Excusing the past

Today I'm asking a question not because I'm trying to lead you in any particular direction, but because I honestly am not sure about the answer myself.

How should we as readers deal with fiction in which there is evidence of reprehensible attitudes like racism, sexism, and homophobia?

I'm not referring here to stories where the bigotry is depicted in order to show how bad bigotry is; the viciously racist characters in the Doctor Who episode "Rosa," for example, are there to illustrate in no uncertain terms what it was like for People of Color in the Civil Rights era American South.  Nor, on the other end of the spectrum, am I really considering awful stories where the bigotry is presented in a positive light, and is kind of the point.  (A particularly egregious example is the H. P. Lovecraft short story "The White Ape," which is repellent from the get-go.)

I'm more interested in the gray area; stories where there is evidence of a bigoted attitude, but the bigotry doesn't form an essential part of the story.  The topic comes up because I've been re-reading the murder mysteries written in the 1930s by Dorothy Sayers, whose name is right up there with Agatha Christie and Erle Stanley Gardner and Ngaio Marsh and the other greats of classic mystery literature.

The bigotry in Sayers's work doesn't smack you over the head.  The main characters are (very) upper-crust British nobility in the early twentieth century, so there's no doubt the attitudes she portrays were prevalent at the time.  And there are some things she does pretty well, even to modern eyes.  Her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, clearly treats his wife Harriet Vane as a complete equal, and in fact in the book where they finally marry (Busman's Honeymoon) Harriet asks him if he will expect her to give up her career as a novelist, and he reacts with surprise that she would even consider such a thing.

The racism, however, is there, and in more than one place.  There's one book (Unnatural Death) where part of the twist of the story is that in the family tree of the victim, one of the great-uncles had been a sketchy sort, had gone to the West Indies, and married a Black woman; their children and grandchildren remained in that culture, accepting their place as People of Color.

So far, so good, I guess.  But when one of their descendants returns to England, he's very much looked at as an aberration.  The Englishman who was the progenitor of that branch of the family is more than once referred to as having done something immoral and offensive by engaging in an interracial marriage; the great-great grandson who shows up in white English society isn't really portrayed negatively, but there's no doubt he's played for laughs (starting with the fact that his name is Reverend Hallelujah Dawson).

Even worse is her repeated low-level anti-Semitism.  There are Jewish characters here and there, and one and all they are the "of course he's money-conscious, he's Jewish" stereotype.  In Whose Body?, Sayers kind of goes out of her way to present the character of Reuben Levy as a nice and honorable guy, but there's something about it that reeks of, "I'm not racist, I have a Black friend."

It boils down to how much slack we should give to authors who were "people of their times," whose attitudes simply reflect the majority opinion of the society they lived in.  In Sayers's early-twentieth-century wealthy British culture, there was a tacit assumption of white British superiority; the racism is almost by default.  The characters don't set out to demean or mistreat people of other races, it's more that the message is, "Of course we're superior, but that doesn't mean we'll be nasty to you -- as long as you know your place."

Christie herself is not a lot better.  One of her most famous novels (and the first of hers I ever read) is And Then There Were None, which has to be one of the most perfectly-crafted mysteries ever written.  But the original title of the book was a different line from the nursery rhyme that is the unifying theme of the entire plot -- Ten Little Indians.  Worse still, when it was first released, it went by an earlier and even more offensive version of the rhyme -- Ten Little Niggers.

At least she had the good sense to change it.  But that doesn't alter the pervasive white wealthy British superiority that runs through all her work.

 

Even authors who you'd think would be more enlightened sometimes include stuff that is mighty sketchy.  One of my earliest favorite books was Madeleine L'Engle's classic A Wrinkle in Time.  The third book in the Murry family series, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, has a neat theme -- riding through time and trying to prevent a catastrophe by altering timelines in selected places -- but the "blue-eyed Indian = good, brown-eyed Indian = bad" trope that skims along right beneath the surface gets cringier the longer you look at it.  (Especially since the "blue-eyed Indians" have blue eyes because they have European ancestry.  Which makes them... better?  Eek.)

I've found myself wincing more than once over all this, and I'm not honestly sure how much of a bye we can give those writers of an earlier time for attitudes that were all too common back then, but which we (or at least most of us) consider morally repellent now.  Does the implicit racism in Sayers and Christie, and the more overt racism in Lovecraft, alter our ability to read works of theirs that have no racist aspects at all?  More recently, what about Orson Scott Card's homophobia?  His bigotry came out in interviews, not really in his work; I don't recall any trace of it in (for example) Ender's Game.  What about worse things still?  Since reading about her alleged role in her husband's sexual abuse of their daughter, I can't read Marion Zimmer Bradley -- but how much of that is because I never particularly liked her in the first place?  Isn't it a bit hypocritical to give authors' bad behavior a pass solely because we don't want to give up reading them?

