Affrighted

     It’s an old word, I know. Its meaning “should” be fairly “obvious.” And it describes a condition from which I suffer at predictable intervals.

     There are many kinds of fear, and many sources for each. For an old man whose final horizon is drawing steadily nearer, it’s common to fear that he’ll die before he’s “ready.” Let’s leave aside for the moment what it means to be “ready” to meet one’s Maker.

     My principal fear in these latter days is of deterioration. Aging brings that with certainty. We lose strength, endurance, agility, flexibility, and – most unfortunately – we lose mental acuity. These deteriorations can be slowed, in some cases even halted, by the right sort of effort and enough of it. But the effort becomes harder to maintain as one ages and grows wearier.

     There’s one fear about which I try not to think and of which I seldom speak, because it affects the core of my usefulness to others. It’s the fear that my abilities as a writer are diminishing.

     I’ve been cranking out op-ed drivel for more than twenty years. Occasionally the impulse seizes me to revisit older pieces: my archives from Eternity Road and The Palace of Reason. Some of those older pieces are a lot better – more sharply focused, more neatly phrased, and overall more powerful – than anything I’ve posted at Liberty’s Torch. The recognition draws a graph I dislike to face.

     But I’ve also been cranking out fiction over that interval. Now and then I get the urge to reread one of my earlier novels or stories. I don’t always resist it. I’m beginning to wonder if I should.

     Op-ed writers are plentiful. (Some would say we suffer an oversupply.) But good storytellers, despite the recent surge in fictions available to the reading public, remain pretty rare. My current sense of whatever enduring value my efforts have for others is that it resides mainly in my storytelling.

     And I’ve become afraid to continue it.

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     You’ll seldom hear a writer with a substantial oeuvre speak of a fear that he’s losing his powers. At least, I can’t remember the last time I read any such thing from a writer whose work I’ve enjoyed. Still, I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m not the only writer who’s ever suffered from that fear.

     My most recent three novels, Love in the Time of Cinema, Statesman, and Innocents, cost me agonies to complete and further agonies to release. From cover to cover of each, I worried that I’d lost my chops – that I could no longer tell the kind and quality of story I’m known for. That fear made me sensitive to reviews and reader email. A review such as this one:

     A superior wordsmith by far than many better known authors, he has a unique ability to write believable characters with extraordinary depth. But the storytelling! My goodness. He holds a near-unique ability to mix religious themes, challenging moral situations, relationship, and some good ol' fashion butt-whoopin' all in one. This text is no exception.

     ...would lift my spirits and (temporarily) reassure me that I was still firing on all twenty-three cylinders. A review such as this one:

     Unsatisfying mil action, unrealistic romance. Marty Sue hero who ends up forced to do the thing he wants but knows he shouldn't.

     ...would leave me in a funk for days, wondering whether I had any business polluting my own record with fresh tripe. And in the nature of things the negative reviews and the negative emails weigh more heavily on the mind than the positive ones. (The average review for a work of fiction at Amazon is slightly over four stars; think about what that implies.)

     The result is an increasing reluctance to start a new story. In case you’ve wondered why the books are being spread further apart in time, now you know.

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     I’m not fishing for reassurance here. I’m mostly doing something I think isn’t done often enough. I’m articulating a besetting fear of the old: the fear that one has transitioned from an asset, valued by others, to an encumbrance they’d as soon be rid of. I think more of us older folks suffer that fear than is generally admitted.

     The marvelous recent movie Act of Valor has something to say about this, as well:

     Before my father died, he said the worst thing about growing old was that other men stopped seeing you as dangerous. I've always remembered that, how being dangerous was sacred, a badge of honor.

     Being dangerous is the critical requirement of a soldier. Every occupation has a critical requirement...and every one of us must fear that a time will come when he “just can’t cut it any more.”

     If you have older relatives or friends, and you sometimes see them mired in an unexplained gloom, this could well be the reason. If you’re still in the prime of life, you will probably know that fear soon enough for yourself.

     Food for thought.

