#it would be nonfiction

[directactionforhope]

Might fuck around and write a book for real

[kjscottwrites]

And, importantly, share some recs!

[idontmindifuforgetme]

About to deep clean & rearrange my bookcase …… I am about to be a girl reborn

[dark-audit]

Myths to Avoid When Writing Torture

Fiction makes, implicitly or explicitly, some kind of argument. A fictional portrayal of a guy simply going for a walk might make the argument that walking is a nice activity to do. This might not be a particularly earth-shattering message, but messages like this are implicit within the literary tools we use in how we portray characters, behavior, settings, and relationships. This underlying argument – a theme – is present in all of fiction. It’s why you’ll often see people make the statement that “all art is political”. And when it comes to torture – a subject which in and of itself has been the topic of political debate for millenia – how we approach the ideas and arguments made within fictional depictions of torture warrant, in my opinion, a degree of care. Torture isn’t just something that happens in movies. It is something that happens today, to real people, on a global scale. It’s not even particularly rare.

The difficulty with the subject of torture specifically is that for the past two decades, the public perception of torture has shifted on a global scale, seen most clearly in how torture is presented in contemporary media, fiction or otherwise. Everybody believes these myths. And getting indoctrinated into having reactionary takes on a topic is nobody’s fault, considering that almost every source outside of academia feeds you misinformation. But that’s, y’know, kinda why I made this blog: in the hopes that I might be able to get people to consider what ideas they’re presenting in their writing.

I want to start out by briefly reitorating some basics of how torture apologia typically works within political discussions, because this very much is relevant to how you can avoid accidentally sending the wrong message.

The first thing you need to understand is that the real-life debate surrounding torture isn’t framed in terms of whether or not torture is good or bad – everybody, including torturers themselves, will concede that it is bad. The more insidious argument is that torture is useful for achieving certain goals, and that it is therefore justified in extreme emergencies. Not only does this argument try to soften the usually rigid negative framing of torture in moral discussions, but it also seeks to poke holes in the international laws which ban the use of torture outright. It’s a moral, political and legal argument all wrapped up in one reactionary package. For this reason, having the theme of “torture is bad” doesn’t always mean a piece of writing isn’t making use of torture apologia. “Torture is useful” serves that goal just fine.

Torture is also often discussed in terms of civility – not the civility of the torturers, but the civility of the victims. It’s the argument that the people who are being tortured are bad people, and therefore don’t warrant the respect and dignity we usually offer to other human beings; they are so bad, essentially, that it’s fine for us civilized people to war crime them. Whenever I’ve encountered this argument, it has usually been presented in a way that was, shall we say, sussy as fuck – some even give up the pretense and straight up call their victims “savages” or “degenerates”. I hope I don’t need to explain why this line of thinking is insane, but in any case, it’s just my way of getting you to consider that a lot of the myths surrounding torture are rooted in broader sociopolitical issues, often racism and religious discrimination, and historically, most often within the context of colonialism.

With that in mind, let’s get into the myths, starting with the most obvious one.

"Torture for information works."

Every study I’ve read has concluded that torture is counterproductive when it comes to gathering intel from reluctant sources. Under severe pain or distress, victims are more focused on saying whatever they think the torturer wants to hear to make the torture stop, as opposed to providing accurate information. On a neurophysiological level, severe pain or distress actually interferes with the pathways of the brain relating to long- and short-term memory; this means that torture in and of itself is likely to destroy the very evidence it sets out to gather. Furthermore, victims are less likely to cooperate if subjected to physical abuse, including torture, and nothing in the infliction of pain itself works as some kind of truth serum. Lying and defiance are more likely under torture.

To a large minority of people, portraying torture as a reliable tool for gathering accurate information will make the implicit argument that torture, although usually bad, can hold utilitarian value in certain exceptional cases. I’ve written about this more in depth here.

"Under torture, everyone cooperates sooner or later."

French prosecutors used torture in the events leading up to the French revolution, as a way to gain forced confessions from suspects. Their failures and successes were jotted down, leading us with a pretty revealing insight – the highest success rate for gathering forced confessions was in Toulouse, an exceptionally high 14%. In Paris, only 3% of suspects cooperated long enough to sign their name – the rest did not. This is one of the primary reasons that the French criminal justice system eventually dropped using torture for intelligentsia. To quote Darius Rejali, who wrote The Book on torture: “Torture the clumsiest method available to organizations.”

So no, not everybody talks – in fact, rough estimate, 90% of torture victims never do. Defiance is by far the norm with torture.

