Mark W Tiedemann

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Vote

Tomorrow is a midterm election day.

I can hear it already. Yawn. What is it with progressives and anyone left of Attila the Hun? Don’t you remember what happened at the last midterm? We had record low voter turnout across the country and in a wide range of close elections—close elections—the Tea Party put enough people in congress to allow for four years of the worst congressional performance in memory.

Let me repeat that. Close elections. We had an average turnout of 23 to 27 % of eligible voters and by any metric Tea Party candidates took seats riding in on around 13 to 15 % of eligible votes. They declared a mandate and proceeded to screw things up so badly that congress has been getting its lowest approval rating since approval ratings were a thing.

The perversity of the average voter being what it is, the blame has been heaped on (a) the System and (b) the President.

The blame is really on this attitude that midterms don’t matter, coupled with a deep conviction that individual votes don’t matter, with an extra dollop of “it doesn’t matter, everything is corrupt anyway.”

The blame—really, does this need saying? Maybe it does. The blame is on bone-stupid lazy people who are too busy to pay attention and have other things to do which they think are more important. Bone stupid. How do you blame a system when you don’t even use it? How do you blame the president, who many of you voted for, when the problem is congress? Why is it so hard for people of an even mildly liberal bent or even a moderate bent to understand the importance of midterms and that the problem is not systemic unless you don’t exercise your primary control function?

Vote! Goddammit, I don’t care who you vote for so much as that you vote! There are differences between the candidates, but sometimes those differences are not apparent in the ten seconds you’re willing to glance at the platforms!

Some key points to keep in mind.

We know, we have seen, it has been demonstrated that financial sector deregulation does not work to the benefit of the working class. Yet low turnout tomorrow will result in a majority of those who have been pushing for exactly that.

We know, we have seen, it has been demonstrated that trickle down economics does not work, yet low turnout tomorrow will likely make that the standard for economic policy.

We know, we have seen, it has been demonstrated that education works less and less well when it is defunded and forced to teach to tests rather than teaching to think, yet a low turnout tomorrow will see education shortchanged even more.

We know, we have seen, it has been demonstrated that reform is necessary in several key areas and said reform has been consistently blocked by a loud, ignorant bloc of congressmen who have a nearsighted vision of the future, and yet low turnout tomorrow will hand them a larger mandate—immigration reform, infrastructure funding, science, tax reform, healthcare.

We know, we have seen, it has been demonstrated that corporations have no conscience, do not have the best interests of anyone other than their shareholders in view, and have used every single opportunity to maximize the pillage of our national treasure to the detriment of our citizens, and yet low turnout tomorrow will see an expansion of the view that corporations are somehow People and should be privileged over and above the workers they employ.

Now, it may be that those who read this will think that all those things are generally good things. Fine. Vote accordingly. But if you don’t think that’s the path we should be treading, vote accordingly but for the country’s sake, VOTE!

Naturally, I assume I’m preaching to the choir here, but who knows? It’s that choir that keeps sitting out the midterms and I’m tired of living with the results of your disinterest.

This has been a personal public service announcement.

November 3, 2014
New Work

I finally got around to putting up a new gallery in Zenfolio. There are, I note, some repeats in this one, which basically means I wanted a full 32 images in it and I really need to go in and clean up the site. It ought to be more useful and representative of my work and I’m toying with upgrading it to a professional site in order to maybe make some sales.

Something for next year, though. Meantime, I still like sharing, so enjoy.

Sample:

October 31, 2014
Games, Equity, and He-Man Woman Hater Clubs

I do not play games. I haven’t for decades. I used to play Trivial Pursuit™ and I still enjoy a game of chess, but both these games are high on the mental acuity charts and low on the following the rules charts. Sorry, but it’s true—to play Trivial Pursuit™, inane as some of the questions are occasionally, you actually have to know something about, you know, The World and its contents. That’s why people who read widely and pay attention to things outside themselves do well at it. Chess requires strategizing way outside the possibilities prescribed by the relatively simple set of rules and works the gray cells and synapses much more thoroughly than the repeatable pattern-following of many games.

Most games bore me, but more than that I am put off by the zero-sum essence of so many of them. For me to win, someone has to lose, and while that is also true in both chess and Trivial Pursuit™, it is also true that you can play both those games without having that as the primary focus. Chess is a problem-solving game and Trivial Pursuit™ is about its contents. That’s my take on both and I’m sticking to it.

Even so, I rarely play either anymore. The fundamental competitiveness of games puts me off. I’m not particularly competitive and I have too often come face to face with the ugly side of a player who staked his entire status on winning games. (I’ve played foosball once. Once. Some friends of mine and I happened to be in a bar, toying with trying the game out. None of us had played it before. We were approached by a guy who, in retrospect, was a regular and a true foosball fanatic, who offered to play by giving us a fourth. Well, he was on “my side” and I was terrible. My friends and I were laughing while trying to figure it out, but this guy damn near punched me out for being so bad. It was far more to him than “just a game” and I never tried it again.) For the most part, this is just me and I have no brief on others who are into playing games. They’re having a good time, life is short, go for it.

