Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • Addenda Tragicus

    I mis-reported something in my previous post.  I said Adam Lanza did this with a pair of pistols.  At that time, that was the report I had, from early news items that did not mention the assault rifle.  But he used one after all, so a correction is in order.  I also said 26 people had been killed, but that was students and teachers and did not include Lanza’s mother, who he killed at home and was apparently the first victim, nor Lanza himself.

    I said “we are a people enamored with violence” and yes, I meant Americans, but obviously that is no real distinction, and the bizarreness of such incidents is hardly confined to us.  This report from China is about a similar tragedy.  (This man used a knife, and while some folks are making a point of the fact that none died as opposed to the Newtown event, I think that misses the central fact.  The report goes on to detail that this attack was only the latest in a growing number of similar assaults.)  Here is another detailing a slaughter in the wake of something we may sometimes characterize as a “western” trigger.  Then of course we have become so inured to stories of honor killings and the massacres of terrorists, it may be that we simply discount them and are willing only to focus on our own tragedies as if we should somehow be immune to this sort of thing.

    But there are two things I want to add to what I wrote yesterday that I suggest feed this kind of inexplicable event.

    The Westboro Baptist Church plans to try to picket the funerals of the children in Connecticut.  Why?  Why else?  Homosexuality.

    But we are beginning nationally to discount them as nutjobs, obsessed with their own religious celebrity.

    However, Mike Huckabee has weighed in, telling us that the shootings occurred because “we have systematically removed God from the schools.”*

    When I talked about the kinds of stories we tell ourselves, this is an example.  Most people are going to shrug this off, the overblown posturings of a disappointed presidential candidate with a viewpoint sharply athwart mainstream.  But I think that also misses a crucial point.

    I said we like very much to find reasons, to explain things, and in the face of the inexplicable we tend to grasp at anything that seems to offer a reason.  We are reluctant, it seems, to simply say “I don’t know, it was one of those things” and then keep looking for meaningful answers.  Meanwhile, these kinds of explanations hang around, suffuse the zeitgeist, drift about until sympathetic minds adopt them.

    Theology 101:  if, as we find in many strains of christian thought, “god” is by definition “within each of us”—because we are his creations and, presumably, he loves us—then any one or number of us who go into a place bring him with us.  Furthermore, children are by christian operating principles “innocent” and certainly the special ones of Jesus’ attention.  Which means that god is inextricably linked to gatherings of children and a school is chock full of god.

    Obviously, this isn’t what Huckabee and his ilk are talking about.  They mean we refuse to put up a crucifix in the classroom and hold organized prayers every day.  They aren’t interested in the nous and spirit of their propositions, only in the propaganda opportunities missed by means of the separation clause.  They don’t trust individuals to carry god with them wherever they go, they want public demonstrations and regular indoctrination seminars.

    And because we won’t do that, they suggest that god is letting slaughter happen.  God, in other words, is holding hostages and killing them (he’s all powerful, right?) when he doesn’t get his way.

    Back in the aftermath of Katrina, Pat Robertson was spewing a line that New Orleans had been inundated because we have shoved god out of our lives.  This in one of the most religious per capita nations in the Western Hemisphere.  “God doesn’t go where he’s not invited.”  He should have done a survey of the number of neighborhood churches there were (and are) in New Orleans.  It was a cruel, unworthy sentiment that was also based on the idea that his god punishes people because others ignore him—and then doesn’t tell anyone that this is the reason the tragedy happened.

    Oh, Scripture?  You mean Sodom and Gomorrah and the search for the righteous?  Lot, who was so righteous he intended handing over his daughters to a mob of horny debauchers rather than risk pissing off his god by letting his messengers be diddled?  Lot, who then later got drunk in a cave and fucked those same daughters, at their contrivance (of course, because it’s always the women at fault) because they thought the whole world had been destroyed and it was time to act like Noah’s kids and repopulate?  That story?  Very uplifting.  (I got in trouble in grade school over that one for (a) bringing up the cave and (b) wondering how come if god could send angels to Sodom to warn Lot’s family he couldn’t have sent the same pair to the cave to tell them the world was okay.)**

    You’ll forgive me if I find that kind of reasoning specious and insulting.

    Obviously, it doesn’t matter to these people what may actually be going on in the hearts and minds of others, only what we appear to have going on.

