Author: G. Scott Huggins

We Now Commence The Reading Of The Rules!

/ G. Scott Huggins / 9 Comments

In response to my post on how to break the rules of writing, a reader asked for my top ten rules of writing. Those are difficult to quantify, and I puzzled over how to do it, but I came to two conclusions: firstly, that anyone who needs these rules really needs them, and they need them to be basic, and secondly, that no one including me should take them too seriously, so here, in no particular order are the Basic Rules Of Science-fiction and Fantasy Writing.

Rule 1: NO POOFTERS!

No, sorry, that’s just in honor of Monty Python Status Day. In all seriousness, write any sort of characters you want, within the bounds of reason. My primary rule is that my heroes have to be the kinds  of people I like. Otherwise, I can’t stand to be around them long enough to tell their story. The only caution is that if it gets really odd, people are going to ask questions. So if you really want, say, all your characters to be Japanese and your story is set in Oliver Cromwell’s England, you do need some reason for that.

Rule 2: No Accidental Time Traveling

It should go without saying that time-traveling is just fine, but for the gods’ sake pay attention to it, and don’t let it happen without a time machine or time spell. Stories told in past tense need to stay in past tense unless you have a well-thought out scheme for transitioning them, as I described in the above-linked post. And if your story flashbacks or flashforwards, you need to make sure that the sequence of events makes sense, and you don’t have a character traveling from Boston to SF by jumbo jet in two hours.

Rule 3: No Poofters Head-hopping

I hesitate to add this, because it’s more a recent convention than a rule. James Clavell wrote excellent if long novels in true 3rd-person omniscient POV, and head-hopped like no tomorrow. But if you want to sell fiction these days, you can’t do it. And if you come up with an explicit scheme to do it anyway, it needs to be balanced. Each POV character should get roughly equal time.

Rule 4: No One Is To Misuse The Jargon In Any Way At All… Because EVERYONE Is Watching

Nothing makes me want to throw a book against the wall faster than someone who obviously doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Please understand your skiffy terms and what most people mean by them. And yet, one rather well-known writer who shall remain nameless managed to create a whole series in which he apparently thought that Fusion Drive meant Faster-Than-Light travel. Don’t do this.

Rule 5: No Poofters Idiots

The reader has to be able to sympathize with your protagonist to some degree, even if you’re writing an anti-hero. We can sympathize with Macbeth, for gods’ sakes. We can sympathize with Alex from A Clockwork Orange. And that means that you can’t make him or her an idiot. Yes, we all do dumb things, nor should your character be immune to that tendency. You can even have your characters get themselves into a major conflict by being an idiot, see Bujold’s A Civil Campaign again for Miles doing exactly this, to hilarious effect. But then they have to be competent at getting themselves out. They can’t be impeded by “major challenges” that a non-idiot could solve in five minutes by simply calling someone up and asking a question.

Rule 6: There is NO…!

Rule 6.

Rule 7: No Poofters Pocket Anti-Tank Guns

You cannot introduce a major or plot-altering power, for either hero or villain, late in the story. The reader feels cheated if you do. You have to explicitly and early allow your reader to know that this power exists. J.K. Rowling was masterful at this. For example, Professor McGonagall teaches Harry and friends about the Animagus Transfiguration in their 3rd year, long before any of them would be able to attempt such a thing. Why? Because it establishes then what the rules are for it. They’re highly restrictive. So when it turns out that Sirius Black and Peter Pettigrew are secret Animagi, we as the readers neither find it incredibly coincidental that they happen to have that power, nor that they are not suspected of it until now.

Rule 8: I Don’t Want To Catch Anyone Living On A Planet Of Idiots:

Aaaaand this was something J.K. Rowling was incredibly bad at. Just to take one observation not completely at random, Hagrid declaims early on that every evil wizard was in Slytherin house. And this appears to be pretty nearly true (although at that time, he should have remembered that Sirius Black the Gryffindor was an exception).
So why is there still a Slytherin House? They could pretty much solve the problem by disbanding the house, unless there is some, never-really explained mystical reason they can’t, and in lieu of that, watching the hell out of it. Or, you know the fact that Time-Turners would be invaluable for a lot of things besides doing double-lectures. Such as, you know, going back to see who was opening the Chamber Of Secrets or something.
And that’s the thing. Even in magic, you can’t just establish that you can do something by magic and then pretend you can’t.