So this is about those who make a life out of games, especially those who have chosen to invest in those games everything of value of themselves. Obsession above and beyond the weekend warrior variety, because for these folks the game is life.

Even with that, there are many gamers for whom more is definitely merrier, they are inclusive, expansive, and social. I’m not talking about them.

I’m talking about those who are evidently very particular about who gets invited into the clubhouse.

We come now to the ongoing farce known as GamerGate. I say farce knowing full well that it has, for some, gone way beyond what may normally be meant by that word. This is not harmless. This is exemplary of just about everything negative in a certain kind of mindset. We’re talking elitism, hypercompetitiveness, insensitivity to others, paranoia, exclusiveness in the extreme, and the abandonment of empathy that comes from a psychic insularity bordering on the pathological.

Extreme?

You do not threaten people’s lives and physical safety over a fucking game!

What’s wrong with you? So there’s a girl who plays games as well if not better than you and she has some suggestions for making it better for more people. So? What’s this whole Attila the Hun thing about keeping her out and beating, raping, and maybe killing her if she doesn’t stop criticizing your fucking game? Did you miss the part that it’s a game? Didn’t your mother teach you that you don’t make threats to people just because they have a different opinion?

Or are you so terrified of women that you just can’t deal with them inside the clubhouse?

Yes, I’m using the simplest terms and models for this because I just cannot wrap my head around anyone older than nine reacting this way.

Unless, of course, we are dealing with a sociopathology that has somehow found a place within gaming from which to look out upon a world that is nothing less than an absolutely hostile place determined to take away all meaning from your life.

This is basic ingrown immaturity which in order to feel worthwhile at all seeks to define everyone else as in some way less in order for you to feel even nominally worthwhile. It appears not much more complicated than that, although I will quickly point out that simple heuristics, put in play, can often result in complex manifestations.

It would be perhaps worthwhile to see a full psychological and anthropological work-up on the mentality at work in someone who is so threatened by the presence of a female in their preferred venue of escapism that they would resort to violence to not only prevent the females from entering but to tear them down to a level of complete subservience from which they might never be able to rise again. Maybe. But I think it reasonable to say that we’ve all encountered something like this from time to time in individuals who have so little sense of who or what they are that just about anything outside their sphere of understanding demands that they ridicule, revile, and render harmless via full-bore antagonism. Rather than step outside and find out about something, better for them to shut it down, blow it up, kill it. Rather than risk the hermetic seal insulating them from any recognition that there are things which they not only lack understanding but which are perhaps more important than the arrangement of furniture in their pyschic den they play a hard and fast game of total destruction on the offending truth.

Game? Did I say game? Indeed, because that’s all this is. The harm comes from the sudden interface with reality that catches them completely unprepared. The game is all, the game is the world, and wouldn’t it be wonderful if the world itself was the game. Simpler, where the rules, as byzantine, myriad, and manifold as they are, could be known, memorized, mastered, and those who did not play by them could be penalized immediately, without any considerations of rights or ethics or pesky maturity. A place where every eventuality is covered by a rule.

For young males of a certain age and mentality, females seem to conform to no rules, at least none they understand. The presence of a female is a chaos-making event that is fraught with exactly the kind of uncertainty these males have fought hard to deny.

I say that knowing full well that any individual, of any sex or gender, who is not part of the game represents exactly that kind of potential to upend everything and render all these carefully-wrought rules…inapplicable. Imagine trying to roll against someone who not only may not know what the die faces mean but who doesn’t care. Imagine then the sheer terror of rolling against someone who not only knows all the rules you do but intends to change some of them to accommodate factors you joined the game in order to avoid.

The vitriol and childish, tantrum-soaked invective of the GamerGaters is precisely the reaction one should expect from someone in full reality-denial mode who doesn’t want their (artificial) paradigm fucked with. They doubtless experience similar reactions to males who threaten the model, but it’s harder to tell the males apart.

Women are obvious purely by their appearance.

Is this sounding pathetic?

Here’s something even more so. That some idiot can publicly threaten violence in a public space and get away with it because the powers that be are too afraid to piss off a different set of Gamers playing by another set of reality-denying rules by doing anything about it. I’m talking about the Anita Sarkeesian event in Utah, canceled because the university refused to enforce a no-carry policy in an open carry state, and yes, I’m comparing the fanatics backing open carry to the GamerGaters, because they’re exhibiting the same pathology of establishing the parameters of a worldview inconsistent with reality or reason and excoriating anyone who suggests that maybe there are circumstances in which a reasonable alternative to walking around armed every-damn-where might be in order.

Like in the auditorium of a university where there will be a speaker appearing who has been threatened with death if she steps up to the podium.

(Pathology? What else do you call people who see the blocking of approval of a surgeons general at a time when we may be facing a rather nasty epidemic just because he said some things you find objectionable? I suggest that the mentality is about the same.)

Others have gone public with rebuttals and denunciations of the GamerGaters, so much of what I have to say is redundant to say the least. But I’m saying it because I think more males need to get out there with this, that targeting women, because they are women, because you can’t handle dealing with them is pathetic, spineless, and repulsive. I don’t care what level psionic warrior you are within the cramped confines of your game, if you don’t know how to talk to a girl like a human being and feel so threatened by females that you would rather stay in the monastery of your game than even attempt to accommodate reality, you have nothing.

