I’m pretty sure that I share quite a few Readers with The Divine Sarah (Hoyt), even though we write about totally different things most of the time, and even when we do write about the same thing, each will often have a totally different (but not opposite) take on the thing under discussion.
And anyway, most of the time she writes about gay pirates or whatever, living on a spaceship or some other planet five hundred years in the future, while I write stuff based on actual historical events. She’s also sold a jillion novels, and I haven’t. Clearly the market is more attuned to fantastic (literally) worlds somewhere else than it is to late 19th-century Europe; so she makes a living from her writing, and I don’t. Annoyingly, as anyone familiar with her historical novels knows, she writes Regency better than I write Victorian/Edwardian.
C’est la vie.
However, thanks to her upbringing in a tiny rural village in Portugal, the real-life Sarah is — unlike many writers — firmly planted in the here and now, and every so often she writes a post that is full of common sense, pricks many fantastical bubbles along the way, and (in her own sweet way) says, “Stop that bullshit.” It’s all the better if you’ve heard her speak in person, as I have, because that thick Portuguese accent, with its liquid vowels and strange intonation, is unbearably compelling, exotic and — dare I say? — sexy.
So it’s really wonderful when you imagine her saying something like this:
Guys, let me give you a tiny hint here “Science fiction warned us” really means “Guys and gals who were writing by the rule of cool and trying to make their next month’s rent warned us.” Now, is that scary? Of course not. It’s people writing drama to pay their rent.
Do most of them know what they’re talking about? Well, people like Heinlein did. That’s why he doesn’t have any big insanity like that. But most of my colleagues? Dear Bob (Heinlein). Remember, these are the people who write regencies with exploding carriages and the duchess taking the gig to the supermarket. Stop it, just stop it.
So get over to Sarah’s place and read her take on A.I., if you haven’t already. You’ll emerge from it refreshed, as I did.
