Have I been too harsh?
For sure, this is probably not my last post on Nyssa's Guardian, and I hope Reese Gabriel, if she's googling for people talking about her, takes it all in the spirit of Oscar Wilde. Some of you have read the excerpt and now know the daunting challenge I face in finishing this load of tripe, and yes I probably will finish it, if only to figure out if the author's quoting of Thucididyes was accidental or deliberate-- or if she just stole it from some other clueless S&M novelist.
Omaha suggested last night that I was being harsh, but only in the company of people who would understand why. The sort of people who click on the "Bondage" sub-genre don't care about the Lost In Space quality of skiffy, and could care less that the author has done a terrible job of contemplating what a cornucopia machine in every home and hotel room really means for a society. They'll accept her cyber-dildos and flouron-beam hygiene rooms so long as they get their mundane S&M long-drawn-out kink scene as routine as an oil change. These aren't the sort of people who want my melange of sci-fi, sociology, and sex in equal proportions: they're putting up with a backdrop in the hopes that it'll lead to sex and not much more.
Be that as it may, I believe that every writer has a responsibility to be true to the tropes they choose to wield. Science Fiction writers have a plethora of tech levels in which to play: everything from our current TL8 all the way up to TL18 (if you're a gamer, you know what this means). Gabriel plays mix-and-match, badly. What's most annoying, however, is that when the skiffy is center-stage, characterization looses. Consider this scene from Gabriel's book:One night, after Nyssa had returned from a party that Estriana had been forbidden to attend, she'd found the beautiful blonde obedient naked in the sanitizing chamber. She was standing against the wall, pushing a large cyber dildo inside her asshole. She had a gag in her mouth and clamps on her nipples. The warm, red cleansing beams were pouring down on her as she moaned through orgasm after orgasm.
Now compare it to a similar scene from a recent Journal Entry: "I... A couple of months ago, I thought you might have, you know, missed boys. It was so unfair that I got all the pleasure of intercourse and you didn't, and I wanted to be able to give you what you gave me. So I bought a... a strap-on. With TCNI. The guy at the shop told me it was the one all of the women who came in raved about."
Linia was so surprised she let Misuko go, then sat on the bed next to her. "You did? But Misuko, you hate transcutaneous neural interfaces!"
Both Gabriel and I slipped in a bit of jargon: "cyber-dildo" versus "transcutaneous neural interface." But I think the JE version illustrates two important aspects to writing: one, the characters come first and, two, the jargon respects the reader's intelligence. Gabriel's "cyber" is completely gratuitous. It tells us nothing about what the toy does and only serves as cheap decoration. The introduction of "TCNI", however, tells us a lot about what the toy is capable of (and I assume the reader is smart enough to puzzle out what "transcutaneous neural interface" means) and that Linia obviously means a lot to Misuko, as she's willing to try this thing after previous scenes had established that she's a bit phobic about technology that feeds information directly into the brain.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but I hope this makes sense to others: you have a moral responsibility to understand your genre before you dip pen to ink. Even moreso, you must respect your reader's intelligence. If you don't, the only readers you get aren't worth respect.
Omaha suggested last night that I was being harsh, but only in the company of people who would understand why. The sort of people who click on the "Bondage" sub-genre don't care about the Lost In Space quality of skiffy, and could care less that the author has done a terrible job of contemplating what a cornucopia machine in every home and hotel room really means for a society. They'll accept her cyber-dildos and flouron-beam hygiene rooms so long as they get their mundane S&M long-drawn-out kink scene as routine as an oil change. These aren't the sort of people who want my melange of sci-fi, sociology, and sex in equal proportions: they're putting up with a backdrop in the hopes that it'll lead to sex and not much more.
Be that as it may, I believe that every writer has a responsibility to be true to the tropes they choose to wield. Science Fiction writers have a plethora of tech levels in which to play: everything from our current TL8 all the way up to TL18 (if you're a gamer, you know what this means). Gabriel plays mix-and-match, badly. What's most annoying, however, is that when the skiffy is center-stage, characterization looses. Consider this scene from Gabriel's book:One night, after Nyssa had returned from a party that Estriana had been forbidden to attend, she'd found the beautiful blonde obedient naked in the sanitizing chamber. She was standing against the wall, pushing a large cyber dildo inside her asshole. She had a gag in her mouth and clamps on her nipples. The warm, red cleansing beams were pouring down on her as she moaned through orgasm after orgasm.
Now compare it to a similar scene from a recent Journal Entry: "I... A couple of months ago, I thought you might have, you know, missed boys. It was so unfair that I got all the pleasure of intercourse and you didn't, and I wanted to be able to give you what you gave me. So I bought a... a strap-on. With TCNI. The guy at the shop told me it was the one all of the women who came in raved about."
Linia was so surprised she let Misuko go, then sat on the bed next to her. "You did? But Misuko, you hate transcutaneous neural interfaces!"
Both Gabriel and I slipped in a bit of jargon: "cyber-dildo" versus "transcutaneous neural interface." But I think the JE version illustrates two important aspects to writing: one, the characters come first and, two, the jargon respects the reader's intelligence. Gabriel's "cyber" is completely gratuitous. It tells us nothing about what the toy does and only serves as cheap decoration. The introduction of "TCNI", however, tells us a lot about what the toy is capable of (and I assume the reader is smart enough to puzzle out what "transcutaneous neural interface" means) and that Linia obviously means a lot to Misuko, as she's willing to try this thing after previous scenes had established that she's a bit phobic about technology that feeds information directly into the brain.
I'm just thinking out loud here, but I hope this makes sense to others: you have a moral responsibility to understand your genre before you dip pen to ink. Even moreso, you must respect your reader's intelligence. If you don't, the only readers you get aren't worth respect.