Got a thrill today while hunting for the original cover art for Throne Price. (I met the author at a con and he told me I could feature it on Reality-Skimming, but I lost the needful reference to find the website again, so now and then I troll for it.) Didn't find the original cover, that featured Erien with UnderGelion for a backdrop, but did come across a review of Throne Price that I had not seen before, which made me happy. A lot of reviews of ORU books start with descriptions of how far the series is set in the future and other aspects of the background, often not even getting to the nitty gritty of the issues central to the particular book in hand. I am not knocking that approach. Well behaved authors are grateful for all attention, and particulary favorable attention, which many of the reviews that feature the external details of the technology and history of the ORU have certainly given us. It is all good! But I am always particularly delighted when someone's review convinces me a reader "got" the big stuff, from my own (admittedly biased) point of view. The summary of how things wound up the way they are will be the same for every ORU book, but the critical issues will be different in every one. So thanks for making my day, Laurie Thayer!
Paragraph from the review is repeated, below, with link to the site of origin:
Throne Price is a difficult book to summarize due to the twisted nature of Gelack politics and the complex net of shifting loyalties. It's easy enough to call it science fiction, but like all good science fiction, it examines deeper issues: loyalty, love, propriety, sexual relationships (heterosexuality, homosexuality and incest) and family values, among others. Authors Lynda Williams and Alison Sinclair treat each of these subjects -- even the most difficult ones -- fairly.
quote from review on Rambles by Laurie Thayer
posted by Lynda at 13:25 permalink
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Clear dreamers in the Okal Rel Universe have visions of the past. This contradicts most people's assumptions that only the future can be worth mystical attention; however, it is perfectly consistent with the Okal Rel worldview which makes a sacred duty of restraint in conflict and societal stability — albeit at the cost of what egalitarian Reetions view as a nasty, hierarchical result.
This morning, in the shower, while thinking about things such as why SF is more into dark fantasy scenarios these days than positive, techno-optimism, I found my thoughts revolving around clear dreams and how they differ from dreams of the future of the optimistic, early Star Trek sort. This post is the initial result. Perhaps it will shape up into a paper one day, or perhaps not.
Okal Rel Looks Back to Stay the Same
Okal Rel's restraint in conflict, which allows for life and death struggle between individuals while condemning the destruction of vital infrastructure, is something I can get behind as a person — not as a "how to" recommendation, but certainly as food for thought about the sanity of no-holds barred conflicts between cultures too technically empowered for their own good (or anyone else's). The social system of Sevildom, though fun to write about, is another matter; but the point, here, is that Okal Rel is perfectly consistent with mystics who look back, not forward. For example, since every Sevolite house descended, originally, from what are now called Purebloods, it follows that everyone (except the few surviving Purebloods) are less Sevolite now than they must have been in some past incarnation. Most Demish cultures likewise venerate a past era of their line's greatest glory, which is different for different lines. (The sameness of Vrellish culture, in Red Reach, is more like that of pre-literate humans.)
Worldviews that look back upon past glory or resist change, in general, offend the reformer in us all, and, indeed, over the course of the ten book saga, change is induced through contact with the Reetions. I think everyone gets that, at some level, even if those who would be revolutionaries need gentle reminders that the hard work lies in setting up the sand castle, not knocking it over with a single, haughty kick. (Anyone who needs help figuring out how a culture might resist such a reformer need only turn to historical evidence such as the struggle of blacks to exercise their freedom in the U.S., women's efforts to get into high status professions, Japanese repression of the introduction of guns, Catholic suppression of science that contradicted church canon, etc. The fun is in making it feel real, not making it easy or quick!)
But apart from the story value and the interesting challenges of culture conflict that the Okal Rel Universe offers me, as a writer, it does sometimes trouble me why I am so interested in a worldview that looks backward, not forward. I used to be very positive about the potential of science to create a better world in the future, and in many ways it has. But I do not feel that optimism any longer. When I reach for it, it is gone. Instead, I feel grave misgivings about the motives of those in control.
Clear Dreaming vs. Dreams of the Future
Future dreamers neglected to address human history to date, with its heavy weight of evidence concerning problematic aspects to empowering human beings with more and more potent tools. They simply left out the far more important side of the equation in the evolving relationship between human culture and the products of the scientific revolution. They left out man himself. (And I mean to include women in that generic usage of man.) We have to start asking how far we dare trust ourselves, because we are human. We therefore need to understand what it means to be human in far less romantic terms than we do, now. Perhaps (although I do not recommend we go the way of the Lorel Experiment) it is ourselves we need to improve. At the very least we need to get a grip on a set of solid, cross-culturally meaningful, values.
