Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Ad of the day: New big and Powerbooks from Apple

I think my Bryce demo is old - Bryce 5 is supposed to be native to OS X already. I guess that’s what I get for scraping the bottom of the Internet looking for free stuff. The hottest new free stuff is the beta browser Safari for OS X.2, which broke Apple’s all-time record for downloads today - 300,000 in 24 hours. (And you thought no one used Macs…) Safari is even faster than Chimera. My browser did pretty well against the other competition - IE whatever (I never open the thing myself) and Netscape 7. It was nice to see that I’m not the only hopeless Mac geek using Chimera. Mozilla wasn’t even mentioned per se. Safari is based on Konqueror, an open-source browser about which I’ve heard great things but have never used myself. I still won’t get to use it, though, because Safari requires X.2, which is 0.5 more operating system than I have on my trusty old powerbook.

I need to upgrade, and if I get a new Mac, the new OS comes free. (Shopping logic - you have to love it.) I’ve been thinking 17″ flat-panel iMac, but then there’s that new 17″ Powerbook. Yes, you could buy three or four PC notebooks for that kind of money, but then you’d have to use a PC, wouldn’t you? My Powerbook (a 333MHz G3, also known as Lombard or Bronze for the bronze keyboard) has been so handy over the years that I don’t think I could go back to being chained to a desk - certainly not if the same display is now in a Powerbook. Then again, the swinging iMac arm is very cool.

That’s the trouble with Macs - you want to buy them for looks alone, and once you have one it refuses to die even when the whole black-and-bronze thing is three years out of style. I don’t need a 17″ display to write stories, but there’s this little voice in my head saying save the economy - buy a Mac.

Illustration of the day: “Icebergs on the Sea of Ymn” (for Marriage is Irrelevant)

Tonight’s topic is that most misunderstood of virtues, honor. I mentioned it back in the comments as a non-Christian value in The Lord of the Rings, with the example of Faramir holding himself bound by the statement that he wouldn’t take the Ring if he found it lying in a crossroads. RJ related this to “let your ‘yea’ be ‘yea’ and your ‘nay’ be ‘nay’” — in effect to be so honorable and truthful that a simple “yes” was as binding to them as any sworn oath. The biblical passage, however, is about simple honesty and in some quarters is even considered to be a prohibition against taking oaths.

Honor is not about honesty or courage or chastity or any of the other virtues which it encourages. Honor is about the actor, not the acts. Consider, for example, The Rape of Lucrece. (Read it now if you haven’t; there are spoilers coming.) (Don’t make me say I told you so…)

Lucretia pays the ultimate price; she chooses honor over life itself, because she values honor more than life. One can therefore be a martyr to honor. During the Spanish Inquisition, some of the accused refused to recant their heresy and thus save their lives, not because they still believed in the heresy but because they never had. Honor did not permit them to lie to save their lives. There was some question (among the genuine heretics) of whether these martyrs should be counted towards their God or condemned as suicides.

Honor means, among other things, doing good not because it is good but because you are good. It is an entirely irreligious motive. Similarly, C.G.J. Jacobi cites honor in explaining the purpose of mathematics: C’est pour l’honneur de l’esprit humain. A more religious mathematician should have said the glory of God rather than the honor of Man.

It’s getting late and I haven’t been all that coherent. Here’s the Asatru perspective on why honor and Christianity conflict. Asatru is a Nordic pagan revival religion, bringing us back to the (other) underlying spirit of The Lord of the Rings.

I was too busy to install Bryce this weekend, but now it’s up and running. So far, it’s been annoying. It’s not native MacOS X, so it’s running the Classic environment. I never run that cow - it’s for people who live in the Mac past. I doubt I’ll end up forking out the big bucks for an official copy. My mac is also an antique at 333MHz, so despite the ample memory Bryce is rendering rather slowly.

My ongoing experiments in 3D software (POV-ray after this) are intended to help me visualize alien planetary landscapes. Yes, I do it all for the fic. I’m hoping to illustrate some fanfic, too, before my 30-day trial expires. Watch this space for practice images.

Time passes…

I made this one following the Bryce tutorial - things were much easier once I booted into OS 9 directly.

Tolkienology 101: What is Your Tolkien Belief System?
brought to you by Quizilla

I’ve been going on in my own comments (shame on me) about what constitutes a religious theme in literature. It’s not an idle question for me; the original novel (the Right Novel, to which the Wrong Novel, the Wrong Prequel, and the NaNoWriMo novel are prequels) was meant to be a fictionalization of a certain historical religious persecution. If I ever get anywhere with it, I would judge my success by whether I’d made it peculiar to those events, specificially the religious and philosophical tenets that led to them. I’m not expecting to have any difficulty writing about persecution per se, but making my theme more than a random religious persecution is much more of a challenge.

It’s easy to write, say, Baha’i fiction about today’s Baha’i, because you can say, look, Baha’i. When, instead, you’re writing about an obscure religion ten thousand years in the future, in its struggles against some other equally fictionalized oppressive regime, how do you know they’re Baha’i without either some link to the Baha’i of the past or some uniquely Baha’i moral quandary for them to face? I still don’t know what that pivotal point is, so the novel has gone nowhere fast.