"When the bad guy does it, it’s torture – when the good guy does it, it’s a tough, but morally justifiable decision."

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. Heroes of stories, especially in the action genre, often engage in the use of torture for information, usually following the framework of the ticking bomb scenario, a thought experiment based on the false notion that torture works as an interrogation method. Here, torture is turned into a heroicact, one that speaks to the toughness of the person who uses it. Ask yourself if you want to frame torturers though this lens – because if you do, you are literally justifying the act torture, and, y’know, you do you, but I am gonna call you stupid and reactionary. Torture done by a “good” person is just as abhorrent as torture done by anybody else.

"Some methods of torture are less severe than others."

This myth stems from governments trying to downplay the use of certain methods of torture, and usually goes hand in hand with euphemistic redefinitions of the concept, such as the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation methods,” also known as “torture lite,” or the Israeli “coercive interrogation.” The methods that have been proposed in this supposed less severe category of torture includes stimulated drowning, also known as waterboarding, as well as caning, beatings, limbs being broken with clubs, sleep deprivation, stress positions (ex. forcing a person to crouch against a wall for extended periods of time,) mock executions, sexual assault, and more. If these things all just sound like torture to you, it’s because they are. There is zero evidence to suggest that any torture methods, including those that leave no physical mark on the body, have less severe outcomes than those that do not – on the contrary, non-physical torture methods, including mock executions, or witnessing the torture of a loved one, have been ranked by victims as causing equal amounts of psychological distress as physical torture.

"Torture only causes harm to the person who is being tortured."

This is incredibly unrealistic. Torture is an act that is destructive in all directions, causing trauma to victims, their family, witnesses, and even torturers themselves. It disintegrates the structure of the organizations that use it, it breeds resentment and hatred in the communities around it, and it radicalizes people into extremism. Pretending that consequences like this don’t exist isn’t torture apologia per se, but if your aim is to show the realistic outcomes of torture, these are some of the things you need to consider.

Torture is portrayed as “scientific”; torturers are “skilled” in the “art” of torture.

The most common methods of torture in use today are: hitting people, sleep deprivation, and starvation. These don’t require a whole lot of brain power to conjure up, in fact the infliction of intense suffering is very straightforward. Human beings are full of nerves. Stick a knife anywhere, and I’d be more impressed if it didn’t cause pain.

Not to mention, portraying torture as “scientific” or something that “requires technical skill” makes the implicit argument that torture works for its intended use, here under the condition that you should at least do it right – which brings us right back to that utilitarian fallacy.

"Torturers are expert interrogators, and possess an extraordinary ability to detect lies in their victims."

Studies have been done on the ability of police officers to detect lies for about four decades now. The average person will have a 57% accuracy rate, meaning they’re barely better at spotting deception than a coin toss. For police officers, the highest estimate is around 65% - but it might also be as low as 45%, meaning they might be less accurate than a coin toss – even though police officers tend to think of themselves as exceptional at spotting deception. The same trend is seen in torturers.

In fact, this myth in particular originated from torturers’ accounts of how they conceptualize themselves, which is not only false, but also cringe. When an interrogator starts making use of torture, their focus tends to shift away from gathering reliable information, and more towards “perfecting” the infliction of pain, which means that over time, those interrogative skills are substantially degraded – they are terrible interrogators. So torturers are no better at spotting lies than your average person; they might actually be worse. They can’t read minds, and they don’t possess some secret mystical knowledge about the psychology of their victims.

"You can train someone to resist torture."

Loads of intelligence agencies and revolutionary groups around the world have published material that supposedly serves as manuals for resisting torture, but the truth is, torture is so extreme, there really is no way to prepare or train someone to “resist” it; this is something that even the CIA has acknowledged. Everybody’s reaction to pain will be different. There is no way to predict how torture will affect anyone, much less give them instructions beforehand that will somehow magically negate those effects.

"Brainwashing through torture works."

Torturers can’t change the emotional framework of a person through the infliction of pain. They cannot change the strongly held beliefs and opinions held by their victims through the infliction of pain. They can’t erase someone’s entire personality or make them a ‘blank slate’ through the infliction of pain. They can’t predict how a victim responds to torture, much less direct that response to their own benefit. This is not how pain works.

This is not only an implicit argument for the usefulness of torture to change someone’s behavior or force religious conversions, but the myth that torturers have some form of control of their victims even after the torture has ended is also used in real life to paint survivors as dangerous or unstable, and thereby bar them from treatment and aid, and even to allow access into countries to escape the circumstances that facilitated their torture in the first place. That last point is why you often see the advocacy of refugee rights in organizations that work to prevent torture; these two branches of activism have a huge overlap.