Rule 9: No Poofters Coincidences.

Like the Pocket Anti-tank Guns, the problem with coincidence is that it feels incredibly contrived. Bizarre coincidence (like a comet hitting the Earth) can START a conflict, because it’s a given. But it would be extremely unworkable to SOLVE, say, an alien invasion by having a random meteor wipe out the invader’s beachhead.

Rule 10: No Distractions

And I’ve just spent all the time I can on this list. I have books to write. So do you. Go write them.

 

 

Luke Skywalker, Rookie Cop

/ G. Scott Huggins / 8 Comments

Have you ever imagined what Star Wars would be like if it were remade as a gritty cop drama? Like, in the real world, where the closest analogue to the way we see Jedi behave is, well, a police force, out to protect the weak and bring the bad guys to justice. And now, the mafia has effectively taken over the city, after hunting down the cops. So, here we have one of the last surviving policemen in the city, a crazy dude who lives in a slum under a partly-assumed name who the Empire leaves alone because basically he’s too much trouble to bother with. And his solution is: train some other poor young schmuck to be a cop. Completely unsupported by other cops. Imagine…

“I was once a policeman, like your father.”

“I wish I’d known him.”

“He was the best driver in Gotham, and an excellent shot. Which reminds me: your father wanted you to have this, when you were old enough.”

“What is it?”

“Your father’s Glock. This is the weapon of a LEO. Not as clumsy or random as a Saturday Night Special. An elegant  weapon for a more…”

“Let me stop you right there before you embarrass yourself further.”

“All right, a mass-produced weapon for a more bureaucratic, but still more civilized age. For over a century, the police were the guardians of peace and justice in this city. Before the Mafia.”

“How did my father die?”

“A young policeman named Darth Vader, who was pupil of mine at the Academy, helped the Don hunt down the police. He betrayed and murdered your father. Now the police are all but extinct. Vader took the power that comes from breaking the Law.”

“Um, what’s the Law?”

“The Law is what gives the police his power. It’s a social contract created by all the people. It surrounds and penetrates us. It binds society together. You must learn the ways of the Law, if you are to come with me.”

“Um, yeah, and do what with that? The Mafia pretty much makes the Law these days. And then they kill you if you disobey them.”

“Um, yes, that would be ‘illegitimate’ Law. Law created by force. The dark side of the Law.”

“The ‘dark side’ of the Law. Which is still just as powerful as actual, legitimate law. Stronger, even.”

“No, no. Quicker, easier, more seductive.”

“Uh, and stronger, because they make the rules and kill anyone who breaks them and have most of the guns. And killed all the police. You literally just said that. And all that’s left is one tiny Neighborhood Watch association that’s hiding in their own houses from the Mob. So what am I supposed to do with my father’s Glock? Join the Neighborhood Watch and kill them all?”

“No, a policeman uses the Law for knowledge and defense. Never for attack.”

“That does not seem to have a history of success around here.”

“Only a fully-trained policeman, with the Law as his ally, will overthrow Vader and his Mafia Don.”

“What? You just admitted that there was once a whole Academy-trained police force, not that long ago, who enforced the Law, and the Mafia Don slaughtered all of them and imposed gang rule. And you, by yourself…”

“And Commissioner Yoda.”

“Commissioner Yoda? Who’s he?”

“The Police Chief who taught me.”

“So you, and the only other policeman older than you are going to train me, by yourselves to without violence take down this Mafia Don who took over the entire city after murdering an entire functional police force?”

“Yes.”

“How does this Glock work?”

“With your finger away from the trigger, take the weapon off safety.”

“Here?”

“Yes.”

<BANG!>

Protagonists: A Spotter’s Guide

/ G. Scott Huggins / 1 Comment

Works of fiction are almost always centered around protagonists. Sometimes, however, it is difficult to tell who the protagonist is. It is possible to have multiple protagonists. One of my favorite novels, which provides a fascinating study of different kinds of protagonists, is A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold, which I highly recommend to everyone. Although to get full enjoyment out of it, you really should read The Warrior’s Apprentice, Brothers In Arms, Memory, and Komarr  first. Do it: it’s not a bug, it’s a feature, and if you don’t like them, you have no soul.

