Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word count: 637

Filk:   Holodeck Hero
Author:  Jemima
Original:  "Paperback Writer" by John Lennon and Paul McCartney

Dear Captain Janeway, where've you been all Night?
I know it's dark out there; do you feel alright?
The crew's getting worried - we all need a break
I was bored to death, so I programmed me a holodeck hero
Holodeck hero

It's a silly program 'bout a silly man
And my Klingon babe doesn't understand
My best friend's bucking for a second pip
It's a long long trip so he helps me be a holodeck hero
Holodeck hero

Holodeck hero

It's got twenty chapters, give or take a few
I can whip up more in a shift or two -
See the Mines of Merc'ry, visit Planet X,
Don a rocketpack - don't you want to be a holodeck hero?
Holodeck hero

When you're feeling naughty you can play the Queen
She's the campiest vixen that you've ever seen
If there's any trouble use the pheremones,
Save the universe - you were born to be a holodeck hero
Holodeck hero

Holodeck hero

Holodeck hero, holodeck hero
Holodeck hero, holodeck hero
Holodeck hero, holodeck hero
Holodeck hero, holodeck hero

[fade out]

Word count: 1315

The following is an email I sent to the C/7 list in regards to the perennial “Did Seven ruin Voyager?” controversy. An abbreviated version of the argument below can be found in the comment I made in Rocky’s Seven of Mine LJ entry last month on the same topic.

People who pin the changes in Voyager on Seven’s appearance are missing the point. The show had problems at least a season before Seven, and I would say two seasons beforehand. As I recall, the actor playing Kes quit and Seven was a replacement. That a replacement for a relatively minor character ended up taking over the show is a sign that there was a huge vacuum in the show waiting to be filled, and Seven filled it.

An ensemble is not enough to carry a sci-fi show, and it wasn’t carrying Voyager. While ensembles are nice in principle, they can lead to an unfocused feeling where all the characters blend into one another, have no disagreements or tensions, and are, to put it bluntly, boring. TNG was terribly dull at the character level because of the shiny happy Starfleet ensemble - the most interesting thing those people did together was play poker. TOS, on the other hand, never had this problem, partly because of Spock and McCoy’s constant bickering and partly because it was never an ensemble show. TOS was about Kirk, Spock and McCoy. By season 3, Voyager wasn’t about anything and didn’t have the novelty value of TNG to keep people interested. There were better sci-fi shows around.

I think people overrate the value of an ensemble cast, or to be more precise, they use the “ensemble” canard because they can’t pin down what really went wrong with the show. If Voyager had suddenly become focused on Janeway, Chakotay and the EMH, the most vocal critics (whether J/C or pure Chakotay fans) would never have complained that, say, Tuvok was getting shafted. Chakotay was a pivotal character, and not only for the J/Cer’s romantic purposes. In a sense, Seven of Nine did not replace either Kes or the mystical ensemble - she replaced Chakotay.

Voyager’s early momentum was shot not when Seven showed up, but when the conflict between Starfleet and Maquis (and Tom) was brushed off. After that there was no internal conflict in the crew to carry between shows, and the nature of the premise kept external conflicts (say, Picard or Kirk vs. the Starfleet brass) from recurring. Chakotay was the most affected by this change because as the leader of the Maquis he was the one who either personified or resolved the resulting conflicts. The canon Paris/Torres relationship was a bad idea (”Blood Fever”, third season) because it defused yet another important area of conflict, as did “Resolutions” for the Janeway/Chakotay non-relationship.

When Seven appeared, she took up Chakotay’s dropped mantle of being the show’s “contrary.” She was outside of Starfleet like the Maquis had been, she had an annoying personality like Spock’s, and she had to learn about humanity like Data, while being tempted to go back to her own people like Odo. She filled a vacuum. If the Maquis issues hadn’t been dropped, then the show could have gone back and forth between other conflicts and Seven-based conflicts, maintaining the ensemble illusion. Instead, it rode on Seven for some time until new conflicts could be created. Demoting Tom was a good idea of which little was ever made, since it had no effect on his duties or his painfully dull relationship with B’Elanna. The EMH’s new, even more annoying personality was a better move for the writers. He became the character you loved to hate, whereas pre-Seven he had been the adorable curmudgeon.

Now it’s possible the Maquis conflict was doomed from the start, since it was political and Trek is a sci-fi show. The writers weren’t up for producing DS9 in the Delta Quadrant, but at least they could have kept up the Starfleet/Maquis banter to the Spock/McCoy level. In fact, as the real conflict subsided, joking about it was likely to increase in such a community. Instead, the writers dropped a major premise of the show, leaving it drifting in search of the Borg.

