"Keep clear of the dupes that talk democracy,
And the dogs that bark revolution.
Drunk with talk, liars and believers.
I believe in my tusks. Long live freedom and damn the ideologies!"
(Robinson Jeffers)
Glory be to God! Today, as I’ve only just discovered, celebrates my favorite ASCII character: one without which a great many important phrases – including a lot of company names – would be both longer and less memorable:
It’s World Ampersand Day!
Yes, Gentle Reader, the mighty ampersand has been honored with a special day to be celebrated around the globe for its contributions to concision, calligraphy, conjunctionless conjunctions, and…and…
So get out there and use it! It’s fun! It’s quick! And it’s international! The ampersand isn’t just an American thing; it’s celebrated around the world for its contributions to our written and printed text.
Here’s a teaser for you: My novel Doors contains more ampersands than any of my previous novels! Yes, Gentle Reader: I’ve embraced the glory of this elegant and supremely useful character. And if I can, so can you!
[This piece first appeared at the old Eternity Road website, on November 12, 2004. – FWP]
Your Curmudgeon had a strange experience this morning. His group is part of a larger, project-oriented software department which meets every Friday for general status review. Now and then, the department head will use that meeting to introduce some question or topic for general consideration and input from the troops. Today was such a day. The question was: "Do employee appreciation events (e.g., company parties and comparable special events) have a positive effect on employee morale?"
As you might expect, most of the other engineers there mumbled something ambiguous and unengaged. Your Curmudgeon did not. Almost without intending to, he lit off on a grand tirade about how "employee appreciation events" missed the whole point of employee morale, that morale is not about time-delimited events intended to compensate for the travails of one's job, but rather about the time one spends actually doing it, and whether the holistic experience is interesting, exciting, and comfortable -- in short, whether the employee can be induced to love his work.
The reactions were mind-expanding. The department head was stunned -- wide-eyed, open-mouthed, speechless, and unable to continue. The other engineers and group leaders were distributed across a spectrum that ranged from baffled to resentful.
Probably the most piercing reaction came from one of your Curmudgeon's own group members, an older man about a year from retirement. He characterized the meeting as "a complete waste of time, pure bull****."
In some ways, this seems consistent with what your Curmudgeon knows of himself and of most other working people. As a rule, engineers are embarrassed to admit their enthusiasm for their work. Most employees of any sort would be unwilling to tell their supervisors that they love their jobs and have committed to them voluntarily; it would seem a stick to beat them with at some unspecified future time. But there's more, apparently stemming from the societal worship of "cool."
Passion of any sort is widely regarded as embarrassing. A raised voice is an unacceptable disordering of the social norm. A Juggernaut-like charge into difficulty, with the intent of smashing obstacles flat by sheer power of will, is considered disrespectful toward one's more restrained colleagues. It's "uncool."
The "cool" phenomenon is a promotion of disengagement over enthusiasm. "Be cool, man." Don't commit yourself. Don't invest your emotions. Don't let anyone know that there's something that lights your boilers, charges your condensers, and gets you greased and ready to kick ass.
Your Curmudgeon, despite his scholarly demeanor, is anything but detached, anything but "cool." He has much more animation and much less inhibition in him than the average guy. He's a fighter and a lover. He's most definitely "uncool," and always has been.
But it's not "in" to be "uncool," to pledge one's life, fortune and sacred honor, to lead charges and build barricades, to declaim on subjects such as love, commitment, and passion for one's work. Such a recognition can leave a passionate person feeling very much alone.
Do the "cool" folks have any idea how they're shortchanging themselves?
Your Curmudgeon is an old man by the standards of the engineering trade. Most of his departmental colleagues are in their twenties and thirties. It feels massively incongruous to outmatch them so on the field of passion. But there's no denying the facts.
Peer pressure might have had something to do with it. In sober retrospection, it almost certainly did. Large meetings are like that. Embarrassment at being lifeless and unexceptional when an oldster was an uninhibited firebrand probably had something to do with it, too.
