Mark W Tiedemann

Category: Writing

  • The Wrong One

    So…I’m again rewriting the historical mystery.  Thought I was done with this draft and had only to await the edits from my most excellent agent, but alas, I have this impish ethical streak that won’t let me just slide…

    Basically, I came up with a minor, almost throwaway, solution to a tiny plot problem as part of the whole revamp and happily sent the novel forth.  But then that solution began to grow in my imagination, like a tumor, until I realized that I had a much bigger problem arising from the solution.  Not to worry!  It would form the basis for the next book in the series!

    That settled, I went about doing other things.

    Only my unconscious kept churning on it and wouldn’t let me drop it like that.  I had created a growing organism within the body of my novel that had to be dealt with.  Argh!

    Yes, I said argh!  because I wanted to get on with other things.  But.  Not to be. The coup de gras came last weekend over an excellent dinner with my friend Carolyn Gilman (who has a new novel out and you really ought to go get it and read it ’cause it’s really, you know, good).  Carolyn works for the Missouri History Museum and her current project is the Revolutionary War in the West—exactly the place and period in which my novel is set.  In the course of the conversation we stumbled on some little-known—no, that’s an understatement—some previously unexamined aspects of the Battle of St. Louis and George Rogers Clark and all that which irritated my tumor into full-blown eruption and I realized that I had to do this rewrite now!

    This made me a bit nervous, as Stacia, my agent, has had what we thought was the second to last draft for a few months now and I had no idea how deep into it she’d gotten and I had to tell her to hold off—

    The revisions will make this a much better book and when I described them to Stacia she was not only supportive but excited and so now I’m a hundred pages into a new draft.  I’ll just give you a little hint as to what was wrong and if anyone remembers this after the book comes out you can ask me about it and I’ll recount the tale.  Basically I had the wrong murderer.

    Embarrassing, I know, but hey, not even the historical facts I learned from Carolyn are particularly well known and the interpretation she’s putting on them are unique, so I don’t feel like a total slacker.

    Anyway, if I’m not posting here much in the next few weeks, this is why.  So have a happy, healthful Turkey Day, everyone.

  • China Mieville and the Ideology of SF

    Now for something fascinating having to do with writing. I just saw this lecture by China Mieville, who I feel is one of the most interesting writers working today. He’s tackling a subject I’ve chewed over quite a lot—the distinction between SF and Fantasy and the theoretical arguments about SF exceptionalism. I have some quibbles, but I would love to sit down with this guy and hash this through, because, to my ear, he’s exactly where I’ve been in terms of what to look at when talking about this.

     

     

    I don’t disagree with a single critical element he brings up—and, as he points out, none of what he brings up is particularly new.

    One quibble I have is a minor historical point, and this may be a result of my arrival in the genre as a potential practitioner at a time in which advocates of Fantasy were the ones making the grand argument that science fiction was “merely” a subgenre of fantasy—a claim many SF writers (and readers) took loud exception to. Fantasy was gaining ground then in the market and was shoving SF aside as the apparent preferred genre of fantastic literature and was basking in its ascendancy and making claims about how the two really weren’t any different. (Interesting that Darko Suvin’s assertions were published in 1979, about the time this argument was being made most forcefully, a few years before the market reflected the preference of Fantasy over SF.)

    For my part, aside from matters of taste, I’ve never really argued that SF is “better” than Fantasy, at least not in any theoretical sense. Only different. I’ve found most examples of hybrids problematic at best, absurd at worst, because of—as Mieville points out—the ideological underpinnings informing them as genres. So the only reason I have ever had a dog in that hunt came from the assertion made by Fantasy advocates about SF being a sub-form and, occasionally, inferior (sometimes by virtue of being hypocritical, sometimes by virtue of an embarrassing specificity).

    (As a personal observation, I find I prefer reading SF and find it very difficult to read Fantasy. However, I can watch Fantasy easily and pleasurably. Only when the quite different faculties employed in reading come into play do I find most Fantasy simply unappealing.)

    Anyway, I’d like to offer the video above. I found it quite fascinating and lucid and I agreed with about 90% of it.

  • Dressing Up

    It’s Hallowe’en.  No news to anyone, we’ve been immersed in it for weeks now.  But this year I’ve been doing a lot of introspective reminiscing and I’ve come to realize that Hallowe’en should always have been my favorite festive occasion.

