Further Thoughts on World Building

A map of Roshar, where the Stormlight Archive takes place.
A map of Roshar, where the Stormlight Archive takes place.

Last week I published a post contrasting world-building between J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings (hereafter: LotR) and the high fantasy genre that followed using Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archive (which includes Way of Kings and Words of Radiance so far and which I’ll be calling just SA). The post sparked some fun and interesting discussion, but the comments (here and on Facebook) made me realize I could have been a little bit clearer about some aspects of the OP. In this post I’m going to use some simple illustrations and a few more examples (the Harry Potter and Hunger Games series) to try and provide that clarity.

The image below depicts the difference between the setting in which LotR takes place (the blue region) and the aspects of the setting that are actually conveyed directly in the LotR itself (the green region).

2014-08-21 LotR Setting-Narrative

To give an example of what I mean, consider the language Quenya. That’s one of the languages he invented[ref]it’s the language of the High Elves, but folks were speaking Sindarin by the time of LotR.[/ref], and he started work on it in 1910, more than 20 years before he started work on The Hobbit. By the time he started work on LotR, Quenya was largely complete. The entire language of Quenya (all the vocabulary, all the grammatical rules, and all the etymology that goes along with it) goes in the blue circle. Just those specific parts of Quenya (a few words, maybe whatever grammar was required for a phrase or sentence) that made it into the LotR go in the green circle. So the blue region is the entire setting (everything the author ever thought of) and the green region is just the parts of the setting that the author actually used directly in the story.

Obviously this isn’t an exact science, but what makes Tolkien’s example so helpful is that he actually made pretty details notes of his entire setting and it even has a name: the Legendarium. The fact that all his world building is collected in notes and papers that are pretty common knowledge (Christoper Tolkien used those notes to complete the manuscript for the The Silmarillion after his father’s death, for example) makes it particularly easy to envision the entire setting as something that is separate from the aspects of the setting that crop up in the LotR themselves.

So that’s what my chart shows: the setting broken down into the parts that show up within the text (the green region) and then the other stuff that might be hinted at in the text, but isn’t actually there directly (the blue region). Here’s what I imagine the charts looking like for LotR and SA side by side:

2014-08-21 LotR vs SA Narrative-Setting

The blue regions are sized identically because I don’t want to try and talk about who created more, Tolkien or Sanderson. They are both epic high fantasy authors, so they both write a lot. I suspect Tolkien created much more in his lifetime than Sanderson has created so far, but Sanderson may well surpass him. Who cares. The point is that they both do a lot of world-building so let’s just call it equal.

The difference, then, is that the proportion of Sanderson’s world-building for SA that shows up in SA is much, much higher than the amount of the Legendarium that shows up in LotR. That’s what the red lines are showing you: Tolkien’s excess world-building is thick. Sanderson’s excess world-building is thin.

Before we talk too much about what that means, let me just throw up one more image. This one adds the Harry Potter and Hunger Game series to the mix.

2014-08-21 All 4 Narrative-Setting

I don’t want to get bogged down in the exact details of who did more world-building than whom, but I think it makes sense to say that the epic high fantasy authors (Tolkien and Sanderson) did more world-building than Rowling or Collins. This isn’t to say that they did better world-building. I’m on-record as thinking that J. K. Rowling’s world-building is total genius[ref]Long version. Short version.[/ref], but she didn’t do very much of it compared to Tolkien or Sanderson.

So here’s the main point of this post: more world-building in aggregate (bigger blue circles) isn’t necessarily better, but thicker world building (more gap between the green circle and the blue circle) is better. And now the explanation/defense and some caveats.

I don’t think more world-building in aggregate is better because it’s really just a genre question. High fantasy does lots of world-building. Serious mystery novels and real-world thrillers do very little of it. Historical fiction does lots of it, but it’s research rather than invention, so it’s a very different kind of world-building. The point is, you should create enough of a world for your story to live in. If your story requires a relatively small setting or occurs in the real world, then you don’t need to do a lot of world-building. If your story has a big scope and takes place in a fantasy world, then you do need to do world-building. More, in aggregate, isn’t better. It’s a matter of fitting the world-building to the story.

So why is it bad to have only a small amount of world-building “left over” as it were? The primary answer is that, especially in stories that take place in fictional worlds, you want to preserve a sense of immersion in the world. Excess world-building helps you do that in multiple ways. The most important is that referring to events and locations that have an existence independent of the main narrative is a really powerful signal to readers that “this is a real place where lots of things happened, not just a setting I threw together for this one particular story.” When every single aspect of your story ends up being required for the plot, you strain a reader’s credibility in the same way that having too many coincidences in the plot strains credibility: it doesn’t seem natural. Your story should have places your characters don’t as much or care as much about as other people in the universe do because otherwise you’re implying that everything in the world exists merely in service of the characters. Which feels horribly fake.

The other ways are less direct, but still relevant. The work of doing more world-building is a kind of quality control on what you do show. I think even non-linguists can be struck by the way the language (especially via proper names) in LotR broke down consistently among ethnic and political groups. Most fantasy writers just pick similar-sounding names without worrying about complex etymologies, but the risk of sounding like just a jumble of made up syllables is higher when you’re just throwing out a jumble of made up syllables. Also, leaving a bigger gap between what you create for the world and what you show in the story means you have more freedom with your narrative. If you feel like you have to show off everything you create, you can end up bending the plot so that it becomes more of a guided tour of your brilliant creation rather than an independent story.

So, just to recap the graphic above, Collins does a bad job of world-building because even though her story is limited in scope, she did the absolute bare minimum to create even the relatively small setting she needed. Sure, her world building is pretty terrible in general (that’s pretty well-known), but even if you set aside the stuff that doesn’t make sense the problem remains that she just reskinned the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur with the slimmest trappings of a generic sci-fi dystopia and called it a day. She does do a little bit when it comes to the culture of the Capital, but there’s nothing about the setting scientifically, linguistically, culturally (outside the Capital), historically or in any other sense that would make you believe that this is anything other than a flimsy, disposable backdrop for her plot. In short: Collins didn’t create enough setting to fit her story.

Hogwarts. Geo-spatially, this is about all the setting Rowling needed for her story.
Hogwarts. Geo-spatially, this is about all the setting Rowling needed for her story.

Rowling also had a story with a pretty limited scope. Hogwarts, the Burrow, and the Ministry of Magic pretty much account for all the setting she needs. But Rowling did a good job of making the world fill lived in primarily through the inclusion of tantalizing books. Where Tolkien made the world seemed lived in by giving forgotten histories to all sorts of places (the Barrows, Weathertop, the Argonath just to name a few), Rowling made the world seemed live in by giving context to all the silly textbooks at Hogwarts. If you think about the number of times a book played a crucial role in Harry Potter, you’ll realize how important they were to the landscape. And the fact that their authors frequently showed up as minor characters or historical figures really deepened the sense in which these books were part of the world. Just like J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling had plenty of material in her own Legendarium left over to make follow-up books that were based on books mentioned in the original series. There’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard, for example, and the new Harry Potter trilogy is going to be based off of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (which also exists as a book). J. K. Rowling was as profligate with the books she invented for the Harry Potter universe as Tolkien was with language or as Sanderson is with magical systems.