Finished? Good.

Now, we could cheat, looking at this book, and say “anyone whose point of view we see the action through is a protagonist,” but that’s no fun, and not always accurate. For example, we see through Quentyn Martell’s POV in the Song Of Ice And Fire series, but it’s hard to argue that he rises to the level of protagonist of anything but his own story, and by that definition, every character in any book, including, say, Greedo, is a protagonist. So that’s a useless definition. However in this case it does give us our five protagonists: Miles, Ekaterin, Mark, Kareen, and Ivan.

The two pairs of lovers, Miles/Ekaterin and Kareen/Mark can give us a wonderful lesson in how to give two protagonists the same, or nearly the same, goals. Bujold does a wonderful job setting this up so that the males of the pairs have essentially the same goal: win the fair damsel. The females of the pairs also have, really the same goal, which is, become a fully-capable person. Yet the flavors of the goals are highly individual: Kareen’s is a coming-of-age story. She is a child becoming an adult. Ekaterin’s is a story of recovery: she is an adult who was scarred by emotional abuse. Both struggle to escape emotional and financial dependence.
On the male side, Miles’s drive to succeed, usually a great asset, becomes his tragic flaw: his determination to win Ekaterin leads him to deceive her dishonorably, and begin a long road to redemption. Mark, on the other hand, must overcome his self-doubt in order to take any action toward helping Kareen, so he can solve his own problem.

(And I just realized that put this way, it sounds like I am describing the most boring piece of romantic, navel-gazing lit-fic in the world, rather than the sharp, funny, action-packed novel it really is. A later blog will explain how Bujold pulled this off.)

However, in the end, Bujold creates four living, breathing protagonists, each of whom have their own unique conflict that means the world to them, and each of them solves that conflict. That’s vitally important: not only does the protagonist HAVE his or her own conflict, s/he SOLVES it by making his/her OWN vital decision. BUT, each of the protagonists does have an important role to play in helping to solve the others’ problems. This creates the complex interplay that makes the book succeed so well.

But lastly, we have Ivan. Is he a protagonist, or not? At first glance, he is not. Unlike the pairs of lovers, Ivan is played purely for laughs. His romantic goals are pursued half-heartedly at best, and his pursuits fail as soon as he begins them. How then, is he a protagonist?

And the answer is this: Ivan’s goal is to help his ex-lover, Lord Dono (formerly Lady Donna) win his goal of being appointed Count Vorrutyer. A close examination of the text reveals that while Lord Dono is quite capable of running his District, he is utterly incapable of acquiring it through political maneuvering. And from inception to climax of that plot, Ivan is the key to turning Dono’s campaign from an utter failure to a triumphant victory. This gives us an important lesson: a protagonist’s goal need not be solely his own. It can be carried out in the name of another, provided that the protagonist achieves that goal in the pivotal moments.

The Girl With All The Gifts (Spoilers)

/ G. Scott Huggins / 2 Comments

This is really my Friday post. It’s today because I had an old friend over for the past three days, whom I haven’t seen in years, and probably won’t see again for a few years. So I am releasing some content from my Patreon site in the hope that my readers will enjoy it.

This wasn’t the movie I planned to write on this month, but I watched it. First of all, I HIGHLY recommend it. It’s a wonderful film, much deeper than the average zombie movie, and in my opinion, is what I Am Legend should have been. Second of all, spoilers ahead, so go watch the movie. I’ll wait.

Are you finished? Good! Wasn’t it cool? Yes, it was.

BUT! Ooooooooooohh, but…

I’m sorry, I still don’t buy it. Two things I especially had trouble buying:

First, the zombie fungus. Here you have an organism that destroys all higher functions of the body in the name of eating. But, wait! They can’t eat each other, so the fungus has to spread almost instantly and render the bitten human unpalatable.  Most zombies, in fact, are almost unmarked by the initial attack. But the zombies do attack and eat (and apparently do not infect) animals.

But then the film shows us two (arguably three) amazing things: the first is that the plague has apparently been around for at least 12 (maybe 11) years. And second: the zombies don’t apparently NEED to eat. In London, we see them standing around in a dormant state when no food presents itself.

So, we have a fungal infection that stimulates hunger, but apparently does not need ANY food. It doesn’t need to consume its host, or the food of its host. And it keeps the host from decomposing.

