Alfalfa, Call the Roll

photog Current Events ,

Donald Trump signed an executive order that specified that the United States federal government only recognizes two sexes; male and female and these equate to the sexes identified by the biological realities of nature.  And he used this basis to forbid biological males from participating in Title IX protected women’s sports.  This provides a basis for activities excluding one sex from the other based on differences in biological identity.  So that’s part one.

But now it’s time to move forward.  Now it’s time to acknowledge that there should be activities that males want to participate without women involved.  And once again, it is based on biology.  It’s very simple.  Women are inherently irritating to men.

Now, I say this as a man whose been married to the same woman for forty-eight years.  This May I’ll have known Camera Girl for fifty years.  She is a delightful woman.  Smart, pretty, wise, witty; you name it.  She is the greatest joy of my whole existence on this planet.  But there are times when I get together with the guys that having her there would be a big mistake.  She’s a woman.  She’s not as lazy as we are.  Or as crass.  And she doesn’t care about nuclear weapons, the Roman Empire, the Lord of the Rings, William Shatner, bad movies in general or anything that would qualify her for a get together with the guys.  And if she did care about those things she would be too strange a woman for me to get involved with.

And even if she was still the same wonderful person she is now and wanted to hang out with the guys, it still would be a bad idea.  And that’s because men occasionally want to escape the company of women.  We want to be unfair and objectivize women and say things about them that they won’t like.  Basically, we want the space and freedom to act like thirteen-year-old boys again.  We want to form our own hierarchies based on whatever primitive and undemocratic criteria we decide on and we absolutely, positively don’t want to fall under the authority of a woman.  Now that’s clear enough.  We want our space.

Now how do we get it back?

It seems to me; the most logical way is to follow reason and fact.  If the Title IX laws protecting separate (but unequal) women’s programs is constitutional then it stands to reason that separate organizations based on the differences between men and women is also constitutional.  Fraternal organization can become just that again.  And sororal clubs can provide women with their own spaces.

Now whether any of the male organizations that have already been neutered by the government can be resuscitated is highly doubtful.  The Boy Scouts of America have just this month officially eliminated the word “boy” from their name.  I don’t see how that damage can be undone.  But new organizations can be started that will replace these hollowed out shells of the past.

And the time to make this happen is now.  With this Supreme Court and President Trump in charge the Justice Department could be the conduit for cases to push for the return of freedom of association.  The only real question is whether there is an organization that would be willing to be the test case.  It should be a new organization that starts fresh and goes after landmark legislation to end the present persecution of male only activities.

And I think the perfect test case should be my own favorite named organization; The He-Man Woman Hater’s Club.  The name says it all.  Now all we have to do is get that feminist Republican jurist on board; John Roberts.

It Grows on You

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , ,

I think I want to talk about science fiction some more.  I don’t remember the first time I heard the expression “literary science fiction?  But I think it was being used to compare to space opera.  Now I’m not well versed in the history and evolution of science fiction past the 1970s.  Halfway through that decade I became deeply interested in making a living so I didn’t have the leisure to read all of the books coming out.  But what I could tell was some of it didn’t seem to be science fiction.  I can remember reading a couple of Samuel R Delaney books and thinking, “This guy has problems that I’m not interested in.”  And so, I decided that literary science fiction was not for me.

It seemed to me that there should be a middle ground between space opera and Samuel R Delaney.  Without a doubt some of the writers from the olden times like Asimov completely eschewed producing characters that sounded and acted like real live human beings.  Now granted, we don’t expect to get James Joyce when we pick up a book with a cover illustrated with a half-naked woman in the clutches of a giant lobster.  But by the same token once you’ve grown up and have some understanding of what people say and do in real life it would seem to me that an author who wants to make his story interesting would make his people act and speak like … people!

So, if you go back and read, for instance, Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Space” as an adult you may be amazed at how threadbare the writing seems.  The characters are for the most part caricatures of the chivalrous hero battling monsters (literally) to save the damsel in distress.  And this is too far in the other direction from literary s-f.  Space ships, evil giant intelligent amoebas and space-time tearing secret weapons are great stuff but unless the characters have at least some similarities to actual human beings it’s kind of hard to get the readers to want to finish the story.

And there is a pretty wide bandwidth between these extremes.  Writers like Asimov and Clarke didn’t spend much time on characterization.  Hari Seldon and Dave Bowman were thumbnail sketches that barely provided enough description to convince the reader they existed.  But these were plot driven stories and as long as their authors would give us anything at all to allow us to pretend that they were people, we could suspend disbelief.

