Spelling mnemonic

I before E,
Except after C,
Or when sounded as A
As in “neighbor” and “weigh”;
Or in “counterfeit”, or in
A word such as “foreign”;
Or when rhyming with “iced tea”
In words such as “feisty”;
Or things found in a bean
Like “protein” and “caffeine”;
Or in names from Westmeath
Such as “Deirdre” and “Keith”;
Or in “leisure”, to keep us from taking a breather,
And lest we forget about “either” and “neither”;
Or in words that describe something that might be feared,
Such as “kaleidoscopic”, “heinous” and “weird”;
Or borrowings got from the land of the Rhine,
Like “gesundheit” and “leitmotif”, “zeitgeist” and “stein”;
Or in “sheik”, “vein”, “reveille”, “heifer”, or “seize”;
But, apart from these few, put your I’s before E’s.

HEROES FALL by Morgon Newquist

Silver Empire, the rising small publisher of some fine SFF titles (see my mini-reviews here and here), is embarking on an exciting new project in the superhero fiction arena: Heroes Unleashed, a series of superhero novels by various authors all set in a common universe. (The link goes to a Kickstarter campaign that runs to Tuesday, so you can still get in on the ground floor.) So far there are five authors with novels in the pipeline, nearly ready for press, and I had the privilege of seeing a draft of the first of them—SERENITY CITY: HEROES FALL, by Morgon Newquist, a fast-paced, enthralling novel that fills in the reader on some of the tantalizing hints from her previous Serenity City stories (“Blackout”, which you can read in PARAGONS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF SUPERHEROES, and “The Gala”, which appears in HA! HA! HA: A SUPERVILLAIN ANTHOLOGY), while leaving plenty to look forward to in future installments.

Amatopia has an excellent review of HEROES FALL here, on which my meager reviewing powers cannot improve. I’ll just add a couple points of appreciation for this book: I loved how Serenity City itself gets more and more fleshed out as a backdrop for the action. The run-down Greycoast where amateur superheroine Victoria Westerdale (no supername for this unpretentious young lady) defends the underdogs with whom she sympathizes and identifies, and also the location of the abandoned Silver Coast Laboratories, where the mysterious Event that turned so many ordinary people into Primes with superpowers took place decades ago. Rhiannon Park, with its 20-foot-tall statues of two of the city’s great superheroes, dedicated by the still rather mysterious Riley Hirsch: who had erected no statue to her own father, the third superhero of the legendary Triumvirate. Northmill Heights Penitentiary, where Achilles, that third, is now incarcerated, following his Rampage of twenty years ago. The Argall Manor house where Riley, heiress to Rhiannon Argall’s fortune, began her life. The Fina Hill Cemetery, which—like so much in this book—turns out to have rather more in it than appears at first glance. As I got to know Serenity City I found myself wanting to see more of it, and more of the spots I know and like already. Seems like this bodes well for the series.

One of the circumstances that make Serenity City seem more real, and more intriguing, is there’s a lot about the superheroes that is not public knowledge: and not only points connected with their secret identities. Twenty years after Achilles’s Rampage, no one knows what really happened to trigger it. No one really understands what Pendragon’s superpower is, or how the supervillain Blackout was killed, or whence came Thanatos (his successor in supervillainy, who seems to have appeared about the time Blackout exited… hmmm, I wonder…), or what really motivates him to induce superheroes to their own destruction. Some of these things we find out in the course of the book, some may remain forever unclear; in a way it’s like real life, where we never get the answers to questions like what happened to Jimmy Hoffa, or who wrote the anonymous op-ed in the New York Times this past week, or how Harry Reid got so rich as a U.S. Senator. Why would we expect superheroes to make detailed information about their own challenges or limitation common knowledge?

Victoria Westerdale herself is an awesome character. She’s superstrong but not supertough, so superheroics carry serious risk for her. But she carries on in the most thankless job that Serenity City offers for a superhero, protecting the people least able to repay her, sacrificing the rewards of a normal life merely from her own sense of personal responsibility as the steward of her powers. The choice she makes at the climax of the book is both surprising and natural for her, and marks her transition to a new life as a mature superheroine. I’m eager to read more of her adventures.