In one sense, it was saddening, but in another, it reminded your Curmudgeon how much he has to be thankful for.
Our passionate moments are the times when we're most alive. The rejection of passion in favor of the slightly bored, can't-arouse-me demeanor known as "cool" that's held the favor of the youth culture for God knows how long now is a poorly disguised rejection of life itself. Its incongruity against the surging fire of life that burns in the body and brain of a young adult is an irony that defies capture in mere words.
Your Curmudgeon will continue to engage himself. He'll continue to sing in the car. He'll charge up the hill with his torch and his pitchfork whenever the fit takes him. And he'll be glad that his is a personality unmarred by "cool."
Let the Limbo people, the willfully disengaged and uncommitted ones, the gray souls who prefer a twilight world in which there's neither true life nor true death, have their "cool." They'll never know what they've missed. More's the pity.
A great many people, most of them good and decent people, have fallen for the notion that if something is generally deemed “bad” by some widely held standard, then it “should” be illegal. Beneath that conviction lie two others:
Not to outlaw it is somehow to condone it;
Outlawing it will have net positive results.
The second of those beliefs can be tested. The first is more difficult to cope with. That having been said, in combination they explain the great majority of all the laws that have been fastened on suffering Mankind throughout recorded history.
Yet there is evidence that in the great majority of cases, outlawing some variety of conduct either has no measurable effect on its frequency, or correlates with an increase in it. Now, correlations are interesting, but we must not immediately conclude that they reveal causes. Still, they’re evidence that we should not assume a proposed law will have only the effects we expect from it.
Take the matter of violence in defense of one’s home or other property. Until fairly recently, he who could honestly claim to be defending what is rightfully his was granted the presumption of legal and moral justification for what he does for that purpose. Under that presumption, the aggressor bore the responsibility for what flowed from his aggression. That is no longer the case in much of the United States.
The change brought unintended consequences. Street assaults and home invasions increased in frequency and in the violence they occasioned. No one wanted those consequences, of course. But we’re not guaranteed to get what we want.
Nonviolent conduct presents an even more perverse picture. Outlawing alcoholic beverages – i.e., the Prohibition era – caused an increase in drinking, moonshining, and bootlegging. Outlawing private gambling produced state-run and state-licensed gambling that rakes in many billions of dollars per year. Outlawing recreational use of drugs has brought about an explosion in organized crime and police corruption. Yet the laws involved were passed by well-meaning people, with malice toward none.
In commenting on laws intended to reduce prostitution, H.L. Mencken delivered the verdict on well-meant legislation many years ago:
There is no half-baked ecclesiastic, bawling in his galvanized-iron temple on a suburban lot, who doesn’t know precisely how it ought to be dealt with. There is no fantoddish old suffragette, sworn to get her revenge on man, who hasn’t a sovereign remedy for it. There is not a shyster of a district attorney, ambitious for higher office, who doesn’t offer to dispose of it in a few weeks, given only enough help from the city editors. And yet, by the same token, there is not a man who has honestly studied it and pondered it, bringing sound information to the business, and understanding of its inner difficulties and a clean and analytical mind, who doesn’t believe and hasn’t stated publicly that it is intrinsically and eternally insoluble. For example, Havelock Ellis. His remedy is simply a denial of all remedies. He admits that the disease is bad, but he shows that the medicine is infinitely worse, and so he proposes going back to the plain disease, and advocates bearing it with philosophy, as we bear colds in the head, marriage, the noises of the city, bad cooking and the certainty of death. Man is inherently vile—but he is never so vile as when he is trying to disguise and deny his vileness. No prostitute was ever so costly to a community as a prowling and obscene vice crusader, or as the dubious legislator or prosecuting officer who jumps at such swine pipe.
