Category Archives: Science Fiction

The Author Gratefully Acknowledges

06 Saturday Oct 2018

Posted by in My Fiction, Politics, Science, Science Fiction, Stories, The Time of Troubles

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My story “Potosí” recently came out in Analog, and it’s gotten lots of the positive and negative attention that I had hoped it would. In the case of this story, I looked forward to some negative attention, as “Potosí” is a not-so-veiled indictment of the Trumpian worldview, and some readers of science fiction, unfortunately, are also white supremacists. (This is not to say, by the way, that everyone who hated the story is a white supremacist. People could have any number of reasons for disliking the story; however, a few people who hated it had objections which were rooted in a white supremacist worldview).

I’ve also been happy with how the story looks in Analog. Even though the magazine is print-only, it’s still nice in this internet age to see one’s name in print. However, I do have one regret about how the piece looks: my bio was omitted from the end of the story. That’s normally not a big deal at all for me–I suspect the editors left it off for space-saving reasons, and the folks at Analog have done more than just about anyone to promote my work. They were even kind enough to run a full page biosketch on me a couple of years ago. But there was a line in my bio for this story that I really wanted to appear in the magazine. Here is is:

“The author gratefully acknowledges the assistance of Phil Ekstrom in working out the physics of this story.”

Phil is a friend of mine whose knowledge of physics not only exceeds my own (that’s an exceedingly easy accomplishment), but his knowledge of physics also exceeds my knowledge of any field at all, including writing. He’s a man of great accomplishment in a wide number of fields of physics and engineering; while it’s hardly his greatest achievement, some will recognize his work in the photo below: Phil was one of the people who wired up the young Bill Gates’ and Paul Allen’s first computer.

young gates and allen

A teenage Bill Gates looks to the top of an imagined stack of 100 billion dollar bills –Getty Images

“Potosí” involves a decent amount of classical mechanics–most of the story takes place in the microgravity of a small asteroid being pushed this way and that by space tugs, mass drivers, and the imaginary forces of human greed and anger. I’m reasonably good at describing  the greed and anger part, but I needed a lot of help with the physical forces. I can tell Phil has years of experience explaining things to undergraduates of varying talent; he certainly needed to call on those skills in order to explain my story to me.

The story has some (I hope small) violations of physical laws, where I did a little handwaving in order to accomplish an artistic goal. But to the extent that “Potosí” is any example of hard sci-fi–as opposed to the science fantasy of Star Wars or the kilomoles of handwavium in Star Trek–I have Phil Ekstrom to thank for giving the story some semblance of rigor. Thanks, Phil.

What’s Your Science Fiction Pen Name?

26 Thursday Apr 2018

Posted by in fantasy, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Politics, Science Fiction

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I’ve really been getting into ambient music lately, and I’m noticing that many ambient artists–maybe most of them–have stage names. Loscil, Biosphere, Oöphoi–many of these folks name themselves as though they were themselves science fiction characters.

I’ve also been wondering a lot about identity in my writing, whether the fact that I’ve been published many times before makes it likelier for new editors to accept a story of mine for publication (it doesn’t seem to–I’m definitely an opening act as far as magazines and podcasts are concerned). But I do like the idea of my writing having an existence which is separate from my gender and ethnic and religious and sexual identity.

If fantasy and science fiction writing were more like ambient music (or if I thought it would accomplish something for me to take on a mysterious, Banksy-esque persona), I would choose the name Gravitrope or Pánfilo for my nom de plume. Both of these names resonate with me for personal reasons: for much of my thirties I was in a band called The Gravitropes, and I feel a kind of spiritual affinity for gravitropism, which is the ability of sprouting seeds to send their first shoots away from the pull of gravity and their first roots towards it. Pánfilo is a wonderful old Mexican name pulled from ancient Greek; the name means “lover of all.” I picked the name for one of my alter egos in my next novel, Pacifica.

