Author Q&A – Tom Kratman, Part One

For the next two weeks, we’ll be speaking with Tom Kratman, author of A Desert Called Peace, Carnifex, and Watch on the Rhine. His newest novel, Caliphate, hit stores on April 1st. Thus far the Amazon reviews are a testament to Tom’s skill as a writer and as a man who pulls no punches.

I first came across Tom’s work when I read Watch on the Rhine, a novel set in the Posleen universe of John Ringo. I was impressed with the level of detail and the gripping action. When I came across A Desert Called Peace, I immediately purchased it and was rewarded with a great reading experience (review here). Tom dared to throw the shackles of political correctness to the wayside and weave a story that illustrated the perils of our own half-hearted commitments in the Middle East. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be over there–we should, and we should be thoroughly committed to achieving our goals of stabilizing the region and punishing those who would threaten our civilization.

It is refreshing to see a science fiction author who isn’t a blatant liberal under the delusion that they are centrist. Tom delivers well-thought political views with a practical voice that many right-leaning science fiction readers should find palatable.

With no further ado, I give you Tom Kratman.

If someone has never heard of you, why would they/should they read your books?

Because every time someone buys one of my books, a Progressive gets apoplexy? 

Because every time that happens an angel gets his wings?

All right, I’ll be serious now.

Really, that’s something I’d almost rather you ask a fan.  Hmmm…no, no “almost” about it.  On the other hand, we don’t have a fan here for you to ask so…

I think you’re asking what makes my books different, yes?  I don’t have a politically correct bone in my body, and the only liberal bone isn’t, strictly speaking, a bone at all.  The books are hard and harsh.  Most people, I think, find them educational.  A lot of people find them uncomfortable.  Why?  Well, I don’t pull my punches.  I don’t avert my or the reader’s eyes from the ugly side of life.  If someone can deal with that, and doesn’t mind exploring some of the darker things that are part of the eternal human condition, they’re welcome to come along.

By looking the ugly side of life, you have a crucible in which you can show the best (and worst) in your characters. Do you find that, as a writer, you feel what your characters feel? Do you share their emotions during the course of the story? Or do you remain detached, as a surgeon will be during a difficult procedure?

I’m usually pretty detached.  But when I need to feel what my characters feel, I will usually do something to make them in one way or another like me, even if only temporarily.  (Note: I’m also somewhat superstitious so there are some limits to what I am willing to do there.  Don’t want the Elder Gods deciding it would be funny to do the things to me I do to my characters, now, do I?)

Does being a retired military officer handicap you with realism when you write military science fiction?

It can.  Let me give you one example, from film, not literature.  Remember the movie GLORY?  It’s one of my favorites, and a fairly accurate one…for Hollywood, anyway.  But there’s one scene in there that just annoys the hell out of me.  It’s after many scenes showing the new troops, who still haven’t been issued uniforms, and expressly not have had them issued because they’re considered inferior, basically screwing everything up.  Then the uniforms are issued and suddenly everything works.  They can march, they can shoot.  It’s wonderful. 

It also doesn’t work that way, ever.  It’s sheer magic, sleight of hand, purporting to be truth.  And it illustrates one of the great frauds of our day, which is an age of institutionalized fraud anyway.  This fraud is that profound change is easy and certain, if only we can change appearances…or change our clothes.

I can’t do that.  Not won’t; _can’t_.  If I tried, I’d end up paying obeisance to the porcelain throne until I thought better of it.  I think I’ve got a duty to my readers of strict intellectual honesty.  I can be wrong, and no doubt have been, but dishonest I cannot be.

And, yes, I _know_ people want that message, that profound change for the good is certain and easy.  But, to quote someone a lot more famous than myself: “Well it ain’t, see?”

Somewhat similarly, I write military fiction.  There is a lot that has to happen for military things to come about and readers rarely want to read about that dull crap.  So I compromise.  I do all the detailed planning but only put in what I think the reader needs so that he can know I did the planning.

