Do Spoilers Really Spoil?

The latest issue of SKEPTICAL INQUIRER includes an article exploring whether advance exposure to spoilers actually makes the experience of reading a book or viewing a movie (the author mainly discusses films) worse, neutral, or better:

Savoring Uncertainty

The author, Stuart Vyse, starts by analyzing the difference between stories that provide a "clear resolution" and those that end with ambiguities unresolved. He notes, "Given the chaos of everyday life, it’s understandable that people are drawn to stories that make sense and provide closure." He links this tendency to a wish to believe we live in a just universe, offering the TV series LAW AND ORDER as a typical example. There I think he's absolutely right. The traditional detective novel is the most moral of genres. It promises that problems will be solved, questions answered, justice served, and criminals punished. In rare cases when the criminal escapes the grasp of the law, it's because the detective has determined his or her crime was justified. Vyse contrasts the traditional formula with the "noir" subgenre, in which ambiguity reigns, morality comes in shades of gray, and justice is far from guaranteed.

He then discusses the connection, if any, between enjoyment of ambiguity and tolerance of spoilers. He also goes into the definition of a spoiler, which can vary according to the individual experiencing it -- e.g., someone who's naive about the particular genre, such as a small child -- and to what extent the information constitutes "common knowledge." We'd all probably agree that the prohibition on spoilers has run out for mentioning that Romeo and Juliet die at the end of the play, for example. For a century or more, certainly since the first movie adaptations came out, everybody has known Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde inhabit the same body. The phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" has become proverbial. When the novella was first published, however, that secret came as a shocking revelation near the end. Upon the original publication of DRACULA, readers who ignored reviews could have picked up the novel without suspecting the Count's true nature. Nowadays, even elementary-school kids know "Dracula" equals "vampire."

Vyse cites research on whether spoilers decrease appreciation for a work, increase it, or have no effect. Results of various studies yield different answers. I've noticed tolerance for spoilers ranges from the zero-tolerance of fans such as one of our children, who avoids even book cover blurbs if possible, to my own attitude, sympathetic to a comment I read somewhere that a story capable of being "spoiled" by knowledge of what happens isn't worth spoiling. I admit exceptions of course, such as knowing the killer before the big reveal in a murder mystery (on first reading, at least) or works in which the climactic twist is the whole point of the thing, such as THE SIXTH SENSE. I don't at all mind knowing in advance whether a major character will live or die; in fact, I sometimes sneak a peak at the end to relieve the stress of wondering. When the series finale of FOREVER KNIGHT aired, I was glad I'd read a summary before viewing the episode. When I actually saw the devastating final scene, having braced myself for the worst allowed me to feel it wasn't quite so bad as other fans had maintained. Having reread many of my favorite books over and over demonstrates that foreknowledge of the plot doesn't bother me. With that knowledge, I can relax into the pleasure of revisiting familiar characters.

In one of C. S. Lewis's works of literary criticism, he declares that the point of a startling twist in a book or any artistic medium isn't the surprise in itself. It's "a certain surprisingness." During subsequent exposures to the work, we have the fun of anticipating the upcoming surprise and enjoying how the creator prepares us for it. In a second or later reading of a mystery, for example, we can notice the clues the author has hidden in plain sight. We realize how we should have guessed the murderer and admire the author's skill at concealing the solution to while still playing fair with the reader. (Along that line, I was astonished to hear Nora Roberts remark at a convention that she doesn't plan her "In Death" novels written under the name "J. D. Robb" in advance. How can anyone compose a detective story without detailed plotting? She must have to do an awful lot of cleanup in revision.)

Learning the general plot of a novel or film prior to reading or viewing doesn't "spoil" it for me. I read or watch for the experience of sharing the characters' problems, dangers, and joys, discovering how they navigate the challenges of the story, and getting immersed in their emotional and interpersonal growth. Once the "narrative lust" (another phrase from Lewis, referring to the drive to rush through the narrative to find out what happens next) has been satisfied by the first reading or viewing, in future ones we can take a while to savor all the satisfying details we didn't fully appreciate the first time.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt

RavenCon 17 (April 2024)

Last weekend, my husband, our daughter, and I attended RavenCon near Richmond, Virginia. Here's the convention's website. Information about this year's con is still up.

RavenCon

Guests of honor were editor Ellen Datlow and author Ursula Vernon, aka T. Kingfisher. Since she's one of my favorite writers, I was thrilled when I learned she'd be there. Her reading consisted of excerpts from a new "Sworn Soldier" novel -- sequel to WHAT MOVES THE DEAD and WHAT FEASTS AT NIGHT, yay! -- and a novel about an angel and a demon teaming up to solve a mystery in a small village. (She mentioned her dismay when the GOOD OMENS series premiered, after she was well into the book.) I watched part of her interview later, fascinating background information about the origins of her writing career.

I appeared on panels about Writing Believable Characters and Geeks Parenting Geeks. The latter especially was a lot of fun, the whole session filled with memories and anecdotes about introducing our children to the worlds of fantasy, SF, and horror, plus the works our kids turned us on to. My husband took part in discussions on Writing with a Partner and Writing a Series. Together we appeared in "How Will Religion Change in Space?" Well attended, that was lively and thought-provoking but slightly chaotic. In our opinion, the moderator opened the floor to questions too soon. Eager audience participation is always desirable, but people kept prematurely derailing topics in progress. I never did get to say much about Mary Doria Russell's THE SPARROW, one book I especially wanted to delve into, but anyway it was a worthwhile and memorable panel.

The most heavily attended session I watched, surprisingly, was a lecture with slides proposing that the folktale of "The Smith and the Devil" is the "world's oldest fairy tale." The room was packed, with people sitting on the floor and leaning against walls -- at 9 p.m. on Friday. An interesting late-night presentation I watched only part of was called "Ask a Necromancer," by a licensed mortician answering questions about her profession. On Sunday morning, a slide show about angel lore in myth, fiction, and film mentioned some works new to me that I may watch on video streaming. I brought up C. S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, strangely (from my viewpoint) omitted from her book list even though she cited several other things that sounded rather peripheral to the topic.

At the Saturday evening masquerade contest, even though I recognized hardly any of the costumes, I marveled at how impressively elaborate most were. Even the "cosplay showcase" of people who didn't enter the official competition featured many dazzling outfits. One I did recognize immediately -- the Queen of Hearts, complete with flamingo, with the equally regally dressed King of Hearts hovering in the background.

Fortunately for getting to events on time, the hotel restaurant offered buffets at all three meals on Saturday and breakfast on Sunday. Not so fortunately, we had to fend for ourselves at Friday dinner in the only food venue open, the bar. With the resulting crowd, we didn't get fed until half an hour after ordering, when the opening ceremony had already started. Aside from not being present for the self-introduction of guests, though, we didn't miss anything vital.

We drove there and back uneventfully. We arrived home on Sunday afternoon to find the house and the cats in good condition.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Art Versus Life

A work of art (specifically, literature, including poetry such as song lyrics) does not necessarily reveal the life or personality of the artist. Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers didn't make a habit of committing murders. Stephen King has probably never met a vampire or an extradimensional shapeshifter, and although he incorporated his near-fatal traffic accident into the Dark Tower series, I doubt he actually encountered his gunslinger Roland in person. Robert Bloch, reputed to have said he had the heart of a small boy -- in a jar on his desk -- was one of the nicest people I ever met. As Mercedes Lackey has commented on Quora, she doesn't keep a herd of magical white horses in her yard. Despite the preface to THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, it seems very unlikely that C. S. Lewis actually intercepted a bundle of correspondence between two demons. And, as a vampire specialist, I could go on at length (but I won't) about the literary-critical tendency to analyze DRACULA as a source for secrets about Bram Stoker's alleged psychological hangups.