The Grand Unification Curse

     There have been several large-scale, powerful, and highly observable trends in fiction this past half-century. Paradoxically, the most conspicuous ones have been in the speculative genres: fantasy, science fiction, and horror. I say “paradoxically” because those genres are commonly conceived of as where a writer goes to do something offbeat and innovative.

     The channels into which spec-fic writers mainly funnel themselves are well known:

• Fantasy has divided into two paths:
  • Traditional (also called medieval or “high” fantasy)
  • Contemporary (also called urban fantasy)
• Science fiction has also divided itself in two:
  • Technologically oriented (also called hard SF)
  • Sociologically oriented (also called soft SF)
• Horror’s divisions are much the same:
  • Traditional: i.e., it employs the traditional monsters: vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghouls.
  • Non-traditional: i.e., it employs contemporary motifs such as serial killers.

     There are sub-subvarieties within the subvarieties – e.g., vampire as good guy vs. vampire as bad guy, or zombie horror vs. zombie humor – but those too are “deeply grooved,” such that little discernible deviation occurs within them.

     This seems to me to be a marketing phenomenon. When one particular channel attracts a large following, whether due to a breakthrough novel or a hot new writer, other writers flock toward it in the hope of “getting in on the action.” It might be amplified by the great difficulty of actual innovation, but that’s a subject for another time and another screed.

     However, there’s another trend that unites all these pathways. It strikes me as a dangerous one, for reasons that will shortly become apparent: the trend toward coercing one’s works into a grand unification around a single “future history” or “alternate history.”

     I don’t know who was first to promulgate the notion of a “future history.” I first encountered the idea in Robert A. Heinlein’s early stories, including the ones in The Past Through Tomorrow, Orphans Of The Sky, and Methuselah’s Children. It is notable that while Heinlein continued to develop the characters and themes in those early stories, he also explored several other threads of development that had no relation to them. Nevertheless, he was among the earliest writers to adopt the future history approach to science fiction.

     Big ideas tend to be attractors. The notion of a consistent grand-unified history proved to be one such. These days, a great many speculative-fiction writers go to great difficulty to fit everything they write into that kind of vision. As with the spec-fic subvarieties enumerated earlier, this has had a depressing effect on actual imagination.

     I’m not trying to be critical here; I’ve felt the impulse myself. Indeed, I’ve been encouraged in that direction by my readers. But I’ve tentatively decided that it’s a pull I should resist...and perhaps that others should resist for the same reasons.

     Among other things, an active imagination dislikes to be bounded or blindered. If you’re fortunate enough to possess such an imagination, you know the delight that comes from having it surprise you with an idea you’d never previously entertained. But when it presents you with such an idea, straining to force it into a previously determined paradigm is at best a dubious use of the gift.

     This came to mind this morning when my very own backbrain awarded me a fresh idea for an SF story. After I’d marveled over the uniqueness of it for a few minutes, I sat down to write it out so I wouldn’t forget it...and as I was writing it out, I started to ponder how I could fit it into the established “future history” of my Spooner Federation series.

     A subconscious alarm bell went off at that point, and thank God for it.

     Genuinely fresh ideas deserve to be treated as fresh ideas: not as suffixes to older, already-exploited ideas, however popular they might have been. It’s not because they’re “rare.” As Isaac Asimov has told us, ideas are all around us; all a writer needs to do is observe his own surroundings with an open and receptive mind, and he’ll have more story ideas than we can exploit in a normal lifetime.

     This is a plea of two kinds. I’ve wearied of never-ending series founded on a single set of characters in a consistent setting. I’ve formed the habit of automatically turning aside from any fiction offering that purports to be a volume in a series. But beyond that, I’ve encountered a number of ideas that deserved to be treated with more respect by their originators: ideas that would have been excellent foundations for stand-alone stories, but which the originator forced, Procrustes-like, to fit into a “future history” or “alternate history” structure for which they were not suited.

     The “grand-unified history” series has its attractions. Among others, if such a series starts out well, the reader may reasonably assume that further readable and entertaining stories will be available to him, soon if not immediately. But lately that’s gotten to be a less reliable assumption. Many of us are hungry for freshness, for intriguing departures from what we’ve already read. The “grand-unified history” series doesn’t promise that; indeed, it’s an unbelievable promise in the nature of the thing.

