The Red pill or the Green pill?

Are you going to take the Red pill...

... or are you going to take the Green pill?

I've rambled on about how much I hate dystopian novels. And how I intend to write prose that is anti-dystopian.

Sarah Hoyt, et alia, have suggested an alternative they call Human Wave. Human Wave is basically old-fashioned Humanism (neither Secular nor Religious, just Humanism qua Humanism) that's contextualized within the motifs of Science Fiction.

That's a fine sentiment. I like humans. I really like cute little humans and attractive female humans--particularly the one to whom I'm married. But I've always thought "man is the measure of all things" to be a bit too uppity. Not humble enough.

Thus I now feel more of a co-belligerent of Human Wave than an unequivocal ally. Instead, something got me thinking about the future and how my writing should engage the future.

Let's suppose I take all the problems in the world and consider worst-case scenarios. The great terror of my childhood was nuclear war.

Maybe there will be a nuclear war, and the radiation will keep growing so that we'll all die. And if that happens, the last survivors would live in Australia, drive race cars, and take suicide pills. That's not a fun day On The Beach, is it?  
Conversely, the survivors in such a scenario would have the time and resources to build underground or underwater habitats with sufficient shielding to protect against radiation. OR they could build rockets and live on the moon for a century or two while waiting for the radiation to half-life away.

So, do you want to keep calm and carry on or do you want to get excited and make things? Do you want the Red Pill or do you want the Green Pill?

(You'll note that I did not say Blue Pill.)

When I was a wee lad (That sounds better in a Scottish brogue.), you could drive through Gary, Indiana and you would see an orange haze in the air from all the steel making. The river in Cleveland caught fire.

Today you can fill your lungs with air that's a lot cleaner. You can go to the beach and take a dip in water that's a lot cleaner, too.

(But I live in Michigan. It's too cold to go swimming. At least, not until we get some more Global Warming, please.)

What changed between then and now is that our parents saw problems and set about to fixing them. They fixed them so well, that the remaining pollution problems became much more subtle, and more questionable.

That's the green pill. You see something is wrong, and you set about to fixing it.

Is the planet too hot or too cold? Don't Stay Calm and Carry On, roll-up your sleeves, build a thermostat, and hook it up. What about unintended consequences? There's risks in anything and we're already dealing with unintended consequences of everything else that's gone before.

Once Upon A Time the world of the future was not a dystopian place. Stay Calm and Carry On was WW2 and on the other side of the Atlantic. The American way has been to see a problem, and do something to try to fix it. We Get Excited And Make Things.

Happily, today most of the things that are worth making are within the scope and skills of one or a few tinkerers. The Maker Movement is a bunch of folks doing art installations, starting companies, subverting monopolies, and engaging in creative destruction. A lot of us are engineers and computer geeks. Note the word "us" because that's who I am. You may have noticed my experiments with the Raspberry Pi.

I also write. And after you read my stories I hope that you will want to get up and invent a jetpack or a flying car. Or a cure for cancer. Or a better way into space.

Inception by Andrew Beery

Inception, the Catherine Kimbridge Chronicles #1 by Andrew Beery is the first of a series of novels, and if the next two novels in the series contain as much big story material, it will be a marvel.

This novel is the sort of "transgressive" work you'll only find in a $0.99 Amazon book, because it does not pay the Hollywood Stupid tax. For one thing, religion users are neither villains nor irritants. The hero's side kick (at least for a little while) is a scientist and a chaplain. And he's married and not contemplating an affair with the female protagonist. What's with that? Doesn't it say, "thou shalt commit adultery," someplace?

Nevertheless, there's not much Bible thumping going on and the book sails clear of sectarian shoals. There's about as much religion as you'll find in a Bollywood movie.

The hero starts the book by dying (and she dies at least twice in this novel), but she saves the life of a powerful alien in a self-sacrificial way. And this makes the alien grateful enough to spend the next 50 years rebuilding her body from scratch and recompiling all of her memories. And adding some nanotech upgrades.

Given these super-powers, the hero doesn't do a whole lot with them. And while the alien is rebuilding her body, Earth government changes so she's transferred from the US Air Force to some kinda world government space command. Sadly, I think the author has never actually served in the armed forces, but he tries to get military courtesy right (with limited success). A bit less Star Trek watching is indicated.

No, a LOT less Star Trek is indicated.

The beginning of the book has some really cool REAL science kinds of gadgets and gizmos. Some of the technology described is current bleeding edge stuff I could recognize. After the aliens give humanity advanced technology, not so much. I can imagine the nanotechnology and the quantum mechanics stuff working that way, and that's probably why I liked the book so much.

