Links : The Pen is Mightier than the Penis

Ah what a day my children. Scalpel launched quite successfully, prompting a lot of people to say nice things about us and one particular person to off-load what looked like a lot of pent up hostility on my co-editor. Doubtless he will recover, frankly I'd rather be spoken ill of than not spoken of at all.

So, as the day winds down I've decided to share with you some of the links I've been hoarding like an OCD hamster in my puffy little cheeks.

FIRSTLY, not massively recent but interesting nonetheless, THIS article in Le Monde Diplomatique by Norman Spinrad about the role played by SF writers Larry Niven, Robert Heinlein and Jerry Pournelle in floating the Reagan-era Star Wars SDI system for shooting down Soviet missiles in space. It's an interesting article as it's taken for granted in many circles that genre writers are writing about the future. However, what happens when those authors decide to try and make their particular futures come to pass, particularly when said future involves a cataclysmically expensive expensive right wing fantasy such as Ballistic Missile Defence. What's also interesting is that Jerry Pournelle has put up a response on his absolutely hideous website that sees him trotting out his pat response that actually the plan was to bankrupt the USSR all along. In the words of Nero Wolfe, "Phooey!".

SECONDLY, we have an interesting post-mortem by Galleycat ("Galleycat, Galleycat... Wheeere are they rowing you?") of a discussion report held at the recent meeting of the Science Fiction Writers of America. The discussion is one of those standard state of the union debates but what is interesting is that publishers are evidently starting to question the value of having SF as a genre at all. By this I don't mean that they're going to stop putting out SF books, but rather that they're going to market them not as part of a genre but like any other kind of novel. This has clearly come from the fact that the likes of Harry Potter and His Dark Materials have escaped the ghetto and publishers are working out that actually, by marketing these books to a niche, they're making sure the books have a harder time escaping the niche. This thinking explains why books such as Jon Courtenay Grimwood's End of the World Blues and Ken Macleod's The Execution Channel have been released without the words "science fiction" appearing anywhere near them. I think this is a positive development. If you look at Soviet SF, for example you see that it is far more literary because Soviet writers were not marketed, they were applicants to a government committee who may or may not have decided to publish their books. The genre ghetto is the creation of the publishing business and, as far as I'm concerned, the sooner they realise that it's harming their sales figures rather than helping it then the sooner good SF writers can be considered comparable to good mainstream writers rather than the people who put out Forgotten Realms novels. SF writers of the world unite, you have nothing to lose but your chains...

THIRDLY, you may, like me, have been bored to death recently by John Scalzi's pursuit of the white whale presidency of the SFWA. Scalzi was his usual outgoing, confrontational and charming self and he campaigned for real change in the face of a regime that was mercilessly mocked for saying, quite truthfully, that if you put genre stuff out there for free then you're harming the lower end of the market. This prompted some big names in the SF industry to hoot and bray and generally exhibit a complete inability to give a fuck about the people at the low end of the paid SF market. After receiving huge amounts of net coverage and being lionised by people who not only weren't members of the SFWA but actively had no stake in who won the presidency of the organisation, Scalzi hilariously lost by quite a wide margin, the SFWA membership preferring someone with experience working in the organisation over a MilSF writer who people seem to quite like. Anyway, amidst the ugly politics and ego-massaging, David Moles has pointed out that, actually, the SFWA isn't worth joining anyway, which is what I thought.

FOURTHLY, a little while back, someone put up a YouTube video of a cable access show called Vagina Power. Hosted by the astonishingly articulate Alexyss Tylor, the show is essentially a series of long tirades by Tylor on sex theory, in particular within the African American community. Tylor was horrified that her stuff was available for free online (she has a nice side-line in videos) and demanded the video be pulled but it was simply too cool to die. A lot of the success of the video comes from her saying things like "He won't give you no Long John Silver shrimp but he will give you a mouth and an anus full of semen" but if you set aside the admittedly excellent language you'll here someone talking passionately and intelligently about sex.

FIFTHLY, THIS was pointed out to me by my good friend A.R. Yngve in connection with THIS excellent piece of criticism. The second piece looks at the Orson Scott Card classic Ender's Game and argues that it's essentially not only an apologia for fascism, it's also a book that glorifies the kind of narcissistic persecution complex that is generally used to justify genocide. To anyone who knows Card's opinions about gays (namely that it should be okay for Mormons to hit their gay kids until they stop being gay), these politics should come as no surprise. The first article is interesting as it suggests that 19th Century Mormons killed off non Mormons settlers that were moving into what would become the Mormon state of Utah. But I'm sure there's no connection between Mormons committing an act of genocide and a Mormon writing a book that justified genocide. still... on the plus side there's an Ender's Game movie in the works and, according to Locus, Card is going to write about what happened to Ender immediately after the events of Ender's Game (as opposed to the other Ender books that deal with an adult Ender)... and they say that burning art is wrong.

