Scribblin's and Quibblin's

In which I wax disagreeable about things RE: writing that have attracted my attention.

• There's a thing in SF where, despite mankind having Outgrown Such Silly Superstitions, Islam still exists. Not Christianity, generally not Hinduism or Shinto, but Islam, Native American religions, and often Judaism. Obviously we know why writers are hesitant to posit Judaism ceasing to be—some unpleasant fellas tried to do that, not too long ago—but what about the other two? My theory?
  
  Racism. After all, enlightened civilized Westerners and Indians and East Asians have moved beyond religion, but Arabs and Native Americans are still primitive peoples, their lives dominated by the tribe. Alternatively, effete, over-urbanized Westerners and Indians and East Asians have lost their spirituality, but the purehearted Arabs and Native Americans retain their tie to their traditions and the earth, in a way their erstwhile conquerors never have.
  
  Yeah, you only think I said two different things in that last paragraph. Either way, Arabs and Natives are being treated as Noble Savages; the only difference is whether you emphasize the noun or the adjective.


• Speaking of, and RE: Keith Graham's stupid "law" for SF writers, "Earthmen are not all white or all men", my SF stories do have remarkably few black people in them. Indeed, only two African Americans, and no Africans (apart from a passing allusion to someone swearing in isiZulu, during a crowd scene). Makes sense, though: the colonies where the stories take place are settled by America, Brazil, and Japan, in one case, and China and the UK, in another. By an astounding coincidence, most of my black cast speaks Portuguese as a first language and thinks capoeira, feijoada, and a little samba is a relaxing evening.
  
  Also, though, look, I'm from Flagstaff, AZ. Our demographics reverses the proportion of Black and Native American—my town's probably about 1/300th Black, but 1 person in 8 is Native (as we call them here). I have known, personally, exactly five black people in my life, not counting the siblings or parents of those five. And one of them was from Burundi.


• I thought that something Tycho said in a slightly different context was relevant to the whole "literary vs. genre" thing, seen, e.g., here.

  I have always been white trash, and will never cease to be so; what that means is that I was raised with an inherent distrust in the Hoity and a base and brutal urge to dismantle the Toity. This is sometimes termed anti-intellectualism, usually by intellectuals, when what it is in truth is an opposition to intellect for intellect’s sake. The reality is that what “is” and “isn’t art” is something we can determine with a slider in our prefrontal cortex.

  My God, to have an instrument like that. Even when you don't agree with him the bastard sure can write.


• Example of not agreeing with Tycho, 'parently he likes John Scalzi, both personally and artistically. I have elsewhere discussed Scalzi's loathsome political disingenuousness—this pretense of moderateness doesn't fool anyone, dickweed, not from you, and not from Jon Stewart, either—I don't know what to say about him as a writer. I hear good things about Old Man's War.
  
  On the other hand, is this, an excerpt from one of Scalzi's books. It's just awful, cutesy-poo pseudo-Whedon prose gymnastics that is far too damned impressed with itself.
  
  One of the commenters said "sometimes your wallet just has to hate good writers". Most assuredly, but my wallet loves John Scalzi. My wallet wants to have a million of his children. My wallet owes him a sodding life-debt, because he is the very opposite of a threat to it.


• So a bunch of people got on Ben Shapiro's case for writing an epic takedown of John Updike, very soon after Updike died. A lot of them were Big Hollywood's resident leftist trolls, claiming that Ben was being mean-spirited. Aside from the fact he's simply saying—what is true—that Updike was overrated as a writer, have you ever read anything a leftist writes RE: the death of anyone the slightest bit to the right? Vlad the Impaler showed more decent deference to the newly deceased!


• I think we can tell by now I don't like florid prose, in fiction? Yeah. I favor that quality, which Belloc too favored, "lucidity". Thus:

  [Lucidity] does not mean ease of appreciation by the stupidest reader or by the reader with the smallest vocabulary; nor does it mean the expression of ideas which are more easily grasped than others. It means that quality in prose whereby whatever you have had in your mind, however difficult to convey, however unusual, however much requiring the use of terms which may be unfamiliar, shall in the highest degree of clarity possible reappear in your reader’s mind.

  Its value in SF, and indeed in fantasy, is also related by Niven's 5th Law for Writers:"If what you have to say is important and/or difficult to follow, use the simplest language possible. If the reader doesn't get it then, let it not be your fault."
  
  Also, Belloc apparently said that the absolute height of lucid writing is "Mary Had a Little Lamb". And he's probably right.


• It's interesting, that unadorned style is not, exactly, what I favor in fantasy prose, but I still hate the standard "literary" fiction floridity. Fantasy prose probably ought to correspond as closely as possible to the style in Tolkien. However, the problem there is, Tolkien had so much background in it, that he could actually write modern prose with stylistic tics borrowed from freaking Old English; I doubt there's more than a handful of people in the world today who have both the ability and the inclination to do what he did.
  
  Alternatively, I think the style in the medieval French romance tradition might be easier to ape, for us—Chretien de Troyes, for instance (and the interesting thing about style, at least in related languages, is it survives translation). French romances didn't have kennings, for one thing (if you tried using kennings in a fantasy novel, it'd probably come off as, at best, an inexplicable borrowing from the Black Mask school of detective fiction, and, at worst, as a William Gibson knockoff). Good things might be done, also, with the pre-Tolkien Romantics and Gothic writers; Bram Stoker or George MacDonald, for instance, or the old standbys, Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson.
  
  Avoid, however, archaism; try to parse out which stylistic elements of those writers I just named are style, and which are just 18th or 19th century English?


• The problem with florid turgid Yog Sothothery in fantasy fiction, is it's really hard to do well. Robert Howard could manage it, said-bookisms notwithstanding; Leiber didn't bother (instead, he just paraphrased Shakespeare, see e.g. Mouser's spells in "The Unholy Grail", which are obviously based on the witches' spells from MacBeth). People who can't manage it, but try, just wind up with the Eye of Argon.