    So in the wake of a tragedy that, in any meaningful way is the equivalent of an earthquake or a tornado, we see certain folks adding to it by twisting the circumstances into an opportunity for theocratic propaganda.

    Which, intentionally or not, feeds the paranoia of certain folks by reinforcing the kind of final solution thinking they may already be indulging and which may from time to time lead to more tragedy.

    We have better stories than this.  We need to be telling them.  Often.  Loudly.

    Oh, and Huckabee’s position on firearms?

    “My position on the Second Amendment to the Constitution is as clear for me as the position held by most journalists toward the 1st Amendment. While I do not consider myself a “gun nut,” I proudly own a variety of firearms and enjoy hunting as well as sports shooting. But even if I were not a hunter or did not enjoy shooting, I would still be a firm believer in the 2nd Amendment right of Americans to own firearms for self-protection and as a matter of principle.”

    But of course, using the same twists of logic he used about Newtown, we have no right to be safe from his god.  Not even children.  (Yes, I am making a point by making an extreme case.)

    We can do better than this.

    _______________________________________________________

    * Does it need pointing out that what did the killing did not come from within the school?  That, metaphorically, evil broke in?  Yeah, well, maybe it does…

    ** Yes, I state it crudely—it is a crude story and deserves no better.

     

     

  • 12-12-12

    Because I can’t resist the date.

    Urban Abstract 2, 2012
    Circles and Levels and Clocklike Movement

    This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.  Proper appreciation must be shown.

    Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.  Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

    It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.  Long ago human beings decided the devices we invented to keep track of time actually meant something to Time itself, as if the universe was somehow required to acknowledge our conceits.

    Still, even as a purely invented coincidence, 12-12-12 is kind of cool.  How many babies will be born today and be considered extra special just because?  If someone happens to win a lottery today, the efficacy of numerically based sympathetic magic will be reinforced, even though it will still have exactly the same relationship as the odds of a coin face coming up with each of a hundred tosses as if the collective numbers of heads or tails somehow imposes necessity on each one (namely, zero).

    On the other hand, any day you wake up with something to marvel on is a win, so I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.

    I’ll be writing up a year-end assessment in a couple of weeks.  Soon it will be 2013—a numerical change about as meaningful as today’s date in the greater scheme of anything.  For instance, it is 2012 in our calendar system (Gregorian—the older Julian is similar, lacking but 13 days, which would make today the last day of November, with today’s numerically alliterative advent still to come) but 5773 in the Hebrew calendar. (A more concurrent calendar is the Holocene, which starts at the beginning of the Holocene Era—ours—by adding ten thousand years.  So it’s 12012 H.E.  I like that.)

    It’s 1434 in the Islamic calendar.  Sometimes I ponder the significance of time lapsed in cultural evolution to try to understand where a given institution is along the line.  In this case, I remember where christianity was in 1400 when seeking to comprehend current attitudes and events.  They were on the verge of the Reformation, with seething splinter groups roiling under the surface about to explode into a family feud they’re still trying to settle.  Hm.

    One of the youngest calendars is the so-called “Minguo” which is from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and dates from the founding of the Republic in 1912.  Their centenary was just celebrated.  It’s 101 in the ROC Minguo calendar.

    We’re fortunate not be stuck using the Unix calendar, which is expressed in seconds.

    The true measure of time is change.  Change in the environment, certainly, but for our purposes, changes in ourselves.  There is no calendar for such things.  Some changes are temporary, some seasonal, others permanent.  They may be profound or just occurrences that seem to have little import.  It’s a question of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

    Passagway
    Passageway

    It’s a common fallacy that our lives are telec, that they have a narrative structure, a beginning and an end in terms of purposes and goals.  If they do, it is a fact that we impose such things, but we’re not born with them.  (Born into them, perhaps, in the case of those who arrive swaddled in family expectations actively imposed.)  We have a start and a finish, which is not quite the same thing.  In between, it’s up to us to find meaning and purpose, make it out of whole cloth if we must, but waiting around for cosmic enlightenment to tell us what we’re here for invites a wasted life.  In an attempt to impose structure and suggest meaning, humans have invented numerous things—like calendars, with attendant rituals and anniversaries.  Out of the matrix of such things many of us find relevance among ourselves and that is not a bad thing at all.