And under no circumstances is it acceptable to threaten anyone, especially if all they do is suggest your game could be improved.

I realize that GamerGate is comprised of a small group within the large and diverse gaming community, but the structure of these games has the unfortunate effect of granting permissions for obscene behavior in the minds of certain poorly functioning child-men. In this is it similar to religion, and in a world which is fully aware of the weight of ugliness layered upon women because men have decided what they are and what they may be, no one who has the least interest in something called morality or civilization can tolerate this infantile nonsense.

Admittedly, I have no profound insights here. There’s actually, in my mind, very little depth involved. These are people who have mistaken a game for reality and forgot—or never learned—how to behave in public. Assholes who talk loudly in the movie theater, ruining the experience for everyone, and who ought to be escorted out. These are the disrupters who sat in the back of the class, fouling the air for everyone else. The inept wannabes who think it’s cool to drug a girl at a party and rape her, because who the hell wants to actually talk to a girl? The real question is, why don’t they want to talk to you? Well, because.

Within their games they are warriors and rulers, wizards and magicians, with many arcane powers. Unfortunately, outside of the game they’re still ten years old and they haven’t learned how to behave.

But they aren’t ten. Physically, they’re adults, and living with such illusions makes them just a bit dangerous.

So, guys—yeah, all you males on the sidelines who know better—time to step up and start stating up front that this is wrong, that women are people first and foremost, that venting spleen over someone just having an opinion is the mark of a very poorly developed intellect, and that threatening and abusing women is no longer acceptable.

As for the GamerGaters—I’m reminded of that foosball fanatic who was ready to take me to the parking lot and beat me up because I caused him to lose a game. Pathetic. Grow up. I’ve known magic people and they didn’t get their powers from a fucking board game. They got them by living life.

October 27, 2014
Racism: It Begins Early

They were marched into the classroom, single file, and lined up along the blackboard to face the roomful of white faces. It would be sheerest invention to say I remember everything about that day. The only things I recall had to do with questions about how my own situation was about to change. Thinking back, though, I can recall, without remembering a single one of their names, a general tension transmitted between the two groups. Groups clearly being treated as groups. And the expressions I saw were not the excited faces of new students but the suspicious faces of new problems.

Negroes. Or, as we sometimes said in 1962 St. Louis, Nigras. (One of the ironies of growing up was that if we used the vulgar euphemism in the hearing of adults we were punished for it, even though it was in common usage among those same adults. They treated it much like cussing, which was a privilege of adulthood. The lesson, clearly, was that a child did not have a right to indulge the language of racism. This was something we could look forward to, like being able to say shit and damn and, though we didn’t yet know the word, fuck without being cuffed by an adult.)

I want to say there were about a dozen of them. Transfers. Kids our age—2nd grade—but different. Alien. I’m not sure any of us had ever been so close to a black person before then. I know I hadn’t. I only saw them on tv or in the movies, occasionally on the street somewhere as we drove by. My entire childhood experience till that day had been with caucasians, and it hadn’t been entirely wonderful at that. Since moving abruptly from kindergarten to 1st grade (after a scant month in school, because my birthday is in October) my “school experience” had become one of daily misery. People who speak glowingly of the innocence of children have forgotten or lived under such unimaginably ideal circumstances as to be from another planet. My peers quickly identified me as weak and easily bullied and so began several years of torment. It’s possible that I looked on these new arrivals with some perverse hope that maybe the bullies would pay attention to them and leave me alone. (There is a short story by Frederik Pohl called The Day The Martians Came which speaks eloquently to exactly this.)

What I do remember is the suspicion in their faces. All of them. From appearances they were not happy to be there. They were unwillingly subjects in a great social experiment and though they probably could not have understood it that way they surely knew they were being used. In any case, they had no choice.

Neither did we. I say “we” as though I were actually part of the other side of this encounter, and I suppose I felt that way, because although I was singled out for “special” attention I never questioned my status as part of the class, part of the group, part of—well, part of society, and that society was clearly defined for me by every marker available. I didn’t know enough then to label that mass of received messaging, it was like the air, you breathed it in and it sustained you, because how could you not? You couldn’t say “I don’t want to breathe this air, I want to breathe that air over there” but on the way, even if you tried, you still had to breathe, and this was the air that was available, and it did its job, it filled your lungs and let you live. But even so, there was no way for us to imagine that we needed to breathe different air. If we thought about it at all, the question would have been “Why don’t you breathe the same air?” Ignorance is like that.