Some of the time lines seemed off to me. It seemed that humanity had some incredibly short deadlines to ramp up production of whole fleets of starships. And to integrate alien technology into their weaponry.

Everything works out for the most part, but it just seemed too rushed. I hope the author will learn to pace himself more in the future. Of course, someone else might gripe that it'd go too slow, so your mileage may vary.

I liked the fact that the human race was good. Maybe too good to be realistic, but the hero in the story and her branch of the military and earth government seemed to all be people of good intent pursuing a good target: the salvation of the human race. In a couple of instances, the hero's altruism and kindness results in a big win for humanity that gives them the edge they need to face the next, harder hurdle.

The scale of harder and harder tasks with bigger and bigger challenges reminded me of both the Lensmen series and also the Perry Rodan series. If you liked those space operas, you'll like this, too. All told, I'll give this novel 5 stars and I hope to see more like it.

Do I think this book is Human Wave SF? Yes, it is good Human Wave SF writing.

Does Good Writing Exist?

A while back I asked, "Does Bad Writing Exist?"

I hope you're wondering if good writing exists. The word "exist" is the axis around which these remarks will turn.

A friend recently told me quality is "goodness of fit to requirements." Writing happens to be one of those enterprises where the requirements are not necessarily apparent.

Mere conformance to the rules of grammar is a readily apparent requirement. (You can get all Chomsky on me and say the rules of grammar are mere social convention. Then the arbiters of taste--the gatekeepers--can say that they define social convention... This way lies madness.)

There are well defined formulae for story telling going back to Aristotle. Conformance to one of these formula is another readily apparent requirement.

The virtues are well known. So whether a narrative upholds humanistic values or not is a readily apparent requirement.

You may want to cut the Gordian knot and say, "the requirement is what sells." This muddies as much as it clarifies, because bad books which are pushed real hard can sell better than good books that are not pushed as forcefully. Complaining about a bestseller like The Davinci Code that gets a huge publicity campaign is complaining about the choice to push it.

Some books stink so bad that an infinite amount of push won't make them sell. And other books are so good that merely making the public aware of them suffices to make them sell like hotcakes. There's something that inheres within a work that engages with push that helps or hurts sales. I think that something is beauty.

What is the ontological status of beauty? Is it a mere social convention or is it a thing that exists in a thing-in-itself aside from any observer to behold it? 

I am claiming something controversial: Beauty inheres within the thing itself. Not the eye of the beholder or social conventions. Beauty exists in good writing.

Social conventions are bound by pragmatic considerations to the criteria of beauty. The buying public recognizes beauty and chooses to buy accordingly. Those who sell books push their titles without much thought of beauty and thus the publishing business suffers from slack sales.

Disagreements about Objective quality stems from the fact that reality does not come labeled with this thing here as good and that thing there as crud. We subjectively estimate beauty in the thing before we think about it and before we talk about it. This creates the appearance that all quality is Subjective. Yet some books don't sell despite infinite push.

This is why Human Wave SF is such a big deal. Human Wave SF posits in old-fashioned Humanism a set of requirements. I’m eager to take the rules of English Grammar and Spelling, combine them with the values of Human Wave SF, and declare this combination to be the Requirements of Writing.
 
Then I’ll use this to define Quality. A couple days ago I asked Sarah Hoyt (with tongue in cheek) where I could find a certifying authority to gauge whether Finding Time was Human Wave or not.

A test for conformance to the Requirements of Writing could be largely objective. Therefore, I claim that Good Writing does indeed exist, and it is recognized as such when it conforms to beauty in the world.

It's my hope that my writing will rise to the level of being good. I've certainly made every effort to do so.

Finding Time Is Human Wave

When I was a tender lad, there was a hue and cry in some circles about this thing called "Secular Humanism." Humanism goes back to the ancient Greeks and it had had a Christian expression with intellectuals like Erasmus of Rotterdam. So, this isn't a Christian versus Pagan thing. In the intervening decades, Secular Humanism has been replaced by something much less Humanistic.

As a tender lad, there were not a lot of dystopian novels out there. The few that were were political tracts, like 1984 (life in totalitarianism sucks), Atlas Shrugged (life in socialism sucks), or On The Beach (life after nuclear weapons sucks--then everyone dies).

But now, they're mainstream like Hunger Games. (Here's a review.)

I didn't like dystopian then, and I don't like dystopian now. Recently, someone asked me if I thought dystopian novels are a sign of the times. I think they are not. My flip answer was that they betoken cruddy editorial policies. A less flip answer is that Secular Humanism has been replaced by something much less Humanistic. (I expand on this here.)