Torture victims cannot be controlled by their torturers. Brainwashing isn’t real.

"Stockholm syndrome is real."

This is a derivative of the brainwashing myth, which means all the connotations previously mentioned remain, but as a cherry on top, Stockholm syndrome as a trope can also serve as an implicit argument for the utility of domestic abuse. So that’s cool.

If you deliberately inflict suffering on someone, that is guaranteed to make that person dislike you. In real life, torture survivors not only tend to be extremely resentful of their torturers, but they also tend to be resentful of anyone belonging to the same demographic as their torturers, whether that be ethnicity, nationality, or even gender or general appearance. Like I said, torture radicalizes people.

"Torture makes people obedient."

Any physical abuse or neglect, including bad cell conditions, access to medical aid, decent food and clean water, is likely to breed resentment in victims and makes them far more reluctant to cooperate with their aggressors. With torture, defiance is the norm, by far. You saw this on a larger scale in the war on terror, for example – turns out that carpet bombing a country to deter terrorism only radicalizes the civilian population, producing more terrorists. No form of violence exists that will make a person particularly eager to shut up and do what you want them to do. It will just make them hate you.

The notion that torture makes people obedient is also an implicit argument for the use of corporal punishment or as crime deterrence, something that along with capital punishment has repeatedly been proven false by sociological studies. People just do not function like this. If you want to create obedience in your story – violence is the last thing you should use.

"People “break” under torture."

Victims of torture sometimes make the conscious decision to do what their torturer wants them to do, and this often serves as a means to buy enough time to plan an escape, or mount up whatever act of defiance they can manage. Sometimes they simply do it to get the torture to stop – this, too, is a tough, conscious decision. If you want to consider this a form of “breaking”, by all means go ahead, but implying personal weakness or lack of willpower in torture victims rubs me the wrong way. I personally see it as a rational choice made by a person who is in an otherwise impossible situation.

"Torture survivors are “broken”."

Torture certainly can lead to extreme psychological distress, but again, the term “broken” here implicitly makes the argument that torture victims simply lacked the mental fortitude to withstand their trauma. In my opinion, there’s a certain degree of victim blaming involved with framing torture survivors in this way, and certainly, it’s a framing that inherently strips away their agency.

Another thing that rubs me the wrong way is the fact “brokenness” implies a degree of permanence and rigidity to human beings that simply isn’t there, as if we are solid objects that, once shattered, can never regain the function we once had. It’s a nitpick, but I view people as organic things, capable of healing and growth – not as glassware.

Conclusion

I’d wager that while reading this, a good portion of you recognized some of these myths from depictions of torture in fiction; that’s not particularly surprising to me. These myths aren’t just widespread, they’ve been engrained in the global public perception of torture by decades of political debate and government propaganda, and as a result, have seeped into popular culture.

Torture isn’t rare, and neither is torture apologia. According to Amnesty International, 31% of the global population believes that torture is justified “in some cases”; as of 2014, AI had also reported on torture or other ill treatment in 141 different countries, despite the fact that torture is internationally recognized as a war crime.

In an ideal world, the subject of torture in fiction is treated with the same due diligence with which we have learned to portray subjects like homophobia, sexual assault, and racism; because, to be fair, all of these things have the capacity to intersect, and very often do. The first step in that regard is to spread awareness about how torture actually functions, which is what I hope to slowly start doing on this blog. At the very least, I hope I can make people more aware of how they choose to portray torture in their writing.

[jazzically]

the library is an archivist's grocery store. imagine jon gets hungry but he cant go around eating people's experiences anymore so he starts devouring memoirs instead and becomes the world's leading expert on every autobiography ever written

[fictionadventurer]

Potential September Reading

The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien (ideally in audio)

An English Squire by Christabel R. Coleridge

A Sherlock Holmes story (and/or a screen adaptation)

C.S. Lewis nonfiction

A sensation or mystery novel

A piece of one of the Psmith stories

Some kind of nonfiction book

[intothestacks]

As a children's librarian in a school where Who Would Win is hardly ever on the shelves due to it being so popular, I saw this and I had to share...

Zoologist Reacts to "Who Would Win?"