The SA suffers from the same basic problem as Hunger Games (not enough extra world-building) but for the opposite reason. He created plenty to tell the core story, but then he kept cramming more and more of hiw world-building into the narrative until there was barely anything left over. The end result is the same: there’s no sense of realism that comes from a reader perceiving that the world extends beyond the borders of the pages.

Tolkien, of course, is the gold standard. Although the scope of LotR is great, it is nowhere near the scale of the Legendarium from which it draws. My one wish for Sanderson—because I really do like SA—is that he would be willing to stop feeling the need to show off every idea he has in the narrative. It makes the story feel like a guided tour instead of an adventure.

First major caveat: we’re only looking at world-building. That’s just one aspect of what makes a work tick. There are all kinds of other factors: quality of prose, vibrancy of characterization, mastery of theme and tone, coherence of plot, etc. I’m not attempting to address those. This post together with the previous one are not an attempt to give some kind of comprehensive theory of fiction or high fantasy. They are not even a complete theory of world-building. One of the most important tricks that Tolkien uses, for example, that has nothing to do with green circles or blue circles is to demonstrate that actions in one work change the setting in ways that are felt in subsequent works. The best example of this is the way that Frodo stumbles upon the trolls in LotR that Bilbo had helped turn to stone in The Hobbit. The persistence of changes to the setting across works is a brilliant tool in world-building (and one I understand Sanderson may excel at) that falls totally outside the scope of this post.

Second major caveat: it’s possible that I’ve got the wrong frame of reference for Sanderson’s books. I have only read his SA series, but I am aware that all of the books he’s writing a linked up in a single world. Tolkien has the Legendarium. Sanderson has the Cosmere. That defense is not as strong as it first appears, however, because it increases the size of Sanderson’s setting substantially (the Cosmere is really big) but it also increases the size of his narrative because in addition to the two books in the SA, we’ve also got: Warbreaker, the Mistborn series, ElantrisWhite Sand, Dragonsteel, and others. In other words: I might be underestimating the scale of Sanderson’s setting, but only if I’m also underestimating the size of his narrative. This is because, unlike the relatively unrelated works of Tolkien, the whole point of the Cosmere is that all the books are actually part of one grand epic. In that case, you might have to draw a much bigger blue circle, but the green circle keeps on growing, too. You’re still let with a thin band. The problem doesn’t actually go away[ref]Of course because Sanderson is only in the early stages of a truly monumental undertaking I can’t be certain in my estimation. But that’s how things look today.[/ref].

The Cosmere crosses the high fantasy genre to include an industrial setting in one of the Mistborn books.
The Cosmere crosses the high fantasy genre to include an industrial setting in one of the Mistborn books (Mistborn: The Alloy of Law).

So here’s where this leaves us—and I promise I’m done on this topic for the time being when I wrap this post up—the fundamental rule is that you want your world-building to be comfortably larger than what you’re actually going to use directly in the story you tell. This came naturally to Tolkien. Keep in mind he was working on Quenya twenty years before he started The Hobbit! I’m sure part of that was his personality, but it was also a matter of religious faith to him: world-building was a form of worship. So he did a lot of it. So, even though LotR is a big story, his setting was bigger.

High fantasy is particularly sensitive to the quality of world-building, but high fantasy authors since Tolkien have generally failed to get anywhere close to his mastery of it. Often, this is because they don’t do enough world-building. This makes sense, who wants to invest 20 years in world-building before they start a story they don’t even know if they will be able to publish or not? Sometimes it’s because they’re just not very good at it. But even when you get someone like Sanderson—someone who creates a lot and who does it quite well—they still can run into the trap of wanting to stuff all of that world-building into their story instead of leaving a nice, comfortable margin. If Sanderson included less of the world-building in the story, the narrative would have more focus and the world would feel more extensive and genuine.

Failing Tolkien: The Fall of High Fantasy

Update: I wrote a follow-up to this piece: Further Thoughts on World Building

2014-08-19 Words of Radiance
Cover illustration for Words of Radiance

I just finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s monstrous tome: Words of Radiance. It’s his second book in the Stormlight Archives and, like the first, clocks in at over 1,000 pages. The expression on the clerk’s face in Barnes and Nobles when she picked up the book to hand it to me was priceless: “Wow,” she said as she nearly dropped the book, “This is a commitment!”

I’ve never liked high fantasy taken as a genre, but I did love The Lord of the Rings (which launched the genre) and I am enjoying Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives. Despite the fact that I’m enjoying them, however, they display the systematic problems that have plagued the genre ever since (but not including) Tolkien.

High fantasy, if you’re not familiar with the term, refers to the kinds of fantasy books that have maps in them. Not to mention a glossary, pronunciation guide, appendices, and maybe an index, too. This is because high fantasy is defined largely by its setting: an imaginary world with its own history, cultures, religions, languages, and—of course—magic.[ref]Close relatives of high fantasy include medieval fantasy and epic fantasy. The antithesis (within the fantasy genre) is urban fantasy like the Dresden Files because those books are located primarily within a recognizable version of the world.[/ref]

Tolkien's own cover illustration for The Fellowship of the Ring.
Tolkien’s own cover illustration for The Fellowship of the Ring.

For all practical purposes, Tolkien invented high fantasy. Of course all the pieces came from Saxon and Norse myths and folklore, but what he created when The Lord of the Rings was first published in the 1950’s was something new. The books were very successful from the early years and have gone on to sell more copies than any other novel (150 million thus far) except A Tale of Two Cities.[ref]Tolkien proves he’s still the king[/ref] The corpus of high fantasy has been and continues to this day to be a long line of Tolkien imitators.[ref]This is starting to change with recent blockbusters like George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire and Patrick Rothfuss’s Kingkiller Chronicles that emphasize created worlds but also depart from high fantasy conventions. Tolkien remains the paramount figure in the genre, however.[/ref]

The problem is that they have all learned the wrong lesson. They understand that setting defines high fantasy, and they understand that Tolkien’s mastery of world-building fueled his artistic and commercial success, but they fundamentally mistake the product (The Lord of the Rings as a narrative text) with the process (Tolkien’s actual beliefs and practices for world-building).

To correct this confusion we must start with the realization that Tolkien’s world-building was inextricable from his religious faith. He was a devout Roman Catholic and what we call world-building he called sub-creation, which is a term with obvious and deliberate religious connotations. As the Tolkien Gateway puts it:

‘Sub-creation’ was also used by J.R.R. Tolkien to refer [to the] process of world-building and creating myths. In this context, a human author is a ‘little maker’ creating his own world as a sub-set within God’s primary creation. Like the beings of Middle-earth, Tolkien saw his works as mere emulation of the true creation performed by God.

As we delve deeper into Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation, it is useful to contrast his view with that of his friend C. S. Lewis, as Professor Downing has done in a paper called “Sub-Creation or Smuggled Theology: Tolkien contra Lewis on Christian Fantasy” at the C. S. Lewis Institute. C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia certainly deserves mention as co-founding the subgenre of high fantasy and, for the most part, his reverence for the work of sub-creation paralleled Tolkien’s. But there were important differences, and those differences are very clear in the different tones and styles of the works and also in the supremacy of The Lord of the Rings over Chronicles of Narnia in historical and literary impact.

