The book you just read sounds like a painful experience.
I suspect that the point of the novel was not 'who can fix this', but that 'Living Large and Lawless' was the best one could do in the face of such overwhelming evil. "Life stinks, lets get drunk and have meaningless sex, and here's my book-length defense of being a jerk."
I will say that I remember reading a very bad novel, the start of a 13 novel series, by White Wolf, and I saw others read it as well. So perhaps its possible if you're demented enough, and speak with enthusiasm to have commercial success to some degree anyways. L. Neil Smith wrote one good book, and then a bunch of follow-up novels which could best be described as 'hack propaganda for Libertarians'. I suppose they sold since there were a number of them made. Later, he wrote better stuff.
I think some of this is pure sermon, and not a commercial product as such. White Wolf said they were going to do that 13 novel thing before the first book sold. I suspect some people lose money just so they can get their viewpoint on the universe out there....like Hollywood with its slew of anti-war movies which bomb, Bomb, and BOMB, and yet they kept on making them because it allowed them to express their deeply felt view....Chimpy McBushhitlerhaliburton is real bad.
To some degree, certain books are sold as sermons. I recently read John Ringo's The Last Centurion, and he spent an awful lot of time blasting Organic Farmers, Global Warmers, Grasshoppers, and Liberal Aristocratics. I'm not sure how much fun it would be if you didn't largely agree with him already. And yes, I suspect he made a success out of that book. So sermons with fun action can sell well. It does help if the sermon is something that a rather large group of people agree with.
Ayn Rand founded a religion. She called it a philosophy that was objectively true. You say tomato, I say tamatoe. Atlas Shrugged, and The Fountainhead, and a few other books, mostly fiction, laid out her theory of life. Objectivism. To save you having to wade through a 53 page speech by the hero of one of her books....Man is the measure of all things. The noble soul respects itself. Welfare and other forms of altruism are evil and enslavement of the noble soul by the looters. Charity is acceptable, but only if its what you want to do and if its uncoerced (and the IRS is a big coercement agency). She had some degree of success, and even today there are Randians.
So you have a guy trying to do what Rand did, and what Ringo is doing, but in his own way. And he's probably trying to do something rather similar to what White Wolf was after.
And in my view, he's basically in rebellion against reality. He's sees a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy (I wish.) when there is no such thing.
I think some of this is pure sermon, and not a commercial product as such. White Wolf said they were going to do that 13 novel thing before the first book sold. I suspect some people lose money just so they can get their viewpoint on the universe out there....like Hollywood with its slew of anti-war movies which bomb, Bomb, and BOMB, and yet they kept on making them because it allowed them to express their deeply felt view....Chimpy McBushhitlerhaliburton is real bad.
They say The Pen is Mightier than the Sword. Change public opinion about your enemies, and you don't have to kill them.
And who is Chimpy McBushhitlerhaliburton?? It sounds like it's trying to say "Bush, Hitler, hail Tim Burton"
Its not inherently wrong to write Sermon as Novel, but its the topic of the sermon that makes it wrong. In this case Get Drunk, Use Mind Magic on Innocent Schmucks, and Be a Jerk is the topic of the sermon (and the sermon is approving of such behavior).
Chimpy (x=Monkey) Mc(x=bland,corporate stooge of McDonalds and other companies) Bush(Pres. Bush, Jr.= Bush) Hitler (Bush=Hitler) Haliburton (Very large company doing much of Iraqi recovery efforts. One of two companies in the world that can. The other company is French. Its a way of saying Bush is the servant of corrupt very big business.)
The whole thing is a way to scream I Hate Bush! Or its a way to make fun of people who make Khan in Star Trek 2 seem like a mellow fellow.
What I'm saying is that Hollywood let themselves blow through a lot of money to finance their obsession with smacking Bush around. I'm not sure if they lost two hundred million bucks doing this or not.
Its not inherently wrong to write Sermon as Novel, but its the topic of the sermon that makes it wrong. In this case Get Drunk, Use Mind Magic on Innocent Schmucks, and Be a Jerk is the topic of the sermon (and the sermon is approving of such behavior).
Yeah, but wrong by what standards? Who are the savages? Read the post in this thread http://gamingoutpost.com/discussions/topic/world-idea-4 to get what I'm talking about.
Eric, I'm glad you posted. I thought of you more than once while reading this book--on the sort of, if this anti-right-wing polemic is annoying me as a right-of-center moderate, how would Eric take it?
Part of what kept me off balance, I think, was that I couldn't tell whether the writer really believed that this was the way the world really is, or whether he was exaggerating a world to show how stupid it was to think that it might be that way. I'm inclined to think the former, but maybe he's really somewhere in the middle. After all, you and I have both created worlds which are not at all like the reality we perceive because we thought they would make interesting backgrounds for play--Post Symp comes to mind on my end, and that world you had David in last I saw him might be one of yours. But we have the advantage that we can run our players through a thousand different worlds, and so if some of them are really contrary to our notions of reality we more than make up for it with worlds that reinforce our views. If this is the world of his game system--well, I can see it as a one-shot, but it reads more like a campaign system, and I would hate to be trapped in that world for any length of time. I remember feeling like Gamma World was a hopeless land of despair that ground me down; I don't think I'd have stayed with it if we weren't alternating between that, Star Frontiers, and OAD&D. This world makes Gamma World look like a theme park.
