writing

My Goodreads review of ‘Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right’

/ Sue Burke / 1 Comment
Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right

Speculative Whiteness: Science Fiction and the Alt-Right by Jordan S. Carroll
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I read this short book before it became a finalist for a Hugo Award for Best Related Work, and it’s a timely choice that deserves the attention the nomination brings.

The author, Jordon S. Carroll, discusses the ways that alt-right/fascist/White nationalists have long used popular culture to promote their ideas, including science fiction, fantasy kingdoms, and superheroes. Alt-right readers, he says, are willing to convince themselves that the future in science fiction is a blueprint for their hopes. This explains their objections to Lt. Uhuru in Star Trek. Black people don’t belong in their future.

Speculative Whiteness shows how these ideas really belong to the past, and how alt-right expectations are self-contradictory in any case. The book includes copious footnotes and ends on a hopeful note: “the alt-right promises a bold new future in space but it never achieves escape velocity from white supremacy’s perpetual present.”

However, the book was published in October 2024, and a lot has happened since then. The alt-right won the US presidential election and many other political offices, and our present seems to be slouching toward a future that only the alt-right wanted.

Here are some articles that extend the focus of the book into the present:

Interview with Jordan S. Carroll – Exploration Log 7: Science Fiction and Other Suspect Ruminations
https://sciencefictionruminations.com…

China Miéville says we shouldn’t blame science fiction for its bad readers – TechCrunch
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/30/aut…

We’re sorry we created the Torment Nexus – Charlie Stross’s Diary
https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog…

How Trump and Musk Are Ruining Sci-Fi – Daniel W. Drezner on Substack
https://danieldrezner.substack.com/p/…

The big idea: will sci-fi end up destroying the world? – The Guardian
https://www.theguardian.com/books/202…

View all my reviews

Stories and Matters of Size

/ Sue Burke / 1 Comment

You might have an idea for writing a work of fiction, but is it flash fiction, a short story, a novel, or an epic trilogy? It can be frustrating to begin what you hope will be a short story, but soon it’s grown too long, and you don’t have time for a novel right now. Or, you might start a novel and run out of steam because there isn’t enough of an idea to fill all those pages.

Here are a few ways to help you evaluate your idea before you start.

• How many scenes can you imagine? A novel might have 80 scenes of 1,000 words each, and a short story just a few scenes.

• How many plot points can you imagine for a three-act outline, Hero’s Journey, or other novel plotting tool? A shorter piece may have only one or two pieces of the plot.

• Can you imagine the story as a picture? The artist El Greco will help illustrate this concept.

A simple picture can be a short-short story. Boy Lighting a Candle, by El Greco, 1571.

This story might be:

“The little glowing fairy was fragile and needed help to stay alive.”

Add a few more characters, and you have a longer short story. An Allegory with a Boy Lighting a Candle in the Company of an Ape and a Fool, by El Greco, 1577.

This story might be:

“The little glowing fairy was fragile, but it attracted too much attention, and the boy didn’t think he could keep it safe.”

With more characters and more conflict, you might have a novel. The Miracle of Christ Healing the Blind, by El Greco, ca. 1570.

This story might be:

“The protagonist’s unusual but successful medical techniques often got him into trouble, and eventually he faced a death sentence.”

A big canvas with a lot happening could well be a trilogy. Burial of the Count of Orgaz, by El Greco, 1586. The painting is 15 feet / 4.5 meters tall.

This story might be:

“The Count’s death unleashed an epic conflict between men and God.”

(Notice the lack of women at the Count’s funeral. That could become an important plot point in the story.)

Exercise

Think of an idea you’ve been playing around with. Try to imagine it as a work of art. Would it fit nicely on a postage stamp? It might be flash fiction. Would it fill a wall-sized mural? You might have an epic. The goal is to avoid unpleasant surprises when you finally start to write. If you need an idea, here are a few:

• A medical team must decide if it can ethically flee a deadly situation.

• A technology company begins to operate in increasingly illegal activities, but the change is so slow and the money is so good that one of the engineers, who becomes deeply troubled, can’t afford to quit.

• A family living in a haunted house refuses to believe in ghosts.

• Two individuals initiate a series of gift exchanges, and the gifts tell more about the givers than they realize.

• Friends witness the breakup of a family from different perspectives and have different opinions.

