Gun Magic

There is a lot of infantile thinking about guns. It is nothing new. If you do not understand guns, they are sort of like magic. You point them at something you want destroyed and pull the trigger. And something bad happens to whatever you're aiming at. Hollywood perpetuates this sort of magic thinking by having guns somehow kill all the terrorists when Jamie Lee Curtis drops a machine pistol in True Lies or all those old westerns where the two gunfighters face off at the edge of town. One shoots, the other falls immediately dead.

Louis L'Amour complained about this in the '70s. He knew his stuff because he was exacting in his historical research. Sorry Toshiro Mifune, but the Seven Samurai isn't a perfect translation into the Magnificent Seven. Americans do not do unarmed peasants.

Black Bart couldn't terrorize a town full of Civil War veterans who were trained in warfare. Maybe he was the fastest gun in the west but he could still die from a shotgun blast in his back. Or if the town is mad enough, he might face six shotguns with the warning that you might kill one of us but you won't kill all of us and you'll be just as dead.

L'Amour claimed the face off at the edge of town was exceedingly rare. And when it did take place, a big guy full of adrenaline won't go down with only one shot. Because he had been a boxer as a young man, his fistfights are often better than his gunfights.

A gunfight isn't a duel between magical weapons where one shoots and the other dies. It's a fight where damage causing attacks are exchanged until one or both sides can no longer hit the other.

People who know something about guns understand this. Most of what you read in books or see in movies does not reflect this understanding. The gunfight brings the climax of the story with a bang and you immediately segue into the denouement and start selling the sequel.

Mindful of this I was reading a thumbsucker about the N most important Science Fiction novels. I was impressed by the inclusion of stories that inspired nothing but eye-rolls when I tried to read them, and I was impressed by the omissions.

(Likewise, I was reading a collection of the best SF stories of last year and after reading one that I knew was excellent, I was impressed by the next two that made me think, "what made that special?" I suppose I would have to be a Social Justice Warrior to understand.)

I figure an SF novel is not important if it reiterates The Message that the SJWs are pushing, but it is important if it changes the direction of the genre. Someone in the '40s and '50s got everyone to writing novels with a rocket ship on the cover. Someone in the '60s got everyone to writing novels with a mushroom cloud with grateful dead in the foreground on the cover. I'll call those important SF stories.

Tom Clancy's Hunt For Red October was important because it got a lot of stories about the Reagan military build-up. The whole field of military SF took off at this time.

But let's backtrack to those 1950s B-quality SF movies. Not the high brow ones like Forbidden Planet, but the cheap ones with giant ants, spiders, etc. You know, like Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. The ones made on the other side of the pond were a little more posh, like The Day of the Triffids, but they all followed the same pattern:

Radiation or something mutates ants into the size
of houses. Or a space comet drops spores on Earth and blinds people while the spores grow into giant people-eating plants. In such a movie the first reel is spent learning Something is Not Right. The second reel is spent convincing someone official to Take Action. The third reel is then divided in two halves: Our Guns Have No Effect on the monster, and finally Something Trivial devastates the monster.

(Something Trivial? Consider something as ubiquitous as water. If you're the alien in Signs, it'll kill you. Same for those carnivorous plants in Day of the Triffids. (Don't forget the wicked witch of the west.) In these movies it serves as Something Trivial to be pulled out at the Dark Moment to act as a deux ex machina and save the day.)

This happens because if guns are magic, then the writer can turn off their magic. 

All this made me grow bored and tired of the entire Horror genre. I wanted to just yell at the idiot who tries to escape the chainsaw wielding fiend by jogging backwards in the forest. The slasher movies were the most annoying. There were tantalizing glimpses of a better way. The scene in Nighthawks with Sly Stallone in drag, or the world's shortest slasher film.

But the old tired pattern is risible to anyone familiar with guns. If you shoot a vampire, the kinetic energy of the round has to go somewhere as it goes through the monster's body. And if the round doesn't interact with the matter of the vampire, then how can the monster interact with other matter, say the girl's neck to be bitten or her blood to be sucked?