Presentation is powerful. They marched those kids into class. Class was interrupted, which only happened when something Important was about to happen. We had to Pay Attention. It was a spotlight being shone on these new arrivals and they were lined up in a way I would later identify as a police line-up, made to face us, who were all still sitting at our desks, so we could get a good look at them and recognize that this was different, they were different, the situation was different. We were being told to accept them, that we had no choice, that these were new students. Told. But we were being shown that these were not kids. They were problems. They might be kids one day, if they passed some test they were clearly being tasked to pass, but we didn’t know what that might be. Oh, we had tests among ourselves (one of the reasons I was on the outside of all the in-groups, my inability or disinterest in these tests), the passing of which gained you privileges with your peers. The rules were known. Baseball, cars, later on pop music, and a vague interest in matters military. Trading cards were big. We all were supposed to Just Know, and if you didn’t, you were weird and not to be trusted. But the test these kids would have to pass, no one knew what that would be. What could it be? But the lines were drawn, that morning, by the principle, the teacher, the entire edifice of St. Louis public education that had decided that rather than just let them in to find a desk like everyone else had done, they had to be escorted in like prisoners, and displayed with a kind of ceremony which designated them as, from day one, not like us.

That line, invisible though it was, persisted. They played among themselves, they sat in a group, they went home together. I don’t recall a single black kid joining the cub scout troop. It was easier for me, in retrospect, to blame it on them not wanting to be a part of us. Of course, none of us crossed the line, either, that I know of. We didn’t make the attempt to include them, but the base assumption was, probably, “why should we?” Even then we had internalized the privilege of the dominant group. It was our club that mattered. I did not for a long, long time make the connection to the way I was bullied and the way they were ostracized, labeled, even though it was right in front of me. Why? Because maybe if I had made that connection I would have been forced to choose sides. And what if they didn’t accept me, either? As it turned out, I did get beaten up by one of them, but it was different than any other time. My beatings and tauntings were always public, in front of others, but this one time I found myself in the cloak room alone with my assailant. I said I didn;t remember a single one of their names, but that’s not true. I remember this one. His name was Percy and I had to escape him rather dramatically. Later I understood—if he had tried to do that like everyone else, he would have been beaten, probably by several white boys, who would have taken exception to him presuming to beat up a white boy. But it set up one more barrier for me that took a long time to die. Curiously, Percy is the only one of all of the black students whose name I remember.

I only attended that school for another year or so and then transferred to a private school where there were no black students until 6th grade and they didn’t last long.

I grew up aware of the divide and for years unable to understand it other than as a conflict between sides. The historical nature of the conflict occupied one part of my brain, but the other part, the emotional part, refused to budge. I made excuses, offered explanations to myself, went along with the ingrained attitudes with which I had grown up, though always uneasily, and every time I was presented with a chance to praise, to see exceptionalism, I took it, never quite questioning the standard I was using to judge. To say someone, some group, is “just like me” is in itself a barrier. A very soft, mushy barrier that on its surface seems like a step forward, an opening of boundaries. But “just like” denotes a difference because it makes a comparison. It’s not the same as saying “he is me” or “we are the same.”

What began then took me nearly two decades to unlearn and I’m still working on it, because there are always new groups held up as Other, who don’t rate, who aren’t “like us,” who won’t assimilate, who fail the (false) comparisons (of course, because how to not fail in the face of a lie?).

But that’s what we did back then. We made comparisons. Who’s better, worse, just like, completely different, less, more? Us and Them is a game played in the nursery. Partly it’s an identity builder, but it also erects walls and fences.

Like that morning when I came face to face with what I was being told not to trust by the very mechanism of introduction. We didn’t question why they were on the other side of the line that had been drawn. Even if we had, we couldn’t then understand that that would still be the wrong question. We didn’t have the stuff yet to ask why there had to be a line at all.

Thus is racism nurtured.

October 21, 2014
Another Year Gone By

I’ve been doing these annual assessments for a while now and this weekend began wondering why. Maybe a way of marking time and keeping track. Not quite keeping score, I’ve never been much concerned with that. At times, maybe, but I really am not competitive that way.

I’ve also never been one for keeping a journal. This blog has been the most sustained attempt at something like that ever, but if it had all been about my life and what I did today or last week, it wouldn’t have made it much past the two month mark, which was the longest previous attempt at maintaining a journal or diary. I’ve noted before that I don’t consider myself very interesting and if proof of that claim is required, there it is. I find myself too dull a subject for continuous consideration.

Which has had the curious consequence of making my fiction difficult. My protagonists have pretty much all been, in first or second draft, the least interesting characters in their stories. I write by seeing through the eyes of the viewpoint character, which for that period means I am that character. My own lack of appreciation for any “special” qualities I may possess translates into a muffled persona on the page. I find myself having to go back in later and insert all the stuff that makes the character worth following.

But the secondary characters thrive under this problem.

Turning around and using that insight to look at my own life yields some…troubling observations. While wanting in many ways to be the hero of my own story, I give far too much, sometimes, to everyone else. They’re important, not me. My granting them that importance is both habitual and a desire that they see what I’m doing and reciprocate. I want my friends to be important so that when they then see me as a friend it must mean I’m important. It can be a tortured way of validation.

(And a bit too complex for any sustained reality—I have my friends first and foremost because I love them. How I deal with them is another matter.)

But it has gifted me with some very good friends and a workable framework for writing.

That assumes I’ve always done this, always used this, always moved accordingly. There’s a certain amount of disempowering going on regarding my friends, as if they had no choice but to accommodate my particular peculiarities according to the way I wanted them to. They accommodated me, sure, but on their terms.