    See, I’ve been wearing costumes all my life.

     

    The last time I went out on a Hallowe’en night in costumes I was 14.  A little old you say?  I agree, but I wasn’t doing the trick’or’trreating, I was being part of the security detail accompany a group of littler kids.  Nevertheless, I always liked getting into costume, into a character, and I went as a town sheriff, complete with a six-gun on my hip.  That would be questionable today, especially as the weapon I wore was a Mattel Fanner Fifty, which looked real.  Except for some high-end models, toy guns don’t look real anymore, and I understand the thinking behind it.  Even when I was a kid there were incidents of robberies done at (toy) gun-point, because for over a decade toy companies, following the Mattel model, made more and more realistic guns.  The Mattels were all like three-quarter size, but in the heat of the moment that’s not going to count for much.  So gradually, authenticity yielded to social reality, and now you have all these bizarre looking things out of bad SciFi movies with tell-tale orange tips screaming TOY!

    Anyway, I went out for a couple of hours, acting as protector of the smaller children, wearing a beard made from burnt cork, a dime-store Stetson, and my six-shooter slung low on the hip.

    I loved it.

    But you get older, some things that were adorable at eight are just weird at eighteen.  Going to dress-up Hallowe’en parties in my adolescence and early adulthood were not that common.  Besides I lost all my toy guns.

    (I had a double-holster set of Mattel “shootin-shell” pistols, black holsters, silvered with fake ivory grips.  They were wonderful!  You could get bullets for them with pressure-plate releases on the back of the spring-loaded cartridges that, when the hammer struck, launched little plastic shells about five or six feet.  I was rough on my toys, always was, and eventually the grips came off, they broke, they ended up neglected and one day tossed.  Here’s a picture of the set:

     

     

     

     

    I loved that set.  Outrageously expensive now.  Here is a site with all the Mattel western toys of the period.)

    Even before that, though, I used to get creative.  When first introduced to Hallowe’en, the costumes were less than wonderful.  Basic sized pull-overs, like jump suits, tied in the back, and a molded plastic mask with large eye holes.  The fabric was cheap, the costumes usually ill-fitting, and almost always ending up in the trash.  The last one of those I had was a Superman costume when I was eleven—it was a little embarrassing because they insisted on tricking it out with glitter on the chest sigil and there was no symbol on the cape.  No matter what, you didn’t look like Superman.

    (Yes, I know—eleven?  Seriously?  What can I say?  I prolonged childhood as long as I could.  In some ways, I’m still a kid.)

    Childhood for me was a series of roles in which I would immerse myself.  Anything, I suppose, to escape the prison of my own self.  Despite my “delicacy” I was really invested in being a soldier.  One year I even had “real” fatigues.  Never had a steel helmet, but I recall the Sixties being a very cool time for toys like this.  I had a G.I. helmet with the mesh for stuffing camouflage in—leaves and the like—which my mother hated because I tracked debris into the house after a hard day fighting Nazis or Japanese.  I had a real cartridge belt with canteen, the envy of the neighborhood, and a couple of very cool rifles.  I had one of the first battery-powered M-14s in the neighborhood.  This one actually made a very neat sound, a heavy thum-thum-thum as the tip of the barrel moved in and out (in what now I can see was a rather disturbing sexual motion, but then it was all about killing bad guys).

    I took on a James Bond persona for a few years—my best dressed time in childhood, even my hair was perfectly groomed (lot of Brylcream) and I had a couple of automatic pistols—but never a shoulder holster.  Awkward when trying to carry a replica Luger in the small inside pocket of a sport coat.  It kept falling out every time I bent over.

    Much of that faded through high school, but by then I was trying to write.  I look at it now and I see that I never stopped putting on costumes, only now I do it in my stories.  Try on a character, go through an adventure, be the cool secret agent or starship trooper or whatever.

    We dabbled briefly in costuming when we started attending SF conventions, but drifted away from it fairly quickly.  That wasn’t the aspect of the community that really attracted us, though I confess to a deep admiration for the skill and dedication some costumers bring to their passion.