To which I say, "screw that. Let's have some more Humanism."

"What would something like that look?" you may ask. This is answered in part here and here.

You might also ask, "Is Finding Time part of this New Human Wave in Science Fiction?"

I believe the answer is either, "Yes," or "Hell, Yes!"

I expressed Human Wave (perhaps too) succinctly as: life doesn't suck, humans win, we're not all doomed. I promise that in each of Finding Time's stories:

• Someone wins
• Nobody's a villain simply by virtue of belonging to some collective
• Nobody's a hero simply by virtue of belonging to some collective
• When I want to send a message, I call Western Union
• None of my stories are metaphorical political or religious polemics
• All the stories are intended to appeal to the buying public
• You paid good money for these stories and I aim to deliver value
• I never tell you what you should like for your own good

It's up to you. I'm not going to tell you how to spend your time & money. If you prefer More Dystopian Blah stories, stay away from Finding Time.

But if those promises sound good to you, I do my damnedest to keep them, and I hope you'll consider Finding Time.

Reading and Writing Manifestos

Some years ago I happened upon an essay in The Atlantic that became a standalone book, "A Reader's Manifesto." It lamented the sorry state of American contemporary literature: What respectable authors wrote as serious, respectable literature was just awful, pretentious, and affected as far as readers are concerned.

I'm sorry to say that though this essay resonated with me and most of my writer friends and all of my reader friends, the Brahmins who decide what shall be published and who give out MFA degrees did not take any deliveries from the clue bus.

Now we are hearing that the publishing industry is doomed, doomed I say because of ebooks. Or something.

Doom is what happens to any business when those who decide upon the products to be offered make their decisions based upon ideology, politics, and group-think instead of based upon market demand. The jargon term is Market Failure and it happens when customers cannot acquire the goods they desire from providers. When this happens, the consumer Goes Somewhere Else. (If the market failure is caused by a government regulating prices or censorship, Somewhere Else is called a black market.)

Disruptive technologies are God's gift to humanity, because their disruptions often undermine formerly unassailable monopolies, creating opportunities for small, agile mammals to raid the nests of big, stupid dinosaurs. In this context, the disruptive technologies of the ebooks plus Internet booksellers, enable the unsatisfied reader to go Somewhere Else.

When I was a child, there was exactly one dystopian novel of any note. (Atlas Shrugged didn't seem dystopian, because I knew John Galt was going to stop the engine of the world and remake it in Ayn Rand's image.) 1984 was a young adult novel only because every high school student was required by Mrs. Grundy to read it in English class.

Why waste time with Big Brother when there are novels with rocket ships and space suits written by fellas a boy could identify with--featuring protagonists who were escaping danger and helping friends out of danger--or better--hunting for and finding treasure. They weren't filled with angst about who would bite them on the neck and suck the life out of them.

Heinlein's protagonist in this novel worked in a pharmacy and lamented his oversight of failing to stock his space suit with amphetamines. Let's see someone try to get away with something like that in today's YA market. Granted, times change and the American culture changes what it finds acceptable.

Hard work, initiative, and resourcefulness characterized Kip Russell (pictured above), not drug use. Readers of 1958 understood that. They saw NASA putting up satellites and would soon see men in orbit and then go to the moon. The future was full of hope and opportunity that could be exploited for everyone's gain.

Editors of 2012 have tended to steer book deals to Yet Another Dystopian story. (Remember when Star Trek made the Enterprise drive 55?) Is the present bleak and the future hopeless? Are there limits to growth?

Maybe. But I won't spend money buying books about it. None of this is new. I've made some of these observations before.

I believe reading is not punishment. The reader is primary and delivering value to the reader is the writer's duty and the reader--not the writer or the editor--defines what constitutes that value. I hope that my writing as it provides that value can also illustrate some of the wonder and beauty of the universe and human nature, but that can't get in the way of the story.

What is new this week is news of a subversive group of revolutionaries (or reactionaries) who are standing athwart history crying stop. Sarah Hoyt has invited fire by articulating certain principles that she thinks characterizes Human Wave Science Fiction writing. And she's put together a manifesto for Human Wave Science Fiction. She names names of writers producing prose that fits this label and manifesto. And she names my favorite SF authors in the process.

I have always thought the future might hold great tribulation, but things will improve as we get smarter about how the universe works. This optimism is probably the most subversive thing that Mrs. Hoyt, et al. is manifestoing.

Manifestoing?