What made you decide to study law? Based on what I can infer about your personality from your writing, the law doesn’t seem as though it would be a good fit for you.

Oh, the study of law was tolerable.  The really annoying part is in practicing it.  I liked stress all my life and so when I left the Army for the second time (I’ve been in and out four times in total), I thought that might be a good fit.  I won more than I lost (where “win” is sometimes defined as “client is facing one hundred and four years, on six charges.  Beat two.  Knock the sentence down to seven years with credit for time served.  Then get two more years and one charge knocked off on appeal.  Where client was so guilty that the dictionary has a little mug shot of him next to the word ‘guilty’”). 

But you can’t sleep when you’re practicing law, not if you care about doing your duty.  You lay down at night and start the parade of cases: “Okay…Opposing witness says X…counter with question Y…ah, but what if he says Z…hmmm….call witness B back to the stand and ask…”   And you do this, every night, for every open case you have.  And when you finish?  You start all over again. 

It wears, after a while.

Ever wonder why lawyers tend to be heavy drinkers?

You were a defense attorney?  The plot thickens!

I suppose it does.  I went to law school intending to be a prosecutor.  Sometime in my first year I realized I could live with myself if I got someone totally guilty totally off (which, in fact, I did on a number of occasions) but that I would not be able to live with myself if I sent someone innocent to prison. 

Do you think that your political views (as presented in your writing) cost you readers?

Yes, I’m sure they cost me readers.  Though at this point I’m pretty much typecast and no one would believe I wrote an entirely apolitical novel even if I did. I’m not sure how one avoids politics, anyway, really.  It’s always in there, somewhere. 

What are my political views, by the way? 

I mentioned above that we live in an age of fraud.  We also live in an age of political illusion…or rather, illusions, plural.  There are at least three of these.  One is that nearly everyone (but me) thinks they’re in the center.  (Me? Oh, in domestic politics I’m right on the edge between the right of the center and the left of the right.  Really.  In terms of foreign relations, on the other hand, I really am somewhere near Genghis Khan.)  Why is this?  Well, we hang around with those who agree with us.  Everyone, just about, we know, shares our opinions and convictions.  You may recall that woman in New York who simply couldn’t understand how George II was reelected since, “Nobody I know voted for him.”  Hmmm?

Another illusion is that we tend to look at the opposite end of the spectrum (yes, spectrum.  I’ll explain why later, if the subject comes up) and everyone off in the distance sort of jumbles together.  It’s an optical illusion.  It also reinforces the illusion that where we stand is the middle.

A third illusion is to add intensity of feeling and vociferousness in defense of a position to where someone stands.  For example, imagine someone who is truly in the middle (if he or she really exists) and just hates the extremes.  Now imagine that intensity as a line rising above the spectrum.  Both extremes will tend to add the height of that line to where they already perceive that true centrist as being, and will see him as extreme left or right, whichever is opposed, from where they, themselves, stand. 

I’ll bite. What do you mean by “spectrum?”

As near as I can tell, the ultimate political-philosophical question is, “What is the nature of man?”  I think it was Heinlein who waxed lyrical about the uselessness of philosophy because that was the core question and it had never been answered.  And he was right to a degree; it hasn’t been.  But then it can’t be.  People differ.  There is no one truth as to the nature of man.

That said, many people still believe they have the answer to the question.  No, “believe” isn’t the right word.  They feel it; there’s very little real thought involved.  And how they feel about it tends, imperfectly to be sure, to inform how they feel about everything else.

Never notice how much of what we think of as liberalism, progressivism, or even more left wing philosophies tend to revolve around the idea that man is more or less profoundly changeable by training and education (or propaganda)?  Ever notice how often the extreme right is fixated on the notion of man’s perfectibility through breeding or at least the rejection of notions of perfectibility by training?  (Yes, I’m familiar with the argument that the Nazis were a left wing movement.  I think that’s mistaking similar symptoms as coming from the exact same disease.)

