How The Hobbit Should Have Ended

Weekend Update!

Hugo nominations are now being accepted.  If you read something last year that you think deserves recognition, and if you're a member of the 2012, 2013, or 2014 World Science Fiction Convention, you can nominate things for the 2013 ballot.  LoneStarCon 3 is the venue of the World Science Fiction Convention, where the winners will be announced this coming August-September and you can find the rest of the details here.  I think Osama by Lavie Tidhar has my nomination this year.  What do you think?

Warner Bros. announced they're making a new Terminator movie.  What is this, number five or something?  I thought the franchise was adequately concluded with Terminator 2, and went along for Terminator 3 because nothing was better in theaters.  But I never saw Salvation and I have a hard time working up any sort of excitement for numero cinco.

DC has announced its expansion of digital lending to libraries.  That's quite the move and I'm sure one that parents and librarians are going to love (please note the sarcasm in my tone).  While you could make the argument that any reading is good, I beg to differ and suspect that reading at low levels or engaging in prurient fiction will not inspire children toward higher levels of maturity or intelligence.  I'll get off my soapbox now.  Because I love the idea of me.  I'm excited for the opportunity to get my comic fix without having to shell out five bucks an issue.  So go DC.

While I've been saying for a while that on-demand printing is the wave of the future, and with physical book sales dropping nationwide an average of 9%, Penguin finally got wise and has put much of its backlist up for on-demand printing using the Espresso Book Machine.  With the upcoming merger with Random House already in the works, this looks like a seismic shift in the way physical books are distributed and consumed.

And in an effort to improve recognition of great books, the National Book Award will include a longlist in 2013.  Like the Man Booker Award, the National Book Award will choose ten titles (but with a twist, it's ten per category of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and young people's literature) for the longlist and then shorten that to the appropriately titled shortlist, which will be announced five weeks later.

NASA got Leonard Nimoy to do the voice-over for a video detailing their Dawn mission, which intends to visit and study two asteroids, named Ceres and Vesta.  Leonord Nimoy, much like Morgan Freeman, could narrate the dictionary.  Check out the video below.

Declaration of Independence from Violence in the Media . . . Or, Do Video Games Kill?

By Steven McLain

Critics and social commentators have once more identified violence in the media as one of several causes in a recent spate of violence in the United States, prompting the President to request another study from the CDC about the links between the two.  While violence itself is on the decline, popularized violence is ever on the increase.  Violent scenes abound in video games, in movies, in television shows and on the news.  While violence is probably going to be an inescapable part of the human condition, tangible steps can nevertheless be taken to minimize the risk of encountering violence, and the possible harm that violence can cause.

On the eve of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, I'm reminded of his "Letter from a Birmingham Jail" and "Declaration of Independence from Vietnam."  Both emphasize Dr. King's resolution toward love and non-violent demonstration, but his true focus is on identifying justice and the laws which prevent it.  He sees systems of injustice in place that regularly denigrate human personality.  Racism, materialism, and militarism gnaw at the soul of the United States, according to MLK, and erode the moral fabric of its people.  To him, injustice is anything that degrades human beings as moral individuals.  And I have to wonder if our culture of violence is itself an unjust system.  Is it perhaps evil?

Certainly, people kill.  Guns themselves are tools for good or evil, protection or harm; the moral evaluation of the act resides in the heart and mind of the individual pulling the trigger.  But I have to wonder about the system that allows guns into the hands of those incapable of discerning right from wrong, reality from fantasy, or who are simply incapable of rendering a moral judgement either way--those who are hopelessly distanced from the society they parasite.

Those people, however, lay at the heart of the issue.  Because as we increasingly glorify murder, and violence in all its guises--from the news media who inculcate hatred to the television shows that fail to address the shattering heartbreak of violence, to the video games that blur the line between what is real and what is fantasy--we've created a system that regularly denigrates human life.  In a popular meme that's been floating around the internet, Samuel L. Jackson is purported to have said that growing up in the South he was surrounded by guns and no one ever shot anyone else.  The real problem, he says, is not guns, but the people who no longer value human life.

So I have to wonder if representations of violence in the media have created a system whereby people are desensitized to violence in general, and acculturated to the idea that human life is expendable, cheap.  If that is the case, then Dr. King's comments are valid.  In perpetuating the denigration of human life, these systems are themselves unjust; they are perhaps evil.