Likewise, in a world where I see only hobbits and dwarves, elves and pre-Christian men, how do I know the theme is a Christian one? Where is the connection to something uniquely Christian? I don’t see it. I judge The Lord of the Rings by the standards I apply to The Right Novel to tell whether I’ve succeeded in writing from the standpoint of a particular religion - is there something there that conveys the spirit of the faith?

It’s not enough for The Right Novel to be moral - I hope all my novels, whether or not they get finished, will be moral. Writing isn’t interesting without some sort of moral dilemma. I hope they’ll convey my morality, and that only the bad guys will endorse moral values of which I disapprove, but I know my morality agrees with everyone else’s on most points - mercy, honor, self-sacrifice, what have you. Those things are a given, and I hope they’re in my fanfic, too. They’re the basic level that I see in The Lord of the Rings, and that’s obviously enough for a great story.

When I look for models for the Right Novel, however, I look for stories that convey ideas with which the reader might disagree. That’s something I find, not in Tolkien, but in Ayn Rand and C.S. Lewis. Not many writers take this approach, and fewer succeed as consistently as an Ayn Rand - some pass off bald statements as theme, like Greg Egan mocking Christians on a bad day, or in the tedious and badly written didactic stories RJ mentioned. That’s not literature, though, that’s assertion.

Considering my lack of progress with the Right Novel, I wonder how often I would write that sort of story of ideas. When I look over my fanfic, I don’t find much in the way of controversial morality - there’s my Ayn Rand pastiche with its debate over the morality of genocide, and a short, obscure story about virtue as its own punishment and another, similar story about breaking the rules. Then there’s a smattering of pro-Borg sentiment, especially in this filk, and a story about mirror-mirror morality. None of the ideas are truly integrated into a story the way I’d want the Right Novel to be.

I’m losing my train of thought, so I’ll stop here. Pardon any incoherence.

RJ’s latest entry reminded me that I had not yet reviewed Many Dimensions by Charles Williams. I was depending on him for the fantastic in Christian literature, so I was a bit surprised to find this novel was, aside from being an good example of pre-war (1931) pro-Moslem sentiment, also a work of Islamic literature in a sense I’ll define below.

The premise is as follows: a churlish Englishman buys an ancient relic from a Persian, brings it home to England, and shows it off to his friends, claiming it’s the crown of Suleiman ben Daood. The stone set therein proves to have great powers, among them that of infinite divisibility. Several copies are divided off and passed around or sold, which angers the faithful Persians to no end. One threatens to raise the Arab street, as they say, in defiance of the English infidels who are so abusing the artifact. The British government has its own plans for the stone.

Miracles, disasters and time-travel paradoxes follow the duplicate stones around the English countryside. The proper order of things is restored only when one of the characters makes the ultimate act of submission, which is to say, islam. At least, that was what I got out of it. Many Dimensions is rather a dense, philosophical work not aimed to please the modern reader, though Charles Williams was an Inkling.

It pleases me only in that it gives me an example of Islamic fiction for my list below. Let me define R fiction, where R is a religion, as fiction that has one of the following as a major theme:

• The realistic lives of modern practitioners of that faith, as such: The Chosen and Daniel Deronda (Jewish fiction)
• Fictionalized past lives of religious figures: The Last Temptation of Christ (Christian)
• Fictional recreations of religious figures in another milieu, usually a fantastic one: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (Christian) and Orson Scott Card’s Homecoming series (Mormon)
• Outright allegory: The Pilgrim’s Progress (Christian)
• Fantastic realism - that is, stories set in the real world in which miraculous or diabolical events occur consonant with the tenets of a particular religion: That Hideous Strength and The Screwtape Letters (Christian), also Many Dimensions (Moslem)
• Religious tourism - that is, stories set in locales postulated by the religion, or during future events predicted by the religion: The Divine Comedy, The Great Divorce, and the Left Behind series (Christian)

That’s all. That someone is a Christian does not make their fiction Christian in any useful sense of the term. Monotheism, in particular, is not synonymous with Christianity, nor are themes of faith, hope, self-sacrifice, temptation, resurrection, or ethics in general.

I have nothing against Christian literature, but I do not consider The Lord of the Rings a Christian work. It is not realistic, it contains no religious figures, and it is not an allegory. Tolkien despised allegory. He said that Middle Earth was “a monotheistic world of natural theology.” There is nothing within The Lord of the Rings that makes it Christian rather than, say, Baha’i.

Perhaps a better argument could be made for the Silmarillion as Christian fiction, but nowhere in Tolkien do I see the ideas that I would consider essentially Christian - original sin, justification by faith, the death of Christ for the forgiveness of sins, the damnation of (apparently) good people for not believing in Christ, transubstantiation, the Trinity, etc. If a person were offended by such things, Tolkien would not offend him but C.S. Lewis would.

