Twilight. God help me, Twilight.

Someday, I'll figure out why I challenged myself to get through Twilight this summer.  The craze is over, so it's no longer useful, and I never thought I'd like it.  I'd tried more than once, and with varying degrees of zeal, over the last few years, but I always gave up.  Finally, it came up on the list of recommended audio books for me, probably because I read other YA, and I thought,  you know -- I can have an audio book on while I'm doing other things, like driving, where it would be hard to turn off.  I can get through it that way.

Maybe it's just that I felt silly calling it crap when all I had was a strong suspicion that it was crap.  Now, I have solid evidence.

Yes, folks, I made it through the first of the Twilight books, from Bella's move to Forks up to her prom date with Edward. I even made it through more than half of the second before rebelling and returning the audiobook to the library early. Alice and Bella made it to Italy, and Bella reunited with Edward, which broke the momentum of "maybe-this-isn't-so-bad" that I'd been kind of building as we traveled with Jacob. And no, that's not about shipping.  I wouldn't wish this chick on Jacob.

Yes, I know what happens. I know that, in the future, Meyer scuttles Jacob's character by having him force a kiss on Bella, for which she punches him. And I know the whole bizarro imprinting thing. I do have a kind of cultural osmosis thing with it, so I know the steps of the dance. I just hadn't tried actually doing it before.  I don't know what would possess her to wreck the only character in the thing that she took the time for people to care about, but hey.  Whatevs.  I'm more likely to class that as a major writing error than a character problem.  But even with that, a little impulsive bit of grossness doesn't compare to the stalking and condescension and bad prose associated from start to finish with the putative hero.

Okay, okay. Elements of fiction.

Character
The main character is apparently one Isabella "Bella" Swan, who thinks herself plain and ugly, not to mention merely human, but somehow has every boy at her new school panting after her. Other than broody vampires and Linkin Park, I'm not sure what her interests are. She mentions some fairly standard classic books, but the only thing she emotionally engages in is fixing motorcycles.  There's nothing wrong with that, and it provided her with her first real characterization (IN THE SECOND BOOK), but of course, it's not treated as important, because it's not related to the real story.  Yes, I'd rather read, "Bella decides to defy her father's wish for her to go to college  by going to vocational school and learning to be a really kickass mechanic."  In fact, that might actually be a pretty good YA book, now that I think about it. The shelves aren't exactly filled with it already, either. Hmm.  Anyone who knows mechanics want to write that? Because I kind of think I'd read the heck out of it.  But I digress.  Because there's not much else to do.  Bella is spoiled, whiny, and otherwise bland, and ultimately wraps her entire life  up in (a) getting a cute guy and (b) getting him to turn her into a vampire.

Her lust interest, Edward Cullen, is a 108 year old vampire who only drinks the blood of animals. He's part of a family of vamps who live this way.  Super-rich and cultured, they've been everywhere and seen everything.  They're all pretty smug, but Edward takes the cake, and "smug" is  his best trait.  Beyond that, he's  controlling, violent, creepy, condescending, and basically, the villain of every Lifetime woman-in-jep movie-of-the-week you've ever watched when there's nothing else on, except with less personality.  The most common word to describe him in the prose?  "Perfect." No.  Not kidding.

Jacob Black is the third member of this little triumvirate.  He doesn't really get developed until New Moon, though he's a presence in Twilight.  A working class Quileute boy from the La Push reservation, he actually approaches decent characterization, even as he works through becoming a very odd kind of werewolf (they change at will and by temper tantrum, and only exist to hunt vampires).  We meet him when he's fixing up an old VW Rabbit, and he and Bella bond over fixing a pair of broken-down motorcycles.  He's generally happy, seems to care about his family and friends, and is genuinely nice to Bella until his author sacrifices him for... reasons.

There's a fairly large cast of other characters, including Bella's parents (the flighty Renee and the mostly decent Charlie), Edward's vampire family (most prominently the doctor, Carlisle, who founded their group, and Alice, who can see the future), Jacob's werewolf brothers (damned if I can remember their names), and a gaggle of mortal school friends who Bella will occasionally speak to when circumstances force her to.

Plot
Bella Swan is the new girl in school. Everyone wants her except Edward Cullen... only it turns out he wants her most of all, because her blood smells so good, but he can't be around her, because he might kill her, being a vampire and all. Bella becomes obsessed with the vampires, ultimately wanting to become one, and getting her wish.  This is temporarily broken up by an interlude when Edward leaves, and she befriends Jacob, though all the while, she's trying to get Edward to come back.  And then they get married and have a kid, and Jacob "imprints" on the kid, which means that he's marry her eventually.  The end.  Oh, okay,  there are also bad vampires, which sometimes need to be fought.

