How do we judge books?

Another way of looking at it is that maybe they have a point. That some people have taken politics into fandom and awards, and that they are judging writers by the color of their skin, their gender and their politics, rather than by the stories they write.

This was part of a comment left on the preceding post, “Sad Puppies and magical thinking“, which used a rather extreme yet pointed example furnished by John C. Wright to illustrate a phenomenon.

The idea that people have been judging stories politically rather than by their contents is an example of this phenomenon, which is assuming there must be a sinister explanation for when reality doesn’t conform to one’s expectations.

The idea that there’s a horde of “Social Justice Warriors” who judge stories not on quality or enjoyment but only on political agenda is oft asserted, but has never yet been demonstrated. This is an example of what I’m talking about when I say it appears the Puppies have fallen into the trap of assuming there must be a sinister explanation for when reality doesn’t conform to their expectations. It’s touted about as a proven fact, but any time this proof is offered round, it’s… not compelling.

In the first place, even when we find people discussing the identity and background of an author or character, this does not amount to judging these things “rather than” quality, does it? You might suspect that quality is being ignored, but you cannot objectively say that it is proven by the fact that other things are discussed.

And really, how likely is it that people would bother with work they don’t actually enjoy instead of work they do? I know that the stereotype of an “SJW” is someone who is soulless, joyless, and completely immune to (or opposed to) fun, but… what’s the motive to read at all, then? The very existence of the stereotype and the attributes… attributed… to it are part of the process.

If you just can’t understand how someone else might not enjoy the things that you enjoy, but enjoy things that you don’t, you have to explain it away when people say or demonstrate that this is the case. The people who said they liked that story did so for the wrong reasons! The people who said they enjoyed that game were lying! The sales figures, however modest they may be, are too high for a thing that you found to be un-fun, so they must be propped up artificially! And look, positive reviews! Award buzz! Why, isn’t that the proof of what you suspected? All these people wouldn’t be lying about their enjoyment of this thing without a reason, after all, and a mass campaign like this would account for the obviously inflated sales…

If you’re immersed in the viewpoint, then it all seems so reasonable. You miss the fact that there’s a step missing: proving that the people who review/praise/nominate/whatever the thing are lying. You’re using the unsupported premise that no one could actually enjoy a thing you didn’t enjoy as “proof” that people are lying, and using that “fact” to prove the rest.

“But why do you care at all if the book has a feminist perspective or queer characters or a Black author?” You might ask. “Why not just focus on quality, like we do?”

Well, there are two reasons, only one of which could be written off as “affirmative action”: in order to counter the extent to which books like these are ignored for reasons having nothing to do with quality.

Oh, here you think I’ve just confirmed what you’re saying? Nope. The reality of the situation (and even the reality of most formal affirmative action) is that it only means giving consideration to a book/candidate (which in this case means giving it a read, or at least starting to), not deciding it has merit before you’ve even seen it. Something like Ms. Bradford’s reading challenge doesn’t call on people to pretend to like books that they otherwise find bad. It asks them to give said books a read. If any of them wind up nominated, the balance of probability is that the nominator found them good enough to be worthy of that, isn’t it?

The second reason is what I suspect the more powerful and more common reason, given that we do read for pleasure and diversion and self-fulfillment. And that is… well, you know how sometimes people want to read books with, say, a Christian perspective? You know how sometimes people want to read a book with military settings and characters? You know how sometimes people reading a military science fiction story or a Christian SF/F story are interested in knowing before they plunk their money down if the author has lived the life they are describing?

The predictable response to this is something like, “Well, but nobody ONLY wants to read those things! I like mil-sci stories but I don’t read them to the exclusion of others! And yes I might think a story is more likely to be authentic if it’s from an author who has served, but ultimately what I care about is quality and if a good story is told!”

Just so!

And this is why when somebody asks you for a military SF recommendation, you don’t assume that’s all they ever want to read. You don’t assume they mean, “Tell me any random military SF story and I will read it. I don’t care about quality, only this one superficial characteristic.” No. You recommend something you think they will like and that fits the requested parameter(s).

This is the function of a book recommendation. That a person is asking for a book of quality or a person recommending a book of quality, a book that’s enjoyable, according to their tastes, is the most basic function. It doesn’t need to be stated as a parameter.

If you can see people talking like, “Can you recommend some books with a queer protagonist of color?” and you can only conclude that they’re ignoring quality and asking others to do the same, you’re ignoring the basic meaning of “to recommend” in association with books.

You might not understand why they care if the protagonist is a queer protagonist of color. But maybe they wouldn’t understand why you prefer libertarian-leaning heroes with military backgrounds, or whatever it is you prefer.

Maybe you’d look at the books that are put forward as fitting the bill and you wouldn’t enjoy them. They don’t do it for you.

