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Extra Sci-Fi S3E3: The Two Towers

This episode of Extra Sci-Fi got me to thinking about a speech that Orson Scott Card gave when he visited BYU back in 2007. He said a bunch of interesting things that have stuck with me over the years, including (to paraphrase) “conservatism is the new counterculture.” He was probably ten to fifteen years before his time on that one. But the thing that struck me the hardest was this:

Fiction is the culture talking to itself.

This goes along with what I talked about in my commentary on the last Extra Sci-Fi episode: that every generation reinvents the world. How do they reinvent it? Through story. And because there’s a necessary give-and-take as part of the process, the bestselling fiction that a culture produces is a reflection of that culture’s values, the issues of the day, and the zeitgeist as it changes and evolves over time.

We can see this in the themes discussed in this video. While Tolkien denied that Lord of the Rings was allegorical in any way, I agree with the folks at Extra Credits that the world wars and the rise of fascism almost certainly influenced his depiction of good and evil. It’s probably also true that the conflict between industry and nature influenced the book too. This isn’t because Tolkien set out to tell a story about these things; rather, because Tolkien himself was a product of the culture of his day, that culture shines through in his works.

This makes me wonder about the stories that don’t become bestsellers. Are there lots of amazing, well-written stories out there that don’t succeed simply because they’re out of step with the ongoing cultural conversation? Kind of like Orson Scott Card’s argument, back in 2007, that “conservatism is the new counterculture.” He made that argument a decade before we reached peak social justice, and got pushed more or less into cultural irrelevance because of it.

Card might not be the best example, because of his role as a culture warrior as well as his fiction writing career. With his Ornery American column, he was basically a shitposter before shitposting was a thing. But I wonder: what are the stories that aren’t getting traction only because they don’t really speak to the culture?

Or is it even possible to write a story that doesn’t speak to your own culture? Since you are a product of the culture that you live in, does that mean that your stories will be a product of that culture too? That certainly seems to be the case with Tolkien. Hindsight is 2020, though, and it’s really tricky to account for unknown unknowns.

I don’t know. I guess the big takeaway is that if you want to be a sucessful writer, you should do everything you can to immerse yourself in your own culture, not only because that’s the best way to improve your storytelling instincts, but because all of the most successful stories contribute something meaningful to the culture’s ongoing conversation with itself.

Pros and Cons: Print Books vs. Ebooks vs. Audiobooks

One of the long-term things I want to do is build a home library. Last weekend, I started cataloging my books and putting together plans for how to do that. I’m sure I’ll be posting more about that in the future, but the big question at the start of it was this:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of each book format?

So I spent some time thinking about it, as well as browsing the internet to get other people’s thoughts and perspectives. There are three major formats for books now: print, ebook, and audio. Here, as best as I can tell, are the major pros and cons with each:

Print Books

Pros:

  • Ownership. If it’s physically in your possession, then you are the undisputed owner of that book.
  • No screens, batteries, or power requirements. Does not require a device to use.
  • Easy to share with others (though there is a risk that they won’t return it! See ownership above).
  • High visibility. Because of this, print books can be symbols of status or social reputation. They also are much harder to ignore once you put them in a TBR pile.

Cons:

  • Space intensive. You have to find a place for them.
  • Heavy, especially when boxed in large numbers.
  • Prone to damage, such as water damage, parasites, etc.
  • Requires shelving to properly store and display.

Ebooks

Pros:

  • Portability. Fits onto your everyday carry (EDC) device, such as a phone or tablet, as well as a dedicated ereader.
  • Requires very little storage space, both physically (on a device) and digitally (small file sizes).
  • Cheap, at least for indie published books.
  • Can read more easily at night, depending on the device.
  • Privacy. It’s easier to hide an ebook from people than it is to hide a print book, or even an audiobook.

Cons:

  • Ownership is ambiguous at best. Do you own your ebook files outright, or do you own a license to use the files? Can Amazon (or whatever site you bought the ebooks from) remove the books from your device at their discretion? It’s been done before!
  • Requires a screen or device to use.
  • Difficult (though not impossible) to share. There is a kindle lending library, but I’ve never used it, and in the handful of instances where I’ve tried, I eventually gave up trying to figure it out. Copying and sideloading is possible, but tricky. Much easier to pull a print book off the shelf and hand it to somebody.