The allegations against Neil Gaiman -- whose work I love, Neverwhere and The Ocean at the End of the Lane were immensely formative in the development of my own writing style -- have made it nearly impossible for me to read his books, something I dealt with in a post earlier this year.  Is it honestly possible to separate the creator from the creation, the product from the toxic culture that produced it?

I wish I had some black-and-white answer for this. I'm certainly not trying to excuse anyone for morally repulsive stances, but it seems to me that considering only overtly racist writing such as "The White Ape" ignores the fact that there's way more gray area here than you might think at first.

I'd love to hear how you approach this as a reader.  I can see having students read and study books with problematic attitudes, because (1) that's how they learn that those attitudes exist, and (2) it gives a skilled teacher an opportunity to analyze those beliefs and demonstrate how horrible they actually were.  But what about reading solely for pleasure?  I loathe the words "woke" and "politically correct" -- they all too often become synonyms for "stuff I don't like" -- but don't they embody the attitude of someone who refuses to read anything that doesn't reflect our current cultural standards?

Even if those standards are laudable?

I honestly don't know the answer to that.  I'm not intending on giving up reading, and for the most part enjoying, Sayers and Christie.  I can't deny that even Lovecraft -- at least his stories where race doesn't come into it, even subtly and implicitly ("At the Mountains of Madness" comes to mind) -- have been major positive influences on my own work.  As for Gaiman and Card, well, I don't want my money supporting people with attitudes and actions I find repulsive, so I won't purchase their work.  But it's a way more complex, and less clear-cut, topic than it appears.

What do you think?  Is there merit to the "(s)he was a person of the times" argument, or are we giving tacit acceptance of repulsive attitudes just because the work is old -- or because we like it otherwise?

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Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question, despite being one myself and at the same time happily married to a wonderful woman.  The reason I didn't question it is that said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me.  You'd think, being bisexual, I'd have had twice the opportunities for romance, but the truth is I'm so completely oblivious that I wouldn't know it if someone of either gender was flirting with me unless they were holding up a sign saying "HEY.  STUPID.  I AM CURRENTLY FLIRTING WITH YOU."  And possibly not even then.

But despite my raising social awkwardness to the level of performance art, Carol was successful in her efforts.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs.  Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J.R.R. Tolkien or George R.R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Galadriel and Celeborn, Eowyn and Faramir, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Freakin' Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations.  I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress that looks like it's being held up by a combination of prayers and Superglue, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Dirk Thrustington and Lady Viola de Cleevauge we're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Volkswagens.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

Being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic either, honestly. [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard.  Between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us, male or female, are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the latest from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

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The edged tool

Today's post comes to you from the Odd Bedfellows department.

Okay, so all of you probably know all about the Harry Potter series.  Kid finds out he's a wizard, gets an invitation to Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, has a variety of adventures while under the tutelage of Albus Dumbledore, and eventually duels with and kills the evil Lord Voldemort.  The series is beloved by some, criticized by others (especially for Dumbledore's repeated cavalier attitude toward putting the child he's supposed to be protecting into situations where he could get killed), and rejected completely by an increasing number because of its racist tropes and author J. K. Rowling's vicious homophobia and transphobia.

You may also be aware of the fact that ever since the publication of the first book in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, in 1997, the entire concept has been under attack by evangelical Christians.  It's all about magic, celebrates witches and wizards, and never portrays any of the characters as believing in God.  With regards to the last-mentioned, the omission is as good as an admission; the Harry Potter series isn't just non-Christian, they say, it's anti-Christian, and inspired by Satan.  Because of this, the books are frequently featured in book bans and book burnings.

It was bad enough that when the staunchly conservative Reader's Digest interviewed Rowling shortly after the skyrocketing success of her first book, they were inundated by irate letters to the editor.  One of the ones they printed said -- this is from memory, so it's just the gist -- "I am outraged that you would publish an interview with J. K. Rowling.  Her book has led to a million innocent children being baptized into the Church of Satan.  I know this because I read it in an article in The Onion."  The editor, showing remarkable restraint, responded, "You might want to be aware that The Onion is a satirical news source.  Its articles are meant for humorous effect only and should not be taken literally."

As you might imagine, this had little effect on the evangelicals, who went right on screeching about how evil Harry Potter is, ad nauseam.  Then, in 2014, one of them, a woman named Grace Ann Parsons, decided to take matters into her own hands.

She rewrote the story, as... um... anti-fan-fic.  The result was called Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles.  Hogwarts is recast as a Christian school run by Dumbledore -- and his wife Minerva McGonigall and daughter Hermione.  Uncle Vernon and Aunt Petunia are evil atheists who have hidden from Harry that his parents were Christian martyrs.  But Hagrid, an evangelical missionary, finds Harry, tells him the sad story, and converts him to Christianity.  Voldemort is there, doing his evil work -- to make Christianity illegal.  The Good Female Students are always subservient to the men; the Bad Female Students are the ones who speak up and/or have talents outside of cooking, sewing, and cleaning.  The four "houses" -- Gryffindor, Slytherin, Hufflepuff, and Ravenclaw -- represent four different sects of Christianity, with Slytherin being intended to represent Catholics.

