Notes (mostly to self) on N.K. Jemisin's The Fifth Season

(Technically spoilers ahead)

* Assured, immersive, easeful, affecting, solid, a sense of being timely, up-to-date, "core." Colloquial. Ambitious without feeling strained. Makes it look easy (sprezzatura).

* The methods are obvious: good storytelling, good worldbuilding. Of course that's just the beginning. What does The Fifth Season teach us counts as good storytelling, good worldbuilding? What is a 'story' and/or a 'world' at this precise moment in history, at this particular textual nexus? (Could I go so far as to say 'strong characterization' or even 'relateable characters'? What does that consist in?)

* So very distant from Tolkienian epic fantasy. And yet finds ways to rekindle its pleasures?

* The conceit that ecological catastrophe can be averted and/or fixed through the power of the imagination (in the book, 'orogeny'). And/or: the conceit that ecological catastrophe can be averted/and or fixed through worldbuilding (cf. normal sense of orogeny, mountain-making). Comforting. Reflexive. (Surely we all fear climate change now. Perhaps the deniers most of all).

* Do storytellers only speak to their listeners? Or also for their listeners? What are the stories we most desire to hear? Are they the same as the ones we most desire to speak? Are they the stories we cannot find the words or images or names or skill to express? Are they what we fear to say, or are too traumatized to say, or rightly know we should not say?

* Anything to say about pronouns & POV?! Second person really works, especially when strands come together at the end. Cf. Banks Feersum Enjinn (structure wise) and (pov wise) Okorafor's Lagoon and Phoenix, Banks' Complicity, Leckie's Ancillary.

* A protagonist who commits massacres. "They will not realize for weeks that you killed the town in this moment" -- the town, ambiguous between object and humans. The realization "I killed Uche" rather than the realization "look what I've literally just done, look who I've killed, look who I may have killed though there is perhaps still time to do something about it." How do we think about "problematic" in relation to that huh.

* To generalize ahistorically a little about what "great storytelling" is ... could it sometimes be figuring out how to "have things both ways"? In Fifth Season I sense these are "my" politics and yet they are owned more expertly, more luxuriously than in real life: they aren't fraught with the same dangers, there is no sense of self-denial on political principle. Yes, there is conflict, there is estrangement ... but the fit between myself and the politics embodied here, that feels natural, comfortable, inevitable. Cf. story sludge.

* How much concern is there with subjectivitybuilding, i.e., how much is the strangeness of the world reflected in the strangeness of the personality types? I think not much. Just slightly though. For the most part these people, despite it all, are us. (Becky Chambers's Long Way as an example of taking it even further. Definitely contemporary personality structures projected into the future).

* A premium on educational capital. The book feels like it esteems education. Hard knowledge work.

* That extended subplot about getting the kind of respect they deserve. Could it seem weird and petty? The fact that it doesn't, is that because of cognitive estrangement / allegory? There is no mistaking it for something that is merely in the story-world. It is 100% about a certain style of brutally brazen interpersonal racism. Episode makes sense because it is interwoven in some way with the real world. We know this isn't just about fictional identity characteristics, fictional decorum, fictional formal equality, fictional regimes of rights. The intensity of that connection managed upward and downward in different episodes and aspects. We KNOW what word is behind the word "rogga." At other points, particularly the more institutional / systemic persecution of the orogenes, less of a one to one correlation?

* Just btw: it's one of those books where by convention the characters are assumed to literally play host to the words that are "from" their "POV." E.g. "what made her think 'ready'"? (Not exact quotes here).

* A sustained downgrading of the concept of "the end of the world." The world ends all the time, it's nbd. A sustained play on the shared planet we all live on and the (capitalist individualist?) personal world, as in "my whole world shattered that day" or "my son was my whole world" (really? Did he have an atmosphere? Arable lands?) Cf. in its many variants, "nowadays it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism." Question: how does this book make me feel, in the end, about ecological catastrophe? More anxious or more comforted? And what else? And does what it makes me think align to what it makes me feel?

