In Which a Morlock Chides Me
A reader with the somewhat dark name of Schwartz takes me to task:
My reply:
Logic. If I call those who act like Morlocks ‘Morlocks’ but do not say ‘And Mr Stross is one such’ nor imply it, nor direct any contumely against him, then, no, sir, I do indeed get to claim what I have claimed, for the simple reason that it is the simple truth.
But for you to use this as an excuse to justify Mr Stross’ bad manners? I complain about the world in general terms, and he calls me a lobotomy victim, and say he loathes my company. You somehow make that out as okay, or merited, or deserved.
For shame, sir. For shame.
Mr Damien Walter of the Guardian newspaper in England I called a Morlock, for so he is, and I registered no objection when he attempted, in his weak and girlish way, to insult me. Turn about is fair play, after all. But Mr Walter, even with the assistance of the Queen’s money, could not write a book to save his life, nor coin a truly ripping insult. He is a nobody, a nothing. Mr Stross is not nothing; he is a writer of solid credentials, widely admired in the field, and deservedly so. He knows how to land a blow when he insults a man. I but chide him for hitting below the belt, because it makes him look weak.
And you claim your shrill little clique of social justice freaklings is a large portion of the world? Indeed? (Ah, the happy kitten fluffs her warlike fur to make herself large!) Well, the nomination results seem not to agree with you.
As to my own opinion of my own work, I am disqualified to answer, since no author can assess his own work — which is not what the award measures.
It measures the view of the voters. They have spoken.
Nonetheless, since you have invited my comment, I will say that ‘One Bright Star’ is my personal favorite for anything I have ever written, and, I will answer in the affirmative, yes, indeed, I thought it was worthy of an award when I first penned the shorter version.
‘Yes, Virginia’ was the most difficult and most brutally honest story I ever attempted to write, and I am delighted rather than ashamed that it receiving honors.
My editor calls ‘Parliament of Beasts’ akin to the work of Tanith Lee, of which a finer compliment I cannot imagine.
‘Pale Realms of Shade’ and ‘Plural of Helen’ are both works into which I poured a very great deal of thought and effort, and even a little bit of my soul, attempting narrative styles and approaches experimental and difficult to master. The success of that effort speaks for itself; you need not solicit my opinion on it.
My nonfiction is deep and clear and amusingly odd, and certainly has something more profound to say than puff pieces about fangirls of Doctor Who. ‘Restless Heart of Darkness’, my final essay in that book, in the best thing written on that topic in three decades.
As a professional writer with two jobs, I have not had the time to read many short stories this year. Therefore, again, you catch me out with a question to which I can give no informed reply.
Nonetheless I can deduce from what I do know to make a guess about what I do not.
I can call to mind two or three stories from last year to mind with no effort:
Rachel Swirksy’s “If You Were a Dinosaur My Love” not a bad vignette, but it was not a story, and certainly not a science fiction story, and most certainly not the best of the year.
It used the story telling technique of IF YOU GIVE A MOUSE A COOKIE, and for its six hundred words or so of disconnected sentences without a single striking image or memorable turn of phrase — except those that stick in memory for their sheer badness and tone deafness, which makes me, as a writer, laugh, laugh, laugh — it maintains a half-playful half-grim tone that grinds to a surprise twist ending of empty despair.
Judged as science fiction, it was crap.
That said, it was not poorly written. It would have been good appearing in some lady’s literary magazine or a school newspaper. It clearly did not deserve publication in a science fiction periodical, must less a nomination for best of the year.
And we southern workingmen do not drink gin in bars. I used to tend bar in Maryland. I solemnly assure you, most solemnly, that none of the Good Ol’ Boys of my bar even knew what a ‘shemale’ is, much less use that as an epithet before beating a paleontologist into a coma with their pool cues. None would use the word ‘sissy.’
Award winning stories, particularly ones so short, are well advised not to intrude elements that jar the reader out of suspension of disbelief.
