Larry Correia is a big-booted barbarian who likes to fight in a cage. And a lot of us love to watch big-booted barbarians go at it.
We like demanding matches. We like a little blood and good sportsmanship (of course, sportsmanship in the cage is different than in other venues). And we respect both sides for showing up and giving it their best.
This last week Larry Correia battled with Alex Dally MacFarlane (and Tor, the silent partner, who thought her new column would be a great idea and has given her their big platform to talk) and Jim Hines. If you didn’t watch the match, here are the links.
I’ve enjoyed reading the give and take in this fight. For me, the barbarians seem to have landed more blows (and done so with many more funny and memorable one-liners.) But that doesn’t mean Alex Dally MacFarlane shouldn’t crusade.
And I mean crusade, as in battle.
Underneath it all MacFarlane wants to change something. She wants to change hearts and minds. A lot of us want to change hearts and minds about various things. A lot of us will show up and risk getting bloody for such things in a variety of settings. Heck, Correia the Barbarian was even willing to spend two years of his barbarian life trying to change hearts and minds in a setting where big boots are not allowed (poor Correia, more sad puppies).
But here’s the deal.
If you want to win someone like me, you’re going to do it not by scolding or brow beating me or by mandating something and then trying to back it up with sticks.
You’re going to do it by writing something so delightul that I cannot but help listen to you.
You’re not going to tell me what I can’t write.
You’re not going to tell me what I must write.
You’re going to model writing that makes me want to write that thing.
You’re going to be like Tolkien and spawn five decades of writers who want to do nothing more than imagine worlds filled with strange races and wonderous settings and weird talking tree men who have lost their wives.
You’re going to invite like-minded folks to join you in creating wonders. Or in just having a good old time. And not worry about other writers inviting folks to their creations, which might be totally different from yours.
And those wonders and good times are the things that will work the magic.
Miguel Sabido is a master of entertainment with message. Here’s a great piece in The New Yorker introducing him, his work, and methods. Notice what made his stuff so effective. The new ways of thinking he wanted to offer were never found in the A story. They were never found in the B story.
Why?
Because the number one thing the story had to do was suck people in (entertain).
And so the new thing to consider was in the C story.
MacFarlane, put it in the C story. And build a Middle-earth. Or a ring world. Or at least some vampires that sparkle.
In the meantime, I’ve got a barbarian book on the shelf that looks like a mighty good time. I think I’m going to give it a read.
There are many good accounts of soldiers in World War 2, but I just finished one that is unlike any others I’ve read. It’s the delightful Sergeant Nibley PhD: Memories of an Unlikely Screaming Eagle by Hugh Nibley and Alex Nibley.
It details the experiences of Hugh Nibley, the famous BYU
scholar of ancient history, as a soldier in the war, starting from when Nibley
was on his mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and met
Hitler coming out of a bathroom in Germany.
This book made me laugh and wonder and sorrow. It includes
insights, surprises, and anecdotes that I haven’t found anywhere else. The
authors also include many pictures that help the whole thing come alive. If you
like history or biographies or are a fan of Nibley’s works, I think you’ll love
this book.
*
Some of the wonderful residents of Rich County, Utah where I live are not going to like this next one. But I have to share it because if what’s detailed in this next book is accurate, it could help so many.
The book is Whole: Rethinking the Science of Nutrition by T. Colin Campbell who has been one on the forefront of nutrition research for over forty years.
Campbell’s legacy, the China Study, is the most comprehensive
study of health and nutrition ever conducted. He’s a renowned researcher at Cornell
University. He has worked as a senior science adviser to the American Institute
for Cancer Research, and sits on the advisory board of the Physicians Committee
for Responsible Medicine.
I share all that to simply suggest that he might have a little bit of expertise that’s worth listening to.
Campbell grew up the son of a dairy farmer and went into the
field of nutrition, believing animal protein, specifically dairy, could help
solve nutrition problems in countries with starving populations.
What he found shocked and surprised him. And at first, he didn’t believe it. But he and others ran study after study, and the science led to one conclusion: a diet high in animal products and processed foods increases the risk of many cancers, heart disease, diabetes, and a host of other maladies just as surely as tobacco increases the risk of lung cancer. What he found is that the healthiest populations ate a whole-food, plant-based diet.
Now that goes against a lot of what we’ve been told. Milk is
supposed to do a body good. And surely there’s nothing more healthy than lean
cuts of meat. And aren’t there studies that prove this?
In this book Campbell explains the science behind the
evidence for what he and other scientists are seeing, the ways our current
scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity of the human body, and
why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that everything we think we know
about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits haven’t changed.
I know this may seem like yet another whiplash science report. You know the kind—one report says red wine is bad for you and the other says red wine is good. But in this book, Campbell explains why we get such goofy and contradictory claims.
If you or someone you love is dealing with heart disease, cancer, including breast cancer, obesity, or diabetes, you will want to hear him out. Whether what he has to say persuades you and what you will do about it, is up to you. But I think you’ll benefit from listening. If you’re interested in science, this book will give you surprising insights about its practice that you probably haven’t considered. Listening to Campbell has been eye-opening. I highly recommend this book. If, after hearing it, you want more information, I recommend his previous book called The China Study.
For a number of reasons, the belief here is that most of the time for most authors who can get a deal with an established and competent house, their best choice is to take it.
Sounds reasonable, but then we get to the money quotes.
The strength of the traditional publishers and the traditional deals is directly related to the amount of the market that is served by inventory in stores. When that proportion was “nearly all”, the power allocation was “nearly all” to the traditional publishers.
***
Self-publishing and new-style digital-first publishing can grow more to the extent that the book-in-store share of the market shrinks more. But while that’s happening, the big publishers are also adding to their capabilities: building their databases and understanding of individual consumers (something that all the big houses are doing and which the upstarts seem not to believe is happening, or at least not happening effectively), distributing and marketing with increasing effectiveness in offshore markets, and controlling more and more of the global delivery in all languages of the books in which they invest.
It will compound the pressure on the alternative players if Amazon continues to grow its global market share for ebooks. The bigger the percentage of the market that can be reached by self-publishers with one stop at Amazon, the less interest they’ll have in picking up smaller chunks of the market with additional deals and the more powerful will be any incentives Amazon cares to offer for making the title exclusive to them.
Shatzkin’s discussion of the amount of the market served by inventory in stores is right on. But his “best choice” conclusion doesn’t follow.
Why?
Because the question for each author has to be which stores will I be in, what kind of floor space will I have, and how long will I be there? And in many cases the answers to those questions do not compete well with indie options.
