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The Subway Test

~ Joe Pitkin's stories, queries, and quibbles regarding the human, the inhuman, the humanesque.

The Subway Test

Category Archives: Journeys

A Labyrinth for the Time Being

02 Saturday May 2020

Posted by Joe Pitkin in fantasy, Journeys, My Fiction, Stories, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

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Aphotic Realm, Borges, dark fantasy, fantasy, labyrinths

I’ve been working on novels for so many months now that having one of my short stories picked up seems as rare as an eclipse. I suppose that when you only have three short stories that you are trying to get placed, acceptances will be rare events by definition. But I did have good fortune with one of my stories recently–a little tale that is odd enough that a few editors didn’t know what to make of it. Sometimes when a story of mine has been rejected many times, I take a long look at the piece and decide that it’s just not my best work. Other times, though, I take a long look after many rejections and I come away thinking this is a good story, and someday somebody will see that.

My latest story, “The Wingbuilder,” fits into the second category. It’s an homage to Borges (especially “The House of Asterion”), as well as a love-letter to video games like The Legend of Zelda and to the classic Jim Henson movie The Labyrinth. Now that I think of it, it’s also a meditation on solitude that might speak to the condition of some isolated, quarantined readers. It appeared in the estimable magazine Aphotic Realm, and you can see it here. I hope you enjoy it.

Photo Credit: Stefan Gara

Thoughts on 2001: A Space Odyssey

23 Sunday Feb 2020

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Biology, Journeys, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, Science, Science Fiction, SETI

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

2001: A Space Odyssey, aliens, mythopoesis, Science Fiction, SETI

I had the joy of watching 2001: A Space Odyssey on the big screen the first time in my life a little while ago. For those of you living near Portland, The Hollywood Theater purchased a 70 mm print of the film a couple of years back, and they show the movie to a sold-out house a couple of times every year. I had seen the film many times before on video–it’s one of the truly formative pieces of art in my life–but seeing it in a literally larger-than-life format impressed me deeply: the movie reminds me why I work in the genre of science fiction.

One of the most celebrated elements of the film has been its technological accuracy. Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C Clarke, working before CGI or the moon landing, were able to predict so many of the challenges and curiosities of living and working in space. As much as I loved Star Trek and Star Wars growing up, I always had the sense that those two franchises were more science fantasy than science fiction (especially Star Wars). 2001, by contrast, looked like some thrillingly-plausible documentary footage from a future just over the horizon.

But it is not the accuracy of the film that affects me so much now. Rather, 2001 is worth watching because of what Tolkien would have called its mythopoesis: its creation of a new mythology in which we could view our modern predicament. As much as any other work of art I can think of, 2001 gets at the painfully intermediate position of our species as part animal and part divine: the film is a 164-minute meditation on Hamlet’s musing: “What a piece of work is a man! How noble in reason! how infinite in faculties! in form and moving, how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension, how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?”

(Another quote, just as apt, comes from Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, the book which also inspired the iconic theme music for 2001: “Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman—a rope over an abyss … what is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.”).

While the film is set in space in the near future, as realistically as Kubrick and Clarke could conceive of it, the setting is just as much a place of the inscrutable divine: in other words, its setting is really The Dreamtime, the Underworld, Faerie. Even though the US Space Program was deeply influenced in real life by 2001, the movie is closer to the mystical cave paintings of Chauvet or Lubang Jeriji Saléh than it is to the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.

Of course, there are many elements of any piece of science fiction that won’t hold up well after 50+ years. In the case of 2001, Kubrick and Clarke seriously underestimated the amount of progress our species would make in some aspects of information technology, while at the same time overestimating the progress we would make in artificial intelligence and manned spaceflight. Those are easy mistakes to make, by the way: I can’t think of any science fiction before the 1980s that successfully anticipated the internet, and of course a movie made in 1968, the year before Apollo 11, would extend the logic of manned spaceflight out to regular orbital shuttles and populous moon bases and manned Jupiter missions.