This sets the stage for someone like Larry Correia to write Monster Hunter International novels. He's a firearms instructor and he's trained civilians and lawmen in how to use guns effectively. You can call him a gun nut, but you'd better smile when you say that.

He respects guns enough to have the round do SOMETHING to the monster, even if it is less than sufficient to kill the beastie. Consider the opening scene of the first Monster Hunter International novel. Our Hero encounters a werewolf. You know, werewolves cannot be killed except with wolfbane and silver bullets. But Our Hero empties his gun in the beastie and it keeps coming, and he uses his fists. It keeps coming, he pushes it out a fourth-floor window, then he drops a desk on top if it.

No wolfbane, and no silver bullets. The werewolf (a young one) cannot regenerate fast enough to survive the blunt force trauma of a desk falling on his head.

At some point, even monsters have to obey the laws of physics. And that awareness is what Larry Correia brought to the telling of monster stories. It changes the entire horror genre. Instead of being helpless, or utterly dependent upon a stupid gimmick, the forces of good can innovate and come up with better ways to fight evil. When "our guns have no effect on the monster" let's try bigger guns. (And if your heroes don't have bigger guns, they can make do like the Finnish did when they beat the Russians in WW2. Like this.)

Making guns less magical
is a very helpful thing for the horror genre. And I think that when more writers realize that guns are not magic, they'll use them more effectively in their storytelling. This makes Monster Hunters important SF/horror stories.

What Science Fiction SHOULD Be

There's been a bit of kerfuffle over what Science Fiction should be. It started with this essay. It has evoked several responses like this, and this. I was singularly unimpressed with the whole premise. Who the bleep has the right to say what Science Fiction IS or IS NOT?

Set phasers on ignore and raise the apathy field.

So, this is a bit of a meta-analysis. I've pontificated, or bloviated, about Science Fiction and Fantasy in its various manifestations. I'm altogether comfy with blending genres. Louis L'Amour wrote several nifty romance novels disguised as westerns. Larry Correia writes horror novels that don't suck because they have so much gunplay.

Lois McMaster Bujold has a whole lot of romance in her Science Fiction novels. If you say she isn't writing Science Fiction, then you are silly enough to say Louis L'Amour wasn't writing westerns.

Not all Science Fiction is the same. If you like science and technology, you'll gravitate toward Jules Verne. If you prefer sociology, you'll gravitate towards H. G. Wells.

Is either better or worse? Silly question. As silly a question as asking "Do you walk to school or carry your lunch?"

Meanwhile, there's a racist in the UK who says there's too much discrimination in Science Fiction, and that Science Fiction OUGHT to depict more blacks, wymyn, etc. The color of your skin or the polarity of your reproductive organs has nothing to do with how good or bad a human you are.

If you think that there needs to be more blacks and wymyn in Science Fiction, then you are obviously not colorblind. (And you are willfully ignorant of several significant writers working today.) Blacks and wymyn are just as capable of being racist or sexist as white guys are capable of reflecting and expressing our common humanity. You're not curing racism or sexism by making demands for more blacks and/or wymyn. You're merely manifesting the subtle racism of diminished expectations.

Science Fiction is not church. And Science Fiction is not a political party. It isn't a club with a secret handshake and standards of conduct.

Science Fiction is a kind of writing.

And what SHOULD any kind of writing do? It should be read. If the writing isn't given away freely, then it should be sold prior to being read. If the writer isn't independently wealthy, its sales should contribute to the writers' sustenance. Bad things happen when a writer does not get paid for his work.

Science Fiction SHOULD sell. If you write Russian Tractor Operas, it may make friends amongst the commissars, but it may not have widespread commercial appeal. Likewise, if you write Morality Plays, it may make friends amongst moralists (and I'm not talking Baptist morals, but stuff like sorting your recycleables), but it may not sell.

If Science Fiction becomes bogged down with a thicket of political or moralistic claptrap, it becomes propaganda. Customers don't buy propaganda. If you don't sell, you'd better have a government subsidy. Your work may be assigned reading, but it will be forgotten as soon as the regime changes.

