Not A Blog™

This article turned out to be a lot longer than I expected. It’s like some sort of opus. Some sort of magnum opus. And despite its length, it is still not yet complete. It will never be complete because I will forever be finding things published in books which bug me. Yes, I have mentioned these in a number of previous articles, but now it’s time to finally quantify the data, consolidate it, and number it, as I am wont to do. These are my Literary Pet Peeves.

Before we get into the peeves themselves, let me make a few general remarks. As I said, I have mentioned some in previous essays. I made a half-hearted attempt to go back and find new examples for these things but, frankly, that’s a lot of work. You’ll have to make do with the same examples, dusted off, slightly polished, but still reguritated. Secondly, these do not include things such as “confusing their with there and they’re”. That kind of thing is annoying, to be sure, but it’s generally not the kind of mistake you find in published—and by extension, edited—literature. The things here are mostly stylistic and plotting devices. Finally, they are numbered for referencing purposes, but this doesn’t mean they’re annoying to me in that order. In fact, that gives me an idea. I’ll rate each of them, on a scale of 5, as to just how annoying they are. 1/5 means I’ll tolerate it but you’ll be receiving at least an eye roll. 5/5 means I won’t finish your book because I’ll be too disgusted.

Let’s begin.

1. The Expiration Date
Annoyance Rating: 3/5

As I wrote in my review of Variable Star a few months ago, the Expiration Date is a lame attempt at injecting popular culture into an otherwise timeless novel. This is mainly a problem with science fiction, although I see no reason why it couldn’t happen with any non-contemporary genre. Of course, if you’re writing a story set in the “present day”, no problem. The present day will eventually be further and further in the past, and the book will reflect that, but it is absolutely okay—expected, really—that the book will contain pop-culture references and slang appropriate to the period. If your “present day” book becomes dated simply due to the fact that the true present day is no longer the time of the book, I can hardly hold this against you. Lucifer’s Hammer is an example of “present day” fiction which is no longer. It holds together pretty good, but the things which date it—how can you complain when it has no temporal pretenses?

However. If you’re writing about something that’s set in the year 11,024—you sure as hell better not be mentioning Google. Even if you don’t specify the year, if your story is clearly in the future, you should not be talking about the current president, the current wars going on around the world, internet trends, (heaven forbid—internet memes), movie stars, and so on. Think back even twenty years (from the time this was written), to 1986. Nobody says “rad”. That’s dumb. (Which raises an interesting question: did anyone ever say this or is it just a current stereotyped description of the way things used to be?) Regardless, just because something is a good, useful word today, does not mean it’s going to be even twenty years in the future. How much less in the five thousand years later you’ve set your story?

Basically what it comes down to is this. Unless you’re writing contemporary fiction, don’t put things in your book which restrict it to the current year in which you’re living. There is no better way to ensure your work goes stale.

2. The Deus ex Machina
Annoyance Rating: 1/5

How can I bust on the good old Dues ex? It’s a classic. The term is a Latin phrase, which was in turn bastardized from a Greek phrase, and it literally means, “The Machine of the Gods”. In the Classical Greek days what happened was, a playwrite would get his characters into a situation from which there was absolutely no way out. Then he’d have some god or another appear in the scene and put everything back the way it should be and everyone lives happily ever after. The special effects of the day consisted of some guy hanging from a rope. This contraption was the machine which supported the actor playing the god. Eventually it came to mean the plot device iteslf which necessitated the use of the gods’ machine. Euripides was notorious for this, eventually causing Aristotle to beat me to the lit-crit punch when he complained that this is the worst way to end a play. I think that stands.

Because this Literary Pet Peeve was complained about some 2,500 years before I’m complaining about it, I won’t rant too long. It doesn’t really bother me all that much because so many stories use it. Hell, I’ve used it. Suffice it to say that it has, naturally, evolved. No longer do gods set things right (although sometimes they do), but now it is more often technology—or even just a fortuitous turn of events. I complained about the Dues ex in Variable Star, too, but I do hate to harp too much on one particular book. Another example from science fiction is actually rather clever, I think. Probably one of the best uses of the device—but it still qualifies.