I find the notion of islam alien, and I found Many Dimensions strange to that extent. Lord of the Rings, on the other hand, reminds me of the Norse epics that inspired Tolkien and of the (pagan) heroic tradition in general - of battles and honor and courage and fate and magic and true bloodlines. Tolkien may have softened it where it is harsh in, say, William Morris, but he did not change it into anything recognizably Christian.

Forth Eorlingas!

Cool download of the day: a free 30-day demo of Bryce 5 for OS X (and the update to 5.0.1). I couldn’t find a demo on Corel’s site, but eventually I thought to check Apple’s list of 3D and imaging software for the Mac.

The Hole wasn’t a sci-fi novel, just a psychological thriller. I found it on the library’s new book shelves. Guy Burt wrote it when he was 18, though he does seem to have taken a while to publish it. Maybe it was published earlier in Britain.

I couldn’t quite follow the rapidly rotating POV for the first few chapters. Three POV characters - two women in first person and one man in third person, swapped back and forth every scene, and they were pretty short scenes. The whole book was rather short, so when I failed to understand the ending, I read the whole thing over to see if it made more sense. It didn’t.

I’m always annoyed when authors mistake ambiguity for depth. I’m not sure what happened in The Hole, and I doubt the author knows, either. Lovecraft can convey horror by a rather sketchy approach to the darkness from outside, but that’s not plot, that’s description. When you get into XF government conspiracies, or What Really Happened in The Hole, the plot is AWOL and the reader is left empty-handed.

Teranesia by Greg Egan seemed like a sure thing. It started out well, but the plot never seemed to come together. I expected more and bigger things to come from the main characters’ youth on the eponymic island. I wanted to see more of what future evolution held for humanity. I wanted an ending, and instead I got a two-page resolution.

Teranesia was short and somewhat bitter. The main characters bashed both religion and, more amusingly, Social Text. At one point the brother worried terribly that his little sister, having fallen under the bad influence of their aunt the professor, would grow up to be a deconstructionist, but she didn’t. I had hoped there would be an explanation somewhere of why. Egan even skimped on the science, giving only enough biology for an above-average sci-fi novel, rather than his usual idea overload - which, perhaps, is an advantage to this novel over his others.

Cool blackwork pattern of the day: Pomegranates from Elizabethan Blackwork

Cool quote of the day: Writers will write because they canít not write (dive into mark). Or in other words, Writers are the people who can’t not write. I suppose that means bloggers are the people who can’t not blog.

Another good link from dive into mark defines Logical Rudeness. I wish I had the time to read it all, but I have a thousand words to write still, and I can’t not write them.

Title: The Borg Queen
Author: Jemima
Contact: webmaster@jemimap.cjb.net
Series: VOY
Part: 1/1
Rating: G
Codes: filk
Summary: You’re not a true filker until you’ve filked “The Boxer.”

I am just a Borg drone
Though my role is manifold;
I once offered up resistance
Like a creature ruled by instinct -
Such are humanoids
All meat and vein
Now this drone does what she has to do
And disregards the pain.
She’ll comply…

When they took my home
And my family,
I was no more than a girl
Kidnapped by metallic strangers
To a silent maturation chamber
Drowning, scared,
Left to grow,
Taken out when I was finished,
Sent to check a manifold,
Seeing all the places
Only drones can go.

She’ll comply,
You’ll comply and he’ll comply,
She’ll comply,
Every living, breathing thing yes it will comply…

An assimilation chamber -
I’m assigned another job
But I see none like me,
Just an endless flow of those
Considered worthiest.
I cut and pare,
But sometimes one looks familiar and
I let them out of there.

She’ll comply,
You’ll comply and he’ll comply,
She’ll comply,
Every living, breathing thing yes it will comply…

And the years pass by like seasons on
A world I know is gone -
I am home
In a unimatrix lead by
One who once was me.
We expand,
Taking homes.

On a Borg cube reigns the Borg Queen,
Nexus to a billion brains,
From a nation long forgotten
By all save those who cut them down,
Re-engineered their children
To know neither fear nor pain,
Gave a number to their species
Of which only drones remain.

She’ll comply,
You’ll comply and he’ll comply,
She’ll comply,
Every living, breathing thing yes it will comply.
You’ll comply and he’ll comply,
She’ll comply,
Every living, breathing thing yes it will comply.
[Repeat ad nauseum]

It’s that time of year and everybody knows the meme:

1. Sleep (for the muse)
2. Write 1,000 words a day
3. Get published (for money)
4. Finish revising Colony
5. Make serious inroads into the Seven Saga
6. Do all those little things I keep putting off, like the sewing and the cleaning
7. Reclaim a hobby lost to writing (I’m thinking cross-stitch)
8. Work 9 to 5 instead of 10 to 6 (or get laid off)
9. Use my health insurance before I get laid off

That’s a lot of new leaves to turn over, but if you don’t make resolutions, you’ll never break any. The depressing ones at the end are in honor of the worst December stock market showings since 1931.