Thirdly, it keeps the host’s CLOTHES from decomposing, which is arguably more impressive.

All this adds up to a question not easily answered: if the fungus does not NEED energy to live, then why does it infect at all?

But the real problem I see here is with the humans. They’ve been fighting this war for twelve years. Now, in six years of WWII, the last time the planet was faced with foes that would absorb the full might of its industrial powers (each other) humans invented the main battle tank, the jet fighter, and the atomic weapon. The humans have held out for twelve years against the zombie horde, which means they MUST have an agricultural and industrial base, and they have developed…

ZOM-B-GON zombie repellent. Stops the zombies smelling you.

And that’s it.

Now, the zombies are fast, but mindless. It’s not too hard for ME to figure out how to get rid of them. What you want is pits with stakes, minefields, and multiple fences with the gaps filled in with concertina wire. Hell, the zombies chase vehicles that are faster than them and don’t look where they were going. You could run dump trucks laying high-explosive mines in front of them until they were gone. And why is London even THERE any more? Why are we not getting rid of the dormant zombies with nuclear strikes? Humans have invented NOTHING to combat this menace. Not bite-proof body armor, not rifles that throw explosive shells (instead, they’re still relying on headshots with standard rifles), no. There are ZERO anti-zombie weapons, or tactics, in play.

So my conclusion at the end of the film was that the human race pretty much had it coming.

When The Watchmen Escape

/ G. Scott Huggins / 1 Comment

A conversation on my Patreon the other day saw one of my patrons make the following point:

“Alan Moore was clearly pointing out that superheros were, by nature, indulging in sado-masochistic escapism, and their exploits should not be seen as heroic in any way.”

I’m going to take partial issue with those ideas, because I think that if that is Moore’s point, he fails to achieve it, at least in the way he wanted to.

Watchmen is a challenging and staggering work, no doubt, and one I have admired since reading it. And I partially agree with the statement: the Watchmen really aren’t heroic. Rorschach and the Comedian are psychopaths, theist and nihilist sides of the same coin. Ozymandias is a Stalinist tyrant, willing to slaughter his way to world peace, the Silk Spectres and the  Night Owls are dilettantes, using “crime-fighting” as a means to fame and self-esteem. Finally, there’s Dr. Manhattan, who is too powerful to be heroic in any true sense.

But is “not heroic” the same as “escapist?” While the Silk Spectres and the Night Owls, I think, can justly be accused of attempting to “escape” from the hard realities of the problem of crime, it strikes me that the other four are, in fact, finding their own ways of addressing what they see as cold, hard reality, and we see four separate means of engagement.

The Comedian considers morality to be a big, meaningless joke, and his response to it is essentially to revel in the knowledge and inflict pain on whoever he feels deserves it at the moment.

Dr. Manhattan is like the Comedian, except that his response to the meaninglessness of life is to disengage and pity humanity, lost in its illusions

Rorschach is the opposite of the Comedian, in that he considers a firm moral compass to be indispensable, but accepts that he will forever struggle against the corruption of an unworthy world, purging it of its worst offenders.

Finally, Ozymandias contrasts with both Rorschach and the Comedian, except that he sees the problem of human evil to be soluble with enough power at the disposal of enough intelligence, while still laughing at the idea that “morality” can apply to a superior being such as himself.

Of these four, only Dr. Manhattan and Ozymandias can be said to be seeking “escape” from the realities of human life. Dr. Manhattan does it by denying, and Ozymandias does it by — if coldly and with horrible calculation — affirming its value. Rorschach and the Comedian — the psychopaths — escape nothing. They embrace what they perceive as reality, and dive into it headlong. To call them escapist would be to deny the problem of evil they face. But if there is no problem, then from what are they being accused of seeking to “escape?”

J.R.R. Tolkien, on having heard that fantasy was being denounced in high literary circles as “escapist” is quoted by C. S. Lewis as having responded, “What kind of men are so concerned that people might ‘escape?’ Only jailers.”

And so I must ask, if Alan Moore is trying to rail against the escapism of comics, who is doing the escaping? Is it the Comedian, trying to escape his responsibility as a moral being? Is it Rorschach, trying to escape the futility of life? Surely they cannot both be trying to escape: they are running in opposite directions. One of them is running the right way.