    In truth, each of us brings to such things what we have and are, whether we accept others’ definitions or not.  I wish people Merry Christmas despite the fact that I impute no validity in the defining mythology, because Christmas is what we make it.  I don’t have a lot of patience for people bent on souring everyone else’s holiday by indulging a political or theological hissy-fit—on either side of the Belief Divide.  I have my own resonances with it and take pleasure from the memory and æstethic significance on which I accrued that meaning.  I watch A Christmas Carol every year, drink egg nog, embrace my friends, and nurture a hearth-glow of fellowship.  I do not have to accept the fables to experience a “holiday spirit” every bit as real as those who do—nor do I appreciate those who insist on dumping cynicism and political scatalogy onto the season in an attempt to ruin it for everyone else in a misguided pursuit of some adherence to reason.  Truth and fact are often only coincidentally related, and the truth of the season is something greater than what is contained in the details of a given story.

    The Gift of the Magi is my guiding narrative…for what it may be worth.

    Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Season’s Wishes, etc etc etc.

    Whatever calendar you use, have a good day.

  • Book Recommendation

    This week at Left Bank Books, as December begins and Christmas is upon us, a number of books—Staff Picks (all of us have them, please check out the list)—are being offered at discount for on-line purchase.  For Wednesday, the 5th, my particular pick is…

    China Miéville’s novel Embassytown is, to my mind, one of the best science fiction novels published in the last decade.  Not necessarily the best novel published as science fiction, but one of the best examples of what science fiction at novel length can do.

    Maybe that’s a fine distinction, possibly one without a difference, but what I want to talk about now is what I mean by “science fiction” in this context and recommend a first-rate experience.

    It’s an ongoing debate, and Miéville himself has weighed in on it, namely the definition of science fiction, principally in relation to fantasy.  What it comes down to for me is a question of philosophical utility.  Does the text at hand offer an examination of the “real world” consequences of a philosophical question given the constraints of a universe we recognize as that which is accessible by science?

    A bit long-winded, maybe, but insofar as any fictive enterprise can be shown to deal with the consequences of questions, the defining terms in this instance—or at least the limiting terms—are “philosophical”, “real world”, and “science.”

    Let me deal with this quickly, since I’ve dealt with it at length elsewhere.  By science I do not mean the rigorous application of what we know of science—if that were to be the determinant, 99% of SF would not qualify, and of that which did, a goodly portion would be enjoyable for a relatively small, self-selected audience.  What I mean by this is more on the order of an æsthetic stance vis a vis the narrative, mainly that the background setting and the foreground action conform to the forms we readily identify as “scientifically defined.”  The universe as understood by scientific enquiry.

    Basically, a vision of a “real world” that we can recognize and agree fits with what we can understand as how the universe operates.

    This automatically throws out most fantasy conceits.  (If you take the trouble to redefine your elves and fairies as parallel human species ala evolutionary branching or as aliens, you have retasked your imagery to perform a science fictional exploration.)

    Which leaves what I consider the most interesting and salient of components, namely the philosophical aspect.

    Science fiction is self-consciously philosophical, insofar as it is deeply, principally concerned with questions of how to live in a changed universe.  Not just technologically, but ethically and morally.

    Which brings me to the Miéville and my rather bold claim that it is one of the best science fiction novels of the last decade.

    The conceit dealt with here is the question of language and its relation both to biology and to a universe that evolves, changes, and is largely unexplored.  Miéville gives an alien race whose language is hardwired into their biology.  They do not “learn” it, they are born with it and simply mature into its proper use.

    And they cannot, therefore, lie.

    Enter humans.

    The humans, as is our wont, work to learn to communicate with these aliens—the novel is set primarily on the alien homeworld, where humans have a single, rather naked and fragile colony/embassy— and when they succeed, they nearly destroy these aliens, who in response to the threat very nearly destroy the colony.

    Throughout, there is discussion and examination of language, its uses, and how it relates to both the universe at large and the inner landscape of individuals.  The examination, which in many ways is an abstrusely philosophical one, is absolutely central to the action of the novel.

    And this is what good science fiction does!

    I won’t here go into further detail.  To do so risks spoilers and if you’re in least interested, you will not thank me.  (I will say that Miéville has produced one of my favorite lines in all science fiction.  No, I won’t tell you that, either.  I want you to have the fist-pump experience I did when I read it.)

    I must also add that while in some ways what I have described might easily be seen as a dry, plodding work, the exact opposite is true.  Miéville is a gifted stylist and his prose rush along, carrying the reader through an adventure.