It is from Isaac Asimov’s short story, The Final Question. Humans keep asking their super-computers whether or not entropy can be reversed (thereby allowing them to prevent the universe from dissipating to nothing). All the computers answer “Not enough data for a meaningful answer”, so they keep building better ones to try and get at the answer. Eventually the computer is built in a different, more efficient, dimension and in a few billion years, the universe does indeed dissipate to nothing. At that point, the computer has all the data it needs, but there’s no one to report it to because everyone died when the universe dissipated. It decides to implement the answer anyway, and says, “let their be light.” Pretty much the ultimate Dues ex Machina.

Further examples can be found at Wikipedia’s List of Dues ex Machinae.

3. The Da Vinci Code Syndrome
Annoyance Rating: 4/5

This one is so named because I first encountered it in Dan Brown’s craptacular best seller, The Da Vinci Code. Before I explain what The Da Vinci Code Syndrome actually is, I first need to explain how I read books. When I read, it’s very much like watching a movie to me. I could have an overactive imagination; I don’t know. But I imagine all the details, to the point where a specified fact will bug me because it conflicts with something I infer. As an example of this (not having anything to do with the DVC Syndrome), say the main character’s house is vaguely described, but not in very concrete terms. It doesn’t matter. I still have very specific details in my head regarding the house. For example, I might be thinking that the front door faces west, and that the main character’s bedroom looks out over the front of the house. A few chapters later, the author will then describe how the main character is awoken by the morning sun streaming in through the window. A-duh-what? That can’t happen; the house is facing the wrong way! Now I have to go back and re-imagine the whole first half of the book because the house has just rotated 180 degrees.

In other words, I imagine every detail of the environment described by the author—even the parts that aren’t explicitly described, or which I infer. My imagination is very precise. Obviously one cannot describe every little thing in the scene down to the tiniest detail, but that is simply the nature of the medium. The best authors recognize which details are important and which can safely be omitted, so this imagination-hole is not something I run into often.

Dan Brown, unfortunately, takes advantage of this weakness of the written word. He magnifies it by going out of his way to not describe main details. Oh, the characters talk about important details; they speak in hushed tones, they revere objects—but these things are not described to the reader. The characters can see and know these things, obviously. They handle the objects. But I can’t imagine them! Gah! There’s no reason for this sort of nonsense unless you’re going for undue sensationalism—which is what The Da Vinci Code is, essentially.

Don’t give me a round-about implication of some object that’s central to the scene. How do I imagine it? I can’t. There’s a fuzzy black spot in my imagination because Brown refuses to describe things. This happens on page 191 (hardcover edition)—leaving me unsuccessfully flailing to imagine this object—and then the chapter ends in a cliffhanger! Gee, thanks, Dan Brown. It happens on page 163 when Langdon is talking in circles about the Holy Grail—almost-but-not-quite getting to the main idea which is that the holy grail is a metaphor for Mary, the mother of Jesus. Except he can’t say that, you see, because then the book’s “surprise” would be ruined. So instead, the reader gets treated to the most unrealistic of conversations as Brown goes 800 miles out of his way to prevent the characters from leveling with each other. Then just when he runs out of flashbacks, hemming and hawing, and other dialogue nonsense, you’re jerked into yet another car-chase scene where nobody has time to think about anything except saving their skins! What a great book!

To recap: the Da Vinci Code Syndrome is purposely going out of your way to write around an object or idea of importance, letting everyone in the book know, but leaving the reader out in the cold. It’s a travesty of the written word, and the author who takes advantage of language this way should be forced to live the rest of his life with people who talk circles around him in order to “build suspense” in his boring, everyday life.

4. Apostrophe-Name Abuse
Annoyance Rating: 2/5

Apostrophe-Name Abuse was something I wrote about a few years ago in an article (no longer online) regarding the use of the apostrophe in media and writing. There was a whole slew of things I was complaining about, but a goodly portion of the article refered to its use in fantasy and science fiction names. For some reason people think the apostrophe means exotic, esoteric names, and so liberally sprinkle their proper nouns with these small tick marks. For the record: this is not exotic. It’s distracting.

Since the original article is no longer online and it’s not in my list of posts which I was intending to bring back, I’m going to repost the fantasy name part of the rant here, since I said it better then than I could now.

