Thursday, February 12, 2004
In Which I Return Again, The Internet Cicada...
Still without good solid 'net access most days. Sorry. Everything else in life is quite swell, though. I just need to finish the hassle-work for this damn Juno account and get my starter package from them.
In other news:
I'm cleanin' up the Hugo Awards, baby-- I'll get 'em all by the end of this year, honest Irishman, even though that means I'll have to read all of Robert Swayer's Neanderthal Parallax books, which I anticipate only in a lukewarm fashion. And I'll have to find a fucking copy of Mark Clifton's They'd Rather Be Right, a book that was apparently erased from existence by the Q Continuum shortly after it was published.
After the Conan collection, I finally settled in to read Stephen King's The Wolves of the Calla, which delivered the expected goods. Fortunately, I only started the Dark Tower sequence (which ends this year) two years ago; I envy not the readers who've been waiting for the punchline since 1982. Y'know... I've noticed a marked aversion of late among a substantial portion of my associates toward buying and reading fantasy series books, and they all cite the uncertain interval between books, and a desire to "read everything at once when the series is completed."
I sympathize, modestly, vaguely and distantly, but for the most part I don't hold with that sort of thinking, and I don't claim to even remotely understand it. For me, the interval between books is part of the fun of being caught up in a series. Tension and anticipation. It's these qualities that made me a football fan this past year, after a lifetime of total indifference to the game. The time between plays is a time for mental self-torture and butterflies in the stomach-- so it is with the gap between books in a series.
Although I know this sentiment could get a severed horse's head placed in my bed, GRRM can take as long as he damn well pleases to finish A Feast For Crows. Just for an example. (Speaking of which, hon, I'm sorry to say that it won't be out in April. B&N's computer is dead wrong. So says the man's own website).
For shits and giggles, I then re-read Heinlein's Starship Troopers again for the first time in five years. If only all crypto-fascist propaganda from hell was so goddamn fun, the world'd be a better place, I tell you. I'm not surprised to see that I still disagree with nine-tenths of the book's social ideas and speculations; but I am gratified to discover that I can now catalog the book's straw men, presumptions, fallacies, and reeking heaps of bullshit with much more clinical precision than I did before. I wasn't stupid at 20, just undereducated and not quite cognizant of how little a public-school English education had to do with real literary comprehension.
Still, Starship Troopers is a fan-fucking-tastically entertaining book, you'll never hear me say otherwise until my dying day. And if you must deliver a sermon that's chock full'a bullshit, a little entertainment is the least you can fucking offer by way of mitigation, o writers.
Coming in this very spot, next week! I promised y'all an excerpt from The Lies of Locke Lamora, And that you shall have. Three shall be the number of your excerpts, and the number of your excerpts shall be three. I made a promise to Jen that she would be the first person on earth to see anything related to this novel; hence the delay. After she's had her first glimpses, I'll underwhelm the rest of you, too.
Thursday, February 05, 2004
In Which The Author Lectures Again, Damn Him to Hell
Lo, the girlfriend has commanded an appearance, and I have appeared. I've been mostly offline for a bit; connectivity at home it utter shit and won't be fixed until next week at the earliest. After that, I'll just be on a dial-up, but at least I'll be on something consistently.
Life is good and work proceeds splendidly. I just finished the new trade paperback collection of R.E.H.'s original Conan stories. For the most part, they're fantastic, displaying a deep inventiveness and a passion that at its best is electrifying, at its worst merely ham-fisted. The influence of H.P. Lovecraft on young R.E. Howard is also delightfully evident; beyond the metaphysical boundaries of Conan's world are the same black depths of unknown aeons and untold madness found in H.P.L's work; a realm full of unfathomable cosmic powers that don't give the remotest shit about humanity's warm corner of the physical world, except when they wiggle a clammy tentacle or two into it by accident.