The flip side, your immediate reaction, I'm sure, is that you played violent video games, you watch violent movies, you see shootings on the news and you turned out okay.  First, I wonder if "okay" is really good enough.  I wonder at the kind of person that allows himself or herself to compromise excellence for cheap entertainment.  But that is beyond the scope of this post.

What I'm trying to get at is that of course you are probably not the kind of person that would commit a violent act.  You're probably a very nice person.  Are you willing, though, to allow the impressionable and the vulnerable access not only to images designed to excite the most violent tendencies but also give them access to weapons of increasingly deadly design?  I would hardly argue that video games cause violence.  But I do believe that a correlation exists between those games and the devaluation of human life.

And I believe that devaluation is a cause of violence.

So I'll let you decide if video games are a system of injustice that promotes violence; I'll let you decide what needs to be done.  

When Houses Fall . . . A Game of Thrones Readthrough Update

I'm on the final leg of Game of Thrones!  What's that mean?  It means it's finally getting interesting.  Stuff went down.  I suppose, if you thought of it as a chess game, then the queen just took the knight.  What's most interesting so far is the way in which Martin has set up the rules of the world; I'm impressed by his world-building on the cheap, and I think I can see where he's going from here.  I'm interested to see what he's going to do with the dragons, and especially with magic, since this doesn't seem to be a world in which magic plays much of a part.  But on the whole, I gotta admit that it hooked me, and I'm really excited to finish the books now.

Kickstarting Cancer's Ass

Jay Lake (author of clock-punk classic and the recently released Kalimpura) has a particularly rare form of cancer and as one of the options to fight it, he needs to sequence the DNA of the cancer against his own DNA.  It's been done before.  By isolating specific genes, doctors have successfully shut down cancer in the past, and both Jay Lake and his friends are hoping they can do the same with his.  Genomic sequencing, however, is expensive, and not covered by Jay's insurance so a couple of his friends started a fund-raiser to get him the money he needs.

I met Jay once at a book signing at the Cedar Hills Powell's here in Portland and was surprised by his humor and friendliness.  Authors at book signings can run the gamut from awkwardly shy to down-right hostile (though, fortunately, the latter is very rare), and I remember thinking how much I'd enjoyed the reading of Green, by Jay Lake.  I was more familiar with his novels set in the Mainspring universe, a kind of clockwork steampunk that defied what I thought punk and science-fiction were.  But at that time he was reading from Green, the first novel in his Green series.  I was intrigued (and it didn't hurt that the cover was one of Dan Dos Santos's).

But I lost track of the author until I heard about the fundraiser for his benefit.  I want to read his work, and I'd like to see him survive his cancer, and I wholeheartedly endorse the fundraiser.  It has succeeded financially, at least, surpassing its goal by nearly 200%; in doing so, however, it caused a minor kerfuffle that brought PayPal's policies and lapses once more to the internet's attention.  Basically, PayPal locked Jay's account due to what it suspected was fraudulent activity.  He invoked Twitter and the blogosphere, and leveraged the influence of his friends and their readership, to motivate PayPal to fix the problem in a timely manner.  John Scalzi has a pretty nice account of what happened, but in reading the comments to his story, I noticed something interesting.

Scalzi has an international audience.  He's popular the world over, and it's no surprise that people from other forms of health care would use this opportunity to lambast American health care (or even for Americans to criticize our healthcare system.  The tenor of the criticism seems to revolve around the recent use of the internet to fund-raise for healthcare.  We're probably all familiar with the concept of micro-loans to start small business in developing countries; we're well aware that Kickstarter has revolutionized creative start-ups.  What's less well understood is the way in which the internet allows people with needs to actively engage humanitarian impulses throughout the world.

The humanitarian loop used to go something like this: A need is identified (either through journalism, word-of-mouth, or more or less official channels including diplomatic); once that need is identified, people with resources have to be able to extend their largesse to those with the need.  Somewhere between those two, however, an organization or individual had to handle the money and see that it was delivered.  The internet takes out the first step, greatly simplifies the final step and most importantly allows everyone with any excess to contribute.  Philanthropy was once the purview of the rich; it now exists for everyone with a couple bucks and an internet connection.