For example, a lot of in-store sales come from the drug store, grocery store, airport, Walmart, Costco type venues. But it’s rare than an author getting an average deal will see the light of day in those places. Those are reserved for bigger sellers. And not very many of those. So unless you’re getting a big deal, you can’t count that floor space.
Poof. Tens of thousands of venues are now no longer part of the equation.
So you are now left with whatever number of stores the publisher can get you into at Barnes&Noble (a max of 675 stores), Books-a-Million (max of 200 stores), Hastings (max of 149 stores), non-chain stores, etc. I think the total number of book stores in the USA is around 10,000 or so. But publishers won’t get you into all of them. Some don’t carry your type of book: they’re used books stores, or kids book stores, or Christian book stores. And even if it’s a store like Barnes&Noble, you probably won’t get into all their stores. So how many stores will you actually be in?
Next, you have to wonder where you’ll appear in the stores you do get into. Will you be face-out somewhere prominent? Or will you have two copies spine-out in the back? If you’re spine-out, that’s just reduced the value of the floor space publishers offer you yet again.
Finally, how long will you be there? If you sell your two copies in a store, are you done at that store? Will your books be there longer than 12 weeks? Will they be there even 8 weeks?
James Patterson can sell millions of books because he has multiple copies in tens of thousands of stores with great display. And he’s usually there for more than just a handful of weeks. If you have two books spine-out in each of 500 stores for eight weeks, how well are you going to do?
Here’s some math on author revenue and units sold. Is selling 1,000 books with the royalties and contract terms offered really worth it? What about 4,000 books? 7,000? Are you going to be in enough stores with a decent placement to get those numbers?
If you’re going to be in thousands and thousands of stores with good placement, and the terms of the contract are reasonable, then, good golly, working with a publisher looks great. But if you’ve got a book that’s good enough to make an editor somewhere want to buy rights to it and the publisher is offering to put you spine-out in a little over a thousand stores with all sorts of contract crap, then Shatzkin’s “best choice” is really a poor one. In those situations my money is on going indie.
Last week, I was booted out of Codex Writers, a private, online writer’s group that I’d been a member of for somewhere around fifteen years. I’m not broken up about it, but the reason for said booting is interesting, unexpected, and worth a post.
Over the years, writers moved in and out of the group, but there were usually somewhere around fifty to a hundred members active on the boards. We discussed the writing craft and business. We held writing contests. We provided critiques. People shared interesting things about their lives.
The group has moderators. And the moderators got together last week and decided John Brown had to go.
Why?
What, of all the sins one may commit online, triggered this?
Was it refusing to stop posting pictures of cats?
Using too many emoticons?
Infecting everyone’s pages with Russian spam bots?
Nope. Nope. Nope.
I know what you’re thinking. Surely, John, you must have
been posting in a belligerent, arrogant, and strident way. You must have been a
jerk.
That’s what you’d think.
I assumed that’s what the problem was too. I invited those
who were angry and hurt to come to my personal thread and explain what it was
that was making them so hurt and angry. A number took me up on the offer. And,
to my great surprise, one of their criticisms was that I was too polite.
One person posted that my politeness made her think I was sealioning (a new term to me). Other’s agreed.
Another person said that my polite manner surely indicated I wasn’t sincere. Other’s agreed.
In fact, one of the moderators stated that being polite was part of the insidious problem that was John Brown. She said that my politeness had suckered folks in to letting my awful behavior go on too long.
I was offensive, and I was too dang polite about it.
So what was I doing?
Well, I was asking for evidence.
Don’t ask for evidence
My sin was suggesting that some claims being made about a
certain topic seemed to be premature. My sin was in looking at the evidence
being offered to support some of these claims and firmly stating that I
couldn’t see how it supported the conclusions.
On every topic on the forum, we could question claims and
discuss evidence in an effort to figure things out. But there was one topic, as
I learned, for which a number of the active members and the moderators decided
that was forbidden.
The topic was systemic or “institutionalized” discrimination.
On the forum, most of the discussion was how it related to publishing.
They explained to me that it was offensive for me to want to
see if the evidence actually supported the claims. It was offensive to post when
I couldn’t see that it did.
You might wonder how in the world can that be offensive.
After all, evidence is one of the first things we ask for when people make
claims.
If Billy Joe comes up to you and says, “Son, aliens done landed in my yard last night. I swear it on a stack of Bibles.” Most of us would want some additional evidence.
We’d want to see the video he took and look at the burn mark
in his lawn and the broken branches he said were made when their ship landed.
And we’d want to see the report showing that the residue collected off the
swing set was a substance unknown to mankind.
But it isn’t just claims about aliens that we do this with.
Historians do it about history.
Scientists do it about science.
Courts require it for reaching verdicts.
Heck, we even do it when we look at movie reviews—we use
those reviews as evidence that the movie is going to probably be good or bad.
Evidence.
We’re always looking for evidence to see if our guesses are
right. But on this topic, wanting evidence was offensive. I was told it was
“hurtful” and “damaging.”
The logic of micro-aggressionism
How could folks get to the point where wanting and
challenging evidence for claims was a bad thing?
Well, quite easily. And they aren’t the first to do it.
And lest you think this unfortunate logic is found only in
obscure writers groups, you need to know it has spread to many American university campuses.
That means it’s eventually coming to an organization near you. And that means
chances are good that you or someone close to you will have to face, at some
time or another, online or elsewhere, an angry mob (or moblet, as the case may
be).
So let’s examine the logic so that when you do, you’ll be
able to see the response for what it is, name it, and bring its tenets out into
the light and show them for what they are.
Here’s their logic.
ONE, each of us
has our individual prejudices, biases, and beliefs about the world.
I’m sure you agree with this. It seems pretty obvious. One guy might think soccer is for wimps, and another might think football is for lumbering meatheads. Of course, it’s not just about sports. We also hold views about people from other groups. Depending on your experience, the media you’ve been exposed to, and the statements and behavior of those around you, you might have unconsciously picked up certain beliefs about Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, Germans, Swedes, Whites, engineers, clowns, etc.
TWO, it’s likely there are others out there with the same prejudices and biases. Some of those ideas will be held in common by smaller percentages of the population. Others will be held in common by larger percentages of the populations.
I’m sure you agree with this too. A lot of Americans like football, but some don’t. A lot of Europeans like soccer, but there are some who don’t. We can see this with our beliefs about various groups. For example, ask anyone in the USA what they think about Nazis, hippies, or hockey players, and you’ll find a handful of common responses.
THREE, various prejudices
and biases can get perpetuated in the society. This is what the
micro-aggressionists call systemic discrimination.
I’m sure you’re nodding along here as well. Americans have
loved football for generations. Europeans have loved soccer too. Views are passed
on from parents to children. They’re passed on via the media. There’s a
systemic introduction to and reinforcement of those likes, dislikes, and
beliefs.
