Writer, filmmaker, game designer
That’s pretty much what we’ve been doing. Made some nice progress on the book – more pieces of the puzzles are in place. (Want a teaser? One bit that I wrote is 9 pages long and stretches over 10.000 years. The next bit is 10 pages and stretches over no more than a couple of hours. Ah, the joy of writing this book…)
OK, more tomorrow or the day after. We’ve decided to stay in Nikiti a couple of days longer than originally planned, so please excuse any slowness in my responses.
I love it when I get hits from really cool search engine terms. It’s rare, but it happens, and I felt I had to share this one:
harold bloom is full of shit
Amen!
Everybody has opinions: I have them, you have them. And we are all told from the moment we open our eyes, that everyone is entitled to his or her opinion. Well, that’s horsepuckey, of course. We are not entitled to our opinions; we are entitled to our informed opinions. Without research, without background, without understanding, it’s nothing. It’s just bibble-babble. It’s like a fart in a wind tunnel, folks.
– Harlan Ellison
Every now and then I realize we don’t have good words for certain concepts or behaviours – but rarely does the chance present itself for the creation of a new word to fit that gap in the language. But today is such a day! And so I proudly present several new words which you can start using immediately:
to stross (verb)
Etymology: From Charles Stross, writer, who dismissed the entirety of science fiction on television without ever having seen any of it.
- To make sweeping judgements about a matter of which one has no knowledge whatsoever.
- To defend said judgements by overgeneralizations and arguments that are either untrue or unrelated.
- To dismiss works of fiction based on their use of poetic license in matters of physics or other aspects of science, esp. when said works are greatly admired by groups or individuals with considerably greater knowledge of physics or science than the strosser.
Examples:
- “It was clear that Bloom had never read one of King’s novels, so he was just strossing.”
- “His arguments were so unrelated to actual fact that after a while we came to the conclusion that he hadn’t even bothered to read the Wikipedia entry on the subject, and was actually strossing.”
- “He strossed Babylon 5, but the people at NASA were huge fans.”
strossian (adjective)
Etymology: see stross (v.)
- Having properties that indicate strossing behaviour.
Example:
- “This kind of strossian dismissal of an entire artform can only lead to a suffocation of art and creativity.”
strosser (noun)
Etymology: see stross (v.)
- One who strosses regularly.
- One currently engaged in strossing behaviour.
Example:
- “He says he hates it with a passion and then it turns out he’s never even seen a single episode of it. And he thinks all those other shows are exactly the same, too. He’s a real strosser, I’m telling you.”
I hope you can see the wonderful potential of these words. And the beauty of language is that it can always be expanded: strossful, strosslike, unstrossing, etc. The possibilities are limitless!
Update: It has been pointed out that “to stross” is potentially more elegant if it can also be used with an object, so the third example has been modified. Do feel free to use the word in other forms as well, though: we do not subscribe to a prescriptive understanding of grammar (or dictionaries).
Here’s a link to Charles Stross explaining why he hates several television series of which he has never seen a single episode. His arrogant dismissal of hundreds of hours of storytelling – none of which he has even seen – and the way he drops profoundly different shows into one hat pretty much says everything about why I find so much modern science fiction (with the exception of some bright lights like Iain Banks) to be unreadable. The superficial obsession with technology, the blind categorization and genre-thinking, the tendency to be fashionably unfashionable… all of that has put me off reading quite a few authors, whose supposedly “deep” work has less to say than three minutes of Babylon 5.
And don’t think I’m a fanatical Trekkie. I do sometimes use said epithet, but that does not mean I blindly adore everything Trek: in fact, I think most of it is crap – but for entirely different reasons. I call myself a Trekkie because I see the potential in Star Trek, and because I am also capable of seeing those brilliant parts of the series for what they are: great accomplishments of art. And I do consider Babylon 5 to be the best use of television I have ever seen, and an incredible work of art, but again, that doesn’t mean I will fanatically defend aspects of it that I find to be flawed. I have no problem saying that Crusade was a mess, or that Thirdspace really didn’t work.