* Stone people. Cf. Pollock's and especially Pratchett's (trolls and golems)? Lithic agency!

* Not happy about the Malthusian edge. And the quasi-authorial interjections about what "matters." Cf. 'Farnham's Freehold' etc. Of course again, super skilled handling of a core strand of sf, albeit an evil one.

* A lot of quiet kink. Fulcrum obviously abusers, but also the faint logic of BDSM. And the "shut up I'm here to fuck you" breeding programme stuff (although that does lead to some genuinely seriously unsexy zero enthusiasm "sex"). But a lot of the time, hard to say why exactly, but it's kinda hot. " I can't tell if this novel is flirting with me or not and the hottest part of it is that I can't even tell."

* So, HOT.

* Does it throw you in at the deep end? And then reward you for sticking it out, 100 pages or so in? At the same time it's not exactly a steep learning curve. Or at least you're I in no doubt iit is going to make sense eventually.

* The final chapters quietly virtuoso in giving the reader a lot of what it is rumoured to most like. Sex, big fights, death of reasonably major characters, a sort of structural twist (of the engineered-by-withholding kind -- cf. e.g. Banks's Use of Weapons and Feersum Endjinn -- which I find nonetheless gratifying), a show-down with a nemesis, a sort of motive twist (last word of novel, saw it coming btw, cf. Feersum again), a coming-together-of-two-storylines, a controlling gaslighting abuser resisted with a defiant existential self-assertion, horrific "sacrifices" (hmmm & cf. Ringworld), action sequences fragmented around interposed aphorisms/horoscopes ("There are moments when everything changes"), apocalypse(s), a special power leveling up, etc. Oh and a glossary!

* Title. Box sets.

* What happens when two characters merge? Cf. marriage. Cf. rightsizing, Mergers & Acquisitions. Cf. how it plays out within the folk poetics of relateability. (What if you like one character and hate the other, and they turn out to be the same?)

* Interesting thing with "you" turning out to be in the other story. Because in another way, of course you the reader had to be there all along, to bring it to life.

* Cf. the powerful and persecuted protagonist of Phoenix. One very distinctive thing: Fifth Season has a sense of record-breaking. I.e. this is something that speculative fiction often does, and here a new record has been set for doing it in a particularly difficult and intense way. (Jemisin makes it look easy, of course). One thing in particular. That is the reconciliation of being special and powerful and magical with being persecuted and oppressed and abused. Jemisin reconciles an extraordinary level of power with an extraordinary level of persecution. "Gods in chains."

Story Sludge Redux

One problem for the supporters of Narrativity is the danger of unconscious falsifying revision—fictionalization, confabulation—of one’s ‘self-narrative’. I will call this Revision for short. Revision may sometimes begin consciously, with deliberate lies told to others, e.g., and it may have semi-conscious instars, but one has not engaged in genuine Revision in the present sense unless or until one no longer has any awareness of having falsified anything. It is true that the conscious/non-conscious border is murky and porous, but cases of Revision are clear for all that—and extremely common. [...] 

Galen Strawson, "Narrativity and non-Narrativity" (2010)

For some probably dumb reason, I've adopted the love of storytelling as a pet peeve. I mean people who love storytelling: stop it you guys! I mean your love of storytelling as such. That half-awestruck, half-mischievous attitude that is mostly taken up -- as it happens -- by professional or wannabe professional storytellers, or by their closest economic allies, whenever they speak of the Power of Narrative.

Telling stories is what makes us human. Telling stories is what makes us human? Maybe it's what makes you human, humans! Unremitting and unqualified piety in the presence of storytelling per se just makes me as cross as a frog in a sock.

I've sort of done this grumble properly in a short essay in Newb Maps of Hell (subtitled, with misleading portent, "vol. I"). But the tl;dr is: (a) we should at least be open to the idea that many good stories might do bad things, and (b) given this, it's possible that when a bunch of people are nodding along in happy wonderment at the power of storytelling, each one of us may well be thinking of different powers and different stories.