I sympathize with fans who mourn the old Voyager, but not because of the ideal of an ensemble or some promising pairing (J/C, J/P, C/T, P/Kes, etc.) that never got off the ground. I like J/P and I like ensembles but I like Chakotay in leather and Tom in the brig more, and I’m not the only one. The Maquis that should have been are still popular in fanfic, from Talking Stick/Circle to MJB’s Revolution to various AU J/C fics. One of the big disadvantages of C/7 being canon is that the leather-clad Maquis Chakotay doesn’t show up nearly often enough in C/7 fic.

Consider it a challenge: What if Seven of Nine had met the early Chakotay?

Word count: 621

I took the fourth off and thought about Seema’s advice to quit my job - specifically, how to go about doing it. I’ve never resigned before, so I don’t know how you deliver the letter (mail, email, by hand?), what it says, or how to say “I quit” politely in person. Maybe Seema knows.

Though I’ve considered quitting before, I’ve never taken that writer’s-eye view of it where you imagine waltzing into work singing Take This Job and Shove It with a chorus of fellow oppressed workers backing you up, or at least you fire off a pithy parting line like Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.

Maybe the muse will come up with something. Her low word count is due to the holiday and to having finished the first draft of a story, which means the count will no longer be increasing but fluctuating with edits.

Word count: 1025

You may be detecting a pattern to my word counts. It’s not that I’m not enjoying writing, but it’s hard to write more than a thousand words in what little time I have before and after my Donneresque commute. When I notice I’ve hit the mark, I bail for the night. Now that it’s the long weekend I could write more, but I think the extra free time is better spent editing or muse-thwacking. (Muse-thwacking is my new term for annoying the muse with a problem until she finds the solution.)

Besides, how would you word-count editing? You could count the additional words, but what if you ended up cutting instead? A writer’s fragile ego can’t handle negative word counts. You could check the previous version out of rcs and do a wc on the diff, but that would require extreme geekiness. More importantly, it’s too many keystrokes for someone who’s checking her progress towards that magic 1000 every ten minutes.

Word count: 1033

I know I’m a few years late for the clue train here, but I just now realized that there were never any angels on Buffy. There were a few good witches, painfully innocent monks, and evil misunderstood gypsies, but the good guys were never fully supernatural. Even the gods were bad guys.

It’s a malevolent view of the universe that identifies all supernatural power with evil and simultaneously restricts all goodness to humanity. (Oz, Angel and Spike are all partly human.) The constant supernatural malevolence makes Buffy a horror show, even though nothing is ever particularly scary.

The difference between horror and fantasy, then, is Elves - the good counterparts to misunderstood evil Orcs. Buffy could have used a few angels on her side; it would have saved her a lot of angst. But then, I get the feeling angst was the point - the only angel was the Angel of Angst.

Word count: 1018

That’s not even counting half a Voyager filk I wrote on the side. I think someone at Boston Common doubts my 1,000 word resolution. The other linked post there says some interesting things about creativity.

Norman Spinrad’s article on style at the end of the July Analog also got me thinking about originality. (The must-read story of the issue, by the way, was “The Empress of Mars.”) He criticizes the “transparent” prose tradition of sci-fi, saying, basically, that alien worlds require unusual styles to convey them. Unfortunately his sample excerpts are of dialogue - I think the issue of suitably original dialogue is less controversial than that of an opaque prose style. Spicing up the dialogue is certainly less work than changing your entire writing style. It’s not clear that the latter is wise, if it’s even possible.

I suspect some people have styles that are like accents. Either you can drop that Boston accent and pronounce your r’s, or you can’t.

Sometime in July is my third-year anniversary as a fiction writer, so this seems as good a time as any to turn over that new leaf again, finally get serious about my writing again, write those 1,000 words a day that all the experts recommend again, submit some more stories to be rejected again, and so on.

The only new part of my resolution is reviving my NaNoWriMo habit of posting a daily word count in my blog. (I guess it’s not technically new, either.) Feel free to mock me if I slack off.

A few technical problems bothered me in Atlas Shrugged - for example, the characters were constantly giving one another (and occasionally inanimate objects) highly meaningful looks. Dagny conveys no end of meaning to her lovers by a look, as they do in return. Even the bad guys have their share of evasive, I’m-not-looking looks.

A few highly meaningful glances are fine in a novel - say, three. Ayn Rand is a violator of the rule of three. She used the word “zero” too many times in fifty pages. She explained certain philosophical points more than three times, even setting aside those famous fifty pages.