One might wonder whether my taking on a writing name like Gravitrope or Pánfilo would be an attempt to game the publication system of speculative fiction. To their great credit, fantasy and science fiction editors are actively working to publish voices from a full diversity of genders, ethnicities, and sexualities. Would a writer with a pen name that seemed less white and male get a little more attention from editors today? Inasmuch as I hold the most privileged identities on the planet–I definitely present as white, male, straight, cis-, Christian, and it’s not worth quibbling over ways that not all of  those labels are perfectly, scrupulously accurate when the labels are definitely more true than not and when they are really markers of social privilege that I’ve held my whole life–it’s fair to say that if I took on a name that suggested a different gender, or genderlessness, or a different ethnicity, I would be dismissed as a poseur. I also don’t want to do anything that will make it harder for people from the full spectrum of humanity to get greater attention for their work. And, if there’s something I can do to help others from that fuller spectrum get published (short of refraining from writing myself), I’ll do it.

Having said that, there is something liberating in sending a story to a magazine under a different name, or to a magazine that uses a blind submissions process (i.e. you send the story in anonymously and the editors only learn who you are if they decide to publish your work). I don’t know whether I’ve had any better luck–or worse luck–getting published in blind-submission venues than in others. But I do like the prospect of my writing being read on its own terms, irrespective of who I am or who editors think that I am. I’d like to imagine my work reaching across boundaries of ethnicity and gender and history to tap at the bedrock of the human condition–in other words, I hope that my stories might function as works of art rather than simply as statements about what it means to be white and male in America.

That’s a fantasy, I know. But hey, I’m a fantasy writer.

And you? If you were to write sci fi under a pen name, what would you choose?

 

hierher

Photo credit: Hierher

 

Review of The Origins of Creativity

14 Saturday Apr 2018

Posted by in Biology, Book reviews, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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Edward O. Wilson’s latest book, The Origins of Creativity, is a return to the trails Wilson explored almost 20 years ago in Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge. In both books, Wilson attempts to bridge the gulf between the sciences and the humanities which has opened over the last century or more. Wilson makes a heroic effort in The Origins of Creativity (touchingly so, given that the great scientist is nearly ninety years old and has given the book some of  the touches of a final work). In the end I was unpersuaded by his exertions, but I am grateful for his return to a theme which is so meaningful for me personally. And, if Wilson’s proclamation of a coming Third Renaissance doesn’t quite convince me, I believe that Wilson still does us yeoman’s service in making an attempt to unify the humanities and the sciences.

Wilson’s starting point is uncomfortable, though obvious, for English teachers everywhere: the science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields have far outstripped the humanities in the public funds they receive, and STEM fields have been vastly more successful at producing lucrative jobs for college graduates. Elected officials regard the arts & humanities as luxuries whose comparatively tiny public budgets are often hard to justify.

Wilson’s diagnosis of the problem is that the humanities are stuck in the cultural cul-de-sac of present day. As Wilson puts it: “The main shortcoming of humanistic scholarship is its extreme anthropocentrism. Nothing, it seems, matters in the creative arts and critical humanistic analyses except as it can be expressed as a perspective of present-day literate cultures.”

While I do think that much of what goes on in the humanities is culturally blinkered, I’m not exactly sure how one would go about making the humanities less anthropocentric. The purpose of art is to explore what it means to be a human being–the humanities are anthropocentric by definition.

It is true that, with the exception of some artists working in the genre of science fiction, most artists and humanities scholars are not deeply educated around science. To put it another way, I think most scientists know way more about the humanities than most humanities scholars do about science. However, I’m not sure how our becoming more literate about evolutionary psychology and paleontology will make artists less anthropocentric. Art is one of the most anthropocentric activities on earth.

Would it help bridge the gulf between the arts and the humanities if the arts expressed something other than “a perspective of present-day literate cultures?” Maybe, but I don’t see it.  True, we would probably gain something by being better educated about the deep, biologically-driven ways that the lives of “present-day literate cultures” are related to the lives of the Lascaux Cave painters and the sculptor of the Venus of Willendorf. It does help us to recognize (and I think most present-day literate people do recognize) that those paleolithic artists were just like us in their humanity–their emotional lives were just as rich and subtle as Margaret Atwood’s. And, I do suppose that realization helps us in humanity’s most pressing moral challenge, that of seeing all humans across time and space as part of a single family, our common fate tied to the health of the ecosystem in which we live.  

Lascaux II

But this realization will not by itself bridge the gulf between the humanities and the sciences. That gulf is there because there is simply too much information to keep tabs on in the sciences for any human being to become an expert in more than a very small number of fields. It may be that our species is gathering scientific insights so quickly now that it’s impossible for a single human to become a true expert even in a single field as broad as chemistry or biology.