With regard to the general improvement of public morals, what has proved effective is the disapproval of others, and the consequences that follow. The evidence suggests that morals and ethics are best imposed through social mechanisms: customs, education, denunciation, ostracism, etc. Many a practice of times past was dedicated to exactly that sort of improvement. If the community has behavioral standards that its members are willing to uphold through public disapproval and ostracism, those things usually suffice to curb disapproved behavior – to hold it to an irreducible or “threshold” level.
From a strictly practical standpoint, the social-improvement crusader “should” be persuaded by that argument. All too often, he reverts to the “But leaving it legal would condone it” position. That’s a tougher nut to crack. At present I have no suggestions for cracking it.
Perhaps we might consider bringing back dueling under the Toth Convention:
The challenged party gets the choice of weapons.
The duel must be refereed by an impartial individual.
It must take place in the pre-dawn hours, when there’s little light.
Challenger and challenged must both bring seconds to act as witnesses.
The deciding rule of the contest must be agreed upon: first blood or incapacity?
Under that convention, the infliction of death, even if unintentional, is considered shameful and subjects the offender to ostracism.
I know the idea will horrify many. After all, we’re civilized now. We abhor violence, especially when we’re its target. But the prospect of being challenged and compelled to stake one’s blood, if not his life, on his words or deeds would inhibit quite a lot of bad behavior. The question is whether we could tolerate that manner of enforcement.
That question is troublesome. At present we don’t even tolerate police violence very well. But the correlation between the end of the “nightstick era” and the explosion of street violence suggests that that might have been a wrong turning. Upon which note I believe I shall leave the field to my Gentle Readers.
I have a mountain of chores and obligations before me today, so this will be brief. I was thinking about bygone fads and trends: the sort of thing Charles Mackay wrote about in Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. In our time, characterized by mass communication technologies that didn’t exist when Mackay wrote, one of the more charming fads was the hallucinatory-nonsense lyric.
The music of the Sixties occasionally brought us “novelty songs” that were intended – I hope — to be funny. Some of them were memorable, such as “Love Potion #9,” “The Witch Doctor,” and “They’re Coming To Take Me Away, Haha!” But they’re largely gone now, except for fleeting manifestations such as the Dixie Chicks’ “White Trash Wedding.”
But the novelty songs had companions that lurked behind the drapes: the hallucination songs. Some lyric writers specialized in them: Pete Brown, who wrote for Cream; Robert Hunter, who wrote for the Grateful Dead; and the incredible Keith Reid, the lyricist for Procol Harum.
Where are their inheritors? Who writes such stuff today? My acquaintance with 21st Century pop music is slight, so I can’t say. But surely someone is still pursuing that art form! Or has the national supply of LSD dwindled too far to support such endeavors?
Well, anyway. If you want a taste of the very best Sixties music has to offer, you can’t go wrong with Procol Harum’s first, eponymous album. It’s both lyrically and musically brilliant, one mesmerizing hallucination after another from beginning to end. Below is my favorite track from that album, with Keith Reid’s lyrics.
Outside the gates of Cerdes sits the two-pronged unicorn
Who plays at relaxation time a rhinestone flugelhorn
Whilst mermaids lace carnations into wreaths for ailing whales
And Neptune dances hornpipes while Salome sheds her veils
Phallus Phil tries peddling his pewter painted pot
But Sousa Sam can only hear the screams of Peep the sot
Who only sips his creme de menthe from terra cotta cups
And exhales menthol scented breath whilst spewing verbiage up
Down technical blind alleys live the wraiths of former dreams
And Greeps who often crossed them are no longer what they seem
And even Christian Scientists can but display marble plaques
Which only retell legends whilst my eyes reach out for facts
Yeah, my eyes reach out for facts
Starting in 2007, I wrote a series of essays collectively titled “The Mask Slips” at the late, lamented Eternity Road website. They concerned the steady erosion of an idea that decent Americans would have thought unassailable: a human being’s right to life. I argued that that idea was being attacked at its most vulnerable margins: abortion and euthanasia.
