I’ve been on a Kindle science fiction reading binge for several months now. I think it was triggered by reading the YA novel “The Hunger Games” with the free Prime borrow that came with my Kindle Fire. I ended up on a quest to read through all the free SciFi novels from the current generation of authors on Kindle, the vast majority of which were Book #1 of a series. I’ve read through fifty or so of them by this point, I didn’t keep close count. I generally steer away from criticizing the style of other writers, but there are a few observations I can’t resist making.
Smirking is not an acceptable substitute for a smile. Not for a sad smile or a wry grin – not for grim smile, a crooked smile or an uncertain smile. Smirking is an objectionable habit that will get your bell rung if you try it in front of the wrong person. The only thing a smirk expresses is “I’m a jerk.” You see? Smirk, jerk, they even rhyme.
So I was shocked to find that nearly every one of the fifty novels I read featured smirking. I don’t remember ecountering any smirking in literature before reading this batch of books. It’s one of those words that irritates as much as the actual act, so I think I would have noticed if it had seen broad use before I gave up reading modern fiction in favor of 19th century authors.
I have three possible explanations for the plague of smirking in this freshly minted science fiction. First, some of it is being written by people in their twenties and thirties who grew up smirking and never got smacked because their parents and teachers were petrified of getting sued. Second, all of these books have been copy edited by some insane person who adds smirks in the theory that smirking makes the books better. I came up with this theory after the characters in one novel smirked a couple times in the first two well edited chapters, after which the book was full of typos and they never smirked again. Maybe the two chapters were a trial run for the editor before the author went broke or ran out patience with the gratuitous smirking. Finally, there may be some cannonical fiction text read by the current generation of authors in which the characters all smirked their heads off. I didn’t read the later Harry Potter books, perhaps Harry became a big smirker as a teen.
I finally got so fed up with all the smirking in one book that I used the Kindle’s search function to count them up. The characters smirked thirty-three times. On the other hand, I just checked two novels which featured top notch writing and imaginative settings, “Smallworld” by Dominic Green and “In Her Name” by Michael R. Hicks. “In Her Name” came back clean, and the single smirk in “Smallworld” appeared in a “wipe that smirk off your face” context. An author after my own heart.
Another issue for many of these novels was political correctness. Yes, authors like Heinlein had some “advanced” views about the roles of the sexes, which unfortunately morphed into writing unreadable android porn by the end of his career. The political correctness problem I’m talking about is one of gender equivalency, ie, you can only tell the male and female characters apart if the author chooses to use “man” or “woman” in the description somewhere. It brought to mind some of the teens and twenty-somethings I’ve come across over the last decade who treat their girlfriends like guys who happen to have babies if somebody forgets to do something.
“Is it my kid?” he asked with a smirk.
“I didn’t see anybody else’s bike in the hallway,” she smirked in response.
Now they’re a few years older and they’re writing novels. One thing you can say about most of these books is that they aren’t derivative of the SciFi classics. Instead, the major influences on many of these authors appear to be Hollywood movies and the science fiction cable shows of ten or fifteen years ago. There’s a lot of “Babylon 5″, “Star Wars” and “Lord of the Rings” peeking through the digital ink.
The last thing I’m going to rant about is ignoring the old rule about writing what you know. Authors who write legal thrillers usually study up on the law and authors who write medical dramas submerge themselves in all that nasty biology stuff. Unfortunately, some of the new science fiction authors seem to figure that the whole point of writing SciFi is you get to make it all up. This results in references like other galaxies found less than ten light years from earth when the closest is probably a dwarf version over 25,000 light years away.
Then there’s the occasional author who chooses to write about gifted characters, scientists and fleet commanders, from the perspective of a couch potato whose greatest achievement was getting all the high scores on a Nintendo system that nobody else is allowed to use. Authors don’t need to be geniuses to write books, but if you aren’t real bright and never held a job, you’re better off writing about cosmic slackers than trying to project your personality and conversational style onto the crème de la crème of a galactic empire.
“Dude! The aliens are going to blow the whole Cigna system.”
“Whatever,” smirked the fleet commander.
Come to think of it, maybe writing what they know IS why so many authors are choosing to write from the perspective of a teenager. And I thought they were just imitating “The Hunger Games”.
I think part of the problem is a general decline in both literacy and a willingness on the part of schools to insist students learn to write. I say this as a history teacher who has to translate, and I do mean translate, the essays of my students.