I’ll be the first to argue that artists could afford to learn a lot more about STEM fields. After all, science and technology are some of the most important organizing principles of human existence today. But whatever art we produce will still be to a certain extent time-bound: we make the art we do to give our lives a some kind of shape that makes sense to us. Our art remains bound in time and place because the human condition binds us to the time and place we live in.

 

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

23 Tuesday Jan 2018

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

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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.

Reading Roundup 2017

31 Sunday Dec 2017

Posted by in Dungeons and Dragons, fantasy, Literary criticism, Reading Roundup, Science Fiction

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I guess I couldn’t get any later with my yearly reading roundup. And, since joining Goodreads last month, the thought of chronicling my reading habits for the last year feels a bit redundant. However, these posts have been fun to write for the last three years, and it helps me to consider in full the books I’ve read over the last year, if only to re-evaluate the stuff I’m reading.

I had a paltry reading harvest this year–13 books in all–though partly this number hides the many short stories, longform journalism pieces, and political blog posts I waded through this year. Having said that, I hope 2018 holds a little less covfefe coverage for me and a few more actual books by thoughtful people.

So, without further prologue, here is my crop of 2017 reads:

Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.  This is one of the most inspiring high-wire acts I’ve read in all of fantasy fiction. Actually, I’m not sure exactly how the book is marketed—it’s an alternate history detective story—but here Chabon manages to weave a truly absorbing and moral tale set in a counter-historical Jewish homeland (which happens to be Sitka, Alaska). Also, Chabon’s writing is much like Eddie Van Halen’s guitar playing for me: while it’s often not exactly to my taste, every page or two I find myself asking “how did he do that?” as Chabon drops off another metaphorical description of the Alaska sky or a tough chess move.

Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? There’s a rough-cut, coarse grained quality to PKD’s writing that gives this book the feel of a brilliantly inventive first draft. For all I know, perhaps it was: PKD was forced by poverty to churn out pulp books at a fantastic rate, under the influence of a good deal of amphetamine. The book is different in almost every way from Blade Runner, the film that was based on it and which provided my first exposure to PKD’s work. The book has a bit more of a Ray Bradbury-ish quality—sci-fi objects like ray guns and electric sheep are not portrayed as believable objects so much as mythical symbols, the kind of objects one would find in a dream. Blade Runner has a good deal more world-building in it. However, the book is the dream that the movie was made from.

Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle This granddaddy of “what if Hitler had won?” novels is my favorite Philip K Dick book. The novel follows the loosely connected stories of several Americans living in a California that has become a protectorate of Imperial Japan. The story has the kind of trippy plot twists that Dick was famous for, but this story seemed tethered enough to a believable reality that it was much easier for me to inhabit this world than, say, Ubik or Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The book is a creature of its time and some of the characterization of non-white peoples—especially the Japanese imperialists—hasn’t aged well; however, I would argue that those depictions are more ham-fisted than aggressively racist. While I’m not normally a fan of alternate histories, this one really got to me.

Dozois, Gardner, editor. The Year’s Best Science Fiction #33. It’s been years since I’ve read a “year’s best” anthology; however, I read this one cover to cover in hopes of learning more about the field I’m writing in. As with any book by a medley of writers, some of these stories spoke to me more than others. There were some good stories from writers I knew about—Kelly Link, James S.A. Corey, and Pablo Bacigalupi all had solid entries—but I was more blown away by several new (to me) writers: Ian McDonald, Gwyneth Jones, Carter Scholtz, Chaz Brenchley, Nick Harkaway, and Kelly Robson. The best of these stories do what I hope (and often fail) to do in my own work, bringing believable characters and well-turned dialogue to stories with the whiz-bang plots and settings of sci-fi. I have such a broad reading appetite, and I’m such a slow reader, that I probably won’t read another best-of anthology in the coming year. However, I have learned a lot about the short sci fi market here, and I do hope to come back to Gardner’s anthology again.

Dungeons and Dragons. Player’s Handbook, Dungeon Master’s Guide, and Monster Manual (three books). I’ve been a Dungeons & Dragons player since Christmas Day 1980. However, this is the first time that I’ve read the three core reference books for D&D from cover to cover. At the time, I had some hope of writing a set of longer and more involved posts about D&D (in addition to this one and this one), and so I told myself that I was doing research. It helped, too, that the books are generally quite well-written and that they provide an old player like me some insight into the evolving sociology of D&D.