Did I mention that this series has a Kickstarter campaign going? It still has a couple days left as I write this. It's fully funded (since about 11 hours into the campaign!), and as you can guess, I think it's highly worthwhile.

I’ve heard talk that someone may be working with Silver Empire on some kind of comic book version of these novels: I’m mainly a novel reader, but I’d be interested in those.

Who owns a grassroots movement?

This is one of those questions that answers itself: nobody, obviously. The whole point of a "grassroots" movement is that it grows up from millions of separate roots, like grass, when there's a feeling throughout a wide section of a population that they need some new direction. It may have figureheads to rally behind, but they aren't the driving force of the movement, and they don't have any kind of authority over it. If they try to lead it in a direction apart from the general consensus, they'll fail.

Literary movements, like the Sad Puppies movement or the more recent ComicsGate movement, have this character as well. If they're destined to amount to anything, it's because there is a broad market being unserved by the established purveyors of their respective forms of literature: science fiction and fantasy, in the case of the Sad Puppies, or comics for ComicsGate. The existence of unserved markets is beyond dispute. Their size and interest is being tested by the creators aiming (like me, as an old Sad Puppy) to produce work we think will prosper. If the enemies of these movements are right, we who try to produce for this market will have little success. If we don't do a good enough job at producing or marketing we may have little success anyway, but the vehement and active opposition to both Sad Puppies and ComicsGate suggest that their opponents suspect the markets for such work are indeed out there, and success is possible.

Another way a grassroots movement, or at least its brand, can fail, is for some of its figureheads to get too puffed-up about their own importance. At the time a couple years ago when Sarah Hoyt tried to leverage her own role in starting out the Sad Puppies movement into ownership of the (untrademarked) name, there were a great many fans who called themselves Sad Puppies based on general sympathy with the ideas it represented. It was a grassroots movement; it meant different things to different people, but all of them had a general dissatisfaction with a direction SFF publishing had taken and wanted something new.

But then Hoyt wrote her blog post, sternly dissing a younger author of growing prominence to Sad Puppy fans, who had dared to publish his own set of recommendations for Hugo nominations using Sad Puppies in the title (you know, so people looking for Sad Puppy information could find it).

And she killed the movement. Suddenly it wasn't fun anymore. Suddenly everyone realized that calling yourself a Sad Puppy wasn't just something you could do casually, and define it yourself, and no one would care much: now it implied taking sides in a dispute--and against someone people liked.

Now ComicsGate looks like it's about to swirl down the same toilet. Vox Day has started a comic book imprint called ComicsGate: I presume he took the trouble of trademarking it before making the announcement. Ethan Van Sciver strongly objects to "his" hashtag being used by a figure he (and many others) strongly dislikes.

Now, I'm not a comics fan of long standing, but am growing more interested in the new voices in the medium; I supported the Alt-Hero comics, and some others, and rather look forward to seeing what they come up with. I see this as part of the movement to reclaim fantastic literature from the bleak, antihuman, antireligious nihilism into which it fell toward the end of the 20th century. But I read with sadness the same recriminations tearing ComicsGate today that sundered Sad Puppies a few years ago: the bitter invective thrown between the anti-Vox Day side and the pro-Vox Day side.

And I suppose the result will be that in their desire to claim the name of ComicsGate for their own, the two factions will turn it into something neither side will have any use for. There are pro-Vox parties "disavowing" ComicsGate, because they're upset with Mr. Van Sciver; which will make Vox's ComicsGate imprint worthless. Swell.

The consolation is that, with or without a name, the movement continues: the unserved markets are still there, and creators will continue their efforts to serve them. The grass continues to grow from its roots, perennially.

My own first effort was the story, "The Kings of the Corona", now close to its publication anniversary in TALES OF THE ONCE AND FUTURE KING. It got some good reviews on Amazon!