    So for Christmas, for yourself, for a treat, go on-line at Left Bank Books and buy a copy.  Read it, give it away as a gift, feed the SF geek in your life, or introduce someone who has stubbornly refused to see the merit in all this “space stuff” to something of undeniable intellectual worth.  Wednesday, December 5th, it’s 20% if bought online.

    Do it.  You’ll be glad you did.

  • I Love Jazz

    We had a treat recently and I wanted to share a bit of it.

    I like jazz.

    No, that’s not accurate.  I love jazz.  So imagine my delight to be asked to work an event at our local jazz spot, Jazz At The Bistro, selling copies of John Pizzarelli’s new memoir, World On A String, for Left Bank Books, during his quartet’s Saturday night performance.

    There is something about live jazz that just goes right into me.  A good group of masterful musicians, having a conversation on stage, it’s just magic.  Pizzarelli is one of the best guitarists in the business and frankly, I didn’t fully appreciate just how good he is till this event.

    You can play a game listening to a musician of picking out influences.  Who is it this player derived inspiration from?  I heard Les Paul, Joe Pass, Wes Montgomery, Larry Coryell, half a dozen others, but a truly good musician takes all those and makes something new out of them, something all his or her own, and Pizzarelli is at that level.  It was an amazing show.

    So I thought I’d share a bit with the video below.  Oh, and please follow the links above and buy the book and his albums.

     

     

    John, by the way, is the son of legendary guitarist Bucky Pizzarelli, who seems to have been around forever and been on damn near everything.

  • Archive

    I have published 529 posts on this blog.

    Absurd.

    I started the Distal Muse as part of an effort toward self-promotion, an effort that has in some ways failed.  But in the years since it was first established (I think it’s first incarnation, as part of a ridiculously complicated site, was 2003) I’ve used it to hone a skill—the short essay—and indulge whims that I frankly have little interest in trying out professionally.  After that original site was replaced by the current one, in 2006 or ’07, I started using it for all sorts of things, including putting up original art.

    I look back over what is here and I’m pleasantly dismayed at the variety.  Not altogether pleasantly nonplussed by some of the content.  But, for better or worse, it’s all mine.

    Some of it, I think, is not half bad.  (May not be half good, either, but that’s a matter of taste.  I think.)

    Since its commencement, I’ve added a FaceBook page and, more recently, Twitter (at my agent’s urging; I’m not really sure how to use that one), to which I link my new posts.  Since one of the purposes of this whole enterprise is to ATTRACT ATTENTION TO MYSELF (to gain an audience, you understand), I thought I’d start using the archive, and link to older posts that may pique the interest of some of the good folks who now subscribe to my various digital presences.

    Obviously, anyone can peruse the archive any time they want, and to my pleasant surprise, some do.  But I thought this might make it easier.

    Yes, I’m trying to get more regular readers.  But I also have a small vanity which chafes at the idea that past work will fade into total obscurity.

    So while I may not post as much new work here as I have been lately (an inordinate amount of which has been political—duh, I wonder why!), I hope folks will indulge in my previous babblings and may find something worthwhile therein.

    Erosions

  • Where Is Found A Soulful Mind?

    Roger Ebert, the film critic, recently wrote a piece about the possible death of the Liberal Arts.  It’s disturbing, not so much for the dire forecast of a nation of business majors and software geeks who know nothing of Montaigne, Sontag, or Charlie Chaplin, but because of what it implies about those who keep track of Culture.

    We are university-centric in our appraisal of where the Culture lies, where it is going, and what value we produce of what may be called a national geist.  Ebert talks about the days in which writers were celebrities and the universities, if not the actual mothers of such luminaries, were at least their midwives.  If there is one thing we have all learned in the last half century, though, it is that such institutions—and their products—are expensive.

    Blame for the death of the Liberal Arts is lain at the feet of conservatives, but here is where I would like to start teasing these definitions apart.  Genuine conservatives, those with whom I grew up and became most familiar, were the champions of the Liberal Arts.  This was before the term “Liberal” became inextricably tangled with the concepts of “permissiveness” and “socialism.”  Because of the constant hammering both liberalism and conservatism have taken in recent years from a class of philistine whose twin deities are money and conformity, we have lost sight of what both of those labels originally meant and, worse yet, the kind of country they informed.