I think we’ll all together here.
However, this is the point where the micro-aggressionists diverge.
When those who have bought into the micro-aggressionist
views see any disparity between groups they focus on (ethnic minorities, women,
and minority genders), they claim, FOUR,
that the disparity between the two groups MUST be because of systemic discrimination.
Nothing else could be the cause.
I was told it wasn’t up for question. Furthermore, I was told that you can’t prove such things anyway. It’s “like ecology.” And so I shouldn’t ask. I was also told that questioning simply proved that I was lazy and ignorant, because if I’d done any amount of thinking or study, I’d agree with them.
But it didn’t stop there. They claim, FIVE, that if you question their default answer, you’re not only an ignoramus, but you are also hurting others. Literally hurting them.
The very act of asking for evidence, they say, is a micro aggression,
a micro threat, a micro attack. It’s a tiny assault. And those tiny assaults
perpetuate the discrimination. So if you disagree, you’re bullying and hurting.
If you question, challenge, or want evidence, you’re damaging people’s lives.
And this all leads them to their final conclusion—SIX, if you won’t voluntarily stop, you
must be made to stop. You must be silenced. And if you can’t be silenced, then
you must be banished.
Did you see where they went off the rails?
Multiple factors
The fact is that there are a LOT of factors that could cause differences in the situations between two people. And commonly held prejudices or biases is ONLY ONE of them. And until you’ve really dug into it, there’s no way to tell how large a factor it is, or if it’s a factor at all.
Here are just a few of the factors that have been shown to
have significant effects on a person’s success:
Birth order
Beliefs about self-efficacy
Grit
Work ethic
Whether you were born and raised in a single-parent family
How wealthy your family was
Self-control
Whether you graduated from high school
Certain pollutants in the environment
Where you lived
Your height
Your level of attractiveness (and it’s different attributes for men versus women)
Your age
Learning disabilities
Reading ability
Level of activity in a religion
General health
Notice that none of them have anything to do with ethnicity,
skin color, or gender. To ignore these as contributing factors in any given
situation is not only simplistic and wrong-headed, it can be harmful.
For example, why do Blacks have such high murder rates in
some of our biggest cities?
Micro-aggressionism would ignore all the many factors above
and assume that it must be some form of systemic racism. It would demand you
accept that explanation. And tell you you’re ultimately contributing to a
perpetuation of high murder rates if you question it.
Luckily, there are others who are looking into that issue. One strong correlation is with high out-of-wedlock birthrates. Another, with the spike in the late ’70s, is with unleaded gasoline. Or was it simply the boom in males aged 15-24? Or is it possible that murder rates are caused by different mixtures of factors at different times? Look at the graphs here.
What if a major factor is out-of-wedlock births? That has nothing to do with discrimination. It has everything to do with a life choice. And if that is indeed one of the main causes, then we can help save thousands of lives by figuring out a way to help the kids in those cities make better life choices and avoid getting pregnant outside of marriage. What if a pollutant is a compounding factor? Working on fuzzy claims of racism isn’t going to take lead out of the air.
But those under the sway of micro-aggressionism gloss over all of that. They are like doctors who diagnose every symptom as a sign of a broken leg.
Your chest hurts?
It must be a broken leg.
You’re bleeding from the head?
It must be a broken leg.
Your belly is distended?
Dang, another broken leg.
Criminalizing disagreement
The second error the micro-aggressionist philosophy makes is
in thinking disagreement is bad.
Yes, it can be uncomfortable when people disagree with you.
Yes, disagreement, even when polite, can stress you, raise
your anxiety level, or make you lose sleep.
But if you forbid disagreement, then you lose all of the
good things disagreement and the challenging of ideas brings.
Things like science and the search for truth.
Things like votes for women.
Things like civil rights.
The progress of our society has only been possible because
we’ve been able to disagree. When we begin to think disagreement is bad, we
start down a road that ultimately leads to a tragic end. One we’ve seen over
and over.
It’s the road of the Taliban and ISIS. The road of the Inquisition.
The road of the KKK. It’s one of the main roads that leads to oppression.
In the last century, Joseph Stalin, the champion of
socialism, the champion of the common man, the one who wanted to wipe out
inequity, killed an estimated 9-20 million non-combatants. Compare that to the estimated
11-12 million Hitler and his Nazi regime killed. What was Stalin’s view on
disagreement? “Ideas are far more powerful than guns,” he said. “We don’t let
our people have guns. Why should we let them have ideas?”
Indeed.
To Stalin, disagreement with his socialist ideas was
hurtful. It was damaging. It perpetuated inequality. Those that expressed even
a whiff of it were either shot or shipped off to the Gulag, the wonderful
forced-labor prison camps where people died in droves.
Mao, Pol Pot, and others all felt the same way about their
programs.
But the micro-aggressionist philosophy blindly ignores that. It ignores they all started with the righteous cause of equality.
Sure, in the beginning, it might feel like the yellow brick
road, but that path doesn’t lead to Oz. It doesn’t even lead to the witch’s
place. That road leads to Mordor.
If you go there and raise that regime, you’d better hope two
little fellows show up who have the courage to disagree.
The truth is that disagreement is like the tension and stress you feel when you workout and build muscles. It leads to a healthy, vibrant, and strong society.
Banning disagreement is like banning exercise. The result is a dramatic loss of health. A society of couch potato, Ding Dong hunchbacks.
What now
The writer’s group I got kicked out of is filled with good and interesting people. I wish them no ill will. And, again, I’m not broken up about being thrown out. Oh sure, there were good conversations and helpful insights. But, ultimately, it means one less distraction. And that’s good for me getting books out the door.
However, the ideology that some there hold is simplistic, unhelpful, and wrong. It’s not going to take them where they want to go. We know because we’ve seen how that movie ends.
And it appears it hasn’t run its course yet in our society. Which means at some point in the future, you’re probably going to meet folks who have, out of the goodness of their hearts, fallen for this logical trap.
I hope you find opportunity to speak up.
When you do, I hope you treat them politely and with good humor.
And I hope you clearly and unfailingly disagree.
Extras
If you want to know more, here are some great reads and
interviews to get you started.
How we pick up unconscious biases
“The Hidden Brain”. This is a Radio West interview of Shankar Vedantam. Nobody conducts interviews better than Doug Fabrizio. In this one Vedantam shares fascinating insights about how we pick up our unconscious biases.
Thinking,
Fast and Slow by Daniel Khaneman. A good-humored and groundbreaking
tour of the two systems in the mind that drive the way we think and the
resulting cognitive biases.