Another was “The Ink Readers of Doi Saket” by Thomas Olde Heuvelt, this is a is the story of a child being murdered by Buddhists priests to cover the fraud of their attempting to grant the wishes written on scraps of paper sent down the river in Thailand.
It is meandering, lacking in plot, charm, wit, lyricism in word choice, depth of description, evocation of mood, and development of characterization. There is one sentence were a ghost or river goddess appears and murders the child-murderer, but does not save the child, and this might qualify it as magical realism if one were generous with the definition to include stories with no magic and no realism.
It is not well written, much less of award-winning caliber, and has not the slightest scintilla of anything science fictional about it. The tale is about pointlessness and despair.
However, it did maintain that same tone of half-playful, half-grim despair, and come to the same resounding conclusion that life was not worth living. Hmm.
In short, Mr Heuvelt’s story is crap.
(It is, frankly, not as good as Miss Swirsky’s, who at least was skillfully able to depict in vivid terms the vignette she set out to depict.)
I also read the opening of “The Water That Falls on You from Nowhere” by John Chu.
The opening paragraphs are worth quoting in full:
The water that falls on you from nowhere when you lie is perfectly ordinary, but perfectly pure. True fact. I tested it myself when the water started falling a few weeks ago. Everyone on Earth did. Everyone with any sense of lab safety anyway. Never assume any liquid is just water. When you say “I always document my experiments as I go along,” enough water falls to test, but not so much that you have to mop up the lab. Which lie doesn’t matter. The liquid tests as distilled water every time.
Uttering “this sentence is false” or some other paradox leaves you with such a sense of angst, so filled with the sense of an impending doom, that most people don’t last five seconds before blurting something unequivocal. So, of course, holding out for as long as possible has become the latest craze among drunk frat boys and hard men who insist on root canals without an anesthetic. Psychologists are finding the longer you wait, the more unequivocal you need to be to ever find solace.
Gus is up to a minute now and I wish he’d blurt something unequivocal. He’s neither drunk, nor a frat boy. His shirt, soaked with sweat, clings to a body that has spent twenty-seven too many hours a week at the gym. His knees lock stiff, his jeans stretched across his tensed thighs. His face shrinks as if he were watching someone smash kittens with a hammer. It’s a stupid game. Maybe in a few more weeks the fad will pass.
I don’t know why he asked me to watch him go through with it this time, and I don’t know why I’m actually doing it. Watching him suffer is like being smashed to death with a hammer myself. At least Gus is asking for it. I know I’m supposed to be rooting for him to hold on for as long as possible, but I just want him to stop. He’s hurting so much and I can’t stand to watch anymore.
“I love you, Matt.” Gus’s smile is radiant. He tackles me on the couch and smothers me in a kiss, and at first, I kiss him back.
I was not able to make it past this paragraph. Same semi-magical realism neither realistic nor magical, same half-grim half-playful tone of voice as the other two stories, the same lack of any science fictional element, no speculation, and a gratuitous sexual abnormality tossed in apparently as an easy way to score social justice warrior checkbox-marked points, got it. Pretentious crap.
These stories and those like them are not only not science fiction, they are the direct opposite in theme, in character, in tone, and in idea as to what science fiction stories are.
These stories do not add wonder. They drain it.
All the short stories I read last year were crap.
This would not be so bad, except that the only short stories I read were the ones on the Hugo and Nebula short list.
So, logically, if I can take the nomination process of every year before this one as accurate, these pieces of crap are being held up your best of the current era.
Let us compare them to the best of years gone by. Is any of your best the equal to the least of the following list?
