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!

Schadenfreude!

Schadenfreude!
Oh, the Schadenfreude!
Gatekeeping
Is what WorldCon employed!
Larry saw
The Hugos were all devoid
   Of any but
      Token picks.
      And it sticks
      Politics
      In the mix.

Schadenfreude!
So much Schadenfreude!
Puppies picked
Good books that we
All enjoyed...
But No-Award
Was given, just to avoid
   Our nasty con-
      Tagion!
      So we moved on.
      We’ve all gone
      To DragonCon.

Schadenfreude!
Darling, Schadenfreude!
That WorldCon is
So damn paranoid!
Del Arroz
Considered a Polaroid...
   But they were too
      Scared if Jon
      Put camera on
      Goings-on
      At their con...

Schadenfreude!
Oh, the Schadenfreude!
All the times
WorldCon has annoyed!
Signaling
Their virtue was unalloyed!
   But anyway,
      Here’s the twist:
      A panelist
      That they missed
      “E” feels dissed!

Schadenfreude!
Darling, Schadenfreude!
Hugo nom’s
They’re admitting no one enjoyed!
Now the swarm
Has their own con destroyed!
   Watch them as they
      All drop out!
      And scream and shout!
      No more clout!
      What a rout!

(Fade out)
Schadenfreude!
Oh, the Schadenfreude!
Schadenfreude!
Darling, Schadenfreude!

Is the cake SCOTUS baked narrow—or deep?

Everyone’s saying today’s Supreme Court ruling  is a “narrow ruling”. It was 7-2 but they mean narrow in impact, tailored to the circumstances in Colorado’s egregious treatment of this baker.

But as I read it (not being a lawyer) they’re pretty clearly saying that if the state tells a Christian baker he has to bake a pro-same sex marriage cake for a customer, then that state must also tell a pro-same sex marriage baker he has to bake an anti-same-sex-marriage cake for a customer. That sounds significant to me.

It makes me want to go find a foofoo bakery and order an anti-same-sex-marriage cake, just to see what they do; and report them to authorities if they refuse. Hopefully folks are thinking the same thing in all fifty states.

https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/17pdf/16-111_new_d1of.pdf

One of these day Ginsberg will leave the Court, and the next ruling on an issue like this is likely to give clearer direction.

Crystal, Brass, and Copper by Matthew X. Gomez

I'm reading Storyhack #2 during sessions on the exercise bike these days and enjoying everything in it so far. This magazine is a great asset to the PulpRev movement.

Not all of it is SFF but today's story, "Crystal, Brass, and Copper", by Matthew X. Gomez, is a fantasy in a magical Caliphate setting. Bahar and her brother are sneak-thieves who imprudently decide one night to rob a powerful wizard, who turns out to be better prepared than they expected; soon she's in the hands of an alchemist like a steampunk mad scientist, and must find a way to keep herself and her brother safe from powerful enemies.

Besides being a gripping short story, CB and C would be a good chapter one in a short novel about these characters.

Little joke

Reading: Prospero Regained, by L Jagi Lamplighter; The Ship of Ishtar, by A. Merritt; Behind That Curtain, by Earl Derr Biggers.

Writing: “Social Skills” (working title), a short story that will probably come to 8000 words. Submitted a story for the Superversive Press Planetary: Luna anthology, still waiting to hear... it seems they were blessed with loads of submissions.

Christopher Lansdown (author of THE DEAN DIED OVER WINTER BREAK, good book and love that title) tweeted something about determinists that got me thinking about this old joke. Or maybe it’s a new joke that already sounds old, not sure...

A Calvinist, a Baptist, a High Church Anglican, an Episcopalian, and a Catholic walk into a bar. The bartender says, “What’ll it be?”

The Calvinist says “God only knows.” The Baptist says “Give me a minute, the choice is irrevocable.” The High Church Anglican points at the Catholic and says “I’ll have whatever he’s having. But not because he’s having it, mind.” The Episcopalian points at the Catholic and says “I’ll have the opposite of what he’s having.” The Catholic says, “I’ll have the usual, Scott. How’s your sciatica today?”

Banned from Facebook!

On Monday it turned out I couldn't log in to my Facebook account anymore. I tried resetting the password, but to confirm my identity it said it would send a code to my phone, and it never did. I tried a few times with no success. Since a lot of people are being banned nowadays, I wonder if my account might have suffered the same fate? It gives me a warm, proud feeling to imagine that I was banned for trespassing against FB content-based censorship, so I'm going to go with that assumption.

That leaves the question of why I'd get banned, especially now. About the last thing I posted on FB was a link to this story, "The Thirtieth Amendment", a bit of science fiction flash fiction I dashed off lately. It's topical in that I make the gun-control proponent a young numbskull, though the real concept of the story isn't tied to the gun issue in particular. As I see it, it's more about the way strident politics is splitting our society into partisan factions that would rather separate than come to a compromise, and the likely result of allowing the most intolerant elements to leave and set up their own separate "safe space". 