To be fair, when the sentiment comes not from a storyteller, but from a reader, that does make me much less cross. Cross as a frog in some crotchless body-stockings possibly, if we're using the same scale.

Furthermore, this particular family of clichés often escapes the lips of writers who are otherwise pretty damn quick-witted and wise, I guess in the same way as do burps and sneezes. And many apparent evangelists, whether storytellers or readers, may offer more qualified and nuanced accounts somewhere, only to find that the feel-good, upbeat, up-in-the-dumps bits get sheared off and quoted and shared and made into memes. Or it's those bits that are the easiest to reach for, when there's a microphone crawling up your chin and a bunch of necks not yet nodding. Which is fair enough: almost as bad as preaching to the choir is crosspatching to the below-quorum.

But all that aside, I just came across Galen Strawson's short essay "Narrativity and non-Narrativity" (2010) which although not something that has the same pet peeve, is at least willing to come with me while I take mine for a walk and a poop. I may not agree with everything you say, Professor Strawson -- the Diachronic/Non-Diachronic "brain chemistry" bit feels pretty dubious -- but I will defend to the death your right to come with me while I take my pet peeve for a walk and a poop, if we're using the same scale. Strawson concludes that it's false that we naturally see our lives in narrative terms, or that we should see our lives in narrative terms. He sees his position as entirely consistent with the reconstructive and confabulatory aspects of memory and personal identity.

As a complete By The Way, while I'm mentioning Strawson, he has a lovely and odd chapter in Mental Reality (1994) on imaginary creatures he calls his Weather Watchers -- they're sort of his Chilled Triffid take on Chalmers et al.'s philosophical zombies -- which I bet would collide amusingly and maybe even fruitfully with some recent plant neurobiology and totally BeAble-Thing-shit crazy phenomenology-inflected ecocritical thought such as Michael Marder's Plant Thinking (2013).

*   *   *

It's not just about entertainment. As storytellers, we have a responsibility to...hrk! *gags* *vomits out an entire endangered panda*

— Sam Sykes (@SamSykesSwears) December 21, 2015

*   *   *

UPDATE: My friend wrote to me with a really good point. "I think my main objection is different, which is that people who tell you they are storytellers are normally so boring."

Short SF&F in 2014

Some excellent squirming parcels of short fiction silked over at The Spider's House (Nina Allan). Never let anyone tell you Silky Stories Are For Losers.

Here's Zeno Agency's Short Fiction Watch & Amal El-Mohtar's Something Rich & Strange.

& here's some short fiction published in 2014, mostly available on the web (I'll keep adding probably):