Oh, and there's a bunch of stuff about how Voldemort loves Barack Obama.

Well, the whole thing went viral, both amongst true believers and people who found it funny.  It even attracted the attention of book reviewer Chris Ostendorf of The Daily Dot, who said the writing style was so bad it "makes E. L. James [of Fifty Shades of Grey fame] look like Shakespeare."

But the reason this comes up today is that I just found out that Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles has recently been turned into a comedic stage play.

I'm not entirely sure what to think of this.

It's not like Hogwarts School of Prayer and Miracles was satire from the outset, the way Trey Parker and Matt Stone's musical The Book of Mormon was.  At least most people don't think so.  There are a few who believe that Grace Ann Parsons never existed, and the whole thing was written to be deliberately and laughably bad.  But the majority of the folks who've expressed an opinion seem to think that Parsons was honestly trying to create something that would have the draw of Harry Potter, but sanctified.

And if that's the case, isn't turning her work into a stage play that's meant solely to mock kind of... I dunno, mean-spirited?

Don't get me wrong; I think the evangelicals are largely a bunch of dangerous loonies, and their book bans, book burnings, and lobbying for censorship are horrible.  At the same time, I'm no fan of Rowling either.  Not only is her anti-trans work horrifying, just taken on their own merits the Harry Potter books are far from perfect, with numerous plot holes, some big enough fly a Thestral through.  (My opinion is if you want to read some good fiction with the Chosen One trope, Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy and Lloyd Alexander's Chronicles of Prydain beat Harry Potter by a country mile.)

I'm also not arguing against satire, here.  Well-aimed satire -- such as the recent torching of Donald Trump and his sycophantic toadies on South Park -- is a time-honored way of pointing out the flaws of the powerful.  But good satire always does what I call "punching upward."  It's David-versus-Goliath.  The ridiculing of Parsons's book, on the other hand, is punching downward.

Better known as bullying.

I'm reminded of the sickening nastiness surrounding the novel The Eye of Argon, by Jim Theis.  Argon was written when Theis was sixteen, and was published in the Ozark Science Fiction Association's fanzine the following year.  It was picked up and publicized in the 1970s as the Worst Science Fiction Novel Ever Written, and excerpts were read aloud at science fiction conventions to gales of uproarious laughter, and even republished in magazines.  Fifty years later, it's still happening.  It has become a party game -- people take turns reading excerpts, and are eliminated from the game if they laugh.

All this derision, aimed toward a novel written by someone who was sixteen years old.

And the sad postscript is that Theis was interviewed in 1984, and described how hurt he was by all the ridicule -- and stated, unequivocally, that he would never write again.  And he didn't.  He died in 2002 at the young age of 49, determined never to expose himself like that again.

How fucking sad is that?

And ask any writer, and you know what?  Every damn one of us will corroborate that we were all writing complete tripe when we were teenagers.  Many of us, myself included, wrote tripe well beyond that.  (There's a reason that there are no extant copies of anything I wrote before the age of thirty-five.)  They'll all also confirm that when we write, we're at our most vulnerable, showing our hearts and souls, and that nasty critiques sting like hell.  I still remember a "friend" telling me, after reading the first two chapters of a manuscript, that it was "somewhere between a computer crash and a train wreck."  Because of that, I abandoned the story for years, but unlike poor Theis, I did eventually come back to it -- it became my novel The Hand of the Hunter.  

Yes, as creators, we need to be able to withstand some criticism.  Well-meaning and intelligent critiques are one of the main ways we learn to improve, and I have really valued the input of the editors I've worked with over the years (as hard as it is sometimes to hear that My Baby isn't perfection itself, as-is).  But singling out a work simply to laugh at it isn't helpful, it isn't productive, and it isn't kind.

And I'm in agreement with the Twelfth Doctor on this point.

So, yeah.  I find myself in the odd position of supporting the evangelical Parsons over the people who are ridiculing her.  I guess I just don't like seeing people embarrassed.  It's why I find a lot of sitcoms unwatchable.  I hate being a bystander while someone is put in a position of being laughed at, and that seems to be a mainstay of comedic television in the last couple of decades.  I once told a friend I would rather be physically beaten than humiliated, and that's nothing less than the unalloyed truth.

Anyhow, let's be careful who we choose to target with our laughter, okay?  Satire, sarcasm, and ridicule are edged tools, and they can leave lasting marks.  Use them with care, and if you're not sure, don't use them at all.  We humans are fragile creatures, and too damn many artists, authors, musicians, dancers, and other creatives have been turned away from a lifetime of self-expression by an ill-timed nasty comment.

Ask yourself if you want to be the reason someone gives up on creativity forever.

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Fictional friendships

I learned a new term yesterday: parasocial relationship.

It means "a strong, one-sided social bond with a fictional character or celebrity."  I've never much gotten the "celebrity" side of this; I don't, for example, give a flying rat's ass who is and is not keeping up with the Kardashians.  But fictional characters?