Audiobooks

Pros:

  • Can listen while doing other things, especially driving or mindless chores.
  • Can also fit into the little gaps in your schedule, turning time that would otherwise be wasted into reading time.
  • Listening is a more passive exercise than reading. This can be a con as well as a pro.
  • Fits easily onto a phone or other EDC device, giving it many of the same portability advantages of ebooks.

Cons:

  • Takes longer to read. You can speed up the narration, but it’s not as easy or efficient as skimming a book.
  • More expensive than the other formats. An exception might be for rare or out-of-print books that aren’t available in digital.
  • Larger files, which take up more storage space. You can easily keep a large library of ebooks on one device, but you’d need a server or a dedicated hard drive to do the same with a large library of audiobooks.
  • Ownership is ambiguous. See above.

What are your thoughts? Let me know!

New goal: bog every day (except Sundays)

For a long time, I’ve struggled to figure out exactly how this blog fits into everything that I do. And while, in the past couple of years, I think I’ve figured out a better way to integrate it with my other creative efforts, I still occasionally go through periods of time where this blog gets neglected, followed by periods where I struggle to come up with relevant content. Not only does this mean that the blog isn’t running as well as it should be, but it also takes energy away from my writing.

After thinking things through, I’ve decided to try out a new approach: blog every day (except Sundays) for the forseeable future. The last time I did this was probably the A to Z blogging challenge several years ago, and that turned out really well. Why not try it again?

But Joe, isn’t that going to suck up more time and energy from what you’re already doing?

Not necessarily. Writing is a muscle that gets stronger every time you exercise it, and blogging every day is one way to keep that muscle toned. Also, when something you do becomes a habit, it takes much less effort to keep up on it. 100% is easier than 99%.

But Joe, this is 2019. Blogging is dead.

I’m not entirely convinced of that, but even if it’s true, I don’t plan to shutter this blog anytime soon. Better to go all the way than to do things halfway, especially if there are benefits other than increasing my unique visitors and engagement stats. Besides, it’s not like this blog is monetized (beyond my own book pages and affiliate links, of course).

So yeah, that’s the plan. We’ll see how it turns out. I don’t expect the content to change much in the near future, but it may, especially as I figure out what needs this blog best fills. If you have any thoughts or comments, feel free to share them! I always appreciate hearing from you.

Minkenry

Nothing to do with science fiction, but I find this channel absolutely fascinating. This is one of their better videos. Looking forward to seeing what Sherni can do once she’s grown up!

Larry Correia on Sensitivity Readers

Larry Correia just came out with another highly entertaining rant, this time on sensitivity readers. In case you don’t know, “sensitivity readers” are people that publishers hire to go through an unpublished manuscript to make sure that there’s nothing that could offend any marginalized groups. Larry sums it up quite well:

A Sensitivity Reader is usually some expert on Intersectional Feminism or Cismale Gendernormative Fascism or other made up goofiness who a publisher brings in to look for anything “problematic” in a manuscript. And since basically everything is problematic to somebody they won’t be happy until they suck all the joy out of the universe. It is basically a new con-job racket some worthless scumbags have come up with to extort money from gullible writers, because there aren’t a lot of good ways to make a living with a Gender Studies Degree.

It only gets better from there. And I have to say, I completely agree with him, not only from a political angle (in fact, politics has almost nothing to do with it) but from an artistic angle as well.

You can’t tell a good story without taking the risk of offending somebody. That’s because being offended is always a choice. Always. My favorite Brigham Young quote, which has gotten me banned from multiple forums, is this:

A good story stimulates the mind and excites the emotions. Anytime that happens, people will inevitably be offended. It doesn’t matter the reason. Humans are weird.

Here’s another way of looking at it: in order to create truly great art, you have to pour a significant part of yourself into it. That’s scary, because it makes you vulnerable.

The perpetually outraged crowd loves this, because it’s a weakness that they can exploit. They don’t care about your art. They only care about power. If you give them that power, they will suck all the greatness out of your art and leave you bleeding and broken on the floor.

That doesn’t mean you should always necessarily go out of your way to offend people, of course. But relying on sensitivity readers is a bad, bad idea. Why?

Because fuck your sensitivity.

Seriously, that’s my favorite part of Larry’s rant. If your skin isn’t thick enough to tell these moral busybodies to fuck off—or to simply ignore them, which is probably the better choice—they’re going to walk all over you.

