Markets, market shares, and rhetoric in a bad novel: Battle of the Linguist Mages, by Scotto Moore

 I should stop wasting time reading bad books.  I am learning the skill.  I put down a book, again.  I expected to find some interesting ideas in Scotto Moore's Battle of the Linguist Mages, along with some irritation, but the ratio tilted too far towards the latter, so I stopped, and this is a healthy practice.  I shall comment.  First, here is the concept, and why I bothered.  One of the tropes of magic and spellcasting in fantasy-- books, games, television, movies, your wacky wiccan relative-- is nonsensical chanting.  You have to do something, right?  What, though, are you saying when you speak these incantations?  Here is a concept.  If you can layer tone on top of tone within your voice, you can layer meaning on top of meaning within a morpheme, which is the smallest unit of meaning within a language.  Do that with enough sophistication, and you can create the Bene Gesserit's "voice" effect from Dune, or maybe even more than that.  An ad agency stumbles onto this process, and starts building it into an online fantasy RPG.  Wackiness ensues.  OK!  That is a sufficiently interesting concept that even if I know there will be some annoying cliches of modern science fiction & fantasy writing, I will give it a chance, hoping that the concept and breezy writing will carry the book.  I will listen to bands with bad singers if the guitarist is sufficiently good.

The expected irritation, of course, is that modern science fiction & fantasy writing is over-the-top identity politics virtue-signaling.  It can be camp fun, as in Cat Valente's Space Opera (highest recommendations), annoying but overlook-able in the context of bigger ideas, or it can go so far as to demonstrate a complete lack of moral compass.  I can mostly spot and avoid the final category without bothering at this point.  I have had to walk away from my once-favorite author, N.K. Jemisin, because she went from being the heir to Octavia Butler to a caricature of bile and hatred.  It is hard to watch a genre that was once the realm of sophisticated and nuanced social commentary turn into the mindless, mirror image of past hatred, spewing vitriol wrapped in self-righteousness and attempted wryness.

If I think that the author might pull off what Valente did with Space Opera, then great.  That book was an absolute gem.  And really, I'm OK with the middle category, much of the time, as long as there are sufficiently interesting ideas.  It's a little like music in clearly defined genres.  There are tropes that turn into cliches, and you can listen around them, if there is an "around."  Consider the G-run, also known as the Lester Flatt run in bluegrass.  Cliche?  Yeah, and every bluegrass guitarist does it, but at this point, it's just part of the genre.

Besides, racism is real, as are bigotries directed against gay people, transgender people and many other "others."  Do the woke overstate it?  Yes, and they obsess over these bigotries myopically, but if you cannot see the world from another's perspective, and see the core empirical observations that motivate their beliefs, that's on you.

With that, yes, I will give a reading to a book like Battle of the Linguist Mages.  Alas, the novel is so woke that Moore must have bought up every caffeine pill on the planet, popped them all, died of cardiac arrest, and had ChatGPT autocomplete the manuscript based on knowledge of wokeness cliches.  Incoherent capitalism-bashing?  Of course.  Race cliches?  You know it!  Mostly, though, Moore goes over the top with gender in ways that undercut the plot, but that is what gives us an opportunity for some social science-y grumbling.  Remembering that I didn't finish the book.  I got about 1/4 of the way through before the LOOK AT MY VIRTUES!!! thing gave me too much of a headache.

First, here is some elaboration on the story.    The first person narrator is an online gamer named Isobel, who is the top player in an ultra-camp fantasy game called "Sparkle Dungeon."  Yeah.  John Waters is looking at this game and saying, "OK, tone it down, girls."  Despite being the gayest, campiest, flaming-est game one could ever design, it is somehow the most popular online game in the world.

Pause.

Here's the difference between Cat Valente's Space Opera, which was genius, and Battle of the Linguist Mages.  In Space Opera, there was a gender-bending main character who was very clearly a Bowie ripoff.  He was a one-hit-wonder turned loser, which was absolutely right.  He was trying to be Bowie, and the copy might get one hit, but he wasn't Bowie.  Honestly, I never got why Bowie was supposed to be the greatest thing since sliced bread, but at least he was original.  Points for that.  Regardless, Valente let the main character be a fuckup because the book needed him to be a fuckup.  It wouldn't have worked otherwise.

Let's consider Sparkle Dungeon.  Some of Moore's one-liners about the contents of the game were on the funny side of camp.  A book about this game?  OK, I'll go with that.  As I said, Space Opera was my point of reference here, and I read the book with the perhaps-vain hope that Moore might come at least somewhere near Valente's genius.  It could be funny.

Indeed, there could be a game out there, like Sparkle Dungeon.  There is some overlap between the online gaming community and for lack of a better descriptor, the drag queen aesthetic, because that's what the game is.  It's all glitter and disco and such, and someone out there wants to play such a game.  In the marketplace, there's a consumer base, and if written with the proper sense of humor and you lighten up, it can be funny even if that isn't your aesthetic.

As I said, I've never bought a Bowie album in my life, nor any glam, but Space Opera was genius, and if you haven't read it, go read it.

But here is where Moore went wrong.  Moore did not simply write a story about the game.  Moore wrote the story with Sparkle Dungeon as the dominant game in the online gaming marketplace, and it was so over-the-top queer that there were obstacles to male-gender characters.

Which means that he lost me pretty much immediately.  I will suspend disbelief on magic, faster-than-light travel, aliens, and all sorts of shit, as the novels about which I write shall demonstrate, but basic economics?  I cannot suspend disbelief on that.

Who plays computer games?  Who is the primary consumer?  Adolescent boys through young men, and not just people who read science fiction/fantasy novels.

Consider the strange tale of Bud Light.  One, just one online ad featuring a polarizing influencer, and the brand collapsed because the consumer base of Bud Light did not want to affiliate with that individual.