Zero Dark Thirty Review

By Steven McLain

Spoiler alert: bin Laden dies at the end.  But we all knew that going into the theater.  The really intriguing part of the movie isn't the outcome, but how it was achieved.  Like most things in life, the journey is just as important as the destination.  Especially when that journey comprises the biggest manhunt in human history, and is fraught with moral conundrums and political machinations beyond the movie theater.  The reason for all the fist wrangling is that the film-makers had extraordinary access to CIA agents and information about the manhunt for bin Laden and because the movie depicts aspects of "heightened interrogation techniques" beyond what was officially acknowledged.  Simply put, Zero Dark Thirty, directed by Kathryn Bigelow and starring Jessica Chastain, takes a hard look at the methods used to gather intelligence not only about the location of Osama bin Laden, but also forthcoming attacks such as the London and Madrid bombings.  In this respect, the filmmakers make a hard decision about how to portray coercive interrogations--torture. 

As a moral argument, few people would quibble over whether to use torture as a means to extract timely information that might prevent an attack, or save someone's life.  The old story goes something like this: a child has been kidnapped and the kidnapper has been caught, but the child has not been found and the kidnapper refuses to disclose the child's location.  Are law enforcement officers justified in using torture to extract that information and save the child's life? 

Lawmakers and intelligence agencies in the war against terror have contended that torture is a valuable and justifiable method for gathering intelligence that might prevent attacks against American interests.  But is torture justifiable in gathering information about the location of Osama bin Laden?  You could argue (and the movie does in passing) that by catching bin Laden further attacks could be prevented, especially attacks on American soil.  But politicians, and the American public, did quibble over the morality and legality of using torture to gather intelligence that would lead to his capture.  By that point, the war in Iraq had eclipsed the war in Afghanistan, and the hunt for bin Laden had been pushed the back burner.

Jessica Chastain as CIA agent Maya

The movie follows that back-burner effort, spearheaded by Maya's quixotic efforts to find Osama bin Laden.  Except that we know those efforts were far from in vain.  In fact, he was caught, he was killed, and it may have earned President Obama a second term in office.  It galvanized support for the president, and offered a viable excuse for withdrawing troops from Afghanistan.  It was a literal nail in the war on terror's coffin. 

Zero Dark Thirty unflinchingly follows efforts to find bin Laden, and looks at the human cost (both to those being brutalized and the brutalizers) of so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" and also at the way intelligence activities shifted toward electronic intelligence with the softening support of detainee programs on the homefront.  But the movie offers a look that is neither easy to classify, nor easy dismiss.  The character of Maya, whom the movie follows for much of the action (save the actual raid on the bin Laden compound, itself unsettling in its banality), is acknowledged from the beginning as "a killer."  She does not shirk from using torture, but the cost is plain on her face and we are left with a parting shot of her weeping--but are her tears catharsis or realization that her life is now meaningless, the majority of it devoted to finding and killing Osama bin Laden?

SEALs about to breach the bin Laden compound

Kathryn Bigelow manages to create a movie that is at once decisive and cloying, tempting the audience with answers but never fully revealing them.  Because, ultimately, the movie hopes to accurately represent reality, in which morality is never black and white, and answers are difficult to procure, if you can even stop to ask the right questions.  Are we, in those tears, meant to see ourselves?  Does Maya embody the American obsession with bin Laden?  And now that we took him out, the meaninglessness of our lives?  How do we confront the horrors of that obsession, and the cost we're still reaping in the Middle East?  These aren't easy questions to answer, but the movie declared brilliantly that they are questions we ought seriously to ponder.

Overall, I would recommend this movie to just about everybody.

Mickey Mouse, You're My Only Hope . . . Or, Use the Force, Disney

By Steven McLain

Star Wars VII is in a pretty bad way.  First, J.J. Abrams said he wouldn't do it.  And now, Guillermo del Toro turned it down as well, saying he's way to busy making remakes of classic 80s cartoons.  Word is even Brad Bird won't touch George Lucas's world with a ten-foot pole.  And it makes me wonder just what the heck happened to turn Star Wars from the most critically acclaimed space fantasy of all time, a perennial favorite with viewers and the basis of rabid fan enthusiasm, into something that the best directors of our age don't even want to associate with.  It sort of has the feeling of that popular kid in high school who ten years later got fat and calls you up around midnight to come score chicks with him at the bar. 