Attacks on a moral-ethical idea at its tender margins should always be closely scrutinized. Often they’re harbingers of a larger campaign to invalidate the idea altogether – not in a logical sense, but as a premise from which ordinary people reach other conclusions and decisions. For the most important moral and ethical ideas are not logically provable. They can be undermined, worn away by gradual incursions until they’ve become historical curiosities, obiter dicta.
Just yesterday, I received an email from a reader of one of my books:
The premise of The Death Cults is difficult to overlook because you're not simply examining particular movements or ideas, you’re organizing them around a much larger question: what happens to a civilization when the value of human life itself becomes negotiable?
I found that framing particularly interesting.
What stood out to me is that the book seems less concerned with cataloguing individual threats than with identifying the common principle you believe connects them. That makes the argument much more ambitious than the title initially suggests.
I was thrilled. Someone had actually grasped my point. That’s a rare thing these days. Yet it was exactly that point that motivated me – along with copious chivvying from my friend Pascal – to compile the essays that became The Death Cults into a separate publication.
The common principle, of course, was hostility to the right to life. I saw each of the several “marginal attacks” as excrescences of that hostility. I believed that the attacks were converging, such that the human right to life would eventually be discarded as a moral premise. I still do believe it.
But all that is prefatory. Attacks on the right to life are part of a bigger picture. How big? Pour yourself another cup of coffee and read on.
Pennsylvania state representative and Democratic Socialist Chris Rabb is the latest Democrat to reaffirm his alliance with virulent antisemite Hasan Piker. What is most notable, however, is his attack on establishment Democrats as “institutionalists,” a new label reflecting the radical agenda for changing our constitutional system. It is a term that is now in vogue on the far left by those who want to tear down our institutions and scrap our Constitution.
Across the country, attacks are growing on Democrats and independents who are viewed as insufficiently radical. Those of us who continue to celebrate the Madisonian democracy as creating the most successful and stable republic in history are now “cultists” and “institutionalists” who are trapped in “nostalgia.”
The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have drawn support from many who want a literal revolution. DSA Steering Committee member Cliff Connolly declared on one podcast that they are “famous for” “Our hatred of the United States Constitution.”
Please read it all. It put me in mind of an observation by one of the greatest minds of the Twentieth Century:
The craving for power which characterizes the governing class in every nation is hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty. – Albert Einstein
The Founding Fathers convened in Philadelphia in 1787 to define a national government. As I’ve said before, to define is to delimit: to say what the thing being defined is and is not. The Constitution was the Founders’ attempt to do exactly that. They had history, John Locke, and Adam Smith for guidance.
History told the Founders what will follow when The State is unrestricted. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, codified men’s half-formed sense for right and wrong. John Locke united theory with practice in delineating the concept of a right and whence it originates. The Constitution, together with the original Bill of Rights, was the Founders’ attempt to reify those ideas. Those documents set out, in clear and specific terms, how the national government would be determined and what it must and must not do.
The modern Left, through its political arm the Democrat Party, seeks to eliminate those documents as working principles. Of course! The Left aspires to be “the governing class.” Therefore they’re “hostile to any limitation of the national sovereignty.” The incursions they’ve made so far have been grievous, such that another few decades of marginal chipping-away might just lead to a de facto “retirement” of the Constitution. But they’re impatient. They want the remaining limitations to fall now.
Professor Turley says it plainly:
The media eagerly publishes these radical views, such as the New York Times column, “The Constitution Is Broken and Should Not Be Reclaimed,” in which Ryan D. Doerfler of Harvard and Samuel Moyn of Yale call for the nation to “reclaim America from constitutionalism.”
Brown University’s Corey Brettschneider called the Constitution a “dangerous document” that is driving this “threat to democracy.”
George Washington law professor Mary Anne Franks condemned the “cult of the Constitution” that has been defended to advance “white male supremacy.”
