Mark W Tiedemann

Author: Mark Tiedemann

  • Our Dreams Are Sleeping

    Neil DeGrasse Tyson is my favorite science pop star. He is right up there with Stephen Jay Gould and Carl Sagan in terms of ability and scope and style when it comes to explaining science to the public. I’ve heard that a follow-up mini-series to Sagan’s superb Cosmos is in the works with Tyson as the narrator.

    After this, I have to say, I love this guy:

    Back in the Seventies, Robert A. Heinlein testified before congress about the benefits of the space program—the ones people don’t generally know about. Among some of them was the surprising fact that suicides among seniors was sharply down since the Gemini program and the announcement of the Apollo program. Years later I noted that suicides were back up after several cancellations.

    We do not pay enough attention to dreams anymore. I don’t know what happened to us. Even in the dark days of McCarthyism we dreamed big dreams. What, have we suffered exhaustion? Possibly. But the more we gut the things that make people give a damn about getting up tomorrow, the worse everything is going to be. It is not all about money, as some would have us believe. Money is a tool. What are we doing with it? One part of our society seems bent on destroying the mechanisms of improvement for the average American while the other part seems unable to make a stand and say stop the carnage. One part has convinced another part that the problem is all about government redistribution of wealth and we should end entitlements and cut out all this useless spending and let private enterprise do everything. As far as I can see, right now, all private enterprise is interested in doing is building more casinos and feeding larger dividends to people who don’t want to pay taxes to support the dreams of the country.

    It might help, though, if we actually had some dreams again. Time to wake them up and let them play. Before we forget how.

  • Textures and Other Ways

    Marty Halpern has an anthology coming out, filled with alien contact stories.  I think it’s going to be a really cool book, not just because one of my stories will be in it, but because everyone else who is in it is a really good writer, and, well, Marty has been doing blog posts about each story.

    Here’s the one for mine.  But check out the rest of them, too, and then plan on buying the anthology when it comes out.  It would make a great Christmas gift, a whole book full of bizarre, well-written, idea-rich alien contact stories.  Remember, too, you need to buy multiple copies—one for the office, one for your bedside, one for the bathroom, and one to carry with you, and one to give to a friend.

    Oh, and the title of the anthology—ALIEN CONTACT—coming out from Nightshade Books.

  • Around The Neighborhood

    Playing with pictures again.  Going for long walks, you never know what you might see…

     

  • Playing Jazz, part three

    Steel-trap smiles made room on the stage, a shuffle of seats, a place where chances die or lives are made, all the welcome of the seen-it-befores and the willingly-impressed, squeezed into a need for the new, hope for discovery, and fear of not-good-enough.

    The room itself prepared for betrayal, but the ears plugged back into the main artery, on the off that something might open a vein or just shut out the silence.

    The Kid opened his case and took out a pair of hands.  Everyone gasped at the tendons and callouses, the length of the reach and the curl of long use.  He attached them and flexed them and came up to the group and sat down with a comfort way past his years.

    Staves crossed, he danced over a brief history of composition, plainsong to Bach and right over romance he played straight into cool.  I heard chords buried under atonal cadences, squeezed between whole-tone and free jazz, unplayed references to Jellyroll, stride, Lester Brown, syncopated against voices lofted on solid riffs, the gifts of Bird found one long, strung-out night, reforming on Miles, scampering with Chick and Herbie, and soaring to Bop.

     

    He told us: sevenths took me out of thirds and they expelled me from the nursery.  On the street a big smiling wind showed me how to flatten my fifths and from there it was only a bus ride to the Village and the Vanguard and Birdland.  In the lower shoals, all eddied with mist and restless listening, the minor blues found release in an augmented major cool that fused with a life beat ignored by the timid, scorned by the comfortable, and recovered by archaeologists of ancient sighs.  It talked to me, whispered secrets, and taught me how to read the palimpsests of harmonies down to the bare rock surface of the first language.  I can tell you this much, what I’ve gleaned from all those notes passed sub rosa between classes, that it’s nothing alone and everything together.