They also have no real idea of how to do research – and I teach juniors and seniors at a college prep school. So, it is no surprise to me what you have reported in your weekly post.
I too read a great deal of badly crafted sci-fi and fantasy books, but in the process, I have also read some real gems! Unfortunately it seems to be a 4 to 1 ratio of poorly crafted books to real beauties. What that tells me is that many people think that they can write a bestseller just by putting their daydream into a word doc. They don’t understand that their lack of attention to learning their craft is quite obvious!I talk about and discuss the books that captured my attention for positive reasons.
The incorrect use and over-use of words goes along with the short attention span that I am always hearing about. Several young authors told me that that is why everything must be in 60 second increments. Yet, wonderful books with beautiful prose and few, if any, pictures still remain on the bestsellers lists. This gives me hope, that the younger generation will sit down and actually find that reading is more than a way to kill time when the power is out.
You had me laughing over my morning coffee, (wasn’t aware of the smirking problem) but I do agree with Kevin. There are times when you wonder what the kids are up to in their exposure to literature and culture. At the same time, I’ve met some motivated, well-read and curious kids in the high school classes I’ve worked with.
I once taught a 6 week block in an English classroom and had the kids write the first five pages to a novel. The students were spot on in understanding the genre they chose and a couple of them I encouraged to keep going to completion. As a historian, I always push old school skills for research topping off with some great things available on the web.
Connie,
For the free books I just read, I would roughly spilt them into thirds, with a third being pretty good, a third being a mix of good and bad, and a third being pretty awful. It’s been many years since I read trade SciFi, but my memory was the split was about the same. In fact, I probably finished more of the bad books when they were free on Kindle because back when they were purchased or borrowed for the library, I would have been disgusted with myself for bringing them home and quit:-)
I felt so bad about not reviewing one book I bought the other night after reading the first one of the series for free that I e-mailed the author just to tell him. Unlike so many new books, the author didn’t explain the world or the characters, he let them develop, so I cared what would happen enough to buy the next book. And it was very good, but unfortunately, the author had a background in horror writing and he made a couple of the evil characters sadists. I just skimmed by those parts, I suspect they would be considered par for the course in horror writing, but I just can’t write a review with a big sadism disclaimer, or recommend limiting the audience to age 40 and above.
Morris
JL,
I don’t have the teaching experience of you and Kevin, so my impression of recent mainstream generations comes mainly from kids I just see around, family of friends and their friends, etc. None of them seem to shy away from talking about their lives, I think some of them see it as a sort of performance art.
Morris
Hi Morris,
I really think you may see history repeating itself honestly. This is actually a subject that I thought about a lot since science fiction is my favorite genre.
If you go back and read much of the “golden age” science fiction (which I’ve been doing lately thanks to your ‘free kindle books” compilation) you’ll find so much of it is pretty bad. Heinlein was an exception (and yes, he did get – interesting – in his later writing). Even many of the authors that emerged later in the 60′s through the 90′s that turned out to be pretty decent, much of their early work was so bad, it was near unreadable.
I think your rough cut of the older and newer sci-to into thirds (mentioned in your comments) is pretty spot on. It is my hope that through sheer volume of output, some readable authors may emerge that the torch can be passed to.
In the meantime, maybe we just need to SMIRK and bear it (sorry, I just had to toss that in there!)
Bryan,
I stopped reading a book two nights ago after the loving father who is reading his son a bedtime story (the mother has passed away) smirks down at him when he thinks the boy is exaggerating in retelling what happened that day.
On my Kindle SciFi compilation, some jerk (still rhymes with smirk) gave it a one star review because I got Lafferty’s first initial wrong in the author listing.
Morris
Just found your site and subscribed bc you are so damn spot-on it’s crazy. I was just going to brag that my book, MARVIN PLOTNIK AND THE SANDY RIVERS HILLTOP RANCH FOR WAYWARD YOUTH, JUVENILES, AND YOUNG ADULTS is totally smirkless, but then I checked and it’s not. A search finds four. Color me flabbergasted. At least they were proper smirks. They were not wry grins. Nor grim smiles. They were full-on this-guy’s-a-moron out-and-out smirks. At least two of them were produced by Count Marmaduke, minion to the Evil Lord Balderon. Hey, if a minion can’t smirk, I don’t know what. I’m just sayin’. Sometimes, a smirk is a smirk.
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