And that’s fine.

Where you lose the plot is when you conclude on the basis of your own personal taste that the books are objectively unenjoyable, THEREFORE the people who praise them are lying and the people who recommend them are doing so only for reasons having nothing to do with quality, THEREFORE any success or acclaim it garners must be undeserved, THEREFORE if several of these books continue to garner any success or acclaim there must be some entrenched cabal with the power to make this happen…

Let me put forward an alternate explanation for why, year after year, book after book, people keep buying and reading and praising things that leave the Puppies puzzled and—unaccountably—sad:

Different people enjoy different things for different reasons.

That’s all it takes to explain what’s happening. No inventing entities in direct contravention of Occam’s razor. No conspiracy theory boards of imagined or intuited connections. None of that is necessary.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Despoiled

One of my favorite moments when I saw Captain America: The Winter Soldier came when the sub-titular character was unmasked, and someone in the theater let out an exclamation of genuine surprise. I envy the person that experience. I really do. Same with the people who didn’t pick up that Anthony Mackie’s character was a high-flying superhero before the reveal.

And when I figure out the central mystery to a story before a big reveal, I feel great about it.

But not every story is a mystery, and I wouldn’t trade decades of comic fandom knowledge for not knowing who the Winter Soldier and Sam Wilson are before seeing it on the big screen.

And you know what? While I didn’t share in the experience of the people who were surprised, knowing who those people were didn’t diminish my enjoyment. It just changed the nature of it. My pleasure came from seeing how these familiar stories were pulled off this time.

And that’s something I think is often missing from our discussion about spoilers. The idea that knowing what’s going to happen diminishes the experience of hearing a story is a kind of strange and fairly modern idea. I mean, there came a point in time where Homer’s telling of the Trojan War became codified as “the official” one, but Homer himself was a performer, not a scribe. Do we think he told the story the same way each time? Do we think people edged away from him when he started up with that “RAGE!” spiel again because there was no point in hearing the story again if they already knew where it was going?

To imagine this requires us to ignore the fact that the story of the war with Troy was old when Homer was young. He might have increased its popularity, but it’s also likely that its permeation into his culture is why his telling became one of his best known works.

Of course, the historicity of Homer and the connection between the surviving written version of The Iliad and any such person is far from a settled question. But I think we have enough evidence to accept that people out there were singing of the rage of Achilles, and we can imagine one such person who was particularly successful at it and call this person Homer.

The point is that while there must of necessity have been a point in any Hellene’s life when they first heard of the rage of Achilles, the strength of Ajax, and the wiles of Odysseus, that point would not usually have been the last time they heard of these things, nor the one and only time they enjoyed them.

A few years ago, there was a raft of articles referring to a study that indicates that having a story spoiled may actually make it more enjoyable by in essence allowing us to sit back and just take the story as it comes. In the time since then, I have increasingly come around to this way of thinking.

I’ve also started to wonder if the disdain for spoilers isn’t tied to the idea that there is (or should be) a “real telling” of a story. The idea of “canon” to mean “the fixed, objective reality of What Really Happened in a fictional timeline” rather than “a body of work” is also a relatively new idea, one that probably dates back to the original Sherlockians trying to reconcile details that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle had simply fired off and then forgotten about, but not much further in any concrete form, and one that has only really penetrated into the ranks of the storytellers themselves as young fans who grow up caring more about such continuity concerns become content producers themselves, and inspire another generation who cares about it even more…

I’ve seen people talking about a divide in fandom between people who see Canon as something to be kept, an immutable stone record that is mastered through memorizing and internalizing the minute arcana which makes it up, and those who see Canon as a set of building blocks and foundations to build on, to be mastered by exploration and analysis and creative rejiggering.

This divide is not intrinsically sexual, but is fairly heavily gendered in practice, as represented by the Geek Boy who quizzes Geek Girls about the trivia of the t-shirts they are wearing, while the same Geek Girls have folders full of fan art and fan fic.

The gender divide is not what interests me here, so much as how deeply entrenched the point of view of the Canon Keepers is and how it might be affecting the prevailing view of spoilers as, in effect, a crime against the art. Now, only the Sith deal in absolutes few things in life are black and white, so rather than describing Canon Keepers as people who believe there is absolutely one telling of a story, maybe I should try a more nuanced description: some tellings are official/real, and no others are. So you can accept the Marvel Cinematic Universe and the 616 comic universe and maybe some of the other versions as “real”, but for each “real version”, there is a single Approved Telling, and you have exactly one shot to see/hear it in the Approved Fashion.

The plot summary on Wikipedia, your excited co-worker at the next cubicle telling the person one cubicle over, the clever parody gifsets circulating on Tumblr… these are not the Approved Tellings, and they therefore diminish it by their existence.