As far as the writing goes…

I put out two new books this year, both of them collections. Gravity Box and Other Spaces is published by a local small press, Walrus Publishing, and a fine job they did of it. John Kaufman, a local artist, did the amazing cover. I’ve bragged about this before. What I would like to add here is that most, over two thirds, of the stories are new, previously unpublished. So far I’ve heard nothing bad about any of them. People have their favorites, their less-than-favorites, but no one has said anything negative about the word, which bemuses me somewhat as there’s a reason these stories have first appeared here and it goes to the question of career trajectories and choices and values.

The other is a reissue of sorts, The Logic of Departure, from Yard Dog Press. Yard Dog was an early supporter of my work. A micropress, they put out two chapbooks by me and a short novel as part of a series of “doubles” (two short novels back to back, like the old Ace Doubles). Logic… is a reissue of the two chapbooks along with a brand new story which I wrote to fit that particular background. They are loosely connected but all three share a theme of getting out, getting away, getting free. I’m very proud of these stories, this is a good collection.

I’m looking at these two books now and trying to understand how I got here instead of somewhere else. I’m looking at my shelf of published works, which now contains about 60 short stories as well as 10 novels. Twelve books.

Donna Tartt, in a career spanning about the same length of time, has published 3 novels and a handful of shorter works. She’s won a Pulitzer and is a regular on bestseller lists.

There’s no comparison between us other than the fact that we are writers who write for publication, which is another way of saying we want to be read by strangers and be, on some level, relevant to the culture at large.

I had plans to have closer to 20 novels out by this time, but plans are often like farts in the wind. You make them, they dissipate, sometimes you don’t even remember making them.

If I have a new recognition this year, today, it’s that I have no likelihood of getting anywhere close to those old plans anymore. I’m not being pessimistic just realistic. I have now turned 60. In most important ways, this means nothing, but importance is relative, and perspective is all important. I’m 60. I am now, in the estimation of my childhood, an Old Man. It’s just a number but I remember clearly wondering how it was possible people could live that long and still be able to walk. Some childhood assessments are difficult to shed and this is one that I find myself wrestling with now.

Sixty. As a matter of practicality, barring any kind of revolutionary change in the culture of which I am a part, I’m on the downslope. Most of my life is over. What this means to me primarily is that I don’t have the time now to have the kind of career I imagined for myself when I embarked on it. Barring something extraordinary, I’m likely going to remain a small-press author, publishing books a small audience will buy and read. A couple of years ago I was encouraged greatly about the trilogy I’d been working on, that it might open major publishing doors for me, and I had good reason to be encouraged, but as time has dragged on without a publishing offer I am beginning to conclude that my writing is simply not what major publishing wants or knows what to do with. If I could write it differently to accommodate whatever the disconnect is I would. (I’ve recently read a synopsis of a new SF novel which suggests strongly that certain elements of my Secantis Sequence have been imagined by someone else and will now inform their career, not mine. No, I’m not suggesting plagiarism in the least. Wheels get reinvented all the time. The resurgence of Space Opera flowered a couple years after my publisher began to implode and so none of my stories now get included in any retrospectives nor my name mentioned with those who are credited with this renaissance. Am I annoyed by this? Sure, but at whom should I direct it? It is pointless envy.)

There were supposed to be at least six Secantis novels by now and perhaps two short story collections set therein. As it transpired, I didn’t think the original three were viable to be marketed elsewhere and without them further novels would be orphans of a sort. I wrote one more Secantis novel and turned my attention to other things which have likewise been unwanted by the market. Since I do not know why it is near impossible for me to change the way I do them.

I have a supportive agent now. She’s helped quite a lot with the writing. She’s one reason I haven’t simply given up.

In a very real sense, this is a relief. I can now stop fretting about my career. It is what it is and, being as objective as I can be about something this personal, it ain’t bad. I can now write the next book or short story without the extra weight of wondering how it will “further” my career. I feel right now, today, that my career isn’t going to be what I wanted it to be. I could pick it apart and name a dozen reasons why—sure I made some bad choices, didn’t do certain things I might have, went with some ideas that were perhaps not as good as I thought they were at the time—but it changes nothing. I’m still where I am.

I went to the gym on my birthday. My right arm has been rather nastily injured lately, so I’ve been finding my routine truncated and often painful. I should probably not work out at all for six months, but by then I would resemble a bowl of mashed potatoes and I don’t have the energy anymore to start all over after that long of a lay-off. I’m stuck with what I have.

That said, I leg pressed 920 pounds. Ten reps. Not shabby.

For my birthday, they gave me a free smoothy, a very healthy one with blueberry and banana and whey.

I came home and found that Donna, my partner for going on 35 years now, laid out a birthday feast for me that just made me want to cry for happy. We ate, drank good wine, and watched an excellent film (The Hours) together. No pressure. Wonderfulness.

On those off-moments when I’m not obsessing over this or that, I have to admit my life is pretty damn good, and I’m just happy to be able to recognize that fact.

Even in my dotage.

Later this week I intend to write a post about my fiction. Time for a (self) critical assessment. Till then, thank you all for bearing with me.