Conversely, if your stories sell, and sell very well, the market will send signals in the form of money to produce more stories.

I love Science Fiction. I want to have a lot of Science Fiction available to me. This means I want a healthy and growing market for Science Fiction. The best thing that I can do to increase the health and size of the Science Fiction market is to write the Science Fiction stories that people want to buy.

This is what Science Fiction SHOULD be.

Remember The Raisin

A joint force of American and British military attacked treasonous subjects of the British Crown and fairly defeated them in battle. However, after accepting these traitors' surrender the British left their American allies in charge. With the British gone, the Americans proceeded to sack the town and murder the wounded prisoners.

This happened about 175 miles from my home in Grand Rapids, Michigan. The massacre became a rallying cry among those forces whom the British regarded as traitors: Remember the Raisin!

The year was 1812. The war has been called the Second Revolutionary War, but is better known as the War of 1812. The victims of this massacre called themselves citizens of the United States, the Crown's opinion notwithstanding. The leader of the American forces perpetrating the massacre was a Shawnee chief named Tecumseh.

This and other violent conflicts between US citizens and indigenous Americans, shaped the popular notion that the people group we call Indians (and native Americans call Indians) were murderous savages.

Right or wrong, this is what US citizens and soldiers were thinking when they fought Indians in Ohio, Michigan, and parts further west. And before you feel too sympathetic about the Indians (or the Brits), you should remember the Raisin.

Nobody has clean hands.

As the US gained power and the power of Indian nations declined, the popular notion changed from murderous savages to worthy foes.

In 1820, an Ohio lawyer, Charles Robert Sherman, named his son William Tecumseh after the Indian chief. If you asked any South Carolina native after the Civil War, the murderous savages were those fellas in blue shirts following General William Tecumseh Sherman. (My ancestors served the Union elsewhere.)

The notion of Indians as worthy foes lasted much longer. If you read Louis L'Amour westerns (and you should), you'll see Indians depicted in this fashion. (I wish I could watch the original 3D version of Hondo.)

However, the death of Louis L'Amour accompanied the decline of the Western genre (as well as the decline of decent writing in that genre).

And in the late '60s the popular concept of Indians changed. Whereas the "heathen" part of heathen savages was once regarded as a Bad Thing, the post-Christian pop culture found the animist religion of Indians a Good Thing. (Or maybe just an excuse to use peyote.)

With a large dollop of New Age fuzzy thinking, the Indians were recast as mystic savants who could be counted on to kick the racist, evil White Man's butt in the 3rd reel when he gets back from his spirit quest.

In particular, I'm thinking of Billy Jack. However, I've recently enjoyed the character, Henry Standing Bear in the TV show Longmire who carries himself like a mystic savant (as contrasted with the character Jacob Nighthorse who is a casino owner).

And that brings us to today and my question: Is "mystic savant" going to be replaced by "casino owner" in the popular imagination?

Mind The Gap

Ric Locke died and he wasn't as well known as some of the other writers I've loved, but he reminded me of all those who have gone before.

The giants upon whose shoulders we stand. The giants whose shoes were several sizes larger than life. Shoes hard to fill.

My father was not a writer. Though he introduced me to Louis L'Amour, he wasn't much of a reader, either. He  died several years ago and news of other deaths take me back to the funeral home in Sparta, Michigan where we honored Dad.

My step-sister's husband loved my dad as much as any of us, and he spoke to me of what a good man Dad was. All I could think of in response was the challenge this posed to both of us as men. Can we be good men like Dad? We must be good men like Dad, because he's gone and someone else must do what he did.

There is a gap in this world. It is created by the loss of great men and women. It challenges each of us to do and to become their replacements.

Dad's death challenged me to be a better father, neighbor, and friend. When I reflect on the deaths of the writers whose prose I've enjoyed, I'm challenged to be a writer who can fill the gap.

I'm challenging you to do the same.