“What
exactly is a microaggression?” By Jenee Desmond-Harris. Another article
from Vox that explains what microaggressions are from the point of view of
someone who agrees with that philosophy.
The First Amendment by the Cornell Law School. An overview of what speech is currently protected and what isn’t.
An example of civic dialogue between a classical liberal and someone who disagrees.
When it comes to politics, we frequently talk twice as much
as we should and listen half as much as is deserved. With our mouths open so
much of the time, we fail to get the facts. And this often leads us to paint things
in hyperbolic black or white.
One area where we seem to do this regularly is with the
Founding Fathers. Depending on our side, we label the Founders as devils or
demigods and the constitution as a wicked document or holy writ.
Is it possible both sides are distorting the truth?
Joseph Ellis, one of the nation’s foremost scholars
of American history, suggests that we are. He has written an excellent article for
the online Encyclopedia Britannica called “Founding Fathers” that points
out both the amazing things the Founders achieved with the birth of this nation
and some of their most egregious failures.
I don’t know about you, but I find clarity a good thing. I
think it helps us have more productive conversations. If you agree with me, I
think you’ll enjoy the clarity Ellis brings to the Founders and the nation they
set up. Read his
article here.
For my part, I think the Founders set up an awesome system. Not because it was perfect at birth, but because it was a system that got enough right to allow us to get where we are today. Look at how far we’ve come on so many fronts! And it got enough right to allow us as a nation to get even better in the future.
Just consider what the Founders implemented that was in no
government at that time. The ideals of individual liberty, the separation of
powers, the ability for a huge swath of citizens to elect their leaders, the ability
to change the constitution itself, the separation of church and state, and the
engine of democratic capitalism that has lifted more people out of poverty than
anything else the world has seen.
The Framers didn’t create the Constitution in a vacuum, but
nowhere in the world had anyone set anything up that went so far. There was
nothing like it, no real examples to follow. And many thought it would fail,
just as France’s attempt in their revolution failed just a few years later.
As for things they got wrong. Well, they themselves soon recognized the way we elect the president and vice president didn’t work and adjusted it. Their idea that political parties wouldn’t form was wrong. Their idea of a militia for common defense didn’t work (see my writeup here). Their compromise on slavery was a festering sore that came to a head before the Union was 100 years old. Their treatment of the Indians was awful. Their reasons for excluding women and those not owning land was bone-headed.
So, yes, they got some things wrong. Some of them held some
beliefs that we find appalling today. And the nation has not implemented their
stated ideals as well as we might have hoped. However, the Founders got so many
things right. And what’s more, they did it as men living in the times they lived,
having grown up with the beliefs and values of that time, not those of 2019!
While we as a nation have progressed from some of their
failures (thank heavens), in other ways the Founders may be are our betters.
There are a great many lessons to learn from them, both from their successes
and failures. One is their humility—they knew what they’d created wasn’t
perfect. Let’s not imagine that we or our ideas are perfect either.
If you’re at all interested in politics, I recommend Ellis’s
article and its view of the Founders. Read it article here.
For example, Rosling wanted to see how well we understand the scientific projections of how our population will grow. After all, a lot of people think we’re headed for an overpopulation nightmare.
In 1950 there were fewer than one billion children (aged 0-14) in the world. By 2000 there were almost two billion. How many do UN experts think there will be in 2100?
4 billion
3 billion
2 billion
What do you think the right answer is?
If a bunch of chimpanzees had to answer the question above, each would choose an answer randomly. And 33% of them would get it right.
But when you ask humans the question, most of them get it wrong. Most of them, in fact, do worse than the chimpanzees. It’s not even close.
Rosling asked 12,000 people in 14 countries were asked this question, among others. Here’s how many got it right in various countries.
To be clear, no chimps were tested. That bar is in there just for comparison. But if they were, that’s how they’d do.
So how is it possible that humans do so spectacularly worse than the chimpanzees?
It’s not because chimps are secretly studying world population stats and hatching schemes. It’s because we humans think we know something, but, in reality, what we think we know is wrong.
And in this case, we think they know that the population is going to keep growing and growing and growing.
But it’s not.
The right answer above is C—there are 2 billion children now, and there will be 2 billion in 2100.
The world has hit the peak number of children it will ever have at any time.
There are around 6 billion people on the earth today. As those 2 billion children get older, the UN experts project the total population to fill out and grow to 11 billion in 2100 and then level off.
That means there is no overpopulation nightmare on the horizon.
Can this be true?
Read Rosling’s book.
Well, what about literacy levels? Poverty? Racism? Wars?
And what about the news—don’t we see the world going to pieces every night?
If you want an eye-opening experience, read Rosling’s book. He delivers all the insights with clarity, expertise, and humor.
Best of all, when you’re done, you’ll have a set of tools to help you correct the picture.
And while you’re waiting for the book, why not watch Rosling in action in this TED talk where he shows the data on population.
Greg, that was a great response. And I think these two statements you made capture perfectly what I object to.
Rather than a desire for what we might term inclusiveness or representation, MacFarlane’s desire seems to be to supplant what she terms a “default narrative” with what, one can only assume, will become the new default narrative.
Writers battled for centuries for a world in which the dominant ethical systems were not the immediate arbiters of aesthetic production. Their legacy to us is a world in which the aesthetic is not always and perpetually chained to power structures and dominant ideologies.
One of the fundamental principles I follow in my art is that I must have passion for the thing I’m creating. I must care about the characters and situations. I must follow my interests. I CAN’T create unless I do. Not only is there no motive, but the ideas don’t flow! My assumption is that this is the same for most practicing artists.
It seems you too read MacFarlane’s words and came away with the idea that she wants to ignore that. She wants to require artists to create art they don’t care about.
Which means her agenda is actually an attack on the very core of art itself.
What MacFarlane wants is propaganda.
Her crusade for what she thinks is right and good would ultimately suck the life blood from artists and their art. Hers is a world of the new wonder drug that will usher in utopia but turns us all into zombies instead.
Hi John,
Yes, absolutely: propaganda is exactly the right word. One of the major concepts I’ve taken from your blog is zing–the things that make me thrill when I’m writing a story. As an aesthetic principle, that’s the only one that rings true to me. Thanks for your good work and for bringing an important issue into a larger discussion.
On a totally different note, I’m looking forward to reading Curse. I love the cover.
I think that is well put. If you pie-chart and checkmark art according to race and sex you will kill it. Literal pie-charts, percentages and graphs have appeared on SFF blogs and webzines. A constant stream of recommending SFF novels according to the race and gender of the author is constant in MacFarlane’s culture. There are no SFF personages recommending SFF because a white or a man did it. This is a massive straw man reacting against nothing.