Now, to support our constitutional system is to be an “institutionalist,” a pejorative term that is as bad as being an “oligarch” in the new revolutionary lexicon.
If the Constitution should fall, whether de jure or de facto, all legal protections for Americans’ individual rights will fall with it.
* * *
Just as we saw in compiling the attacks on the right to life, the marginal attacks on Constitutional constraints have been elements in a converging assault on constitutionalism itself: the thesis that there must be a Supreme Law that binds governments as clearly and absolutely as moral precepts bind men. It’s foolish to think that there could be any other terminus. It’s even more foolish to imagine that the men driving those attacks are innocent of that aim.
“When a man shows you who he is, believe him,” said poet Maya Angelou. The men of the American Left have shown us who they are, and by implication where they’re headed. This is no time for decent Americans to say to one another that “They don’t really mean it.”
(If you’re not familiar with Gentle Giant, the group was part of a Seventies surge into experimental forms within popular music. The title of their second album, Acquiring the Taste, says a lot about what it takes to enjoy their oeuvre. Yet several of their recordings, especially Octopus and The Power and the Glory, have joined my list of favorites. Give them a try.)
And now for something completely different…
* * *
In pursuit of a project I’m following with brilliant video composer Hazel Williams, I spent a couple of hours yesterday seining through the five novels of the Realm of Essences series. Hazel, who’s composing a “trailer” for Chosen One, needed a concise biography of the character I’m most abused for killing: Louis Redmond. My intention was to assemble the most relevant bits of the novels that follow Chosen One for her edification. I think I succeeded at that, but alongside the intended outcome came another.
Reviewing those books brought me to tears.
It was a remarkable experience. I hadn’t read those books for many years. You might find that natural. After all, they’re my creations; why would I reread them when they came from my imagination? We read for the novelty of experiencing other writers’ creations, don’t we?
Well, yes. But when revisited after a long time away, one’s own creations can seem like the products of another mind. I wrote the last of the Realm books, Statesman, ten years ago. Coming back to them after such a long interval was unexpectedly affecting.
It put me in mind of why I set out to write fiction in the first place.
* * *
The writer and the reader usually have some compatible aims. The reader is there to be entertained and moved; the writer knows it and is there to see to it. Good fiction must entertain at the very minimum. If the writer can give the reader a memorable emotional journey as well, he’s achieved on two counts.
But I set out on the Realm series for other reasons, as well. I wanted to do something that a great many writers appear to have abandoned: the depiction and exposition of true heroism. I wanted to create characters that exemplify my conception of a hero: one who puts himself at risk for someone or something else that he values more than his own interests.
It’s for the reader to decide whether I met that goal… but in going back through the Realm novels for the first time in more than a decade, I was “the reader.” I was thrilled by Louis’s adventures. I derived a huge refreshing dollop of the inspiration I felt in those early years, when nothing seemed quite as important as telling a heroic tale to the best of my ability.
That has always been my aspiration: that my readers should feel exactly that sense of uplift, and to experience the renewal of purpose that’s the central animating filament of a memorable, heroic character.
The question we all face – “Why am I here?” – is one that every hero must answer. Good fiction helps us to face it. Not to answer it; merely to confront it open-eyed.
* * *
Sometimes, a hero must be “soft-pedaled:” depicted in a fashion that downplays the essence of his heroism. Superman gets to wear a gaudy costume, but that’s a job requirement for a comic-book superhero. Real-life heroes sometimes wear uniforms, but they’re seldom that gaudy.