2014-08-19 Narnian Map

Downing points out that, for Tolkien, “engaging one’s creativity is an imitation of God and a form of worship.” For Lewis, by contrast, a work of art had to have a higher purpose than the creative impulse itself. In his famous essay “Sometimes Fairy Stories May Say Best What’s to be Said,” Lewis propounded a dualistic account of artistic creation. The Author writes for the sake of writing, but The Man harnesses this impulse towards some external end. As Downing summarizes Lewis: “[A] writer can’t even begin without the Author’s urge to create, but… he shouldn’t begin without the Man’s desire to communicate his deepest sense of himself and his world.”

The Lewis-Tolkien dialogue on sub-creation is a particularly interesting one for a Mormon to enter because of theological differences over the term “creation.” As Downing notes, C. S. Lewis referred back to the orthodox Christian theology of creation ex nihilo in his discussion of artistic creativity. Lewis wrote in a letter to Sister Penelope:

‘Creation’ [as] applied to human authorship seems to me entirely misleading term. We rearrange elements He has provided. There is not a vestige of real creativity de novo in us. Try to imagine a new primary colour, a third sex, a fourth dimension, or even a monster which does not consist of bits and parts of existing animals stuck together. Nothing happens. And that surely is why our works (as you said) never mean to others quite what we intended: because we are recombining elements made by Him and already containing His meanings.

For Downing, this is a point against Tolkien. Tolkien stressed the independence of sub-created worlds but—as Downing and Lewis point out—there is no such thing as independent creation. Humans create by dividing or combining elements that are already available, not by making new elements. From a strictly orthodox Christian theological perspective, this is a fairly serious indictment of Tolkien’s theory of sub-creation because it draws a deep chasm between the kind of creation in which God engages and the kind of sub-creation in which we may participate. How can we be worshipfully imitating our Father when it turns out that the process in which we are engaged is actually a totally distinct process that only happens to share the same label by linguistic happenstance?

Tolkien's own cover art for The Two Towers.
Tolkien’s own cover art for The Two Towers.

As it turns out, however, a rejection of creation ex nihilo is one of the defining aspects of Mormon theology. As many non-Mormon Christian theologians have also observed the Creation (as depicted in Genesis) is almost exclusively a depiction of creation the way that Tolkien and Lewis and all other writers create: by re-arranging pre-existing materials. After “let there be light,” God’s work is all about separation: light from dark, sea from dry land, and so forth. He doesn’t seem to create the earth, moon, stars, sun, or anything else by calling them into being out of the void, but rather by molding unformed materials. For a Mormon like me, at least, sub-creation is more akin to the Creation of God, not less.

In any case, however, what really matters is that Tolkien viewed sub-creation not merely as just another tool in the writer’s tool belt (along with plotting and characterization, say) but rather as a stand-alone activity that had merit in and of itself. This belief is what allowed Tolkien to be such a profligate world builder. He created vastly more material than ever made it into his books. He called this trove of linguistics, geography, history, myth, culture and genealogy the Legendarium, defined by the Tokien Gateway as “the entirety of J.R.R. Tolkien’s works concerning his imagined world of Arda.”

The relationship between The Legendarium and his literary works (like The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings) an important one in two ways. First, as noted, the Legendarium is far larger. According to Downing, for example, “Quenya, the elvish tongue… had a vocabulary of several hundred words, with consistent declensions and etymologies” by the time he completed The Lord of The Rings, but only a sparse handful of those words appear in the text. The second is that they are, to a large degree, independent. The Legendarium was not completed for the purpose of writing The Lord of the Rings but as an independent exercise undertaken for its own merits. The stories came later, not as an afterthought, but as a distinct labor with their own objectives and process.

Of course in practice the two activities—the world-building and the story-telling—were intertwined. The point is simply that there were two activities, and Tolkien loved them both.

His reckless and extravagant acts of creation are what, to a large extent, made his fiction seems to vibrant and real. Early in The Lord of the Rings, Frodo is nearly killed by a barrow-wight. If you consult Appendix A you will learn that he had been trapped in the cairn of the last prince of Cardolan. Who was that prince? What was Cardolan? I have no idea, but I also have no doubt that Tolkien’s Legendarium contains the answers to both questions. This is just one example of many—to many to count!—where the characters in The Lord of the Rings came across an abandoned place that was steeped in history and drama not directly related to the story.

Arganoth as envisioned by Ted Nasmith.
Argonath as envisioned by Ted Nasmith.

Argonath is, among these many examples, the one that has haunted me for the longest. Here’s the passage, which comes from the chapter “The Great River” near the very end of The Two Towers, that has haunted me since I first read it in a pop-up camper in Tennessee on a summer vacation when I was only 11 or 12 years old:

Upon great pedestals founded in the deep waters stood two great kings of stone: still with blurred eyes and crannied brows they frowned upon the North. The left hand of each was raised palm outwards in gesture of warning; in each right hand there was an axe; upon each head there was a crumbling helm and crown. Great power and majesty they still wore, the silent wardens of a long-vanished kingdom.

What impressed me then and has remained with me ever since is that Arganoth has basically nothing to do with the rest of the story. Sure, it marks the historic northern boundary of Gondor, but by the time we get to The Lord of the Rings, Gondor has already shrunk far from those boundaries. And sure, Strider / Aragorn is a descendent of the antecedents of Gondor, but does that really matter for the story? No, it doesn’t, and that’s why it makes Middle Earth beautiful. It is creation for creation’s sake. I knew, even as a kid, that Tolkien understood perfectly who had built these strange, forgotten pillars and why and the knowledge that he knew things that weren’t in the book is what made the book seem so real. Just like the real world: there’s always more history in Tolkien’s work than you can take in at once. [ref]My confidence was not misplaced, as it turns out. “It was originally constructed about TA 1340 at the order of Rómendacil II to mark the northern border of Gondor,” according to The Lord of the Rings Wiki.[/ref]

Tolkien's cover for The Return of the King
Tolkien’s cover for The Return of the King

So Tolkien loved sub-creation for its own sake, which caused him to do quite a lot of it, which in turn made the setting of The Lord of the Rings vivid beyond compare, which in turn led to the widespread popular love of those books, which in turn helped found the genre of high fantasy. Now, over a half century later, high fantasy is a genre cluttered with books full of maps of fantasy countries and continents, but none of them have remotely captured the grandeur of Tolkien’s original because they have tried to imitate his product without understanding the process that led to it. And Brandon Sanderson’s Words of Radiance (despite being a very fine book) is the perfect example of how it has all gone sideways since Tolkien.

High fantasy writers since Tolkien have created less and showed off more. The bigger problem is not that they have created less in total but rather that the ratio of what they have created for the setting to what they show you on the pages of their novels has diminished substantially. Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives are a great example of this problem because I get the feeling that he very well might, by the time he’s done, eclipse Tolkien in terms of sheer creative output, but he also seems bound and determined to shoehorn every last thought he has ever had about his creations directly into the text. [ref]I’m sure he’s leaving lots out by his own estimation, but compared to Tolkien there’s pretty much nothing left to the imagination at all.[/ref] This has three bad consequences.