    But tonight we will sort of dress up for the kids coming to the house to receive their booty and admire and enjoy their glee in being Something Else for the night.  Looking back, I admit that sometimes I got a little weird with some of it, but in the long run it did me no harm and probably a great deal of good to try out different personae.  And I haven’t actually stopped.  Just that the wardrobe is more expensive now—and fits better.

    Have a boo-tiful evening.

  • A Few Thoughts Concerning Margaret Atwood

    Actually, just one. I’d like her to stop trying to be an authority on science fiction. I haven’t read her new book of essays on the topic, but I’ve heard her in interviews and read some of her thoughts in the past, and based on that she’s pretty much a tourist. Back when her publisher thought claiming her work was science fiction would hurt her sales, she misunderstood the genre magnificently (“Oh, sci-fi has rockets in it. I don’t do that.”) A lot of it reminded me of Susan Sontag’s egregiously off-base attempt to define it.

    Of course, being in the same company as Sontag isn’t a bad thing, especially not if you want to remain within the fold of the folks who persistently fail to “get” any kind of genre work. But it has become obvious that Atwood likes some of the aesthetic possibilities in SF and can’t help using them, and it has become likewise obvious that claiming common cause with SF isn’t hurting her sales, so now she’s a very Out There advocate.

    But she still doesn’t get it. In a recent interview she characterized SF as basically religious, since it speaks to the desire to embrace something vast and elemental and be awed—the way one is supposed to be awed by religious epiphany and ritual evocation of spiritual connection.

    There are two things wrong with this. One, it suggests that the only way humans can experience awe and wonder is within a framework that can only be defined as religious. Two, it ignores the decades-long assault on paradigms that is the core impulse in written SF. Religion is nothing without the continuity of its paradigms, preserved as they are by the acceptance of their unassailability. But, like science, science fiction has no reverence for paradigms that fail to explain anything and the tendency is to go at them tooth and claw in order to rip away the caul that muffles genuine transcendence. This is not religious in the least—it is, if anything, the aesthetic of the newest gadget, a consumer culture variant that says anything done last year is, you know, Last Year.

    That said, science fiction is also like an overcrowded antique shop whose proprietors just can’t bring themselves to throw anything out. Everything that was ever done in the genre since 1926 is still there, used and reused, and that, too, is very much like science.

    Because being “wrong” in the overall sense doesn’t mean all the bits by themselves are in error or are useless. Alchemy and Chemistry are separated by an insurmountable barrier of fact, but some of the laboratory methodology devised in alchemy is still useful in modern chemistry, at least conceptually. Einstein superseded Newton in ability to explain the universe at large, but we haven’t tossed Newton in the dustbin when it comes to working out simple cause-and-effect relations on the macro scale. No one takes Doc Smith’s Lensmen series seriously anymore, but we’re still writing about starships, elite cadres of supercompetent heroes, and interstellar warfare with inscrutable aliens. We just don’t do it with the kind of naivete E.E. Smith used.

    But more than that, the points we’re making are different. We’ve moved on to more sophisticated themes, or even themes that were not considered at all half a century ago. John W. Campbell Jr. declared in the pages of Astounding that no aliens could be morally superior to humans. That’s a laughable, pathetic idea today, but we do still wrestle with the potential relationships.

    Ms. Atwood should read more fantasy if she wants to find religious fiction. Science Fiction is all about how the universe is not dependable, reliable, or amenable to petition. Religion is about finding a way to stability through the assertion of belief over circumstance. Science is about figuring out how things work. Science Fiction is about how to live in the universe science shows us, which offers only the most conditional stability.

    To be fair, I understand where she might get that idea, that SF is religious. It’s the awe, the “sense of wonder”, that is difficult to separate from one of the “varieties of religious experience.” And it may well be that people turn to religion for exactly that thrill of awe. But that’s not the point of religion. And the source of the awe is very different.

    I’m glad she likes SF now. But I’m less sanguine about the expectations she will provide those just coming to SF after having read her ideas. I suspect many of them will be disappointed and give up on it. In this regard, I see her as very much like Harold Bloom, who dumped all over Harry Potter because he thought it was inferior to what he regards as worthwhile YA, all the while missing the good part of the whole Harry Potter phenomenon.

    On the the other hand, maybe it won’t make any difference. Maybe no one will really pay any attention. That, too, will be a shame.