I don't actually Episodes I through III on the debacle.  Yeah, they were pretty bad, but they didn't ruin the franchise as much as all those Clone Wars cartoons, licensed action figures and midichlorians did.  I don't want to get too deep into the muck with this, but George took a bold leap with his franchise; and sometimes bold leaps just turn into belly-flops.  The crass commercialization of the franchise, however, sunk it completely (to mix metaphors).  What used to be something original and compelling became just another gimmick to turn a buck--and people caught on.  Especially the people who like to make original and compelling cinema (though del Toro's recent Voltron remake makes me wonder). 

That's beside the point.  The point is that Star Wars isn't a franchise that people want to get behind anymore.  It's too restrictive, too puerile (case in point: Han shot first).  It's too childish (but once more, Peter Jackson seems to be doing okay making childish adaptations of beloved stories).  Regardless.  If Disney want to turn the ship of Star Wars around, they need a serious marketing coup.  They need to address the silliness of the franchise so that it appeals to the hard-core fans, while accruing new fans along the way.  I think they should start pounding out the books again, leverage some of their capital into fan films, or maybe even a series of webisodes that could boost interest and drive sales.  Somehow, Disney has to make us all believe in the Force again.

The Wheels of Inequality . . . Or, Education for Capitalists

By Steven McLain

I can't really say enough about Fernand Braudel's three part series on Civilization and Capitalism from the fourteenth through the eighteenth century.  I can hear you saying it already, "Whoa! Steven, that sounds really boring."  Economics?  History?  Combined?  That must put you to sleep.  In fact, it's the opposite.  We all "know" how the economy works, about the invisible hand and about production, consumption and the market, but I challenge you with this: Really?  What is capitalism?  Can you define capital, or the division of labor, or really discuss how people throughout most of the history actually produced and consumed and distributed things?  Do you really know how money works?  Stew on that for a second.  Then go read The Wheel of Commerce, the second of Braudel's three part work.  Even if you think you can answer those questions (especially if you think you can answer those questions).

If you glance at the top of my blog, you'll notice that I changed the description.  It used to be something generic about reviews, and entertainment news and blah blah blah.  Now, the description is "Where cultured geeks go."  I thought long and hard about where I wanted this blog to go, about what things I wanted to say in it.  I'm big into history, and I'm big into storytelling, and I'm big into movies and TV and I wanted to venue where I could talk about all the above without feeling that I'd moved outside my niche.  Basically, I thought that entertainment reviews and updates was too blase.  It was too narrow.  So I expanded it a bit to incorporate culture, art, history--all those humanity bits that you learned in high school and have promptly forgotten, thinking they're unimportant.  I'm hear to tell you otherwise.  I want this to be a venue for people who already value their English and History classes, and hopefully bring a bit of culture to everyone who thinks otherwise.

Which is why I'm talking about Fernand Braudel.  Something came up in his book today that struck me as odd.  In the era before the Industrial Revolution, which he somewhat advisedly calls the "pre-industrial" era, people split their time between harvesting crops, and engaging in small level industry.  During the fall harvest, whole communities would abandon their industries (spinning, weaving, making rope, sewing clothes, etc.) to bring in the harvest.  But during periods when food was not being harvested, each person engaged in some form of industry.  The pattern is the same in regions in which harvests were not annually collected, in fishing communities for instance.  Small industry was the hallmark of peasant life.  

Cottage industries took those small industries and directed excess to markets, where products could be traded in kind, or purchased using money.  But Braudel goes on to talk about the necessity of industry amongst the poorest members of society.  That industry actually arises from the least wealthy.  It struck me that in the post-capitalist world, the poorest no longer require that level of industry.  They need not produce at all.  In fact, they hardly contribute even their labor, which Adam Smith considered the only capital inherent to everyone.  In theory, a welfare state provides what was once produced by one's own labor.

