Brand loyalty

I was at the cash register in a bookstore when they asked me if I was interested in getting a customer loyalty card. I hadn't been exposed to the term in person yet, and my face instinctively broke out in a rictus snarl. I didn't think of the proper response until I left, which is of course to ask about the punishment for disloyalty. perhaps a "D" for disloyalty on the forehead. I would turn to the shareholders and exclaim: "A fair mark, my Lords."

The term branding is not a coincidence. Marketeers think of you as cattle, and who can blame them? That is what you get when you behave like a herd. It's not you showing off what you own, it's them.



Not that this is necessarily a bad thing. It's a bit too easy to deride advertising in any form when it obviously pays for so much. The entire entertainment industry is dependent on it. But it's not like you are powerless to defend yourself against this system. They are desperate for your money and there's no reason you shouldn't treat them like the overeager suitor they are.

Every company in the world would love to know what you will buy. Market research for toys is an ongoing torture chamber for the big toy companies, who honestly have no idea how to get children to buy something, unless they actually want it. If the movie industry was smart enough to realise that they have the same problem the music industry still has, they would implement the same solution. It really isn't that complicated anyway.

Big Corporations also care what you think, because it's profitable to do so. P.R. damage equals serious losses in their books, so don't hesitate to vote with your wallet. We have the luxury to make these choices now, so why shouldn't we? Unethical practices disappear quite quickly when sales suffer. It's far from perfect, most companies just shift the slave labour to a vendor, but they won't be able to keep that up forever.

The real advantage of multinationals being the only world wide organisations that will set policy in the future, is that they are a lot more vulnerable to checks and balances than a national government with a set term in office. They will rule a world where they are dependent on a fickle consumer with constantly changing needs and allegiances, who will turn on the corporations like rabid wolverines whenever they don't get what they want.

But I love foie gras, in spite of what they have to do to those geese to get it. Sometimes cruelty is just tastier. I don't see a problem with anesthatising piglets for castration, but if it doesn't happen, I won't stop eating pork. The weak link in that positive consumer-driven future is that people are easily satisfied idiots. Democracy did not work as advertised either. Realistically, don't give up the samosas made from ground-up Chinese fetuses, but demand that it consist of at least 90% unwanted children.

There is no Golden Age

The BBC has a new documentary series dealing with British Science Fiction and it's broader socio-cultural impact. The first episode of the Martians and Us deals with the concept of Evolution as used by H.G. Wells in the Time Machine and War of the worlds, and all the writers that followed in his footsteps. This one is about J.G. Ballard, though.



The first episode also reviews the Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, later filmed as the Village of the Damned. A perfect example of why science fiction can run circles around fantasy. It exemplifies 1960's parent's fears. Now that they could afford a better education for their children, they ended up with smart-assed kids. A little bit too smart even. They keenly felt, like their parents had, that their generation's era was over and that their replacements would tear everything they believed in to shreds. Not that they aren't experiencing something similar right now. All of the kids in the world chatting with pedophiles from space, their parents still unable to get bonzibuddy from their computers.



Fantasy on the other hand, never really gets beyond good v.s. evil as a plot, and overblown nostalgia as a unifying theme. Constantly hankering back to a past that never was, a charming bucolic fantasy. It's no coincidence that the hero is always a lowly farm lad, thrust into the hustle and bustle of things through some magic agency. No writer has managed to surpass J.R.R. Tolkien's initial idea in any significant way. Even in the book itself, every character is longing for the past or some of it's trappings. Ancient objects, battles thousands of years in the past, long lost loves, homes that don't exist anymore.



According to recently deceased author Robert Jordan, "....Fantasy is an area where it is possible to talk about right and wrong, good and evil, with a straight face. In mainstream fiction and even in a good deal of mystery, these things are presented as simply two sides of the same coin. Never really more than a matter of where you happen to be standing." - CNN chat December 2000
In other words, in Fantasy, Men are Men, Women are Women, Good is Good and Evil is Evil, no nuance required.

