No, I haven’t gone insane (or insaner) and started spouting math, although I am something of a math geek (not hard core – I’m too out of practice for that). I’m talking calculus in the sense of “making calculations” about just about anything, and differential in the sense of “about differences”. Yes, it’s a sucky pun. I don’t do the other kind.
So. The calculus of difference. What does that actually mean for a writer?
If you were to ask the PC crowd they’d claim you had to have minorities in proper (that is ridiculously exaggerated – no, that does not mean GGG-cup females) proportions. At least one of every victim class minority as a heroic character (is it any wonder “cast of thousands” books are bloating the shelves? By the time you’ve shoehorned in several varieties of dark-skinned male and female leads, some asian-ish male and female leads (but not Japanese-asian-ish because they’re too successful) and made sure that some of each group are gay and some transgender and some belong to some peculiar gender previously known only to small betentacled creatures from Betelguese V, there isn’t room for a story. If you’re writing fantasy it’s worse because you can’t just have someone’s ancestors be from the appropriate location and culture, oh, no. You have to create entire faux societies in which the assorted skin colors and sexual peccadilloes match the mores of oh… somewhere between 1980 and 2010 AD, US Urban Left. The world building required to park that in a universe with magic is interesting enough without trying to produce a plot as well.
Which is why you get these immense doorstoppers that move the plot maybe a day or three in the course of a thousand pages. (Okay, maybe I’m exaggerating. A little bit. It was more like 800 pages).
For the rest of us though, it means people who think in ways a sane person would expect someone from that background to think. That means the culture that’s built itself into a world-spanning empire on the backs of a system of debt-slavery is likely to figure that someone opining on the evils of slavery needs a little personal experience of the benefits of it as practiced in their realm. And someone who’s grown up with that system is going to think it’s pretty decent, and definitely better than what the barbarians on the other side of the ranges are doing.
Oh, and as Sarah said over on According to Hoyt, males of any species will have different thought and behavior patterns. Yes, even aliens – if they have an actual male and female and there’s any kind of sexual dimorphism. I’m quite sure Dave can offer biologically feasible examples where this isn’t the case.
It’s actually pretty simple to figure out why male and female humans and human-like anything will have differences in the way their minds work. I started wondering why the hell the feminist crowd was being so bloody stupid about different thought patterns before I finished my first degree. A relative had a complete crash into severe depression caused by menopause. Her estrogen levels crashed so low it messed up the endocrine pathways in her brain – permanently. I got to witness the complete personality change that followed.
Now, if an imbalance in a sex-dependent hormone can cause that kind of dramatic change in someone’s personality and mental capacity, how hard is it to see that the male brain with its much higher levels of testosterone and androgen is going to be fundamentally different than the female brain with its much higher levels of estrogen and progesterone? I mean, really. Duh.
So, gee, there’s going to be different ways of looking at things. There’ll be cultural frameworks that overlie the biological tendencies and provide the acceptable paths by which those biological tendencies can be expressed (or not). The only cultures that express anything approaching modern Western “official” mores will be very wealthy and probably shortly thereafter very dead. Because historically speaking no culture that endorses anything that profoundly breaks the laws of reality ever lasts long. And it can’t get to the point where it endorses anything so dumb unless it’s sufficiently wealthy that culturally suicidal ideas can be adopted by those who want to be trendy.
And of course, all these lovely, fascinating differences will lie just under the surface of the plot where they seep into a reader’s awareness without the reader realizing that there’s something important going on here, and that they’re being subversively deprogrammed from the Cult of the Politically Correct.
So go thou forth and practice this brand of differential calculus, and disguise it with a cracking good story. And I shall go forth and do the same.
Mad Genius Club 
30 responses to “Differential Calculus”
I’ve observed that the Liberal mind keeps all of it’s individual “thoughts” (for want of a better term) tightly encapsulated and segregated so as to prevent their many contradictory ideas from coming into contact and going off like a Matter-Anti-Matter explosion. Like their idea that we are all perfectly equal and their idea that we’re all so different and diverse. Or the idea that White Males are inferior and yet also superior by the fact that they run everything. Of their belief in freedom of speech and their belief in silencing everyone who doesn’t agree with them.
Ah, if only I could build some kind of mad-science ray that would cause a containment breach. I’d literally blow some minds.
Meh, that or an anti-typo beam….
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Er. That number you hid in the message led to one of those pay by the second self-stimulation places. Would there by any chance be a typo in there somewhere?
When you get it built, please let me know! There’s nothing like the sight and sound of heads exploding to make a girl happy. (This “girl” anyway).
Oh dang. I’m in trouble. My bisexual pervy Prince just got assassinated by his bisexual pervy boyfriend. But! He was a blonde, so it’s OK, right? And yes, there was magic involved, but it was mostly the alligators . . .
*looks at alligator that just appeared in bathtub and is scaring the cat* Um, so, how much, in what form (small bills, jewelry, certificates of exchange, antique books), and where should I leave it?
I assure you, I do not send alligatorgrams. For starters, the alligators are too large. Much easier to charm the designated dinners down into the depths of the Rip, where the gators live . . .
This one exists only as a very rough first draft. But it was such a pleasure to murder that bullying vicious young man (who was fast turning into a rapist, and would have been a very, very bad king.)
Ah, yes. Nothing like killing someone who goes to so much trouble to deserve it.