Overall I loved most of the changes that these 5th edition books bring to the game. There is a long-running tension in the D&D community between those who like their games full of rules and statistics and those who favor the role-playing and interactive story-telling aspect of the game. (Of course, there are also many gamers, perhaps most, who play somewhere between these two extremes. As you can probably imagine, as a sci-fi and fantasy writer I play D&D for the story-telling). To my great joy, 5th Edition D&D is clearly an attempt to make role-playing and story-telling the center of the gaming experience. The focus on characters’ backgrounds and motivations and personal flaws, the reward of “inspiration points” to players who engage in particularly good role-playing, the inclusion of a more nuanced and morally complex alignment system—all of these innovations have turned 5th edition D&D into a game about inhabiting a character and playing a role. Yes, there are a few ways that the game has had its rules overly stripped down and simplified, but overall I’m much happier to see D&D moving towards a model of interactive storytelling.

I’m also pleased to see that the creators of this edition have worked hard to remedy the racist and sexist depictions of the first editions of D&D. So far as I remember, not a single illustration from 1st edition D&D depicted a non-white adventurer, and the descriptions of “savage” humanoids like hobgoblins and orcs were full of signifiers that associated these evil creatures with Asian hordes and African tribesmen (some of this racism was inherited directly from D&D’s source material. It’s no coincidence that the only African-American actors in The Lord of the Rings movies played orcs). Similarly, depictions of females in 1st edition D&D were almost always of the “chainmail bikini” variety—for example, on the cover of the original Dungeon Master’s Guide here:

dmg1e

5th edition has thankfully put real armor on the women, and the illustrators have broadened the color palette for illustrations, including (at last) for dwarves, elves, halflings, and all the other good-aligned creatures that might take up arms against a sea of goblins:

5thedfemale

Heath, Chip, and Dan Heath. Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard. I’m generally skeptical of self-help books (especially those that are given to me at work), but I really loved the authors’ light tone here, as well as the well-researched underpinnings for what they were suggesting (hint: it’s in the title). I’m going to try these precepts in my own life and at work.

Kawasaki, Guy, and Shawn Welch. APE: How to Publish a Book. One of the best books on writing that I’ve ever encountered. Very different from the Brenda Ueland/John Gardner types of writing books, this one really focuses on the business end of publishing and promoting a book. I’ve built my publishing plan for Stranger Bird around these guys’ suggestions.

Hamilton, Alexander, John Jay, and Hames Madison: The Federalist Papers. Reading these fabulous essays was a bit of a slog, owing to the authors’ 18th century style. They were also at times hilarious: I wish I had counted the number of times Hamilton accuses the opponents of the constitution of wantonness, calumny, affectation, or speciousness (in the end he half-apologizes for his “intemperances of expression”). More importantly, though, I was struck by the genius of how the Constitution was framed, how an entire government could be brought about with so few moving parts in it. Of the three authors, Madison was my favorite: a gentle author, brilliant and deeply read, but also horribly compromised by his own slaveowning. Here (and elsewhere) we learn about Madison’s wish that slavery be abolished as inimical to a republican form of government; yet, like Jefferson and almost all the other founders, he did not free his own slaves in his lifetime or in his will. His Federalist 54, where he tries to explain the Three-Fifths Compromise, is one of the most fascinating and troubling things I’ve read from any of the founders. I have another take on these remarkable essays here.

Miéville, China. The City and the City.  I liked this book pretty well, though it suffered somewhat in comparison to Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, which I had read the month prior. Miéville turns in an interesting murder mystery in one of the most compelling imagined settings I’ve encountered recently, a double city in the Balkans somewhere where the inhabitants of each half are required by law not to see the inhabitants of the other half. Equal parts Kafka and Philip K Dick, this book offers a thought-provoking meditation on life in the Balkanized spaces of the world, the Jerusalems and Berlins and El Paso-Juárez double places.

Newton, Cam. Deep Work. I loved this book on first reading, though as Newton’s ideas have sat with me some of them haven’t aged well. I definitely agree with his overall thesis, though: that people who are able to focus for long periods of time on truly “deep work” (i.e. work that would be hard for others to do) can find themselves in great demand. This kind of focus is an increasingly rare skill. It is definitely having an effect on my work and home life.