I suspect that this isn't entirely true; the poorest are still actually engaged in small or cottage industries, but that the markets where they are sold has changed.  Just as likely, because they are small industries they are not visible industries.  The include things like home repair, sewing clothes, producing the things that make life possible.  Where the shift actually takes place is amongst the lower middle class, the broad swath of population that are entirely wage-earners and have just enough income to dismiss small industry as beneath them.  Braudel talks about this phenomenon actually leading to the rise of textile manufacturing in what is now The Netherlands.

In the United States today, most of the population enjoys the benefit of a reasonably high income.  Possibly not as high as you or I would like, but higher than any of our forebears and most of the world alive today.  But the primary bulwark for most of human history is no longer a viable option for many Americans, especially those who live in cities, where space is the ultimate luxury.  But small industry can still reassert itself, and the self-reliance we seem to have lost in the last fifty years can be restored.  The main obstacle I see in this, however, is a woefully inadequate school system, which is incapable of providing even a basic level of education. 

Let's be clear about this: education for the masses is a good thing.  Education is an inherent good.  But we have to balance the cost of education with the ultimate return.  Because education does have a cost.  We might think about child-labor as an evil today, but children were productive and contributed to profit.  While I won't ever advocate child labor, I'd like people to consider the economic drain of removing this capital from the economy.  It has to be balanced, at some point, by the profit they will generate once they have been educated.  And since education is considered a service of the state, the state should derive more benefit from its citizens than simply the benefits of informed citizenry.  There should be economic benefits, as well.

What this means is that education needed to provide a viable skill, as well as produce well-informed and intellectually capable citizens.  Woodshop, metalshop, automotive, home economics and various other skills are more useful than ever, by offering people the opportunity to use the capital of their arms (labor) as well as the capital of their minds. 

But the system can hardly provide for the education of the mind.  Most of its budget is absorbed by things like school lunches, providing resources for the underprivileged (whatever that means), and offering tutors and additional resources for developmentally disabled children.  We have to pause for a moment and consider the economic return these latter will offer the state.  For the millions invested in them by the state, how will the state be compensated?  It's a tough moral calculus, but one that ought to be discussed at the public level.  And while the argument for things like school lunches is valid (mostly that hungry kids don't learn as well), providing food is not really part of educating someone.  What I'm arguing is that every dollar of education should go toward shoving information into kids heads.  If it does not directly put information in their brains, then it should be cut.  That means that teachers should be experts in their fields, not experts in pedagogy.  That means miniscule administration.  That means education dollars should not be used for food, or sports, or the hundred other things to which they currently go.  And the moral calculus I described earlier needs to be seriously considered.

There are a hundred other things wrong with the system, and a number of ways that it can be fixed.  But ultimately it boils down to providing people the opportunity to better themselves, not have it "bettered" for them.  Go read Wheels of Commerce and let me know what you think.  Post your thoughts in the comments section below.

Weekend Update!

My Christmas break wasn't entirely unproductive.  I've got two new short stories and the first chapter and outline of a new fantasy novel.  I spent a lot of time with family and friends, and I read a tremendous amount of economic history.  I also read at least one novel, and I'm still trying desperately to finish Game of Thrones before I start watching the HBO television show.  I've gotten really interested in the economy of magical worlds, so I've been spending some time looking at how the economy actually works in the real world.

In the meantime, I haven't seen anything new in the theaters.  I'm really looking forward to seeing Les Miserables, Django Unchained, Jack Reacher and Zero Dark Thirty (which I've been informed hasn't been released nationwide, yet).  The Hobbit, while enjoyable, was underwhelming.  On a somewhat related note, George Lucas is engaged to DreamWorks Animation Chairperson Mellody Hobson.

Speaking of Zero Dark Thirty, it's been getting a lot of attention from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who are questioning the narrative it advances, and wondering whether CIA operatives purposefully misled the filmmakers about the importance of torture in finding Osama bin Laden.  The debate centers around the films portrayal of "advanced interrogation techniques" producing timely intelligence in the manhunt of the terrorist leader.  Members of the Senate Intelligence Committee want to know if it's true.  And if it's not, they want to know why the CIA gave the filmmakers false information. 