John Varley was doing what MacFarlane suggests almost 40 years ago. Why is it anyone’s problem if MacFarlane hasn’t read those or thinks the idea is still cutting edge when it’s been done to the point few even notice it anymore. It’s a question of scholarship, not whether such stories exist. They plainly do and have for a half-century.
The other problem is promoting naked identity advocacy in the same breath one forbids others to do it as a form of exclusion if not bigotry. The idea is that the straight white male is awash in wanting to see himself in media precisely because they are straight, white, and male. The problem there is that there is no sign this is actually true. As one example, the 2/3 black NFL is the No.1 sport in America, not hockey or NASCAR. There is no example of that within MacFarlane’s world, which is not diverse even while it cries for diversity. A natural demographic majority is being confused with identity supremacy, as if the reason Chinese films are Chinese or Arab films Arab is because they constitute some informal analogue to the KKK rather than an accidental and natural cultural expression. In other words MacFarlane has no Mammoth Books of White Men anthologies to push back against. An accidental demo of such an anthology is not the same as purposefully making one. A demo is not identity supremacy.
SFF is white and straight for the same reasons the NBA is 80% black and straight. There is no conspiracy. People like Jim Hines cannot accept the fact that SFF is simply an accidental cultural expression in terms of its demo that may or may not change over time. Looking at too white group photos of SFF convention chairs and hinting “racism” is as dumb as looking at too black group photos in a boxing gym and doing the same.
If you want diversity in novels, write it, but don’t accuse me of bigotry or mandate change, because there will be push back.
James,
I think you raise an interesting point. Is the SFF reading community mostly white and straight? Is the SFF author community mostly white and straight? And what are the interests of those majorities?
I ask the last question because white and straight authors might be interested in writing about folks outside the groups they identify with. They might not. They might be more interested in artificial intelligence. Who knows?
Do we have any actual data that isn’t anecdotal?
I know what I see at the conventions I go to, but I’m going to conventions in Utah. Not a statistically valid sample of total readership across the US (grin). And it would be interesting to see how all the major interests (plots, character types, settings, etc.) compare against each other, not just those focused on sexuality or ethnicity. It might be that SFF writers just don’t care about that topic. It might be that many do, but readers don’t.
Ultimately, if there’s a huge number of authors that are interested in certain types of characters and the dynamics they bring to a cast, then I don’t think anyone is holding them back from writing about those folks. Nor should anyone. Same with readership: if there are readers out there who find those dynamics interesting, then those stories will have demand and find success in the marketplace.
But as you point out, just because an author or reader finds other stuff more interesting that doesn’t mean those folks are by default bad actors. Or unwittingly holding others down.
If you write a great story, and the public loves it, nobody is going to hold you down. Not in today’s world.
I would assume that just as the NFL players have a different demographic from its viewers, so too the SFF authors have a demographic different from that of SFF readers. Wouldn’t it be a great study to see this kind of information?
BTW, the Writing Excuses folks recently announced that they felt their class wasn’t welcoming enough to folks of color.
Out of last year’s thirty attendees, we had only one writer of color, which is not even close to a realistic representation of the speculative fiction market. This was a sign to us that something was wrong. Our ratio of men and women was about half and half, which was great; that meant that both men and women deemed our retreat a safe and welcoming environment. Our ratio of white writers to writers of color was a clear sign that some writers did not necessarily feel the same welcome, and we want to change that.
I love all of the Writing Excuses folks. I think they’re great. But I wonder about their diagnosis. Who has data on the demographics of the current pool of new USA speculative fiction authors? Are they sure it’s not accurate? And what’s the demographics on the Writing Excuses podcast? This diagnosis seemed odd to me.
I do think it’s great that they want to reach out and attract authors who represent demographics that are different from the SFF majority. We’re always looking for the same but different. And folks with different backgrounds are going to bring new twists on the stories in the genres we love.
But why not just do that? Why not reach out and invite without any mention of quotas? And do these folks really need a scholarship? Or would it be more effective to use the money to broaden the podcast audience to communities they are interested in and let the interest flow naturally?
Their diagnosis doesn’t seem to be backed up by any real data. Then you have Asian folks in the comments wondering why they aren’t included. Folks from Eastern Block countries wondering the same. How inviting is that?
I think their introspection and desires are laudable. I just think that inviting broadly, working to build a broad customer base, and then judging all on their merits is a better way to go.
To me that Writing Excuses program is depraved. As for the SF community, I can vouch for the fact they are human – tell me a good story and I don’t care who’s in it. Larry Niven and John Varley commonly went outside the norm decades ago now. I accepted and even expected it because it was part and parcel of what SF does. As in music, there is no added attraction knowing the artist is gay, black or female. The attraction is artistry. Start pie-charting that and you may as well stick a fork in it. I am completely unaware of the gender and race breakdown of the 1500 song on my iPod. I know it is varied, but that was accidental. I go for the songs. In literature I go where the writing is. People like Jim Hines and Mary Robinette Kowal aren’t doing the SFF community any favors – far from it.
That community jokes about women destroying SF. Women can’t do that, and they can write SF as good as men. To me it’s not even an issue. But in the current climate, when they sarcastically use the world “destroy” on their all-female kickstarters, they’re not thinking where this all leads, so “destroy” is actually a perfect word. I’ve seen enough recommendations by race and gender to know they’ll do the same thing with awards, and if they become editors and publishers, there too. That is “destroy.”
This whole identity fracas needs to be booted out of SF and the ring leaders too. By “booted” I mean ignored, as in their fiction. I don’t care about a person’s politics but this is all just hate speech in the end and I won’t support it. When you think Harry, Bella and Katniss have taken millions of readers from core SFF, you’d think that core would get the message that readers don’t like to called racist, privileged, homophobes. By Hines’ and Kowal’s reckoning, the NHL must be KKK. So what’s the NBA: a black KKK? This is all so terribly stupid. So SFF’s white – so what? Samba is black, shadow puppetry Malay and Arab music is shockingly Arab. So what? Send Hines to the NBA to check it out. Something must be wrong.
I never knew that John Barnes was black. I didn’t care. I didn’t care that Octavia Butler was black. I don’t know what sexual orientation Jim Butcher is and don’t care.
At the same time, when you say, “there is no added attraction knowing the artist is gay, black or female,” I wonder if that’s the case for gays, blacks, or females. I don’t know if you belong to any of those groups. But I wonder.
I wonder because I know that I sometimes am more interested when someone is part of a group I strongly identify with. I think this is just normal. Not something to try to change. I don’t think you can change it. We’re built to be group’ish. So when Mitt Romney ran for president, I think my interest was piqued a bit more because he was a Mormon. I didn’t want to vote for him because of that–I’m opposed to Harry Reid and didn’t like John Huntsman or Orrin Hatch as candidates. But there was extra interest. He was skilled and one of “my people.” I don’t know if I’m explaining it clearly. And his group affiliation certainly didn’t override everything else. But it did add something.