The older I get, the more I think that it might be our own clear dreamers, the sociologist and historians, the visionaries and even those theists whose beliefs do not begin and end with hate and ego, who are more likely to help us with humanity?s next big challenge than any grant — hungry scientist or industrial researcher — and not by looking forward, but by looking back at where we have gone wrong before, and advising us on how to reduce the risk of stacking up even more disgraceful moral wreckage of the sort that clogs history books.
I am still enamored of science as a method of problem solving. My vision of rational, humanistic utopia is reflected in the Reetion way of life, which I admire despite its imperfections. But I am increasingly alarmed by the use of science, and profit, as substitutes for political philosophy and morality in general. Pure science of the rocket-ship or laboratory sort has nothing to say about whether or not you ought to do something unthinkable to other people to achieve your goals. Pure profit, as a cultural icon, would oblige us to celebrate the success of organized crime, which surly deserve the gold star for operating with as little overhead as possible and no moral qualms at all.
Science Fiction is too often preoccupied with bigger guns, nastier nanotechnology and more deadly viruses, as if we worship the evil or the power bound up in such stuff. If those who dominate behave morally, it is nothing but good luck, or perhaps wishful thinking that those who are most clever will also be most moral in the long run. I think there is plenty of room, in the field, for a saga that acknowledges how even enemies have some interests in common, even if only to score a victory one can subsequently enjoy. Blood, death, love, high stakes and violent disagreements are all still possible. But we simply have to figure out how far is too far, no matter what. If we cannot do that, we may be doomed by our own passions. But once again, it is history that gives me some encouragements, because for every Easter Island in the human record, where conflict consumed both sides, there are counter examples like the Geneva Convention or ancient armies preparing battlefields, in a way that seems oddly quaint to us, before arranging to get together and have it out.
If we cannot learn not to fight, we need to learn new rules for doing it, and I fear I have ceased to imagine we can refrain from waging war on each other, given the looking back at history that I have done over the last couple of years. We need a way; however, to wage safe war, every bit as much as we need to practice safe sex. In other words, we must achieve some real life, satisfying, form of Okal Rel.
References: Visions of the Future (in Sci Fi or Cultural Studies)
Science Fiction after the Future Went Away /
a feature by Ken MacLeod- Popular Visions of the Future
- Nostalgia for the modern / Thomas Hylland Eriksen
Static World Views in History
The Notion of Time in India / by Hajime Nakamura [summary by Angie Weicekauskas , '93]- Ancient Egypt: A History of Art and Culture / by: Lisa Kremen The Academy for the Advancement of Science and Technology Hackensack, NJ
posted by Lynda at 09:17 permalink
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Heh. This is cool. An editor of an unnamed publisher/publication is offering to critique short pieces of work online. He mentions the amount of CRAP he reads as submissions at work. I've heard the same complaints from other sources as well. You think if there's so much crap out there, all the good writers I know (you know who you are) have a decent chance of getting published. Just finish the damn story already!!
(click title for the link.)
posted by Virginia at 16:14 permalink
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I have finally finished the post I started on July 3rd to report the second day of Westercon, took it off draft and published it. Can't figure out how the URL for the direct link should work; the posting's on the archives page for July 2005.
posted by Anonymous at 08:15 permalink
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This post is about two problems with skimming reality, in the real world: reacting instantly to first impressions, and horrid typos.
Yesterday I surfed to PublishAmerica while doing my morning mail, and after spending a grand total of ten minutes looking over the site, and the news items on success stories in particular, I gleefully dispatched an e-mail to two mailing lists where I share a sense of community with fellow writers, recommending PublishAmerica as something worthy of their attention.
I was swiftly chastened for my naivety by a flurry of replies, catching me up with the complaints clogging writers' forums and law courts, from authors accusing PublishAmerica of misleading them. This morning I spent a bit more time investigating and was left feeling saddened and frustrated.
I continue to believe in a world where more deserving artists get published, and the art of writing thrives accordingly, but I now feel I was wrong to be heartened by PublishAmerica, in particular. If PublishAmerica is as sincere and honourable as it claims to be, they should allow captive authors to dissolve their contract with them, at the very least, and be more forthright with new prospects about what they are getting into in the first place. I suspect many authors would still want to publish with PublishAmerica, even if they were told frankly, up front, what their prospects were for making money. And it would be reassuring to know what percentage--if any--of submissions are turned down by PublishAmerica. I do believe more books deserve readers. I do not believe every book does. (The article I found most useful, in my researches, was Publish Anything: The Saga of a PublishAmerica Author by Lisa Maliga.)
I still find the situation in the traditional world of publishing too painful for aspiring authors, in particular, to be healthy for reading and writing, in general. Of course, I am terribly happy to have publishers! This observation is in no way a criticism of them or any other publisher in business, today. The only ones I have ever met are good, book-loving people, doing their best to help their authors succeed. But if we want writing and reading to thrive, we need to find ways to make it more respectable to start small and grow bigger, naturally.