Or is the true escapist Alan Moore, who does not want to face that very dilemma?

 

How To Break The Rules

/ G. Scott Huggins / 3 Comments

Like every other endeavor, creative or not, fiction has rules. And it has more rules than I could possibly list here, in all sorts if categories, from character (we have to care about your character) to plot (you have to have a climax) to basic writing mechanics (you have to have consistent sentence structure).

And every single one of these rules can be, and has been, successfully broken.

Now the problem with this is that a lot of beginning writers, frustrated with the rules they are accused of breaking, latch on to the above sentence and pick an example of great, rule-breaking fiction, let’s say, Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas,” and say, “See! It’s a great story told in mostly exposition with no characters. I can do whatever I want, WHEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!” and then write awful dreck and start screaming and crying that Teh Eeevul Establishments (Patriarchy/Left Wing Gatekeepers/Cishet Scum) Does Nawt Rekunnize Muh GEENyus.

This is dumb. This is very dumb.  This is like my nine year-old son who keeps wanting to make movies based loosely off Star Wars and games based loosely off Minecraft only with all the tension taken out. Except he has an excuse: he’s nine. Actual writers have to be adults.

So, here is what I have learned about how breaking the rules really works. I’ll give an example from my own story, “Requiem With Interruptions,” which was my second published story, sold to a pro magazine. In it, I broke three rules:

1) Never have more than one viewpoint character in a story.
2) Never have more than one type of POV (point-of-view)  in a story.
3) Never switch tense in a story.

So, how did I break these rules and still have a saleable story? Well, let’s look at why these rules exist in the first place. The rules — most rules in fiction, in fact — exist so that you do not confuse the reader. Readers do not like being confused. They like being puzzled to a certain degree, but that is not the same thing. Leading the reader into a mystery while making them wonder what is going on is a purposefully-crafted technique. Confusion is just an accident. The challenge, therefore, was how to create the effect I wanted, which was to puzzle and intrigue the reader, without confusing them.

So first, I came up with my own rules, governing how the story would be presented:
1) There would be a 1st person, 2nd person, and 3rd person-limited POV.
2) 1st person and 3rd person would always be in past tense. 2nd person would always be in present tense.
3) The order these POVs would be presented in would be strictly cyclical: From 2nd to 1st to 3rd, and then repeating.

By doing this, I was presenting chaos in order. The reader never had to figure out where we were. The rhythm was clear. Which leads me to my first induction: The more you break some rules, the more strictly you must adhere to the other rules. I did not mess around with plot structure. I did not mess around with things like antiheroes. I did not (much) mess around with weird sentence structure. Every rule broken served a purpose. Which leads to my second induction: You break rules for clearly understood reasons.
Nonconformity for its own sake isn’t cool. At best, it’s showing off. At worst, it looks like the arrogance of ignorance, and Dunning-Kruger isn’t a famous author. And this leads to a corollary: The more you like breaking the rules, the better you have to know them.

Okay, I hope this helps anyone out there who is still on an earlier stage of writing than me. Go learn and break rules in good health.

Harry Potter And The Invisible Curriculum

/ G. Scott Huggins / 2 Comments

It’s been a long day. Sick wife. Patreon Rewards due. Novel writing. Trying to land a more permanent day job. All (except the first one) good things, but tiring. So I’m just going to pen a short rant here:

It strikes me that the greatest feat of magic ever produced at Hogwarts was its ability to teach those kids things like grammar, composition, and basic math without ever having taught any classes in it. Harry Potter writes better than most of my juniors, and to my knowledge he was never assigned a single essay nor asked to read a single work of literature or piece of technical writing.

If I were a completely humorless scold obsessed with defending all aspects of my identity from the slightest hint of disrespect, I might scream at Rowling about this, as she obviously feels such instruction unnecessary, and I can only laugh bitterly at how wrong she is.

However, I can’t help thinking that there must be the potential for a whole treasure trove of secondary adventures at Hogwarts: Harry Potter and the Misplaced Modifier. Harry Potter and the Greatest Common Factor. Harry Potter and the Supporting Paragraphs. Harry Potter and the Law of Sines. Harry Potter and the Periodic Table. And of course, that page-turner, Harry Potter and the Five-Paragraph Theme of DOOM.