Here's one he really liked:

And one he really did not:

[deanmarywinchester]

previous years: 2022, 2021 / list of worst sf/f/horror

the bangers were BANGING this year, I kept mentally readjusting my top 5 list every time I read something good so the honorable mentions are extremely honorable this year. I hope you read anything that sounds good from this list and tell me about it!

top 5:

chain gang all stars by nana kwame adjei-brenyah: when I say that this book is like the hunger games for adults, I’m not making a glib comparison between two books about fighting to the death, I’m saying that I haven’t felt so intensely about a book since I stayed up late to tear through the hunger games and sob about it when I was thirteen. this book is satire as real and devastating as I’ve ever read, with action scenes that feel like they’re being dripped directly into my hindbrain and a unique and believable love story. put it on hold at your library literally RIGHT now.

the actual star by monica byrne: about a post-climate catastrophe utopian society built around a religion started by a teenage girl in 2012 based on mayan traditions, and also about the teenage girl, and also about the maya. this book made me crazy because the future society felt real enough to touch, with its radical openness and collectivity solving problems that exist today but causing new ones that are totally novel and meaty and interesting to dig into. read it if you’re interested in different ways of being.

the spear cuts through water by simon jiménez: really, REALLY good, fresh, original epic fantasy. jimenez picks a few perspectives to stick to but hops fluidly into bystanders’ brains to give you their perspectives, so even background characters feel fleshed-out and no one’s pain is dismissed as a side effect of heroic battles or whatever. highly recommended if you like framing narratives and stories about stories, and like epic fantasy but wish it wasn’t mostly about finding acceptable enemies to slaughter with cool swords

the dispossessed by ursula k. le guin: I love how much this book is about hope as clear-eyed commitment to the boring and difficult work of a brighter and necessary future. sometimes the work of the glorious anarcho-communist revolution is leaving your university post and romantic partner for months at a time to dig irrigation ditches so nobody starves when there’s a drought. read this book for diplomatic conniving, a clash of values between a capitalist planet and its dissident moon, and hope.

imperial radch trilogy and its spinoffs by ann leckie: what if you were built to be a weapon of the empire, a serene sentient battleship with thousands of human bodies all containing your consciousness, and you lost all bodies but one and had to figure out how to be a person, singular and alone? what if you were a 19th century british military officer and you slept for a thousand years into the decline of the empire? what if you were grown in a vat to be a facsimile of human and then told off for eating all your siblings even though eating them was SO interesting? what then. leckie’s prose is incisive and funny, her unreliable narrators are wonderful, and her stories are intimate even though the backdrops are insanely huge. 👍.

honorable mentions:

house of leaves by mark z. danielewski: guys? anyone hearda this one? anyway. Something Is Wrong With This House horror with themes of storytelling and grief. recommending that you slam this book as fast as possible like I did so you can hold all its layers in your head at once.

the lathe of heaven by ursula k le guin: i thought I didn’t like ursula k le guin, and then I read this book, went OH and immediately devoured the hainish cycle. im so sorry miss ursula. this book about a hapless pacific northwesterner whose therapist is making him dream different realities into being is so sharp and sly and funny. themes of choices, ends and means.

he who drowned the world by shelley parker-chan: I liked the prequel to this addition to the radiant emperor duology. I LOVED this book. parker-chan has invented new and exciting modes of fucked-up codependency and im obsessed. historical light-fantasy with themes of ideals vs what it takes to reach them, gender, and regret.

babel by r. f. kuang: found the didacticism of this book annoying, but i really loved the concept of this novel and the way it slowly ratchets up the stakes. this novel is for people who want to smash the fun of the magic school genre against the reality of universities’ complicity in the imperial machine.

piranesi by susannah clarke: im late to this book but it’s such a weird little gem. peaceful yet unsettling. a man takes care of an endless house with an ocean inside it until he realizes the house is stealing his memories. themes of memory and devotion.

hell follows with us by andrew joseph white: I can only read YA these days if it’s a reread or if it’s genuinely good and really really strange. this is that. weird gory fantasy about a trans teen who escapes his militarized post-apocalyptic christian cult and finds himself turning into something Different. my only gripe is that he uses 2023-perfect language to describe transness and I think he should be inventing genders weve never even thought of. such is YA.

some desperate glory by emily tesch: a rolickin’ good space opera time with terrible women <3. a thriller about how the golden child of her isolated human-supremacist space station cult deprograms and the consequences of it. this feels like a grown-up SPOP until the theoretical physics gets involved. big fan

the library of mount char by scott hawkins: this book is harrow the ninth in suburbia until it becomes a more macabre version of the absurdity of the gomens apocalypse. God raises his children, sometimes brutally, to hone their powers in a neighborhood that mysteriously keeps out outsiders. came for the dysfunctional mess of the god-children and now I can never look at a grill the same way

runners up:

bunny by mona awad: books that make you WISH you were in mona awad’s MFA program where she must have been having a terrible time. the weird one out in an MFA program accepts overtures into the unbearable rich-girls’ clique to find out what they’re Up To. themes of aimlessness and the intersection of class with the art world

camp damascus by chuck tingle: have you ever wished that you were simply too autistic to be successfully demonically brainwashed into not having gay thoughts? horror-flavored thriller that was just fun

light from uncommon stars by ryka aoki: this author put a bunch of genres in a blender and came up with something fun and surprisingly cozy. an immortal woman must sell violinists’ souls to the devil in exchange for their fame, or he’ll drag her to damnation instead. there might be aliens and coffeeshop romance involved. definitely a blender.