Style
In On Writing, Stephen King writes about the first book he read where he said to himself, "I can do better."  In his case,

Worst of all (or so it seemed to me at the time), Leinster had fallen in love with the word zestful. Characters watched the approach of ore-bearing asteroids with zestful smiles. Characters sat down to supper aboard their mining ship with zestful anticipation. Near the end of the book, the hero swept the large-breasted, blonde heroine into a zestful embrace. For me, it was the literary equivalent of a smallpox vaccination: I have never, so far as I know, used the word zestful in a novel or a story. God willing, I never will.

After Twilight, I'm vaccinated against ever, in any case in which I am not actually discussing a gemstone, using the word topaz, which is the color of Edward's eyes when he's not hungry.   Aside from potatoes, russet is also out (it is the color of Jacob's skin, and that of all of his friends, because, you know, a synonym of "red" is not at all in questionable taste).  And, ye gods and little fishes, if I start rambling on about how perfect someone is, please take away my writing license. If I felt like it was meant to call attention to Bella's immaturity -- making her sound like a gushing junior high student describing her favorite boy band, in contrast to more realistic prose -- I might take it better, but there's no hint that it's meant to do that.

Other than that, when the prose isn't awful, it's, at its best, serviceable, getting us from point A to point B.  The best scene for me is Bella's first motorcycle ride, describing the thrill of it as her skin is pulled back in the wind.

Setting
Eh. Could be worse. I've never been in Forks or on the Olympic peninsula, so I don't know if it's accurate or not, but the world in Meyer's head is reasonably well described.  I feel like I could probably recognize it if I saw it, and the constant rain and clouds make for a suitably unusual atmosphere.  I've seen city people complain that Bella would be lost in a new school her first day, but I'm a small town girl by upbringing, and the new kid would be a seven days' wonder in most small towns, especially as the daughter of the chief of police.  Whether or not she'd be  fawned over in quite this way would depend on her looks and her ability to fit in with the right crowd, but I'm not fussed about it. I guess my own inclination would be to choose the Olympic peninsula, then make up a town there that would have what I needed, but that's a quibble.

A bigger quibble is the use of the real Quileute reservation and making up folklore for a group that she doesn't belong to (she used some basic starting point, but needed a vampire mythos to go with the wolf mythos, and so made one up from whole cloth -- which is pretty standard writing practice, but starts to get a little hinky when you're messing around with someone else's folklore).  I guess they're getting some money in, which is good, but it's pretty much textbook appropriation. Then again, if she'd made up a nation, there would be some fairly serious problems, too.  She makes up legends and holidays for an Italian city, too, and plays pretty fast and loose with other western vampire lore. So... I don't know if there's a point there.

Theme
It's hard to say what the theme is exactly.  It's a romance.  Will Bella stay with Edward or fall for Jacob? You could tease out some disturbing misogynistic themes (the way Edward orders Bella around -- and the way she thinks that's right and "perfect" -- is creepy).  There's definitely a bit of a class theme happening.  (Middle class Bella must choose between patrician Edward and working class Jacob.) Maybe uses and abuses of superior powers? Could we tease that out?  Maybe. I'm not sure I like the conclusions of the books, but I think an argument could be made, at least, for that.

I don't know.  Mostly it's about who Bella wants to, um, be vampirized by.  Yeah.

Other
All of that said, these books obviously hit a cultural nerve.  I've seen people put up ideas about, "People read what they're told to read by really powerful marketing people!" which is... well, kind of bull.  Yes, once the machine starts running, there are people who'll jump on board to see what it's about, but I've seen way too many slick ads and marketing practices fail miserably to actually get this kind of cult following to think it's more than a minor contributing factor, at least at the beginning, when these things initially catch the public imagination... and after that, the marketing is using the popularity as much as causing it. It becomes an echo chamber, and that does make for greater popularity... but the marketing needs something to start bouncing that echo off of.   The books were being read and talked about before the real gestalt came. Yes, some of it was in the fandom fun game of Team Edward vs. Team Jacob (I am, personally, Team Buffy), and some came from the movies, but the books were hits before the movies.  I know. I was a YA librarian when they started coming out,  and the first I heard of them was when the kids started asking for them.

Does marketing help?  Sure. But if the people who pick them up don't like them, they're not going to grab their BFFs and say, "OMG, TEAM JACOB 4EVA!"  More likely, they'll get a shrug and maybe, "That was pretty good," like Sea of Trolls or The Mysterious Benedict Society or any of the vast number of books that the marketers have sworn are about to be "The Next Harry Potter!"  You  remember when everyone dressed up as Inkheart characters, don't you? Or when they camped out at the bookstore for the midnight release of Tunnels?  Yeah, me neither.

