author: Nicole J. LeBoeuf

This'll be a long, long entry, and another one having nothing to do with work on any particular manuscript (though thoughts of them arise). As writing goes, I've been a bum these last few days. The excuses are rife, and run the gamut from office work to home improvement, from social engagements to bicycle maintenance.

Also sleep and irregular sleeping habits. The late-late-late Wednesday night at the IHOP lead to a following Thursday of sleepwalking from obligation to obligation. (I really need to get better at all-nighter recovery.) Then on Friday my husband and I took the living room apart and painted one of the walls thus revealed. Saturday involved finishing touches on the paint job, an initial stab at reassembling the living room, and watching Disc 2 of Fushigi Yugi over a pot-luck dinner with friends.

My interest in the show flagging as it progressed (I must be broken; everyone else thinks it improves with each episode), I took a stab at working on the code for this blog. Discovered some huge CSS problems in Internet Explorer (y'all might have said something!) and tried to fix them. Created the Category and Manuscript sorting menus now available in the left margin. Ended up with something that works in both browsers, except that one entry persists, for reasons unknown to me, in wonkifying itself in Internet Explorer, and only when my I-can-see-it-you-can't editing menu isn't displayed.

(But, hey! W3C says it validates as HTML 4.0 Transitional!)

And I've been working my way through a stack of library books. John and I hit the library a couple Thursdays ago, and I started in on Viable Paradise's Suggested Research Reading For Aspiring Fantasists. I have now finally read The King In Yellow, along with three science fiction novels by Jack Vance and one of Nesbit's children's fantasies that I hadn't gotten my hands on before.

Also in that stack was a last-minute impulse pick, The Visitor by Sheri S. Tepper. Which leads to the reason for the title of this post, here, and indeed its existence. I finished reading that book just now, and thoughts of it, aided by too much Coca Cola during the anime viewing and too much garlic during dinner, have been impeding all attempts to get to sleep. So I figured, what the hell: I should get up and write down those thoughts, because if I'm going to have insomnia I might as well share it with the world.

Thought The First: I do think Ms. Tepper has totally given up on the human race.

No, really. Her characters are always striving for a better world, but they are without exception merely carriers of good intentions whose effectiveness depends on a nudge, or even a shove, from the angels. Or the fairies. Or various imaginations of Deity. And as her books' publication dates get later and later (if the sampling I've read is any indication) these supernatural beings have been increasingly wrathful ones. They remorselessly sweep away the chaff of humanity, using disease and catastrophe to solve the problem of overpopulation and unfailingly leaving alive those open-minded humans that are either the deities' annointed heroes or those that are amenable to being shepherded by said heroes. The epilogues invariably show these virtuous survivors making plans to build themselves a new Eden.

Which is why I say "earned utopias." The deus ex machina doesn't simply wave a wand and create paradise; it pushes a sort of reset button that cleanses the world of those who don't want/deserve paradise, preparing the way for those left to work hard at creating paradise themselves, something that is only possible after the reset enacted by, or the powers granted by, the deus.

These are not books that show readers the way back to the Garden. At most, these books preach a particular morality--one I admit I agree with: a doctrine of feminism and environmentalism and responsible reproductive choice and religious tolerance. But these values are not themselves what saves humanity. Instead, the message seems to be, "If you don't adhere to these values, the Avenging Angel will delete you. Then, the Avenging Angel will hand over the keys to the kingdom to those people who do adhere to these values." The reader comes away not with ideas for saving the world but merely with a better understanding of the author's dogma. Those of us who agree with the author's values might indulge momentarily in her fantasies of vengeful nature Goddesses eating up whole cities, or fungal symbiotes imposing worldwide harmony, but we don't come away with any sort of pragmatic direction for real world activism.

And it's not that I expect pragmatic direction from every science fiction novel, but I do expect to see some faith in humanity's ability to save itself without depending on divine intervention. Or on the godly destruction of the unrighteous, for that matter! Recent Tepper novels have a lot more in common with premillenial dispensationalistic fantasies than I think her fans (myself among them) would like to admit.

Thought the Second: Tepper's apocalypses don't follow real-life social dynamics.

I yearn to write a short story whose punchline is "On the last day was the Rapture, when in a twinkling of an eye God's chosen people were taken away to Heaven, and the environmentalists inherited the earth." But real-life catastrophes don't work that way. Catastrophes don't discriminate between the virtuous and the bigots. They do discriminate, but not in ways conducive to righteousness.

For instance, look at New Orleans. If we were living in a Tepper novel, by and large the breached levee would be a means for Deity to cleanse the city of corrupt politicians, children of undeserved privilege, and bigots of both the racial and the religious kind. Those left behind would be the poor, the black, the gays and lesbians, the voodoo practitioners, the strippers, the prostitutes, all of them working together to survive and to rebuild their home in the image of good egalitarian ideals. But look what really happened: those with means got the hell out, and many of those left behind--too poor to own a car, or too old or infirm to travel, those that could not afford to abandon what little they had, those with little more to their names than their pride and their idea of home--simply drowned. The survivors have been denied food, water, aid, and dignity by the botched plans of the well-intentioned in government and the disinterest of less-well-intentioned government figures. They've even been denied attempts to leave under their own power. In their starving desperation, the stranded survivors, having learned that it's every man for himself, have in many cases turned on each other.

But that brings us back to deus ex machina. In a Tepper novel, the flood wouldn't just be the inevitable result of a 200-mile-wide Category Four hurricane and the underfunding of the levees. It would be guided by some supernatural figure (maybe the ghost of Marie LeVeaux) who would take an active hand in saving the sheep and drowning the goats. Heroes would arise in its wake bearing gifts and miraculous powers, ready to smack down government obstructionists (who'd all get eaten by alligators) and lead the poor but honest survivors to rebuild their home in a manner condoned and encouraged by Mother Nature.

I'm not sure I'd want to live in that world, tell you the truth. I want to see humanity win out against both aversity and averice without the crutch of avenging angels, super powers, misanthropic reset buttons, or any of the other artificial oversimplifications Tepper perpetrates on her worlds.

Of course, I'll be the first to admit that the short story I'm starting to write about the rebuilding of New Orleans will probably fall afoul of all of the above. But if I do my job right, the supernatural aid will exact a price, and the ethical situations therein won't be monochrome.

Or maybe it will be just as much a wish-fulfillment fantasy as any of Tepper's god-enforced utopias. Maybe the story will evoke not hope in humanity but longing for something else. I don't know yet; it's not finished. But I can swear this much: it won't be anything I need feel ashamed of longing for.