Rulfo, Juan. Pedro Páramo. This slim story took me forever to finish, pokey as I am at reading in Spanish. I found the style much more accessible than Fuentes’ style in Artemio Cruz, and Rulfo’s story is both hilarious and frightening, like a gothic Poe tale retold by a Mexican John Kennedy Toole. The story was difficult, too, though—lots of unannounced time shifts, POV shifts, moments where it was unclear whether the speaker was living or dead. I may well teach this book sometime for my sci-fi and fantasy class. Anyone who liked the movie Coco should read this darker take on the subject.

Garamendi--de Pedro Paramo

Photo: “De Pedro Paramo 1/3,” Antonio Garamendi

 

What Would You Call a Martian Highball?

30 Thursday Nov 2017

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science, Science Fiction, Stories

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I’m working on another hard sci fi story again. It’s a genre that I often make a conscious effort to branch out from–part of me feels much more drawn to writing absurdist Borgesian stories, or “The New Weird,” or whatever it’s being called these days. Yet something else draws me back, again and again, to writing hard science fiction, the stuff of space elevators and pressure domes and transhumanism.

One thing about hard sci fi that makes me feel out of my depth is the sheer volume of research that a serious hard sci fi reader expects from a story. And the research is wide ranging: it doesn’t matter whether I happen to know a little about genetic engineering; a good hard sci fi story also demands that I know something about AI and cryptography and planetary physics and orbital insertions.

That’s part of the fun, being able to research Martian concrete one day and asteroid mining the next. It’s also a little daunting to read the hard sci fi work of some of the current masters, folks like Linda Nagata and Ian McDonald and Gwyneth Jones, and see just how deeply researched their futures are, to see how offhandedly they predict something transformational about humanity 200 years in the future and make me wish I had thought of that.

Here’s a simple, dumb example. I’m writing a story set on a Mars colony between 100-200 years in the future. What do people drink there? I have a scene set in a bar, a kind of hangout that might remind people of an underground dive full of beer and curly fries. But it’s occurred to me in the last day or so that beer is a highly unlikely drink for colonists living under pressure domes on Mars: any staple crops like wheat or barley or oats would very likely be used for solid food, not beer. I’m fairly confident people will still want to drink alcohol 200 years in the future on Mars, but if it’s Martian hooch I would guess they’ll want something that yields a lot of alcohol from a relatively small biomass. What would that be? Fruit brandy? Potato vodka? Mezcal?

I still like the idea of a bunch of Martian undergrads downing beers and curly fries, so I may just leave those details in even though they make little sense. One of the characters in the scene is happy to see a Kentucky Bourbon on the menu–I suppose any society that can send 60,000 emigrants to Mars can also export Kentucky Bourbon, which makes more sense than exporting kegs of Earth beer over months and months and at fantastic weight. I’m not sure what to call the cocktail the character orders. Right now I just call the drink an offworlder, which seems a decent enough name, but I’m hoping to find a name with a little more zazz.

Hazel Nicholson

Photo Credit: Hazel Nicholson

What do you think? What would you call a Martian cocktail made with Kentucky Bourbon, perhaps distantly related to an old-fashioned?

Potosi Picked Up!

18 Monday Sep 2017

Posted by in Advertising, Beta Readers, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories, Stranger Bird, The Time of Troubles, YA fantasy

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I’m happy to announce that the great science fiction magazine Analog has picked up my story “Potosí” for publication. “Potosí” will be the fifth story I’ve had appear in Analog, and by far the longest story (nearly 10,000 words) I’ve ever placed in a professional market.

As I wrote elsewhere, “Potosí” is set in a near future where corporations and countries squabble over the solar system’s vast mineral rights. It’s also a meditation on white supremacy and terrorism, an attempt to explain today’s world in new and striking clothes–much the same way that Star Trek explains the Cold War and Forbidden Planet explores World War II survivors’ guilt.

It’s been a good (and busy) week for my writerly life. One of my recent stories (another Analog pick-up called “Proteus”) is getting some very nice attention, and my quest to publish my first young adult fantasy novel, Stranger Bird, continues apace. I’m hoping for a publication date of November 3–keep watching the transom for that.