Arthur C. Clarke ends the Martians and Us episode by stating that the purpose of Science fiction is to map out all possible futures, so that we can pick the one we want. Clarke is widely respected, not just for excellent novels, but for some actual science as well. For instance, he suggested that geostationary satellites would be ideal for global communication in 1945. To me, this pretty much sums up the difference between the two genres.

So why is it that there is such wide-spread contempt in literary circles for Science Fiction, but escapist sword and sorcery is a main stay of bestseller lists? It's a little better in cinema, but that's mostly due to Star Wars. Before that film, Science Fiction was guaranteed b-movie fodder.

The answer is both simple and disquieting. Fantasy demands nothing from it's viewers, they are transported to a simplified world full of whimsy and presented with a morality play with a happy end. Science Fiction presents complicated concepts and a deep abiding pessimism about humanity's motives and competence, post-apocalyptic wastelands, police states and the generally deleterious effects of technology on society, often foregoing even tying up loose ends in the final act.

It is Science Fiction's nature that it is frequently overtaken by real science, and the futures that we imagined in the past begin to look charmingly naive to cynical modern eyes. Fantasy is beholden to no standards of accuracy whatsoever, not even those of historical fiction. Both genres have horrible writing in books and ridiculously bad films. But, where badly executed Science Fiction has the underlying ideas that it is trying to communicate, bad Fantasy has no redeeming qualities whatsoever.

Everything you like is gay

The one scene in Herman Wouk's Don't stop the Carnival that has always stuck in my brain is when the main character is forced to spend his anniversary dinner listening to his daughter's new boyfriend's theory about the homosexuality of Balzac. Considering the kind of books Balzac wrote, he is astonished that anyone would write something like this about him.

"Klug shrugged and smiled, his good humor restored. 'The Satyriasis was a familiar pattern. Overcompensation, plus a flight from self-knowledge.'
'It's an interesting idea, anyhow,' Norman said. 'Balzac must be the only one left.'
Klug's smile faded into a tolerant, pitying look. He said to Norman smoothing his hair, 'There's always resistance to these discoveries. Read A passion in the Desert again. And Louis Lambert.'"

The essence of literary criticism from most people's perspective is to prove that what you think of an author is wrong. That it is obvious looking through his work that he/she is homosexual, fascist, had a domineering mother, etc. I don't know if I disagree with this idea. Since Derrida's expulsion from the philosophy departments, he has been happily adopted as a caulking agent to patch up any and all theoretical holes between feminist/queer theory and 'straight' literary criticism.



It's not that I don't think this kind of research can't create interesting results, but why should I care about an author's homosexuality? A friend of mine once told me a particularly awful author he had introduced me to was gay, I think in an attempt to make him a little more salonfähig. (You might guess his name if I told you that his pseudonym is the name of the protagonist of For Whom the Bell Tolls.)



Not coincidentally, I hate Hemingway and because of this purely subjective point of view, I can authoritatively state that the idea of him as a great writer is bullshit. I can't stand the choppy torrent of declarative sentences, especially when you realise it's not even trying to pare down to a kind of sparse simple beauty. He took his direction from the Toronto star style guide, i.e. a business writing book that discourages one from using long words and passive sentences.

The only good thing to come out of his fame are all the people trying to write like him and failing, ending up with short, punchy novels that were mostly written by people who could write about their character's inner life. Hemingway's imitators are only great to the extent that they aren't like him.

Zelda Fitzgerald didn't like him, called him "bogus" and "phoney as a rubber cheque", and that happens to be exactly what I think. The supposed homosexuality is just a foil for those people that believe that what he wrote down is just the tip of the iceberg. Who really wants to read a bunch of childish stories about "tough guys", how much they hate homosexuals and their mothers? It comes as no surprise to me that his best book, is filled with writers like Joyce, Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein, the one with biggest balls of them all.



Does it make Bambi any less of a saccharine saga that it's author probably also wrote Josephine Mutzenbacher, erotic classic and the inspiration for dozens of 1970's German sex comedies? Why does writing always have to be about the author's sexuality? If you've read any of the post preceding this one, you will know that it's mostly wank. You're forgiven for thinking I type this with one hand, I probably should.