First: it makes the stories bloated. Sanderson seems preoccupied with making sure you know exactly how the magical system he has created works. How does that help the story? Did Tolkien need to tell us how Gandalf’s magic worked in excruciating detail? And even if you argue that Sanderson’s strong suit is magical systems where Tolkien’s was language, the metaphor still holds: no one reads The Lord of the Rings and feels like someone tried to sneak a lecture on linguistics into their fantasy novel. The linguistics are there, of course, but Tolkien doesn’t feel the need to beat you over the head with them, whereas large portions of Words of Radiance revolve around nothing other than frog-marching the reader through a tour of Sanderson’s fabricated lore. [ref]Come hell or high water, anyone who finishes the novel will understand the difference between an Honorblade and a Shardblade.[/ref]

Second: it makes the worlds seem flimsy. Far from having an abundance of lost cities and forgotten heroes to populate the fringes of the story, Words of Radiance is rife with extra characters and stories (in the Interludes sections especially) that over-explain the universe. You rapidly get the impression that nothing—no religion, concept, magical power, artifact, civilization, or anything else—is going to be introduced in this book without being explained to death. Reading The Lord of the Rings feels like visiting another world because you know that there is a story underneath every stone, far more than you will actually experience in the text. Reading Words of Radiance feels like visiting a theme park ride by comparison: you have the impression that if you take even one step off the beaten path you’d see the 2×4’s holding up the painted backdrops. No matter how much you create, you have to hold something back or the reader is going to see through your creation.[ref]You can always publish it later in The Silmarillion if you need to.[/ref]

Third: it requires a very specific scope. Because high fantasy authors feel the need to cram every part of their sub-creation into the stories they write and because they often invent their worlds from the very moment of first creation, they trap themselves into writing only cosmic stories. This is bad because Big Questions are easy to raise but hard to answer, and so right off the bat high fantasy writers are painting themselves into a difficult corner. But even if they can pull it off, the fact remains that they are only capable of writing mega-epics. Which, to be clear, is a category that excludes the founding high fantasy story: The Lord of the Rings. Did you notice that the definition of Legendarium included the “world of Arda.” What, exactly, is that? You wouldn’t know, based on reading The Lord of the Rings, just as you would never have heard of Eru Ilúvatar (“the supreme God of Elves and Men” and “the single omnipotent creator”) nor of the Ainur (“divine spirits, the ‘Holy Ones’” who actually shaped Middle Earth).

 

Cover illustration for Way of Kings (Stormlight Archives #1)
Cover illustration for Way of Kings (Stormlight Archives #1)

Tolkien did all the work of sub-creation back to the Big Bang of Middle Earth, and you can read all about it in The Silmarillion, but none of truly foundational lore shows up in The Lord of the Rings at all.  It’s true that Sauron is a pretty epic bad guy, but the scope of the The Lord of the Rings is actually quite limited. It’s the story of one particular time that one particular bad guy threatened the peace of one particular region of the world. Gandalf is clear that this isn’t some ultimate final battle or anything like it. He calls the last military campaign “The great battle of our time.” (emphasis added) and when Frodo says “I wish the ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened,” Gandalf replies: “So do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us” (emphasis added). Eru never shows up. Neither do the Ainur. The story of The Lord of the Rings is, compared to the majestic backstory Tolkien had available, mundane. It is almost an anti-epic. It’s emphatically not a story that tries to be about everything all at once and it’s in that specificity that it becomes singular and glorious. I generally dislike high fantasy as a genre precisely because it has lost sight of imperative of specificity that underlies the very definition of narrative.

It’s worth noting at this point an important fact: Tolkien originally tried to include The Silmarillion for publication in the same book as The Lord of the Rings.[ref]According to Wikipedia, but with citations.[/ref] It wasn’t his foresight that saw The Lord of the Rings published as a standalone text, but rather the imposition of editors and publishers who viewed the former work as uninteresting to the public. And they were right: The Silmarillion (which I have read and very much enjoyed) is only good because The Lord of the Rings is great.

The point of this essay is therefore not that Tolkien was an omniscient genius who is the only one to do high fantasy the right way, but simply that his theory of sub-creation is deeply important to the success—both artistically and commercially—of The Lord of the Rings and that anyone who wants to emulate that aspect of his success should study it, understand it, and emulate it.

Tolkien believed in sub-creation as an independently worthy action and engaged in it as a form of worship, and that explains the creation of the vast Legendarium. This was the well from which he dipped to draw out works like The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and it makes sense to think of them as two separate kinds of projects: the world-building vs. the narrative itself.

Subsequent high fantasy authors have failed to fully appreciate this distinction and especially the worthwhile endeavor of sub-creation for its own sake. This is understandable. Writers get in the business to tell stories, not to write thousands of pages of backstory and setting that no one will ever see. They see world-building as necessary to telling fantasy stories, and they see Tolkien praised for the central place his world-building played in The Lord of the Rings, but they end up emulating the final product without fully understanding the process that went into it. They build the world for the story instead of for itself.

What’s more, the process is daunting. It requires an extraordinary amount of work that, in a way, seems wasteful. Why create an entire language—grammar, vocabulary, etymology and all—when just a few fun-sounding syllables here and there will do? The temptation to short-change the world-building and to only build what you need is overwhelming for authors who are not generally flush with cash and are often working on deadlines. How is it possible to justify the kind of exorbitant labor of love that Tolkien has engaged in?

For most people, it isn’t possible, and that is one major reason why The Lord of the Rings still stands alone. No one else seems able or willing to do what Tolkien did. They keep trying to get similar results, however, and I guess that’s good enough for fantasy’s audience.

If all of this sounds a little bit too harsh, let me restate what I said at the outset: even if I hold the genre of high fantasy in low regard as a whole I love The Lord of the Rings and I also like the Stormlight Archives quite a lot. I expect to read all of them.

But I stand by my criticism. It’s not that Sanderson hasn’t invested enough in world-building (he probably has), but it’s more that he just doesn’t seem willing to view that world-building as both intrinsically valuable and distinct from the narrative. He seems to want to cram all of it into the books. And that’s a bad thing. The Stormlight Archives are still excellent, in my opinion, but they are not nearly as good as they could be if they were treated as truly independent stories rather than vehicles for delivering world-building content. An abridged treatment would really, in this case, be a better story. Sanderson could have more focus without Interludes so tangential they make you want to pull your hair out [ref]I read them all, but my brother just started skipping them[/ref], a richer and more immersive world, and greater freedom in the scope he chose to pick. Sanderson is a great writer, but there is still only one J. R. R. Tolkien.

I Am An Object

2014-07-22 Jubal Early

Last week I was carrying my laptop out of my home office to use in another room and I tried to close the door behind me. I was, at the moment, deeply engrossed in some speculation that seemed very important to me at the time, which is I why I completely forgot about the pullup bar that had been hanging there for the last couple of weeks until it crashed down on my head.

I was indignant.

It didn’t really hurt much–and the laptop was unscathed–but it just didn’t seem befitting of my status as an agent which is to say an originator of actions. I make things happen. Things do not happen to me. “There is a God,” says the Book of Mormon, “and he hath created all things, both the heavens and the earth, and all things that in them are, both things to act and things to be acted upon.'[ref]2 Nephi 2:14[/ref] I know which of these I consider myself to be, as a general rule.

But we don’t always get to choose.