But the beauty of 2001 is not how much the movie correctly predicted but rather how well it explores the timeless theme of what it means to be a human being. What strange gods called out of the darkness to our rude, frightened hominid ancestors to make us human? What awaits us if we can survive the deadly unintended consequences of our own ingenuity? In wrestling with those questions, 2001 is every bit as bottomless a work of art as Paradise Lost or Faust or the Popol Vuh. One can argue that there are no gods that made us, that the monoliths of the movie will never be found because they never existed in the first place. However, 2001 speaks to something very deep in our cultural DNA (and, for all I know, in our literal DNA): the yearning for our spiritual parents.

Two hundred years from now, if we somehow survive this dreadful bottleneck of overpopulation and ecological collapse, our descendants may be living in domed cities on the moon and Mars; we may be gliding in beautiful submarines through the oceans of Europa and Ganymede. We will still be looking for the monoliths.

Happy 2020

01 Wednesday Jan 2020

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Journeys, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories

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Analog Science Fiction and Fact, Rick Novy, Stanley Schmidt

About ten years ago, I submitted one of the first science fiction stories I had ever written to an anthology called 2020 Visions, published by the now-departed M-Brane Press. The editor, Rick Novy, was someone I didn’t know, but M-Brane had given me my first publication the year before, and I thought I would try with this new story about a plague carried by super-intelligent starlings.

Rick Novy didn’t take the story, but he gave me some excellent feedback–the piece had way too much infodump, and it took a very long time for the story’s action to get going. And he gave me a lead on another publisher: Stanley Schmidt, then-editor of Analog, might be interested in the story if I tightened it up.

Thankfully, Stanley Schmidt was interested in the piece once I had revised it, and “A Murmuration of Starlings” became the first of five stories that I’ve published in Analog. And it was through Analog that my work did get picked up for anthologies, and later how I was approached by an agent to option one of my stories for a movie.

I’ve published a lot more fiction over the last ten years, and I’m starting this decade with more hope (about my writing, anyway) than I had ten years ago. But one of the thoughts I had this morning as I woke to the year 2020 was that anthology, 2020 Visions, that I couldn’t get published in at the beginning of the last decade. I’m grateful to Rick Novy for the kind feedback and the kinder tip.

My Autumnal Love Affair with Math

20 Sunday May 2018

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Journeys, Musings and ponderation, Science

≈ 5 Comments

Tags

education, Khan Academy, math

I was an indifferent student of math growing up. I wasn’t bad at math exactly, but I didn’t much like the subject (except for geometry, which I took in high school from a brilliant and generous teacher who had left off being a rocket scientist–literally–so that he could teach young people). I pretty much stopped taking math as soon as I was allowed to  in high school–I stopped out at algebra III.

A couple of years later, in a spasm of optimism, I signed up to take a 7:00 am calculus class to meet my math requirement in my freshman year of college. I was influenced in this fool’s errand by one of my heroes, my writing professor Tom Lyon, whose hypoglycemia obliged him to teach at 7:00 and 8:00 am exclusively. I believed that something would blossom in me, and I would develop into the scholar and writer I was destined to be, a scholar and writer like Tom Lyon, if I got up every morning for calculus in the early hours.

Alas, my 7:00 am calculus teacher was no Tom Lyon: I remember her as earnest and competent, but not particularly skilled or experienced as a teacher. Probably, given that I was a freshman at a land grant university in a 7:00 am calculus class, she was a relatively new graduate teaching assistant. More importantly, what seeds of knowledge she sowed my way fell on rocky ground, or weedy ground–I remember not a lick of calculus from that class. Practically my only memory of that whole term was one morning watching the sun stream into the room late in the quarter and feeling the joy of being an 18 year-old in springtime.

Somehow I managed to pass that class despite all the time I spent gazing out the window. And 25 years later, somehow I managed to get a master of science degree in environmental science without much knowledge of calculus. I knew enough to be able to recognize that something was a calculus problem–the same way I might recognize that the people next to me are speaking Portuguese–but as for using calculus to model a problem or make a useful prediction about the world, the little glyphs and grammars of differential equations were utterly alien to me.

