Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

I read a lot. A few dozen books a year, give or take. When working a third shift job a while back, during which I was guarding a gate in the middle of nowhere where no one ever arrived, I’d sit on the roof of the guard shack under the clicking-clacking overhead lights and read a book and a half a night. I’m fairly well versed in the classics, though I have little time for most of them, with the exceptions of H. Rider Haggard, Jules Verne, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and just about everybody that came out of John W. Campbell’s golden age. Though with all of that reading, at this point accumulating into the many millions of pages, I read very little of what is being published right now.

Why is that? There are many folks who are first rate writers being printed now, many (if not most) writing for TLE. But besides them, there’s Dean Koontz, Robert Crais, Michael Connelly, Brad Meltzer, and a handful of others. So what makes their writing better than others who burden us with their endless repetitions of the same nihilistic plots? In a word: people.

The characters who people the very best works of fiction, the ones who stick with you years, even decades, after closing the book are the ones that you can understand. Even the most bizarrely fantastical of the lot, the Lazarus Long’s and Captain Nemo’s and Elijah Baley’s, are folks that you can grok because they are, first and foremost, people. They are flawed, yes (unless they’re John Carter, who never set a foot wrong, even while setting a foot wrong), but they are not defined by their flaws. They had grit, some steel in their spines and spit in their eyes.

This is missing in many of todays supposedly great characters. I won’t name any specifics, as this isn’t meant to be a hatchet piece, but suffice it to say that so much of the milquetoast that passes for first rate fictional heroes are anything but. But, given the world of political correctness pushed to the point of absolute insanity where literally everything is offensive, how can they be? The characters have been spayed and neutered and whitewashed in an attempt to not get on anyones bad side to such an extent that they might as well be shapeless gray forms with barcodes attached. There’s nothing there.

Likewise to see a character with anything forming a personal opinion (see: one not decided in committee) is something only villains do. Unless that opinion is that Republicans are stupid, following a President that is evil. That’s all good. Be tolerant, though only of the intolerant. Anyone else, anyone who looks at the world as shades of gray, with no defined sense of right or wrong, where no one is to blame for their actions as we are all victims of society (except those victims of victims of society), is off limits. They’re enlightened, don’t you know.

I haunt used book stores like a ghost. Every so often I turn up a gem. An Asimov that I haven’t read yet. A Murray Leinster short story collection. One of Richard C. Meredith’s lost, underrated classics. I revel in these. I revel in them because I can understand the people that move through them. I understand the geniuses in Isaac Asimov’s books not because I am particularly smart, but because they are worthwhile people. Likewise Leinster; likewise Heinlein, Dick, and the plethora of old guys (and gals) who could (on their worst day) write worlds around what passes for 95% of the best sellers that I am plagued by. I revel in it because it’s proof to me that there was a world, once upon a time, when folks were rational, decent, and consistent. When people were polite, yet still willing to stand up and make a point they felt needed to be made, offense be damned. I’m a relatively young guy. I missed out on most of that world. Yet it still exists. There. In dusty old paperbacks with fifteen cent cover prices. And I refuse to believe that it’ll never exist again.