My frustration turned to amusement and I chuckled at myself. We think we are agents–and in a sense we are–but we’re also objects. We inhabit physical bodies that are subject to physical laws, and the laws of physics don’t give a whit for concepts like “narrative” or “justice” or “intention.” Because we live comfortable, safe live and are careful to avoid injuring ourselves, most of us manage to forget this most of the time. It takes a pretty horrific event (like a car crash) or a silly frustrating one (like closing a door and making a pullup bar drop on your head) to be reminded that we’re not exempt from the rules. Not even when we think we’re thinking very, very clever and deep thoughts.

Last week I dreamed of car crashes. Or, more specifically, I dreamed of that long endless moment between loss of control and impact. The period where you have just enough time to realize two things: that a collision is coming and that there’s nothing you can do about. The dream always started with a sudden lurch in the pit of my stomach and then the eery lack of sensation as the tires left contact with the road. Then a sense of weightlessness. I was always the passenger, not the driver, and I could never see out of the windshield of the car. I didn’t know how high we were, when we would hit, exactly what the car’s orientation was, or if I would survive. And even if I had known, there wasn’t anything I could do about it. Then a momentary flash of impact, and the dream restarted: the wheels no longer touching the road and me helplessly wondering what would come next.

That’s not always how life feels. But I think it’s probably what is always going on. We’re all Jubal Early at the end of the last Firefly episode “Objects in Space.” Adrift, we have freedom of movement, but nothing to push off of. We can flail in whatever way we would like during our indeterminate wait for death.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOhm-fS9Fa4

No, that’s not really how bleak my outlook on life is. But sometimes it feels that way.

Stunning Medieval Style Lord of the Rings Illustrations

2014-06-21 Russian LOTR Illustrations

I stumbled across a piece at The Verge that linked to a Tumblr page full of incredible illustrations from a Russian edition of Lord of the Rings that are done in a medieval style. They look incredible. Be sure to check them out out, because they really are amazing.

2014-06-21 Russian LOTR Illustrations 02

Can Christians Rock?

There’s an interesting review over at First Things of Christopher Partridge’s new book, The Lyre of Orpheus. Partridge’s theory, according to First Things’ Stephen Webb is as follows:

Rock is essentially transgressive. Christianity upholds a sacred order that excludes the profane. Therefore, contemporary Christian music cannot be true rock and roll, because it is “unable to establish a credible presence in [rock’s] profane affective space.”

Webb contests this theory, but he does so very weakly, writing: “Satan might or might not be beyond redemption, but everything else, including the devil’s music, isn’t.” That may be true, but it’s not really informative (how does one go about redeeming a genre or music?) nor does it actually address the core point. If rock is intrinsically transgressive, then when you redeem it you don’t really have rock anymore. The question that Partridge begs, and that Webb never spots, is this: transgressive of what?

I know it’s only a short review, but all the musicians noted were born in the 1950s – 1970s. It’s certainly easy to surmise that in the time they were making music (the 1970s and 1980s) traditional family values were still relatively dominant in America. In that context it makes sense to assume that “transgressive” meant contradicting these traditional values of modesty, self-restraint, and fidelity. But that assumption doesn’t make sense any more. No big surprise, by the way, Partridge himself was born in 1961. His cultural reference points were already stale in the last millennium.

By coincidence, I also picked up this story from the Daily Beast today: Watch What You Say, The New Liberal Power Elite Won’t Tolerate Dissent. The article’s first paragraph shows what Partridge and especially Web could have been talking about all along:

In ways not seen since at least the McCarthy era, Americans are finding themselves increasingly constrained by a rising class—what I call the progressive Clerisy—that accepts no dissent from its basic tenets. Like the First Estate in pre-revolutionary France, the Clerisy increasingly exercises its power to constrain dissenting views, whether on politics, social attitudes or science.

When the powers that are in charge change, so does the meaning of the term “transgressive.” Music that is truly subversive now is effectively opposite of what was subversive back then. This makes sense: terms like “subversive” and “transgressive” are value-neutral without context. They are good or bad and useful or damaging entirely dependent on what it is they are attacking and promoting in its stead. It’s entirely possible for Christian rock to be subversive of the dominant culture while authentically embracing Christian tenets. In fact, because it faithfully embraces Christian tenets. You probably won’t get this if by “Christian rock” you are thinking of the kind of praise or worship music that you’ll find on Christian radio stations, because that music is geared towards being played in houses of worship. It doesn’t oppose or subvert anything. It probably can’t be real rock and roll. But it’s only one particular variant of Christian rock. How about my favorite band of all time: Thrice?

Yeah, I’m biased, but pay attention to which way the causality runs. I’m not endorsing Thrice as an example of a counter-cultural Christianity because I like the band. I liked the band in the first place precisely because of its subversive (in relationship to the Clerisy) nature. Nowhere is this more obvious than the official video of their song “Image of the Invisible” (off of their 2005 album Vheissu). The music alone screams beleaguered defiance and the lyrics match it perfectly: So raise the banner, bend back your bows / Remove the cancer, take back your souls and Though all the world may hate us, we are named / The shadow overtake us, we are known. But, in case the subversion theme wasn’t overt enough, the video drills the point home with a distinctly dystopian theme in which Christians are part of a modern underground resistance movement, fighting to get out a message that the world hates, has always hated, and will always hate.

Has Webb forgotten the relationship between the Church and the world depicted so directly in the New Testament, culminating in the crucifixion of God’s Son by the greatest political empire of the time? How about Paul’s words to the Ephesians:

For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.

Give me a break, Christ’s alleged crimes were basically variants of “subversion.” Subversion of the orthodox religious view and subversion of the Roman political order. We worship someone who was tried and executed for subversion 2,000 years ago, and Partridge thinks some aging rock stars have a damn thing to teach Christians about what it means to be subversive?

I think not.

 

Reason.com: Video Game Nation

The libertarian website Reason.com has a special collection of articles and videos on video games coinciding with the June 2014 issue of their magazine. I’ve never been a huge gamer, mainly because I wasn’t allowed to have a video game system growing up. But I’ve always loved them when I had the chance to play. I especially became interested in their impact on people after reading Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter and Jane McGonigal’s Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. I even recently bought Liel Leibovitz’s God in the Machine: Video Games as Spiritual Pursuit. I don’t see them as the “waste of time” that I was often told they were.

Reason‘s collection looks at the interaction of gaming and society from various angles. Check it out.

Book Recommendation: Spin (Robert Charles Wilson)

2014-05-21 The ChronolithsIt could just be me, but I don’t hear folks talk about Robert Charles Wilson enough. The first book of his I read was Spin, which won the Hugo in 2006. I thought the sequel (Axis (Spin)) was good, but not great. I’m listening to The Chronoliths now, which was nominated for a Hugo in 2002. Turns out he’s been nominated a few more times, too (1999 and 2010), but–like I said–he’s just not a name that I hear come up often enough in discussions of great sci-fi.

The reason I like Robert Charles Wilson is that he’s one of the best there is at combining truly human-centered, character-driven stories with real, honest, sci-fi concepts. The drama in his books is emphatically character-driven, but it simply couldn’t exist without the sci-fi elements. To me: that’s what all sci-fi should strive to be.

