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The Chosen One saga continues
Sep. 12th, 2019 11:15 pm
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.
Yeah, it's an overused metaphor, but it's still a good one. The publishing industry is in the middle of an immense change just now, and the similarities to the last years of the Cretaceous era are hard to miss. I had a reminder of that -- more precisely, two very neatly juxtaposed reminders -- this afternoon. 
Reminder #2, though, came from Founders House Publishing, the firm that's bringing out The Weird of Hali series. Founders House isn't a huge corporate press; it's a small firm, a little family-run business taking advantage of print-on-demand technology to carve out a niche market under the feet of the huge corporate presses. Yes, that's when I thought of the metaphor of dinosaurs and mammals. 