My fear is this. It is readers and writers, themselves, who are to blame for the difficulty of making small-circulation publications work better. It is we who would rather read this week's best seller, than take the time to look for something worthwhile closer to home, risk investing in an unproven commodity, or give a less-than-perfect work with promise the encouragement it deserves. The struggle to create a good place for writers to thrive in, is therefore beset by threats from all sides. It is still a good fight, despite that, and I would hate to see bad experiences, such as the kind reported by some PublishAmerica authors, detract from the importance of making space in the world for more authors to get published. My blessing on all small press publishers, and all honest markets for the diversity of talent in the world that may never be best-seller material! May those of us who love to read, and love to write, have the good sense to support them, as well as the latest best seller.
My second discomfort of the day is -- typos.
As one of those creative types who read and wrote for content, as the saying goes, I have always been prone to spelling mess ups and keypad fumbles. Ever since I was in elementary school, my report cards would say things like "Janey (I didn't start going by Lynda until first year university) is a delight to have in the classroom, but her handwriting is messy and she has trouble with spelling."
Now, thanks in part to a copyediting course at SFU, I find I am haunted by my past transgressions. I read my own copy, online, and I cringe at the typographical blemishes. I look at a beloved book and think about the well-known-oops in it, before I remember to love it for its content. I have lost my innocence. :-(
Sadly, I know I shall never stop being prone to typos. But I can swear a mighty oath to proof read everything TWICE and to spell check even e-mail before I dispatch it.
As a final gesture of reform, I entreat any readers who spots a typo on the Okal Rel Universe website, or any of my blogs, to report the evil thing to me at lynda@okalrel.org in the hope that you will, therefore, be the last innocent bystander exposed to its malignant influence.
posted by Lynda at 08:11 permalink
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Discovered the World Naked Bike Ride today, in the July / August 2005 issue of George Street Letters, a magazine put together by Dr. Robert Budde of UNBC here in Prince George. I got the magazine last night and read it from cover to cover, which is odd because I only glance at other magazines and newspapers and get my world news from CBC 1, most days, because the TV coverage is so long-winded and feels untrustworthy somehow. I use the web a lot, but not for news, as a rule, unless it is to check out something I've heard about for more information, like the supposedly banned MTV ad that came past me last week via e-mail. (Interesting ad, but I'm leaning in the direction of hoax, given the dearth of main stream media coverage of such a ban and lack of details available about it on the internet, such as exactly what branch of "the US Government" was responsible for banning the ad and under the jurisdiction of what law, as my brother-in-law pointed out. But I digress.)
This entry is about the World Naked Bike Ride and why I learned about an international phenomenon of interest to me via a local arts and culture newsletter instead of from somewhere else.
The World Naked Bike Ride gave me courage. So much of the news of the world can be summed up with: "Those who have the most want more. Those who 'have not' are either getting so nasty about it that it makes you sick, or else they are dieing quietly in ways that make you numb with grief for humanity." Not so much fun to go and dunk yourself in, voluntarily, at the end of a day's work. People who do things like the World Naked Bike Ride, to protest the values of unthinking consumption, have managed to side step the Great Big Fat Rule that goes something like this: "Take nothing seriously unless it makes you rich, famous or powerful." Naked bikers are advocating a better quality of life through the simple expedient of saying "no" to the barons of industry who keep insisting we cannot be happy without a newer, bigger and better whatever it is we currently have the older, smaller and less snazzy version of at the moment. They are even doing it politely, albeit stark naked. No one has to get brutally murdered. And the pictures make you smile to look at because the naked folks in them look so very human and completely unashamed of it.
Why I encountered my ration of morale lifter via the George Street Letters magazine is also interesting. Viewing myself strictly as a field subject in my own brand of personal, mico-anthropological field work, I think it reflects a preference for reading something written by people I know, that might mention things I have personally experienced, and have something to say that makes me feel like part of a community, instead of staring slack jawed at some far distant citadel of media mega-wallop that offers me the unappetizing choices of either worship from afar, despite increasing doubts about its motives and integrity, or being suckered into the fantasy that glitzy offers to add my bit of input actually constitute meaningful dialogue.
Speaking to smaller audiences may be the inevitable cost of idiosyncratic publishing, whether the medium is a blog like Reality Skimming or a community newsletter like George Street Letters. But damn it all, there's something "real" about it. And it can still connect you up with the global picture, when necessary, like one of a myriad creeks that flow into a thousand different rivers.
posted by Lynda at 09:57 permalink
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Everyone wants to overthrow Sevildom. This is a good thing. After all, I do not advocate the fictional oligarchy of the Gelack side of the Okal Rel Universe as desirable. I would be a huge failure in my own estimation if the net result of the Okal Rel Universe was to foster an elitist obsession with bloodlines and birth ranks in the real world. The problem I have with readers and writers who want to tear down the status quo of Sevildom has nothing to do with idealogy.