The gaps in my math knowledge were worse than this, actually: I remember as I was gathering the last data for my thesis that my classmate Alison Jacobs had to explain to me the formula for the slope of a line (y=mx+b) for about 30 seconds before I realized that she was talking about something that I had studied for months and months in junior high school. It comforted me a bit to learn later that the great E. O. Wilson had gotten his PhD in biology at Harvard without calculus–in Letters to a Young Scientist he talks about sitting in calculus class as a 32 year-old assistant professor, trying to atone for his crime of omission. But for me, it has been hard to shake the sense that however well I might use words to describe the thicket of the world,  I’ll never know the trails by which I might, using math, penetrate to the heart of things.

I had to climb over my own emotional palisades, then, to set out on a journey to teach myself calculus at age 45.  For me, coming back to differential calculus via Khan Academy has felt less like atonement and more like the discovery that someone I had regarded as homely in high school showed up at the 30 year reunion looking like a knockout. Somehow over the thirty years since I first sat in that 7:00 am calculus class, I have discovered that I’m in love with mathematics.

So far as I can tell, there’s no direct benefit to me in learning calculus or any other kind of math. No matter how good I may get at it in middle age, there will always be others around me who know math better and who use it more naturally than I. And what would I use calculus for anyway? I’m no better an English teacher or outcomes assessment specialist because of it. One could argue that I’m a worse English teacher because of it, opportunity costs being what they are–every hour I spend learning about limits and differentiation is an hour I don’t spend honing my knowledge of composition theory or something else I might actually use in the classroom.

But I don’t want to stop myself: I study math because math has become beautiful to me. Perhaps it seems more beautiful to me because it has no obvious use to me. I’m long past the spring term of my life now. Perhaps I can love math now because “the heyday of the blood is tame”–though in so many areas of life I feel I am entering a second youth, or even a long-delayed first youth. I never became, never will become, the scholar that Tom Lyon was in my life. But I’ve come back to scribbling out derivatives at 7:00 in the morning as I did when I was 18. The morning sun in springtime fills me with a different kind of joy.

10 000 Year Clock Badges Khan Academy

Screenshot credit: Khan Academy

R.I.P., U.K.L.G.

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

Posted by Joe Pitkin in fantasy, Journeys, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Writers of America, Utopia and Dystopia, YA fantasy

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books, fantasy, literature, mythopoesis, sci-fi, Science Fiction, Stories, Ursula Le Guin

ursula_k_le_guin

By Gorthian (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

One of my literary heroes, Ursula K. Le Guin, died yesterday after a long illness. In her careful, forceful prose, and in her far-reaching moral vision, Le Guin expanded for me the concept of what a science fiction and fantasy writer could be. She was not the first great fantasy writer, but she was the first fantasy writer I encountered whose work had the feel of a high-literary novel. I’ll miss her.

Someday I’ll write a longer appreciation of her work in which I try to explain how meaningful her writing has been for me. For now, I’ll simply reprise the last essay I wrote about Le Guin, a post about her marvelous book The Lathe of Heaven.

The Penultimate Stranger Bird

04 Tuesday Jul 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Beta Readers, fantasy, Journeys, My Fiction, Stranger Bird

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

books, editing, fantasy, marketing, Stranger Bird

As followers of The Subway Test have read before, I’m publishing a fantasy novel called Stranger Bird this year. Working with my estimable friend Erica Thomas at Works Progress Agency, we’ve landed on a launch date of mid-October. And so begins my final editing slog, getting the manuscript ready for layout. I’m surprised at how many little things (and even a couple of big things) I’m changing in response to the feedback of my beta readers and my awesome copy-editor, Ann Eames. Thanks, beta buddies!

If you’re reading this, I’m grateful that you’re reading. And if you like fantasy, I hope you’ll take a look at Stranger Bird when it’s ready.