C. S. Lewis labeled the practice of trying to discover a writer's background, character, or beliefs from his or her work "the personal heresy." Elsewhere, writing about Milton, he cautioned against thinking we can find out how Milton "really" felt about his blindness by reading PARADISE LOST or any of his other poetry.

The Personal Heresy

An article by hip-hop musician Keven Liles cautions against analyzing songs in this way and condemning singers based on the contents of their music, with lyrics "being presented as literal confessions in courtrooms across America":

Art Is Not Evidence

Some musicians and other artists have been convicted of crimes on the basis of words or images in their works. Liles urges passage of a law to protect creators' First Amendment rights in this regard, with narrowly defined "common-sense" exceptions to be applied if there's concrete evidence of a direct, factual connection between a particular work and a specific criminal act.

This kind of confusion between art and life is why I'm deeply suspicious of child pornography laws that would criminalize the broad category of "depicting" children in sexual situations. A description or drawing/painting of an imaginary child in such a situation, however revolting it may be, does no direct real-world harm. Interpreted loosely or capriciously, that kind of law could be read to ban a novel such as LOLITA. Would you really trust a fanatical book-banner or over-zealous prosecutor or judge to discern that the repulsive first-person narrator is thoroughly unreliable and that his self-serving claims about his abusive relationship with a preteen girl are MEANT to be disbelieved?

Many moons ago, in the pre-internet era, a friend of mine who wasn't a regular consumer of speculative fiction read my chapbook of horror-themed verse, DAYMARES FROM THE CRYPT. To my suprise, she expressed sincere worry about me for having such images in my head. Not being a habitual reader of the genre, she didn't recognize that the majority of stuff in the poems consisted of very conventional, widely known horror tropes. Even the more personal pieces had been filtered through the "lens" of creativity (as Liles puts it in his essay) to transmute the raw material into artifacts, not autobiography.

In case you'd like to check out these supposedly disturbing verse effusions, DAYMARES FROM THE CRYPT -- updated with a few later poems -- is available in a Kindle edition for only 99 cents, with a cool cover by Karen Wiesner:

Daymares

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Bad People Versus Bad Institutions

In his latest LOCUS essay, Cory Doctorow discusses whether "all the internet services we enjoyed and came to rely upon became suddenly and irreversibly terrible – as the result of moral decay." Setting aside the question of whether "irreversibly terrible" is a bit exaggerated, he reasonably states that "it’s tempting to think that the people who gave us the old, good internet did so because they were good people," and the internet was ruined, if it was, by bad people:

Don't Be Evil

The problem isn't that simple, however, since institutions, not individuals, created the internet. On the other hand, institutions comprise many individuals, some with honorable motives and some driven solely by the quest for profit. In short, "institutional action is the result of its individuals resolving their conflicts." Can corporations as such be evil? Doctorow doesn't seem to be saying that's the case. Every institution, private or public, includes multitudes of people, with conflicting goals, some good and some bad -- both the individuals and their goals. Moreover, as he doesn't explicitly mention, some people's characters and motivations are neither all good nor all bad. Many drift along with the corporate culture from fear of the consequences of resistance or maybe just from failure to think through the full implications of what's going on. He does seem to be suggesting, however, that vast, impersonal forces can shape negative outcomes regardless of the contrary wishes of some people involved in the process. "Tech didn’t get worse because techies [workers in the field] got worse. Tech got worse because the condition of the external world made it easier for the worst techies to win arguments."

What solutions for this quandary could be tried, other than "burn them [the allegedly villainous "giants of the internet" such as Amazon and Google] to the ground," in my opinion a bit too drastic? Doctorow insists, "A new, good internet is possible and worth fighting for," and lists some aspects he believes must change. Potential avenues for improvement can be summarized by the need to empower the people who mean well -- the ones Doctorow describes as "people within those institutions who pine for a new, good internet, an internet that is a force for human liberation" -- over those who disregard the concerns of their customers in single-minded greed for profit.

On the wider topic of individual responsibility for the villainous acts of institutions over which one doesn't have any personal control, one might be reminded of the contemporary issue of reparations to historically oppressed groups. Of course, one can quit a job and seek a more ethical employer, but renouncing one's nationality or ethnic ancestry would be severely problematic. However, since that subject veers into "modpol" (modern politics, as strictly banned on an e-mail list I subscribe to), I'll simply point out C. S. Lewis's essay, in a different context, about repenting of other people's sins:

Dangers of National Repentance

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

In Celebration of Happy Endings

In fiction, is a sad conclusion more "realistic" than a happy one? "The belief seems to be that tragic or unhappy endings are 'real' and therefore 'worthy' while happy endings are an easy cop-out." This essay on the Word Wenches blog strongly objects to that belief:

Word Wenches: Happy Endings

The insistence that happy endings are unrealistic seems based on the undeniable fact that the real world contains lots of horror and suffering. Yes, admits this blogger, but it also contains "a lot of happy stuff," which she wants us to "celebrate. . . not push it under the carpet and call it mindless fluff." People who hold the latter position apparently believe writers and readers of such "fluff" are evading reality, hiding from the grim truths of life. As if the grimness and suffering were somehow MORE "real" than the joyful bits. Is a house in the suburbs with two cars and a jacuzzi any less "real life" than a roach-infested apartment? (During our fifty-plus years of marriage, we've lived in both as well as various environments in between.) Every work of art constructs its effects by selecting elements from the total mass of lived experience. Why shouldn't we preferentially select the good rather than the bad sometimes? Dwelling solely on the bad and labeling it "realism" reminds me of a passage in C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS: The senior demon advises the junior tempter to induce the human "patient" to consider his feelings about the impact of bombs on human flesh as a reflection of "reality" and his feelings about sunshine and happy children as mere wishful thinking.

I suspect a large part of "serious" critics' dismissal of romance arises not just from its predominantly female audience but also from its generic requirement for a "happily ever after" or at least a "happily for now." Yet if it's actually true that half of all marriages in the U.S. end in divorce (which I've read is a faulty claim based on a misinterpretation of the statistics), then it's also true that half of all marriages last a lifetime.

Not that the Word Wenches blogger is saying no fiction should conclude with a sad outcome. What she objects to are stories (in whatever medium) that "are needlessly miserable at the end." If the disastrous or tragic conclusion grows naturally out of the story, as an inevitable result of the characters and their situation, that can work for her. That's different from a pointlessly sad ending designed for shock value or to flaunt the author's commitment to gritty "realism" -- or "simply because the writer thinks it will make for a better, more dramatic ending." I agree. "Sad" fiction isn't necessarily depressing. The finale of a tragedy by Shakespeare feels uplifting, not depressing. Seemingly meaningless destruction of the characters and their goals, to me, IS depressing. The purpose of art is to impose structure on, or discover it in, the apparent chaos of "real life."

In one of his books on literature, C. S. Lewis approaches the issue of "realism" from the opposite angle, addressing critics and readers who think the down-to-earth content of comedy is more "realistic" than the solemn grandeur of tragedy. He points out that the zany coincidences required to make a good farce work are just as artificial and therefore "unrealistic" as the plot of a well-crafted tragedy. Every genre includes some details of mundane life and excludes others, according to its particular requirements.

So we have no reason to apologize if we love to read and write upbeat fiction.

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

Commercialized Holidays

Recently I saw a Facebook post lamenting the materialistic nature of the Christmas season nowadays. The holidays focus too much on buying and receiving presents. Advertisers swamp us with messages encouraging greed. Oh, for the old-fashioned, gentle, family-centered Christmases of his youth. Well, this person appears to be around my age (mid-70s), and I remember childhood holiday preparations characterized by frenetic seasonal advertising and feverish anticipation of presents. (Of course, we were ad-bombed by less sophisticated technology, and the store displays probably went up slightly later in the year, but it was the same general kind of atmosphere.)