One of the writers from whose example I learned the most was the late Roger Zelazny. Here is his most striking depiction of heroic essence: unprepossessing, unglamorous, but resolute and definite:
"Oh man of many bodies," said Taraka, "why do you begrudge me a few days within this one? It is not the body you were born into, and you, too, do but borrow it for a time. Why then, do you feel my touch to be a thing of defilement? One day you may wear another body, untouched by me. So why do you consider my presence a pollution, a disease? Is it because there is that within you which is like unto myself? Is it because you, too, know delight in the ways of the Rakasha, tasting the pain you cause like a pleasure, working your will as you choose upon whatsoever you choose? Is it because of this? Because you, too, know and desire these things, but also bear that human curse called guilt? If it is, I mock you in your weakness, Binder. And I shall prevail against you."
"It is because I am what I am, demon," said Siddhartha, hurling his energies back at him. "It is because I am a man who occasionally aspires to things beyond the belly and the phallus. I am not the saint the Buddhists think me to be, and I am not the hero out of legend. I am a man who knows much fear, and who occasionally feels guilt. Mainly, though, I am a man who has set out to do a thing, and you are now blocking my way."
“I am a man who has set out to do a thing.” Could there be a more compact description of what animates a hero? For Sam / “Siddhartha” has embraced a costly purpose: the liberation of a whole planetful of people. He knows it to be a purpose that will try him sorely. He accepts it anyway.
“Just out of curiosity, how long has it been since blood has been spilled here, in the Jhereg Wing?”
“Not since the Interregnum, Lord Taltos.”
“It would be bad for the Organization interests to have any sort of violence take place here, wouldn’t it?”
“Very bad. I hope you aren’t suggesting any.”
I leaned on his shoulder, very slightly. “I? No, no, not at all. I wouldn’t think of such a thing. I was just making conversation.”
“I see. What was it you wanted to know?”
“Who arranged to have those Easterners arrested?”
There was the faintest hint of a tightening of muscles, but no more. “Why, the Empress, Baronet Taltos.”
“At your request, Count Soffta. And I’m very anxious to learn which of my colleagues asked you to make the request.”
“I believe you have been misinformed, Baronet Taltos.”
“Have you heard of me, Count Soffta?”
My hand didn’t leave his shoulder, but neither did it tighten, nor did I make any other movement. He said nothing for two or three heartbeats, then he said, “It may take me some time to find out, and I’m expecting a rather large number of visitors very soon.”
“Yes, I imagine you are. But under the circumstances, I’m willing to let it take as much time as necessary. I’m sure your visitors will understand.”
“It could be very expensive.”
“I’m prepared to pay. It is my wife, you know.”
“Yes . . . .”
“So the cost is irrelevant.”
“I guess it is.”
“Perhaps it would be best if you could gather the information?”
I could almost feel him weighing the odds, attempting to select the best thing to say, the best thing to do. “There may be repercussions—”
“I have absolutely no doubt that there will be. I accept them.”
“All of them?”
“Whatever may happen.”
“I accept them.” Vladimir Taltos – witch, assassin, and crime lord – accepts that he’ll most likely lose his life to save the life of his estranged wife. There’s a hero for you.
The two heroes above had conscious purposes for which they were prepared to give everything.
* * *
We don’t usually think of heroes in terms of their aspirations. That word feels too close to achievements. Yet there is a difference.
Many young men aspire to be heroes without fully grasping what heroism entails. Few of us become genuine heroes. But all of us are asked to give something of ourselves – time, labor, money, love, other values – no matter what it is we set out to achieve. Often, the young man gives without recompense: he never achieves what or as he’d hoped. But what he gave is not returned to him.
Ultimately, it’s the aspiration that matters. The more clearly the young man sees the probable costs, the more laudable is his quest. If the fulfillment of that quest would be to others’ benefit rather than his own, we may legitimately call him heroic, even if by far the greater part of his life is as common as dirt.
We never see superheroes doing utterly mundane, body-and-life maintenance things. Those moments don’t make it onto the big screen. Note that at no instant of 24, throughout eight long seasons, do we ever see Jack Bauer take a “pee break.” We see his risks and his derring-do. And we see what he’s prepared to give to fulfill his purpose.