October 13, 2014
Why Science Fiction?

I found out several years back, when my career started wobbling, that my dad, concerned, wondered aloud to my mom, “Why’s he writing science fiction? Wouldn’t it be better to do something people will buy?”

Of course, he didn’t understand that the odds of making money at writing are pretty much the same in any genre, that it’s as much luck as talent, more than a little being in the right place at the right time sort of cosmic alignment, and personalities are always involved. There’s a bit of playing the lottery in trying to launch a writing career. Once you start publishing, it’s natural to think things will get easier or at least more predictable. But stability is a distant shore you keep rowing toward. You bump into a lot of other boats on the way.

His concern was over financial matters and it might not appear evident to anyone not involved in the writing business how these things play out. In my own case, I will say that it might not have mattered what I chose to write about, the trajectory might have been much the same. The business aside, though, the question has validity in terms of the artistic choices we make. Why this and not that? What is it that inspires you to do what you do and not something else?

I’m currently working on a new novel. As I’m writing, I find myself venturing more and more into what is recognizably literary mainstream. The choices I’ve been making about the way I approach the characters and the themes feel less genre-soaked. I sense I’m pitching my prose toward a wider audience. That said, it is definitely science fiction, insofar as I’ve set it in the future and I’m talking about the changes in human conditions brought about by technological and cultural shifts. I’m very interested in how then will be different from now.

Isn’t that what “mainstream” does as well? Detail the difference in a character that emerges after a series of transformational events? Trace the path of those changes and show how people evolve over time, under pressure?

As far as I can tell, the chief difference between mainstream and science fiction lies in the nature of the change. In mainstream, characters evolve in perfectly recognizable ways to become something perfectly recognizable to our current apprehension and experience. In science fiction, those changes connote differences we may not recognize and cannot yet achieve because they require the world around us to be different. That “What If” in science fiction is qualitatively different and sometimes quantitatively distinct.

Yet it’s still change. It’s about character.

One of the clearest distinctions between SF and Literary Fiction I ever read put it this way: science fiction always privileges premise over character. In other words, the normal SF story is about its conceit more than it is about its people. I can understand that, but then I have to ask: Well, isn’t the standard historical novel more about the history than it is about the people in it? I pick on historical fiction because it shares the most with science fiction in terms of approach and purpose. Both are about people in conditions and contexts separated from the here and now by distinct differences in culture and technology.

(I could point out here that, even were this to be generally accepted, received wisdom would make the fact that Hilary Mantel’s historical novels, Wolf Hall and Bringing Up The Bodies, winning the Man Booker Prize raised almost no eyebrows, but had something like Ann Leckie’s currently much-praised novel Ancillary Justice even shown up on the long list for that esteemed Literary award there would have been dismay and more than a smidgen of ridicule.)

To be fair, a great deal of science fiction has treated the changes in technology and culture like suggestive exoticisms rather than as serious considerations. A lot of this may have to do with maturity more than any inherent problem with the conceits themselves. Speaking for myself, when I began writing (as a teenager especially) I included as much strange stuff as I could imagine simply because it was strange. It rarely served the story, not because I didn’t want it to, but because firstly I thought the strangeness was the point and secondly because I had a long way to go before I understood how one makes such things relevant to the story.

Insofar as science fiction emerged from an adolescent-driven pool of interest, this makes perfect sense. In my own case, it was many years before I found myself consciously caring about character. I was most interested in event, in novelty, in that exoticism I mentioned. I was interested in the “coolness” of the thing, not the emotional inner lives of the people living in that coolness. No more than I cared about the personal insecurities and childhood regrets of any of the gunslingers in the westerns which I also indulged because of their innate coolness. In that case we wouldn’t necessarily call it exoticism, but it was. It wasn’t here or now, which seemed dull and annoying.

With growing experience and maturity we eventually discover that, on a fundamental level, it really always has been a question of character that brought us back again and again to the particular stories we loved. We just didn’t think of it in those terms or have the intellectual or emotional stuff to recognize and expect more from that part of the story. We could grasp the emotional significance of swords and guns, or spaceships and rayguns, but not be equipped to handle an existential crisis in the midst of the changed milieu in which the story was set. That milieu seemed easier to grasp, like next year’s new car models or a new fashion just on the scene. Experience teaches, gradually, that such things have little value with the viewpoint of the people living with them.

So the question becomes, since character eventually emerged to dominate my concerns, why then do I still write science fiction?

Because that appreciation of the exotic and the cool factor did not erode simply because my appreciation for what others hold to be all-important grew. Because I am in many ways still 12 years old. And lastly (though not, perhaps, finally) the world seems to have caught up with science fiction and to do it honestly and rigorously and with due attention to all æsthetic concerns demanded of good art is to write perfectly good Literary Fiction. If we can regard stories about England under Henry VIII as “literary” then we can so regard stories about the interstellar diaspora. Both eras may be equidistant in terms of relevance to the present and both may serve as substrates for telling us things about ourselves.

Finally, though, I write it because I love it and to do any art really well love has to be involved. I may be able to write an essay about something I find only somewhat amusing or interesting but my ficti0n requires viscera and I’m only able or willing to supply that if I am in love.

