Sobre el arte del plumífero 3

Thoughts upon the craft of a pen-pusher.

• One of the entries in the Turkey City Lexicon is this, called simply "Not Simultaneous":

  The mis-use of the present participle is a common structural sentence-fault for beginning writers. “Putting his key in the door, he leapt up the stairs and got his revolver out of the bureau.” Alas, our hero couldn’t do this even if his arms were forty feet long. This fault shades into “Ing Disease,” the tendency to pepper sentences with words ending in “-ing,” a grammatical construction which tends to confuse the proper sequence of events. (Attr. Damon Knight)

  I think I have a new pet peeve (not to say "grounds for induction to the Red Lantern Corps"): prescriptivism from the linguistically ignorant.
  
  Because, see, what Knight or whoever first came up with this does not understand, is, English's aspects frequently do not do the tasks their job titles imply. We use our present progressive as a simple present and our unmarked present as a frequentive (compare "I'm shopping at Wal-Mart" to "I shop at Wal-Mart"). This is because we're working around the fact Germanic languages are absolutely impoverished in their ability to express verb aspect. One of the other aspects we work around our lack of—admittedly one that I don't think any Indo-European language actually marks—is the semelfactive, the term given to the Navajo ending for when a verb happens as part of a process. And guess what, the morphological ending we give the semelfactive semantic function (yes, I needed to put it like that)? Progressive.
  
  Anyone who disputes this: "Pocketing the money, I handed over the negatives." Has your mental disease reached the point that you will claim that sentence describes two simultaneous actions? If so, all I can ask is where you learned English, and who taught it to you—and what the false-advertising laws are, in your doubtless far-flung foreign land. Also perhaps what species originally concocted your native tongue.
• I know I've talked about this before, but I keep seeing it and so I'm going to keep taking it out on you. The whole idea that characters need to change, that static characters are bad, is something that comes from novels—because in novels, the characters' psychological journey to self-discovery (blargh) is what the book's about. In a romance, the protagonist can be static, because the story is dynamic (i.e., things actually happen). Conan doesn't develop—thief to mercenary to pirate to king, he's still the exact same guy; he calms down a little in his old age and that's about it. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser don't actually change at all, not till they stopped being worth a damn anyway; Leiber just went back in the 70s and wrote a bunch of prequels about them (look at the publication dates of the individual stories). James Bond, Sherlock Holmes, the Stainless Steel Rat (which is even worse than Bond, by the way)—all of them are static.
  
  Also, when you try to mix "character development" (in this sense rather than in the sense of "establishing who the hell this guy we're reading about is") with a non-novelistic, stuff-actually-happens, plot, you know what tends to happen? Anita Blake, that's what happens—like all change, change in characters is, at least as often as not, decay, rather than improvement. The "lolicon rapist", post-c. 1969 version of the Gray Mouser is the same thing, come to think of it. I'd wager if Bond or Holmes started getting novelistic "character development", they'd basically turn into Hannibal Lecter, who's pretty much the stereotype they're based on taken to its logical extreme. Consider also the trainwreck that Criminal Intent became when they started giving Goren "character development", or the later seasons of House.
• I have elsewhere mentioned the gobsmacking exercise in hypocritical self-righteousness that is Ursula LeGuin's "Science Fiction and Mrs Brown". But I mostly restricted my remarks to LeGuin, since it was a science fiction post. Now it's Woolf's turn.
  
  Only, I don't have to write it, because (as in so many things) Theodore Dalrymple already did. One point he missed, though, is that Woolf's Three Guineas, with its asinine idea that female suppression occurred in warlike eras, therefore women's emancipation will bring peace, is a "cum hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy. It's also illiterate Eurocentrism, because in societies (the Apache, for one) where the women own the property, guess who decides when to have raids and wars? It ain't the men.
• I am not fond of "show, don't tell", and yet I am also annoyed by the irrational taboo on descriptions. It is especially irksome that these come from the same people. Some things should be told, others shown. Virtually nothing can be tabooed; not food, not scenery, not clothes, hair, or equipment. If you need to describe those things, then they need to be described. The only actual rule RE: what you should or shouldn't describe in depth is sex-scenes—after a certain point you're writing porn—but that's an ethical, rather than an aesthetic consideration.
  
  Just keep in mind what you're doing. I have scenes where I describe very little, apart from fight moves—because they're fight scenes. I also have scenes where I describe what a person does with their dirty clothes after taking a shower. It depends on what you're trying to accomplish; in the fight scenes I'm obviously going for...whatever action scenes are for, actually all the terms used to describe their purpose seem reductive. In the putting-away-laundry scene, I'm trying to establish character and a feeling of "everyday life". That's really important in any genre, but especially in SF, since their everyday life is different from ours (the water for the washing machine in question has to be synthesized from carbon monoxide and methane, for instance—the planet they're on has its colony under domes).
  