In A CHARLIE BROWN CHRISTMAS, first broadcast in 1965, Charlie famously asks what Christmas is all about, as he despairs over the commercialization of the holiday, with even Snoopy embracing the hype.

In 1957, C. S. Lewis published an essay called "What Christmas Means to Me" (a title I'm almost certain wasn't chosen by Lewis himself, but that's beside the point). He says three things "go by the name of Christmas": First, the Christian religious festival. Second, "a popular holiday, an occasion for merry-making and hospitality." The third is "the commercial racket." Read this short essay in full to note how little that cultural aspect has changed, aside from the technology, since Lewis complained of it in the 1950s:

What Christmas Means to Me

A CHRISTMAS STORY (the BB gun movie), based on episodes in Jean Shepherd's fictionalized memoir IN GOD WE TRUST: ALL OTHERS PAY CASH, takes place in 1940; the real-life incidents underlying it probably occurred in the 1930s. The film shows a department-store Santa in an extravagantly decorated setting, with an assembly line of children waiting to declare their wishes.

According to Stephen Nissenbaum's THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, an analysis of the shift from the REAL old-fashioned Christmas of drinking, carousing, and house-to-house begging (wassailing) to the domestic, child-centered holiday we think of as a "traditional Christmas," concerns about commercialization sprang up concurrently with the cultural shift. Even before the mid-nineteenth century, merchants aggressively advertised their wares as perfect for seasonal gifting, while troubled moralists warned of Christmas becoming "laden with crass materialism" and producing a "generation of greedy, spoiled children."

In short, every era's nostalgic imagination relegates the traditional, unspoiled Christmas of bygone years to their parents' or grandparents' day, or maybe the generation before that. More accurately, that ideal holiday never existed in the first place.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

The Purpose of Horror

What is horror fiction (whether in print or on film) good for? My parents certainly took a dim view of my fervent interest in the genre, beginning at the age of twelve with my first reading of DRACULA. A familiar physiological or biochemical hypothesis proposes that reading or viewing horror serves the same purpose as riding a roller coaster. We enjoy the adrenaline rush of danger without having to expose ourselves to any real risk. Personally, I would never get on a roller coaster except at gunpoint, to save someone else's life, or to earn a lavish amount of money. I'm terrified of anything that feels like falling and don't like any kind of physical "thrill" experience. Yet I do enjoy the vicarious fears of the horror genre. Maybe real-life thrill rides or extreme sports feel too much like actual danger for my tolerance level, whereas artistic terror feels controllable.

H. P. Lovecraft famously asserts, "The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest fear is fear of the unknown." Therefore, horror is a legitimate subject for art, even though he believes its appeal is restricted to a niche audience. We might link Lovecraft's thesis to the physiological model, in that the feared unknown becomes manageable when confined within the boundaries of a story.

In DANSE MACABRE, Stephen King suggests that all horror fiction has roots in our fear of death. Embodying the threat of death in the form of a monster entails the hope that it can be defeated. I think it's in 'SALEM'S LOT that a child character says, "Death is when the monsters get you."

In an interview in the October 2022 LOCUS, author Sarah Gailey maintains that "horror is designed to put the reader in touch with an experience of the body, where that experience is one that they typically would not wish to have." Our culture separates body and mind from each other, while, Gailey says, "Horror serves to remind us that those things aren’t separate. The ‘I’ who I am is absolutely connected to the physical experience of my body and the danger that body could face in the world, and horror does an incredible job of reminding readers that we live in bodies, we live in the world, and we are creatures."

This comment reminds me of C. S. Lewis's remark that the truth of our nature as a union of both the spiritual and the physical could be deduced from the existence of dirty jokes and ghost stories. Bawdy humor implies that our having fleshly bodies is somehow funny, shameful, or incongruous. No other species of animal seems to find it funny just to be the kind of creature it is. Supernatural horror highlights the sense that separation of body and soul, which should form a single, unified entity, is deeply unnatural. Hence we get the extremes of zombies (soulless yet animated bodies) and ghosts (disembodied spirits).

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Is Time Travel Impossible?

A character in C. S. Lewis's posthumously published novel fragment THE DARK TOWER asserts it is. (Granted, one faction within Lewis scholarship maintains THE DARK TOWER wasn't actually written by him, but I don't find that claim convincing. Anyway, the issue doesn't affect the point of the story.) He argues that physical travel to the past or future can't be done for a basic, irrefutable reason: A corporeal trip into a different time necessarily carries all the atoms in one's own body into that other time. But in the past, all those particles existed in other entities in the physical world, whether inanimate objects, living creatures, liquids, gasses, whatever. In the future, those same particles will again be distributed through the environment. The only way you could materialize in a different moment would be if duplicates of each of your atoms, molecules, etc. existed in the same place at the same time. According to the laws of physics as we know them, that's impossible. Therefore, physical time travel is forever, irrevocably ruled out, unless we invoke magic rather than science.

That story is the only place where I've encountered this argument, which strikes me as highly convincing. On this hypothesis, other temporal "locations" could be only viewed, never visited. Accordingly, Lewis's character has invented a device for viewing other times, although it turns out the true situation is more complicated than he believed.

While I've come across other stories of observing rather than traveling to some non-present time, I don't remember any that offer a theoretical grounding for the impossibility of temporal travel in the flesh. It's not unusual in time-travel fiction, however, for a traveler to be unable to exist in the same location more than once in the same moment. In Dean Koontz's LIGHTNING, a traveler can't visit a place/time where he already is/was. He's automatically shunted away from that point. In Connie Willis's series about time-traveling historians from a near-future Oxford University, the same prohibition applies, but it's not clear whether the simultaneous existence of two of the same person is outright impossible or would produce a catastrophic result if it accidentally happened. In such works as the Harry Potter series, THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE, and Robert Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps," on the other hand, any number of you can be in the same point in space/time at once.

To me, the former rule seems more plausible, because it makes the issue of the same material object being in two places at once less obvious, although I've enjoyed lots of fiction in the second category. One possible way to get around the problem raised in Lewis's DARK TOWER: Instead of a corporeal leap into a different time, travelers might project their consciousness and build temporary bodies in the other time by "borrowing" stray particles from the surrounding air, water, and earth. When the traveler released the borrowed matter to return to his or her point of origin, the particles would dissipate harmlessly into the environment. Another method of bypassing the problem shows up in the new QUANTUM LEAP series: The leaper's consciousness occupies the body of a person in the past, presumably suppressing the host's personality in a sort of temporary, benign possession. (The time-shift operated differently in the original series, while this version does leave unanswered the question of where the leaper's body is while his immaterial consciousness travels to multiple past eras.)

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Age Ranges for Fiction

Editor Laura Simeon writes about determining whether a children's or YA book is "appropriate" or "inappropriate" for a certain age:

What Makes a Book Age-Appropriate?

Current "battles over so-called 'inappropriate' content in kids’ and teen books" can lead to situations where "school librarians nationwide report that some administrators are incorrectly treating these age recommendations as prescriptive and using them to craft policies that override the expertise of library professionals and limit students’ access to books." But determining which readers certain books are suitable for isn't that straightforward.

Do age guidelines for reading materials refer to vocabulary and sentence complexity or to content? The two criteria don't necessarily align. Simeon points out that a child with advanced literacy skills might be able to read a particular novel's text fluently but not be developmentally ready for the themes it includes or the way it deals with them. Her essay offers several examples of 2022 books that cover potentially sensitive topics (e.g., divorce, mental illness) in ways suitable for middle-school and YA readers, respectively. Conversely, I could mention numerous classic novels with stories fully accessible to preteen readers but with vocabulary and style that could prove challenging for some contemporary twelve-year-olds—for instance, THE SECRET GARDEN, especially the Yorkshire dialect passages.