    William F. Buckley jr. may have been many things, but poorly-read was never one of them, nor was he an advocate for the kind of close-minded censoriousness that has poisoned the Right today.  Presently, George Will carries the torch of a conservatism fast vanishing in the flood of a reactionary myopia that passes for conservative but is nothing but avaricious opportunism dressed up in an ill-fitting suit of Victorianesque disapproval.

    But then Ebert goes on to remark on his comment log and how refreshingly well-read, educated, and enthusiastic his readers seem to be.  The Liberal Arts is not dead or even dying.

    But it may no longer have a comfortable place in universities, which charge a small fortune for an education with which the buyer not only wants but needs to cash in.  Degrees in philosophy, except for a rare few, pay poorly in a job market grown increasingly cutthroat by dint of the exclusion of the kind of broad outlook once supplied by a Liberal Arts education.  Why bother with Thomas Paine when he died poor, a loser?  Or Herman Melville, who had to quit writing because it didn’t pay well enough to support him?  One could go down the list.

    And yet.

    People read.  Widely.  Minds rove over as broad a range of interests as at any time in the past—more, as there is more to learn, to see, to experience.  It would seem the Liberal Arts is far from dying.  It has only moved out on its own.

    I’ve encountered students who refuse to read.  They want to know only those things that will garner them good salaries and all that this implies.  Success.  Goodies.  “Why read F. Scott Fitzgerald?  Hell, I read Ayn Rand in high school.  That’s my kinda culture. ”

    I have no time for them.  Were I a teacher in a college, I’d flunk them and send them from the hall.  They are as clueless and feckless as they think others are who pay attention to the contents of the mind.

    Tell me this—once you have the six-figure salary and the 2200 square foot condo and the BMW, what are you going to do with yourself in those moments when you’re the only one to keep you company?  Other than winning a footrace, what have you done?  When you look around for something to Do, how will you recognize what is of value, of worth, of substance?

    I know, most people like this could care less.  If they don’t have any culture now, they think, if they think about it at all, that they can always buy some later, when they’re “secure” or ready to retire.

    Unfortunately, by then they may only be able to recognize “value” as the price tag on the frame rather than the world that’s on the canvas.

  • New (ish) Job

    Okay, I’m going to be a bit less here for a while. For one thing, I think I’m fairly toasted from the election season.  My blood pressure hasn’t been this consistently tasked since, I don’t know.  And the aftermath has gone from bad to silly.  Sure, I could probably comment on the silly (oh, the stupid—it hurts precious, it hurrrtsss), but why?  Just seeing it should be enough and I don’t need to get angry all over again every day.

    Look, guys (yeah, you old white farts who seem to think the only two things of value in this country are money and the military), Romney lost.  He lost because people didn’t like him.  Although, to be fair, a lot of people apparently did like him.  Maybe.  Maybe it was just that a lot of people don’t like Obama.  But apparently not enough to vote for Romney.  Anyway, you seem to be trying to find every other reason under the sun (or under a rock) to explain that so you don’t have to face the most likely reason—your policy positions don’t appeal, Romney didn’t have enough “charm” to overcome his deficiencies as a candidate, and a majority of people, in spite of a long campaign of disinformation, defamation, and distraction, think Obama should have another four years to see what he started through.  Romney lost because voters preferred something else.  It’s that simple.  You want to change that for next time?  Do something about the nonsense in your party, grow up, and stop fooling around with issues that piss people off.  Then come back and talk to us.

    Also, it is not the end of the world.  It’s not even the end of the world as you know it.  Obama is not the anti-christ, he’s not a socialist, he’s not going to end liberty (I actually saw that declaration often, that his re-election would be the end of our freedom, and I couldn’t help but wonder: what do you people think is going to happen?  And ancillary to that is: just what can’t you do today that you could do five years ago, other than maybe afford the mortgage on your McMansion? Jeez, folks, get a grip!)  In four years you’ll have another shot at trying out your vision, the election will happen, and people will vote.  America will go on.

    Anyway, that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about today. Ahem!

    I have a new job.  Newish, anyway.  I’ve been doing some on-again off-again work for Left Bank Books this past year.  They opened a downtown St. Louis location a few years back and it’s been taking a while for people to become aware of it.  So I took walks around, meeting people, letting them know the good news, that they have a full service—independent—bookstore right in their midst.  Now and then, I’d repeat, remind, find some new folks, and it seemed to have a small effect.  Business picked up.