     I could go on, but that fresh SF idea I mentioned a few paragraphs ago is beckoning to me. I simply have to see what I can do with it. Later, Gentle Readers. Wish me luck.

Preconceptions

     My praise of John Ringo’s Black Tide Rising series triggered an interesting exchange with a Gentle Reader:

     GR: You enjoyed that? [Imagine a tone of distasteful stupefaction]
     FWP: Very much. Why?
     GR: It’s nothing at all like what you write.
     FWP: That’s true, but what of it?
     GR: I just can’t see anything in it that’s...you.
     FWP: You know, I can’t name even one book by someone else that’s at all close to the sort of dreck I turn out. Contemporary fantasies about an alternate Creation story? A weird Shire-like county in the middle of New York that breeds geniuses and millennial heroes? An anarchist extraterrestrial colony that runs afoul of a planetary Overmind? Christian-flavored erotica about divinely appointed priestesses of fleshly desire? Where have you ever seen anything like that, except from me?
     GR: That’s not the point. Ringo’s stuff just seems so far from your sensibility.
     FWP: But Tom Kratman’s novels aren’t? I like those a lot too, remember?
     GR: It’s just not how I think of you.
     FWP: Would it reassure you to hear me rant about novels I dislike?
     GR: Not really.

     I like competently done military fiction, whether situated in “our” world or in some science-fictional setting. But then, I like a lot of other kinds of fiction, too. I have wide tastes in all the arts, which has caused people to wonder about me for a long time: “How can someone who enjoys X like Y as well?”

     I think it stems from readers’ preconceptions.

     I write so much, and always from a libertarian-conservative Catholic Christian perspective, that I must seem pretty strongly “characterized.” But that’s an effect that arises from knowing me through only one facet: what I write. I wouldn’t doubt that other writers are perceived just as narrowly, on the grounds of what they write.

     As I’ve met a few of them, including some of the more popular ones, I can assure you all that we’re a goodly distance from our characters. We haven’t shared their adventures, either. And without naming names, I shall tell you about those who make really vivid contrasts with their fictions.

     There was one who wrote marvelous adventure fiction. “Man’s man” stuff. Before we met I envisioned him to be a real Indiana Jones type: broad shoulders, chiseled features, and a rock-hard physique. He turned out to be quite ordinary in appearance. His speech was a dual surprise: very diffident and guarded, and in a high tenor at that.

     There was another whose specialty was humor, in several genres. I assumed he had to be a convivial, life of the party sort. I could hardly imagine him without a smile. Yet he never cracked a smile in all the hours I spent in his company. When I learned about his marital history, it made a lot of sense, but only then.

     There was a third whose stories were the oddest things I’d ever encountered. His breadth of imagination made me wonder if I had any business writing at all. I hardly expected him to be the reserved, totally buttoned-down individual he proved to be. (He attended a science fiction convention in a suit and tie, and carried a briefcase wherever he went.)

     Those three have all passed away, so I’m reasonably confident they won’t mind my employing them here as examples.

     Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec cautioned us against imagining an artist from nothing but an acquaintance with his work: “The work is always so much more than the man.” That’s true some of the time, at least, but the reverse is frequently true as well. Many an artist is unwilling to present anything but his art to public scrutiny. The phenomenon of the celebrity-artist, whose movements the cameras follow and whose pronouncements on anything and everything are reported by the media, is a relatively recent development. Then again, so is the phenomenon of celebrity itself.

     If you attend fans’ conventions or writers’ conferences, you’re likely to experience the same sort of contrast between “people you know” and their real-life instantiations, who stubbornly diverge from your imaginings. It’s to be expected. We’re just not what you think. That’s a large part of why I avoid such gatherings as a matter of policy; I’d rather not be compared to the larger-than-life figures that fill the pages of my books. I would be found wanting, and badly wanting at that.

     I hope I haven’t disappointed anyone too badly.