  • There Is Contact…

    Hey, something of a more lit’rary nature now.  I have a stored reprinted in the new collection Alien Contact  edited by Marty Halpern.  Here is the cover:

     

    I am very jazzed about this for a whole bunch of reasons.  One is that I have had very few stories anthologized this way (as a reprint).  Another is the superb company I’m keeping in here—Le Guin, Swanwick, Silverberg, Cadigan, Gaiman, King, Stross, and so on and so forth.  Still another is that Marty took one of my own personal favorites, Texture of Other Ways.  This is a kind of prequel story to my Secantis Sequence.  This is about the big hairy conference that precedes the events in my novel Compass Reach and sort of sets everything in motion.

    I would put a link to direct purchase, but I don’t really want anyone to buy it from Amazon.  I’ve been in a real “support your local independent bookstore” mode for some time now, so until I find a better direct link I’d like to ask you all to go order it from your local indie.  Sorry if this is inconvenient, but that’s how I feel just now.

    Anyway, I hope y’all enjoy it, especially if you didn’t catch these stories the first time around.

  • An Age of Wonder and Annoyance

    I have two things to talk about that are related by the slenderest of threads. Bear with me.

    First I’d like to say something about how marvelous is the age in which we live, at least from the perspective of someone who has now lived in a couple of “ages” since arriving on this planet in 1954.

    A short while ago I had lunch. While having lunch I like to watch something, so I popped the DVD of The Right Stuff   into my player and settled back to my roast beef and movie.  While watching, it occurred to me how blase I’ve  become at this technology.

    See, growing up, movies were a Big Deal.  My parents went every other week at least and took me.  Going To The Movies holds a special, nostalgic place in my memory.  It was a shared event, but more than that it was in fact An Event.  TV was there, sure, but it was crappy and even at age four I kind of recognized the difference.  Movies were Big, they were Special, they were Unique—and they went away.  Though it was dependable.  The first run theaters got the new films and ran them for a week, maybe two.  The next batch were due in and they swapped them out, so the films went to the cheaper neighborhood theaters, usually only for a week.  Plus, these were double features.  You sat in the theater for up to four and half hours to see two movies.  Before I was born, it would be two movies, plus—cartoons, a short subject, maybe a news reel.  Going to movies was a significant amount of time and a major outing.

    We brought our own snacks.  Mom would make up some popcorn or put a brown bag of candy together, and we might—might—bring a bottle of soda to share.  The concession stand was more than we could afford usually.

    And after the movies left the theaters, they were gone.  If you  hadn’t seen them when they came out, during the three or four weeks they were in town at one or another theater, you were s.o.l.  Some of the bigger hits might be rereleased a year or two later and a few films were perennially rereleased, but the vast majority did not come back.  You had to remember them.

    Television changed that somewhat when networks started leasing movies to show at certain low-traffic times, and then in the late Sixites and early Seventies there were a variety of movie programs—Movie of the Week, Thursday Night At the Movies, A Picture For A Sunday Afternoon.  Suddenly all these old films started turning up again, and of course after ten P.M. local networks aired a lot of B pictures or films from the Thirties and Forties, but you had to stay up for them, and you never knew what you would get.  (Some of my favorite memories with my dad come from Friday nights, sitting up late, watching some of these movies, some of which were unintentional howlers at which we’d poke fun.)

    A lot of people today probably don’t see the wonder in being able to go to a store or online and buy a film and watch it at home.  VCRs didn’t come in till the late Seventies (and the early models weren’t great), but it ushered in an age of comparative cultural wealth.  The idea, when I grew up, that I could actually own one of these movies, for myself, and watch it when I chose to…

    You forget occasionally to sit back and appreciate what we now have.  It is amazing—the technology, yes, but the fact that I can drop a disc in a machine and watch The Maltese Falcon or  Gone With The Wind  or  The Right Stuff  whenever I please is…incredible.

    That’s the good part.

    The other amazing thing is this vast and complex online community—several communities, actually, some overlapping—that we have with more ease than it used to be to make a long distance phone call.  It’s amazing.  I can communicate with people I would never have known existed in one of those previous “ages” and talk about things only a rare handful of people I ever met face to face would even have been interested in before.  Like-minded, like-enthused, like-whatever people around the globe who can now “chat” online.

