The Chosen One saga continues
Sep. 12th, 2019 11:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ecosophia
This morning I was amused to hear from one of the readers on my blog—tip of the hat to Yvonne Rowse—that Katy Rose Pool, a blogger on the Tor.com website, has posted a longish piece on the trope of the Chosen One in science fiction and fantasy. The amusement, of course, came because her piece appeared all of five days after I’d put a lengthy and rather edgy essay on the same subject on my blog Ecosophia. It’s hardly the first time I’ve had the theme of one of my essays scooped up by the corporate media—that’s been happening since fairly early on in my blogging career—and it’s par for the course that it was done without acknowledgment. Mind you, I don’t recall any other examples that were quite so prompt, but then I knew when I posted my essay that there was a pretty good chance that I was going to hit a nerve.I hope none of my readers think that I’m particularly vexed by this. Au contraire, this sort of surreptitious borrowing is an inevitable consequence of the way that the marketplace of ideas is set up just now, and it’s also one of the few ways that genuinely new ideas can find their way into the nearly airtight bubble of today’s approved discourse. I want to talk about both those dimensions here.
To begin with, while Tor Books and its online subsidiary are an integral part of the mass media industry—Tor is one of scores of once-independent labels that have been reduced to petty fiefdoms within the gargantuan Macmillan media empire—the people who provide content for Tor.com and other corporate blog platforms by and large aren’t part of the corporate world and its culture. They’re writers like me, some aspiring, some already successful, who leapt at the chance to turn out raw material for a well-known brand for the sake of publicity. I’d have tried to get the same sort of gig back when I was clawing my way to a full-time writing career, except that in those days I mostly wrote occult nonfiction and the big boys of the publishing world aren’t interested in promoting that.
Well, and there was also my awkward independent streak as a writer and thinker. One of the reasons I’ve found a happy home among small and midsized publishers is that the big boys of the publishing world treat content for books and websites as an industrial product, to be turned out to spec on demand. The conspiratorially-minded like to think of this as a consequence of evil plots among our sinister overlords, but the conversations I’ve had with editors and marketing people at the big publishing houses that have picked up a few of my book projects have convinced me that it’s a matter of groupthink instead. In today’s world, where mass market publishing is dominated by a handful of grotesquely oversized corporate behemoths, the decisions that matter are made by a very small number of people, who share similar values and mindsets, and who are also as fashion-conscious as a gaggle of twelve-year-olds reading the latest issue of Tiger Beat.
That’s why science fiction and fantasy, which used to be among the most consistently original of literary genres back when they were turned out by hundreds of independent publishers, have become obsessed with one dreary cliché after another now that they’re the wholly-owned subsidiaries of a handful of bloated media conglomerates. It’s also why the writers who get sucked into providing content for said conglomerates have so unenviable a task. Their job requires them to do two mutually exclusive things. The first is to follow without question the requirements handed down by their corporate bosses. The second is to write something interesting, so that people keep reading the books or the blogs. Those requirements are mutually exclusive, in turn, because no matter how interesting the latest fashion might have been when it was new and fresh, by the time it gets picked up by the folks in the corner offices it’s roughly as new and fresh as the mummy of Ramses III.
How do you square that circle, and keep your bosses buying your content when they want you to rehash the same old same old but keep it interesting and fresh and new? The answer, of course, is that you carry out covert raids on the feral side of the blogosphere, the side that hasn’t submitted to corporate domestication, and surreptitiously import as much from there as you think you can get away with.
I suspect many of my readers know that outright plagiarism from bloggers has become pandemic in the news industry these days, as reporters desperate to meet deadlines lift whole paragraphs from obscure corners of the internet and hope they won’t be caught. What Pool is doing is of course far less objectionable. She’s simply picked up a topic discussed on an obscure corner of the internet, put her own spin on it, sedulously removed any reference to the edgy political dimensions of the theme, and turned out a pleasant, unthreatening, and entertaining piece that clearly caught the interest of her readers. I don’t mind this in the least, because the result is that an idea I wanted to get into circulation has gotten a substantial boost.