I may turn these into flash fiction for my Patreon supporters someday. Mention it in the comments if you’d support me in exchange for that.

The Heinlein Hypocrisy II: A Superior God

/ G. Scott Huggins / 6 Comments

“Men rarely (if ever) manage to dream up a god superior to themselves. Most gods have the manners and morals of a spoiled child.”

“Intermission: Excerpts from the Notebooks of Lazarus Long”, pp. 243-24

I’ve always found it funny that Heinlein wrote this twelve years after his most famous work, Stranger In A Strange Land, in which Heinlein’s attempt seemed very much to be to dream up a God (or at least an Archangel) superior to human religions. I will, of course, admit to seeing some truth in the statement. Pagan gods are famous for their sexual exploits and selfish behavior. When it comes to the God of the Bible, I am going to disagree with him, though I know that many readers will just as vociferously agree. However, the discussion of whether the God of the Bible is open to such charges and the refutation of them would be material for an entire column in and of itself, and as that is not the purpose, I will simply note my disagreement for what it unarguably is: mine.

The problem I have with Stranger In A Strange Land is not that it plays around with the idea of religion, especially organized religion. That’s fair enough. But what I find interesting, and a bit hypocritical about SF writers is this: when they try to create their own gods that are superior to the gods we already have, they inevitably do so by creating a fairly standard god and then subtracting the characteristics they happen to find irrelevant. I have already pointed out in an earlier column that Arthur C. Clarke does this in Childhood’s End  with the Overmind.  Like the God of the Bible, it is an immense, near-omnipotent force. Unlike the God of the Bible it simply can’t be bothered to notice anything more insignificant than a new species to be incorporated into itself and is quite happy to maintain a slave species in perpetuity to assure itself of growth. It kills without remorse or compassion, and exists without love. But surely, growth means that you become more, not that you become less. As an adult, I have learned to appreciate whiskey. I have not stopped appreciating ice cream. And while it is true, there are games that my children love which now bore me to tears, my inability to enter fully into those modes of play is a fault in me, not something laudable.

Heinlein’s case is more complex. Heinlein as a writer was far superior to Clarke in engaging the human condition. In my last Heinlein post, I acknowledged that Heinlein was one of my favorite agnostics/atheists, and this is one of the reasons why. As an aside, Heinlein’s inner monologue in which Jubal Harshaw considers the problem of perceiving the divine is one of the most perceptive and honest engagements with the issue that I have ever seen from the agnostic point of view, and his wry look at those who believe in random chance as a primary cause is just as cutting as his engagement with religion. Valentine Michael Smith’s Church Of All Worlds in philosophy is pantheistic: Thou Art God (and so is everyone else). In the novel, the simple act of learning the Martian language (although it is not simple, of course) is sufficient to imbue the learner with  a mode of understanding that makes people morally perfect and grants them godlike powers. And I have to admit that in this, I actually see a mirror of what Paul and Christ did teach. This is in fact what “being transformed by the renewing of your minds” would look like if the Church ever actually accomplished it (though the miraculous powers might or might not follow). Obviously, such accomplishments have been exceedingly rare and transitory if they ever existed.

So what, one might ask, is my problem with it? What is missing? I would argue that what is missing is any concept of justice. Now, to be honest, I am not sure whether Heinlein would ridicule the notion that justice is something that humans “need.” However, in Time Enough For Love, one of Lazarus Long’s quotes was: “The more you love, the more you can love–and the more intensely you love. Nor is there any limit on how many you can love. If a person had Time Enough, he could Love all of the majority who are decent and just.” He also said “The only sin is hurting others unnecessarily.” This seems to imply that sin and justice are things Heinlein recognized. Then what is to be done with the sinners? Heinlein has no answer for this, it seems. The Church of the New Revelation that ends up lynching Valentine Michael Smith causes great hurt to others unnecessarily. And yet, it’s almost as though it doesn’t matter, because everyone is immortal anyway. Even Foster himself is an archangel in the end, just like Michael. And Digby, who poisoned Foster. And if someone like Foster can end up as an archangel, then one might reasonably ask what the point is of anything? If it does not matter, then why does it matter? What is the point of cherishing loyalty and duty, as Heinlein called them, the two finest inventions of the Human mind, if they produce nothing superior than that which would be produced without them? In fact, what seems to be produced by the Church of Many Worlds is not better, more just people, but only people who have more fun, overseen by what C.S. Lewis called, Our Grandfather In Heaven: “a senile benevolence who, as they say, liked to see young people enjoying themselves, and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, ‘a good time was had by all.’” All well and good but we have ended up exactly where Heinlein started his objection: with a god no better than its maker.