Oh, yeah.  No question.  I have wondered if my own career as a novelist was spurred by the parasocial relationships (now that I know the term, dammit, I'm gonna use it) I formed with fictional characters very early on.  In my first two decades, I was deeply invested in what happened to:

• The intrepid Robinson family in Lost in Space.  This might have been in part because I had a life-threatening crush on Judy Robinson, played by Marta Kristen, who is drop-dead gorgeous even though in retrospect the character she played didn't have much... character.
• The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise.  Some of the old Star Trek episodes are almost as cringeworthy as Lost in Space, but when I was ten and I heard Scotty say, "The warp core is gonna blow!  I canna stop it, Captain!  Ye canna change the laws of physics!", I believed him.
• Carl Kolchak from the TV series The Night Stalker.  Okay, so apparently I gravitated toward cringeworthy series.
• Luke Skywalker and his buddies.  I'll admit it, I cried when Obi-Wan died, even though you find out immediately afterward that he's still around in spirit form, if Becoming One With The Force can be considered an afterlife.

Books hooked me as well, sometimes even more powerfully than television and movies. A Wrinkle in Time, The Chronicles of Narnia, Lord of the Rings, The Lathe of Heaven, Something Wicked This Way Comes, The Chronicles of Prydain...  I could go on and on.  Most of which caused the shedding of considerable numbers of tears over the fate of some character or another.

More recently, my obsession is Doctor Who, which will come as no shock to regular readers of Skeptophilia because I seem to find a way to work some Who reference into every other post.  Not only do I spend an inordinate time discussing Doctor Who trivia with other fans, I have found a way to combine this with another hobby:

I made (L-to-R) a ceramic Weeping Angel, Dugga Doo, Dalek, Beep the Meep, and K-9, which sit on my desk watching me as I work.  I'm careful not to blink.

The reason this comes up is a paper in The Journal of Social and Personal Relationships that looked at these parasocial relationships -- specifically, whether the COVID-19 pandemic and the uncertain years following had weakened our relationships with actual people, perhaps with a commensurate strengthening of our one-sided relationships with fictional characters.

The heartening results are there hasn't been a weakening of our bonds to our friends, but our bonds have strengthened to the fictional characters we love.  So, real friends of mine, you don't need to worry that my incessant fanboying over the Doctor is going to impact our relationship negatively, unless you get so completely fed up with my obsession you decide to hang around with someone who wants to discuss something more grounded in reality, like fantasy football teams.

"The development, maintenance, and dissolution of socio-emotional bonds that media audiences form with televised celebrities and fictional characters has long been a scholarly interest of mine," said study author Bradley J. Bond, of the University of San Diego, in an interview with PsyPost.  "The social function of our parasocial relationships with media figures has been debated in the literature: do our parasocial relationships supplement our real-life friendships?  Can they compensate for deficiencies in our social relationships?...  Social distancing protocols and quarantine behaviors that spawned from the global COVID-19 pandemic provided an incredibly novel opportunity to study how our parasocial relationships with media figures function as social alternatives when the natural environment required individuals to physically distance themselves from their real-life friends...  [The research suggests that] our friendships are durable, and we will utilize media technologies to maintain our friendships when our opportunities for in-person social engagement are significantly limited.  However, our favorite celebrities and fictional characters may become even more important components of our social worlds when we experience severe alterations to our friendships."

Which I find cheering.  The events of the last few years have forced us all into coping mode, and it's nice to know that the tendency of many of us to retreat into books, television, and movies isn't jeopardizing our relationships with real people.

So I guess I'm free to throw myself emotionally into fictional relationships.  However much they cost me in anguish.  For example, I will never forgive Russell T. Davies for what he did to the brilliant and fearless Captain Adelaide Brooke in the last minutes of the episode "The Waters of Mars:"

Dammit, Russell.  She (and her entire crew) deserved better.

Be that as it may, it's nice to know I'm not alone in my fanboy tendencies, and that by and large, such obsessions are harmless.  Now, y'all'll have to excuse me, because I need to go work on my ceramic replica of the TARDIS.  Maybe I can install a little speaker inside it so when I press the button, it'll make the whoosh-whoosh-whoosh noise.  How cool would that be?

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Wretched hives of scum and villainy

Being a fiction writer, I think about villains a lot.

Of course, the proper word is "antagonist," but "villain" is a lot more evocative, bringing to mind such characters as the the dastardly Snidely Whiplash from the brilliant Adventures of Dudley Doright of the Canadian Mounties.

Left to right: Snidely Whiplash, Dudley Doright, Fair Nell Fenwick, and Dudley's horse, who is named... Horse.  They just don't write comedy like that any more.

One of the things that I've always tried to do with the villains in my own novels is to make them three-dimensional.  I don't like stories where the villains are just evil because they're evil (unless it's for comedic effect, like Mr. Whiplash).  My college creative writing teacher, Dr. Bernice Webb (one of the formative influences on my writing) told us, "Every villain is the hero of his own story," and that has stuck with me.  Even with the most awful antagonists I've written -- Lydia Moreton in In the Midst of Lions comes to mind -- I hope my readers come away with at least understanding why they acted as they did.