He also has some prose chops. Look, I realize that sci fi (along with all genre fiction) tends to be less about the art and craft of prose than literary fiction, but there were some parts of “Spin” that rose to the level of good art by any standard.

He’s one of those guys who, when I’m reading their story, I think to myself: “I’ll really be doing alright if I ever get this good.”

Moral Complexity and Heroes

2014-05-17 Defenders

Will McIntosh got a chance to promote his new book Defenders on John Scalzi’s blog a couple of days ago. In it, he makes a frequently heard assertion which is that (in common terms) heroes are boring and unrelatable. McIntosh states that “I don’t particularly like stories with villains. I prefer the good and bad in characters to be more a matter of degree, and, ideally, subject to individual interpretation.” He elaborates:

I prefer Frankenstein to Dracula, for instance. Count Dracula is a bad guy, no doubt about it. Stab him in the heart and no one sheds a tear. But what are we supposed to feel as the Frankenstein monster burns? He kills people, he’s a psychopath, but he was thrust into the role of monster–he didn’t choose it. Maybe Victor Frankenstein is the villain of the piece, but here again, it’s complicated. The good doctor screwed up royally, but that wasn’t his intent, and intentions count when we’re judging good versus evil.

So the thing that’s interesting here is that he’s espousing moral complexity within a morally objective framework. As he puts it, “intentions count when we’re judging good vs. evil” which implies, I think, that there is such a thing as good and evil. So far so good. I think the case against heroes is a little overdone (plenty of books have pretty unambiguous heroes, from The Lord of the Rings to Les Misérables), but the idea that it’s more interesting to have complexity: I can dig it. As Sirius Black told Harry Potter: “The world isn’t split into good people and Death Eaters. We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.” So good and evil exist, unambiguously, but people are complicated.

But then the sets up a plot where each of three factions can plausible be seen as the bad guys, and writes:

While there are unquestionably villains in the world, I think most human conflict takes this form, where the villain of the story depends on your perspective. While I was planning this post, my wife reminded me of the ever-shifting alliances in the novel Nineteen Eigthy-Four, where Oceania is at war with Eurasia and allied with Eastasia on one day, and allied with Eurasia and at war with Eastasia the next. Yes; one day someone is your sworn enemy, the next, they’re your ally. Maybe that’s why I’m uneasy writing about villains.

So I’ve got some issues here. First of all, it’s not a trivial leap to go from moral complexity of individuals to moral complexity of groups. A group is not a person. We often anthropomorphize groups, but once you get past middle school most folks start to realize that the narrative of history as being about good guys and bad guys is somewhere between a useful simplification and an outright fairy tale. Morality applies to individuals. It doesn’t make any more sense to talk seriously about an entire nation being good or evil then it does to talk about a table or a pretzel being good or evil. Secondly, “ one day someone is your sworn enemy, the next, they’re your ally” shows a shift from complex moral objectivism to simplistic moral relativism. 

I get that people confuse these ideas all the time. That’s because in both cases the answer to “Was that a good thing to do?” starts with “It depends…” In the place of moral relativsm, “It depends on your subjective assessment of morality.” In the case of complex moral objectivism, “It depends on what the person knew, what he should have known, what he was trying to do, how serious he evaluated the issues, etc.” Complex moral objectivism holds that good and evil can be hard to figure out, but that they are there. They’re real. We just don’t always recognize them. Simplistic moral relativism holds that there isn’t any underlying truth to moral clams. It’s just personal preference.

Now, maybe McIntosh’s actual book handles this topic a whole lot better than his little post at The Big Idea. That’s entirely possible. A lot of good artists are good at making art at least in part because it’s what they focus all their attention on, to the point where talking about the process of art or the products they have made is something they have no talent for at all. So I’m not criticizing the book. I haven’t read it yet, and it actually sounds interesting to me, based just on the setup.

I’m just saying, come on: you don’t need moral relativism to get moral ambiguity and complexity. And, more importantly, there’s still room for heroes and villains even in a world where good and evil aren’t always obvious. Sometimes because you just know (see: Voldemort) but also sometimes because evil isn’t about grand gestures. It’s about apathy, indifference, and following orders (see: The Banality of Evil).

James F. McGrath on Science Fiction and Religion

What does science fiction have in common with the Bible? More than we might expect. Both grapple with profundities. Both ask, among other key questions: How did we come to be? Where are we headed? How should we conduct ourselves? Where do we put our faith? The answers are not necessarily agreed upon…Thus, science-fiction fandom, with its canons, debates, and conundrums, has intriguing and instructive overlaps with the domain of religion.

So says biblical scholar James F. McGrath in an interesting article in the Spring 2014 issue of Phi Kappa Phi Forum.[ref]He actually co-edited the volume Religion & Doctor Who: Time and Relative Dimensions of Faith.[/ref] I’d actually considered writing a post on this topic given my more recent choice of entertainment, including The Dresden Files and Doctor Who.[ref]Mormon scholar Hugh Nibley tackled this same subject in his Temple & Cosmos. Atheist author Jason Colavito has argued that H.P. Lovecraft’s tales paved the way for the “ancient astronaut” theories found on the History Channel.[/ref]McGrath discusses TV shows like Lost, Star Trek, and Doctor Who, making for a fun read. In the end, he concludes, “Bottom line, science fiction is less about the future or past and more about our reflections on them. This type of speculation can be fascinating and meaningful, not merely diverting or academic…[S]cience fiction is a wonderful window into how humans perceive religion in the present.”

Check it out.

 

The Barbarians at the Gate of Sci-Fi

You might not have heard, but the sci-fi community is currently embroiled in a civil war. Then again, you might actually have heard. Things have gotten so bad that the story hit both USA Today and then the Washington Post this week. I want to share the story, and my perspective on it, for two reasons. First: I love sci-fi. But second, and more relevant to a broader audience, the way that political partisanship has torn the sci-fi community apart is pretty good case study of how partisanship damages the fabric of larger communities.

The Literature of Ideas

2014-04-30 Tom Swift Jr

I love science fiction because it is, as Pamela Sargent called it, “the literature of ideas.” For me the animating spirit of sci-fi is the spirit of inquiry. The genre has less to do with with outer trappings of spaceships or robots and more to do with the simple question: “What if?” This has been true since some of the earliest science fiction works, like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Dr. Frankenstein’s futuristic technology for reanimating corpses is central to the plot and intrinsically interesting, but it’s there in order to support moral questions about the duty of the creator to the created.[ref]You can tell a lot about the genre of sci-fi just by noting that the full title of the book is Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus.[/ref] That setup, envisioning alternate technology in order to frame questions that couldn’t be examined so clearly without the imaginary technology, is the essence of science fiction. That is the sense in which it is truly the literature of ideas.

I understand that Frankenstein isn’t necessarily the first book that people think of when they think of science fiction and that my definition isn’t universal. But it’s not just my random personal opinion, either. In addition to Sargent, sci-fi legend Ursula K. Le Guin recently told the Smithsonian Magazine (speaking about the impact of science fiction on real-world society), “The future is a safe, sterile laboratory for trying out ideas in, a means of thinking about reality, a method.” That method is exactly what I fell in love with.