    It’s the conversation that counts, the contact that matters, so talk to me now and let’s play some jazz.

  • Playing Jazz, part two

    Smoke pirourettes around the shrinking shapes of idle speculation.  Ritual anticipation settled for the inevitable triage of experience and achievement, dues and wisdom, invitation and exclusion.

    Sax throated obligatory admiration, mood recycled in reserve, and the shadows pressed faceless to the glass, watching the shark-moves of truth encircled by motifs, melodies, modes, and measures.

     

    Do you even know, they asked, what it is you want to say, never mind how to say it?  Do you have a mouth to match your measures?  Chords for your chords, a tongue for your tune?  The heart for your beat?

    The Kid folded his wings, shuffled his stand, arranged his perspective, and raised his sites. The air gathered close, keeping clear through the collection of relevant minutiae, ready to move when the words finally came.

    “I seen sad corners, he said, empty streets full of ghosts and ghosts full of need. Houses without homes and homes with no walls, towns without pity, summer in the city, and cities with no names.  I’ve heard all the ways a dime can be rolled, a quarter flipped, and a promise sold for the safety of a brick.  I’ve sat at bars and listened to the pointless frustration of voices with no song, the outlines of dreams, substanceless schemes, and aimless desire with no match to ignite, through nights with no stars only lights in the sky, and I came through the mess with a shape and a name and a point to be made.

    So here I am and I’m asking the chance.

    Let me sit in ‘cause I want to play jazz…”

  • Playing Jazz, part one

    I hung out in a small spot of night on the fringes of No Smoking and Adults Only.

    Thick air, eighty proof attitude, and shadows that kept your seat for you during intermissions.

    The stage belonged to a round of changing keys, facile fingers, and moods found in forgotten closets, abandoned buildings, after hour garages, and overlooked streets, brought in by saxes, axes, horns, and skins wearing misery wrapped up in puzzles, suits that only glowed in moonlight, who spoke in tongues unheard by day.

    One night they were handing out faces to the smiling, voiceless crowd, laying foundations for towers that never rose, sending messages in forgotten codes, when the Kid walked in, case under his arm, hat cocked, eyes clear behind opaque wisdom no one sought.  He stood at the foot of the stage, straight, respectful, patient, till the set was done and they noticed him.

    They asked him who he was and what did he want.  He set his case down on the edge of the platform and he said:

    “Who I am is a work in progress, a collection of possible outcomes, an arrow looking for a bow, a bullet for a barrel, a truth for a mouth to put it in.  What I do is whatever it takes to make all this congeal into reason and purpose.”

    We heard echoes.  So what, they asked then, do you think you’re gonna do here?

    And he answered: “I want to play jazz.”

  • Another Top 100 List

    NPR conducted a survey of the most popular all-time science fiction and fantasy novels and the results are in.  According to the polls, these are the top 100 SF & F novels.

    Like the “other” meme from the BBC that sent around last year, there are some bizarre inclusions—entire trilogies and series instead of single novels—which I suspect are inevitable given the nature of the process.  I mean, I love Iain M. Banks’ Culture series, but that’s what?  Ten books?  Hardly fair.  But then something like Gene Wolfe’s The Book of the New Sun actually is a single novel published in four volumes.

    It’s the omissions that bother me.  It’s obvious a lot of young readers contributed, because there seems to be a significant percentage of newer work, often at the cost of seminal works that should be on any representative list.  I mean, hell, Brandon Sanderson has two separate slots but Delany and Silverberg are nowhere to be found.  I expected to see The Song of Ice and Fire on the list given its current popularity, but not that unwieldy piece of self-referential excess The Wheel of Time.  I mean, come on—the best?