Simeon lists issues that trouble people who want to restrict students' access to the "wrong" or "inappropriate" books, among them the fear that kids might "lose a romanticized notion of childhood innocence." It is to laugh. The only people who believe in the "innocence" of childhood are adults who've forgotten large portions of their own childhoods. When James Barrie calls children "innocent" in PETER PAN, he couples that adjective with "heartless." It has often baffled me when would-be censors object to having child readers exposed in fiction to phenomena they're almost certainly aware of in reality. "Books can be upsetting and confusing," Simeon acknowledges, "but so can real life. Unlike real life, readers can skim, skip, take breaks, and walk away."

Anyway, age range recommendations for books, like genre categories, are marketing tools. Their chief purpose is to help booksellers and librarians decide where to shelve things. C. S. Lewis says somewhere that any book worth reading at age eight (aside from "books of information") is equally worth reading at any age. I first encountered many of my favorite children's and YA authors in adulthood. I have a vague memory of reading a couple of the Narnia novels in elementary school, but I tracked down the entire series only in my twenties. I've reread them over and over since then. I'd never heard of the Winnie the Pooh stories until my high-school Latin teacher read us a chapter every Friday (while we passed around WINNIE ILLE PU).

My own policy about children and books, based on my own prodigious quantity of "inappropriate" reading from about age eight on, has always been that their reading shouldn't be censored. If they stumble upon a literary work and find it interesting, let them tackle it. If they come across passages "over their heads," they'll be either bored or repelled and will simply skim or skip. As for the few books I owned that I flatly didn't want my underage offspring to read, I kept them securely stowed where the kids didn't know they existed.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Writing to the Future

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column, on writing nonfiction pieces that will still be relevant by the time they're published:

Six Weeks Is a Long Time

The time lag that may undercut the applicability of a written work, according to him, seems to be getting shorter. Circumstances can always truly change overnight or in an instant, of course. Consider the difference between September 10, 2001, and September 11 of that year. Yet it may seem odd to define an essay meant to be read a month and a half after it's written as "futuristic thinking." The near future, however, is still the future. As C. S. Lewis's senior demon says in THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, all human beings constantly travel into the future at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.

I once read a story about a time-viewing machine that allows the user to look into the future. The culture-transformative feature of this device is that it has no lower limit on how short a time span it can look ahead. And apparently (if I remember correctly) one can view events in other places, not just where one happens to be personally located. Suppose you peer ten seconds into the future? You're effectively spying on people's actions in the present, in real time. (On second thought, it may have been a past-viewing device. Same principle applies.)

Doctorow wrote this month's article in the midst of a new, highly contagious COVID variant and the imminent invasion of Ukraine, addressing us "in the distant, six-week future" from his moment in the past when "the odds of nuclear Armageddon [seemed] higher than they’ve been for decades." He greets his future audience thus: "I bear glad tidings. Only six weeks ago, you, me and most everyone else we knew couldn’t imagine getting through these next six weeks. If you’re reading these words, you did the unimaginable. Six weeks and six weeks and six weeks, we eat the elephant of the unimaginable one bite at a time."

We're familiar with the question of what message we'd like to send to our past selves. There's a country song about writing a letter to "me at seventeen." But what message might you want to send to your future self? Unlike speaking to one's past self, this we can actually do. Are there important events or thoughts you might want to write down as reminders in case you've forgotten them a month, a year, or decades from now? What would you like to record as an important reminder for the citizens of your city, your country, or the world next month, next year, a decade from now, or generations later? People often do the latter with physical "time capsules." Would the things you choose to highlight turn out to be important to those future audiences or not?

Isaac Asimov wrote at least one essay predicting future technological and social advances, and surely he wasn't the only SF author to do that. Some of his predictions have come true; many haven't. An essay like that could be considered a message to future generations.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Verbicide

The final chapter of C. S. Lewis's STUDIES IN WORDS shifts from the narrowly focused topics of the rest of the book (each chapter delving into the history of a particular term and its relatives) to a general overview of what he calls "verbicide," the degradation of the meanings of words. Not that he expects words to stay frozen in their original denotations. As he says somewhere else, expecting a changeless language is like asking for a motionless river. What he objects to are changes that empty words of meaning. Most words now used as insults or compliments began as descriptive, neutral terms. "Cad" is short for a reference to boys or young men, surviving in the golf term "caddie." "Villain" originally meant a peasant and eventually became derogatory when it grew to emphasize the alleged boorish, thug-like traits of the typical peasant. (That's almost certainly how Richard III uses it in Shakespeare's play; he plans to act like an uncouth brute, not a mustache-twirling incarnation of evil.) Now it just means a very bad person. "Gentleman" denoted a man of a particular social class before it gained the connotation of someone who displays the fine manners and honor expected of that class. By now it has lost all connection with class status and simply means a polite man or, even more vaguely, a man the speaker approves of. To call someone a good Christian, in Lewis's day, had come to signify a favorable opinion of the subject's behavior rather than a statement that the person belonged to a certain religion and believed, at least theoretically, in its doctrines. Lewis deplored the trend of turning previously useful words, which at least implied specific grounds for praise or condemnation, into yet more all-purpose synonyms for "good" and "bad." "Awful," which originally meant "awe-inspiring," evolved to mean "very bad." "Fantastic," which implied wildly imaginative or incredible, came to mean "very good." I shudder to think how Lewis would react if he visited our era and discovered "awesome" has morphed into a substitute for "very nice."

Speaking of "very," it has changed from meaning "truly" to a general intensifier that writers are advised to avoid. Mark Twain famously suggested that we replace every "very" with "damn." The editor would delete all the "damns," to the great improvement of our writing. (Not that this trick would work nowadays, when few editors would blink at that once-unprintable word.) As for "damn" itself, it has little more content than a snarl. To echo Lewis again, someone who trips over the furniture and exclaims, "Damn that chair!" doesn't really expect it to be endowed with a soul and condemned to eternal torment. "Literally" has become, for many casual speakers, another content-free intensifier even in statements the diametric opposite of literal.

Then there's the phenomenon of euphemism creep. Valiant attempts to replace taboo or insulting words with less offensive equivalents sooner or later result in the euphemism taking on the stigma of the word it replaces, so a new alternative has to be invented. "Retarded" originated as a euphemism implying a little slow rather than feebleminded. During my teen years, "idiot," "imbecile," and "moron" had already served as insults in popular speech for a long time, but high-school lessons on mental health taught us they still had sober scientific meanings in reference to precisely defined IQ ranges. In my youth, "colored" and "Negro" were the polite words for Black people; now they're considered at best old-fashioned, at worst offensively patronizing (except in the names of organizations such as the NAACP). Long before I was born, "toilet" shifted from a personal hygiene ritual to the room where it was often performed, then to a particular plumbing fixture in that room. As a result, in my teens I found the older use of "toilet" in Victorian novels puzzling, and at that age we were apt to snicker at the label "toilet water" for a type of perfume.

Writers can't stop language from changing, not that we'd want to. Nor can we hope to stem the flood of verbicide. What we can do is try to avoid the latter in our own prose. Aside from dialogue, where current slang such as "awesome" for "very nice" may fit the character, we can take care to use words in their proper context with precise meanings.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Survival Through Storytelling

Recently I came across an ad for a book subtitled something like, "How to survive hard times by telling stories." I can't find it again, so I don't know the title, author, or specific subject matter. (Google and Amazon didn't help because the terms are so general.) Not knowing leaves me free to speculate about what that phrase means. To me, it suggests that we cope with difficult experiences by shaping them into narratives that discover purpose in the seeming randomness of the ups and downs of our lives.