The first science fiction that I ever read was 1950’s era series Tom Swift, Jr. Even though it was mostly ghost-written fluff for little kids, it couldn’t help but convey a sense of the importance of ideas. Ideas matter. Ideas change how see the world, and can therefore change what we make of the world. Science fiction isn’t about predicting the future. It is, in a small but real way, about shaping the future.

Politics in Sci-Fi

2014-04-30 John Harris

Of course you can’t get all poetic about the literature of ideas without expecting to find a good deal of politics along for the ride. The Tom Swift, Jr. novels all conveyed a surplus of good ole American patriotism in the best tradition of 1950s Cold War sentiment. Meanwhile, Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness is an inquiry into the social role of gender by examining a hermaphroditic alien race while The Dispossessed explores the tension between human nature and left-wing, Utopian political ideals.

Part of what I love about the genre is that it explicitly talks about all that stuff that you’re not supposed to bring up in polite company: politics, religion, and morality. Sci-fi has always been full of wildly divergent ideas for better and for worse. Mostly for better, in my experience. When writers care more about their craft–about engaging the audience and telling a good story–this usually forces them to be at least a little nuanced and careful in their politics. Most of us don’t like preachy characters or message fiction, even when we might largely agree with them. That’s why I’ve always viewed Heinlein’s writings with a mixture of admiration and tolerant patience, sort of like a crazy uncle who can be forgiven his occasional political ranting because he otherwise tells a good story.[ref]And, just to be clear, I like a lot of what Heinlein has to say about politics, as in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress.[/ref] A lot of my favorite authors (Le Guin, but also C. J. Cherryh and Lois McMaster Bujold) are folks who, I’m pretty sure, have politics that are far, far away from mine. I love their stuff anyway. And for writers who are closer to my world view, like Larry Correia, there’s no guarantee that I will like what they write just because I agree with some of their political views.[ref]I loved Hard Magic: Book I of the Grimnoir Chronicles and the rest of the Grimnoir series. I didn’t really get into Monster Hunter International (Monster Hunters International).[/ref]

I have no idea how right-wing and left-wing authors got along in decades past, but as far as I can tell they managed just fine. I’m basing this on the fact that some of the old guard have reacted with annoyance and disdain to the politicizing of the current crop of sci-fi authors, but we’ll get back to that in a bit. Meanwhile, the audience had no trouble picking and choosing from a variety of authors. If you wanted to find authors who agreed with your politics, you probably could. Traditional, conservative folks like me might have to work a little harder to find a common voice, but they were out there. And, most importantly, you probably had no real strong desire for political conformity. The audience was perfectly happy to go along with a wide-range of political, religious, and ethical viewpoints. It was part of the experience, and usually a beneficial one all around.

The Political Polarization of Sci-Fi

2014-05-01 Stranger-in-a-Strange-Land

In recent years, this happy little equilibrium has collapsed. It’s impossible for me to know if the reason is technological or political, but it’s probably both. The technological changes include social media and self-publishing. Social media makes it easier for sci-fi authors to interact directly with their fans and also to interact with each other in impersonal and public ways. Self-publishing forces more and more authors to do just that. It’s called platform building, and the idea is that authors have an obligation to get out there and build a brand name. This is especially true for self-published authors, but even traditionally published authors feel the pressure to get out there and be as visible as possible to boost their sales.[ref]I’m not an author, so I’m basing this on what I’ve heard from various traditional and self-published authors whose blogs I follow.[/ref]

It is absolutely not a coincidence that two of the central figures in the current civil war–John Scalzi and Larry Correia–are both relative newcomers to the genre and both at the forefront of those respective technologies. For his part, John Scalzi runs the incredibly popular blog The Whatever, which he’s maintained since 1998 (before “blogging” was even a thing). The most prominent recurring feature on The Whatever is a segment called “The Big Idea” in which Scalzi turns over the mic to authors with a book coming out to discuss and promote their work. Scalzi’s blog promotes his own stuff, too, of course. He mentions his Hugo-eligible books and stories whenever nomination time comes around and announces new projects, too, but he also uses his platform to help out others. It is a very big platform by now. Scalzi also self-published his first sci-fi novel, Old Man’s War before it was bought by Tor. Scalzi is an outspoken liberal who penned the incredibly famous article about white-male privilege: Straight White Male: The Easiest Difficulty Setting There Is.

On the other side we’ve got Larry Correia. Whereas Scalzi has been a professional writer throughout his entire career (he did film reviews, non-fiction, and corporate writing before he broke into sci-fi in 2005), Correia is an even more recent entrant to the field of professional writing. His breakout hit, Monster Hunter International, was self-published in 2007 before it was picked up by Baen and republished in 2009. He currently has 9 sci-fi books in print (which is about the same as Scalzi, I think) and runs his own blog incredibly popular blog called Monster Hunter Nation. Where Scalzi is an outspoken liberal, Correia is a Mormon and proud gun-nut with generally conservative views.[ref]That makes Correia a lot closer to me on the political and religious spectrums, in case you haven’t been reading this blog very much.[/ref]

Both of these gentleman have a lot of readers and fans, both of their books and also of their blogs. As you can imagine, this is a recipe for trouble. In the old days, neither Correia nor Scalzi would have been so well known for their political views because for the most part the sci-fi audience had to guess at politics from what the fiction that author published. If they even thought about it at all. Which, unless the book appeared to take an overt stance, they probably didn’t. Now there is more awareness but, unfortunately, there are also sides. The blogs are not just a source of information, but also a virtual space for like-minded fans to congregate. It’s no surprise that Scalzi’s blog is stuffed to the gills with commenters who generally agree with his views and applaud his willingness to write about them publicly, and the same goes for Correia, although perhaps less-so since Correia takes a more hands-off approach to comment moderation. It’s hard to imagine that this homogeneity doesn’t radicalize the views of Scalzi and Correia at least a little bit simply because human nature is what it is, and it definitely radicalizes the communities themselves. When contrarians come around to pick a fight,they are seen not just as someone who disagrees, but as representative of the other tribe. And then, last but not least, there’s the fact that these politicized leaders of politicized tribes can shout at each other in public. Thanks to social media, authors not only interact with their fans more (and in public) but also with each other more (and in public).

None of this is anybody’s fault, really. There are no villains thus far. It’s just the way things are. Technology has consequences for society, and one of the consequences of social media in all its many forms is to make it easier for people to sort themselves into like-minded groups, whether that’s their intent or not. This is why the civil war in sci-fi is perhaps just a smaller example of the larger trends taking place across our society as a whole.

Of course, it’s also possible that Scalzi, Correia, or both are just more politicized than the Old Guard. (I’ve noticed, for example, that a much more experienced writer like C. J. Cherryh definitely has her opinions, but has so far kept completely out of internecine combat, even when it touches on issues that she personally cares about.) I’m not as interested in the theory that newer writers are just more political for two reasons. First: I just don’t think there’s any way to judge. Second: even if they are, you might still wonder if there’s some reason for that fact. In other words: it might still come back to a consequence of coming into your own as a professional writer in an era of social networking and platform building. In any case, I’m sticking with a technology-based explanation of political radicalization in the sci-fi community for this post.

What Hath Partisanship Wrought?