- Allamagoosa by Eric Frank Russell
- The Star by Arthur C Clarke
- Or All the Sea with Oysters by Avram Davidson
- That Hell Bound Train by Robert Bloch
- The Men Who Murdered Mohammed by Alfred Bester
- Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes
- Hothouse by Brian Aldiss
- The Dragon Masters by Jack Vance
- A Rose for Ecclesiastes by Roger Zelazny
- Soldier, Ask Not by Gordon R. Dickson
- “Repent, Harlequin!” Said the Ticktockman by Harlan Ellison
- Marque and Reprisal by Poul Anderson
- The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth by Roger Zelazny
- Neutron Star by Larry Niven
- Inconstant Moon by Larry Niven
- Vaster than Empires and More Slow by Ursula K. Le Guin
- Eurema’s Dam R. A. Lafferty
- The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin
I cannot continue. I am overcome with emotion. My fingers shake on the keys.
* * *
I am only listing here Hugo winners and nominees that I not only remember, but adore, and salute as the highest and most excellent examples of the craft. I am only listing the stories here which I remember vividly.
I still get chills thinking of the little boy in the closet in Omelas afraid of the mops, and I still smile when I think of the Offog that was destroyed by gravitational stress.
And you are telling me the best, the very best, the best of the best that this generation has to offer, compared to that — and I wrote out only a partial list — is a handful of dull and dreary tales about moping homosex were-seals being killed by Buddhists or drunk frat boys or drunk rednecks?
You are comparing that to Beowulf Shaeffer racing to figure out how the unseen force of the dark star can kill him through the invulnerable hull of a General Products spacecraft?
You are comparing that to the company of the Star Fox, space privateers, flying against a deadly alien menace?
You are comparing that to a man in LA looking up and seeing the moon many times its wanted brightness, and slowly, frighteningly, realizing why?
With hunting leviathans on Venus?
With one genius who sadly admits that failure, not genius, prompts the glory of man? Or a second genius slowly losing his intelligence but not his soul?
With a crew of misfits discovering a self-aware forest-mind ruling a green world?
With discovering the Bethlehem Star to have been a nova that slew a civilization?
With the dragon cavalry of Aerlith, where the eerie posthuman Sacerdotes hide, facing the mutants bred by the Basics, who descend from the haunted and crimson star Coralyne ?
Or the punctuality of a conformist future disrupted by a clown armed with jelly beans?
I cannot express myself without vehemence which might seem untoward, so I will not express the degree of my displeasure at any man who calls offal equal to the food of the gods.
These writers are pygmies who have inherited the mansions of titans, and the dwelling does not suit them.
* * *
It is no accident that I stumbled across one weak and miserable and illmade story after another after another. They are made that way on purpose and the Hugo granted them on purpose: the purpose is to demean those stories of which I have posted here only the slightest list.
Therefore, no, in all full honesty and with the careful fear of my conscience, I say that if this is the best the conformist establishment paint-by-rote nihilists can produce, nothing that the writers loyal to modern notions are like to offer are equal to those my readers and supporters have selected. Not even by half, not by a quarter, not by an eighth.
Unbeknownst to you, because you did not ask, please learn that those stories of mine were written over a period of decades, and only published in an anthology this year. They are a culmination of a lifetime of effort, and the fact that they all came out this year, at once, was because I found a new publisher this year, one willing to publish my short stories.
With all due modesty, I suggest that I am a very skilled writer.
To be sure, Mr Stross is equal to me in imagination, and Mr Peter Watts my superior both in prose style, sharp characterization, and in imagination, all three. I do wish Mr Watts would use his great skills in the service of good rather than evil, but his choice of the dark banner to follow does not make the prowess of the black knight any less impressive.
I can say with no fear of contradiction that I am inferior by far to Mr Stephen Baxter, whom I admire deeply as I would admire a pagan god. I bow to Ted Chiang, who has a daring imagination and a crisp prose style I cannot match, who is only hampered by his predictably negative worldview.
Whereas, with all due respect, the good Mr Scalzi is inferior, albeit his lighthearted and derivative forays into nostalgia have their place — not everyone is in the mood for steak every night. Sometimes you just want a cheap burger.