This book should have been banned

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Bars and Shadows: The Prison Poems of Ralph Chaplin

Cover of book

This book of poetry should have been banned. Its author was serving a 20-year sentence in a federal penitentiary for his opinions, and the poems he wrote in Leavenworth were unrepentant:

“But whether it be yours to fall or kill / You must not pause to question why nor where. / You see the tiny crosses on that hill? / It took all those to make one millionaire.” (From the poem “The Red Feast.”)

Ralph Chaplin opposed the United States entering World War I. Worse than that, he opposed capitalism. As a member of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and editor of its eastern US publication Solidarity, he made speeches and wrote poems and songs. The best known is “Solidarity Forever,” which became a union anthem.

But, as economist Scott Nearing wrote in the introduction to Bars and Shadows, “When the war broke out in Europe, with millions of working-men flinging death and misery at one another, men like Chaplin, the world over, regarded it as the last straw. Was it not bad enough that these exploited creatures should be used as factory-fodder? Must they be cannon-fodder, too?” In the eyes of the IWW, the war would only serve to increase the economic power of capitalists.

At the same time, the US Espionage Act of 1917 prohibited interference with military operations and recruitment, and any other speech deemed to support the enemy during wartime. Promptly, Chaplin and a hundred other IWW members were rounded up, convicted, and jailed for speaking out against the draft.

The Espionage Act, amended, is still part of US law and is still being invoked, but from the beginning it has had a contested relationship with free speech. During World War I, as recounted in the book Over Here by David M. Kennedy, one man was arrested for calling President Woodrow Wilson a Wall Street tool, and others faced charges for merely discussing the constitutionality of conscription. A man was jailed for saying the war was for J.P. Morgan “and not a war for the people.”

The law was amended in 1918 by the Sedition Act to further forbid “disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the government, flag, and military. Expressions of opinions in one part of the country might be acceptable, but in other places, where public officials were dedicated to more vigorous enforcement, those same words by the same speaker were treasonous utterances that could bring jail time.

By 1922, however, when Ralph Chaplin’s book of poetry was published, the war to end all wars had ended, and alarmist lawmakers had moved on to other concerns. Chaplin was released after four years in prison.

I discovered this book in the library of my church, where we take pride in safeguarding banned books. We hold the first edition of Bars and Shadows, and the book is still in print today with many later editions by various publishers, and it’s available free from Project Gutenberg.

Chaplin told Nearing he was not a poet, which he said was an “aesthetic creature” who condescended to workers. He favored making culture “with a rebel note.” The thirty poems in the book adhere to meter and rhyme, and they tell us not to mourn the war dead “but rather mourn the apathetic throng” too cowed to speak. He describes the sound of a bugle playing taps to end the day in prison, and his longing for “the smell of grass and flowers,” and he compares his restless heart to the battle song of a storm. On Christmas day, seven sparrows perch at his barred window — so meagerly is his heart comforted. He misses his wife and son.

But his anger abides.

“The paragon of paltriness / Upraised for all to see […] / The smirking, ass-like multitude / Cringe down at his command […] / Is there not one to share with me / The shame and wrath I own?” (From the poem “Salaam!”)

He exalts when a prisoner escapes from the penitentiary, and he longs for freedom.

These poems express Chaplin’s sharply felt emotions and his grasp of the world that inspired those feelings. Sincere, simple words give the poems strength.

This book came into my hands more than a century after it was printed. Now speech is again being limited in the United States: legally suspect words include gay, women, diversity, equity, pronouns not assigned at birth, Black lives matter, Free Palestine, criticism of Tesla, or merely speaking Spanish in public. Who dares not grovel if you could be next? This little book offers a counterforce.

Let us continue to write poetry.

Let me talk you out of writing

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“If anyone can talk you out of writing, they should.” I think Harlan Ellison said that — at least, it sounds like something curmudgeonly he would say.

Here’s why you shouldn’t be a writer:

You’re not talented enough. Actually, this is a lie. Of course you have talent. We’re all born talented. Children love to make things, and so did you when you were young. Then you may have absorbed the Romantic Era myth of the artist as a hero who effortlessly produces works of staggering genius that are perfect in the first draft. You can’t do that. Neither can I. Neither could they. If you poke into the biographies of the great, heroic writers, you’ll find they studied hard, worked like dogs, and rewrote endlessly.

