So here we are.

[truepenny]

749 words so far today.

TO DO:
1. more words
2. pack pens to ship to Waterman and Sheaffer
3. short stories need markets, especially since another rejection letter arrived today. And it pains me greatly that there are so few markest for short sf/f/h with sexual content that isn't erotica. Also, is alternate history fantasy or science fiction? Anyone have a compelling theory?

The whole short story thing is actually bumming me out today, between the stories that can't find homes and the query letters that feel like they're being dropped into black holes. Of course, my hormones are also whacked out this week, so I'm not feeling as resilient as I might.

::deep sigh::

---

Outed myself as a freak last night (again), when a friend asked what I've been reading lately, and I told the truth: Munby, Man of Two Worlds and Imperial Leather, The Burning of Bridget Cleary, and The Nazi Doctors.

Reading the latter at the same time as G. K. Chesterton makes for some really unpleasant moments. I mean, I like Chesterton in a sort of mildly bemused way, and he's definitely comfort reading, but then he comes out with something like this, at the end of "The Bottomless Well" in The Man Who Knew Too Much:

"You lectured me with a lot of ideal patriotism, my young friend; but it's practical patriotism now for you and me, and with no lies to help it. You talked as if everything always went right with us all over the world, in a triumphant crescendo culminating in Hastings. I tell you everything has gone wrong with us here, except Hastings. He was the one name we had left to conjure with, and that mustn't go as well, no, by God! It's bad enough that a gang of infernal Jews should plant us here, where there's no earthly English interest to serve, and all hell beating up against us, simply because Nosy Zimmern has lent money to half the Cabinet. It's bad enough that an old pawnbroker from Baghdad should make us fight his battles; we can't fight with our right hand cut off. [...] I don't believe in the Empire growing until it reaches the sky; I don't believe in the Union Jack going up and up eternally like the Tower. But if you think I am going to let the Union Jack go down and down eternally, like the bottomless well, down into the blackness of the bottomless pit, down in defeat and derision, amid the jeers of the very Jews who have sucked us dry--no I won't, and that's flat; not if the Chancellor were blackmailed by twenty millionaires with their gutter rags, not if the Prime Minister married twenty Yankee Jewesses, not if Woodville and Carstairs had shares in twenty swindling mines. If the thing is really tottering, God help it, it mustn't be we who tip it over."

And you read that and realize, that's where something like the Holocaust comes from. That ugliness in the midst of pleasant rationality, like a kind of moral Tourette's Syndrome, and the simple conviction that that ugliness is itself pleasant rationality: the truth of the world in which we live. And, no, it's not. It's hate, and it's evil. I don't care who you aim it at, or what it is you think they've done. It's not rational; it's not justified; it's pure selfish rabid blindness, and the people who give into it (like the Nazis, like terrorists of any stripe, like the pro-life fanatics who bomb abortion clinics, like any perpetrator of a hate crime) become far far worse even than they imagine their victims to be. In taking away someone else's humanity, ultimately what you do is forfeit your own.

Reading The Nazi Doctors is hard, but it's the juxtaposition with this piece of popular literature that has truly given me the screaming horrors.

---
WORKS CITED
Chesterton, G. K. "The Bottomless Well." The Man Who Knew Too Much. 1922. New York: Dover Publications, 2003. 56-72.

Comments

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Alternate history is fantasy when the market you like next is a fantasy market and science fiction when the market you like next is a science fiction market.

If it's Ideomancer or somewhere that asks you for a label, roll a die.

[larryhammer]

Alternate history is neither fantasy nor science fiction, but speculative fiction. As are fantasy and science fiction.

However speculative fiction is not a genre (species) but a carrying bag (genus) for several genres, so the label is not helpful for market purposes.

---L.

It depends on which way you play it

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

I like the more diciplined sort which approx to SF

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

This week, most alternate history is published as science fiction. But if there's enough magic in it for most readers to notice, it's fantasy. Unless there are spaceships; anything with a spaceship in it is science fiction, currently. This will probably be true for at least the next five years.

Except, of course, when the editor has different ideas about what category and/or genre it fits in.

And I've seen alternate history marketed as mystery and as romance.

[talimena.livejournal.com]

Well said, about Chesterton. I find Father Brown stories great comfort reading, usually, but the casual anti-semitism and racism is horrifying and sometimes I can't get past it at all. Sometimes it seems worse because it is casual.

Sympathies on the short stories and hormones.

Gene Stratton Porter

[hms-yowling.livejournal.com]

wrote popular YA fiction in the 19teens/1920s. I'd read Girl of the Limberlost and Freckles, and had enjoyed them. A few years ago, I found a work I'd not read at a yard sale and bought it (I wanted to read it myself, but thought my nieces might like it, too). I was floored by the content. It took places in California and was about a young girl uncovering a plot by the evil, murderous, "imitative" Japanese race.

Having done a bit of research into California and it's troubled history with Asians (and knowing what came during WWII (internment camps)) it was particularly sickening to read what amounted to racist filth in the midst of a book celebrating both nature and, for that time, a fairly feminist vision of "girlhood."