It is about oversimplifying the problem.
I recently came across a story that illustrates this very well. It is a story about an amazing woman. I am taking it as a given, here, that the story is true. It is based on journal entries made by Northwest explorer David Thompson, on two separate occasions, and on one journal entry made by Sir John Franklin. The Manlike Woman overcame the cultural limitations imposed on her as a female to carve out a life better suited to her unique personality. She did it despite the humiliation of being deemed a "loose" woman by natives and Thompson's European fur traders alike. She did it without any obvious role model to inspire her. She blazed her own trail. She had a huge impact on her immediate followers and defined her own life, on her own terms. How much impact did she have on the world at large? Almost none.
In fact, she barely qualifies as a footnote in history.
I discovered her in a two page article entitled "Columbia River / Indian Prophetess"
in Mysterious Canada: Strange Sights, Extraordinary Events, and Peculiar Places by John Robert Colombo (Doubleday Canada, 1988). Few articles in this charming and entertaining book, endorsed by none other than SciFi's own Spider Robinson, are as authoritatively documented as Manlike Woman's story. Two pages back, you are into ghosts and claims concerning visitations by UFOs although Colombo tackles the chronicling of such things more in the style of a folklorist than with the breathless, question-posing habits of an Erich von Daniken.
The only mention I could find on the web to Manlike Woman, was a post on a forum, (See http://roxen.xmission.com/~drudy/hist_text-arch4/msg03326.html), although whether that is due to the difficulty of referencing someone without a name, I cannot know. (In an effort to remedy Manlike woman's obscurity, I have submitted an article to Wikipedia called Manlike Woman the Indian prophetess of the Upper Columbia River.)
My point in all this is not to belittle the heroic life of someone like Manlike Woman. It is to rebut any reader or writer of the ORU who says: "Yes, but surely some feisty rebel will have overthrown all this horrible, Sevolite-centric hierarchy by standing up for him or herself, hundreds of years ago!" My suggestion is that attitudes of this sort are innocent of any realistic grasp of history and the potence of the obstacles involved, in particular.
The ORU does seek to chronicle improvements in social justice, through change. But those who want to write for it must accept the complexities and very real difficulties inherent in the process. In other words, any story that solves the problem of Sevolite dominance, in 6,000 words, with a feisty commoner who says "fooey" to the whole thing, is unlikely to find favor with me. On the other hand, such a story might be very interesting if the author took the time to research how similiar rebels were treated by history, first, and to understand the ORU well enough to produce a plausible interpretation or variation on the theme in a genuninely ORU setting.
I would be excited to see such a story. In fact, if nobody else beats me to it, I might write one or two of them myself.
posted by Lynda at 07:30 permalink
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Reading the article "Total Recall" this morning, in the current Discover, gave me an idea. The article describes the photolog phenomenon as exemplified by Flickr. The idea relates to past and present "best policy" for dealing with the public. In the past, the successful ploy was to put up a false front. Now, to my considerable personal gratification, that is less and less possible, as was recently reinforced for me at the SFU "Future of Publishing" workshop I attended last week.
Here's the idea. Spin doctoring works when the channel of communication is narrow and broadcast-based in nature. The message must be blunt and shouted. It has to be clean and simple. You don't want to provide any rough spots for any negativity to stick to. This is very little like a real relationship, with multiple means and opportunities to test how genuine our impressions of each other really are. Information in the blogsphere, however, does more closely approximate relationship status. There are many ways to test the truth of a projected persona or product, and the greatest risk is not being misunderstood during a long stretch of silence after shouting out your broadcast-mode message, but being distrusted or otherwise dismissed as disrespectful of the audience. That is much more akin to relationship rules than the old, lordly mode of communication in which whoever has the power to shout the loudest gets believed no matter what the message.
Sounds like a healthy thing to me.
posted by Lynda at 08:05 permalink
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Thoroughly delighted a new impression of Amel, from friend and reader Brianna Thomas. David has put it up on the Flash version of the gallery, that can be navigated to via the SAGA button on the www.okalrel.org homepage. I will add it to the blog, as well, and put it in the HTML version of the gallery, accessible from the same SAGA link. Brianna is interested in doing an ORU set of tarot cards for us! Perhaps for sale by Windstorm Creative as part of the Fandom Press manifestation of the ORU.
Also spent the morning, today, proof reading the galley for the Okal Rel Universe Anthology: I, edited by Virginia O'Dine. Virginia and I still have hopes we'll see the anthology on sale at Cascadia Con, but we decided last night that if the timing is too tight we will go for quality over speed. I've made the opposite decision on projects, in the past, and regretted it long after the target event had been and gone.
posted by Lynda at 11:05 permalink
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