--M. J. Young
To some degree, I can disengage from a work, and just see what tricks the author is doing. L.E. Modestit (whom I generally like) had his heroine in the Sophrano Sorceress become spelled to be young, and beautiful. So he had her spend an awful lot of time complaining about how she had to eat like a horse to keep up her weight with the magic system in that world.
Thats an authorial trick. Readers like pretty heroines, so give them one. But to do so looks like pandering, so have her complain endlessly about some incredibly minor problem to disguise your playing to the readers.
And BTW, one of your fire spells came from the 'Sorceress'. The one that people far and wide can detect.
Moving on. However, it does get kinda boring if you're disengaged. And if there is really no one to cheer for. So that strategy only works for a while. It might stave off infuriated rage, but it tends to end with blase' and boredom and the books gets put down after a few chapters anyways.
One thing that came to me from your description was the tendency of certain people to imagine themselves as Brave Transgressive Artists when they are the Establishment. George Clooney gets an award for bravery for making a McCarthy bashing film while Theo van Gogh who got stabbed to death for his film on Islamic treatment of women is not even mentioned in the award show that decorated Clooney. There are ideas that were old hat in 1965, but they get endlessly recycled. "I'm tired of these old cliche's, bring me some new cliche's" Samuel Goldstein is supposed to have said.
I'm not sure what world you're talking about with David. Currently he's in "Hunter's World" which is based on the idea that modern society could be twisted to encourage sociopathic predation on those weaker than ourselves...which is an idea I'm not greatly in disagreement with. Its stretching reality a good bit, but there is a strong tendency for the strong to enjoy crushing the weak. (and yes, that sort of behavior does tend to hit my buttons a bit.) Its like Post-symp Man. You see PSM as a good arguement against Darwinian ethics...as it is.
You'd be stretching yourself if you created a world in which Darwinism was actually good. I created that world in which French foreign policy was actually wise and effective.
That said, I agree we can write up worlds we don't largely agree with because we have a thousand we do agree with. I suspect in that regard, at least as it comes to actual play (although I could not say regarding game design) that you're more amiable than I am. Its hard for me to run Evil characters even though I try to be fair. Its just hard. I'm going against my grain when I do it.
As to whether he's serious....hmmm. I'd say a lot of Moonbats (taken from Georges Monbiot) are serious, or they are of the viewpoint that a bit of lying in the Great Cause is okay because the Enemy is demonic. I did read a bit of an arguement today about the Left and its penchant (see Janeane Garofalo) for calling rightwingers racist. Some thought 'yeah, they see us all as racists.', but others thought it was merely a useful tactic by those on the Left to shut down debate or to change the debate from 'should we or shouldn't we?' to 'rightwinger defends himself'.
Then there is also the Joker by 'Jack Nicholson' who wants to destroy all art, but the ones that are horrific because those are real and true. This sort of notion of only the ugly is real was contested by CS Lewis who pointed out that a flowering meadow was just as real as a scene of horror. White Wolf tended to go this way in their books. Interestingly, one of the few times I tried to run a White Wolf game more true to the vision in the game books, it did not work that well. The books may say one thing, but how the players play it is another thing. People may want the emo cred of being angsty and dark, but in reality, they'd prefer to kick down doors, kill monsters, and take their stuff, or something closer to that in keeping somewhat with the game background. Like 'fight bad guys, rescue hostages, and send supervillains off to jail.' for a super setting.
I think Gamma World was kinda meant to be not taken that seriously. Its sort of a joke like some B movies.
"Oh, no, Samantha, the N-rays put out by the invading alien spaceships have mutated the artichokes into ravening monsters. Run for your life!"
But I'm not the best person to say such because I tend to not get jokes like that. And I'm not really sure how many B movies were really meant as jokes.
Well, I think B movies were never really meant as jokes. In the main they were serious attempts to make money, based on the mistaken belief that they had such a great story idea for this film that production values wouldn't matter.
Your discussion of the attitude that only the ugly is real takes me back to a similar intellectual problem I faced decades back. I was bothered by Chaotic Neutral as a D&D alignment, and particularly by the way it was played in practice, but I couldn't put my finger on how to correct it. Then I saw a bumper sticker that said something to the effect of "perform acts of random kindness and senseless beauty," and I knew immediately that this was what was wrong with most portrayals of chaotic neutral. It became "I can do anything I want", which devolved to "I can do whatever I think benefits me", and that was definitively chaotic evil. It was around that time that I launched my only chaotic neutral character, the attorney Sivad Cam, whose creed was that every sentient being has the right to be whatever he chooses to be, as long as he does not prevent any other sentient being from exercising the same right. He defended an anti-paladin in the courts of the city, and persuaded Dagda that the conversion of one of his low-level druids to become a paladin was a reasonable application of the man's belief that all things should be balanced in a world in which chaos and evil were so overwhelming. Chaotic neutral means "I believe in individual human rights, of everyone, including myself." That's very different from "I can do whatever I want."
--M. J. Young