Alligator-skin purses perhaps? Waste not, want not, after all
Oh, the thirty footer that got the prince will be stuffed and on display.
“And THIS exhibit is the magnificent … ahem… *vile* beast that killed our beloved prince”
Well, which pervy one was blond? The prince, the boyfriend or both? Besides, magic AND alligators makes everything good.
The prince. I keep coming up with these nasty people.
Yeah, the beauty of parallel Earths is that you can use _every_ weird idea you’ve ever had. _This_ world has a mid-continent spreading ridge up the middle of N. America, with hotsprings to offset the ice age and alligators living there. And magic. And magic horses. Cute guys, beautiful witches, orgies.
I used to read straight SF, but writing fantasies can be hideously fun.
Oh, yes. It’s a bit like grand opera (where you can do ANYTHING so long as you sing it). With fantasy so long as you give it a plausible backstory, you can do damn near anything.
Interesting how the Universe is working this week . . . I just finished initial revisions (typo hunting more than anything) on a story where one sub-plot is the main character’s problems with premature menopause. She knows, and her herbalist knows, that drinking strong infusions of a certain root make her feel better, but their society has lost the medical knowledge of why the stuff works.
That and the protagonist has had a very sheltered life in some ways. In her mind, her deity made her an Odd, and she’s profoundly aware that the only reason she’s not miserable or dead is because He has given her a place and vocation where she can make use of that Oddness. A number of other members of her society are not so happy about her Oddness, as you might imagine, and consider her at best unnatural and at worst a traitorous heretic. The character does not encourage other women to try and follow in her footsteps.
I suspect the PC crowd would scream if they ever stumbled onto the story.
It sounds rather like they would, yes. Of course the screams and shouts of “Evulz! Evulz!” from the PC crowd are often a sign of something worth checking out, so it’s not ALL bad
The estrogen thing… I had issues with EXTREMELY high estrogen for about three years. The result was a sort of permanent low grade depression.
Oh, quite. An imbalance in ANY direction causes serious issues. Just like it’s bloody well documented that women taking massive overdoses of male hormone substitutes actually gain a degree of spatial judgment (along with deeper voices, horrific acne, and pseudo external genitalia – I had occasion to talk to the sister of a member of Australia’s international swim team once, back when the Chinese were dominating because they were feeding all their female swimmers hormones like candy. More than once the swimmers would be in the change room, go “What’s that man doing in here?”, turn and it’s one of the Chinese women. And yes, the behavior also became very male-typical).
Hence my general opinion of the line that there’s no difference in how men and women think. Of course there bloody well is. Duh.
OT, I know that once they quit taking the supplements and the hormones work their way through their bodies they will slowly lose that spatial judgement and the acne. Does the pseudo external genitalia also shrink back into their body over time or is this a permanent side effect?
Apparently it does gradually reduce.
Take LOTR. Today, this wouldn’t fly among the SFWA crowd. Lots of straight Euro males in a Western fantasy world, fighting against a sinster East and South, with some Christian overtones. And yet, among the people I know who love it are: atheists, Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus, men, women, gay men and women . . . You get the picture. Piling on PC details and filling quotas doesn’t make a good story, and it certainly doesn’t make an enduring story.
Absolutely. A good story trumps damn near everything. Hell, I grew up on Narnia (and similar), and still remember those books fondly. They wouldn’t fly with SFWA and co either. The Calormenes are just too “evil arab”, and Tash… well.
But the stories are good, and that’s what I remember and like.
Wow, I guess I’m totally hosed with my sword & planet novel. It’s a first person POV from the point of view of the male protagonist. Not once does he have thoughts of raping the princess nor does he spend any time agonizing over killing people who were trying to kill him or endanger the princess. The guy doesn’t even use language stronger than “dammit,” which is used once, or “damn,” which is also used once.
I do have some apparent good guys who end up as bad guys and some apparent bad guys who end up as good guys. Do you think that will make the literati like me?
Oh, and it’s purely escapist adventure entertainment without any deeper meaning or sly comments on the cultural and political issues of the day.
Is there any hope for me?
Oh yeah, I’m part of the YA author’s circle that’s received some mention here. My site got a nice bump in traffic when I was featured on Celia Hayes site. Now it’s my turn to do the same for three other authors. If anyone reading this would like to be touted on my site, just leave a reply.
Sure, Henry, and leave me your information… site can be found with click-through on my name, email is cedarlila@gmail.com
I’ll contact you later today or Saturday morning. Thanks!
Only if you want the literatzi to love you. If you don’t care what they think, you’ve got plenty of hope – I’ve always preferred the validation that comes with lots of cold hard cash, anyway.
“If you’re writing fantasy it’s worse because you can’t just have someone’s ancestors be from the appropriate location and culture, oh, no. You have to create entire faux societies in which the assorted skin colors and sexual peccadilloes match the mores of oh… somewhere between 1980 and 2010 AD, US Urban Left.”
Oh yes. This. So much!
I’ve seen so much of this nonsense in a certain fantasy RPG (as well as their ‘novels’) set in a world that is supposedly late Medieval-early Renaissance Europe that it makes me want to scream. And the very few efforts at showing how people from such a world and culture(s) would really act and think is denounced with wild shrieks as ‘fascist’ and every other meaningless buzzword.
And for the gentleman writing that sword and planet novel, I hope he lets us know when it gets published. I’d love to read it.
Oh, me too. I’m always in for good reading, no matter what genre it says it is.