Of course, understanding their motivation, whether it be money, sex, power, revenge, or whatever,  doesn't mean you need to sympathize with it.  I wrote a while back about the character of Carol Last from Alice Oseman's amazing novel Radio Silence, who I find to be one of the most deeply repulsive characters I've ever come across, because what motivates her is pure sadism (all the while wearing a smug smile).

Oseman's story works because we've all known people like her, who use their power to hurt people simply because they can, who take pleasure in making their subordinates' lives miserable.  What's worse is because of that twist in their personality, a frightening number of them become parents, bosses, teachers, and -- as we're currently finding out here in the United States -- political leaders. 

The reason this whole villainous topic comes up is because of a paper published in the journal Psychological Science called "Can Bad Be Good?  The Attraction of a Darker Self," by Rebecca Krause and Derek Rucker, both of Northwestern University.  In a fascinating study of the responses of over 235,000 test subjects to fictional characters, Krause and Rucker found that people are sometimes attracted to villains -- and the attraction is stronger if the villain embodies positive characteristics they themselves share.

For example, Emperor Palpatine is ruthless and cruel, but he also is intelligent and ambitious -- character traits that in a better person might be considered virtuous.  The Joker is an essentially amoral character who has no problem killing people, but his daring, his spontaneity, his quirkiness, and his sense of humor are all attractive characteristics.  Professor Moriarty is an out-and-out lunatic -- especially as played by Andrew Scott in the series Sherlock -- but he's brilliant, clever, inventive, and fearless.

And what Krause and Rucker found was that spontaneous and quirky people (as measured by personality assessments) tended to like characters like The Joker, but not characters like the humorless Palpatine.  Despite his being essentially evil, Moriarty appealed to people who like puzzles and intellectual games -- but those same people weren't so taken with the more ham-handed approach of a character like Darth Vader.

"Given the common finding that people are uncomfortable with and tend to avoid people who are similar to them and bad in some way, the fact that people actually prefer similar villains over dissimilar villains was surprising to us," said study co-author Rucker, in an interview in the Bulletin for the Association of Psychological Science.  "Honestly, going into the research, we both were aware of the possibility that we might find the opposite."

What seems to be going on here is that we can admire or appreciate a villain who is similar to us in positive ways -- but since the character is fictional, it doesn't damage our own self-image as it would if the villain was a real person harming other real people, or (worse) if we shared the villain's negative traits as well.

"Our research suggests that stories and fictional worlds can offer a ‘safe haven’ for comparison to a villainous character that reminds us of ourselves," said study lead author Rebecca Krause.  "When people feel protected by the veil of fiction, they may show greater interest in learning about dark and sinister characters who resemble them."

Which makes me wonder about myself, because my all-time favorite villain is Missy from Doctor Who.

Okay, she does some really awful things, is erratic and unpredictable and has very little concern about human life -- but she's brilliant, and has a wild sense of humor, deep curiosity about all the craziness that she's immersed in, and poignant grief over the loss of her home on Gallifrey.  Played by the stupendous Michelle Gomez, Missy is a complex and compelling character I just love to hate.

What that says about me, I'll leave as an exercise for the reader.

On the other hand, I still fucking loathe Carol Last.  I would have loved to see her tied to the railroad tracks, Dudley Doright-style, at the end of the book.

But I guess you can't have everything.

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The moral of the story

I was asked an interesting question yesterday: does a good fictional story always have a moral?

My contention is even stories that are purely for entertainment still often do have morals.  Consider Dave Barry's novel Big Trouble, a lunatic romp in south Florida that for me would be in the running for the funniest book ever written.  Without stretching credulity too much, you could claim that Big Trouble has the theme "love, loyalty, and kindness are always worth it."  Certainly the humor is more the point, but the end of the story (no spoilers) is so damn sweet that the first time I read it, it made me choke up a little.

Another favorite genre, murder mysteries, could usually be summed up as "murdering people is bad."

But that's not what most people mean by "a moral to the story."  Generally, a story with a moral is one where the moral is the main point -- not something circumstantial to the setting or plot.

The moral is the reason the story was written.

I'm a little ambivalent about overt morals in stories.  I've seen it done exceptionally well; Thornton Wilder's amazing The Bridge of San Luis Rey is explicitly about a man trying to find out if things happen for a reason, or if the universe is simply chaotic.  His conclusion -- that either there is no reason, or else the mind of God is so subtle that we could never parse the reason -- is absolutely devastating in the context of the story.  The impact on me when I first read it, as an eleventh grader in a Modern American Literature class in high school, turned my whole worldview upside down.  In a lot of ways, that one novel was the first step in shaping the approach to life I now have, forty-seven-odd years later.

