking more and driving less, or going to the gym three times a week? It doesn’t make sense to me that you would, but even if that’s the case, I will bet that the statistics and charts and graphs would be different than the ones for simple dieting. Are you more likely to lose weight and keep it off if you do it via exercise? If not, then there really isn’t anything a person can do to successfully and healthily shift their weight downward. Again, we need different statistics for that. I don’t expect the diet stats to apply there.

Because if weight loss is actually that bad for you, regardless of whether you do it by calorie restriction or healthy eating or exercise, then we’re even more screwed than we knew.

Anyway, there’s been a million discussions in my social circle about dieting and the Bad Idea-ness thereof, so I wanted to link to something that cited actual studies, complete with a bibliography of peer-reviewed articles at the end. Short form is, I stand by what I’ve said all along: eat better food, not less food, and get thee to a gym.

If somebody knows a reason why that’s a bad idea, please share.

good thoughts on endings

The ending of a story is inextricably tied up with the rest of it. It flows from what precedes it, but it also shapes and reshapes everything that precedes it. The ending of a story can tell us what the story means — it can give meaning to all that precedes it.

If you’re already familiar with The Sixth Sense and Casablanca — or if you don’t mind having their endings spoiled for you — you might want to check out Slacktivist’s post on endings. Normally I read his journal for his ongoing dissection of the Left Behind books (as an evangelical Christian himself, he finds the books not just bad with respect to plot, character, pacing, and prose, but morally and theologically abhorrent). You can see a bit of that peeking through where he talks about the Book of Revelation as an ending, but mostly this post is about narrative, the job an ending is supposed to do, and what happens if you replace it with another ending.

Good thoughts, says I. And it reminds me of one of the challenges inherent in playing RPGs with an eye toward the aesthetics of plot and character. Unless you script everything that happens and leave nothing to chance — and sometimes even if you do — you will occasionally find yourself in a position where some event doesn’t fit, where the story takes a turn that you would not have put in, or would have revised back out again, if this were a story you’re writing. But RPGs don’t allow for revision; every gaming group I know tries to avoid redlining unless there is absolutely no other choice. So sometimes what you end up with is a fascinating exercise in interpretation: how can you view and/or explain those events in such a fashion as to arrive at a meaningful ending? How can you use an ending to resolve conflicts or disappointments lingering from before?

Endings matter a lot to me. I’ve said before, I don’t mind seeing/making characters suffer and fail and lose what matters to them — in fact, I often enjoy it; yes, writers are sadistic — so long as the suffering and failure and loss mean something. They have to contribute to a larger picture, whether that picture belongs to the character in question, or other people on whose behalf they have gone through hell. But random, meaningless suffering, or suffering whose purpose is to show you there is no meaning . . . no. I’ll do gymanstics of perspective to avoid that, to arrive at an ending that gives a different shape to what has gone before.

How about you all? What are your thoughts on endings? If you’re a writer, do you know them when you set out (which probably makes arriving at meaningfulness easier), or do you have to create them as you go along? If you’re a gamer, how do you feel about retiring/killing off characters, or ending games? How about the alternate endings Slacktivist talks about, where a different resolution gets tacked on?

stopping hate

I wish my motivation for a non-writing-related post were more cheerful.

Came across two things today. The more recent is this post about a murder that took place not too far from where I live. A couple of guys spent literally hours beating a man to death, dragging him out into the middle of nowhere, leaving him to die, then coming back to find and shoot him, and so far their defense for this has been “he was gay.” Which he wasn’t. But his actual orientation is in a sense irrelevant; what’s relevant is that it’s being claimed as a justification, that Indiana has not passed any anti-hate-crime legislation, and that this story has been buried. Almost nobody reported on it when it happened. Not nationally; not locally. Just a couple of smaller, more independent papers. But when a ten-year-old girl was killed, it made news everywhere.

Turning to gender, I’m sure many of you read Joss Whedon’s . . . I don’t want to call it a rant, or a diatribe, because those words invite you to dismiss his words as undirected anger. Nor was it a manifesto, per say. His post — a bland word — about Dua Khalil, a young Iraqi woman who was beaten to death in a so-called “honor killing,” and about how spectators stood around and filmed her death on their cellphones, doing nothing to try and stop it. (Those videos are online. I have not gone looking for them. I’m sure you can find them if you try.) Skyla Dawn Cameron and others are putting together a charity anthology of essays, short stories, poetry, artwork — anything relevant to the issues Whedon raised, regarding misogyny and violence against women. I don’t think they’ve specified yet which charity the proceeds will go to, but it’s not for profit.

I figure both of these are issues near and dear to the hearts of some of my readership here. Both links contain information on how you can take action. If you’re an Indiana resident, you can particularly help out with the Hall case. Either way, I hope these efforts can do at least a little bit of good.