January looks like a pretty good month for genre releases.  First of all, the behemoth against which all fantasy epics are compared comes to a conclusion this month.  A Memory of Light concludes the Wheel of Time.  Since the tragic loss of Robert Jordan, the series has been helmed ably by Brandon Sanderson.  The final book is set to be released Tuesday, January 8th.  Jay Lake's third installment of the Green Trilogy, Kalimpura is set for a January 29th release.  Peter Hamilton's new book, The Great North Road was released this last Tuesday, January 1st.  I'm kind of interested in The Explorer by James Smythe.  Here's the publisher's synopsis:

When journalist Cormac Easton is selected to document the first manned mission into deep space, he dreams of securing his place in history as one of humanity’s great explorers. But in space, nothing goes according to plan. The crew wake from hypersleep to discover their captain dead in his allegedly fail-proof safety pod. They mourn, and Cormac sends a beautifully written eulogy back to Earth. The word from ground control is unequivocal: no matter what happens, the mission must continue. But as the body count begins to rise, Cormac finds himself alone and spiraling towards his own inevitable death, unless he can do something to stop it.

 Tor.com is offering, for free, an ebook collection of the best short stories offered from their site in 2012.  You can read them all on the site, or you can download the collection.  Either way, it seems like a pretty good deal.

 

What's Love Got To Do With It? . . . Or, Awkward Sex Scenes

By Steven McLain

I sat down today to begin my new novel.  The fantasy genre has shifted toward things that are grittier, more hard-hitting, supposedly truer to life.  That means the violence is more graphic, the language is better suited to HBO, and the sex is if not gratuitous then definitely bordering on pornographic.  In fact, it reads a lot like those romance novels I used to eye askance in the back corner of the book store. 

The trend toward incorporating "romance" into fantasy isn't really new.  Paranormal romance and urban fantasy are basically Mary Sues writing about chicks in leather kicking butt and taking names, a trope familiar to the romance genre since at least the 90s.  Joe Abercrombie and George Martin are the guys who come to mind first when I think of the general shift toward noir in fantasy fiction.  Not that there's anything wrong with genre-blending; some interesting things come out of it.  Case in point: Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson. 

But the emphasis on sex and violence (especially violent or deviant sex) makes me leery.  On the one hand, I think it's prurient.  On the other, I don't think it serves the story.  Ultimately, what serves the story is up to the storyteller and the adage goes that sex sells.  So maybe the storyteller needs sex and violence to simply get people reading.  Regardless, nine times out of ten, I figure you can drop it and the reader would never notice.

But let's get back to my book.  I had to figure out a way of dropping readers directly into the action, not quite in media res, but definitely close.  So I found a moment between scenes of action, a moment I knew would be leading up to a pretty spectacular action scene and started the story there.  I think it's a good decision, and I'm happy with the story so far.  One thing that definitely took some thought, though, was who was going to be my protagonist.  I have a view-point character, but as I was thinking about it, I realized that he has none of the goals that would make him the protagonist of the story.  Much like Watson is not really the protagonist, though he tells the story, I decided to tell this story from the viewpoint of a minor character caught up in the whole shebang.

In the world of history, that is, the world of historians, the biggest buzzword of all is "agency."  It encompasses will, action, and most importantly, the ability to act.  We look at people as agents, and their actions as discreet components of historical frameworks.  So when I sat down to write this story, I had to think of my character Kared as an agent and distinguish his actions as somehow different from that of the protagonist, whose specific goals would direct the story.  Interestingly, by disengaging my protagonist from my viewpoint character, I was freed to tell a much broader story.  I knew at the beginning that I didn't want to hop from perspective to perspective--basically, that I wanted to stay in one person's head the whole time.  The easiest thing to do would have been to tell it in the first person, but I have an aversion to that, and besides, I didn't think it really fit.  Sometimes, I wanted to step back a bit and get more omniscient.

So by letting my protagonist and viewpoint characters be different people, it allowed me the freedom to do that.  That doesn't mean that my viewpoint character won't have goals of his own, just that they will not influence the direction the story takes.  My viewpoint character has to grow, and change, in ways that the protagonist doesn't have to.  And his goals, successes, and failures are ultimately smaller and more intimate for that.  I think it ties the reader more deeply into the story.