I have no intention of commenting on that individual, but economics are interesting.  Consider whichever transgender people you know.  Most transgender people, or at least those with gender dysphoria who attempt to manage that dysphoria by presenting as the other sex, wish merely "to pass."  Their goal, essentially, is to be invisible.  Their goal is to go through life being thought to be and seen as however they present such that you would not think that their natal sexes were anything other than how they present.  If you even know that they are transgender, then in some sense, they did not achieve the goal-- "passing."

The phrase, "trans rights," encompasses many policies, from nondiscrimination in employment to the use of puberty blockers, hormone replacement and surgery for minors.  The extent of public support varies by policy, of course.  Nondiscrimination in employment has relatively high levels of support, while surgery for minors has much less support, and is opposed by majorities in every poll I have seen.  Yet even putting aside the controversial topic of surgery for minors, the political fight for nondiscrimination laws protecting transgender individuals from employment discrimination still requires transgender people in public, as visible proponents, creating a paradox.  The primary goal for many, if not most transgender people is to be invisible by "passing," while political activism requires a high level of visibility.

Pause and reflect.

The observer's dilemma, then, is to recognize that those who are most visible are significantly different in a vital way from a large portion of the transgender population.  We cannot ask, then, how Bud Light consumers would have reacted had Bud Light paired with a quietly passing dysphoric person, because the whole point of passing, quietly, is to be some form of invisible.  Bud Light paired with someone more polarizing, and we can contemplate whether there is something inherently off-putting to the Bud Light consumer about an ostentatiously non-passing transgender person which would not be the case about your friend, neighbor or family member, but that second pairing could not happen for the very economic reason that to be quietly passing is to be outside the set of potential economic partnerships.

Yet those who drink Bud Light have their own set of attitudes and beliefs.  You don't have to share them, and neither do I.  I suspect they would not enjoy Space Opera.  I'd make a joke, but that would just be douche-y, and I'd never do that.

Shut up.

Where was I?  Oh, right.  Bud Light consumers were so bothered that they stopped buying the beverage.  The beverage, itself, is still the same vaguely alcoholic pisswater that it has always been.  If you have no sense of taste, and care only about killing brain cells because you don't have enough brain cells to know what you will lose, then it is just as valuable to you now as it was before.  So why stop drinking it?

The cultural association.  They do not want to be seen drinking the vaguely alcoholic pisswater also consumed by the person hired by Bud Light as a spokesperson for that ad.  The drink did not change, the can did not change, it is just the possibility of someone looking at you differently when you buy it.

You may be as astonished as I was when it happened.  I even posted about it.  I was absolutely gobsmacked about it.  I still don't really get it, but I don't have to.

I do, however, observe it.  If Bud Light drinkers are so insecure in their manhoods and heterosexuality (oops, did I type that?) that they can't even drink the same drink as some irrelevant person on the inter-tubes, then how many gamers are going to play an online game so over-the-top queer that it'd make John Waters wince?

However macho-insecure your average Bud Light drinker is, how shall we describe gamers?

As we think about how to answer that question, consider the popularity of military-themed, first person shooter-style games, and gamergate (oy).  Rather Ramboistic, I'd say, if I can coin a term.

So if a game designer creates the most amazing interface ever with the best storylines and algorithms and technology, what would happen?

Remembering that Bud Light did not change their product at all.  Same product.

There will be some players, but Sparkle Dungeon will not reach anything more than niche status.  The digital Rambo-wannabes are not going to say, hey, fuck this military shit, I wanna play the campiest, gayest game ever!  This is not a thing that will happen.  I will suspend disbelief on magic and all sorts of things, but not basic economics.

How important is this for the story?  Alas, rather.

There is more, but from a social science standpoint, this observation seems the most directly, empirically contradictory.

Some attention should also be paid to the motivation.  Moore's concept, shared broadly by the critical theory left, is the manipulative power of language.  He is deeply terrified by the ostensible power of advertising companies to control your thoughts, with the magic of the novel being merely a sci-fi/fantasy extension of leftist, anti-capitalist paranoia intersecting with a zombie belief in Sapir-Whorf taken to wild extremes.

Recall that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the debunked idea from cognitive linguistics that your thoughts are structured by and constrained by your language, so you cannot even think a thought without the language to think it.  Bullshit, long ago debunked, but leftists still lap this shit up like a dog on a hot summer day.

Why is the critical theory left so obsessed with manipulating language?  They believe that language dictates thought, so to speak.  They believe, as per Foucault, that existing powers (like "corporations") control language to control thought, and they fight back by pushing language in another direction.  Every linguistic push you see/hear from the left is based on this premise.

Moore's novel comes from such a premise, in which advertising, even prior to the "power morphemes" discovered as a plot point, is still effectively mind control.

The problem is that it just doesn't work.

And sometimes it backfires spectacularly.  See:  Light, Bud.

The idea of the perfect science of mind control through language has run its course through science fiction (people reference "doublethink" and "doublespeak" without even having read the novel or knowing that the words come from a novel), but it took China Mieville's Embassytown to do something really interesting with it (see my comments here and here), applying Sapir-Whorf to an alien species, and given the inconsistency of empirical effects, isn't it time to give up the notion that if you just tweak your phrasing in some minor but critical way, people become putty in your hands?

This was not a good book, and even stopping about 1/4 of the way through, I could not come close to an exhaustive list of the problems that drew my frustration.  The concept could have been done well, but go read Cat Valente's Space Opera for some escapist fun, or China Mieville's Embassytown for some serious thought about language and thought.

I make no secret of my belief that this man is among the most underappreciated guitarists of his era.  Great voice, too.  Stephen Stills, "Word Game," from Stephen Stills Live.