She knew the rule of show-don’t-tell, but in Atlas Shrugged it seems to have morphed into show-and-tell. Maybe this is just a matter of taste, but I prefer a lighter hand. I’d rather she implied the meaning of the meaningful glance and let me figure it out or not on my own. The Fountainhead seemed to have the lighter touch.

Ayn Rand once noted that the modern heirs of the Romantic tradition in literature - that is, genre fiction such as spy thrillers and mysteries - tended to have problematic heroes. Such things could not happen to such people, she said, meaning that the exciting adventures of the plot were impossible to reconcile with the bland Everyman characters.

This is not a problem with her writing. Rather, Atlas Shrugged is overloaded with heroic heroes and evil villains. Perhaps because her notions of both good and evil are unusual, the characters tend to blend into one another, feeling the same joys or fears (the good feel joy and the evil fear), having the same reactions to the same events, and so on.

The Fountainhead has a great advantage over Atlas Shrugged in this regard, because that shorter novel has room for only one of each Randian type - the Hero, the woman who will eventually see the heroic light, the man who should have been a hero but went wrong, the penny-ante bad man, and the truly evil man. It’s also an earlier work, from when Ayn Rand saw more of a possibility of human variation; in Atlas Shrugged everyone starts out farther along the road to good or evil, and the entire world is forced to make a choice in the end.

The problem of good and evil characters comes up even if you’re not writing your own personal apocalypse. Ayn Rand thought most Christian fiction (by which she meant Hugo and Tolstoy, not Lewis and L’Engle) failed on both counts - that the Christian ideal had proven impossible to project into a fictional hero, and that the corresponding villains frequently ended up as strangely sympathetic characters. She based her own characters on a different division of good and evil.

Her evil characters in The Fountainhead are quite successful, in that it’s only the , dying flashes of goodness within them with which the reader sympathizes; they are otherwise despicable yet still believable. There isn’t much good left in the bad guys of Atlas Shrugged, yet they, too, avoid the twin bad-guy perils of being unbelievably, even comically, vile, or on the other hand, being attractive or sympathetic characters.

Roark is an engaging hero in The Fountainhead because he simply is the way he is, out there in the open for all readers to observe. The heroes of Atlas Shrugged are all so busy off-screen saving the world from altruism that it’s the people stuck in the middle, Dagny and Rearden, who become the protagonists by default. It’s telling that the real hero goes unrecognized for two-thirds of the novel, though it’s done very cleverly.

The great danger of good guys is that their very goodness will make them blander than their moral inferiors - not the bad guys in this particular case, but the characters who haven’t yet seen the egoist light. When there’s no one of interest caught in the moral middle, the bad guys can outshine the good guys. This has been going on from Lucifer’s speech in Paradise Lost to Khan’s (recycled from Melville) in the twenty-third century.

It’s not clear whether the writer has to change the definitions of good and evil in order to avoid the problem, but that approach worked for Ayn Rand.

I blogged a while back that Atlas Shrugged was a sci-fi novel, but I didn’t give it a real review. I needed something long and distracting to read over my recent Weekend of Kitsch, and now the novel has gotten me thinking about several topics: the decay of civilization, the difficulty of writing a convincing bad guy, the similar but less-known difficulty of writing a convincing good guy, showing and telling, and the eternal question, But is it sci-fi? It may take me a few entries to cover it all.

Last things first: Atlas Shrugged is science fiction with a vengeance. The plot is an extreme version of the hard-sf standard in which the insightful inventor/scientist goes up against the ignorance of the bureaucrats and wins. Our Hero has invented a mysterious new motor, and Our Other Hero has invented a new metal that’s stronger and lighter than steel. It has been noted that Atlas Shrugged is a kind of [alternate] history, being set in a subtly different U.S. somewhere around the 1930’s. Most of the rest of the world has already succumbed to socialism or communism.

Atlas Shrugged is also a disaster novel. I enjoyed watching the U.S. fall apart piece by piece - not because I have anything against my country but because it was done so well. Like most genre fiction, the novel has a complex plot in which all the little accidents add up to one very big one, whereas in real life, all the little things falling apart never seem to lead anywhere. The Concorde flew its last flight for Air France today (British Airways will stop flying them in October), NASA’s solar airfoil crashed in the Pacific yesterday, and the escalator at my T station was broken for half the week. Although it’s shocking to see Ayn Rand ravage the U.S. with a plague of fictionalized MBTA bureaucrats, at least she puts the poor country out of its misery by the end of the novel. I’ll be stuck with the MBTA forever.