As I began writing the chapter, though, I realized that my viewpoint character, since he was not a protagonist, couldn't act with the same freedom that my protagonist could.  He would be a limited agent, so to speak.  A limited agent has a much better opportunity to explore the world I've built for this story.  In ways that a king or aristocrat might be unable to, someone confined by social, religious or class obligations sees the world in a fundamentally different way, neither better nor worse.  But we're so used to seeing fantasy worlds from that point of view that it's lost a lot of its potency.  And besides, being oppressed has a sort of fantasy ring to it already.

From the outset, then, I wanted to show my viewpoint character as a very limited agent.  He is at the mercy of several factors, most obviously his own master.  The relationship he has to the world is one of ownership; he is the property of another and completely contingent upon that relationship.  His body, not even his sexuality, is his own, yet we as the reader have to see that he as a person remains unbowed.  So I added a scene in which he is compelled to engage in sexual intercourse.

I had two options.  I like to think of the first as the James Bond approach, which skirts the actual sex but cuts at the last moment to sometime after.  There are a couple of pros to this approach.  The first is that it keeps the rating PG-13, maybe even PG, but still informs the viewers/reader as to the role and nature of the character.  We don't need the sex to know that James Bond sees women as cheap pleasures, rather than as meaningful pursuits.  The second is that it keeps the story moving.  If the point of the story is to get from Point A to Point B and kill the bad guy, then the sex adds no meaningful conflict or complication to the story.  It is gratuitous.  Unless it's not, see below.

The advantages of showing the sex are equally relevant.  It keeps people interested, it adds a layer of characterization that might have otherwise been absent, and sometimes it adds a compelling conflict.  But still, why show it.  The conflict can be unfolded simply by knowing that the event occurred.  We don't need to witness it.  The only defense I can make of the sex scene is the same defense I would offer to any questionable scene.  If it advances plot; if it promotes a richer characterization; if it somehow unfolds and ultimately helps the story, then go for it.  But those are some pretty big shoes to fill.  I'd actually offer this advice: if you can do without it, don't use it.

In my case, I pondered each of these advantages and decided that showing the sex made the reader more viscerally aware of who the character was, in a manner that actually saved time and space on the page.  It keeps the story taut, I think, while still advancing the character's journey.  So I decided to keep it in.

That being said, I was lost in the actual writing of it.  I wanted to keep it somewhat classy, and there are only so many euphemisms for genitalia you can use before you sound juvenile and trite.  Also, this isn't erotica.  I didn't want the scene to wander into titillation for its own sake.  I had to keep it tight, get in and out as fast as I could, and make sure the climax was deserved.  If I pulled that off, then I feel pretty good about the whole thing.  If not, it just sounds silly.

So that's chapter one.  I'll keep you updated.  In the meantime, let me know what you think makes a good sex scene.  Heck, what makes a bad one?  And how do you tell if its necessary?  Leave me comments below.

Be Careful What You Wish For . . . Or, Another Game of Thrones Read-Through Update

Cersei Lannister by Lee Moyer

By Steven McLain

I've been making my way through Game of Thrones rather glacially, I have to admit.  But bear in mind that it's the holiday season and this book hasn't really inspired me to keep reading.  But I made a commitment, dang it, and I'm going to finish the book. 

From sort of a philosophical perspective, I have to admit that I like the book.  I mean, I like idea of the book.  Political intrigue, dragons (sort of), impending doom, and the walking dead (Maybe.  They seem to have been forgotten).  I like the idea of the whole thing, but the book just doesn't seem to live up to the promise.  I'm well into the five hundredth page, and things are kind of getting rolling.  Eddard Stark is undeniably the protagonist, at this point.  So, at least I've identified a protagonist.  You might call Caetlyn a protagonist as well, but we don't get a lot from her point-of-view and she seems strangely passive, regardless.

The difficulty in finding the book's protagonist is one thing; without that emotional hook of a clearly defined character that the reader can sympathize with, the book stands entirely on plot.  And there's not a lot of that.  I really am surprised that this book did as well as it has.  Maybe the late 90s was just one of those periods were not a lot was going on, and Game of Thrones is at least a mediocre story with professional writing.  I don't know.