The left, by the way, often denies this.  Look, however, to the original draft of the Port Huron Statement: “Man is infinitely perfectible.”  Consider how much the left hates the very notion that intelligence is heritable.  Consider Lenin’s “New Soviet Man.”  Consider the emphasis, less common than it used to be, on the “rehabilitation” of criminals.  There’s a subset of that view, too, which holds that man would be perfect but for the iniquities of our society that pervert his already perfectly good nature.  That one’s become a really common two-step, over the last 30-40 years.

I think both extreme views – right and left – are silly, but that doesn’t mean they’re not deeply held or extremely powerful. 

Silly?  Absolutely.  How does one deny that training and education – oh, and propaganda – has had an impact in the collective decision of, say, European women to stop replacing themselves?  I mean, the urge to reproduce is – must be – as hard wired as anything human.  Yet they stopped.

Because the nature of man is the core question, and because different people have opposed views on the matter, it – like any two points, defines a line.  The existence of one extreme tends to organize people along the other.  Perhaps better said, the two extremes tend to organize each other.  Moreover, they tend over time to drag people away from the center, or to make those who remain in the center relatively quiet. 

Now take the typical X-Y graph that purports to describe the true nature of the political spectrum, one that, perhaps, posits an X axis that describes the attitude to planned social progress or to reason, while the Y axis describes the attitude to government.  If one plots out a given sample of people one will find that two corners of the graph are uninhabited.  There are few if any who are both sane and not morons who have very positive attitudes towards government and very negative attitudes to planned social progress, or vice versa.  Instead, in plotting a sample, one gets a fairly narrow oval, running from lower left to upper right.  Turn that graph clockwise forty-five degrees and look at it again.  Yes, it now describes left-right, with minor up and down differences, which differences are irrelevant when compared to the major right-left differences and which are, again, overcome by the mutual and hostile organization driven by the extremes.

So yes, imperfectly descriptive or not, a left-right spectrum works better than any X-Y I have yet seen.  As the Great Helmsman once observed, “There is always a left and always a right.”

By the way, I don’t think Libertarianism is anything contrary to what I said above, on good part because they, themselves, are fractured in just the way that the normal left-right types are.  “I don’t want much government because people are innately rotten and will use it to my detriment.”  “I don’t want much government because people are innately good and government perverts that goodness.” 

See what I mean?

Some people expected me to be libertarian in my writing, by the way, and were sorely disappointed that I turned out not to be.  Why am I not?  A few reasons.  One is that I don’t share the assumptions of innate goodness or innate rottenness they seem to.  Another is that there are two practical questions they’ve never answered to my satisfaction: 1) How do we provide for the national defense?  2) How do we deal with public health (by which I mean plague prevention, not socialized medicine)?

Do you believe that there is a place for editorializing about political subjects in a science fiction novel?

You have read at least one of my books, right?

Yes! In fact, I’m throwing this question your way because I have.

Depends on what you mean by “editorializing.”  It also depends on what any given reader means by it.  The first book I had published revolved in large part around the tremendous polarization caused by both abortion and gun control.  I didn’t intend, and really don’t think I did, editorialize against either though I definitely went out of my way to show that they generated extremely strong feelings.  Still, I was accused of editorializing against them.  (Now I did do some editorializing, but not about abortion, qua abortion and very little, if at all, about gun control.)

Is that a case of some stupid readers?  No, probably not, especially considering that most of those bitching about it never read the book.   It is, however, a pretty fair example of how people are organizing to the extremes, how feelings take over from reason, nowadays, anyway, and of the generally fraudulent ethos of modern life.

There are also some people who mistake what a character says and believes for what an author does.  Larry Niven has a technical term for them.

 The short version of that is, if you discuss or illustrate a political issue, with or without consciously taking sides, you will be accused of editorializing anyway.  And God help you if you present inconvenient facts.

Come back next week for more of Tom Kratman!