    And with whom one can trip over an area of sensitivity so fast and so inexplicably that it makes your head spin.  I have recently had this shoved in my face just how easily some folks take offense and how impossible it can be to explain yourself or extricate yourself.  Unless you want to be an ass, it is often better to simply leave the group in question rather than see the crap continually stirred.

    But because it is so easy to leave, not to mention remain anonymous, I think many people never learn the nuances of real interaction.  Distance used to serve a vital social function, namely keeping people apart by virtue of the difficulty of communicating.  Letter-writing requires thought—the trouble you have to go through to draft the letter, address it, go to the post office, etc. I think tends to make people more thoughtful and thorough.  It’s not like a casual conversation, which the ease of communication has sometimes turned the most serious conversations into because it is difficult to tell when it is time to stop cracking wise.

    Further, though, once a foul has been made, it doesn’t go away.  It perpetuates, spreads, and suddenly people all over may know all about the reputation you have earned through misadventure.

    Part of the problem—a big part, I think—is the fact of the words remaining behind after the conversation is over.  Spoken conversation has a half-life, very short, and events carry people past ill-considered phrasing or cliches, aided by the visuals, the body language and facial expression.  But when you write something down, it has weight, and online exchanges acquire significance never intended for a brief exchange.  You can consider the words, read them over again and again, and derive meaning and intent whether it’s there or not.

    The wonderfulness of our enabling technologies render us lazy, allow us to take for granted things which in an earlier time, with less speed and availability, would not have been so poorly used.

    So instead of a thoughtless sentence being immediately apologized for, brushed aside, and forgotten, the offending sentence lingers, a solid legacy that reminds and continues to irritate.  The down-side of modern ease.

    Part of the pleasure of all these things should be from not taking them for granted, from a near conscious recognition of just how cool things are.  On the one hand, we maybe have to grow thicker skins—certainly we have to learn new interpretive skills—and on the other maybe let our skins thin a little so we can sense the amazing gift much of this world is.  Hard to know where to apply what and for a whole generation or two there is the perfectly understandable if annoying question, “What’s the big deal?”

    Unfortunately, if you have to ask…

  • Online Encyclopedia

    The beta version of the online  Encyclopedia of Science Fiction is up.  Hot damn, no more wrist strain hefting the paper tome every time I want to check an obscure SFnal factoid!  Just a cursory tour shows the online edition is easy to search and has the same depth as the original, plus all the links are live.

    Alas, I am not within this one, either.  Not sure what to do about this.  No doubt many writers aren’t included—after all, the editors are merely mortal, one can’t expect them to have read everything.

    On the other hand I did get shortlisted for two relatively prestigious awards, I have published ten novels and over fifty short stories…

    Someday.  Someday.

  • Controversy Bullies

    We thrive on controversy.  Say something in this country, make a statement, be declarative, and someone will get in your face and tell you you’re wrong and suddenly there’s an audience.  People choose sides, there’s shouting.  We should license controversy vendors who appear quickly to sell tickets, popcorn, and soft drinks of choice when this happens.

    For a long time now there’s been a watchdog group with a website and an agenda to keep track of fraud committed against writers.  You would think this would be a noncontroversial, no-brainer—writers work on margin, are underpaid usually, and can’t afford attorneys to look out for their interests.  Despite exceptions, most writers rarely are able (or even, sometimes, willing) to litigate on their own behalf.  It’s time-consuming, ulcer-causing, and pricey!  And often it’s against a corporate entity that has a war chest that can spend a writer into oblivion even before the case gets before a judge.  So Writers Beware started up as a service to alert writers to who the bad guys are.  And there are—bad guys.

    Not too surprisingly, said bad guys don’t like this.  Writers Beware has taken a bite out of their bottom line, derailed some of their scams, and given writers some power to protect themselves.  That’s to be expected.

    But this is just underhanded.  Assuming for a second it is what it claims, it is to be dumbstruck at the lunacy.  Why would a writer join an organization dedicated to destroying another organization that is protecting writers?

    I don’t know who is really behind Write Agenda, but they’re going after people who have done service for writers.  If in fact individual writers are doing this, it seems as boneheaded as blue collar workers who attack unions for defending higher pay and better working conditions.