There are those among my allies who hold Mr Scalzi in personal despite. Not I. He has always been polite to me, and I hold him in no illwill. He is good at what he does, but what he does lack genius, originality, flare. He is a solid midlist writer who pens workmanlike if bland yet entertaining yarns. He is in nowise the best of our field. He gets a ‘C’.
And there are others inferior to Mr Scalzi in prose, imagination, and characterization and all, which have been nominated or won awards. They get ‘D’ or ‘F’. I would not be so uncouth as to recite their names here, or give my judgment of their work. My opinions on that score are private.
But I humbly but forcefully suggest that each such story was either by an author who had some personal trait the Morlocks uphold as possessing talismanic virtue (such a being non-Anglo or non-Male or non-Hetero, but above all non-Christian) or the story concerned and flattered at least one such of these talismanic mascots.
Mr Scalzi has had eight nominations over the years; I have two decades worth of nominations piled up here in one year, only seven.
Tell me, sir, have you ever written Mr Scalzi and called him arrogant for not turning down nominations? Should he not step side and make room for other hopefuls, and you have so amusingly claimed I have a duty to do?
I am in the same position as Cordwainer Smith might find himself in, if years and years of his works all suddenly came out in one or two anthologies in the same year, because the market was shut against faithful Christians.
I would not so compare myself, save that the likeness is apt. Cordwainer Smith was dismissed by John W Campbell Jr, and so some of his best work (as ‘Scanners Live in Vain’) appeared in very small magazines. The worldview reflected in the Instrumentality of Man short stories was somewhat sacramental, hence at odds with Mr Campbell’s more secular view.
Like I was, and for the same reason, he was shut out. He was nominated twice and never won once. Unlike less deserving souls whose names you know as well as I.
A tall man is not boasting if he can see over the heads of pygmies, and says so. Social justice crap like what is offered in the field today not only is my work better than, but nearly any workmanlike product of any solid craftsman would be better than, yes, because it is crap, designed as crap, promoted as crap, glorified to be crap.
Yes, my works on the ballot, all of them, are the best work in their categories for this year. I suggest you read them and see for yourself.
I arrogantly dismiss at your arrogant opinion of my arrogance.
You do not know me, know nothing of me, and do not know of what things I am proud and of what I am ashamed. Guard your own arrogance, my dear sir, and do not presume to give professional authors unsolicited advice as to how to conduct our business affairs.
You did not even ask me whether I am doing this to please myself, or to please my wife, or to please my dear readers.
Since I have not said, how do you know?
How dare you presume to know?
What I am is humble: too humble to betray the voters who ponied up an outrageous $40 to hoist me aloft on their shields and cry that I should seize the purple. If I withdraw a nominated candidate of mine from consideration, what of the loyal fan to whom that story is the best of the year? I would be a poor servant if I rebelled against him. … and that attitude of meek submission to my employers and patrons is what you are calling arrogance, my big-mouthed and small-souled friend.
As for the rest, I am not yelling, nor is that a proper (nor honest) characterization of our effort here at the Evil Legion of Evil Authors. I have it on good authority that we all speak in menacing whispers.
All that happened is that we did openly what the Morlocks, year in and year out, have done privately, and everyone in the field knew it, and no one did jack.
The system is broken. We are attempting an awkward fix. Had the community acted earlier, the shock would have been less.
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
(Quoting me): ” I think it sad that Mr Stross has decided, not for the first time, to insult me publicly, when I have never said a harsh word against him, nor treated him with anything but respect, nor am I likely to change that policy.”
When you are on the public record decrying large portions of the world as “Morlocks”, you do not then get to claim that “you’ve never said a harsh word against” someone who feels he fits in with the people you decry.
I ask you, in your own conscience, do you honestly believe you wrote three of the five best novellas published this year? If so, I am stunned by your arrogance. If not, I ask you to pick one, and decline the other two nominations; let other deserving candidates appear on the ballot.
Because all you are doing is proving that yes, yelling loud and organizing can overwhelm people trying to make individual decisions; and that is a point far too often proven in our history as human beings.