the fragile threads of power by v. e. schwab: if you haven’t read a darker shade of magic and you like tightly paced high fantasy and historical fantasy elements, political intrigue, and pirates, read that first. if you have, there’s more now! lila bard are you free on thursday when I am free

the library of the dead & our lady of mysterious ailments by t. l. huchu: a teenage girl provides for her family in soft-apocalypse magic edinburgh with a job carrying messages from ghosts to their living relatives. an ongoing mystery series about the intrigues she uncovers among the dead.

severance by ling ma: this books is on the list of media that is the terror to me: it's about an apocalyptic disease that makes people reenact their routines mindlessly until they collapse. intimate apocalypse novel with themes of late capitalist malaise.

ocean’s echo by everina maxwell: i didn't really like winter's orbit because i'm just not a romance guy, but this second novel stands alone and the romance is more insane and less of the entire point of the novel. (also it's between essentially Discworld's Carrot and Moist Von Lipwig, which is. really something.) in the Space Military, a buttoned-up mind controller must pretend to bend a socialite with illegal mind-reading powers to his will. what if fake relationship but the relationship they have to fake is "brain linked master/servant pair."

the murderbot diaries by martha wells: novellas about a misanthropic security android who jailbroke itself in order to watch tv. the name "murderbot" is a joke but it very much did kill people <3 themes of paranoia and outsiderhood, corporate wrongdoing, repentance, and trust

black water sister by zen cho: zen cho is good at any kind of fantasy she writes, including this, her first modern fantasy novel. a closeted lesbian has to move in with her family in malaysia after college in the US, only to discover that her dead grandmother has some unfinished business involving a local goddess and a conniving real estate developer. themes of family, gender, and place.

the way inn by will wiles: a man who’s paid to pretend he’s other people to attend conferences in their place gets trapped in an endless Marriott. has the sharp humor of a colson whitehead corporate satire until it becomes more straightforwardly horror-flavored.

[exitbearpursuedbyactor]

I know I’ve seen the post asking for this before but does anyone have any books that are similar to the tv show Mash?

It can be a totally vibes-based recommendation

[evilkitten3]

maybe instead of watching fictional old men fight to the death we should make that happen in real life

[arctic-hands]

This isn't an attempt at a flex I swear and I recognize people can have different learning experience and still be intelligent even if they don't/can't read, but given my abysmal education growing up I have to wonder what would have happened to my brain if I wasn't such a voracious reader as a kid

[swampthingking]

the thought of cracking the spine of a book makes kevin nauseous. he like opens it just enough to see the words and holds the book at such uncomfortable angles to read— anything to keep the book pristine and intact. he does not let people borrow his books because he is a control freak (as a term of endearment) and does not trust them to take care of them the way he does.

and andrew is the complete opposite, cracking the spine as soon as he opens it. he annotates in pen. he dog ears the pages because who the fuck has time to find a bookmark. he throws books out of anger. he throws them at aaron for fun. he lets them get smashed and torn in his bag. he always keeps them, he just prefers them to look like they’ve been read.

[qqueenofhades]

Alice Albinia's The Britannias is a fascinating book on many levels but also the prime reason why writing about history, especially premodern history, double-especially premodern women's history, is not so easy as just quoting some writers utterly without context/critical scaffolding/enquiry/rigorous methodology and doesn't actually prove what you want it to prove, even if the point is one to which we might otherwise be sympathetic.

[lacnunga]

In the wake of the IA situation, I've seen a lot more posts circulating about using your local library and I just. Sigh

[augustheart]

fanfic writers who want to be professional writers listen to me. you don't have to adapt fanfic into a novel. you don't even have to write a novel to be a professional writer. you can write other things. i saw someone bemoaning the fact that the only writing they'll be able to break into is scraped fanfiction. a) have more confidence in your skills b) YOU CAN WRITE OTHER THINGS!!! even within fiction there are genres other than romance and young adult dystopia! and there are things other than pure fiction!!! it's okay!!!!