    I’ve now joined them as part of their regular staff.  Part time.  I’m still trying to launch a literary career, after all, and I need time to, you know, be literary.  But how cool is this, that I get to work in a bookstore now?

    Peruse their webpage.  These folks do a lot.  Many, many author events, lots of programs, reading groups.  Now, obviously, to do cool things requires cool people, and they have more than enough.  The last few weeks I’ve been trained by some and they rate high on my cool people meter.

    So if you wonder at my lack of comment here or you can’t get me on the phone as often as you might like, well, this is why.  As we wait for the fuse to catch on the rocket of my best sellerdom (yeah, right), I’ll be there, wandering amid the shelves and offerings and drooling (dryly, dryly, can’t get the pages wet) and wondering why I won’t live long enough to read all the really great books.

    Oh, yeah, I’m still writing stories.  I have a little news on that front as well, but I’ll save it for later.

    So have a good rest of the year, check back from time to time (I’m a little compulsive about this, I will be posting something), and maybe if any of you are in St. Louis, come on by Left Bank.

  • Noir At The Bar 2 (Two), Too

    I have a new short story in this anthology.  really, you should go buy one.  I mean, I’m not the only one in it, there are many stories by some really good writers.  They even went so far as to do this rather interesting book trailer:

    Look who else is in this!

     

    Erik Lundy
    John Rector
    Caleb J. Ross
    Hilary Davidson
    Aaron Michael Morales
    Matthew C. Funk
    Kevin Lynn Helmick
    John Hornor Jacobs
    Jane Bradley
    Matthew McBride
    Cortright McMeel
    Fred Venturini
    Gordon Highland
    David James Keaton
    Nic Young
    Jason Makansi
    Robert J. Randisi & Christine Matthews
    Jesus Angel Garcia
    Tim Lane
    Nate Flexer
    Glenn Gray
    Duane Swierczynski
    Jon McGoran
    Les Edgerton
    Frank Bill
    Mark W. Tiedemann
    Benjamin Whitmer

    I mean, hell…that’s a lot of bang for the buck.

    You can buy it from Subterranean Books.  Not to be confused with Subterranean Press, which is completely different.

  • Some Thoughts On SF, Nostalgia, Words

    This past weekend I attended our local convention,  Archon.  It’s a St. Louis convention that’s not actually in St. Louis, for many reasons too convoluted to go into here, and this one was number 36.  Which means, with a couple of exceptions, I’ve been going to it for three decades.  (Our first con was Archon 6, which featured Stephen King as GoH, and thus was something of a media circus.  I met several writers, some whose work I knew and loved, others of whom I just then became acquainted—George R.R. Martin, Robin Bailey, Charles Grant, Joe Haldeman, Warren Norwood. Some have passed away, others are still working.)

    I go now to meet up with friends of long acquaintance, in whose company we have spent relatively little actual face-time, but who by now have become touchstones in our lives.  It’s odd having people who feel so close that you see at most one weekend a year.  Granted, the internet has helped bridge those gaps, but it’s still a curious phenomenon, one which I kind of dealt with this weekend on at least one panel.

    This year, the novel that seems to have garnered the most awards was Jo Walton’s Among Others. It won both the Nebula Award and the Hugo Award, both times beating out what I considered the best science fiction novel of perhaps the last decade, China Miéville’s Embassytown.  

    Now, please don’t misunderstand—I thought Among Others was a marvelous novel.  I enjoyed it thoroughly, was, in fact, delighted by it, and certainly being delighted is one of the chief pleasures of reading.  I do not here intend any slight on the work.

    But it took two awards that are supposed to honor the best science fiction of the year, and Among Others was barely fantasy.  (One of the things I admired about it was the line Walton danced around separating the fantasy from actual occurrence and simple perception on the part of the characters.)  It is in the long tradition of English boarding school stories, written as the diary of a girl who is somewhat isolated, who has run away from her mad mother (who may be a witch) after a tragic loss of her sister and a crippling accident.  Living with her father now, she is placed in a boarding school where her love of science fiction is one of her chief methods of coping. The novel then chronicles the succession of books she reads over a year or two, many of which were exactly the books I was reading then and loving.  It is in that sense an overview of a particular period in SF, one I found myself reliving with immense pleasure.