    Which happens.

    As a kid, this is simple.  There are bullies in the schoolyard.  It’s nice when the teacher looks out for them and does something, but what was better was for there to be some kid big and bad enough to take on the bullies and sort of protect the weaker ones.  That’s pretty much what such organizations like Writer Beware do.  Fraud is a criminal offense and it’s nice when an Attorney General or D.A. prosecutes for it, but the fact is they don’t have the resources (or sometimes the inclination) to police the way we’d like them to.  So occasionally a watchdog group springs up and when they’re effective, the bullies look for opportunity to get rid of them so they can return to lording it over the other kids.

    But there always seems to be a handful who don’t like the protector.  For whatever reason, they seem to prefer to get beat up rather than accept help.  It doesn’t make sense, it’s counterintuitive—maybe they don’t like feeling beholden and certainly we’d all like to be able to take care of ourselves.

    But we aren’t kids and this kind of assault is pretty common these days.  Labels get thrown around, occasionally bordering on libel or slander, tempers rise, and the controversy draws an audience.

    In this case, it’s reasonably easy to see the difference.  Writer Beware has a track record.  All The Write Agenda seems to have is a bunch of baseless assertions.  But they’re engaging in the Great American Pastime of “Let’s Create A Controversy!” combined with “Let’s You and Him Fight!”    At least we have one advantage in this one—writers (generally speaking) can read.

  • Without Naming Names

    I didn’t really enjoy Archon very much this year.  I hesitate to pin blame because so many things are going on right now that my dissatisfaction could be result of factors completely unrelated.  Any number of them might have coalesced into the hazy funk that seemed to follow me around all weekend.

    But there did seem to be a lack of focus at the convention and I was surprised at the lack of meaningful programming.  I volunteered to do two workshops, one on Saturday the other on Sunday, but except for titles and brief descriptions, there was no structure to speak of.  I showed up and improvised and the people in attendance seemed satisfied.  Copious notes were being taken in any case.

    I did get to spend time with people I only see at conventions.  A tip o’ the hat through the internets to Selina and Lynn, Vic, Tom, Rich and Michelle, and a handful of others who made it worth my while to show up.

    One thing I will say, the convention returned to Collinsville, Illinois, which is about 15 miles from my house.  Not an onerous drive except for getting over the bridge, on which this weekend there were repairs and therefore traffic jams.   The convention facilities themselves are okay—it is, after all, a convention center (Gateway) and it is designed for such things.  It used to be there was only one good hotel there, but a Drury has been added.  The dearth of decent restaurants is a problem.  I don’t consider Arby’s, Bandana’s, Ponderosa, Ruby Tuesday, or  Steak’n’Shake decent restaurants.  Fast food, sure.  But there’s still only one really good restaurant there, Porters, which is fine eating and expensive as hell.  Last year Archon moved to Westport Plaza.  I know there were complaints about it being spread out and the dealer’s rooms were on the other side of the plaza from the actual programming, but it was a cool setting, good food, decent hotels, and…

    Yeah, it’s closer to my house, but more importantly there’s no bridge that is always being repaired.

    Even so, that doesn’t explain my loss of enthusiasm.  I think I’m just really tired from the last eight months.  I’m not working on anything right now but what I want to be working on, till my agent tasks me with more revisions or something, so I’ve decided to work on the small stack of short stories I have.  Rich Horton was at Archon and pointedly lamented my non-output of short material.  So that’s what I’m doing now.

    And learning my away around Twitter.  One more distraction, but I’m told it is necessary for my coming popularity vis-a-vis my career.

    Things just seem unsettled lately.  There are reasons which I won’t go into here, but they seem to be ganging up on me.  I’m so easily distracted, I throw my hands up at merest provocation and put off till tomorrow work I really need to be doing today.  For instance, the story I should be working on is staring at my back just now, on the other computer, while I explain all this to you.  It’s a cool story, too, if I can just bring it home.  So while it’s pleasant chatting with you here, and you’re such a terrific audience patiently listening to me gripe about not much, I’m going to hit the publish button and go do that cool story.

    But I wanted to tell you about Twitter.  Really.  (See? I’m not a Luddite.)

  • What They Never Tell You When You Start