That’s what makes the present situation so fraught with possibility for those of us on the feral side of the blogosphere, off in the obscure corners of the internet where ideas don’t have to be approved by a corporate marketing flack to find their way to readers. As those who remember the twilight years of the Soviet Union know well, when every officially respectable media outlet is ringing changes on the same dreary themes, nothing is so appealing as a genuinely different idea. Nor does it matter in the least if those genuinely new ideas have had every obviously challenging aspect scrubbed off them.
It’s of no concern at all, in other words, that Pool didn’t happen to mention the way that the Chosen One theme has monopolized so much of science fiction and fantasy, or that she said nothing at all about the way that this particular trope helps support the myth of meritocracy that the corporate managerial class uses to justify its monopoly on power. That myth is already cracking apart—the college admissions scandal is just one of the rifts opening up in it just now—and it doesn’t take superhuman powers to notice how pervasive the Chosen One theme has become or how obviously it relates to the self-image of the absurdly overprivileged.
There are things that only have power so long as nobody talks about them in public. Certain kinds of myth are among them—and now that people on a corporate forum like Tor.com are talking about the trope of the Chosen One, the unraveling of the myths that gave that trope its emotional appeal and political influence will proceed apace.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-13 04:01 am (UTC)This far and no farther! Or we go all out and open the fooftawoo cage, as soon as we can find somebody dumb—I mean, brave—enough to turn the key. Carnacki, maybe?
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-13 04:34 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-13 04:46 am (UTC)Smithers! Release the fooftawoos!
Eructavit Smithers
Date: 2019-09-15 02:36 am (UTC)“Yes, Smithers?”
“Shouldn’t we try the tactical nukes first?”
“No, Smithers.”
[Smithers stands aghast, as one who dare not utter an eructation rising to the pharynx.]
[Madam stands beside the hearth, tosses her head back with a light laugh.]
“Ah. I see what you are thinking. You think me precipitate – exudate – perhaps even – mad. But it is not so. There is more at stake than you know, Smithers. Even you have not been told all. The foe is hard upon us. Again I say: release the fooftawoos.”
“At once, Ma’am.”
[Smithers reaches towards the Venetian glass mirror above the hearth. His hand passes foggily through into Looking-Glass World. He and his reflection simultaneously press a button on the farther wall – a button that is only visible inside the mirror! ]
[A panel on the hearthside wall wrinkles in time, drawing away to reveal a glittering diamond encrusted grid, behind which we dimly see a terrible, writhing confibulation of fooftawoos. As the diamond gate swings wide, they begin to uncoil and advance. Smithers retreats with stately haste to the opposite corner of the room. ]
[Exeunt fooftawoos, adverbially, passing through walls or windows ad lib.]
[Madam remains beside the hearth, smiling her characteristic, cynical, lopsided smile. She speaks softly, as if to herself]
“That ought to hold the bustards.”
[Smithers places his head in his white-gloved hands and utters a brief, disconsolate raspberry.]
Re: Eructavit Smithers
Date: 2019-09-15 02:55 am (UTC)Re: Eructate Smithers
Date: 2019-09-15 03:55 am (UTC)Okay, Smithers, go ahead and put the fooftawoos back in their kennel. And feel free to go ahead and eructate, since you managed not to do so on Taco Tuesday.
(Today’s autocorrect—it thinks “eructate” should be “edu taters.”)
Re: Eructavit Smithers
Date: 2019-09-15 02:57 am (UTC)Re: Eructavit Smithers
Date: 2019-09-16 05:03 am (UTC)"Cry havoc, and let slip the fooftawoos of war!"