One of the bigger abusers I’ve seen of the apostrophe is the science fiction author C. J. Cherryh. I may have mentioned elsewhere that I find her work tiresome and needlessly difficult to read. Well, part of the reason for that is her insistence—nay, her fetish—for ludicrous names. One of the alien races in her Chanur Saga is the tc’a. Excuse me? Aside from not actually knowing what this is supposed to sound like, the first thing I think when seeing this is “oh, what letter is missing?” As well as, “is the name really made prohibitively longer by spelling the whole thing out?” Is it actually supposed to be tckdixoalaza? Are they really known as the tcßa? That’s kind of redundant on the “s” sound there, although that wouldn’t stop Mrs. Cherryh who also has an alien race known as the knnn. I don’t think I knnn pronounce that one, either, seeing as how it has no vowels.

But I digress. The point is, there is no letter missing from the tc’a name. There’s just an apostrophe in there for no reason! There’s no need for it, except that these authors think it makes them creative. I’m sorry to burst your space bubble, but it just makes you look like you’re not creative enough to come up with good, pronounceable names, and believe me, that’s much more difficult to do.

5. Confusing Equals Exotic Syndrome
[Also known as: Smarter than All of You]
Annoyance Rating: 3/5

My first real run-in with Confusing Equals Exotic Syndrom was in a book I had read which purported to be a collection of the best science fiction short stories of 2004. I got an entire essay of rant material out of it. Rather than reposting it here as a classic, I’m taking a few pieces to write this article. The story Elector by Charles Stross was the work from which I coined CEE.

In order to illustrate my point as to what CEE Syndrome actually is, I used a rather long excerpt from Elector and then made fun of it. However, it’s so chock full of weirdness it’s nearly impossible to comment on after the fact. So, in true Mystery Science Theater style, I present here the passage in bold face, with my obeservations in regular.

To set the scene, the main characters are in a restaurant discussing (I think) the future of mankind, but more specifically, some sort of solar-system-wide election that’s coming up.

“Ah, the simple pleasures of the flesh! I’ve been corresponding with your daughter, Manny. She loaned me her experiential digest of the journey to Hyundai +4904/-56.


Doing the math, that would be Hyundai -87.5714286. No need to be obtuse. Regardless, can you imagine anyone actually saying that? (Unless they were showing off?) Talk about awkward. Do they not have nicknames in the future?

I found it quite alarming. Nobody’s casting aspersions on her observations, not after that self-propelled stock market bubble or 419 scam or whatever it was got loose in the Economics 2.0 sphere…

But it’s Economics 2.0! You’re telling me 419’s still fool these new economists? I’ll wait for the 2.1 beta, thanks.

…but the implications—the Vile Offspring will eat the solar system, Manny. Then they’ll slow down. But where does that leave us, I ask you? What is there for orthohumans like us to do if what is essentially a non-human civilization of level II on the Kardashev scale—full control over the entire energy output of a star, full computational utilization of the resources of a solar system—decides it wants to recycle our mass?”

I hate this reference. As I wrote in the original article: Surely he doesn’t think this piece of cold-war antiquity is going to stand up to the tests of time? He tries to pass off this smarter-than-all-of-you universe, but then has his characters talking about some pseudo-scientific technology measurement from the 60s. Exotic.

But even worse, he doesn’t even give his readers credit here! He whips out the Kardashev scale (light conversation, to be sure), but then feels the need to explain it, just in case nobody gets it. I don’t know whether to be insulted that he brought it up in the first place, or insulted that he thinks I don’t know what it is.

Manfred nods thoughtfully. “You’ve heard the argument between the accelerationistas and the time-binder faction, I assume?” he asks.

Well that goes without saying.

“Of course.” Gianni takes a long pull on his beer. “What do you think of our options?”

Note: Manfred doesn’t actually answer Gianni’s question in the next paragraph. Instead, he explains the arguement between these factions he just mentioned. But Gianni just said he heard it! Why is the other guy explaining it? I mean, aside from helping the reader out, of course. Insert Head Slap of Stupidity here.