If I can be excused for detouring into my favorite television show, Doctor Who, you can find there a number of examples of episodes where the moral gave the story incredible impact.  A few that come to mind immediately are "Midnight," which looks at the ugly side of tribalism and the human need to team up against a perceived common enemy, "Demons of the Punjab," about the inevitability of death and grief, "Dot and Bubble," which deals with issues of institutionalized racism, and "Silence in the Library," with a subtext of the terrible necessity of self-sacrifice.

But if you want examples of bad moralistic stories, you don't have to look any further.  The episode "Orphan 55," from the Thirteenth Doctor's run, pissed off just about everyone -- not only because of the rather silly cast of characters, but because at the end the Doctor delivers a monologue that amounts to, "Now, children, let me explain to you how all this bad stuff happened because humans are idiots and didn't address climate change."

So what's the difference?

In my mind, it all has to do with subtlety -- and respect for the reader's (or watcher's) intelligence.  A well-done moral-based story has a deep complexity; it tells the story and then leaves us to figure out what the lesson was. Haruki Murakami's brilliant and heartbreaking novel Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki is about what happens when people are in a lose-lose situation -- and that sometimes a terrible decision is still preferable when the other option is even worse.  But Murakami never comes out and says that explicitly.  He lets his characters tell their tales, and trusts that we readers will get to the punchline on our own.

Bad moral fiction -- often characterized as "preachy" -- doesn't give the reader credit for having the intelligence to get what's going on without being walloped over the head repeatedly by it.  One that immediately comes to mind is Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead, which is so explicitly about Big Government Is Bad and Individualism Is Good and Smart Creative People Need To Fight The Man that she might as well have written just that and saved herself a hundred thousand words.

I think what happens is that we authors have an idea of what our stories mean, and we want to make sure the readers "get it."  The problem is, every reader is going to bring something different to the reading of a story, so what they "get" will differ from person to person.  If that weren't the case, why would there be any difference in our individual preferences?  But authors need to trust that our message (whatever it is) is clear enough to shine through without our needing to preach a sermon in a fictional setting.  Stories like "Orphan 55" don't work because they insult the watcher's intelligence.  "You're probably too dumb to figure out what we're getting at, here," they seem to say.  "So let me hold up a great big sign in front of your face to make sure you see it."

A lot of my own work has an underlying theme that I'm exploring using the characters and the plot, but I hope I don't fall into the trap of preachiness.  Probably my most explicitly moral-centered tale, The Communion of Shadows, is about the fragility of life, the importance of taking emotional risks, and the absolute necessity of looking after the people we love, because we never know how long we have -- but I think the moral comes out of the characters' interactions organically, not because I jumped up and down and screamed it at you.

But it can be a fine line, sometimes.  Like I said, we all have different attitudes and backgrounds, so our relationship to the stories we read is bound to differ.  There are undoubtedly people who loved "Orphan 55" and The Fountainhead, so remember that all this is just my own opinion.

And maybe that's the overarching moral of this whole topic; that everyone is going to take away something different.  After all, if everyone hated explicitly moralistic stories, the Hallmark Channel would be out of business by next week.

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Fiction come to life

Regular readers of this blog know that besides my obvious hat of Skepticism Blogger, I also wear a second one, which is Fiction Writer.  And we fiction writers are, almost without exception, a strange breed.  Discussions with other authors has turned up a commonality, a psychic oddity that I thought for a time was unique to me: our fictional characters sometimes take on a life of their own, to the point that they seem...

... real.

The result is that there are times that I feel like I'm not inventing, but recounting, stories.  The plot takes turns I never intended, the characters do things that surprise me for reasons that only later become apparent.  In my current work-in-progress, a quirky novel called The Accidental Magician that follows Stephen King's dictum to "create sympathy for your characters, then turn the monsters loose," I've "discovered" that (1) a character who I thought was nice but rather bland has turned out to be scrappy and edgy, (2) a character who started out as a bit of a puffed-up, arrogant git unexpectedly became a serious badass, and most surprisingly, (3) a character I thought was dead is still alive.  

I honestly had no knowledge of any of this when I started the story.

Be that as it may, I really do (truly) know that it's me inventing the whole thing.  My books are, after all, on the "Fiction" aisle in the bookstore.  Which makes the claims of a few authors even more peculiar than the Who's-Driving-The-Car sensation I sometimes get; because these authors claim that they've actually met their characters.

Like, in real life, in flesh and blood.  According to an article in The Daily Grail, more than one writer has said that (s)he has been out and about, and there, large as life, has been someone from one of their stories.

Alan Moore, for example, author of the Hellblazer series, said that he ran into his character John Constantine in a London sandwich bar.  "All of a sudden, up the stairs came John Constantine," Moore said in an interview.  "He looked exactly like John Constantine.  He looked at me, stared me straight in the eyes, smiled, nodded almost conspiratorially, and then just walked off around the corner to the other part of the snack bar."

Moore considered following him, but then decided not to.  "I thought it was the safest," he said.

Graphic novel artist Dave McKean has also met a fictional character, but not one of his own; he says he's run into the character Death from Neil Gaiman's series Sandman.  Which has to have been pretty alarming, considering.