The State of Sci-fi
Date: 2019-09-13 09:03 am (UTC)Though not wildly surprising. Sci-fi publishers have decided to run away from the novelty and sense of wonder that was a staple of the genre toward the latest political agenda du jour. From Tor’s submission guidelines:
“...actively request submissions from writers from underrepresented populations. This includes, but is not limited to, writers of any race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, nationality, class and physical or mental ability. ”
Nothing about the content of what they are accepting. Of all the things to mention in a set of submission guidelines, it’s the identity of the author.
The Vintage Worlds anthology rekindled in me a long-dormant interest in sci-fi — by long-dormant I mean decades. I was curious to see what the current state of sci-fi looked like and checked out some of the fiction magazines. As I read through Clarkesworld I felt like I viewing a game of wokester one-upmanship. Quality of the stories was very mixed but there was this common thread of an agenda of sorts. I have no problem with LBGT themes or other nationalities, but there was this weird box-checking quality to it. Often it wasn’t even integral to the narrative — just a quick aside to show how “with it” the character was — a little obnoxious wink at the reader.
Now working my way through recent back issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. Not as bad but it still crops up there.
Re: The State of Sci-fi
Date: 2019-09-13 04:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-13 01:46 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-13 04:34 pm (UTC)(If something of the sort were to happen, I'll be very interested to hear whether the comment gets put through, or whether a sedulous editor deletes it...)
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-13 05:58 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-13 06:08 pm (UTC)Ignore the publishing dinosaurs...all the rest of us do
Date: 2019-09-13 03:22 pm (UTC)OTH,it dropped a hint that the series heroes were now tackling the Dark Lords and their universes from classic horror fiction; they already did the King in Yellow as seen by the Crazy Castaigne, complete with Holocaust and Dropping the Bomb. Not that the universe described by Chambers wasn't already seriously proto-fascist (pardon the buzzword - trying to use it in its old sense, meaning that Mussolini would have loved the uniforms, and Hitler, their domestic policies. Which I do know were horribly typical of the period anyway.)
Stirling seems to be quite conventional about Dark Lords, though his Emberverse is full of very lively polytheist religions whose gods, like your pantheon, truly enforce the preservation of nature. I think we both realize that's what it takes.
And yes, Stirling's hero was a Chosen One par excellence, knew it, and considered it a burden given him to bear.
Re: Ignore the publishing dinosaurs...all the rest of us do
Date: 2019-09-13 04:41 pm (UTC)I wish I could say that I was surprised to hear about the Emberverse. Another good reason to stay away from the corporate sphere!
Magic will find a way
Date: 2019-09-13 05:43 pm (UTC)However, this is spreading your ideas, even if authorship was filed off. Magic has as a strange habit of doing what you want, paying little attention to how.
Something more or less of this kind happened to me last week. When I decided to take a look at the second knowledge material on CGD, why, suddenly in a blog (only tangentially related to magic, as it was a paranormal discussion), someone causally mentioned this:
[ https://forums.forteana.org/index.php?threads/minor-strangeness.28407/post-1892068 ]
One way of checking that a piece of steel had been heated up sufficiently to harden it is to try to attach a magnet to it.
When the steel is at required heat, it loses it's ability to attract the magnet.
But when It cools down again, it attracts the magnet as usual. Maybe I should say the magnet attracts the steel.
So, where have the magnetic properties of the steel gone when it is hot ? and why do they return ?
The cause is something something molecular structure. But reading this, it was clear why steel is considered active/niter, and magnets are passive/salt. I have a bad habit, from my scientism days, of having to know why something is so, at least in a general way, to be comfortable with it; I could say the unknown still terrifies me.
This was not so physical as books, with what you need, falling over your head. But the timing was remarkably odd, impossible to not notice.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-09-16 04:53 am (UTC)Orthodox Spenglerian
Amazon bestseller status achieved by pedidiigitation
Date: 2019-09-19 08:23 pm (UTC)https://nextshark.com/brent-underwood-amazon-best-seller-foot/