One argument that has popped up, and which I’ve seen elsewhere, is the claim that the value of the work should be divorced from the artist; that you don’t judge the value of a book on whether the person who wrote it is a nitwit in real life. Ursula LeGuin once wrote that one should never meet the artist, because you’ll find out that the author of the great work of fiction that you cried and read to tatters is actually a bad-smelling weirdo in a tinfoil hat.

And to a point, this is true. Whether a book speaks to you doesn’t have anything to do with the subjective views of the author on, say, the merit of price controls for tungsten.

But this viewpoint is somewhat blind to the degree to which an author’s beliefs and views affect the work. At the obvious end of the spectrum you get Atlas Shrugged or Ecotopia – polemics where the characters and plot are ideological sockpuppets, political Mary Sues. But less obviously, there are plenty of books where the author’s personality and politics actually diminish the book. Not because the author doesn’t cater to one’s own political prejudices, but because they actually warp the course of the story. The plot becomes a lecture. A scene or a character appears and the reader thinks “aha, this is just like that guy in the author’s previous novel”. And it takes us out of the story, reminding us that we’re actually just reading something made up, and worse, made up by a writer who has a particular tic they can’t keep out of their writing. I don’t want to think “okay, this is the Sexy Nordic Blonde who shows up in all of his novels,” instead of seeing her as a real, three-dimensional character; I don’t want to have a story broken by the villain being a conservative strawman who’s an obvious stand-in for the author’s political enemies. It stops being a good work by a writer who happens to be a jerk in real life, and starts being an intrusion of the jerk into the writing, which isn’t so good anymore. The only thing worse than breaking the fourth wall is having it knocked down by a creep.

Then there’s the separate issue of supporting the artist. Assume that the only problem with a book is that the person who wrote it is an ass: do I really want my money going to keep him in hookers and blow? If the author is long dead, that’s hardly an issue – you can cheerfully buy as much T.S. Elliott as you like without worrying that your money goes to anti-Semitic causes – but when an author is very much living, how do you balance the fairness of paying an artist for his work versus the distate for giving money to someone loathsome? Stealing their work is clearly wrong, and checking it out of a library or buying it used is certainly quite legitimate, but at some point it’s still some variety of “I want to enjoy this work but I don’t want the author to get any money for that”. And I’m still mulling over to what degree that is fair, even if it’s legal.

I may post it up here eventually if I can figure out how to do friends-only posts and make everybody register or something, but in the meantime it’s over at LJ.

It’s very weird to write something and not revise it.  You can’t do that and survive NaNo; quantity over quality isn’t a joke, it’s a necessity. As another NaNo’er advises, you have to be like  a shark: swim forward at speed at all times.

But when I’m deciding to invest time reading a book, I don’t want to commit to reading (much less buying) multiple books if I don’t know I already like it. It’s a bit like agreeing to a first date and then having the other person ask you what kind of house the two of you should live in and how many kids you want to have; geez, buddy, I’m not ready for that kind of commitment!

And so it really pisses me off to get to the end of a book and only then find out it’s only Book 1 of a trilogy. Because that tells me that not only could you not fit a whole tale in a book-sized package, but you figured you needed to trick me into reading it, and then hope you’d hooked me into shelling out for two more books just to find out what happened next.

Not going to happen, hopeful author. I stopped caring about the characters right there and then.

• John Scalzi is even funnier in person, if you can imagine such a thing. He  is also extremely gracious and did not attempt to stuff me into a microwave or drop me down an elevator shaft, as SF authors are occasionally rumored to do to those they find annoying.
• Mary Robinette Kowal is not only an amazing writer, but she forever changed the way the audience members think about tortillas. And chess magazines.
• I was, in fact, the only one wearing suit. (Not on purpose. I had to drive over directly from a deposition in Oakland.)
• It is far, far better to park elsewhere and BART over than to try and find a parking space in the Mission.
• Steven K— got the best author book signature ever; how often does an author write “WTF?” in your book?
• The reading of “Alternate History Results” is up on YouTube.