Of course, most people, myself included, chalk this up to the overactive imagination that we writers tend to have.  We picture our characters vividly, imagine the scenes in full Technicolor and Sensurround, so it's not really that surprising that sometimes we see things that make us wonder if maybe our fictional worlds have come to life.  But some people believe that this isn't a coincidence -- some chance resemblance of a person to a character in one of our stories -- but a real, literal manifestation of a fictional being into the waking world.

The (fictional) Japanese evil spirit Oiwa, as depicted by Utagawa Kuniyoshi in the story Yotsuya Kaidan (1825) [Image is in the Public Domain]

Such fiction-become-real beings even have a name.  They're called tulpas, from a Sanskrit word meaning "conjured thing."  In the western occult tradition, the idea is that through the sheer force of will, through the power that the imagined being has in our minds, it becomes real.

And not just to its creator; believers claim that a tulpa has an independent reality.  Graphic novel writer Doug Moench, in fact, says he met one face to face.  The story is recounted in Jeffrey Kripal's book Mutants and Mystics: Science Fiction, Superhero Comics, and the Paranormal, and is excerpted in The Daily Grail link I included above; but suffice it to say that Moench was writing a scene in one of his Planet of the Apes comics about a black-hooded bad guy holding a gun to the head of a character, and heard his wife call him -- and he went into the room to find a black-hooded intruder holding a gun to his wife's head.

Understandably shaken by this experience, Moench apparently went through a period where he was uncertain if he should continue writing, because he was afraid that it would become real.

Predictably, I think what we have going on here isn't anything paranormal.  Moench's experience was almost certainly nothing more than a bizarre, and very upsetting, coincidence, and a fine example of dart-thrower's bias (think about all the millions of scenes writers have created that haven't come true).  But there's something about the tulpa thing that still gives me a bit of a shiver, even so.  There are plenty of characters I've created that I'd just as soon stay fictional, thank you very much.  (The amoral domestic terrorist Jeff Landry in my novel In the Midst of Lions is a good example; that sonofabitch was awful enough on the printed page.)

But there are a few characters from stories I've written that I wouldn't mind meeting.  Tyler Vaughan from Signal to Noise comes to mind, because more than one person has told me that Tyler is actually a younger version of me, and I'd like to apologize to him for saddling him with my various neuroses.  And I'd like to meet Leandre Naquin from The Communion of Shadows just so I can give him a big hug.  But the majority of 'em -- yeah, they can stay fictional.

So I'll take a pass on the whole tulpa thing.  For one thing, I see no possible way it could work.  For another, all the accounts of authors meeting their characters are way too easily explained by the fact that writers' skulls tend to be filled with things that I can only call waking dreams, so we're to be excused if sometimes we blur the edges of reality and fiction.

And third: I'd rather not have some of the scenes I've written come to life.  I had a hard enough time putting my characters through some of that stuff.  No way in the world would I want to live through it myself.

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The tale of a troublemaker

One of the things that resonates about the best fiction is its ability to point us in the direction of truths that somehow transcend the mundane factual reality that surrounds us every day.  I know that there are books that have changed my life and my worldview permanently, twisting my perception around and leaving me fundamentally altered afterward.  The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle.  Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco.  The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula LeGuin.  1Q84 by Haruki Murakami.

These kinds of books may not come along often, but when they do, they can leave you reeling.  As science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany put it, "Fiction isn't just thinking about the world out there.  It's also thinking about how that world might be -- a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they're going to change the world we live in, they -- and all of us -- have to be able to think about a world that works differently."

This quote immediately came to mind when I read the new book by Andrew Butters (that I was privileged enough to have a copy of prior to release), Known Order Girls.

The story's protagonist is Katherine Webb, a teenage girl who has grown up as part of the "Known Order" -- a programmed society where everything is run by a sentient AI called Commander.  Commander is the ostensibly benevolent dictator that keeps everything stable, making sure the trains are on time and the economy hums along -- and that each man, woman, and child knows exactly what their place is.

And stays there.

But Katherine is too smart for her own good, and sees that the rules that keep the society stable are also a straitjacket to creativity and growth and individuality.  So she starts to rebel -- in small ways, at first.  The penalties for breaking the Known Order are dramatic and terrifying.  But soon she finds out that the price for compliance might be higher still.

I can honestly say that I have seldom met a protagonist whom I was so invested in, whom I so deeply wanted to win the day.  I won't spoil the story by giving you any details other than a suggestion that there are points you'll want to have plenty of tissues handy.  Stories with teenage main characters are usually targeted toward the Young Adult market, but this is a novel that can (and should) be read by all ages.

In an interesting synchronicity, while I was making dinner yesterday evening, I had my iTunes going, and the wonderful song "I Was Born" by Hanson popped up.

The lyrics immediately put me in mind of Katherine Webb's fight against the monolithic control of Commander.  Sometimes there are people who are born to go places no one's ever gone, do something no one's ever done, and be someone no one's ever been; after reading Known Order Girls, I think you'll agree that Katherine is one of those.