If you disagree with my opinions, I won’t mind – as long as you have actually seen the series in question, and as long what you’re saying has some kind of consistency. But Charles Stross is talking out of his ass: he’s condemning these shows because he believes science fiction on TV must be bad. He goes on to elaborate a theory of why this is:
Consider a script. A script consists of pages each of which represents one minute of on-screen action. It typically runs to 250 words, most of which are dialog. A 42 minute TV show is 10,500 words (a novelette, in fiction-not-script terms), but breaks down into four scenes, each of which needs a near cliff-hanger ending (prior to the advertising break, to keep the viewers wanting to see more), and a restart at the beginning (to drag in new viewers who have channel-hopped over from a less compelling production). Of each roughly 2,500 word scene, then, about 250-500 words will be wasted (dramatically speaking) on reestablishing the action, and the last 500-1,000 words goes on setting up a mini-climax (except in the first and final scenes, where you need a setup and a climax for dramatic, not advertising, purposes). Thus, the 10,500 word script actually contains about 7,000-8,000 words of meat, or 28-32 minutes of non-repetitive on-screen action to propel the story forward. (As a reference point, a 8000 word short story, to an average reading speed of 350 words per minute, takes 22 minutes to plough through. I’m ignoring, of course, the need for additional background description in the short story — stuff that doesn’t belong in a script.)
This mechanical way of looking at art is so profoundly wrong, it baffles the mind. And even if that wasn’t the case: Stross is analyzing a medium that is audiovisual in terms of text. This is about as useful as dancing about architecture: has he never heard about that “worth a thousand words” business? If the visual media worked the way Stross thinks, no meaningful storytelling could be done in them at all – no television series, no films, no painting, no sculpture… nothing at all. And why don’t we throw music and poetry out the window while we’re at it?
He’s also conveniently ignoring the fact that series like Babylon 5 or Battlestar Galactica are building on what happened before, and don’t need to exlain everything again, so the storytelling and world-building are structured in a completely different way than in a novel or short story. As I wrote in a comment, it’s not like audiences get their minds wiped between episodes.
Finally, technology and genre. Who says that all stories set in the future or in space need to be about technology? Is it artistically wrong to use a “science fictional” setting to explore issues not specifically technological? Babylon 5, for example, delves deeply into issues of resistance to political oppression. These issues are as relevant to the situation today as to the situation 200 years ago, but the fact that they are set in the future allows them to be presented in a fresh environment. It allows the series to take elements of the past and use them in a different environment, and thus gives the viewer new angles on the matter – it takes the material out of its familiar context to allow us to think about it differently. Would Babylon 5 be more meaningful if it spent more time talking about how realistic space physics would affect the situation?
Ironically, Stross also complains that Battlestar Galactica – which he didn’t see, either – ended with a stupid twist. That’s actually almost accurate, but he’s got it all upside down: the ending was stupid because it threw out the basic questions about technology that the series had been treating until then, at times quite successfully. Yes, that’s a pretty glaring flaw, and BSG has more of them – but it also has many deeply affecting stories that do honestly probe questions related to philosophy and technology.
But no. It’s all TV, so it must all be superficial nonsense produced by the studio system for gullible teenagers.
EDIT: Apparently his dislike for Babylon 5 (of which he has never seen a single episode) comes from his belief that it portrays cultures as monolithic. And here is Babylon 5’s answer to that, in a scene about diversity that still brings tears to my eyes.
Cell is a recent-ish novel by Stephen King, in which cellphones cause people to go mad, and pretty quickly cause the downfall of human civilization. It is dedicated to George Romero and Richard Matheson, and that’s what it reads like: somewhere between scary, hilarious and thoughtful. It asks interesting questions about human behaviour and morality and is both exciting and well-written. It’s not as awe-inspiring and deep as Duma Key, but it’s a good book, and worth reading.
I’m currently halfway through Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon. If the other half of this book is as fascinating and deep as the first half, this book will be added to my list of Books Everyone Should Read.
Not a page has gone by that hasn’t impressed me. I think I shall have to read more by this fellow.
“Poetry fettered fetters the human race. Nations are destroyed, or flourish, in proportion as their poetry, painting, and music are destroyed or flourish!”