***Watch out!  SPOILERS ahead!!!***

Daenerys by John Picocio

Okay, let's see what's been going on.  The King threw a tournament; Caetlyn brought Eddard a knife implicating Tyrion in the botched assassination of Bran; Sansa doesn't cry (interestingly, the hinge on which the story turns); Arya discovers a plot against her father, but her father dismisses it; Daenerys gets pregnant, eats a horse heart, and watches her brother drown in boiling gold; Caetlyn captures Tyrion; Jaime Lannister attacks Eddard, kills his men, and flees; Eddard tries to keep the peace, discovers that Cersei and Jaime are lovers, and that the prince is their offspring.

Have I missed anything?  I'm sure I have.  Tyrion is getting on my nerves, but at least he's doing things.  I imagine that pretty soon civil war will erupt in the land, Eddard will be killed and the next book will be just as emotionally disengaged as this book.  

Emotional distance might be my biggest complaint about this book actually.  Without that clear protagonist, I'm not sure who to be rooting for, and I'm left to the caprice of the plot, which is little more than an intellectual exercise in this novel, a lot like watching chess.  I can sort of see why people like these books, but I'm just a little flummoxed at their overwhelming success.  Oh well.  It takes all types.  

I'm at least nearing the end, so I should have a review for you in the next few weeks (if I manage to power through in the next couple of days).   

Gandalf's Purse . . . Or, Economics in Fantasy Fiction

Georg Gisze the Younger by Hans Holbein

By Steven McLain

Capitalism is a fairly recent invention.  Fernand Braudel, in his magisterial economic history of the fourteenth to eighteenth century, points out that the word "capitalism" was unknown to Marx in 1867.  The author of Capital, who revolutionized the modern understanding of production and consumption, was unable to articulate that system as "capitalism."  Capitalism was for a later century.  But capitalism is the system of the world economy in which we find ourselves.  None of it is providential, and certainly, it was never unavoidable; historic contingency and decisions (both conscious and unconscious) worked to bring us to this conclusion.

Fantasy, however, asks its readers to imagine a world that is not capitalist.  More often than not, fantasy takes its cues consciously from history.  From the Roman, to the Medieval, to the Renaissance and Enlightenment, fantasy writers invoke the past and use them as both setting and muse.  Human history is replete with tragedy, drama, humor, deep cruelty, and unimaginable altruism.  But according to economic historians, not so full of capital investment.

It all boils down to what you can invest your money in.  Innovation, for much of human history, was slow because the material costs were not only high, but required significant inlays for maintenance.  Braudel suggests that infrastructure during the Medieval period required approximately 5% of the total construction cost per year in upkeep.  Roads, castle walls, town gates, every piece of infrastructure essentially needed to be rebuilt every twenty years.

What's worse, land was itself not particularly valuable.  Agricultural techniques were insufficient to feed the population, requiring more land to be under production, which in turn required more people to farm.  Huge numbers of seasonal workers were regularly hired just to farm the massive tracts of land necessary to feed a single village.  Furthermore, peasants were deeply inimical to change and actively resisted innovation, assassinating workmen brought in to introduce new agricultural techniques, or destroying their workshops. 

Minas Tirith

But what does this mean for the fantasy genre?  Science fiction has long prided itself on its world-building, and since the early days of the fantasy genre, elaborate myths, genealogies and languages have been created to expand worlds of magic and adventure.  From Dunsany, to Lovecraft, to Tolkien these worlds have been rich in detail; indeed, the appeal of these works is often their elaborately conceived backstories.  Nonetheless, as important as these languages, myths and histories are to the fantasy genre, of vital importance to world-builders is the economy of that world.

How a world is built, physically and economically, is just as important as how its politics are structured, what games one plays for the thrones, or the sounds of a world's words.  How is food produced?  How are goods transported?  Is it a barter system, money economy, or something else?  Are markets seasonal, weekly, or everyday?  Where and when are fairs?

Consumption, production and the circulation of goods are each important considerations; that the book you're writing doesn't necessarily deal with the economics of the world is not a legitimate argument.  Not only will it add a layer of believability to the novel, it adds flavor and suggests conflict.  Conflict is the basis of all story, and inequality is the basis of human economy.  One person produces too much, another has too little; somehow they come to an agreement. 

These are the rules of human history.  Because of this, they are the basic rules of fantasy fiction.  So figure out where your money comes from.