Tim Maughan, "The Four Days of Christmas" > see also BBC / Unknown Fields Division report
Alyssa Wong, "The Fisher Queen" > Wong interview
Yoon Ha Lee, "Always the Harvest" (Upgraded)
Timothy Thornton, "Sunrise"
Paul Graham Raven, "Los Piratas del Mar de Plastico (Pirates of the Plastic Ocean)" (Twelve Tomorrows) > in Jo Listicle
Carmen Maria Machado, "The Husband Stitch"
Project Itoh, "From the Nothing, With Love" (Phantasm Japan) > Mamatas endorsement
Sarah M. Watson, "The Internet of Paternalistic Things"
Sulagra Misna, "Homes of the Future"
Sofia Samatar, "Ogres of East Africa" (Long Hidden)
Oliver Buckram, "Two Truths and a Lie" (Interzone #252, May/Jun 14)
Adam Roberts, "Gross Thousand" (Noir)
Tim Maughan, "Ghost Hardware" (Arc 2.2) > fiction & fact three-legged race to the future
Yoon Ha Lee, "Combustion Hour"
Rose Lemberg, "A City on its Tentacles"
Kelly Link, "I Can See Right Through You"
Alix E. Harrow, "The Animal Women" > read by Anaea Lay
Cory Doctorow, "Huxleyed into the Full Orwell"
Elizabeth Bear, "This Chance Planet"
Rachel Swirsky, "Grand Jeté (The Great Leap)"
John Chu, "A Cost Benefit Analysis of the Proposed Trade-Offs for the Overhaul of the Barricade"
Tim Maughan, "Your Gaze"
Amal El-Mohtar, "The Truth About Owls" > intro
Paul Kincaid, "The Lost Domain"
M. John Harrison, The 4th Domain (Kindle: UK, US)
Martin McGrath, "King Rook" (Albedo One #45)
Rosanne Rabinowitz, "Living in the Vertical World" (Mind Seed)
Yoon Ha Lee, "Wine"
Linda Nagata, "Codename: Delphi"
JY Yang, "Storytelling for the Night Clerk"
Shira Lipkin, "The Final Girl"
Carmen Maria Machado, "Help Me Follow my Sister into the Land of the Dead"
N.K. Jemisin, "Walking Awake"
Polenth Blake, "Never the Same" > in Nina Allan BSFA listicle
Timothy Thornton, "Children's Story"
Genevieve Valentine, "A Dweller in Amenty"
Amal El-Mohtar, "The Lonely Sea in the Sky" (Lightspeed #49: Women Destroy Science Fiction!) > on the name Lucy
Bonnie Jo Stufflebeam, "The Damaged" (Interzone #250)
Cory Doctorow, "Petard: A Tale of Just Desserts" (Twelve Tomorrows) > in Jo listicle
Saladin Ahmed, "Without Faith, Without Law, Without Joy" > at Rich & Strange
Sofia Samatar, "How to Get Back to the Forest"
Kai Ashante Wilson, "The Devil in America"
Catherine F. King, "The Ninety-Ninth Bride"
Alex Dally MacFarlane, "Pocket Atlas of Planets"
Aliette de Bodard, "The Days of the War, as Red as Blood, as Dark as Bile"
Alix E. Harrow, "A Whisper in the Weld"
Rhiannon Rasmussen, "The Hymn of Ordeal, No. 23"
E Lily Yu, "The Urashima Effect"
Rose Lemberg, "Stalemate" > at Rich & Strange
Margaret Ronald, "The Innocence of Place"
Yoon Ha Lee, "The Bonedrake's Penace"
Kate Elliott, "The Courtship"
Theodora Goss, "Cimmeria: From the Journal of Imaginary Anthropology" > Ian Sales's BSFA #1
Bruce Sterling, "The Brain Dump"
Deborah Walker, "The Three Brother Cities" (Mind Seed)
Ian McDonald, "The Fifth Dragon" (Reach for Infinity)
Greg Egan, "Seventh Sight" (Upgraded)
Nick Mamatas, "The Burning Stones" (LampLight Vol. 3 #1)
Kameron Hurley, The Body Project
Rose Biggin, "A Game Proposition" (Irregularity)
Ken Liu, "The Regular" (Upgraded)
Lauren Beukes, "Slipping" (Twelve Tomorrows)
Gareth L. Powell, "This is How You Die" (Interzone #251, Mar/Apr 14)
Denni Schnapp, "Mind Seed" (Mind Seed)
Helen Callaghan, "Sex and the Single Hive Mind" (Mind Seed)
Angela Kendrick, "Half a Man" (Kindle: US, UK)

... this list saying much more about supply of variation than it does about adaptive fitness, i.e. more about my reading habits than about what's out there that deserves your tender scrutinies.

Storytelling and Sludge

When storytellers tell you how great stories are, are they any different from any producer enthusing about their product? Why don't we give storytellers the same amused skepticism we give to someone selling a blender?

Here's a related question. Some right wing genre writers (Sad Puppies and that lot) will tell you that right wing science fiction and fantasy has the best stories. They may not always be subtle, they may not always have the most elegant writing, or the most thought-through politics, but they've got the best stories. What if it's true?