- William Blake
Let’s start with this: an excellent article by Stephen King on Harry Potter and reading in modern society. [Warning: do not read it if you haven't read the Potter books, because it spoils them completely. And if you think the books are silly or beneath you, you are a silly person. You can understand this post without reading King's article.]
There’s one quotation from near the end which I particularly liked, and which is the basis of this post.
I began by quoting Shakespeare; I’ll close with the Who: The kids are alright. Just how long they stay that way sort of depends on writers like J.K. Rowling, who know how to tell a good story (important) and do it without talking down (more important) or resorting to a lot of high-flown gibberish (vital). Because if the field is left to a bunch of intellectual Muggles who believe the traditional novel is dead, they’ll kill the damn thing.
And that is the essence of the problem with modern academia and people like the despicable Harold Bloom (who, incidentally, hates both Rowling and King). Not only do they have a terrible idea of what makes a good novel (something as obscurantist and incomprehensibly written as possible, with little to nothing real to say about the world), they also want the novel to be dead. The idea that “no-one reads anymore” and “all the good novels were written in the past” is essential to their understanding of art: that it’s something exclusive that only they and their buddies can understand. If it’s popular (i.e. King or Rowling) then it must be bad. If they had lived in Shakespeare’s times, they (like many others) would have thought him mediocre; they would have said the same about Dickens or Chesterton or Mark Twain or any other great artist popular in his own time.
But people like Harold Bloom aren’t just glorifying a past they intentionally distort: they’re strangling the present. To a large degree thanks to them, the current attitude towards art in our society is deeply unhealthy. It’s not just that some writers get overlooked – that has always happened and probably always will, to some degree. And it’s not just that some academics wouldn’t recognize a great novel if someone hit them repeatedly in the face with it (Harold, I’m thinking of you) – no, even readers think lowly of what they enjoy reading. Millions of people read Stephen King, and there’s good reason for it: not just because his books are often exciting or scary, but because they’re full of wonderful observations of modern society, strong and memorable characters, powerful themes that are relevant and important, and on a sentence-to-sentence level, simply fantastic writing.
But how many of these readers are aware, when they’re putting away It or Duma Key, that they’ve just read a literary masterpiece? Almost none of them. “I know it’s just Stephen King,’” they say, “but I kinda like it.” As if reading something enjoyable has to be justified. As if art must, by definition, be unpleasant to be meaningful. It is one of the best novels ever written about childhood and childhood friendships. Duma Key is a deeply thoughtful work about friendship, fatherhood, the human body, and art. They are also exciting and funny and scary – like a good Shakespeare play.
King makes another very useful observation:
And, of course, the bigheads would never have credited Harry’s influence in the first place, if the evidence hadn’t come in the form of best-seller lists. A literary hero as big as the Beatles? ”Never happen!” the bigheads would have cried. ”The traditional novel is as dead as Jacob Marley! Ask anyone who knows! Ask us, in other words!”
But reading was never dead with the kids. Au contraire, right now it’s probably healthier than the adult version, which has to cope with what seems like at least 400 boring and pretentious ”literary novels” each year.
You see, a great many kids still read. It’s when they turn into adults that they stop. And why is that? It’s because when they’re adults, the books they are expected to read are shit. The critics haven’t applied their disgusting ideas to children’s literature as much (yet) – if only because they don’t take it seriously in the first place. What children read is considered to be mostly stupid anyway, so they have much greater leeway when it comes to reading books they like. But as they grow older, they are taught that the kind of books they enjoyed were stupid, now it’s time to read something boring. Something that no-one but professional critics would really read in the first place; something that people mostly praise because they think they ought to, not because it actually did something for them.
That’s what Harold Bloom and his intellectual bedfellows (like the equally idiotic Theodor Adorno with his hatred of anything modern) are selling us: the death of art. Because what is art if not the ability to reach out and touch people? The ability to talk about the things that make us human, both good and bad? What is art if not imagination and craft combined into something that transcends both?
Art, Mr. Bloom, is not your exclusive boys’ club. It’s a living, breathing entity, a force that is alive now, not just in your silly and outdated idea of a canon. It shouldn’t be populist, but it has every right to be popular. And I hope that one day it crushes you and your accomplices, you stranglers of dreams, because the alternative is too terrible to consider.
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