And Heinlein was able to write dozens of stories that were populated with various flavors and ages of his “competent man” whom I guess we were supposed to imagine were stand-ins for Heinlein himself.  And there was some humanity on display there.  Definitely not James Joyce but voices that were reminiscent of real people (at least somewhat).

And over the decades, characterization, especially in the hands of female authors (authoresses?) has become the dominant ingredient in literary science fiction.  And now it has reached the point where leaving out the science is completely acceptable.  Wonder has been replaced by social justice and grievance reckoning.  That’s how you end up with something like “The Handmaid’s Tale” as the exemplar of successful science fiction.

Well, all of this is very interesting.  But there’s nothing like actually trying to write a full-length novel to show someone just how much work it is to balance along that tightrope between too much and too little characterization.  And the hardest trick (for me) is getting dialog between a man and a woman to work.  I really only have my discussions with Camera Girl as my template.  But we’ve known each other for fifty years so it’s almost a pantomime at this point.  One- or two-word sentence fragments, facial expressions and gestures gets a lot done at this point.  This doesn’t translate into character dialog.  Nor would I want my protagonist to sound like me.  I’m anti-heroic.  I’m more like comic relief.

But it has given me greater respect for good writing, even in other genres.  And I think I’m getting a taste for it.  It grows on you.

Well, Another Time

photog OCF, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , ,

What is it that science fiction readers (and writers) like about the genre?  Is it that we escape the bounds of the familiar?  Does it somehow excite us more if the villain shoots a laser, or a blaster at the hero instead of a 9mm?  If the hero is driving an FTL (faster than light) cruiser instead of a BMW does that add to the interest in what he thinks to himself?  If an android or a robot murders a politician instead of an antifa terrorist, does it make the killing more psychologically significant?

Maybe it’s the sense that we can get at the heart of things if we aren’t trapped in the ordinariness of the here and now.  If the bad guys have capture not just a subway train but the whole Milky Way galaxy maybe we feel like we are dealing more with absolutes.  Stark choices cry out for decisions.  In the face of real evil, we will have clarity.

Or maybe it’s just the desire for freedom.  Advanced technology provides the writer with mechanisms that simplify and clean up the story line.  If the writer has painted himself into a corner in his narrative there’s no need to re-write the problem.  Just pull out a heaping helping of unobtanium and leap over the obstacle with perfect ease.

Of course that can lead to some cheesy results.  Probably 90+% of time travel stories fall into this category.  By the end of the story the protagonist is busy murdering a dozen temporal versions of himself on his way to reclaim his life in the here and now.  Heinlein did his “All You Zombies” short story all those years back but I’ve never gotten on board with all that jazz.

Maybe the thing I like about it as a storyteller is the way it allows you to build the story outward.  You can start with a future world that has interplanetary travel and terra-forming and then at some critical juncture an alien race possessing FTL capability can show up and upend this whole fictional world.  Or maybe it’s a species that just floats through space at galactic rotational speed but can live indefinitely in vacuum and when it reaches a new solar system it infects these new worlds and eradicates all other forms of life and then moves on to spread to the next system.  Or maybe a small black hole is drifting into the solar system and will destroy the Earth and Sun unless some new force can be brought to bear against this irresistible force of nature.  Or, or, or…

Of course, the danger is in pulling too many rabbits out of your hat.  You can’t have small black holes, cosmic plagues and FTL aliens showing up all in the same week.  At least not respectably.  The days of the cliff hanger are long past their prime and unless you’re serializing your book by the chapter, surprise technology needs to be believable and can’t be hauled on stage just in the nick of time.

The reason for this topic is that I was just considering the other day a subplot where the underground technology that my protagonist possesses could accidentally discover a space ship that was buried deep beneath the surface of the Earth hundreds of millions of years ago.  It would allow me to add new facets to the story but I’m afraid it will complicate and confuse the story too much.  I think I will leave that for a later story in the same world.  But I have to confess it’s fun to toy with what can be done with that kind of addition.  It would be amazing.

Well, another time.

08FEB2025 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

Sing a song of sixpence,

A pocket full of rye;

Four and twenty blackbirds,

Baked in a pie.

When the pie was opened,

The birds began to sing;

Wasn’t that a dainty dish,

To set before the king?

The king was in his counting-house,

Counting out his money;

The queen was in the parlour,

Eating bread and honey.

The maid was in the garden,

Hanging out the clothes.

There came a little blackbird,

And snapped off her nose.

Nursery Rhymes