We human beings are storytelling creatures. We share jokes, urban legends, and episodes from the daily news. If we're enthusiastic about a book or movie, we often can't wait to rave about it to fellow fans. Think of a small child trying to recite the plot of a film, each sentence starting with "and then. . . ." Everybody enjoys telling others about experiences they've lived through, good or bad, although some people do it more skillfully than others. Every family has tales passed down from parents, older siblings, and other relatives. Memories get polished into anecdotes retold and embellished over the decades and generations. Two of the world's major religions, Judaism and Christianity, have their roots in stories (the Exodus from Egypt and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, respectively).

As C. S. Lewis mentions somewhere, we can find "escape" in literature by reading even the most depressing or tragic work of fiction, because it provides a temporary distraction from our own mundane troubles. Moreover, stories impose order on the untidy incidents of everyday life, in which no sequence of events has a definite beginning or end. Narrative makes sense of the world. As writers are often warned, the argument "but it really happened" can't justify a farfetched scene in a novel. Reality doesn't have to be believable or logical; fiction does.

I'm reminded of my favorite Terry Pratchett passage, this often quoted dialogue between Death and his granddaughter in HOGFATHER:

“All right," said Susan. "I'm not stupid. You're saying humans need... fantasies to make life bearable."

REALLY? AS IF IT WAS SOME KIND OF PINK PILL? NO. HUMANS NEED FANTASY TO BE HUMAN. TO BE THE PLACE WHERE THE FALLING ANGEL MEETS THE RISING APE.

"Tooth fairies? Hogfathers? Little—"

YES. AS PRACTICE. YOU HAVE TO START OUT LEARNING TO BELIEVE THE LITTLE LIES.

"So we can believe the big ones?"

YES. JUSTICE. MERCY. DUTY. THAT SORT OF THING.

"They're not the same at all!"

YOU THINK SO? THEN TAKE THE UNIVERSE AND GRIND IT DOWN TO THE FINEST POWDER AND SIEVE IT THROUGH THE FINEST SIEVE AND THEN SHOW ME ONE ATOM OF JUSTICE, ONE MOLECULE OF MERCY. AND YET—Death waved a hand. AND YET YOU ACT AS IF THERE IS SOME IDEAL ORDER IN THE WORLD, AS IF THERE IS SOME...SOME RIGHTNESS IN THE UNIVERSE BY WHICH IT MAY BE JUDGED.

"Yes, but people have got to believe that, or what's the point—"

MY POINT EXACTLY.”

Off topic, RE Halloween: Vampire fans might enjoy my duology TWILIGHT'S CHANGELINGS, starring a vampire-human hybrid psychiatrist:

Twilight's Changelings

Another good introduction to my vampire series is the stand-alone romance EMBRACING DARKNESS:

Embracing Darkness

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Educating the Passions

Over the July 4th weekend, columnist David Brooks wrote about the importance of storytelling:

America Has a Great Story to Tell

Skipping past the explicitly political content, I was particularly impressed by the discussion of "propositional" (intellectual) knowledge versus "emotional and moral knowledge." Brooks quotes 18th-century philosopher David Hume: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.” My first reaction, as many readers' might be, was, "Huh?" But Brooks goes on to explain:

"Once you realize that people are primarily desiring creatures, not rational creatures, you realize that one of the great projects of schooling and culture is to educate the passions. It is to help people learn to feel the proper kind of outrage at injustice, the proper form of reverence before sacrifice, the proper swelling of civic pride, the proper affection for our fellows. This knowledge is conveyed not through facts but through emotional experiences — stories." I would add, by the way, that poems and songs perform the same function. Think of "America the Beautiful" or "This Land Is Your Land," to name only two examples.

The importance of educating the passions (i.e., emotions) forms one of the core messages of C. S. Lewis's THE ABOLITION OF MAN (1943). He adopts from Plato the metaphor of the human personality being composed of three parts, the head (reason), the chest (spirit, in the sense of emotions), and the abdomen (basic appetites). Reason should rule the whole person, including appetites and desires; however, it does so, not directly, but through the "chest." One of the chapters in THE ABOLITION OF MAN, in fact, is titled "Men Without Chests." The "proper" attitudes alluded to by Brooks develop not through intellectual study, important as that is, but by osmosis, so to speak, permeating a child's world-view before he or she has any idea what's happening. And that happens through implicit assumptions that may never be explicitly stated. For instance, in Lewis's book he analyzes passages from a pair of English textbooks for pupils at British elementary schools (as we'd call them). Both of them convey the underlying, taken-for-granted idea that there are no such things as objective values. The authors of the texts may not have even consciously realized that's what they were doing. Lewis covers similar ground in his PREFACE TO PARADISE LOST, where he refutes the disdain of one of his contemporaries for "stock responses." The attitudes and emotions dismissed by some critics as "stock responses," Lewis maintains, are not innate and automatic. They have to be deliberately shaped through years of growth. Good preconceptions as well as bad have "got to be carefully taught" (to quote the song from SOUTH PACIFIC).

As writers, we should be heartened to recognize the vital importance of stories in that process.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Xmas Musings

I've just read a recent book about Dorothy Sayers, SUBVERSIVE, by Crystal Downing. One theme to which the author frequently alludes is the concept of living by an exchange model, an expectation of behaving certain ways to get equivalent value in return. For instance, Downing emphasizes that Sayers cautioned against the mind-set that doing good deeds guarantees one will "go to Heaven" or even enjoy prosperity in life. At the current season, this idea reminded me of Christmas gifts, naturally. We often speak of "exchanging presents" or having a gift exchange at an office party. Ideally, we'd give presents that reflect our awareness of what the recipient really wants, without any consideration of what we might receive from that person. In practice, our gift-giving is often constrained not only by what we can afford but by the anticipated size and monetary value of the present we expect the recipient to give us. If we spend a lot more in giving than the other person spends on us, we might feel miffed at the discrepancy or embarrassed at having put the other person in an awkward spot. Conversely, not spending enough on a gift may distress us because we fear the recipient will think we're stingy, or we might even feel guilty about not giving what we "should."

This subject reminds me of two short essays C. S. Lewis wrote about Christmas as celebrated in Britain in his time. You can read them here:

What Christmas Means to Me

Xmas and Christmas

In "What Christmas Means to Me" (a sappy title I seriously doubt Lewis chose himself), he distinguishes three things called "Christmas": The first is the religious festival. The second, a secular holiday devoted to merrymaking, "has complex historical connections with the first" and, in mid-twentieth-century England as in our contemporary culture, is joyfully celebrated by millions of people who don't practice Christianity in any other way. The third phenomenon, which Lewis says "is unfortunately everyone's business," he calls "the commercial racket." Note that this article was first published in 1957! Here's where the topic of gift exchange comes in. He laments the modern pressure to give presents or at least send cards to everybody we know, a custom he maintains "has been forced upon us by the shopkeepers." Not only is this obligation exhausting and a hindrance to the "ordinary and necessary shopping" we still can't avoid, "Most of it is involuntary." While I think "most" is an exaggeration, Lewis amusingly summarizes the hapless shopper's plight thus: "The modern rule is that anyone can force you to give him a present by sending you a quite unprovoked present of his own."