“The accelerationistas want to upload everyone onto a fleet of starwhisps [sic]…

Come again?

and charge off to colonize an uninhabited brown dwarf planetary system. Or maybe steal a Matrioshka brain that’s succumbed to senile dementia…

You might not know what the Kardeshev scale is so it gets explained to you, but you sure as hell better know what a Matrioshka brain is, because you’re not getting any hints on this one! It’s so obvious. Everyone should know this refence without even getting their Dyson spheres in a bunch.

and turn it back into planetary biomes with cores of diamond-phase computronium to fulfill some kind of demented pastoralist nostalgia trip.

Well, of course. I’d be all over that. Biomes with Cores of Diamond-Phase Computronium is practically my middle name.

Rousseau’s universal robots.

No hints!

I gather Amber thinks this is a good idea because she’s done it before—at least, the charging off aboard a starwhisp part. ‘To boldly go where no uploaded metahuman colony fleet has gone before’ has a certain ring to it, doesn’t it?”

All together now: AAAh…HAHAHAHAHAHAHA—sheesh. I just realized: Expiration Date and CEE in the same passage! Fantastic.

Manfred nods to himself. “Like I say, it wouldn’t work. We’d be right back to iteration one…

Because “square one” is so 20th century.

…of the waterfall model of singularity formation within a couple of gigaseconds of arriving.”
A couple of gigaseconds? You mean like a couple of “31 year” timespans? Yeah, I hate how those just fly by.

It should be clear from this example why an extreme case of Confusing Equals Exotic Syndrome is also known as “Smarter than All of You”. I’m still trying to figure out who Stross is trying to impress here. Despite my enjoyment of plausible physics and scientific references in my science fiction, I know when someone’s showing off. If I (or Stross or anyone else) tried to display this much knowledge in a single conversation, people would be disgusted, and rightfully so. Just because you have a story in a book somewhere doesn’t mean you can get away with it, either. Confusing does not equal exotic. It equals intellectual pomposity.

6. Second Person
Annoyance Rating: 5/5

You’re probably at least passingly familiar with the Choose Your Own Adventure series of children’s books. There was a period of time, I think when I was in the fifth grade, where I read every Choose Your Own Adventure book in my school’s library. I only stopped reading them because I ran out of books (some I read as many as three times), but even so, there was always one thing that bugged me. The choices in the book were never what I would have done. Look back today, I see the choices are nothing short of ludicrous in some cases—but then again, so were the books.

The CYOA books were, out of necessity, written in second person. The main character was always “you”. You were the one who was supposed to save the world or win the champeenship or whatever, but more often, you ended up dying. In one particularly epic Star Trek adventure, I managed to kill the entire crew of the Enterprise by flying it into a black hole. Good times.

Anyway, at least in the CYOA format you actually got to choose, to some limited extent, what you were going to do. However, every so often I come across some regular (non-choosable storyline) fiction which is written in second person. In otherwords, “you” are the main character again, but someone else gets to tell you what “you” do.

There are not many things in this world that will instantly initiate my mock mode, but this is one of them. This is just a giant pile of hubris on the part of the author. I mean, seriously. Who do you think you are, that you can tell me what I’m going to do. You can’t. I will willingly enter many a world—including video games where I play some other character who does things that I wouldn’t do in the cut-scenes—but when all of “my” actions are scripted and you’re telling them to me? Forget it. I can’t get into that, not even one iota. It just doesn’t happen.

Fortunately, most authors are smart and don’t indulge in such nonsense. The ones who take the plunge—well, they serve to remind the rest of us why we don’t bother. Again, I wrote about this story in the post I did a few years back making fun of a collection of science fiction short stories. One of those happened to be in second person. The story was Three Days In A Border Town by Jeff VanderMeer, and I wrote the following.

This is the first serious story I’ve read that was written in second person. Second person! There’s a reason stories aren’t written in second person, and that’s because the reader doesn’t like to be told what he’s doing. Not only that, but in Three Days “you” are a female character. This would be okay if written by woman, but the author is male. So the author, a guy, is telling me, a guy, that I’m a girl and I reminisce about having sex with a guy. That’s just weird.

I believe it’s safe to say that I am such a strange person, no matter what kind of story you could write in second person, it will never even be close to being “me”. So what’s the point of me spending time reading it? “I” have more important things to do.