2014-05-01 Fahrenheit 451

So what is actually going on? Well, if you ask the liberals, they are just trying to make the sci-fi community safe for minorities by chasing out hatemongers and bigots. If you ask the conservatives, they are trying to keep the sci-fi community safe for free-thinkers by resisting political correctness. The sad irony is that a central strategy of the conservatives is to say intentionally provocative things (you can’t keep a right if you don’t exercise it) and a chief strategy of the liberals is to interpret whatever conservatives say in the worst possible light (to validate their claim that the racists, sexists, etc. have got to go). It looks almost as though the two sides just decided to have the biggest, nastiest, most convoluted fight they could possible have, and came up with the perfect strategy to escalate and perpetuate it. Call it cooperation or call it co-dependency; it’s ugly by any name. The saddest part? Both sides contain a mix of decent people who really think they are trying to do the right thing, people who seem to have some serious issues unrelated to politics, and plain old trolls. Good luck sorting that out.

In practical terms, there’s an ongoing feud at the SFWA (that’s the professional organization for sci-fi writers, artists, and editors) that culminated in a particularly controversial conservative named Theodore Beale (who writes under Vox Day) being formally ejected from the organization. You can read a self-declared liberal-slanted recap of that mess here. Lest that make you think that the conservatives were being unreasonable, the liberals worked hard to show they could be just as insane when they went bananas over the announcement that Jonathan Ross was going to host the 2014 Hugo awards. Jonathan Ross, a British comedian who is married to Hugo-winner Jane Goldman, had no idea that he was walking into a minefield because (like most of humanity) he didn’t know about the ongoing SFWA feuds. So when a couple of liberals protested (based on no evidence at all that I can see) that he would make fat-jokes and this would make the ceremony hostile for overweight people, he didn’t handle their concerns with kid gloves. The spat blew up on Twitter with sci-fi author Seanan McGuire getting into a fight with Ross’s daughter who tried to defend her dad by saying: “I’m Jonathan’s overweight daughter and I assure you that there are few men more kind & sensitive towards women’s body issues.” Yeah, it was that ugly. Understandably, Ross said “the Hell with this”[ref]Not an actual quote, so far as I know/[/ref] and backed out. Liberals, as a general rule, celebrated their victory although there were exceptions. Neil Gaiman, for example, said that he was:

seriously disappointed in the people, some of whom I know and respect, who stirred other people up to send invective, obscenities and hatred Jonathan’s way over Twitter (and the moment you put someone’s @name into a tweet, you are sending it to that person), much of it the kind of stuff that they seemed to be worried that he might possibly say at the Hugos, unaware of the ironies involved.

But things really blew up when the Hugo nominations were announced on April 19. It didn’t take long for folks to notice that there were a lot of unexpected names on the list, and that those names corresponded to a slate of nominations from conservative-leaning authors Larry Correia had promoted on his own site starting back on March 25. Worst of all? The list included a novellete by none other than Vox Day / Theodore Beale. Scalzi responded immediately, although in stark contrast to his polemics during the controversy so far he took a moderate, calming approach, headlining his piece: No, The Hugo Nominations Were Not Rigged. Other than throwing a bone to his political allies, dog-whistle style[ref]It was a smart move. He pacified his allies by giving them a platform, but refrained from further escalating the fight himself.[/ref], Scalzi has essentially gone radio dark on politics since then.[ref]There was one exception, but by ignoring the Hugo controversy itself it continued the pattern of expressing general support for the liberal side of this war without actually joining in.[/ref] My theory is that Scalzi is smart enough to realize that the fight is now getting to a point where it’s going to start threatening the genre as a whole. Or, he might just be biding time to unleash after the Hugos, which is what others have explicitly stated that they are doing[ref]I’m afraid I’ve forgotten the name and lost the link of the particular author who stated this, but it was someone who is also up for a Hugo this year. I’ll try to recover it.[/ref]. Meanwhile others, like Tor author John C. Wright (who is friends with Correia and other conservatives) isn’t waiting. He publicly resigned from SFWA in an open letter.[ref]Notably, however, he did not sever his relationship with Tor.[/ref]

So now the sci-fi community has officially lost its mind. What bothers me the most, however, is to see that even the publishers are starting to get involved. John Scalzi’s editor and friend Patrick Nielsen Hayden has been a loud voice criticizing the conservative side (you have to go into the comments to find it, try #501 or #502). He is also senior editor at Tor, which recently published a controversial article arguing that sci-fi writers should stop using binary gender in their books.[ref]I’m not exaggerating. The first line is: “I want an end to the default of binary gender in science fiction stories.”[/ref] Tor is also where Scalzi publishes. Meanwhile Baen, where Correia lives, is cultivating it’s reputation as the place where conservatives can flee oppressive liberal Manhattan editors. This sentiment is reflected by Baen author Brad Torgersen along with Larry Correia himself. Meanwhile Baen editor Toni Weisskopf (guest-posting at Baen author and conservative Sarah Hoyt’s website) gives the impression that Baen as a corporate entity is at least marginally OK with their status as political refuge.

Let’s recap: back in the day authors put their politics in the books. Fans, editors, and publishing houses, as far as I can tell, didn’t have any stark partisan divides. Today, authors put their politics out there in blog posts and tweets, which become rallying cries for groups of like-minded fans. Then the fans and the authors get into fights with each other over politics. And, because the community is so small, these fights get personal and nasty very quickly.

Where Does It End?

2014-05-01 Bradbury Cover

I don’t want politics out of sci-fi books, but I do wish we could get politics out of the sci-fi publishing world. I’m not really sure if we can just roll the clock back to where things were before. I suspect not, and that makes me sad. On the other hand, this is one of those situations where markets and profit-seeking tend to make people behave more decently rather than less. I suspect money, consciously or unconsciously, has a lot to do with Scalzi’s sudden moderation. And that it had to do with Wright quitting the SFWA but not Tor. Baen publishes Lois McMaster Bujold (who I suspect is not conservative) and Tor publishes David Weber (who most definitely is), and these refugees give hope that we can stop things from sliding into full-on, open warfare with the publishers as intentional ideological mouthpieces.

My perspective is one of both fan and hopeful author. I hope that when I’m ready to start submitting my stories, probably in a couple of years, sci-fi will still boast the free-wheeling intellectual, religious, and political diversity that I’ve always loved. Look, I know that as a conservative I will always be viewed with faint suspicion and find myself the odd-man-out, but part of being a conservative is being willing to deal with bad luck (like finding yourself in a minority position) without complaining. I’m willing to accommodate myself to that reality. All I want is a chance to participate in one, big, giant conversation. I don’t want it to be my turn to try writing and find that instead of this chaotic tapestry of audience and texts I’ve got a regimented set of ideologically homogeneous boxes, and that I’ve got to pick just one.

Sci fi, as the literature of ideas, cannot survive under those conditions.

Disclaimer (added as an update)

I mentioned a lot of individuals by name in this post. I do not know any of them personally, nor do I have any inside information. When it comes to my guesses as to the motivations of named individuals, I’ve tried to be generous and conservative (not in the political sense) but I might still get it wrong. In any case: talking about people individually is not the point. It’s just there to provide the story, as best I understand it. The overall trend of political polarization is unmistakable and is based, as I suggest, primarily on general technological trends rather than the actions of any particular author or editor. I really do think there are good and decent people on both sides of the political divide here. And I really think there are people who have behaved very poorly, but I have not focused on that in this post.