*   *   *

Eric S. Raymond has a genuinely-trying-to-be-balanced-and-thoughtful post about how science fiction is a bit better when it's written by fanatically right wing asshats. Real "Cursed Coloncornuthaum: -4 Charisma" types, according to the post, "can't lose," and are destined to inherit the canon, or at least the people's hearts. More-or-less. Raymond calls these guys the Evil League (nowadays I guess they might be called Puppies), and he calls everyone else the Rabbits.

It's obviously a whole heap of embleer hraka, but I wonder if there are whiffs of truth, to do with (a) "colonization by English majors" (but save that for another time) and (b) storytelling?

Pick up a Rabbit property like Rich Horton’s The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy 2014 and you’ll read large numbers of exquisitely crafted little numbers about nothing much. The likes of Correia, on the other hand, churn out primitive prose, simplistic plotting, at best serviceable characterization – and vastly more ability to engage the average reader.

I do sometimes have a sense that storytelling is more difficult if your politics aren't solidly conservative or reactionary. It means you face a slightly denser cloud of trade-offs to navigate through. Trade-offs between your political conscience and your viscerally gripping plot, I mean. With time and ingenuity and energy and Promethean artifice, you can probably still wiggle your way through without making any trade-offs. But betimes fuck wiggling. And/or: maybe you'll just pick a strategy that seduces the reader on some other level than plot, maybe you'll become a stylist or a wit?

Or to put it bluntly.

Revolutionary stories are harder to tell than reactionary ones.

Is that too blunt? Is it nuts? To me, it sounds like a pretty modest conclusion to draw from the pretty widely-accepted principle that there is such a thing as ideology. That is: culture has a certain slow current in it, a kind of sludgy, slushy flow that -- overall, and in the long run-off -- tends to support wealth, privilege and power, and to betray, bewilder, atomise, marginalise and recuperate everything and everyone else.

Maybe that's why I've never been too sure about fetishizing stories as such, something which seems widespread in a lot of fantasy writing in particular. "Stories: aren't they totally fuckable?" "Hey you people who have self-selected as a constituency who like stories, you know what I think is really important? Do you want to know. Stories."

"We make meaning out of stories -- that's what humans do," claims Mike R. Underwood.

Authors I like -- Borges, Calvino, Živković, Pratchett, Pullman, me -- are guilty of this kind of faux folk pro-narrative populism. Constantly turning round to you with curly hair and huskily whispering, "The dream outlasts the dreamer, the story outlasts its teller!" with twinkles pulsing in their dead imaginative eyes.

Isn't the story-sludge, in its natural state, economically regressive, ecologically unsound, and a bit bigoted? Shouldn't the attitude to stories be a bit more, "Stories are here to stay, so we might as well make the best of them!" *grins* *falls dead with exhaustion*

(Neil Gaiman, to be fair, signed my Lane with "HI JOE [sic]! IT IS THE DISINGENUOUS CHAUVINISM OF THE CULTURAL PRODUCER TO PERMIT THE IMPLICATION THAT *ANY* STORY WILL DO TO PROPAGATE UNCHALLENGED XNG" while several people waited, but he should be more vocal about that stuff! (If it ever turned out that wasn't true: we owe it to each other to tell stories, Neil Gaiman)).

But say you were only interested in gratifying, escapist, and (probably) forgettable genre storytelling. Say you didn't want to be Evil League of Evil or Rabbit exactly, but to be somewhere in the middle, or to rise about the distinction, or sink below it, or something.