I’m thinking about genres. I think there are some connotations, resonances, or expectations in a name. And some fit with a genre and some are a bit off. If “Veronica Michaels” or “Jenny Flowers” is writing military thrillers for men, it might “sound” wrong. If she’s awesome, it becomes an asset. But I think an initial reaction might be “too girlie.” If you have “Brad Thor” writing sweet romances, I think the resonance of that masculine name might jar with the expectations of that genre.
So I agree with what you have to say about this “pie chart” stuff. I think the NFL example is a good one.
At the same time, I do see these group effects and name expectations/connotations working on me.
I think there’s a big difference between “H.P. Lovebunny” and Con-Or-Bust, The Carl Brandon Society and Writing Excuses rewarding people because they’re not white. What I mostly resent is the idea this must be done because it is a shared racial failure on the part of whites, as if too many whites is always suspect but too many gay, Latino or black groups never is. That’s just a weird attitude to me, and a double standard even a child should see.
Just because some people want to see themselves reflected in media doesn’t mean it is a universal experience. Just because a group is 57.587% this or that doesn’t lessen its authenticity nor does it need to have a quota. Like MacFarlane, if someone wants to see themselves, write it. Why the calls for diversity? Make a movie and populate it with whomever you choose. No one is stopping you.
Diversity is one thing, using the topic as an attack platform is another. When the SFF authors most talking about diversity are saying things on Twitter like “CAN SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE WHITE PEOPLE?!!” and “Cis peeeoooople,” those are defamatory slurs, and they are coming from the heart of the SFF community, and their colleagues are not calling them out.
I think the new politically correct SFF community has this one exactly backwards. They are basically accusing a decades old community that embraces the weird and eccentric as having an aversion to the weird and eccentric. If I wanted to see people like myself I sure as heck wouldn’t like Niven’s Beowulf Schaeffer, Poul Anderson’s Nicholas Van Rijn, Bradbury’s Uncle Einar, Spielberg’s E.T, or in other words, a pantheon of weird cultures, eccentrics and iconoclasts.
To me it’s just laughably stupid to suggest such people are startled by something as prosaic as a black or gay person. SFF fans are the last people on Earth to be xenophobes. In fact SFF almost by definition embraces diversity if not outright strangeness. The fact that whole hard genre was started in male-oriented adventure stories a hundred years ago in a country 90% white has no more meaning to me than Bollywood being majority Hindu. No one did it on purpose and neither needs to be un-did on purpose. No cultural hobby in the world does. Either call to diversify Samba, the NBA, Bollywood, hip-hop, Arab literature, middle-weight boxing, the entire thing world-wide or shut up about it.
A lot of good points.
I’m seeing it this way. It’s like food. You have a town, and all they have are hamburger joints. They like hamburgers. They’re happy with hamburgers. They eat a lot of different types of hamburgers. They’ve been eating hamburgers for decades. One day someone says, you know what, I love Thai food. I want more Thai food. I’m not so interested in hamburgers all the time anymore.
Okay, so what’s the next step?
The pie chart approach says that someone needs to regulate all the burger joints and mandate they need to start offering Thai items.
What? Why? They’re in the business of burgers.
The pie chart approach also leads some to say that if the burger people don’t include Thai items, they must be bad in some way.
What? They’re selling burgers to people who like burgers. So what? If the burger joints want to add different items to their menus, okay. But mandating they cook food they aren’t interested in cooking?
The other approach is to win customers.
Open your Thai restaurant (or invite someone in to open one), and get people to try it. If they like it, they’ll buy it. The town may go crazy for it, and a majority of people start eating Thai. Or maybe the majority continues to eat burgers, but some love some Thai now and then.
This second approach is focused on building a customer base, on try it, you’ll like it. On winning customers.
If you want, you invest in inviting great Thai restaurateurs to open shop. You invest in helping people discover them. Or you invest in training folks to become great Thai restaurateurs.
This is all independent of the burger joints.
I suspect some folks would say, yeah, well, what if there’s a planning & zoning committee in the town, and they are forever putting the kibosh on non-burger restaurants? Or telling them they can sell their stuff, but only in the warehouse out by the dump?
That’s a problem. And that’s happened in the past.
But I can’t see that happening now. I don’t see it at the major publishing houses. It’s certainly not happening in the indie world. Amazon doesn’t care about anything except that your book is formatted correctly. Wait, correction. It does filter some content. But that doesn’t prevent you from going out into cyberspace and putting up your own store to sell those types of stories.
So write something awesome. Get people to try it. Build a customer base. That’s it. There’s nobody who is stopping anyone from doing that. You might find a lot of people like your stuff; you might find only a few do. But you can’t mandate that people like your stuff.
If your goal is to get hard-core burger people to like Thai, then you might not start with a Thai restaurant. You might start, a la Sabido, with burgers, with a bit of something Thai on the side (the C story). Satay maybe.
Am I missing something?
BTW, what the heck is “H.P. Lovebunny”?
I was joking about a kind of a bait and switch you brought up with Jenny Flowers. Who knows what H.P. Lovebunny would get ya. Maybe The Spa of Ulthar.
H.P. Lovebunny. I could see that actually being a great name for a military thriller writer. It’s so against type.
“What are you reading?”
“The latest Lovebunny.”
lol
They would eat it up. I know they would.
We could make up a new sub-genre called “Special Thrill Fiction.” Let author H.P. Lovebunny be your guide to a new world of SF with military hijinx, spies, naked assassin cults and banging planets into one another by fitting them with equatorial engines. Our hero is from a civilization which is nothing more than one giant military bordello for colonizing Aardvark people from the Crab Nebula.
John,
Thank you for posting about this. I’ve written a response that addresses the issue from what I believe is a different angle, responding to some of the problems that you’ve identified in MacFarlane’s post. I’d like to know what you think: http://www.gregoryashe.com/2014/02/post-binary-gender-and-ethics-of-fiction.html
Best,
Greg
Greg, that was a great response. And I think these two statements you made capture perfectly what I object to.
One of the fundamental principles I follow in my art is that I must have passion for the thing I’m creating. I must care about the characters and situations. I must follow my interests. I CAN’T create unless I do. Not only is there no motive, but the ideas don’t flow! My assumption is that this is the same for most practicing artists.
It seems you too read MacFarlane’s words and came away with the idea that she wants to ignore that. She wants to require artists to create art they don’t care about.