"Xmas and Christmas," a witty piece of satire, bears the subtitle "A Lost Chapter from Herodotus." It purports to be the classical historian's report of strange winter customs in the fogbound island nation of Niatirb. The writer describes the sending of "Exmas-cards" bearing pictures that seem to have no discernible connection to the festival supposedly being celebrated, such as birds on prickly tree branches. There's a funny description of the citizens' reactions to receiving cards or gifts from anyone they haven't already gifted: "They beat their breasts and wail and utter curses against the sender; and, having sufficiently lamented their misfortune, they put on their boots again and go out into the fog and rain. . . ." Herodotus concludes that Exmas and "Crissmas" can't possibly be the same holiday, because surely millions of people wouldn't undergo those ordeals in honor of a God they don't believe in.

This essay's description of the illustrations on "Exmas-cards," including "men in such garments as the Niatirbians believe that their ancestors wore two hundred years ago riding in coaches such as their ancestors used, or houses with snow on their roofs," highlights the way our images of a "traditional Christmas" often owe more to art, literature, and the media than to firsthand experience. Those idyllic snow scenes, for instance, and the songs about sleigh rides. If anyone in the modern U.S. goes on a sleigh ride around the holidays, it's most likely a staged event, not a spontaneous family outing. As for songs such as "Winter Wonderland," "Let It Snow," and "White Christmas" (rescued from banality only by its seldom-sung prologue, which frames the singer as a Los Angeles resident nostalgic for the northeast winters of his childhood), a considerable percentage of the American population sees white Christmases only in the movies. In the popular imagination, though, December is supposed to conform to the standard described by TV Tropes in this entry:

Dreaming of a White Christmas

As the page explains, "Unless a work of fiction takes place in a tropical or arid setting, or in the Southern Hemisphere, it will always snow in winter. . . . The snow will be there to look 'pretty'. It does not melt or turn slushy, nor is it ever coated with dirt or litter. It is never accompanied by freezing winds or icy rains." While our family lived in San Diego at some points during my husband's Navy career, we could tell when it was winter (aside from chilly nights and increased rain) because the distant hills turned green rather than brown. Growing up in Norfolk, Virginia, I seldom experienced snow in December as a child. We got it mainly in January. My late stepmother, a native of the coastal region of North Carolina, loved snow and always hoped for a white Christmas. Considering her birthplace, I doubt she ever saw snow at Christmas during her entire early life. Yet the ideal derived from fiction, movies, and songs shaped her vision of how the winter holidays were "supposed" to look.

Merry Christmas, white or green, to all who celebrate it!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Good Guys and Bad Guys

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS essay discusses empathy versus selfishness and why being the "bad guy" is actually taking the easy way out:

It's Easy Being the Bad Guy

It's not uncommon to think villains are more fun to read and write, while heroes are boring. Hurley recalls her childhood reading diet of "feel-good fantasy novels," the kind of "noble tales" in which the good and people can be counted on to fulfill our expectations of their good or evil choices, and we know in advance "who would prevail and who would fail." In childhood, she "found this predictability boring and formulaic after the first three or four novels." Later she realized fiction of straightforward good and evil offers a welcome, valid respite from the "messy and complicated" real world where "good people coming out on top is far less common than we’d like." By adulthood, most of us have learned that's how the world works. It's understandable to want a fictional world that operates differently. In addition to fantasy, Hurley mentions detective stories, pervaded by the theme that truth will come to light and justice will prevail. As she puts it, "This is why we tell so many stories about the good folks winning, to balance out some of the everyday horror we encounter in a world that is fundamentally unfair."

In her early years, Hurley "believed goodness was the default state." Later in life, after decades lived according to an allegedly realistic philosophy of self-interest, she discovered that doing the right thing, rather than the easy "default" path, is a difficult choice that must be consciously taken. She notes that "we must actively choose goodness every day" and affirms, "Goodness. . . is not a state, but an act, one we must perform again and again." A provocative article well worth reading in its entirety.

In real-life terms, C. S. Lewis maintains that the notorious criminals, tyrants, and other villains of history have a monotonous sameness, while the saints are gloriously unique. Nevertheless, I feel there's some truth in the idea that it's often easier to write a convincing, interesting villain than a believable hero. Lewis himself creates interesting good characters, such as Lucy in the Narnia series and Dr. Ransom in the space trilogy (OUT OF THE SILENT PLANET, etc.). Madeleine L'Engle does an especially fine job with her engaging young heroes, e.g., Meg and her brother Charles Wallace in A WRINKLE AND TIME and its sequels. The dual protagonists of Diane Duane's Young Wizards series also rank high in that category. Two of my other favorite good characters are Dorothy Sayers's mystery-solving duo of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. Terry Pratchett also does this sort of thing brilliantly, as with formidable witch Granny Weatherwax and police chief Vimes.

The assumption that heroes can't interest audiences without fundamental flaws and deep-seated self-doubt has led to distortions such as the portrayal of Aragorn in the LORD OF THE RINGS movies and the jarringly out-of-character behavior of Peter in the large-screen adaptation of PRINCE CASPIAN. This assumption is a fairly modern development, though, not an eternal verity in the creation of mythic, legendary, and fictional good guys.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Risk Assessment and Fear

So schools, bars, restaurants, theaters, concert venues, casinos, etc. in Maryland have been ordered to close, and gatherings of more than fifty people are forbidden. Both of the cons I was scheduled to attend this spring have been canceled, sadly but inevitably. While of course we'll obey the official edicts and exercise prudence in daily life, I can't help thinking some reactions are overkill. The panic-buying, for instance, aspects of which baffle me. Bottled water stripped from store shelves, when there's no threat to the drinking water supply? We have electricity, running water, heat, and cable and aren't at risk of losing them. Major retailers reassure us that there's no long-term shortage, only a distribution problem that will clear up rapidly if people stop panic-buying. If everybody would just buy what they require for a week or two at a time, the stores could keep up, and we'd all be able to get what we need.

It's a familiar truism of human psychology that we overestimate rare dangers and underestimate common ones. The extraordinary threats draw attention BECAUSE they're rare. Here are two short pieces on that tendency:

Jared Diamond on Common Risks

Drawing the Wrong Lessons from Horrific Events

As is often pointed out, we're far more likely to get into a car accident driving to the airport than to die in a plane crash. We're more at risk of injury or death in traffic on the way to the big-box store than of exposure to the coronavirus (in this region, at least). The population of Maryland is about six million. Our county has a population of 573,000. As of Monday, there are 37 confirmed cases in Maryland, only two in this county. Since members of our family haven't traveled abroad lately or come into contact with anyone who has, our individual risk of crossing paths with the virus is near zero. Yet the daily deluge of breaking news still makes me anxious (mainly, on a personal level, about being unable to restock the items we need for daily living), and to stop brooding over it takes real effort.

Psychologist Steven Pinker has a section on phobias in his HOW THE MIND WORKS. He notes that almost all phobias (irrationally exaggerated fears) fall into a few categories, derived from things that threatened our prehistoric ancestors. Hence our common fears of spiders and snakes, even though most species encountered in urban areas of North America are harmless to humans. "Fears in modern city-dwellers protect us from dangers that no longer exist, and fail to protect us from dangers in the world around us." Instead of spiders and snakes, we should be afraid of "guns, driving fast, driving without a seatbelt, lighter fluid, and hair dryers near bathtubs." While we may exercise sensible caution about such things, most of us aren't terrified of them (although driving-phobic people do exist, and transportation assistance is available for those who can't force themselves to drive across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland). For every freeway-phobic person, large numbers suffer from fear of flying, despite the greater safety of the latter mode of travel.

In C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS, senior devil Screwtape reminds his nephew Wormwood that "precautions have a tendency to increase fear." When standard precautions become routine, however, "this effect disappears." (Think how blase we've become about airport security lines. I remember when dinosaurs roamed the Earth and non-flying companions could accompany departing travelers right up to the gate.) Screwtape advises Wormwood to keep the "patient" obsessing over all sorts of extra things he can do "which seem to make him a little safer" and can be developed into "a series of imaginary life-lines" in response to imagined potential developments. (Accumulating a hoard of bottled water even though there's no threat to the public supply?) Earlier in the book, Screwtape points out that "real resignation, at the same moment, to a dozen different and hypothetical fates, is almost impossible."