    Embassytown, on the other hand, is solidly SF built on a very meaty idea that plays out with intensity and provokes a great deal of thought—everything SF is supposed to do.  It is also marvelously well-written and to my mind was hands down the best of the year, if not, as I said, the last decade.

    But it lost to the Walton.

    Why?

    So I proposed a panel at Archon to discuss the power of nostalgia in a field that is presumed to deal with cutting edge, next level, philosophically stimulating ideas.  It’s supposed to take us new places.  Granted, most of it no longer does—instead it takes us to some very familiar places (after eight decades of definably “modern” SF, how many “new” places are there really to go?) and in the last couple of decades, it’s been taking us to some very old places, alá Steampunk and alternate history.  I’d never given much thought to this before as a nostalgic longing because in both cases the writers are still proposing What If? scenarios that ask questions about the nature of historical inevitability and technological destiny.  The story might well be set in 1890, but it’s not “our” 1890 and we have to come to grips with the questions of why “our” 1890 has preference in the nature of human development.

    But Among Others didn’t even do that.  It was just a recapitulation of one fan’s love of a certain era of fiction.

    Again, absolutely nothing wrong with that and I say again, Among Others is a fine novel, I unhesitatingly recommend it.

    My question in the panel had to do with the potential for exhaustion in SF.  Paul Kincaid talks about this here in an examination of two of the best Best of the Year anthologies, Dozois’ and Horton’s.  In my own reading, I’ve noticed a resurgence of old models—planetary romance, space opera, etc (Leviathan Wakes by James S.A. Corey for instance)—where we’re seeing writers take these comfortable, familiar forms and rework them with more contemporary sensibilities, broader perspectives, certainly in many instances more skillful prose.  But the “cutting edge” seems to be occupying narrower slices of the collective SF zeitgeist.  (William Gibson, to my mind still one of the most interesting SF writers, has all but given up writing SF in any concrete fashion and is now doing contemporary thrillers from an SF perspective.  Is this cutting edge or an admission that there simply isn’t anywhere “new” to go?  Likewise with Neal Stephenson, who opted to go all the way back to the Enlightenment and rework that as SF—taking the notions of epistemology and social science and applying them to the way a period we thought we knew unfolded from a shifted perspective.)

    Kincaid’s piece talks about insularity in the field, which is not a new criticism—arguably, the recent upsurge in YA in the field is a direct response to the ingrown, jargon-laden incestuousness of the field in the 80s and 90s, where it seemed that if you hadn’t been reading SF since the early Seventies you simply would not understand what was going on—but I’m wondering if a new element has been added, that of an aging collective consciousness that unwittingly longs for the supposedly fertile fields of a previous Golden Age in publishing, an age before Star Trek and Star Wars and cyberpunk, when it was easier (supposedly) to write an almost pastoral kind of science fiction and you didn’t need a degree in physics or history or cultural anthropology to find your way.  (I suspect the tenacity of iconic worlds like the aforementioned Star Trek and Star Wars can be explained by a very common need for continuity and familiarity with a story that you can access as much through its fashions as its ideas.)

    Having just turned 58, and feeling sometimes more behind the curve both technologically and culturally, I’m wondering if, in a small way, the accolades given to a work of almost pure nostalgia is indicative of a wish for the whole magilla to just slow down.

    (The trajectory of my own work over the last 20 years is suggestive, where I can see my interests shift from cool ideas, new tech, stranger settings, into more personal fiction where the internal landscapes of my characters take more and more precedence.  And many of them are feeling a bit lost and clueless in the milieus in which I set them.  Not to mention that I have moved from space opera to alternative history, to more or less straight history and into contemporary…)

    The panel was lively and inconclusive—as I expected, because I didn’t intend answering my own question, only sparking discussion and perhaps a degree of reflection.

    SF goes through cycles, like any other art form, and we see the various subsets rise and fall in popularity.  There’s so much these days that I may be missing things and getting it all wrong.  The reason I brought it up this time is a response to the very public recognition of a given form that, this year, seems to have trumped what I always thought science fiction is about.

    I confess, there are many days I look back to when I first discovered SF, and the impact it had on my adolescent mind (and the curious fact that when I go reread some of those books I cannot for the life of me see what it was about them that did that—no doubt I was doing most of it for myself, taking cues from the works) and when I first thought about becoming a writer.  It does (falsely) seem like it would have been easier “back then” to make something in the field.  Such contemplation is a trap—you can get stuck in a retrograde What If every bit as powerful as the progressive What If that is supposed to be at the core of science fiction.