There's definitely a sweet-spot where your writing can sort of surf that story-sludge, so that your plot can deniably benefit from the fumes and spray of various pervasive stereotypes and fetishes -- you know, an ordinary girl with an extraordinary talent, or love at first sight, or a femme fatale, or a manic pixie dream girl, or a virgin, or a tart with a heart, or a butch chick who scrubs up chic, or a gritty underdog (triumphant), a knowingly retro damsel (in distress, subversible), an angry babymomma, a Meet Cute, a wicked CEO of a bad apple multinational corporation, a crooked politician (unmasked), a maverick detective (results), a plot voucher (elfin, redeemed), an already seven-foot stoic warrior-woman scowlingly consenting to wear heels, an exquisitely crafted little number, an uncle tom, a shrill do-gooder, a level head and a lantern jaw, a tonto, a jaleface minstrel, a complex relationship with dad, a svengali (with a Past, mind), some inscrutably slitted eyes, short grief, scars that make you interesting, Fate, bootstraps (own), bikini (chainmail), a savage (noble AF), a guido, a non-specific ethnic (kooky), an unflinching mercenary, a Latin (passionate), a Latin (proundly grandoise), revenge, revenge, the streets, the Real World, revenge, revenge, a hotbed mosque, ambient women, a shrill holier-than-thou hypocrite, Faery-bankrolled largesse for my dawgs, an amputation (inspiring, eventually), bros, a monocultural alien species, a perfectable humanity, an incorrigibly expansionist alien species (corriged the Hard Way), an Everyman confused by the confusingness of it all finally finding the answer ... in his heart, some hot, increasingly-consensual sex, a Chosen One, a sex cure, a deeply flawed anti-hero, a just law, an unjust law, a wicked utopian, a deus ex neckbeard, the feelgood uniqueness of humans, a tainted individual redeemed by suicidal sacrifice, a make-over, nest defence, a totalising trauma explaining all behaviour, an orc, a haranguing mother-in-law, slavery as a sign of how exotic this setting is, a swineherd king, a thieves' guild, no unfamiliar ideologies, a lone inventor, a fat stupid gullible US tourist, a far future society terribly knowledgeable about (a small part of) 21st century society, the-bright-side-of-massacred-families-is-vigilante-dads, the incompetence of professional armies vs. ragtag pluck, a convenient suicide, a terrorist "refugee", good vs. evil, royal blood, a loopy hippy, being forced alas to commit genocide so that a magnitude more souls may be saved, vengeance, vengeance, a sniper, a tribesman's childlike wonder, a rich and pampered activist, some Darwin-made-me-badass shtick, all our nerves a-thrill to the harsh babble of the animate towelhead, the swelling relief of the pet running barking through the rubble and corpses, a natural genius, anybody who is steely in any way whatsoever, first contact as divine revelation, anybody who is simply evil, the lovely importance of ancestors, a crone, if-you-die-in-the-game-(/flamewar)-you-die-for-real, torture comeuppance, a human shield, twins (destined), a you-look-so-fetching-in-that-haze-of-gunsmoke-and-Stockholm-Syndrome romance, a HIDEOUSLY UGLY nurse see what I did there?, everything being a game, stories making us what we are, reneging your debt being evil, androgyny being untrustworthy, fat being evil, bureaucracy being evil, bureaucracy being myopic and counterproductive, darkness being evil, complexity being evil, ugliness being evil, the cheer of the street urchin wits-o-phage, deformity being evil, violence the solution, violence the solution, violence the solution, the pluck of lightly Americanised Tory heartlands the solution, an ultraviolent rape revenge the solution, swarms being evil, the pitilessness of the gnome moneylender, the stop-at-nothing nuclear defence of the nuclear family, or indeed just of your home, or some other ingot of ultra-compressed narrativium -- without actually slipping under the sludge, without actually being off-puttingly and distractingly offensive, not even to a readership of hearts of gold and eyes of steel.

Maybe -- I think -- it can be OK to do that.

(And/or to do other kinds of compromise. You can weigh one thing against of another, you can sort-of-cancel-out some dodgy indulgey technique you've used with some seriously vital political clarity somewhere in the same story).

But I think that, as fans and critics, we should try to acknowledge and appreciate the cunning of any gripping tale which doesn't rely on the standard-issue fetters and clamps to do all its gripping for it. The structures of storytelling are endlessly pliable to principled wit. And I also think that, more trickily, we should give credit to the tale that has permitted itself to contort into some weird, counterintuitive, and less-than-gripping shape, because of its fidelity to a principle of political resistance.