Although my reading is no longer largely science fiction and I have grown pickier about it than I was in times past, a good science fiction story still pumps my imagination and drives my senses more than any other form. It takes a lot of work to write fiction and if I’m going to devote that much to it I’m only going to do so if I love it. I find that while I feel just as strongly for individual works in other genres, I do not feel that way about other genres in toto. If they were neighborhoods, I’d only want to live in the SF district. I can visit the others as much as I want, but I’ve built my house on the Foundation of science fiction.

And I can’t tell you how pleased it makes me to see other neighborhoods adapting the style and coming here to visit more often.

All that said, it does sometimes pain me to see so much in the field still written as if the neighborhood was still under siege, a ghetto where a certain want of technique is regarded as a kind of gang color and a regard for more refined observations as a sign of defection, where the obstinate insistence that fine writing—which can only really derive from closer scrutiny, greater empathy, and more honest assessments of character—is somehow the mark of someone who doesn’t “get” SF, and where the simple recognition that the world and therefore the universe is a multiplying heterogeneous metaplex and should be written about as such is a form of betrayal. Genuine experience must be conveyed through the lens of genuine observers, i.e. characters who are real and complex as we can make them. This is the only way to deal out truth, which at the end of the day is our stock in trade.

At least, that’s my opinion.

And that, not to put too fine a point on it, is why I still write science fiction.

October 10, 2014
New Additions

I have a rather ambivalent relationship to automobiles. My dad was a shade tree mechanic par excellence. I doubt there was anything he couldn’t fix short of straightening a bent frame (though I bet he could have figured out how to do that, too) before cars became half computer.

I, on the other hand, could not have cared less about the machinery of…well, anything. The mechanic’s gene or whatever it is missed me. Dad would haul me out to the garage regularly to help him do a repair and my overwhelming sense was one of “LET ME OUT OF HERE!” Bored doesn’t cover it. He would try to explain how things worked, why they were the way they were, and for what it’s worth a good deal of it stuck. If, later, as a driver, I found myself in the middle of nowhere with a malfunctioning set of wheels, I could probably have pulled a McGyver and fixed the damn thing.

But the all-consuming love one sees in the faces of males of a certain type when they pore over their engines…uh uh.

I still don’t care that much. Oh, in a theoretical way, certainly, but the getting-the-hands-in and “tinkering” is not anywhere in my suite of anticipated pleasures.

But I do like cars. I like the way many of them look, I love driving them, I appreciate the æsthetics of them, I would not want to do without them. They are, in my book, cool things. I am a firm believer in paying a good mechanic to keep them doing what they’re supposed to be doing.

I would like one day to own a really fine high-end…something. Mercedes, Lincoln, Porsche, Lexus, whatever.

For now, though, I am a happy driver to have a new set of wheels. Given the destruction of my previous set, this was a necessity that has turned out nice. I have a new car. 2013 Corolla.

Yes, another Corolla. Our fourth. We like them.

But this one is NOT BLUE.

Observe:

Not quite a matched set, but close enough. His and Hers. Ours and Ours.

September 28, 2014
Life Has Been So Much Fun Lately…

…that I’ve decided to say nothing about it today. I’m getting a new car tonight, already selected it. Just need to sign the papers and take it home. I’m getting almost no fiction written today, which is a bummer (maybe I’ll slip a paragraph or two in later), but other things are getting done. I’ll tell you all about the year I’ve had this past week some other time.

For now, a photograph. An old one. Was a time I toyed with becoming a portraitist. I was developing a style, according to some (though I couldn’t see it), but I had done some half-way decent work. I found this the other day while looking for something else. This is Paula, who modeled for me for a few months way back in the late Seventies. She never wore make-up, she was just naturally beautiful and photogenic, and I would have loved to do more work with her, but time moved on and we’ve long since lost touch.

Anyway, I still do the occasional portrait, should anyone be interested. Enjoy.

September 26, 2014
Life Sometimes Hits You In The Ass

I realize people don’t want to hear about your woes, not unless they’re amusing in some karmic way, or you have a manner of relating them that takes them up out of the pit of despond wherein the currents swirl in an effort to pull you down further. But life is a heady mix of things, both good and bad.

Let me start with the good, just to leaven the stew.

We’re alive, the meteor missed the house, and the dog is happy.

Well, now. On to the rest?

Last Friday I was due to be at work at two in the afternoon to prepare, with coworkers, for a Big Deal event for Left Bank Books. We were entertaining Melissa Gilbert at Maryville. Yes, that Melissa Gilbert, of Little House On The Prairie fame. Half Pint? Was that the character’s nickname? I wouldn’t know. I think I’ve seen three or four episodes, ever. Not my thing. (But to my chagrin, no one got my repeated references to Z’Ha’Dum, so maybe that evens things up.) Anyway, I had to stop by the post office on the way and do something else (I don’t remember now) and after that I turned onto Kingshighway to head north.

As I drove along I glanced to the right and saw a woman walking down the street, just past Ackerman Toyota, dressed in what I think of as “Dig Me” attire. She was attractive, seemed in good shape, and was certainly an attention grabber, painted on distressed and ripped jeans, tank top, long blond hair. I saw all this in less than an eyeblink and turned my attention back to the road.