One of my favorite Lewis quotes comes from an essay he wrote in answer to the question, "How are we to live under the threat of the atomic bomb?" It's a longish passage, but I think it's worth reproducing here:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. 'How are we to live in an atomic age?' I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things - praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts - not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

As a last resort, we could reread Daniel Defoe's A JOURNAL OF THE PLAGUE YEAR, Stephen King's THE STAND, or Connie Willis's DOOMSDAY BOOK and remind ourselves our current plight isn't nearly so bad as that, nor is it likely to become so.

In case you have time to watch a video of about six minutes, here's a calming message from a layman of our church—with a Maine Coon. Cats make everything better:

Jeff Conover

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Social Media in the Raging 20s

In her latest LOCUS post, Kameron Hurley writes about tension and anxiety in the era of instantaneous communication and miscommunication:

Into the Raging 20s We Ride

She discusses misinformation, the pitfalls of following news bites in real time, the anxiety caused by exposure to floods of "unfettered" and unfiltered content, and feelings of helplessness when overwhelmed by what appear to be irresistible, impersonal forces. The essay begins with this generalization: "I’ve found that the insidious problem for me in scrolling through social media is that it feels like action. Ironically, it also creates – in me – a profound feeling of being out of control over events in the wider world, while generating a huge amount of anxiety and worry."

We tend to think if we Like or Share a post on a vital topic, we've done something about it. We often forget to dig deeper for reliable information or to seek out something concrete we can do in the real world. Hurley recommends rekindling the joy of creation, as well as becoming more intentional and selective about the online sources we expose ourselves to. She points out, "Our always-on culture has been driven by organizations that seek to get an increasing share of a finite resource: our attention. The more attention I give their services and algorithms, the less attention I have for the things that matter to me." The "luxury of deep focus" is an important resource of which social media can deprive us; Hurley writes about the need to rediscover that focus.

I was surprised at her remark that she's trying to spend more time on books. When and why did her book-reading decrease, I wonder? I can't imagine not reading a portion of a book-length work every day (in practice, two or three, since I always have several books going at one time, each for a different reading slot in my schedule). Unlike many people, including Hurley, I don't get ensnared by Facebook for long sessions. Some days, if time runs out, I barely glance at it or don't open it at all. When I do scan my feed, I devote only twenty minutes or so to it. Since I've friended or followed so many people, the content is effectively infinite, so there's no point in trying to consume all of it. The organizations and individuals I'm really interested in, I see regularly near the top of the page. My personal infinite black holes in terms of online reading are Quora and TV Tropes, where I have to make a conscious effort not to get sucked in except during free time I've specifically allotted to recreational surfing.

Hurley's comments about the illusion of taking action remind me of some lines from C. S. Lewis's THE SCREWTAPE LETTERS. (Like Shakespeare, Lewis offers an apt quote for almost any situation.) With regard to steering the victim's "wandering attention" away from what he ought to be spending his time on, senior demon Screwtape advises his pupil, "You no longer need a good book, which he really likes" to distract the "patient"; "a column of advertisements in yesterday's paper will do. You can make him waste his time not only in conversation he enjoys with people whom he likes but also in conversations with those he cares nothing about." Later, Screwtape says, "The more often he feels without acting, the less he will be able ever to act, and, in the long run, the less he will be able to feel." Screwtape would probably get a lot of mileage from the temptation to chase an endless chain of web links down multiple rabbit holes. In a different work (I can't remember which), Lewis points out that our brains weren't designed to cope with infinite demands on our sympathy in the form of a torrent of news about crises and disasters in distant places that we have no power to affect. I wonder what Lewis would say about social media and the 24-hour news cycle. His reaction would definitely not be favorable; in his lifetime, he avoided reading newspapers on the grounds that the content was often distorted or downright false.

Hurley's essay concludes with a declaration that's easy to applaud but often hard to practice: "Our attention, like our lives, is finite. Choose wisely."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Worlds with Depth

The Fall/Winter issue of MYTHLORE includes an article by Katherine Sas on creating the "impression of depth" in a work of fiction (specifically, in this case, in the backstory of the Marauders in the Harry Potter series), a term coined by Tolkien in his classic essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics." One of my favorite themes in fiction is the overshadowing of the present by the deep past. That's one reason I find Stephen King's IT enthralling, a feature that the new movie tries to present a bit better than the old miniseries, but still not adequately. So I'm glad to have an official name for this theme. Sas herself paraphrases this effect as "a sense of antiquity and historical reality."

The essence of the "impression of depth" consists of a feeling that the author "knows more than he [or she] is telling." Tolkien refers to the creation of "an illusion of surveying a past...that itself had depth and reached backward into a dark antiquity." He mentions the crafting of this effect in BEOWULF by "allusions to old tales." In his own work, Tolkien uses invented languages, frame narratives, references to ancient tales and lost texts, and "hypertextual layering" (i.e., metafictional features that draw attention to the text as an artifact). Such techniques produce the illusion of a world that has existed for a vast expanse of time before the present action and contains places, peoples, and events glimpsed at the edges of the main story.

Within a more limited physical setting, King's IT creates an illusion of deep time by the gradual revelation of how the monster originally introduced as merely a supernatural killer clown has haunted Derry since the town's founding—revealed by Mike's research into the generational cycle of the entity's periodic return and hibernation—and, eons before human settlement, came through interstellar space from an alien dimension. Likewise, the TV series SUPERNATURAL begins on a small-scale, personal level and expands to encompass an entire cosmology. At the beginning of the series, all we know about the background of Sam and Dean Winchester is that their father is a "Hunter" (of demons and other monsters) and that their mother died in a horrific supernatural attack when Sam was a baby. The brothers themselves know little more. We, and they, soon learn that their father made a deal with a demon. Eventually it's revealed that Sam and Dean were destined from infancy, not to save the world, but to serve as "vessels" for divine and diabolical entities. As they strive to assert their free will against this destiny, they uncover secrets of their family's past and the worldwide organization of Hunters (along with its research auxiliary branch, the Men of Letters), they clash (and sometimes ally) with demons, angels, pagan deities, and Death incarnate, and, incidentally, they do save the world and visit Hell and Purgatory several times. They learn the real nature and purposes of Heaven, Hell, and God Himself. The hypertextual (metafictional) aspect of the series is highlighted in episodes such as a visit to an alternate universe where the brothers are characters in a TV show and their discovery that a comic-book artist who turns out to be a prophet (as they believe until he's revealed as the very incarnation of God) has published a series that chronicles their adventures.