It’s possible I’m judging Heinlein too harshly. He himself said of the book “I was not giving answers. I was trying to shake the reader loose from some preconceptions and induce him to think for himself, along new and fresh lines. In consequence, each reader gets something different out of that book because he himself supplies the answers … It is an invitation to think – not to believe” (Vonnegut). Well, fair enough. There’s a lot in the book to think about. But surely it would be disingenuous to think that Heinlein was, if not giving a social blueprint, at least proposing what a “real” religion might look like, and if so, he has hardly met his own criteria for what a truly inspiring god might be like.

I think the author who has in recent years most closely approached the idea of what a god might look like is Lois McMaster Bujold and her Holy Family as portrayed in The Curse of Chalion. They are anthropomorphic, yes, but they are good, and while their expectations of humanity are not high, they are awe-inspiring for the lengths they will go to, in spite of their limitations, to care even for individual humans.

Vonnegut, Kurt, “Heinlein Gets The Last Word” New York Times On The Web. Dec. 9, 1990.

 

 

 

Retro Movie Rant: A Brief Defense of X-Men 3

/ G. Scott Huggins / 15 Comments

I think I was one of the few people who actually had anything like good feelings for the last X-Men movie of the original trilogy, X3, The Last Stand.

And there were things that upset me about it, most notably Scott “Cyclops” Summers’ death offscreen.

But overall, I found that the complaining was without much merit. It seemed to me that mostly, the audience was upset that the screenwriters and director had chosen to make a tragedy, in which the old X-men fought, and half of them died, for their ideals.

I mean, I have some sympathy with those who get stuck with a story they didn’t want. But in many ways, I felt the movie did an excellent job of portraying the costs of war, both between humans and mutants, and between mutants and mutants. You don’t go into that and not suffer loss. You don’t go into it and not come out scarred. And the characters who survived took up roles they had never really wanted, and found that they could do what their mentors would have wanted.

It was, to turn a phrase, not the movie we wanted, but perhaps a movie that we deserved to see.

How To Structural Fiction: A Workable Plot

/ G. Scott Huggins / Leave a comment

I don’t know how many writers or would-be-writers I have here, but I’m going to pass on a very simple lesson that I learned from the late, great Algis Budrys at Writers Of The Future. Because while hardly any new writers need “an idea” as earlier discussed, many need to know what to do with that idea. So here is a plot structure that intrinsically works:
Ingredients:
At least one protagonist.
At least one problem (and this is important) solvable by the protagonist!

Step 1: The protagonist encounters the problem. This is generally your hook. If this is a long-standing problem (like, say, the protagonist has a terminally-ill child and has had for years) then the problem must become immediate.

Step 2: The protagonist attempts to solve the problem using a reasonable amount of intelligence and the resources available.

Step 3: The protagonist fails. Ideally, the protagonist fails in a way that costs him something, or makes the situation worse, or reveals something to her about the nature of the problem.

Step 4: The protagonist attempts to solve the problem using what he has learned the first time to bring more resources to bear.

Step 5: She fails again, more severely or learning more.

Step 6: The crisis is now imminent. The character is out of some resource (this may include time) necessary to solve the problem. She throws everything valuable to her at solving the problem, knowing there will be no other chances.

Step 7: The character triumphs against great odds. Or, if the story is a tragedy, she may fail. Note that the character losing his life does not necessarily count as failure.

This formula gets you a functional story.

At this point, some objections may occur to you, such as:

That’s not the only way to write a story!

You are right. I never said it was.

Fiction is more than a formula!

Of course it is. And people are more than skeletons. Nevertheless, people work very BADLY without skeletons, or with incomplete or damaged skeletons.

Wouldn’t that make all stories the same?

Again, only in the sense that having practically the same skeleton as most other people means that YOU are qualitatively “the same” as all other people. In other words, not at all.

In any case, that concludes the brief lesson. For many of you, it won’t be necessary, but it was valuable to me when I read it, and in that spirit, I pass it on.