Traffic was stopped at the light at Osceola, at the north end of the Charles Schmitt car lot. I stopped just shy of the entrance to said lot.

A moment or two later I heard a horrible squealing of tires, looked up to see a large pick-up bearing down on me, just time enough to think “Oh, shit” and brace for impact. Bam! Rocked the car, jostled me around, ruined my afternoon.   Naturally, just as this happened, the light turned green and the vehicles ahead of me moved on. A few seconds either way…

I got out of my vehicle. The trunk of my car…well, have a look:

The truck that hit me was a Ram 1500. Appropriately named, I think. Two men got out, both in workmans attire (painter pants, t-shirts) and the driver had a panicked expression.

“In a hurry are you?” I asked.

“Not really,” he said.

Then I realized what had happened. “But she was awful nice to look at, wasn’t she?” I said.

He hesitated, then gave me a goofy, embarrassed grin. “Yeah, I admit it.”

Naturally, the young lady to whom I referred was nowhere to be seen. Not that it really mattered. He could have been trying to read a billboard for all it mattered, the fact was he hadn’t been paying attention to what was in front of his fairly rapidly moving vehicle.

   As you can see, it didn’t do much to his truck. Knocked the front license plate off.

His passenger called the report in on his cell phone. We pulled onto the lot so we didn’t block traffic. A mistake, I realized later, since it then took damn near two hours before a cop showed up to take the report.

The people at Charles Schmitt let me call my work to let them know I might be late.

At which point Kris and Jay appeared, as if by magic, to see what had happened. My bosses. They’d been on their way in and passed the lot and Kris said “Is that Mark?” Jay said, “I don’t know, was he wearing a hat?” They called Left Bank and found out about my call, turned around, and hung with me for a time until they absolutely had to go.

The event that evening was going to be awkward without me, but they assured me they’d handle it. After the police FINALLY arrived, I walked down to Ackerman Toyota to see about leaving the car there. We’re good customers. We’ve bought three vehicles from them (and will likely buy more) and get all our service done there, so no problem. I then called Donna, who was as it happened on her way home. She picked me up at Ackerman and took me to work.

No one had actually expected me to come in, but they seemed appreciative.

Now, I had just spent almost $600.00 on that car repairing the automatic window mechanism on the driver’s side. It’s probable that the car is now totaled, but we’ll see.

Yesterday I learn that the gentleman who hit me let his insurance lapse months ago. Wonderful.

This is some kind of cherry on the sundae of my year. I’ve had to replace me glasses. There were other repairs. My coffeemaker died. But several weeks ago I injured my arm at work. An annoying injury at the bicep that is taking a damnably long time to heal and when this guy hit me I apparently jammed that arm again and it now hurts about as bad as it did when I first injured it. It’s now Tuesday, though, and I have no other mysterious aches and pains, so I seem to have dodged the whiplash bullet. (I’m fortunate to be in as good a shape as I am, otherwise I might be more screwed up.)

The prospect of buying a new car is one of mixed emotions. I’d love one. But not just yet. We’ve had a year of unexpected expenses and more stress due to other factors which I would rather not discuss here, and things are…awkward. We were talking a couple more years before new car time for me. We really can’t afford it, but on the other hand you do what you have to.

I had two new books come out this year, of which I am very proud and happy. I would appreciate a bit more attention to them. A few reviews in the appropriate places wouldn’t hurt, a few more sales, etc. But all in all, that part is good. But if this is some kind of karmic realignment, I think I’m glad a new novel didn’t come out this year, I’m not sure I’d survive the balance of joss payments!

One thing of which Donna and I are extremely grateful is the number of good friends we have. They’ve been terrific, even in wholly unexpected ways.

But I would rather not have things happen that calls upon them to be as supportive as they have been.

In a few weeks I’ll be sixty. The mind boggles. Unrealistically, I’d thought things might be a little easier by now, and really, when I pull back from dealing with the daily nonsense, much of life is easier. It’s just that I don’t have as much energy to deal with it all as I used to, so it seems…well, more annoying, to be sure.

I picked up my rental this morning—a rather cumbersome Kia SUV—and the insurance adjustor has already looked at my old Corolla. I await his call to tell me what will be. Whatever it is, we’ll deal with it.

With a little help from our friends, who have been terrific. Thank you all.

So let me wrap this report up. Just letting you all know what’s going on.

Have a better day.

___________________________________________________________________________________

p.s. Well wishing and so forth are appreciated. But I’m perfectly serious about boosting the signal on the books. That kind of support would do some serious good anytime, but right now it would be balm to a sore psyché.

Gravity Box and Other Spaces

The Logic of Departure

Or, if you’re so inclined, give a follow on Twitter: https://twitter.com/MWTiedemann   That would be like a kindly Thumbs Up sent across the interweebs.

September 23, 2014
Old Image

Something from the distant past. I shot this some time in 1974 or 75. I do not remember where, but the internegative made from the original 2 1/4 square transparency has produced a rather painterly scan.

September 13, 2014