SIXTHLY, I was going to write a review of Spiderman 3 but then I realised that Scaryduck got there before me and commented on the absolute mess in a far more eloquent manner than I could ever have.

Comments

[James Enge]

"a regime that was mercilessly mocked for saying, quite truthfully, that if you put genre stuff out there for free then you're harming the lower end of the market."

I don't get it. How does posting stuff online harm "the low end of the market"?

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

You think the people arguing for the merits of giving away selected work on line aren't themselves at the "low end of the paid SF market"? Jo Walton ("papersky" on Livejournal) will be very surprised to hear this, I think.

On a different subject, I was on that panel at the Nebulas, and I don't recall anyone suggesting that there shouldn't be genre or bookstore category called SF. Perhaps you've discerned this as a second-order implication of something somebody said, but I don't see it.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

The idea is that everyone has a limited amount of time that they can spend on reading SF.

The more stuff available to fill that gap free of charge, the less money there is in SF as a whole.

The top end of the market isn't as effected by this because the top end has its loyal customers anyway. Nobody is not going to buy the next Charlie Stross because Missile Gap is available for free. However, they might think twice before buying Interzone or another outlet for smaller writers because given the choice between Interzone with people they've never heard of or Missile Gap by a known quantity, they'll go for the known quantity.

It's the same process through which immigrants drive down prices for manual labour.

Personally, I'm not really convinced by the argument as I don't think it will ultimately harm the business in the long run but I do think that it's a principled position to take and one that deserves a more thorough response than pointing and laughing.

The fact that the pointing and laughing came almost entirely from the top end of the market just underlined how distasteful I found the whole thing.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Patrick -- Jo Walton is an established author who was just on the short list for a major literary award. If you honestly think that she's at the low end of the market then I seriously think you need to consider your frame of reference.

If you read the Moles piece I was responding to, you'll see that he points out that actually, the SFWA is mainly of interest to the people who have sold three pieces to Star Wars Gamer. The views that were mocked IMHO so distastefully, came from someone in an organisation mostly made up of those kinds of "professional writers". THAT's the low end of the market.

As I said, I don't buy the argument but I think that it's a position that deserves more respect and careful consideration than that displayed by the people who took it upon themselves to mock.

[Patrick Nielsen Hayden]

My frame of reference is very carefully considered. Jo is one of my favorite writers in the world. But if awards and critical acclaim put a writer in the "high end" of the market, Howard Waldrop would be rich.

I'm not poormouthing on Jo's behalf. She has achieved some things that other writers might well envy. But to characterize her as a commercially successful writer who "hoots and brays" at writers at the "low end" is silly.

I don't disrespect the idea that people might download Missile Gap rather than read Interzone. I might well do so myself, for the simple reason that the last Charles Stross story I read was entertaining, whereas the last issue of Interzone I read was dull. However, the question I would pose is, how is it that Charles Stross became a "known quantity" for your hypothetical choosers? Perhaps it was because evil corporate publishing tycoons beamed wrong thoughts into the brains of people who would otherwise be avidly seeking out magazines full of writers they never heard of. Alternately, there may be other reasons.

[Jonathan McCalmont]

Yes... people are conservative and prefer to read authors they've read before and liked rather than engage with writers that they might like even more. This is a fact about human nature as regrettable as it might well be.

The issue is whether well known authors putting out free stuff actually harms SF writing as a whole. I rather suspect that what harm it does, it repairs with the other by bringing in people who might not otherwise read such things.

However, the SFWA official who made the "technoserf" comment was clearly focusing on his constituency... the low end of the market.

This wasn't RIAA saying that free content is theft and is harming our collective culture but rather a man expressing concern about the possibility of free stuff from big writers undermining the low end of the market.

I think that given that a) his remarks clearly came from good intentions and b) his argument was not obviously insane that he was deserving of a greater degree of respect and consideration than that afforded him by the hooting and laughing of the SF community.

For the record, I adore Jo Walton's work, as I do Charlie Stross's but in the paddling pool that is genre fiction, these people are both markedly better off than the guy who gets published in Star Wars Gamer.

As I said, I'm not convinced by the argument that free stuff harms to low end of the market but I don't think it's obvious balls and I do think that pixel-stained technopeasant day did not show the genre community in its best light.