6
Mar
2010
On where to put your black swans.
6
Mar
2010
Joseph Fouche has a fascinating article entitled Seizing the Opportunity to Destroy Western Civilization. I don’t know anything about Fouche, although the blogroll he belongs to suggests a right-libertarian bent with touches of joyful submission to authoritarianism (Althouse? Really?), but this article of his has all the makings of a classic for writers of epic fantasy.
Fouche’s starts by describing the premises of Nassim Nicholas Taleb: when historians look back on history for the cause of some famous historical catastrophe, they tend to look too far. They look for a narrative in history that connects all of the dots leading up to the horrible event they’re documenting, trying to discern which ones were causative and which ones were not. There are, naturally, academic objections to the narrative theory of history, which show that political catastrophes are not the result of long-term trends but are immediate chaotic perturbations that lead to disasters. Thus, for example, people link 9/11 to the execution of Sayyid Qutb in 1966, whereas the more proximate cause of 9/11 can be found in Saudi politics less than a decade earlier. (I think I’ll take issue with his characterization of the bank disaster; many economists agree the perturbations that lead to the great recession could have been damped by Glass-Steagel.)
Fouche then says, rightly I think, that what’s missing from the argument about whether or not long-term narrative or proximate perturbations of political equilibria can be used to describe the causes of catastrophe is this: the personal narrative of the actors. His example is WWI, but 9/11 works fine. Bin Laden had little interest in attacking “The West” in the 1980s: his interest was in rooting out corruption and the invasion of outsiders within the future Caliphate, most notably the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Qutb’s opinions on America, which were substantial, were minimal to Bin Laden’s overall ideology. After the invasion of Kuwait, Saudia Arabia allowed the US to operate on Saudi soil, and that slotted itself into Bin Laden’s personal narrative about the purity of the Caliphate, and generated a response.
If you’re a writer, this is a great idea. Instead of deep and ancient narratives leading up to the emerging crisis, what you need is a villain with some authority who has had a long-standing personal narrative– of personal greatness, of ancient darkness, of national unity, whatever– and then craft a few small events that he can, in his mind, coerce into being part of his personal narrative. How much coercion he must do to make it fit makes a great measure of his corruption. You can even point out failures to contain the perturbations he creates, failures of personal action or legal frames, and show how his narrative is powerful enough to infest others, overcome such objections, and lead to disaster.
On the other hand, it also reduces the idea of heroism to a counter-point. I’m still thinking about how to contain that.
1
Mar
2010
New Story, “Fortune Cookie.”
1
Mar
2010
This is a fairly standard Furry fantasy, with some antagonistic-to-furry language at the beginning. If you think you recognize yourself in the story, you’re probably wrong. It was a lot of fun to write, and I’d like to thank an unnamed lovely young woman for giving me so many amazing ideas. M/F, bondage. Please enjoy Fortune Cookie.
17
Feb
2010
Notes from a WIP
17
Feb
2010
Who knows? I might make it by Friday after all:
It was easy then. Remove his infectious code, pull up the registry and edit out all the brutal redirects from his remotes, along with shutdown codes that prevent legitimate anti-malware from running.
The penguin doesn’t care about any of that. To me, all of that’s just bits and bytes, and tromping through it is routine.
Even in 2020, being a cocksucker in South Africa is dangerous outside of Capetown or Johannesburg, especially if you meet the rare angry religious type from the northeast corner. Being pale-skinned is unusual, but not worth remarking on except when getting joshed by your mates. But living with cyberwear that just works without daily permission from Seattle or San Jose? Now that’s queer.
18
Jan
2010
Three Things For Today.