This story is one of those infrequent deeply moving, wildly inspiring tales, reminding us that one determined, defiant troublemaker can indeed change the world for the better.

Do yourself a favor.  Get yourself a copy of Known Order Girls by Andrew Butters.  I promise you won't regret it.

Better still, buy a copy for every teenager you know.  There are features of our own Known Order that could use some defiance right about now.

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Nerds FTW

There's a stereotype that science nerds, and especially science fiction nerds, are hopeless in the romance department.

I'd sort of accepted this without question despite being one myself, and happily married to a wonderful woman.  Of course, truth be told, said wonderful woman pretty much had to tackle me to get me to realize she was, in fact, interested in me, because I'm just that clueless when someone is flirting with me.  But still.  Eventually the light bulb appeared over my head, and we've been a couple ever since.

Good thing for me, because not only am I a science nerd and a science fiction nerd, I write science fiction.  Which has to rank me even higher on the romantically-challenged scale.

Or so I thought, till I read a study by Stephanie C. Stern, Brianne Robbins, Jessica E. Black, and, Jennifer L. Barnes that appeared in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, entitled, "What You Read and What You Believe: Genre Exposure and Beliefs About Relationships."  And therein we find a surprising result.

Exactly the opposite is true.  We sci-fi/fantasy nerds make better lovers.

Who knew?  Not me, for sure, because I still think I'm kind of clueless, frankly.  But here's what the authors have to say:

Research has shown that exposure to specific fiction genres is associated with theory of mind and attitudes toward gender roles and sexual behavior; however, relatively little research has investigated the relationship between exposure to written fiction and beliefs about relationships, a variable known to relate to relationship quality in the real world.  Here, participants were asked to complete both the Genre Familiarity Test, an author recognition test that assesses prior exposure to seven different written fiction genres, and the Relationship Belief Inventory, a measure that assesses the degree to which participants hold five unrealistic and destructive beliefs about the way that romantic relationships should work.  After controlling for personality, gender, age, and exposure to other genres, three genres were found to be significantly correlated with different relationship beliefs. Individuals who scored higher on exposure to classics were less likely to believe that disagreement is destructive.  Science fiction/fantasy readers were also less likely to support the belief that disagreement is destructive, as well as the belief that partners cannot change, the belief that sexes are different, and the belief that mindreading is expected in relationships.  In contrast, prior exposure to the romance genre was positively correlated with the belief that the sexes are different, but not with any other subscale of the Relationships Belief Inventory.

Get that?  Of the genres tested, the sci-fi/fantasy readers score the best on metrics that predict good relationship quality.  So yeah: go nerds.

As Tom Jacobs wrote about the research in The Pacific Standard, "[T]he cliché of fans of these genres being lonely geeks is clearly mistaken.  No doubt they have difficulties with relationships like everyone else.  But it apparently helps to have J. R. R. Tolkien or George R. R. Martin as your unofficial couples counselor."

Tolkien?  Okay.  Aragorn and Arwen, Celeborn and Galadriel, even Sam Gamgee and Rose Cotton -- all romances to warm the heart.  But George R. R. Martin?  Not so sure if I want the guy who crafted Joffrey Baratheon's family tree to give me advice about who to hook up with.

One other thing I've always wondered, though, is how book covers affect our expectations.  I mean, look at your typical romance, which shows a gorgeous woman wearing a dress from the Merciful-Heavens-How-Does-That-Stay-Up school of haute couture, being seduced by a gorgeous shirtless guy with a smoldering expression who exudes so much testosterone that small children go through puberty just by walking past him.  Now, I don't know about you, but no one I know actually looks like that.  I mean, I think the people I know are nice enough looking, but Sir Trevor Hotbody and Lady Viola de Cleevauge they're not.

Of course, high fantasy isn't much better.  There, the hero always has abs you could crack a walnut against, and is raising the Magic Sword of Wizardry aloft with arms that give you the impression he works out by bench pressing Subarus.  The female protagonists usually are equally well-endowed, sometimes hiding the fact that they have bodily proportions that are anatomically impossible by being portrayed with pointed ears and slanted eyes, informing us that they're actually Elves, so all bets are off, extreme-sexiness-wise.

And being chased by a horde of Amazon Space Women in Togas isn't exactly realistic, either.  [Image is in the Public Domain]

So even if we sci-fi nerds have a better grasp on reality as it pertains to relationships in general, you have to wonder how it affects our bodily images.  Like we need more to feel bad about in that regard; between Victoria's Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch, it's a wonder that any of us are willing to go to the mall without wearing a burqa.

But anyhow, that's the news from the world of psychology.  Me, I find it fairly encouraging that the scientifically-minded are successful at romance.  It means we have a higher likelihood of procreating, and heaven knows we need more smart people in the world these days.  It's also nice to see a stereotype shattered.  After all, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "No generalization is worth a damn.  Including this one."

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