I’m not exhorting anyone to be a hero. I won’t encourage others to do what I know I never could. But to aspire:
Come, my friends,
'Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Tho' much is taken, much abides; and tho'
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
As my Gentle Readers know, I write in the speculative genres. (Yes, considering how romances are conducted these days, I consider romance a speculative genre.) Those who read my novels know it going in; Amazon makes it perfectly plain, as do the covers and the promotional blurbs. So the reader should be prepared for a little speculation: i.e., imaginative depiction of how things might be in a different reality, or in the future.
Some aren’t. At least, that’s the way they express themselves in their reviews.
Of course, the misguided-review problem isn’t mine alone:
I would love to correct the factual record on one of my reviews on Goodreads, but I won't.
My favorite one-star review was on Monster Hunter Files. The header was "This is a collection of short stories." And the review was simply "I don't like collections of short stories."
— Julie Frost--That Werewolf Writer🐺🦉 (@JulieCFrost) August 30, 2026
That unnamed reviewer simply had to express himself or explode. Tragic, eh? I hope he headed off the crisis before detonation. But enough of that.
Speculative-fiction writers must speculate. They’re required to change something about contemporary / real-world / this universe reality. The specifics of the writer’s speculation are what determine the genre – the “marketing category” (Steven Brust) – into which his book will be thrust, there to beckon silently yet importunately to Amazon doomscrollers forever more.
It hardly need be said, though in my inimitable fashion I’ll say it anyway, that a reader who dislikes speculation in fiction should browse among the non-speculative genres, and leave the speculative ones for persons of different tastes. But things are as they are. This aspect thereof cannot be easily changed.
The tweet embedded above caused me to remember an event that brought me some perplexing thoughts. It was early in my auctorial career: the Year of Our Lord 2000, if memory serves. Two persons of whom I had (and have) a high opinion had started a small press. They declared themselves dedicated to the speculative genres. They’d fulsomely complimented two short stories I’d sent them, so I decided to try one of my novels on them: a Christian-speculative tale over which I’d labored hard and of which I was proud.
(A digression: Those Gentle Readers who casually end sentences with prepositions can’t imagine my agony over the previous sentence. De gustibus non est disputandum, and all that. Digression ends.)
Well, to cut to the chase, they didn’t like it. “Not orthodox,” came the reply. Their objections focused on the speculative elements in the novel. They bore on matters Catholic doctrine does not address: the possibility of magic and the exact nature of the afterlife.
Hm. Well, you can’t please everyone, and only a fool would try. But it was a disappointment as well as a surprise. The implication was that the Church has told us everything, and that to go beyond Church doctrine to any extent is unworthy, even if the author takes great care not to contradict an explicit Church teaching.
That wasn’t the first time a reviewer objected to a speculation in a speculative novel or mine. While I shrug it off when it occurs, it always puzzles me. It makes me want to ask the reviewer: What are you here for?
But I’m not here to grump about a couple of misguided reviews, nor about the rejection of a novel. This is more of a reflection about accepting things for what they are.
Many have argued that capitalism does not offer a satisfactory moral message. But that is like saying that calculus does not contain carbohydrates, amino acids, or other essential nutrients. Everything fails by irrelevant standards.
To judge a thing relevantly, one must judge it by the relevant standard. To apply an irrelevant standard guarantees that it will “fail.” After all, the creator didn’t have that standard in mind when he labored on his creation. Its prescriptions and proscriptions were not on his mind. No reasonable person expects that his shower stall will be equipped to allow him to check his Facebook status as he scrubs.
And now, having written the last sentence above with glee, I am once more in mind of the “No True Scotsman” fallacy. Have we entered an age in which everything we own is expected to do everything we ever want? Has that become “reasonable?” Must our refrigerator remind us that it’s time to change the oil in our car? Must our lawnmower remember that we need bread, milk, and to schedule a chat with our financial planner?
I feel a headache coming on. Perhaps it’s time to lie down for a while. Do have a nice day.