Tolkien's colleague and close friend C. S. Lewis reflects on the literary impression of depth in two articles reprinted in his collection SELECTED LITERARY ESSAYS, "Psycho-Analysis and Literary Criticism" and "The Anthropological Approach." In both pieces, he concludes that the ideas of hidden, half-forgotten, multi-layered dimensions in place or time and disguised remnants preserved from the ancient past are alluring in themselves. We're fascinated by the suggestion of "the far-borne echo, the last surviving trace, the tantalizing glimpse, the veiled presence, of something else. And the something else is always located in a remote region, 'dim-discovered,' hard of access." We're thrilled to enter "a world where everything may, and most things do, have a deeper meaning and a longer history" than expected. Many readers (although admittedly not all) enjoy the idea "that they have surprised a long-kept secret, that there are depths below the surface." Tolkien's exposition of this effect, as well as the creation of it by him and other authors who use similar strategies, offers valuable hints to writers who want to produce that kind of impression.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Writing in Times of Anxiety

Kameron Hurley's latest LOCUS column tackles the problem of writing through anxiety. The essay focuses mainly on public crises and disasters but mentions its application to personal troubles as well:

Writing Through the News Cycle

She quotes a common reaction: “It’s 2019. Who doesn’t have anxiety?” She also highlights what she sees as the difference between today's news-inspired worries and those of people in the 1950s and '60s faced with possible nuclear war: Nuclear holocaust was a hypothetical threat; such crises as wars in the Middle East and global climate change are already happening. "That makes optimism and hope a lot more difficult to cling to, and anxiety ratchets up the more one stays glued to the news." (A good reason, by the way, to resist the temptation to click on every Internet headline or obsessively pore over social media streams, a remedy Hurley herself alludes to.) She compares chronic anxiety to a "faulty fire alarm" (I'd say "smoke alarm," which is what she seems to be talking about), which keeps going off despite the absence of fire. Subjected to constant alerts, one suffers fear and anxiety even though, objectively, there's nothing more wrong at this moment than there was a minute, an hour, or a day ago.

One cognitive trick I try to remember to use on myself, by the way, is becoming mindful of the fact that very seldom is this present moment unbearably terrible. (It can be, of course—if one is in acute danger or severe pain, for example—but more often than not, it isn't.) Much of our unhappiness springs from brooding over unpleasant, scary, or outright horrible things that might happen in the future.

In response to the challenge of writing "through the tough times in life, personal as well as national, and, increasingly, global," Hurley says, "I’ve found that focusing on a better future, and putting that into my work, has helped me deal with the news cycle and the rampant anxiety." My own reaction as a writer to public disasters and personal troubles is pretty much the opposite. I don't feel capable of creating fiction with the weight needed to confront such crises. The problems of my characters seem to trivialize by contrast the real-world distress around us. Instead, I've turned to composing lighter pieces, stories featuring hints of humor and protagonists with believable but not dire problems (such as my recent novella "Yokai Magic," a contemporary light paranormal romance inspired by Japanese folklore) rather than backstories that abound in horrors and tragedies. Also, on a personal level, working on a story that I can hope will entertain readers as well as myself not only helps to distract me from whatever I'm worrying about but can cheer me with a sense of having accomplished something.

Some critics might label taking refuge from real-world problems in fiction, whether weighty or light, "escapism." Tolkien dealt with this charge many decades ago, asserting that such critics confuse "the escape of the prisoner" with the "flight of the deserter"? If we find ourselves in "prison," why should we be blamed for trying to get out? Hurley herself makes it clear that "this doesn’t mean closing one’s eyes to the horror." A fictional vision doesn't have to equate to "the flight of the deserter"; rather, according to her, "We are what we immerse ourselves in. We are the stories we tell ourselves."

Coincidentally, this week the local Annapolis newspaper, the CAPITAL, published a column by psychologist Scott Smith headlined, "How to stay happy in a world filled with sad events." He discusses how to deal with the modern condition of being "inundated with tragedy." He makes the very cogent point, "Our human brain is not really built to process this ongoing flow of tragic and negative events. We live with a brain that is tooled for a much slower pace...." Like Hurley's column, Smith's emphasizes the emotional and physiological stress caused by being constantly bombarded with negative images in the 24-hour news cycle. He mentions, in addition, "Our brain is also not very good at placing tragedy in context or calculating probability." When we hear about high-profile, terrifying, but extremely rare disasters, our brains are wired to react to these remote (for the vast majority of us) contingencies as if they were "imminent threats." Smith lists several suggestions of ways to reorient our thinking and appreciate the good things in our own lives, remedies that collectively boil down to "focusing on the positive and limiting our exposure to negative events that are out of our control." He would doubtless agree with Hurley that we, as writers, should resist allowing stress to drain our energies and instead cultivate the positive benefits of exercising our creativity.

I've probably quoted C. S. Lewis's refreshing perspective on global problems here before, but it's too relevant not to include now. This passage comes from his essay on living in an atomic age—demonstrating that news-related stress is far from a recent phenomenon:

"In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. "How are we to live in an atomic age?" I am tempted to reply: 'Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year, or as you would have lived in a Viking age when raiders from Scandinavia might land and cut your throat any night; or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.' . . . .

"In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. This is the first point to be made: and the first action to be taken is to pull ourselves together. If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts—not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Learning from Fake News

Cory Doctorow's latest LOCUS column explores what "fake news," conspiracy theories, and hoaxes can reveal about our culture:

Fake News Is an Oracle

He begins by discussing the mistaken idea that science fiction predicts the future. Instead, SF "can serve as a warning or an inspiration, influencing the actions that people take and thus the future that they choose." A second function of SF, where the analogy with fake news comes in, is to expose "our societal fears and aspirations for the future" somewhat the way a Ouija board planchette reveals the fears and desires of the users by responding to unconscious movements of their hands. As Doctorow points out, even the most innovative spec-fic creators must choose their material from an existing array of tropes that resonate with their audience. Authors write "stories about the futures they fear and rel­ish." The fiction that gets published, achieves bestseller status, and captures the imaginations of readers reflects hopes and fears dominant in the current popular culture: "The warning in the tale is a warning that resonates with our current anxieties; the tale’s inspiration thrums with our own aspirations for the future."

Similarly, a hoax, conspiracy theory, or false or deceptive news item that gets believed by enough people to make it socially significant "tells you an awful lot about the world we live in and how our fellow humans perceive that world." As an example, Doctorow analyzes the anti-vaccine movement and why its position on the alleged dangers of vaccination seems plausible to so many people. Asking what makes people vulnerable to conspiracy theories and false beliefs, he speculates, "I think it’s the trauma of living in a world where there is ample evidence that our truth-seeking exer­cises can’t be trusted." While the first step in fighting fake news is "replacing untrue statements with true ones," a deeper solution that addresses the roots of the problem is also needed.

Speaking of true and false beliefs, and harking back to the topic of my post of the week before last, I was boggled by a widely quoted comment from a certain junior congresscritter: "I think that there's a lot of people more concerned about being precisely, factually, and semantically correct than about being morally right." Say WHAT? As one article about this remark is quick to point out, using precise language and accurate facts isn't mutually exclusive with being morally right. Ideally, we should aspire to do both:

CNN

The article summarizes the attitude behind the Congresswoman's remark this way, noting that it's not exclusive to her: "My specific fact may be wrong, but the broader point I was making still holds. The problem with that thinking is that it says that the underlying facts don't matter as long as the bigger-picture argument still coheres." This attitude is said (correctly, in my opinion) to lead to a moral "slippery slope."

I would go further, though. I'd call having the correct facts one of the essential preconditions to being morally right. How can we make moral judgments if we aren't certain of the objective materials we're working with? If a speaker's statements about concrete, verifiable facts can't be trusted, should we trust that speaker's version of truth on more complex, abstract matters?

As writers, we in particular should place a high value on accuracy of language. Referring again to C. S. Lewis (as I frequently tend to do), his book THE ABOLITION OF MAN, first published way back in 1947, begins with an analysis of a couple of secondary-school English textbooks sent to him for review. From certain passages in those texts implying that all value is subjective, Lewis expands the discussion to wider philosophical issues and constructs a detailed argument in defense of the real existence of objective values, "the belief that certain attitudes are really true, and others really false, to the kind of thing the universe is and the kind of things we are. . . . And because our approvals and disapprovals are thus recognitions of objective value or responses to an objective order, therefore emotional states can be in harmony with reason. . . or out of harmony with reason." And how can we recognize which values are "true" or "false" in this higher sense without verifiable knowledge of "the kind of thing the universe is"?

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt