Matt McIrvin&#39;s Freaky Alternate Reality

In my earlier post I took a slightly different tack, talking about stuff that really was pretty good but maybe not as astoundingly great as I thought it was (Douglas Hofstadter, William Gibson). That is not quite as embarrassing.

Much of the embarrassment I feel today over this stuff is really kind of joking; the lessons I learn sting a lot more when they're recent, and what's left years later is just the memory of that.

I first noticed this when re-reading and re-re-reading stuff I wrote when I was a kid. There was this pulse-pounding outer-space robot-brain-transplant technothriller called Watch Your Brain (complete text here!) (http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/kibology/watchyourbrain.html) that I wrote when I was about 10 or 11. When I read it at 13 or 14, it was profoundly embarrassing; I couldn't believe I had ever written anything that stupid. When my parents fished it out of the attic and I re-read it at 30, sure, it got some bad laughs, but on the whole it seemed charmingly precocious. Enough water had gone under the bridge that that kid who wrote it was just an early version of me, and I could judge the work as having been written by a boy in grade school.

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...Nevertheless, reading my age-30 introduction again, I see that there are some bits that stung a little anyway, maybe not for the same reasons as at 13...

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spasmsproject.livejournal.com

"the lessons I learn sting a lot more when they're recent, and what's left years later is just the memory of that.
"

That's an excellent point.

"I first noticed this when re-reading and re-re-reading stuff I wrote when I was a kid."

Well, that I can totally relate to. I've been writing stories since I was four years old, and my parents saved a lot of my writings to give back to me when I was older. On the one hand, it's always fascinating to contrast my output from kindergarten with my junior high or high school output. On the other, it can be a little withering. For instance:

I finished my first novel when I was eleven. It was about a man who is blinded in an accident and loses his job and his fiancee and all his friends and decides to kill himself. Fortuitously, just as he's preparing to die, he meets some other people with disabilities and gets comfortable with his blindness, gets a new job, new friends, a new fiancee, etc., and life is good for him again. At the end, he goes back to the doctor a year later and is informed they can cure his blindness with surgery, to which he replies something like, "No, I want to stay blind. Being blind has made me see." Thus the book's title, "Blind Justice."

I was really proud of it when I wrote it, and as an adult, I've had people assure me it's a hoot and a half and that I should turn it into a farce, but... ouch. Just looking at it makes me blush. =)

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jwgh

A bunch of people seem to be ashamed of enjoying the Dr. Dolittle books. I remember reading a bunch of them as a kid but I don't remember anything particularly shameful about them -- my memory is that they were sort of Jules Vernesy in their way. I do remember there being a whole lot of them available at my local library.

I remember really liking 'The Sword of Shannara' by Terry Brooks, then rereading it years later and being appalled by how derivative it was and its atrocious writing. I also read a bunch of other Terry Brooks books, but gradually lost interest. (Towards the end of this process I remember reading that he was a lawyer and realizing that this probably could have been deduced from the plots of the last few books of his that I read.)

I agree with something that one or two people said in the discussion you linked to, which is that it's not all that embarassing to admit that you liked something that wasn't very good when you recognized that it wasn't very good when you read it in the first place -- the real embarassment comes from having genuinely thought that something was good which you now realize (or at least think) has no redeeming qualities. I therefore don't really mind that I used to read a lot of David Eddings, for instance.

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Yeah... I read Doc Smith's Lensman novels in high school, at the enthusiastic recommendation of friends, and was bothered by how crap they were (considering the author's inexplicable high esteem among classic SF novelists) but also bothered by the fact that I could not stop reading.

Later I found out that, considered in the proper context, they were less crap than they seemed and the adulation for Smith was somewhat deserved. The copyright pages said they were from the Fifties, by which standard they'd have been shockingly naive; but they were really from the Thirties, by an author who had gotten his start in science fiction earlier even than that (his first novel was from 1928). Suddenly all the cliches in them seemed like important innovations. Also, they'd been damaged somewhat in their transition from magazine serialization to novel series: the whole first volume was a minor unrelated novel that had been badly pasted into the Lensman future history, in a manner that also gave away a big chunk of the ending.

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jwgh

Yes, Eddings was like that with me (but without the benefit of historical importance) -- with every book I would think to myself, "Why am I reading these?" and I could never come up with anything more satisfying than "Because I want to."

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...And today, I keep on reading Rudy Rucker's novels despite being perfectly aware of their enormous flaws. But obviously I'm getting something out of them.

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lots42.livejournal.com

Some books are fun to read because of their flaws. I read Tinker mostly to discover which shockingly insane thing the heroine would do next.

The worst was not summoning anyone from either two loyal-to-her armies when a powerful man threatened her.

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vardissakheli.livejournal.com

how much people insist they're nothing but word salad, I still love Stephen Donaldson's books.

I also should see if I still have Jonathan Livingston Seagull and try to remember if I really did like it more than Siddhartha.

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Donaldson's "The Killing Stroke" is one of the best short stories i've ever read. But his Covenant books are incredible garbage. And he really seems to like writing about rape.

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Hmm, how about Orson Scott Card? Did anyone fess up to Dan Brown? Heh.

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No, but there's a big pile-on-Dan-Brown festival going on over here (http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007095.html#007095)... I think his celebrity is still too recent for him to be somebody's youthful embarrassment.

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I'd found Elaine Radford's "Ender and Hitler" essay somewhere on the Web some time ago, and that really changed the way i felt about "Ender's Game" (no doubt helped along by the fact that OSC is a psycho right-wing Mormon nutbag). I was wondering if i was the only one; i wish i could find that essay again.

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Ah, i found the page that referred to the Radford essay in most detail.

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Which i found via Kuro5hin.

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I like Kessel's essay (haven't read Radford's), but it's also important to observe that this sort of special-bullied-kid-revenge fantasy does not begin with Card but runs through the whole history of the SF genre. I think it's the basis of the whole Odd John/Slan/Tomorrow People subgenre of stories about misfit super-mutants (particularly common in YA stories).

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...In fact, I seem to recall Phil Dick saying at some point that it seriously creeped him out, and he tried not to write stories like that. When he wrote misfit super-mutants they were usually villains.

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...Slans, that is, not Ender (I think Dick was dead by the time "Ender's Game" came out).

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Lots of people dislike "Ender's Game". I recall

james_nicoll saying as much recently.

I liked it when I read it, and eventually chalked up the disturbing aspects of it to conscious "Starship Troopers" homage. Note also that while I'm sure he always had the thing about gayness, Card seems to have gradually drifted further into right-wing nutbag territory over time; I have vague memories that back in the Eighties some of what he wrote sounded like centrist critiques of Reaganism.

A few years back I read the long-delayed second volume of his collection of good stories of the Eighties, Future on Ice. His introductory material was absurdly cranky, consisting of equal parts excoriation of the cyberpunks and excoriation of Bill Clinton. I can certainly understand the drive to bash a US president you don't like, but doing it in a collection of stories explicitly selected from a decade in which he was not president is a little odd. Bashing the cyberpunks at least did have something to do with the 1980s, though, as Gardner Dozois remarked, it seemed like a sad reenactment of a battle that nobody could remember the reasons for any more.

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I collected all the blog entries about Dan Brown by Geoffrey Pullum here: http://4-ch.net/book/kareha.pl/1133815847/

I don't know the first thing about Dan Brown, but I do know those blog entries are amusing.

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lots42.livejournal.com

I'm not embarassed to read Card. I'm embarassed FOR Card. He took a great book 'Ender's Game' and just pissed all over it.

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There was a big thread elsewhere about authors who have pissed on their great books with sequels. Some people mentioned LeGuin with her Earthsea books, although i don't recall the specifics (and, of course, i've not read them).

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Maybe they didn't care for Tehanu, which was written years after the Earthsea trilogy and is substantially different?

I dunno, I remember liking it. It's been awhile since I read it though.

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Yep, that's the one. I kept thinking "Tehama".

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I haven't read any of the Earthsea books, but I do remember reading somewhere that Le Guin had come to dislike some of the choices she had made when writing them and wrote Tehanu with the conscious intent of subverting them. I can imagine a big fan of the original books not liking that at all.

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jwgh

This is amazing: http://lib.aldebaran.ru/author/braun_dyen/braun_dyen_angels_demons/braun_dyen_angels_demons__1.html

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jwgh

This makes me happy, for instance:

"How did you find me?" Langdon could barely focus. His mind was racing from the image on the fax.

"I already told you. The Worldwide Web. The site for your book, The Art of the Illuminati."

Langdon tried to gather his thoughts. His book was virtually unknown in mainstream literary circles, but it had developed quite a following on-line. Nonetheless, the callers claim still made no sense. "That page has no contact information," Langdon challenged. "I'm certain of it."

"I have people here at the lab very adept at extracting user information from the Web."

Langdon was skeptical. "Sounds like your lab knows a lot about the Web."

"We should," the man fired back. "We invented it."

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"I have people here at the lab very adept at extracting user information from the Web."

Hee hee hee hee hee.

You know, I'm almost convinced that Brown does it on purpose.

"We should," the man fired back. "We invented it."

That reminds me of the episode in the new Doctor Who series where the Doctor and Rose meet a man who claims to own the Internet. Rose protests that no one owns the Internet, and the man replies, "Yes, and let's just let people keep thinking that."

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lots42.livejournal.com

Now that I think of it, it seems that much of my teenage Piers Anthony love was because of his then-healthy attitude towards sex. 'Boobies aren't to be feared, they are cool'.

Plus, the cool stories, interesting characters and neat powers helped. Too bad everything went to hell in the novel 'The Color Of Her Panties'. And if any Piers newbie is reading this, that's an actual honest to god novel and it's worse then it sounds, even the non-sexual parts.

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What I usually hear about Anthony is that to extract enjoyment from his books you want to start at the beginning of one of his endless series, read them in order, and the moment you stop having fun, just put the book down and walk away, because they're not going to get any better.

As I happened, I followed that advice: I started reading "Split Infinity" (the first one in the Apprentice Adept series of SF/fantasy crossovers), came away thinking "Eh", and never read any more.

But people keep telling me that his first novel "Macroscope" was really very good.

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jwgh

Harlan Ellison wrote a nice tribute to him at the beginning of Dangerous Visions, I think.

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astrange.livejournal.com

Piers Anthony books seem to be completely random with regards to quality. I've read at least one book of his (though I've completely forgotten the title) which had less engaging writing than Watch Your Brain does. And Xanth has gone completely unreadable even if you are 13, unless you don't mind reading books made entirely out of reader-submitted puns. Somewhere in between there and the first Xanth books (which were just sort of boring), he did manage to produce a few that I still think are actually good. The only example I can think of immediately is Castle Roogna, though.

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glitter-ninja.livejournal.com

Good advice. I actually experienced embarassment over books I used to like while reading Anthony's "Incarnations of Immortality" series as a teen. The first book was terribly good, I thought, despite the fact that I don't really remember it. By the time I got to the fifth book I was embarassed that I'd ever liked Anthony, especially with his "author's notes" that involved him wigging out because fans drive by his house and chastized him for not mowing often enough. It was a lot like Usenet, now that I think about it.

Other than that, I may have grown out of a lot of books, but I'm not embarassed that I used to like them. Not even those stupid adventure novels written by men as an excuse for softcore sex scenes. Those were popular when I was a teenager. I WILL NOT BE EMBARASSED.

What embarasses me are old writings and reports. Stuff I thought was terrific seems so pedestrian now, and it irks me when I remember teachers who encouraged these things. Did they think what I wrote was great for a 20 year old, or did they think it was great on any level? Because it's not great. And they may be really terrible professors if they thought it was great research.

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Sometimes grading student papers is kind of like reading slushpile submissions: most of them are so mind-bendingly awful that when you find one that's actually mediocre you want to kiss it.

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If there were any books I liked when I was younger that I would be really embarrassed about now, I've managed to erase them from my memory. Well, except for Donald Duck comics, those were just shit and I did like them. Most other comics I liked still stand up to scrutiny today.

I did like Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series a lot, and nowadays I have some trouble with that because they're full of the kind of magical elitism I've come to really dislike, but I still think they're very well-written books, for being YA stuff.

Which reminds me: Hey, fantasy authors, cut it out with the following:

1) Good vs. Evil. I'm thoroughly sick of it.
2) Magical elitism. I don't want to hear another thing about people who are BETTER than everyone else because they can use MAGIC, yet they still stoop so low as to HELP those far inferior to them because they're JUST THAT GOOD.

Not that I actually read any fantasy. Because, 1) and 2).

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1) Good vs. Evil. I'm thoroughly sick of it.

I'm not sick of it per se, but I'm sick of it being done badly.

2) Magical elitism. I don't want to hear another thing about people who are BETTER than everyone else because they can use MAGIC, yet they still stoop so low as to HELP those far inferior to them because they're JUST THAT GOOD.

I'm working on something right now that involves magic as just another area of academic study. OTOH, in this imagined universe, one would no more check out a grimoire to a random student than one would allow an undergrad in Physics 101 to play around with a high energy particle accelerator.

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I'll accept good-versus-evil stories as soon as someone shows me a person who would actually place their own actions in the "evil" half of the division. And who isn't a bored teenager.

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Ever watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

No, seriously. The Mayor, who remains one of my most favorite villains ever, is unabashedly evil. Best bad guy that series ever had, because he was human (well, at first).

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I mean a real person.

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Ah, I misunderstood. A good point, that. Although the really good (in the sense of being good stories, anyway) good-vs-evil stories that I've read don't rely on the source of evil being human, but rather some natural or supernatural force.

Whether one in turn buys that depends on one's proclivities (sort of like what my dad, who trained as a physicist, said about the Age of Unreason series: "As long as you buy the central conceit, it's great").

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