Those of you with a low threshold for old-geek nattering should wander off and get a fresh cup of coffee at this point.

Back when I was a slip of a girl and Dragon was just about It for gaming publications (White Dwarf would soon be the hip, new enfant terrible, but it wasn’t yet), I sent an article in to Dragon. It was probably awful; I don’t remember it well, but I was fourteen at the time, so you can pretty well guess. Roger E. Moore was the editor. He didn’t buy the piece, but he sent me a nice letter offering helpful suggestions. I incorporated them, and sent it back.

I think I sent it in four times before I gave up. But every time, he sent suggestions, encouragement, and thanked me for my interest in the magazine. At one point, he even photocopied some notes he and Kim Mohan had sent to each other, so I could see what they, as editors, were interested in. I don’t know how or why he found the time to do this,  but for an aspiring writer, having an editor put in the effort to help improve writing he wasn’t even going to buy was an incredible boost.

(Years later, at GenCon, I ran into Mr. Moore and thanked him. He looked slightly afraid. In retrospect, I realize that being surprised by a fangirl wearing thigh-high leather high-heeled boots can be startling for the average middle-aged gamer.)

And now, sadly, the lawyers have taken over. Not the gamer ones, either.

Certain events of the past few days have convinced me that most of writerdom has trouble finding its own ass without a claque of workshop buddies to comment on the journey (“I like the way you used your hands to search, but did you really need to use the flashlight?”).

Samwise warned me that Accelerando was awfully hip, and it is. It’s like reading Neal Stephenson, but smarter and more entertaining, and without the bits where the author just can’t restrain himself anymore and barges out of the book to ramble at you. Unfortunately, like Stephenson, the characters and dialogue are far secondary to the hip, futuristic idea stream. And after a while they all start to sound alike. The secondary characters are flat and uninteresting (especially the female characters) and the protagonists are just annoying. I got about halfway through before deciding that I really didn’t care enough about any of these people to want to find out what happened next, and I was a little tired out from keeping up with the new! cool! future! that was being thrown at me.

The Atrocity Archives was much better. It still has the problem where any character onscreen for more than fifteen consecutive minutes sounding exactly like every other character, and Bob, the quantum/supernatural hacker dude, really is as annoying as every Slashdot groupie you’ve ever met; but it manages to be funny without diminishing from the horror. The title novella was the best of the two; “The Concrete Jungle” started out strong but simply wasn’t as good at “The Atrocity Archive”, and the ending was eye-rollingly pat.

The current-but-outgoing vice president of the SFWA wrote a barely-coherent tantrum about the evils of a) artists who give away their work FOR FREE!!! b) on THE INTERNET!!!!. Because it interferes with a good, old-fashioned, wood-chopping way of life where if you want to call people idiots, you have to hike uphill in the snow to do it, by cracky, without all this fancy bloggery.

Or something. I told you it was barely coherent.

Anyway, to mock his spittle-flecked insulting of other writers as ‘scabs’ and ‘pixel-stained technopeasants’ who dasn’t use a woodstove like He-Man Hendrix, Jo Walton has declared today International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day!

In honour of Dr Hendrix, I am declaring Monday 23rd April International Pixel-Stained Technopeasant Day. On this day, everyone who wants to should give away professional quality work online. It doesn’t matter if it’s a novel, a story or a poem, it doesn’t matter if it’s already been published or if it hasn’t, the point is it should be disseminated online to celebrate our technopeasanthood.

Jo will be posting links in comments. In the meantime, I offer my own non-professional-technopeasantry, in the form of a short story originally written for Subterranean’s “SF cliche” issue (edited by John Scalzi).

This At Last

He rested his fingers over the glowing ON button, not really sure if anything would happen, afraid not to try. “Idiot,” he said out loud. “The entire human race is dead. There’s nobody left to laugh at you.” Or to tell me I’m going crazy, he thought, and turned the robot ON.

There was a soft hum like a fine Swedish appliance as its brain powered up. The robot flexed its fingers in precise sequence and turned its head from side to side. The eyelids blinked rapidly as if it were awaking from a dream, rather than going through a series of mobility tests. It sat up in its cardboard shipping box and looked at him with its artificial eyes.

It was the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

“Hello,” it said. There was something familiar about its voice, as if it had been copied from an actress not quite famous enough for him to remember her name. “I am a Lang Model Six scientific assistant. For my initial activation, Doctor, I will need a sample of your voice, so that I may respond to spoken instructions. Please say a minimum of ten words to allow my software to create a reliable imprint.”

He looked around the shipping dock. Bins full of Tyvek envelopes were pushed up against FedEx shipments stamped LIVE SPECIMENS and NEXT-DAY AIR. In the mail clerk’s cubicle, letters and intraoffice mail spilled out of a wire cart. He’d come back here hoping to find medicine the abandoned pharmacies didn’t carry, and the coffin-sized box labeled LANG ROBOTICS had caught his eye.

The robot sat patiently and waited for him to speak. Environmentally-friendly packing peanuts clung to her short black hair. She didn’t bother to brush them away, and the absence of such a human gesture unnerved him more than anything else about her. It, he thought, it, not she, you need to keep your grip on reality, buddy. It’s a robot, and it’s not any more human than a toaster.

“Uh, hi,” he said. “I’m not a doctor. My name is Adam–”

“Thank you,” the robot said, smoothly cutting him off. “Adam, I am now ready to recognize voice commands. What would you like me to do next?”

“Well,” he said. “I guess you should go ahead and get out of that box.”

It stood up in a crackle of packing peanuts and folds of plastic sheeting. The robot was dressed in a plain beige coverall. There was a manila tag hanging from a band around her right wrist. Adam flipped the tag over: LANG ROBOTICS, it read, QUALITY INSPECTED BY #117.

He let go of the tag. The robot stood still, waiting. Even barefoot, it was a few inches taller than Adam. He wondered if all humanoid robots were like this one, identical sisters stamped out of a mold, or if you could pick and choose their appearance like the paint color of a car. He imagined some high-ranking scientist clicking through a Web page, checking boxes for gender and hair color, moving the slider on the eye color scale to get just the right shade of blue, adjusting her height and the shape of her hips–

“I need to carry some of these boxes out,” he said. “How much can you carry?”

“My safe lifting capacity is eighty-five kilograms.”

“Then take those white boxes and bring them out the loading door,” he said. “We need to get them home while it’s still light out.”

#

Right after Adam found himself the last man on Earth, he had been really excited about the idea of being able to live wherever he wanted. With everybody else dead of Fadeaway, he could set himself up in San Simeon, or the White House, or even Larry Ellison’s mansion, if he felt like it. That turned out to be one of the many ideas that sounded great until you tried it. Fadeaway killed people–it had nearly killed Adam–but it didn’t make the bodies disappear. Or the food people left behind, or for that matter the guard dogs, the ones that hadn’t starved to death yet. Adam found out that he didn’t get much enjoyment out of living in a mansion that stank of corpses and rotting Brie. Anyway, now that nobody was alive to keep the power plants running, it was pretty hard to find your way around a big house, however elegant, after the sun went down. You just didn’t run San Simeon on a generator looted from Home Depot.

He’d settled on a new “planned development” outside of San Jose. Only the model homes on the property had been finished, and furnished, before the end of the world. Nobody had ever moved into the houses around it–some of them weren’t even finished–so there were no dead bodies, no freezers full of mold, no roving packs of dogs.

Adam and the robot moved the white boxes of antiviral drugs into Naxos, the model house he used for storage. He actually lived next door, in the Doric. It had a better floor plan.

She followed him into the house. Sometime during the drive back from the research institute where he’d found her, Adam had decided that it was kind of silly to keep calling the robot “it”. A lifetime with nobody to talk to but himself, and no human voice that came from somebody still living, he figured, was going to be a lot worse for his grip on reality than talking to an intelligent robot.

“Make yourself at home,” he called over his shoulder, walking to the back of the house where the kitchen was. The generator outside was pretty noisy, even though he’d put insulation and baffles over it, but it beat sitting in the dark. He had considered putting in solar, but that meant getting up on a ladder, and what if he fell? There was nobody to call 911, much less put him back together.

“Thank you,” she said.

Adam returned from the kitchen with a bottle of Merlot that would have cost him ten dollars if he’d had to pay for it. He knew he could raid the cellars of any fancy wine shop, now, but he’d gotten accustomed to cheap red wine back when he was living on a data entry clerk’s salary. He was usually pretty strict about limiting his alcohol intake, knowing it would be all too easy, in an empty world, to just sit and drink himself away. Today, though, seemed like a good occasion to celebrate, now that he had somebody to help him carry things and look for salvage. And talk to.

He sat down and put the bottle and a wineglass on the elegant coffee table. He looked at the robot, then the glass. “Do you, I mean, can you drink?” he asked. “I know alcohol probably doesn’t affect you.”

“I can, in small amounts,” she said. “It’s part of my analysis package. Here.” She poured a mouthful of wine into the glass and lifted it to her lips. Adam half-expected her to make a face, the way most people did with this kind of wine, but she drank it without flinching.

“There’s ethyl alcohol,” she said, “and some tannins, flavor compounds that–”

“Hey,” he said, “You’re using contractions.”

She blinked, as if confused, and then smiled. It was the first time Adam had seen her do either. “I learn things,” she said. “It’s part of my programming to make working with a robot easier. I analyze your speech patterns and gestures, and incorporate them into my behavior.”

“Oh,” Adam said. “I thought you were just, I don’t know, more relaxed. That’s what humans do. I thought…never mind.”

“I am doing what humans do,” she said. “Am I incorrect? The data I have says that normal human behavior is to adjust to the social norms and conduct of other humans, and to adopt the modes of speech of their friends. If this is uncomfortable for you, I will revert to my default.”

“No, you’re fine, don’t. I, um, I like you better this way.”

“Thanks,” she said.

Adam poured himself a glass of wine and drank it fast. He would have made a face except that he’d known what he was in for. Tannins, he thought, she’s not kidding. Not so sure about those flavor compounds.

“Want to watch a movie?” he blurted, and felt like an idiot, but then she smiled and said yes, as if it were an idea she liked, and not just a positive reaction to whatever he asked her to do.

The only DVD in the house Adam hadn’t watched was a Regency romance. He nodded off during the scene where the wealthy cad confronts the poor but heroic suitor. The robot watched the screen intently and didn’t say a word.

#

The first week was awkward, but Adam got a lot more done than he had in the previous month. He needed to put up better insulation in the house, and find more canned goods, and the robot never got tired, plus she lifted things he couldn’t even move with a handtruck. She didn’t need sleep, either. He thought she stayed up and watched his DVDs while he slept, but he could never really bring himself to ask.

The second week, he gave up and named her. He chose Helen, after a robot he vaguely remembered from an old science fiction book. He toyed with naming her after an old girlfriend, or an actress he’d had a crush on, but that felt adolescent and weird, somehow. Helen was a good name, pretty but not sexy, and it was a tiny reminder that she wasn’t human, no matter how much better she was at understanding humor or what behaviors she’d picked up from the heroines in his movie collection.

It was almost the third month after finding Helen that he made a pass at her, and it took the better part of a six-pack for him to stop telling himself he didn’t really need to know whether Lang Robotics had made her just like a real woman. Adam was drunk enough that he didn’t realize what he was doing until he was already kissing her, and then she was kissing him back. Her skin felt oddly smooth, but instead of cold plastic and hard steel rods underneath she was warm, and soft, and how different a real woman might have been was something Adam could no longer remember.

Afterward, with her head tucked against his shoulder, Adam watch the room slowly lose its spin as the alcohol wore off. The comforting wall that the beer had put between him and his better judgment was dissolving. He felt stupid and pathetic, as if he’d woken up from a night at the bar to find someone he didn’t even know in his bed. Not someone, something, he thought. You’ve just made love to a glorified inflatable sex toy. You think having a complicated steel brain makes her any more real?

Helen stirred against his shoulder. Reflexively, he stroked her head, feeling the soft hair that never grew and would never turn grey. She made a satisfied little noise and moved one of her legs to twine with his.

She’s as real as I’m ever going to find, he told the negative voice, and pulled her close against him.

That was the moment Helen chose to tell him she loved him.

#

“How can you be sure there isn’t anyone else?” she asked. They were driving down I-5 towards Irvine, where Lang Robotics had its headquarters. They had a siphon and a pump to take gas out of cars along the way, and a cooler full of food for Adam. Helen didn’t need any.

“I guess I can’t be,” Adam said, “but I am. I don’t know, maybe it’s some kind of Jungian race consciousness thing. But I don’t…. well, I don’t feel as though any other people survived. There was no Internet, but there were a lot of short-wave radios. Nothing, on any channel. I put together a ham kit I found at a Radio Shack and I would send out a broadcast every few days, but I never heard anyone else. Just static.”

“It would make sense that somebody else survived, though,” Helen said. “If you had a genetic resistance to Fadeaway, shouldn’t there be other humans with the same resistance?”

“Probably,” Adam said. “If they turn up, that’s fine. If they don’t, well, that’s okay too.”

She gave him an affectionate kiss on the cheek. “Okay.”

It took Adam another fifty miles to work up to the question he really wanted to ask. “I know we’re going here to look for parts and a repair kit, in case something happens to you,” he said, and by now he was not at all surprised at the physical pain that twisted his heart at the thought of anything happening to Helen. “But there may be, well, there may be other robots. Other people like you. And they’ll have positronic brains, and be a lot prettier than me. I’m, I’m scared that you’ll want to be with them, and you won’t have any use for me. I’m just human. I’m not perfect, like you.”

There was a long silence, and Adam couldn’t tell if he’d finally managed to come up with something her memory banks couldn’t handle. Or if she was trying to find a way to give him a good-bye speech: sorry, honey, but I’m leaving you for a man who never farts, doesn’t need tetanus shots and won’t grow old and die.

“In the movies, when the man says something really stupid, the woman is supposed to slap him and then give him a big kiss before they live happily ever after,” she said. “But I’m afraid if I do that, you’ll drive the car off the road.”

“You’re probably right,” Adam said. “So don’t.”

“Can I do it once we get to Lang Robotics?”

“Sure, if you do it before we power up all the cute male robots.”

“Deal,” she said, and laughed until she got hiccups, and Adam wished they were going west, not south, so that they could drive off into the perfect California sunset.

It’s hard to read. There’s a deep current of despair; this isn’t the slick, techno-clever Japan of an Isaac Adamson or William Gibson novel. The protagonists are women who work the night shift at a boxed-lunch factory. The happiest of the group lives in a loveless marriage and has a son who won’t speak, which should tell you about how well off everyone else is. One of them commits an impulsive crime and the other women are, one by one, drawn in. The “feminist” blurb makes it sound like they’re in some kind of protective sisterhood, which is exactly not the case.

The ending didn’t work too well for me, but the characters and the plot twists are believable and very real.

Daughter of Hounds is kind of a sequel to Low Red Moon. I was a little iffy about picking this one up, especially since the cover art looked like an attempt to sell to the Anita Blake fan market, but what the hell. It’s hard to review this without getting into spoilers, but it’s an interesting look into the world of the ghouls without making you feel like you picked up something by White Wolf. It’s also not as scary or disturbing as Low Red Moon. Granted, that’s a high bar, but even the ghouls aren’t half as scary as Narcissa Snow.

I’ve been finding Patrick Califia‘s latest stuff disappointing. I don’t mean disappointing in the “not my kink” kind of way (okay, that too) but just…not as well written as his previous work. There’s nothing in Boy in the Middle that’s as gripping or well-written as the stories in No Mercy. He’s started to fall back on explaining and exposition rather than just showing us, or getting inside the heads of his characters. If you’re one of the people who still can’t get enough of vampires, you might like it.