Which means her agenda is actually an attack on the very core of art itself.
What MacFarlane wants is propaganda.
Her crusade for what she thinks is right and good would ultimately suck the life blood from artists and their art. Hers is a world of the new wonder drug that will usher in utopia but turns us all into zombies instead.
Hi John,
Yes, absolutely: propaganda is exactly the right word. One of the major concepts I’ve taken from your blog is zing–the things that make me thrill when I’m writing a story. As an aesthetic principle, that’s the only one that rings true to me. Thanks for your good work and for bringing an important issue into a larger discussion.
On a totally different note, I’m looking forward to reading Curse. I love the cover.
I think that is well put. If you pie-chart and checkmark art according to race and sex you will kill it. Literal pie-charts, percentages and graphs have appeared on SFF blogs and webzines. A constant stream of recommending SFF novels according to the race and gender of the author is constant in MacFarlane’s culture. There are no SFF personages recommending SFF because a white or a man did it. This is a massive straw man reacting against nothing.
John Varley was doing what MacFarlane suggests almost 40 years ago. Why is it anyone’s problem if MacFarlane hasn’t read those or thinks the idea is still cutting edge when it’s been done to the point few even notice it anymore. It’s a question of scholarship, not whether such stories exist. They plainly do and have for a half-century.
The other problem is promoting naked identity advocacy in the same breath one forbids others to do it as a form of exclusion if not bigotry. The idea is that the straight white male is awash in wanting to see himself in media precisely because they are straight, white, and male. The problem there is that there is no sign this is actually true. As one example, the 2/3 black NFL is the No.1 sport in America, not hockey or NASCAR. There is no example of that within MacFarlane’s world, which is not diverse even while it cries for diversity. A natural demographic majority is being confused with identity supremacy, as if the reason Chinese films are Chinese or Arab films Arab is because they constitute some informal analogue to the KKK rather than an accidental and natural cultural expression. In other words MacFarlane has no Mammoth Books of White Men anthologies to push back against. An accidental demo of such an anthology is not the same as purposefully making one. A demo is not identity supremacy.
SFF is white and straight for the same reasons the NBA is 80% black and straight. There is no conspiracy. People like Jim Hines cannot accept the fact that SFF is simply an accidental cultural expression in terms of its demo that may or may not change over time. Looking at too white group photos of SFF convention chairs and hinting “racism” is as dumb as looking at too black group photos in a boxing gym and doing the same.
If you want diversity in novels, write it, but don’t accuse me of bigotry or mandate change, because there will be push back.
James,
I think you raise an interesting point. Is the SFF reading community mostly white and straight? Is the SFF author community mostly white and straight? And what are the interests of those majorities?
I ask the last question because white and straight authors might be interested in writing about folks outside the groups they identify with. They might not. They might be more interested in artificial intelligence. Who knows?
Do we have any actual data that isn’t anecdotal?
I know what I see at the conventions I go to, but I’m going to conventions in Utah. Not a statistically valid sample of total readership across the US (grin). And it would be interesting to see how all the major interests (plots, character types, settings, etc.) compare against each other, not just those focused on sexuality or ethnicity. It might be that SFF writers just don’t care about that topic. It might be that many do, but readers don’t.
Ultimately, if there’s a huge number of authors that are interested in certain types of characters and the dynamics they bring to a cast, then I don’t think anyone is holding them back from writing about those folks. Nor should anyone. Same with readership: if there are readers out there who find those dynamics interesting, then those stories will have demand and find success in the marketplace.
But as you point out, just because an author or reader finds other stuff more interesting that doesn’t mean those folks are by default bad actors. Or unwittingly holding others down.
If you write a great story, and the public loves it, nobody is going to hold you down. Not in today’s world.
I would assume that just as the NFL players have a different demographic from its viewers, so too the SFF authors have a demographic different from that of SFF readers. Wouldn’t it be a great study to see this kind of information?
BTW, the Writing Excuses folks recently announced that they felt their class wasn’t welcoming enough to folks of color.
http://www.writingexcuses.com/2014/01/17/annoucing-the-writing-excusescarl-brandon-scholarship/
Here was the issue they saw and their diagnosis.
I love all of the Writing Excuses folks. I think they’re great. But I wonder about their diagnosis. Who has data on the demographics of the current pool of new USA speculative fiction authors? Are they sure it’s not accurate? And what’s the demographics on the Writing Excuses podcast? This diagnosis seemed odd to me.
I do think it’s great that they want to reach out and attract authors who represent demographics that are different from the SFF majority. We’re always looking for the same but different. And folks with different backgrounds are going to bring new twists on the stories in the genres we love.
But why not just do that? Why not reach out and invite without any mention of quotas? And do these folks really need a scholarship? Or would it be more effective to use the money to broaden the podcast audience to communities they are interested in and let the interest flow naturally?
Their diagnosis doesn’t seem to be backed up by any real data. Then you have Asian folks in the comments wondering why they aren’t included. Folks from Eastern Block countries wondering the same. How inviting is that?
I think their introspection and desires are laudable. I just think that inviting broadly, working to build a broad customer base, and then judging all on their merits is a better way to go.
To me that Writing Excuses program is depraved. As for the SF community, I can vouch for the fact they are human – tell me a good story and I don’t care who’s in it. Larry Niven and John Varley commonly went outside the norm decades ago now. I accepted and even expected it because it was part and parcel of what SF does. As in music, there is no added attraction knowing the artist is gay, black or female. The attraction is artistry. Start pie-charting that and you may as well stick a fork in it. I am completely unaware of the gender and race breakdown of the 1500 song on my iPod. I know it is varied, but that was accidental. I go for the songs. In literature I go where the writing is. People like Jim Hines and Mary Robinette Kowal aren’t doing the SFF community any favors – far from it.
That community jokes about women destroying SF. Women can’t do that, and they can write SF as good as men. To me it’s not even an issue. But in the current climate, when they sarcastically use the world “destroy” on their all-female kickstarters, they’re not thinking where this all leads, so “destroy” is actually a perfect word. I’ve seen enough recommendations by race and gender to know they’ll do the same thing with awards, and if they become editors and publishers, there too. That is “destroy.”
This whole identity fracas needs to be booted out of SF and the ring leaders too. By “booted” I mean ignored, as in their fiction. I don’t care about a person’s politics but this is all just hate speech in the end and I won’t support it. When you think Harry, Bella and Katniss have taken millions of readers from core SFF, you’d think that core would get the message that readers don’t like to called racist, privileged, homophobes. By Hines’ and Kowal’s reckoning, the NHL must be KKK. So what’s the NBA: a black KKK? This is all so terribly stupid. So SFF’s white – so what? Samba is black, shadow puppetry Malay and Arab music is shockingly Arab. So what? Send Hines to the NBA to check it out. Something must be wrong.