In spelling out this speculation… and I should point out that much of the last two paragraphs are speculative… I’m not trying to say there’s anything wrong with the “carved in stone” approach to canon versus the “built from tinker toys” approach, nor with this potentially related approach to reading stories/seeing movies.

I’m just raising the question of where it comes from, in the interest of examining if it’s really necessary, on a person-by-person basis. I feel like some of us have just accepted the idea that spoilers spoil in the sense of ruining a movie.

You ever notice how the second time you watch a movie, you often catch a lot more than you did the first time? The genuinely clever lines, the little background details that show how much thought went into the worldbuilding and plot, stuff like that? This will always be the case, but I suspect based no my experience that you catch more of it when you’re also not trying to put together the larger details.

It’s true that I’ll only see a movie the first time once, but I also generally only see movies on the big screen once. If I want to get the most out of that opportunity, I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary. I don’t want to know all the twists. I don’t want to know all the jokes. I don’t want to know all the background details.

But I want to know the story, in the same way that an ancient Greek crowding around a poet singing on the street corner would know of the rage of Achilles.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

Freddie Gray didn’t deserve what happened to him even before the police lied

State Attorney Marilyn Mosby stood up today and announced that the six officers involved in the homicide of Freddie Gray of Baltimore will be charged with this crime. Among the findings she revealed is the fact that an illegal “switchblade” that he reportedly carried was in fact a perfectly ordinary and perfectly legal knife, and was not found until after he was detained (thus cannot constitute probable cause for a search or arrest).

I’m seeing this fact and a few other key points being touted about the Twittersphere as an important aspect to the case, and I agree. It is important to document when officials charged with public safety and blessed with public trust lie to the public to protect themselves and each other. It is important to document deliberate falsehoods in this case as they indicate deliberation, if not premeditation for the crimes. It is important to document these lies because the truth is important.

But I worry.

I worry that the narrative will become—or perhaps in some corners is already becoming—“See? Freddie Gray did not deserve this treatment! This proves he died for no reason!”

No, in point of fact, it does not.

Because even if Freddie Gray had been carrying an illegal weapon, he did not deserve this treatment and he died for no reason.

He was arrested a mere five blocks from the precinct house. Less than half a mile. He was savagely beaten and then thrown into the back of a van with no padding, no safety restraints, no protection of any kind and taken on a forty minute joyride which served no other purpose except to slam him around inside the hard metal confines of the vehicle.

If his attackers did not intend to kill Mr. Gray, they certainly intended to injure him and they certainly displayed a gross disregard for his life.

In cases of police violence, we are told time and time again that we cannot judge officers for taking steps to protect themselves, for making life-and-death judgment calls in the heat of the moment. If we point out all the cases where suspects who fit one profile are taken in safely despite being heavily armed and belligerent versus the cases where suspects who fit another profile are shot repeatedly at the first sign—often imaginary—we’re told you’re not there, you can’t know what’s in their head.

Well, that hardly applies in this case. Half a dozen men against one man, broken, bleeding, and in handcuffs. Even laying aside the question of whether the force used to subdue him could be said to have been warranted (and forgive me for being dubious, given everything else we know), there is no “safety” or “in the moment judgment” that can excuse or justify what happened next.

So if we say that Freddie Gray didn’t deserve this brutal execution because he wasn’t carrying an illegal weapon, what we are saying is that people—at least certain people—do deserve this treatment for carrying an illegal weapon. That the actual rule of law, which prescribes that persons accused of a crime be detained, charged, and tried before punished, should not have been applied if Freddie had been breaking this law.

I’m going to say something that should not be controversial:

Beating people suspected of a crime into a pulp then throwing them into a metal box and slamming them around for upwards of half an hour to see what happens is not a legitimate function of a police department. It is not a legitimate function for a democratic state power to execute. It is not something that a nation that aspires to the loftier ideals espoused by the United States of America should be doing.

It doesn’t matter if the victim of a crime is also a criminal. The law does not and should not care. We should all be terrified of the idea that government agents can decide a person is a criminal and then decide that their rights are suspended on that basis.

Yet it happens.

It happens every day.

And a lot of us don’t notice, if only because our own knee-jerk judgments of who is and isn’t a criminal happens to match the determination being made by the police.

We have ways for determining criminality and processes for dealing with criminals. They are not perfect. They are not themselves perfectly free from brutality and bias at any level of their operation. But they are there, and they should not be ignored by people who are touting the concept of “rule of law”.

Freddie Gray didn’t deserve what happened to him, and he was killed for no reason.