So, yes, Twilight (and other properties, including Potter and the Hunger Games) have huge marketing pushes, but that's not enough to account for it, because other properties have launched with the same amount of fanfare, only to fizzle out into invisibility because the initial readers don't care.  For some reason, they did care about Twilight.  Maybe there's an attraction to the chaste romance -- vampires have always represented forbidden sexual practices, and now chastity is treated as something of a sexual taboo, inviting ridicule and ostracizing from peers. That would be a weird new twist in the vampire lore, but not really one that doesn't fit into past concepts.  If that's what's currently taboo, then it might well accrue to the vampire mythos.  Maybe it's just the wish-fulfillment of having a choice of prom dates, though that's offered by a lot of other books.  The power seeking?

I don't know. I can't put my finger on anything that really separates these books from the many others of their type, published before and since. I am obviously not the target audience.  Even when I was a teen, teen romance kind of bored me.  I wanted to be a Jedi, not a prom queen.

But, at any rate, I finished the first one.

Dystopias, or, how I'm spending my summer non-vacation

This year, I decided to play the summer reading game, and, since I'm planning to do a workshop on how to put together a dystopia, I decided to refresh myself on the genre classics.

My reaction to the classics is... mixed.

First, credit where it's due, Anthony Burgess is awesome at creating slang in Clockwork Orange.  Seriously good at it.  (And it's a trick writers shouldn't try in public until they've mastered it, honestly -- that's difficult stuff.)  Nadsat is a work of genius.  And of the classic dystopias I've been reading, I definitely like this one best.  Of the protags, Alex is the most compelling, even if he's deeply evil.  Because he has a discernible personality, at least.

Yeah.  That's pretty much the problem.  Alex is distinctly unlikeable, but Orange was the only one of the dystopias that actually had a functioning character in the central role.  Granted, I'm a big one for theme -- I love theme -- but 1984,  Fahrenheit  451, Brave New World... all of these books struck me as not much more than theme as extrapolated through setting, with characters existing only because the author needed someone to view the setting.  In each case, the theme was important -- the manipulation of language and history from Orwell, the distraction and dumbing down from Bradbury, the hyper-controlled genetic experimentation and consumption from Huxley -- but it felt more like listening to a preacher tell a barely-crafted parable than actually reading a novel.  (Animal Farm, ironically, was much more of a human experience.)

And... how to put this...

Reading these classic bits of SF has really given me a window into why SF was talked about as a men's genre.  Orange is blatantly and violently misogynist, though that's chalked up as a fault in the viewpoint character in the end... sort of.  The others are... well, women are invisible, except insofar as they have an impact on the men who the story is about. Orwell's Julia is a deeply unpleasant woman who exists only as a catalyst for the just as empty Winston.  I literally can't remember the names of two women that Bradbury's Montag interacts with  (one his wife, the other a neighbor girl).  And BNW has Linda (a drunk who proves the downfall of Bernard's boss) and Lenina, a complete and utter blank slate who exists to be lusted over by Bernard and John Savage.  (I do have a kind of weird desire to do the intellectual exercise of flipping it -- to give women the agency to have wrecked the world all on our own, and have men play only the kinds of tangential roles that we see here... basically, I wonder what a world as hyper-feminine as Clockwork Orange is hyper-masculine could be made to look like... but it would have the same ultimate problem: It's a thesis, not a story.)

Even that, I could forgive, but the men they orbit are built of pretty flimsy cardboard, too. They're all of a certain stereotypical cast (Alex aside) -- virile smart men who gruffly state truths that ought to be written in stone.  Upstanding, but put-upon, people who, one understands, are right. They may be weak (Bernard) or breakable (Winston), but nothing about them really leads to seeing them as humans at all.  You can imagine them as square-jawed realists, staring into the face of Truth and being so tough that they can accept it when the rest of the world of dandified and fortunate people have to reject it...

In other words, plain old male nerd fantasy, thus giving rise to the idea that SF is a club for male nerds.

So I'm going to go ahead and say it: Dystopia has improved.

It owes a lot to these classics, which initially paved the way, but it's evolved to include actual,  you know, STORY.  Things happening to people you have some reason to care about.

This is not to downplay the importance of theme.  But theme happens whether you spend your time building it or not.  To paraphrase Stephen King (from somewhere in On Writing or Danse Macabre, maybe both), stories throw off meaning like uranium throws off radiation.  And if you have much of a story, if you've spent blood and sweat and tears writing it, the damned thing's got to be about something.  Let theme happen on its own. The stories turn out better if it's not the first thing on  your mind.


The ideas are amazing. Orwell was quite prescient, and the things he invented (Big Brother Is Watching, the memory hole, newspeak, etc) are permanent parts of the culture.  Both Bradbury and Huxley were great at spotting our distract-ourselves-to-death culture.  Burgess's questions about both evil and mind control in the attempt to stop evil are smart and worth asking.  My problem is just with the novels as novels.