I never knew that John Barnes was black. I didn’t care. I didn’t care that Octavia Butler was black. I don’t know what sexual orientation Jim Butcher is and don’t care.
At the same time, when you say, “there is no added attraction knowing the artist is gay, black or female,” I wonder if that’s the case for gays, blacks, or females. I don’t know if you belong to any of those groups. But I wonder.
I wonder because I know that I sometimes am more interested when someone is part of a group I strongly identify with. I think this is just normal. Not something to try to change. I don’t think you can change it. We’re built to be group’ish. So when Mitt Romney ran for president, I think my interest was piqued a bit more because he was a Mormon. I didn’t want to vote for him because of that–I’m opposed to Harry Reid and didn’t like John Huntsman or Orrin Hatch as candidates. But there was extra interest. He was skilled and one of “my people.” I don’t know if I’m explaining it clearly. And his group affiliation certainly didn’t override everything else. But it did add something.
I’m thinking about genres. I think there are some connotations, resonances, or expectations in a name. And some fit with a genre and some are a bit off. If “Veronica Michaels” or “Jenny Flowers” is writing military thrillers for men, it might “sound” wrong. If she’s awesome, it becomes an asset. But I think an initial reaction might be “too girlie.” If you have “Brad Thor” writing sweet romances, I think the resonance of that masculine name might jar with the expectations of that genre.
So I agree with what you have to say about this “pie chart” stuff. I think the NFL example is a good one.
At the same time, I do see these group effects and name expectations/connotations working on me.
I think there’s a big difference between “H.P. Lovebunny” and Con-Or-Bust, The Carl Brandon Society and Writing Excuses rewarding people because they’re not white. What I mostly resent is the idea this must be done because it is a shared racial failure on the part of whites, as if too many whites is always suspect but too many gay, Latino or black groups never is. That’s just a weird attitude to me, and a double standard even a child should see.
Just because some people want to see themselves reflected in media doesn’t mean it is a universal experience. Just because a group is 57.587% this or that doesn’t lessen its authenticity nor does it need to have a quota. Like MacFarlane, if someone wants to see themselves, write it. Why the calls for diversity? Make a movie and populate it with whomever you choose. No one is stopping you.
Diversity is one thing, using the topic as an attack platform is another. When the SFF authors most talking about diversity are saying things on Twitter like “CAN SOMEONE THINK ABOUT THE WHITE PEOPLE?!!” and “Cis peeeoooople,” those are defamatory slurs, and they are coming from the heart of the SFF community, and their colleagues are not calling them out.
I think the new politically correct SFF community has this one exactly backwards. They are basically accusing a decades old community that embraces the weird and eccentric as having an aversion to the weird and eccentric. If I wanted to see people like myself I sure as heck wouldn’t like Niven’s Beowulf Schaeffer, Poul Anderson’s Nicholas Van Rijn, Bradbury’s Uncle Einar, Spielberg’s E.T, or in other words, a pantheon of weird cultures, eccentrics and iconoclasts.
To me it’s just laughably stupid to suggest such people are startled by something as prosaic as a black or gay person. SFF fans are the last people on Earth to be xenophobes. In fact SFF almost by definition embraces diversity if not outright strangeness. The fact that whole hard genre was started in male-oriented adventure stories a hundred years ago in a country 90% white has no more meaning to me than Bollywood being majority Hindu. No one did it on purpose and neither needs to be un-did on purpose. No cultural hobby in the world does. Either call to diversify Samba, the NBA, Bollywood, hip-hop, Arab literature, middle-weight boxing, the entire thing world-wide or shut up about it.
A lot of good points.
I’m seeing it this way. It’s like food. You have a town, and all they have are hamburger joints. They like hamburgers. They’re happy with hamburgers. They eat a lot of different types of hamburgers. They’ve been eating hamburgers for decades. One day someone says, you know what, I love Thai food. I want more Thai food. I’m not so interested in hamburgers all the time anymore.
Okay, so what’s the next step?
The pie chart approach says that someone needs to regulate all the burger joints and mandate they need to start offering Thai items.
What? Why? They’re in the business of burgers.
The pie chart approach also leads some to say that if the burger people don’t include Thai items, they must be bad in some way.
What? They’re selling burgers to people who like burgers. So what? If the burger joints want to add different items to their menus, okay. But mandating they cook food they aren’t interested in cooking?
The other approach is to win customers.
Open your Thai restaurant (or invite someone in to open one), and get people to try it. If they like it, they’ll buy it. The town may go crazy for it, and a majority of people start eating Thai. Or maybe the majority continues to eat burgers, but some love some Thai now and then.
This second approach is focused on building a customer base, on try it, you’ll like it. On winning customers.
If you want, you invest in inviting great Thai restaurateurs to open shop. You invest in helping people discover them. Or you invest in training folks to become great Thai restaurateurs.
This is all independent of the burger joints.
I suspect some folks would say, yeah, well, what if there’s a planning & zoning committee in the town, and they are forever putting the kibosh on non-burger restaurants? Or telling them they can sell their stuff, but only in the warehouse out by the dump?
That’s a problem. And that’s happened in the past.
But I can’t see that happening now. I don’t see it at the major publishing houses. It’s certainly not happening in the indie world. Amazon doesn’t care about anything except that your book is formatted correctly. Wait, correction. It does filter some content. But that doesn’t prevent you from going out into cyberspace and putting up your own store to sell those types of stories.
So write something awesome. Get people to try it. Build a customer base. That’s it. There’s nobody who is stopping anyone from doing that. You might find a lot of people like your stuff; you might find only a few do. But you can’t mandate that people like your stuff.
If your goal is to get hard-core burger people to like Thai, then you might not start with a Thai restaurant. You might start, a la Sabido, with burgers, with a bit of something Thai on the side (the C story). Satay maybe.
Am I missing something?
BTW, what the heck is “H.P. Lovebunny”?
I was joking about a kind of a bait and switch you brought up with Jenny Flowers. Who knows what H.P. Lovebunny would get ya. Maybe The Spa of Ulthar.
H.P. Lovebunny. I could see that actually being a great name for a military thriller writer. It’s so against type.
“What are you reading?”
“The latest Lovebunny.”
lol
They would eat it up. I know they would.
We could make up a new sub-genre called “Special Thrill Fiction.” Let author H.P. Lovebunny be your guide to a new world of SF with military hijinx, spies, naked assassin cults and banging planets into one another by fitting them with equatorial engines. Our hero is from a civilization which is nothing more than one giant military bordello for colonizing Aardvark people from the Crab Nebula.