I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free…of the Car

18 Saturday Feb 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Advertising, Journeys, The Ideal Vehicle

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British Petroleum, Chester Lampwick's rocket car, Ford, greenwashing, marketing

I’ve seen the Ford Company’s Super Bowl commercial a few times now–Google has determined that I’m part of Ford’s target demographic when I choose a Philip Glass or Gerald Finzi piece to listen to on YouTube. There’s a shout-out here to electric cars, to new car-sharing economic models, to bike sharing, and to self-driving vehicles–all trends that Ford seems to be trying to get out in front of. And it all plays out over Nina Simone’s “I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel to be Free,” one of the most beautiful and spiritual songs in American popular music. I have to say it’s a remarkable ad, even though Google doesn’t seem to know how much I dislike driving and how unlikely it is I’ll ever buy a new car as long as I live:

Or maybe that’s the point. Ford seems to be selling its brand here to people that don’t consider themselves drivers, or at least not typical drivers. It’s too early yet for me to say whether this particular piece of corporate propaganda is simple greenwashing–think British Petroleum’s laughable “Beyond Petroleum” campaign that aired in the months before the ecological crime they perpetrated with the Deepwater Horizon spill. Is it possible that Ford is really positioning itself as part of the solution to climate change, energy scarcity, air pollution, traffic gridlock–that is, all the problems that Ford hath wrought over the last 100 years?

It’s not impossible to imagine Ford remaking itself for a new transportational reality. Electric cars and self-driving cars are still cars, and Ford seems better-positioned to create them, if they want to, than many other companies trying to enter those markets. It’s a little harder for me to see how car-sharing and bike-sharing fit with the business model of Ford or any extant motor company: the whole idea behind vehicle sharing is that fewer people overall will buy cars. But I suppose there are smart people in Detroit trying to see how they could monetize car sharing in a way that beats out Uber and Lyft–perhaps the Ford of the future will be a massive car (and bike?) owner, a kind of Netflix of vehicles, renting out cars to drivers at a price that makes car ownership seem silly.

A corporation, whether Ford or BP, is an amoral kind of organism designed to do nothing more  than maximize value for shareholders, in the same way that an amoeba is designed to eat rotting organic material until it’s big enough to split, amorally, into two amoebas. I wouldn’t call Ford’s move in these new greener directions a sign of Ford’s goodness, any more than BP’s greenwashing was a sign of corporate evil. Both corporations are just trying to make money for shareholders, and Ford is better positioned to handle the changes coming its way than British Petroleum has been. Solar power and wind power are entirely different industries than petroleum extraction; BP is no better positioned to enter the solar power market than Nike or Coca-Cola are.

And to be sure, Ford hasn’t transformed itself–the ad seems more aspiration than reportage. The ad slips in a decent amount of legerdemain, as when this supposedly green, forward looking new company cuts to a shot of the GT tearing along the freeway with all the subtlety of Chester Lampwick’s rocket car from The Simpsons. But the ad has beguiled my attention in spite of, or perhaps because of, my distaste for the driving experience. If a car company can do that, it’s a pretty neat trick.

Reading in Hood River!

23 Monday Jan 2017

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Journeys, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

fantasy, marketing, readings, sci-fi

My Bloggish Friends:

I’m happy to invite you to a reading I’m giving at the beautiful AniChe Cellars tasting room in Hood River, Oregon. AniChe Cellars has dolled up an old Depression-era bank at 301 Oak Street in Hood River, well worth seeing. Come taste some ridiculously good wine in ridiculously scenic Hood River while I read a ridiculous story or two.

Saturday, January 28, at 5:00–I’d love to see you!

Happy Birthday to The Subway Test

05 Monday Dec 2016

Posted by Joe Pitkin in A Place for my Stuff, Journeys, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Stories

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

birthdays, marketing

I’ve been sojourning two years now in the blogosphere. And slowly, very slowly, I believe I’m getting the hang of it. “Getting the hang of it,” in my case, means writing more and more what interests me, on the schedule that interests me, rather than trying to use blogging to present myself to the world as some kind of up-and-coming writer, or as a hauntingly original voice about to break through, or some other kind of self-promotional folly.