7. The Personal Dictionary
Annoyance Rating: Varies by Class

The Personal Dictionary is a peeve of degree. Every writer has a certain amount of this tendency in them, I believe. It’s human nature to invent words—and in some cases, entire languages—to describe concepts which may or may not have a word. This is fine. Robert Heinlein invented the word “grok”. It means to know something so thoroughly you practically become that thing. It can also just mean “to know”, so some people use it to sound geeky. At least, I use it when I want to sound geeky. Douglas Adams, in turn, made up a series of words making fun of the making up of words in science fiction.

Sass that hoopy Ford Prefect. Now there’s a cool frood who really knows where his towel is.

And if you grok that ref, welcome to my world.

These examples would be considered a class 0 personal dictionary. Yes, they made up their own words, but they did it for very specific reasons and it works in the book. A class 2 personal dictionary would be like the magic spells in the Harry Potter series. Goofy. Kinda lame. But not too annoying. The annoyance factor, then, corresponds to the class of Personal Dictionary.

If you haven’t figured out what I’m talking about by now, the personal dictionary is when an author makes up their own words—either from scratch, by putting real words together, or changing the spelling of real words slightly—so that the reader knows what the made up words mean, but they are also fully aware of the fact that these words do not appear in any dictionary. If this is for a good reason and doesn’t get in the way of the story, class 0. If the author keeps doing it for the entire book, throwing out all the regular words in the dictionary in favor of their own personal vocabulary: class 5.

I’ve only ever found one example of a class 5, thank goodness. I was unable to finish the book—even after I picked it up again not three months ago with the intent to write a sarcastic and bitter rant about it for this blog. Yes, that’s right—the only reason I was reading the book was to make fun of it. I knew I would be successful in finding rant material because I had already unsuccessfully finished the book. It’s really bad. I never wrote an entire entry about it, so I’ll discuss it here. The book is Threshold by Caitlín R. Kiernan.

To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, here is the very first sentence.

The girl named Chance is standing in the rain, plain and skinnytall girl shivering beneath the April night sky pissing rain like icywet needles, and she can’t stop giggling.

Skinnytall? Icywet? What? Is it too much to ask to use actual words when describing this person? Words like “skinny” and “tall”—perfectly useful words by themselves—yet not good enough for Ms. Kiernan who must follow in the footsteps of Dr. Frankenstein and sew together a new creation from parts which, I suppose, she believes to be dead. And then there’s the fact that this sort of long, rambling, stream of consciousness style writing of which she’s so fond leads her to write unintentionally hilarious sentences. By the end of the first sentence I was giggling, too—but not for the same reason as the girl named Chance. I was giggling at the ambiguous verb attribution: the skinny tall girl is pissing rain like icywet needles? Sounds painful.

This sort of bizarre sentence structure goes on throughout the book, making it needlessly difficult to read. But more annoying than the written-while-stoned narration is the random made up words. As I flip through the book, I find them sprinkled throughout: ghostvoice, slivershine. Back roads are described as being “countrydark”. Countrydark? What the hell does that even mean? Why is wood yellowbrown? Is that like light brown? Or does it mean ribbed with yellow and brown? There’s scaldingquick, garagebloated, and a rare triple-word construct: dishragswaddled.

Kiernan is working from her own, personal dictionary. Sure, you can puzzle out the meanings of these avantcrap falsewords. The context of the sentences in this stumblescuttletale tells you what you need to know. But I guess I just prefer authors who actually know how to use real words properly. There’s something to be said for not just making up your own words when you’re too lazy to figure out how to use the existing ones right. That something is skill.

But even more telling is what Keirnan chooses to use when her pseudodescriptors fail her. A filing cabinat is described as being “battleship gray”. A light in a parking lot throws a “Sodium-arc glow”. At one point, the sun was shining through a window into a character’s eyes. It was shining, according to Kiernan, “like a fireball.” Holy shit. THE SUN IS A GODDAMN FIREBALL!

So Kiernan either makes up her own freaky Frankensteinian words, or she uses cliches. In other words—she can’t write. This is an example of a class 5 personal dictionary: it happens throughout the book enough times that it cannot be ignored, and so I just didn’t bother to finish the book. It annoyed me to a five, on a scale of five.

So those are my literary pet peeves. As I said, lengthy, but incomplete. As I continue to read, I’m sure more will be added. It’s inevitable. True to form, I will continue to mock them here. It seems I have no other options if I wish to stay sane.

-Ted

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