  The importance of establishing the everyday life of characters is something I learned from anime; I think it may be indirectly related to wabisabi and Buddhist "impermanence" and that sorta thing. It's also present in Tolkien (which I read before I'd seen any anime except Cities of Gold and the old Toei fairytales, but I didn't recognize it there), and also in Chesterton (who I didn't really read till I was in my 20s).
• I realize, my anathemas pronounced on what are known to Tropers as SpaceWhales, and also on creatures like the Outsiders in Niven, is basically the old "every sapient alien species represents an ecosystem the size of Earth's" thing. So, if you want space whales, you will need space seaweed, space krill, space anchovies, and space remoras—possibly in something like the debris disks we've found around some stars, that are much denser than our asteroid belt. Also you still probably can't have the Outsiders, because they are photosynthetic sapients and a plant has no need of a slug's brain, let alone a human's. They might need something like a jellyfish's or amoeba's "brain", to travel to where, e.g., there's more of some non-photosynthesized nutrient, but they're not going to be any smarter than that.
  
  Actually, space-borne life, assuming an ecosystem large enough, might well be more likely an encounter for a space-faring civilization than silicon-based. Silicon life is probably only somewhat less likely than carbon—while it has the same bonding positions those bonds would function somewhat differently. But remember, silicon life is likely to exist at temperatures where, e.g., sand is a gas (2503 K, in case you wondered). So anything those people could make a spaceship out of, is likely to be too heavy for them to launch it...since anything lighter would probably melt if not vaporize in their atmosphere. They are thus unlikely to be spacefarers.
• A major source of "prescriptivism by the linguistically ignorant", and thus of my rage, is half-educated people who think current technical usage is "correct", and the common usage from which that technical usage derives is "incorrect". E.g., poisonous and venomous mean the same thing, I don't give a tinker's damn at a rolling doughnut how biologists use them. A poisoner—one who deliberately puts toxins into food for the sake of doing harm—is called "veneficus" or "venenarius" in Latin; the toxin itself is "venenum", the origin of "venom". "Poison" literally means "a drink, especially medicinal or toxic", in Old French. Another product of the same root is "potion". You really want to pretend "Forerunner" and "Precursor" are two different things?
  
  Or take "bug". "Bug" means "creepy crawly"; though currently restricted to insects or occasionally all arthropods, it has probably been applied not only to insects but to arachnids, gastropods, myriadopods, and probably lizards, frogs, and snakes (the same by the way is true of "reptilia" in Latin, though going the other way). If you tell me "bug" is restricted in meaning to the Hemiptera, I'm going to laugh in your stupid face. Words are themselves a science, and that science says that common usage is derived from (I know this is very challenging for you) the usage that is common. Pillbugs and mudbugs are crustaceans, not insects. The biologists get to correct me on this when they stop calling birds with hands "terrible lizards", mmmkay?
  
  Also? It's called a damn buffalo, not a bison. Your precious water buffalo were first called that in 1758. Ours, again, first called "buffalo" in 1635. While the name was first applied to the African buffalo, in the 1580s, ours obviously have more right to be called that than the Asian ones do—the African one isn't closely related to either.
• I'm sorry, also, prescriptivists, but you feel "good" or "bad". "Well" and "ill" are both adverbs and adjectives, "well" is related to "weal" and "wealth" (which latter is to "well" as "warmth" is to "warm"). And you should never say you "feel poorly" or "feel badly about something", anymore than you'd say something "tastes poorly". Adverbs, see, modify verbs or adjectives—so if you "feel poorly", it means you are bad at emotions (or tactile sensation, I suppose). I feel poorly, so I see a psychologist; when I feel bad, I either apologize or see a doctor.
  
  Also, why do we assume "no split infinitives" comes from Latin? Old English had an infinitive formed with an ending, not a "to", just like Latin; it seems to have been with "-an" (compare German "-en"). And again, German also prefers not to split its infinitives (it has both an ending-infinitive and a "to" infinitive). Basically, as Western European languages transitioned from inflected synthetical grammar to ever more isolating analytical grammar, they came up with all kinds of weird rules to try to make new constructions make sense with the old rules.
• Why is Mesoamerica so totally untapped by fantasy writers? I suppose a part of it is that its actual history is pretty much the opposite of the narrative. I.e., most people know the Aztecs were bloodthirsty, do they know they deliberately destroyed their subjects' records (the Spanish only destroyed ritual manuals, and not even all of them)? Do most people know the Postclassic Maya were basically "Renaissance Italy"? Only I don't think the Borgias routinely married their aunts.
  
  But the real history of the place is like something already out of a fantasy book. The Tenochca Alliance (what we think of as "Aztecs") deliberately inverted a major portion of their culture's ethical values...purely for the sake of power. Namely? Cannibalism is the biggest taboo Uto-Aztecans have, to the point where the Hopi try to blackmail anthropologists into hushing up its occurrence among the Anasazi.
  
  You people keep rehashing your self-congratulatory myths about the Middle Ages, when there was a real-life honest-to-god Black Magic empire you could be basing stuff on? Just get out.