Which gets to the last part of his post:

To further illustrate how Sensitivity Readers stifle creativity and suck all the fun out of books, at a recent writing convention I attended there was a panel on Intersectional Feminism or something like that. I didn’t attend it (I’m not a glutton for punishment) but several of my friends went because they were curious to see how much of a train wreck it would be.

The panel was a bunch of feminists and the whole thing turned into a big competition of who could be more offended, and who could speak for more “marginalized” people. At one point a certain author (who is an upper class white lady) had to establish her street cred, so she actually called her professional Sensitivity Reader and put her on speaker phone.

Seriously, this shit is like the victim Olympics. It has fuck all to do with creating books that readers will actually enjoy.

I went to a party that night where a bunch of people who’d attended that clusterfuck of a panel were talking about it. Apparently the only panels at this event which were more dreary was the one about the evils of capitalism (I shit you not), and the one about writing comedy which degenerated into authors who’d drank the social justice Kool Aid telling everybody what not to write because it might be “offensive”.

I’m pretty sure I was at that convention. I didn’t attend the panel, but I did run into an aspiring professional creator who told me “I just found the solution to my problem! Sensitivity readers!”

Even at the time, I wanted to put my arm around this guy and tell him to have confidence in himself and in his art. I still feel that way. We talked a bit about the outrage crowd, and about the difference between trusted alpha readers who have your best interests at heart, and sensitivity readers who may or may not. But I felt really horrible about it, because I could tell that this guy was getting pushed and pulled and tossed back and forth in all the wrong ways.

If sensitivity readers provide any value at all, it’s basically as overpriced alpha readers. But even there, the value proposition is dubious because the feedback is so toxic. Larry is right: these people create nothing. They can only destroy.

I’m a creator, not a destroyer. Because fuck your sensitivity.

Why I deleted my Facebook account (again)

Please watch this video in its entirety (before YouTube takes it down). Whatever you think of James O’Keefe, this is serious stuff that he’s exposing, and it affects all of us.

The first time I deleted my Facebook, it was out of privacy concerns. I came back because there were social groups, such as my local church congregation, that organized all of their activities on Facebook and by being off the platform, I was cutting myself out of the loop. So I got back on, rationalizing that I could be careful about what I shared and it wouldn’t be an issue.

The second time I deleted my Facebook, it was because of the negative effect it was having on my life. I was disturbed about the way that social media was programming people, and I could feel it beginning to happen to me. It was around this time that I deleted my Twitter as well.

I came back because I worried that I was becoming too much of an “internet hermit.” There were also some social groups that it was more convenient to interact with over Facebook, but much less so than before. Mainly, I knew that there were people who wanted to reach out to me, and cutting out Facebook entirely seemed a little too extreme.

This time, however, it isn’t just about privacy issues, or even about social programming and the negative effects of social media in our lives. It’s about power, and conscience.

Facebook, Google, Amazon, and other big tech Silicon Valley companies have a massive political and cultural influence on our lives, and I don’t like what they’re doing with it. They’ve become too powerful, and now they’re abusing that power to shape our lives and our communities in ways that I don’t agree with. But the truth is, the only reason they have any power at all is because of us. We give them their power, and we can take it away.

I’m getting off of Facebook permanently this time because I don’t want to give that company any more power than they already have. I’m also deleting my Twitter. If I do come back to social media, it’s going to be through alternative platforms like Minds and Gab.

The next big step is to de-Google my life, and I’m not sure how I’m going to accomplish that. However, with the direction things are going, I believe it’s more important now than ever to do so. As for Amazon, it’s going to be much more difficult since such a large chunk of my income comes from them. What I will probably have to do is limit my dependence on these companies without cutting either of them out of my life completely.

Extra Sci-Fi S3E2: The Fellowship of the Ring

Another fascinating episode from Extra Credits, this one focusing on the themes of generational passing and the diminishing of ages that is present in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. I have a lot of thoughts on this episode, but they all basically boil down to one thing:

Every generation reinvents the world.

It’s a theme that’s also present in my favorite novel of all time, The Neverending Story. The Childlike Empress of Fantastica is dying, and the only way to save her is for someone from the human realm to give her a new name. Fantastica, of course, is the realm of all fictional stories, and the Childlike Empress receives a new name when the next generation makes the old stories their own. There is nothing new under the sun.

This is also a theme present in Star Wars: The Last Jedi. I’m not a huge fan of the movie, but the best argument I’ve heard in favor of it basically boils down to this theme: that the old generation has to pass away in order for the new one to rise and take its place. I’m still not entirely convinced that The Last Jedi did this well, but I can see how someone who loved the movie would see it that way.