  • My World of Tomorrow

    This weekend I’ll be attending the local science fiction convention, Archon.  I’ve only missed a couple of these since 1982, when Donna and I went to out very first SF convention, Archon 6. Stephen King was guest of honor and we got to meet many of the writers we’d been reading and enjoying, some, at least in my case, for many years.  Until that year I hadn’t even known such things happened.

    Science fiction for me was part of the fundamental bedrock of my life’s ambitions.  Not just writing it or reading it, but in a very real sense living it.  It is difficult to recapture that youthful, naïve enthusiasm for all that was the future.  The vistas of spaceships, new cities, alien worlds all fed a growing æsthetic of the shapes and content of the world I wanted very much to live in.

    I’ve written before of some of the aspects of my childhood and adolescence that were not especially wonderful.  My love of SF came out of that, certainly, but it was altogether more positive than merely a flight response from the crap of a less than comfortable present.  I really thought, through a great deal of my life, that the world was heading to a better place.  I found the informing templates and ideas of that world in science fiction, in the positivist philosophy underlying so much of it.

    And I liked that world!

    It was not a world driven by bigotry or senseless competition for competition’s sake.  It was not a world where deprivation was acceptable because of innate fatalism or entrenched greed.  It was not a world that lumped people into categories according to theories of race or economics that demanded subclasses.

    True, a great many of the novels and stories were about exactly those things, showing worlds where such attitudes and trends dominated.  But they were always shown as examples of where not to go.  You could read the paranoid bureaucratic nightmares of Philip K. Dick and know that he was telling us “Be careful, or it will turn out this way.”  We could read the dystopias of a Ballard or an Aldiss and see them as warnings, as “if this goes on” parables.

    You could also read Ursula Le Guin and see the possibilities of alternative pathways.  You could read Poul Anderson and see the magnificent civilization we might build.  You could read Clarke and glean some idea of how people could become more than themselves.

    You could see the future.

    And what did that future offer?  By the time I was eighteen I knew I wanted to live in a world in which we are all taken as who we are, humans beings, and nothing offered to one group was denied another just because.  I recognized that men and women are equals, that our dreams and ambitions are not expanded or diminished by virtue of gender.  I understood that building is always more important than tearing down.  I discovered that Going There was vital and that the obstacles to it were minor, transitory things that sometimes we see as too big to surmount, but which are always surmountable.

    Sure, these are lessons that are drawn from philosophy and science and ethics.  You can get to them by many paths.  I just happened to have gotten to them through science fiction.

    I envisioned a world wherein people can engage and interact with each other fearlessly, without arbitrary barriers, and we can all be as much as we wish to be, in whatever way we wish to be it.

    So imagine my disappointment as I watch the world veer sharply in so many ways from that future.  A world where people with no imagination, avaricious or power hungry, people of truncated and stunted souls are gaining ground and closing those doors.

    There is a girl in Pakistan who may yet die.  She’s 14 years old and she was shot by the Taliban because she dared to stand against them.  She assumed her right to go to school, something the Taliban refuse to accept—females should not go to school—and rather than engage her ideas they shot her to silence her.

    In our own country we have men in places of power who think women shouldn’t have the right to control their own bodies, others who opine that maybe slavery wasn’t so bad after all, others who deny the legitimacy of science because it contradicts their wishes and prejudices.

    This is not the world I imagined.  Why would any sane person deny anyone the right to an education?  How could the community around this girl even tacitly support this idea?  This is so utterly alien to me that it is incomprehensible.  This is evil.  This is not the world of tomorrow, but some kind of limpet world, hermetically sealed inside its own seething ignorance that, like a tumor, threatens everything that I, for one, believe is worth while.

    So I write.  I write stories and I write this blog and I write reviews and I write and I talk and I argue.  It is disheartening to me how many people use their ignorance as a barrier to possibility, to change, to hope.  I can’t help sometimes but think that they would have benefited in their childhood from more science fiction.

    I still have hope.  It still comes from the source well of my childhood imagination, that we can build a better world.  If that’s naïve, well, so be it.  Harsh reality, unmitigated by dreams of beauty and wonder, makes brutes of us all.

    See you at Archon?