This is true not because he was innocent, but because he was a human being and endowed with certain rights.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

STATUS: Friday, May 1st

The Daily Report

Last year, I finally gave up on what had previously been my main criteria in a cell phone: a physical keyboard. As a result, I got a newer and spiffier phone than I’ve ever had before, and one of the things I noticed when playing around with it was that it made for a far better recording device than the headsets or built-in mics I’d used before.

I quickly tried to make use of this with a few small, side projects that I used as incentives for miscellaneous crowdfunding, but I started to run into a snag pretty early on that has just gotten worse: while it performed flawlessly in my initial tests, it seemed like the more I tried to rely on it, the more it would tend to skip and distort the recording at odd moments.

The problem has only been getting more pronounced. I’m not sure why that is, but it’s really affected my Tales of MU worldbuilding podcasts, which were supposed to be a quick and easy thing that would answer some reader demand and then move on from. Because I can’t tell when and where it skips until I play it back, I often have to throw out entire takes as unusable.

Well, the good news is that I don’t have to wrestle with this anymore. Through an act of reader generosity, I now have a decent USB condenser microphone. I’ve been testing it this early afternoon, figuring out things like optimal distance and speaking volume. I haven’t quite worked out how the accompany mic stand is supposed to work, as there are no instructions for its assembly/deployment and I’m a bit reluctant to just force it. I’ll probably look for any demo videos/reviews on YouTube after this that might show it in action.

This is going to be a huge deal in getting more worldbuilding podcasts up, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There’s a number of things I started last summer when it seemed like my phone was going to be a serviceable recording solution which I left off in the middle due to frustration (and then forgot about the frustration and committed to doing the worldbuilding podcasts).

So, in the near future, expect more of the MU podcasts. In the slightly beyond that future, expect more filk, satirical relaxation tracks, et cetera.

The State of the Me

Doing well. In addition to the gift of a microphone and webcam, I also was gifted some art supplies  and vitamin supplements yesterday. In addition to the practical value of these gifts, it just makes me feel good about myself that people cared enough to do this.

Plans For Today

Man, you have no idea how much I want to say “play around with microphone”, but I have a bunch of writing I need to do.

 

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.

So, apparently it needs to be said…

…that when I write a thing on my blog talking about how I feel about a thing, I’m on my blog, talking about how I feel about a thing.

I say this because earlier today I wrote a post that was mostly just how I feel about spoilers. It concluded:

It’s true that I’ll only see a movie the first time once, but I also generally only see movies on the big screen once. If I want to get the most out of that opportunity, I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary. I don’t want to know all the twists. I don’t want to know all the jokes. I don’t want to know all the background details.

But I want to know the story, in the same way that an ancient Greek crowding around a poet singing on the street corner would know of the rage of Achilles.

I feel like that’s pretty clear that I’m talking about me there, and that I’m not speaking in absolutes in any sense of the word. E.g., “I believe I’m best served in most cases by having read a fairly detailed plot summary.” There’s no value judgment attached. No exhortation towards others. Not even an invitation to join me.

I guess I can see people reading the middle part, where I wonder if the anti-spoiler part of geek culture isn’t related to what I call the “Canon Keeper” part of culture, as being prescriptive. Perhaps I should have spelled out more explicitly that I don’t see the link as being what you might call inherent or direct. That is, I didn’t say, “The only reason anybody could think they don’t want spoilers is they approach canon like this way, and that’s wrong.” I wondered if there’s a link, at the cultural level.

And to explain what I mean by that: even after I started actively seeking out spoilers for some things, I still felt… weird about that. Like I was doing it wrong. I would sometimes be apologetic about the fact that I’d spoiled myself, or downplayed the extent to which I did it… because Everybody Knows That’s Not How You Do It, right?

If the post had a larger point, it wasn’t “Look at me, I made the correct choice, don’t you wish you were more like me?”, it was, “This is where I am right now on this. This is why.”

The weird thing is that even though the criticism of it cropped up on the Tumblr cross-post, I have a feeling that it wouldn’t have happened… or wouldn’t have been so pointed… if I’d made the post on Tumblr to begin with. If my critics see this over there, they might take exception to that, and it’s certainly not something we could prove one way or the other without being able to peer into adjacent alternate realities… but I feel like maybe people read a more prescriptive air into things they see as an “article” on an external site rather than a “post” on a personal blogging platform.

Well, this is still a personal blog. The name in the address bar is mine. The posts here aren’t pieces for some clickbaity online magazine. I’m not sitting here dispensing the wisdom of Solomon when I’m talking about my life, even if I do have a weird philosophical aside in the middle of a post.

The next time I notice that kind of snark in the Tumblr notes, I’ll probably ignore it. I certainly won’t make a policy of responding to it every time. And I’m not going to change how I blog.

Originally published at Blue Author Is About To Write. Please leave any comments there.