18
Jan
2010
No great announcements, just a few writerly things I saw today:
#1: Regarding my recent reviews of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Jo Waltonnails my opinion to the floor:
The techniques of writing and reading [science fiction] have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel—because they are. Modern SF assumes. It doesn’t say “The red sun is high, the blue low because it was a binary system.” So there’s a double problem. People who read SF sometimes write SF that doesn’t have enough surface to skitter over. Someone who doesn’t have the skillset can’t learn the skillset by reading it. And conversely, people who don’t read SF and write it write horribly old fashioned clunky re-inventing the wheel stuff, because they don’t know what needs explanation. They explain both too much and not enough, and end up with something that’s just teeth-grindingly annoying for an SF reader to read.
Exactly right, and that’s what’s wrong with everything fromWinterson’s The Stone Gods to the atrocious “science fiction” of e-book only romance writers like Jet Mykles and Reese Gabriel.
#2: The Five Stages of Publishing. See, I skipped down to acceptance right from the beginning. And it’s always worked for me.
#3: I’ve been writing again, and it’s been an iffy thing. The skill comes and goes like a guilty whoremonger. But I received an invitation for an anthology of “Queerpunk,” and have been thinking about how to work cyberpunk, homosexuality, near-future transhumanism, and I think I have an opening:
I met him in the one place where we could possibly have met: on a de-orbiting shuttle. I was coming back from another freelance job in orbit, all wracked out and drained but carrying so much new knowledge it had weight. He had a suit, and a tie, and all the signs of a lunar career. We’d have never met if it hadn’t been for the blackout, that fifteen minutes of silence when you’re cut off from the net. We were forced to talk to each other. Hell, we were forced to notice each other. Which wouldn’t have happened without the blackout.
Our seats were side by side. But he had all the newest stuff, corporate double-signed and encrypted with Diffie Hellman Six, every one of them with a publicly visible EULA and the checkmark box visible should the Pirate Corps come looking. And me? Diffie Hellman nine but GPL’d, man… all the way.
I’m not sure where to go from there. I know I have to get them into bed and emotionally involved, but what’s the plot? Hmm…
10
Jan
2010
Review: Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
10
Jan
2010
So, I’ve finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, and my reactions are mixed, to say the least. My primary reaction was one of intense sadness: she really does believe that she’s braving new territory. She is completely unaware that she’s hacking through a jungle right next to a long, well-trodden road and the crew that’s building it is far, far ahead of her, and her course takes her away from the best conclusions. She’s off in a strange, dualistic universe in which robots come to feel “just because.” There are dialogues about how humans have emotions and yet this obviously emotional robots does not, and yet not a single word toward the general consensus that emotions are what give us the capacity to come to a conclusion, to shut rationalization down and make a decision, to break ties between competing choices, and without emotions we would be helpless. When a video game acts as if it wants to defeat you, it has been given that want by its developer; at some stage, we turn off the abstraction and act as if the game wants to defeat us. Winterson picks up the glittering tools of modern science fiction and engages in bronze-age reflections with them.
The Stone Gods is science fiction written as an excuse to do whatever the hell she wants, without regard for the reader’s sense of continuity or rationale. The sense of used furniture is stronger than ever.
Winterson is trying to do too much: she’s trying to tell a love story. She’s trying to tell a story of ecological disaster. She’s trying to tell a story about fatalism, and about how fatalism is the only logical attitude to take given Mankind’s tendency to destroy himself. Individual death is a metaphor for the world’s end– not in an entropic sense, but in a personal one, and an immediate one.
Toward the end of the book her lyricism returns, coupled with some really stupid scenes stolen from the worst post-apocalyptic fiction you could possibly imagine. Think Shirow’s Appleseed, watched without translation or subtitles, and the author then tries to re-write what she saw as farce. That’s where it’s going.
But the ending makes me cry because the writing is so good, even if the writer is telling you the character is hallucinating as she dies. But Winterson makes me cry reliably. I wouldn’t waste my time reading her “science fiction” ever again. If you love breathtakingly beautiful writing, check out The World, And Other Places, her collection of short stories. Each is small, worth your time, and not an insult to your intelligence.
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