But above all, being alert to the semi-translucent, unpredictable play of political struggles within science fiction and fantasy means also means acknowledging that those struggles aren't ultimately decided in the cultural sphere at all.

It is easiest to get that point if you go up on your haunches, prick your ears and twitch your nose at the breeze. Even if we do sometimes run up against what feel like fixed, non-negotiable structures within storytelling -- against rules of (licked) thumb about what turns pages, about what readers care about and what they don't, about what gets pulses racing and what doesn't -- well, who wants to pander to power? It is an Evil League of Evil move to fixate and fawn on such structures, to mistake the rules of a game for the Rules of Life, to mistake the ball of a gag for the Sunrise on a Final Horizon of all Norms.

Battle songs are not written for Goodreads stars. Not mainly anyway. People whose lives are shaped by the desire for social justice and the hope of social justice -- I think this is usually true -- have other shit going on in those lives than writing science fiction and fantasy. They have other people's lives going on in their lives, for starters. And because whatever science fiction and fantasy they do write is neither the totality nor the centre of their political consciousness -- even better, their political agency -- it is rich and free, and it participates in the fullness of life, all its perpetual battle, passion, savvy, injury, hilarity, philosophy, acuity, solidarity, comprehension, emergence, tenderness, realism and optimism. How could it not?

*   *   *

Note 1: "... fetishizing of stories as such ..." Maybe the point is that the idea of a story is itself so rigorously recuperated, so ferociously defended in its ideological function, that all this feels faintly like the the wrong kind of sacrilege -- it feels kind of wrong to make that short step from (a) the idea that we are immersed in ideology to (b) the idea that the story form itself has picked a side. "In the enemy language it is necessary to lie" (Sean Bonney, Letter on Poetics (After Rimbaud)). You can take that idea in at least two ways: as a recommendation of tactics, and/or as a warning, that when the voices that are the most brutally silenced somehow struggle through to tell their stories, what they say isn't quite true. Not quite true because it is forced into story form. (Although cf. "with time and ingenuity and yadda yadda" q.v.).

Note 2: "... these battles aren't decided in the cultural sphere ..." -- that's the dialectic nature of ideology critique, I guess? Ideology critique is the interplay of (a) a ruthless examination of how our reality is constructed through culture, institutions, norms, mores, language, habitus; and (b) praxis, that is, getting stuck in wherever the will to struggle is getting diverted into the virtual, the abstract, the disconnectedly cultural, and orienting it to where it can do real good.

Note 3: "Eric S. Raymond has a ..." Dull disclosure plus hmm: I haven't read anything by these Evil League of Evil people yet. The drift of this post, translated into the vocab which inspired it: Rabbit fiction is probably much better than Evil League fiction, but even if it isn't (and maybe I will find out it isn't), by definition it doesn't matter in the least; even if the Rabbits were total roadkill fiction-wise, who wouldn't want to be a Rabbit? The way Raymond characterises Evil, it sounds like they needlessly restrict their revels to one cramped, lukewarm, strictly-defined bathtub. I have read a lil: dipped into the Hugo nominated Correia and Vox Day and want to give the former a proper read eventually, and there's a John C. Wright staring at me right now from the shelf . . . and possibly a Hoyt on the Kindle . . . I tend to really enjoy Neal Asher, but he's probably not evil enough. I always loved Heinlein as a kid, especially Job. Hmm.

Note 4: "Revolutionary stories are harder to tell than reactionary ones." This is broad-brush stuff, so perhaps it's not worth trying to make this discrimination, but . . . Thesis: revolutionary stories are harder to tell than progressive stories. Progressive stories are harder to tell than reactionary stories. Reactionary stories are harder to tell than conservative stories. Conservative stories are the easiest of all stories to tell.

Note 5: I wonder if story-sludge is at all similar to what Terry Pratchett's wizards called narrativium.

Note 6: Gaimain and/or Pratchett: “Hell may have all the best composers, but heaven has all the best choreographers.”