As a writer, this theme weighs especially on me because I feel that I’m personally living it with ever book that I write. All of the greats of the genre, like Tolkien, Herbert, Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Card, Le Guin—the list goes on and on—loom over me every day. With their passing, the world feels somehow diminished. They left us with a great gift—their books—and yet as time passes and the old world crumbles into dust, these gifts from the previous generation feel increasingly out of place. It is time for a new generation to rise and give the Childlike Empress a new name.

I want my books to be a part of that. I hope that one day, mine will be one of the voices that helps to reshape the world. I hope to one day leave behind a gift as great as the ones that we were given: stories and books that made us feel deeply and taught us meaning and love. Is there anything greater than this? Raising a family, perhaps, but that too is a form of generational passing.

I’m sure this theme of generational passing applies to a lot of fields too, not only in the arts, but in trades, and crafts, and sciences too. Indeed, it is a fundamental part of the human story, because of this singular truth: that every generation reinvents the world. There are curses as well as blessings that are passed down from generation to generation, but it is up to each of us to decide whether those curses and blessings stop with us, or whether we will continue to pass them down.

Lots of interesting stuff to ponder and think about. That’s part of what makes Tolkien so great. He spent an entire lifetime writing Lord of the Rings, and that time was not wasted.

Life, the Universe, and Everything 2019

Life, the Universe, and Everything was this past weekend. It’s a local Utah convention with an academic flair, which means there’s a little less cosplaying and a lot of interesting and informative presentations, in addition to all the great panels. There’s also a strong writing and publishing track, though in recent years they’ve expanded the tracks on art, music, and film. Regardless, it all comes back to science fiction and fantasy.

I’ve been coming to LTUE for the last eleven years, and I think this was my favorite one yet! Part of that might have to do with the fact that future Mrs. Vasicek was there with me, but still. Lots of friends, lots of books, lots of panels, and lots of fun!

On Thursday, there was a really fascinating presentation on pre-modern methods of food preservation, such as pickling and fermentation. Really interesting stuff. Not only did we geek out on cheesemaking and sauerkraut recipes, but we also looked at how the production and supply of salt shaped trade routes, empires, and wars. It was extremely informative.

Since Thursday was Valentine’s Day, I picked out some chocolates and a copy of Leading Edge issue 58, where my first published work appeared. I was a bit worried that it would seem tacky, but some friends assured me that it wasn’t, and future Mrs. Vasicek seemed to really appreciate it.

There were a bunch of interesting panels on Friday. My favorite was probably the one on community building for creatives, with Sandra Tayler and M. Todd Gallowglass. They both had some very interesting stories and advice, as well as the other panelists. My biggest takeaway was that in order to build a community around my own work, I need to be a better participant in other creative and fan-based communities. Like LTUE, for example.

I also picked up a copy of the first LTUE benefit anthology, Trace the Stars. My mission for the rest of LTUE was to get as many authors from the anthology as I could find to sign it. Some of them weren’t there, but I did get most of the ones who were. One day, I’ll get all the signatures and turn it into a book of power! Wuah-haha!

The book signing was fairly low key. A lot of the big names didn’t show up, partly due to the weather, but there was still a good turnout. One of my very first fans who bought Desert Stars at my first ever book signing came over to chat. It was really good to catch up with him, and to let him know that I’m still writing and publishing.

There were a lot of really great panels on Saturday, on topics like surgery in space and what archaeology would look like on an artificially created world. Caught up with Eric James Stone and his wife Darci, who is a close friend of future Mrs. Vasicek. As we were all hanging out in the library, Brandon Sanderson walked up to say hi, and I was able to introduce future Mrs. Vasicek to him. We were actually both in Brandon’s class ten years ago, and didn’t know each other at the time. Brandon got a kick out of that.

My Saturday panels were very well attended and went off very well. The one on villains was particularly good, I think. There was just enough contrast in our viewpoints to keep it interesting without being too argumentative, and everyone had good points. When we made our plugs at the end, I urged everyone to subscribe to Pewdiepie, which got a kick out of the audience. I’m doing my part!

The panels were great, the banquet was great, catching up with old friends was also great. I may have spent a little more than my budget on books, but it was great to support my author friends, and I’m really looking forward to reading some great stuff!

All in all, another great year!