I’m happy to be here, happy to be publishing a story every once in a while, happy to share insights when they come to me. Thanks for reading, friends.

Science Fiction As a Gateway Drug

14 Thursday Jul 2016

Posted by Joe Pitkin in Biology, Games, Journeys, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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nerd culture, sci-fi, Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, utopia

For a few years in boyhood at least, I loved science and technology. One of my fondest childhood television memories was of watching the original Cosmos miniseries with my dad, seeing Carl Sagan in his turtleneck and corduroy blazer as he traveled the universe on his “Ship of the Imagination” over Vangelis’ spacey soundtrack. I can remember my dad scoffing pretty frequently at Sagan’s goofily over-acted facial expressions–Sagan perpetually appeared to be having some kind of ineffable and mystical experience on his dandelion-seed ship–but the show appealed to the ten year-old me, so much so that I believed in 5th grade that I was destined to become a physicist.

I left science behind in junior high school for the same reasons that a lot of kids do: math and science classes were difficult (often not all that well-taught, too); I struggled with the emotions of puberty and my parents’ divorce and didn’t find factoring polynomials to provide much of an escape from my problems. For a couple of years I became a lackluster student in most subjects, but especially so in science and math, culminating in my freshman year of high school with the lowest grade I received in my many years of formal schooling (a D+ in biology).

Somewhere around age 14 I realized that the kids I thought were cool–the orchestra and debate kids who watched Stanley Kubrick movies and listened to classical music for fun–seemed to get As and Bs pretty effortlessly. And I wanted enough to be like them that I wised up in school a little. However, my perception of those cool kids was that coolness was all about literature and music, Camus and Sartre and Kafka and Stravinsky and Bauhaus (the band, not the architectural movement). Coolness had little to do with science and math beyond getting good grades. And so my trajectory through high school, college, and some time beyond kept me almost entirely in the humanities, with results which I probably could have predicted and which might have depressed me if I had predicted them: by age 24 I had a master’s degree in English and was an adjunct faculty member of a tiny community college.

Given where I ended up, how did I come back to science at all? I came back the same way that many, many young people get into the sciences in the first place: through science fiction. In 1998 I purchased one of the seminal computer games of all time: Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Players of Alpha Centauri guide a faction of colonists through the development of humanity’s first settlement beyond the solar system. I was fascinated by the idea of a planet-wide university, of colonists building supercolliders and space elevators and massive ecological engineering projects.I loved the idea of a human society devoted to the acquisition of knowledge and careful stewardship of natural resources–an ideal that sometimes seems far removed from the society I actually live in.

Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri - PC - IGN

I also realized (pretty slowly, after a couple hundred hours of game play) that all of the projects which the game modeled on this fictional alien world were projects that real human beings were actively pursuing on this planet, for good and ill. Among them, there are massive environmental protection projects, ecological restoration projects, and sustainability efforts whose success or failure will determine the future of human civilization. I realized that I wanted to live in a world of science, not merely as an observer, but as an active participant.

In years since, the burgeoning of the internet, with its powerful democratizing effects, its incubation of the citizen science movement, of “outsider science,” of the makers’ movement, has convinced me that the ideal of a human society made entirely of scientists, naturalists, and ecologists could be our society. All people can become scientists. Becoming a scientist requires time and dedication, but it requires no secret gnosis that is kept from non-scientists. Do I want to learn how volcanism works? I have only to read and observe for several hundred hours before I will know a good deal about it (ironically, that’s about how much time I spent playing Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri). Do I want to learn calculus? Khan Academy is right here on the internet, assuring me that I can learn anything, for free, forever.

You Can Learn Anything | Valley Oaks Charter School Tehachapi

As there is in most science fiction, there’s a lot of hand-waving and pseudo-scientific ersatz explanation in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Some of the hand-waving, now that I know a little more about science, seems pretty laughable in retrospect. But that hand-waving got me in the door, years after I’d thought I’d closed the door. People like Gene Roddenberry and Sid Meier have done as much to recruit scientists as anyone on earth.

 

 

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