    But I see the absence of work that is essential to any overview of 20th Century science fiction—no Joanna Russ, no Van Vogt, no John Brunner, no Gordon Dickson or Poul Anderson or Doc Smith or…

    Partly, I think, the problem is in that they decided to lump SF and Fantasy together.  Expected but disappointing.  I really do not expect people who think the Xanth series fit for a top 100 list to even be aware of  C.J. Cherryh, and if that sounds judgmental, so be it.

    Last year I composed my own list of 100 novels “everyone should read” in response to the BBC meme.  I suppose now I ought to do a 100 SF novels essential to any grasp of what science fiction is.

    Or maybe not.  Maybe this is just the nature of these things when handed over to a committee.

    But I gotta say, women are sorely underrepresented in this.  Of course there’s Ursula K. Le Guin (and Margaret Atwood, which I find amusing for other reasons) and Audrey Niffenegger.  But come on: Octavia Butler, C.J. Cherryh, Joanna Russ, Mary Gentle, Sherri Tepper, Kate Wilhelm, Justina Robson, Nancy Kress, Leigh Brackett, C.L. Moore, Margaret St. Clair, Carolyn Ives Gilman, Nicola Griffith, Lisa Goldstein, Michaela Roessner, Emma Bull, Gwyneth Jones….

    You get the idea.

  • The Problem…Succinctly, Loudly

    This has been going around, so maybe you’ve seen it already, but if not here’s another opportunity. Dylan Ratigan is saying what many of us have expressed a part of in the last several years, some of us more so.

    I wrote about this previously here

    Basically, what Ratigan is talking about is the leaching of latent wealth out of the country by multinationals who have corrupted the American political system to guarantee as few regulations as possible, regulations which ordinarily would require then to reinvest that money here instead of taking out of the country to squirrel away in financial safe havens.

    They have managed to convince a lot of Americans that this is to safeguard their freedom of the marketplace, when in fact all it does it give most of us a smaller and smaller allotment of resources with which to work.

    I, too, am dismally disappointed in Mr. Obama, who is just one more politician who lost his cajones when he got into office and refuses to tell the truth.

  • Done (Almost)

    So about an hour ago I typed up the last changes in The Spanish Bride, formatted it into a master doc, did the word count, printed out the last five chapters for Donna to savage review.  When she’s done I will make the final corrections and send it off to my agent.

    I was asked to trim the fat—condense it—and it has lost 20 thousand words of excess.  Some of it may go back in eventually, but not much, I think.  A good deal of it was window-dressing.  I explained to my agent that, really, I can write a space opera and know pretty much exactly what to leave out, what to keep in, but going back the other direction threw all that in doubt.  How well-versed are people in the 18th Century?  Anyway, it has been educational.  When I get around to writing the next Ulysses Granger novel I should be a bit more concise right from the start.

    So I have now completely rewritten two whole novels since March.  I’m going to go take a nap now.  Tomorrow…?  I’ll worry about that in the morning.

  • Down. To It and Otherwise

    But not depressed. Just tired. Sort of a twilight feeling.

    I’m working on the last chapter of The Spanish Bride, an action/historical mystery/thriller/etc set in the uncrowded days of 1780s St. Louis.  This is about the fifth draft now and I think it’s ready.  Just one more chapter.

     

     

    This is always a dangerous point in the process.  I see that finish line and I get anxious, I want it to be done, but the last stretch of a novel is where all the promise is supposed to pay off, so you shouldn’t hurry it up.

    It will be fine.  After I finish this draft, Donna gets to read it and then I must go back and fix the things she indicates need fixing.

    But I am tired.  I’ve been constantly redrafting a novel—this one and Orleans—since March.  I need a break.  A couple weeks to catch up on some other things.  I have a guest blog to write, things around the house to tend to, more photographs to finish, friends to catch up with.

    The image above was taken the night of the Fourth of July.  A pall of smoke filled the neighborhood as if some battle had been fought (which ritualistically it had).  I’ve manipulated it a bit to make it a little stranger.

    I’m going to go feed the dog and watch some tv now.