You’re too scared. This might be true. But what exactly are you afraid of? Making mistakes? Failure? Rejection? There are all kinds of fears. The Writer’s Book of Doubt by Aidan Doyle lists a wide variety of them. I own the book and I’m scared to read it, although the book also explains how fears can be overcome.

You might not know enough about the writing business. As a result, you have unrealistic expectations, whether you want to try traditional publishing or self-publishing. (Writing without the intent to publish is fine, of course, and if that’s your goal, ignore this paragraph.) However, you can learn about the business. The information is freely available, but…

You don’t want to work hard. And it’s going to be very hard work. This might be the most common reason for not writing. I don’t like to work hard, either. It’s lonely, sometimes boring, and, well, hard. There’s always more to learn, and it’s easy to get lost in books and conferences about writing rather than to sit down and write. Or to watch TV or doomscroll rather doing the research, planning, writing, rewriting, more rewriting, and even redrafting. “The first draft of anything is shit,” as Ernest Hemingway probably said.

When I talk to people who aren’t writers, rewriting turns out to be the thing they find impossible to understand. They can’t imagine needing to rewrite a dozen or more times.

When I talk to people who are experienced writers, they whine about how hard the work is, but they’ll rewrite until it’s right, and they’ll do all the other tasks the job involves. They’ve learned how to work hard.

Do you still want to write? Good. I wish you every kind of success, whatever success means to you. If you want more encouragement, I recommend this free comic, Art & Courage: A Guide to Sustaining a Creative Path, created by the Applied Cartooning Lab. It addresses all kinds of art, not just writing or cartooning.

And finally, here’s some writing advice that keeps me going:

“Write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” — Isak Dinessen. That is, you’ll have good days and bad days, sometimes good months and bad months, and letting it affect your self-definition or self-worth will leave you emotionally exhausted. You can’t write if you’re too tired.

For me, writing (and other art) contains within itself a constant source of joy. If you look at the faces of athletes as they enter a stadium or field, many wear big grins. They’re about to do the thing they love the most. They’ll get to work as hard as they can and as smart as they can. They can do their best. You can do that, too, if you choose a creative path, because excellence is always possible. Art lets you bring your whole self to your work.

Using all the senses in writing

/ Sue Burke / 3 Comments

Using sensory details makes writing more vivid so that readers can see, hear, feel, taste, and smell what’s happening in a story.

Naturally, it’s a little more complicated than that.

First of all, we have more than five senses. Vestibular sense involves movement and balance. Proprioception is also called body awareness and tells us where our body parts are in relation to each other and how to do things, like pick up a heavy rock or delicate egg. Chronoception lets us sense the passage of time. We can also sense temperature and pain.

This article at John Hopkins University Press says there are nine senses. An article at the University of Utah Genetics Science Learning Center says there are twenty, but it counts some senses in other animals. That might be useful if we’re writing about non-humans.

The things that we sense are interpreted through our thoughts and emotions, too.

As writers, how do we use these senses in a story? The correct answer to this and many other questions is: It depends. What’s the story you want to tell? What matters to the characters in it? What is the pace you want? Romance novels tend to be lush, and a mystery might be spare, and in either case, the senses that you evoke will guide the attention of the reader to what matters. An intriguing whiff of perfume at a party with contrasting notes of candy-like violets and earthy sandalwood might signal the start of an affair. A barking dog might make Sherlock Holmes deduce.

When we write, it’s best to go directly to the sensation. A bad example: Becky smelled acrid smoke and knew it would be toxic. Instead, this: The smoke reeked of acrid toxins. The reader will know that Becky was smelling it and recognized the smell. Fewer words are always better than more words, too.

Next, why do these particular sensory details matter? An article by Donald Maass, “Moving Along” at Writer Unboxed, shows how to use sensory details to evoke emotion. I’m going to disagree with him, though. He says the final example is “focusing not on visualizing, sensory details,” but I say it is. Count the colors mentioned. Note the things we could taste and feel, especially the dryness. Consider the snippets of conversation we hear. It gives us the full picture with plenty of vivid sensory details in an unselfconscious way by showing us how these things matter.

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(Art: stick figure by Core5ivpro.)