Sure, they're narratively repetitive. There are two basic Conan plots that I can identify; call 'em "Conan's Gotta Kill a Guy" and "Conan Shouldn't Be In This Goddamn Tomb." Mix and match as you see fit-- sometimes Conan kills a guy after he loots the tomb, sometimes he kills a guy inside the tomb before looting it. That's why I would recommend reading the stories at intervals (should you pick up the collection) rather than in one straight gulp. A little "steely-thewed wolfish/tigerish/pantherish vitality" goes a long way.
Read in skips and jumps, they're heaps of fun. With one exception.
I just couldn't get fully into "The Vale of Lost Women," not at all merely because it's chock full of racist sentiment, but because it's the sort of racist sentiment peculiar to a certain epoch in the American South, 1870-1940 or so. R.E.H. wasn't a pernicious racist, it's not him that I'm upset with. It's that these sentiments, perfectly acceptable to the sensibilities of most "civilized" white readers in 1933, stick out like a giant ape climbing the New York City skyline to someone born forty-five years later. What the hell are they doing in the mythical Hyborian Age?
The Girl of the Week: "You care naught that a man of your own color has been foully done to death by these black dogs-- that a white woman is their slave! Very well!"
Conan: "But I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man... If you were as old and ugly as the devil's pet vulture, I'd take you away from Bajujh, simply because of the color of your hide."
(Tangent: Hell, now that I think on it, I'm reminded of the R.E.H. adventure story (I forget the title; it was in one of those "less famous works" collections) where a "great white hunter" type is prowling through an African village. The hook sentence in the first paragraph was literally: "Suddenly, he heard the piercing scream of a white woman!" Ah, back in the days when adventure fiction was young and paid well, and any old shit would fly...)
Anyhow, I don't object at all the the possibility of racism in the Hyborian Age. Not one little bit. I would object strenuously to it being nonexistent; it would be catastrophically contrary to human nature. I just object to its specific qualities here; this is the attitude of the American South of old toward its "darkies" and "niggers," the 19th-century disbelief that the brains of black men and women functioned like those of white folks, the folklore that cast the darkest aspersions on the "mysterious ways" and "secret lusts" of the insular, dim-witted, animalistic negro stereotype. Here it is, choking up this account of a time some 12,000 or so years ago; a time after the oceans drank Atlantis, but before the shape of our own world had been revealed. And yet it has our very own Antebellum South sort of "darkies."
Pull the other one, it's got bells on.
Conan is astoundingly well-travelled; a dark-aspected, dark-haired reaver who has murdered men, burned towns and ships, and fought for pay in a hundred different cities, states, marches, regions, and countries; a supremely pragmatic barbarian devoid of civilization's emotional prejudices, yet even he, in the clutch, speaks of black men in terms that any K.K.K. twit would approve of? I just don't fucking buy it; I can't bend my mind to the thought that the darkest-skinned inhabitants of this imaginary world twelve millennia past would still be nothing but grass-skirted minstrel show caricatures falling all over one another to rape white women. It's an unwelcome intrusion of 1933 into 10,000 BC.
I had a long post a while back in which I railed at the idea that past ages/fictional places can always be fruitfully and reasonably judged (in terms of the individual and the society) through the lenses of our contemporary philosophies and conceits; and at the related idea that characters in fantasy settings should display contemporary social attitudes and ethical postures. "The Vale of Lost Women" helps illustrate my objection perfectly-- the simple fact is that forty or fifty years down the line, many of the things we take for granted nowadays (or find it politically expedient to support) are going to be discredited and thought of as ridiculous. This is unavoidable... and it's a clear reason to avoid pandering to contemporary conceits if you want your fantasy to have any chance at genuine longevity. It's purest banana peel-smoking balderdash to assume that we've arrived at some sort of objective Final Enlightenment concerning human ethics; our entire species is a work in progress. Our fantasy worlds shouldn't be free from racism, prejudice, and political correctness; they should just be as free as possible from those conceits as imported directly from our own world and our own time.
Sory, that might've gotten a bit heavy. Time to go; do note that I've instituted a new comments feature that operates on the principle of "not fucking disappearing into thin air." Post upon my blog, ye mighty, and despair.