It ain't Shakespeare, but would such a story get me banned? Maybe. One thing that makes the Left so prickly, I believe, is their belief that they are "on the side of History": in other words, they take it for granted that the future belongs to them by rights. This is why so many on the Left have descended into gibbering madness at the election of Donald Trump, as so many did also at the election of George W. Bush. They can't stand the thought that their way of looking at things might lose.

And this in turn is why writing and reading science fiction that presents our vision of the future is so key: because the Left has been cranking out theirs for decades, and has taken enough control of publishers and networks and studios that the future where the Left has already won, where there are no more conservatives, no more libertarians, no more religious believers of any sort, but especially no Christians or Jews, or at least none whose religion is the most important part of their life: this becomes the standard way for many people to think about the future.

I don't mean that we should be writing "our own propaganda", that actively argues for our beliefs. I mean, unless we feel like doing that. But mainly, I mean that we should write stories where the future contains people who believe as we do, where religion is not presented as a ridiculous or despicable thing. As a dry little joke I once tweeted, "Oh, I remember this episode of Law and Order: it's the one where the fundamentalist Christians turn out to be the bad guys." I could multiply examples of the Leftward bias in SFF, but it hardly seems necessary... I remember, for instance, reading a story in one of the science fiction magazines set in a dystopian future where enemies of the state were taken off in police vans that the author called "ashcrofts", after a Republican then serving as attorney general. It was a completely gratuitous, unfair and unnecessary slam. Similar zingers, always aimed rightward, are what turned me off mainstream SFF for twenty years.

Simply writing stories that give religion, or businessmen, or patriots, or veterans, or conservatives, or Republicans a fair shake is mischievous enough to shake up the Left's monopoly. 

And if they're set in the future--and if it turns out that conservative ideas have become the norm in the future--that's icing on the cake. Good stories with such backdrops are what I want to do as a writer.

I haven't tried getting back into Facebook. But it has given me an idea for a cartoon that I don't have the talent to draw. Perhaps someone else would care to. It goes like this:

First panel: Two guards in uniforms with the Facebook "f" on them are hustling a frightened-looking fellow forward, roughly holding an arm each, coming through an institutional corridor. There is a poster on the wall captioned "BIG ZUCKER IS WATCHING YOU", with Zuckerberg's face staring out. Word balloons: "That's enough out of you!" "It's off to Facebook Jail with you!" "B-but, guys, can't we talk about this?"

Second panel: They throw him through a barred door. "We don't have to explain anything to the likes of you!"

Third panel: They walk off laughing, the prisoner holding the bars, looking after them. Main word balloon: "W-wait! Wait! At least tell me--" Very small word balloon, from off to the right behind the bars, a musical note. A thought balloon with a question mark to the prisoner.

Fourth panel: The viewpoint pans far back to the right inside the "cell", and we see that it is not a cell at all: the "prisoner" is standing in an outside courtyard, open to the sidewalk and the street, where people are walking dogs, children are playing, etc. The prisoner is dumbfounded, his hands still on the bars of the door locked before him, which we now see leads to the inside of a prison.

Fifth panel: the viewpoint pans still further back and upward, and we see that the prison is a building shaped like a Facebook "f", and the "prisoner" is now running toward the street along the right crossbar.

Sixth panel: Back inside the jail, the two guards are intimidating another frightened person, who was just putting something up on a bulletin board, maybe with a heading like "New Facts About Benghazi!" Word balloons: "Hey, you! Yes, you! You better take that down if you know what's good for you!" "Yeah! You don't want to wind up in Facebook Jail like that other guy!" 

Nine Books

Minutes ago, Cedar Sanderson posted an interesting challenge on MeWe. (What, aren’t you on MeWe yet? Has the steady drip of revelations of malfeasance by the Twitter and Facebook people still not gotten to you? Well, please add me as a contact when you get around to joining.)

The challenge is simply: list the classic books you think people should read, and its occasion was a list at themanual.com which a commenter pointed out was “mostly crap”. I checked it out anyway, and found some of the proposals pretty odd. The listmaker was wise to save his suggestion of Joyce’s Ulysses till last, because I probably would have given up on him as soon as I saw it.

It so happens that I’ve finally begun the huge task of unpacking and organizing my books this past week, so I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about literature lately. So here is a quickie list of seven books I think people who like reading fantasy and science fiction should read. Perhaps I’ll try to reread them all in the coming year: I haven’t been doing nearly enough rereading lately, and these are all old friends.

The Charwoman’s Shadow, by Lord Dunsany.
Winter’s Tales, by Isak Dinesen.
That Hideous Strength, by C. S. Lewis.
Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad.
A Canticle for Leibowitz, by Walter M. Miller Jr.
The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Eddison.
The Odyssey, Homer.
The Man Who Was Thursday, by G. K. Chesterton.
The Castle, by Franz Kafka.

If you have suggestions of your own, please chime in. I always like to get comments.