There’s also much more that I want to share here on The Subway Test, and I’m sure I’ll have some longer musings and ponderations here soon, but for now I’m pretty busy just keeping on top of my sci fi and fantasy writing.

From Poetry to Science Fiction

27 Tuesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Book reviews, fantasy, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science Fiction, Stories

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While on a road trip yesterday, my wife and I listened to B.J. Novak’s hilarious and touching story “J. C. Audetat, Translator of Don Quixote.” J.C. is a skilled and thoughtful poet in an age that doesn’t value poetry (that is to say, our age). He finds fame instead by translating, first Don Quixote, and then other great works, each to greater acclaim, even as his translations grow ever more absurd. I won’t say much more about the story for fear of giving away the joke—it really is a marvelous story.

Part of why I was so touched by the story was how much I recognized myself in the character of J.C. Not that I’ve ever been famous—rather, J.C.’s inner struggle with writing poetry for small literary magazines that practically no one reads called up an old personal struggle of mine.

Not long after I started college I knew I wanted to be some kind of writer, and at that time I wrote short fiction, poetry, and creative non-fiction pretty much in equal measure. Towards the end of my time at college, though, during a tough and lonely time in my life I listened to a cassette tape recording of a Robert Bly reading called “Poetry East and West,” and I decided, precipitously, that I would devote myself to poetry for the rest of my life.

I was not at that time a good poet. I became one over time, but I wrote quite a few bad poems before I wrote a single good one, and I wrote many more bad ones after that first good one. It was some years before I any knack at all for writing good ones.

What attracted me to poetry in the first place was its almost total disdain for market forces. Nobody will pay you to write a poem, and so you are free to write whatever you like, to dig down to the bedrock of existence, beneath those composting strata of life’s trivialities that we spend so much time buying and selling.

That way of writing and living still appeals to me. But it was only after years of writing poems that it dawned on me why nobody will pay you to write a poem: because nobody reads poetry much. To be a poet today is to walk away from readers and towards an absolute experience, like a monk or yogi or hermit. I could shut myself up in my cabin, in the manner of Robert Francis or Bashō or Emily Dickinson, and pour myself into work that few people would see, living a full life in conversation with an indifferent world, like a man calling down into an empty canyon or a sparrow singing for a mate in a supermarket parking lot. That would be a painful way to live, but it would be a life defined by the coolness of an uncompromised vision.

I don’t think I’m cool enough to be an artist of that type. It’s hard to imagine throwing my voice down a canyon for years like that. I want people to read my work, to ask me questions about it, to tell me how they reacted to it. This desire is not the same as the desire for fame—the idea of being famous gives me the willies. Rather, what I want is a conversation, a person who reads something I’ve written and says that was meaningful to me or I’ve been nagged by this question about your main character and I have to ask you. And to have that conversation, I need a reader.

I chose to write science fiction and fantasy because I thought they were genres I could write in, and at the time I was exploring the idea I thought fantasy and science fiction could use a more serious literary treatment than they have usually gotten in recent decades. (The fact that the world is full of literary science fiction and fantasy writers shows how dated my understanding of those genres was, as well as how many writers have been working the same hustle I hoped to, only years before it had ever occurred to me).

Someday I may hole up in the cabin and write poetry for the rest of my life. But not right now. Right now, I’m grateful to have a handful of readers. Every once in a while someone will email me about how much they got out of a story of mine, or with a question about something that didn’t make sense to them, and it’s that feedback from a few readers that keeps me writing.

The New Yorkering of Science Fiction

14 Wednesday Jun 2017

Posted by in Book reviews, HPIC, Literary criticism, Musings and ponderation, Science Fiction

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A couple of weeks ago one of my writing group comrades passed along to me this Laura Miller article from Slate on the incursion of “literary novelists” into the field of science fiction. I often find the premise of such articles cringeworthy–that there are good, serious writers out there who used to write good, serious fiction about failing marriages and suburban malaise but who now have decided, who knows why, to write crap about lasers and robots with big boobs.

Hajime Sorayama--Sexy Robot

Hajime Sorayama, Sexy Robot–photo credit Moody Man

Miller’s article is more nuanced than that–it acknowledges that the line between literary fiction and science fiction has always been blurry, and that calling a book “literary fiction” is no more a guarantee of its quality than calling a book “science fiction” guarantees that it is trash. Miller’s basic argument is that life is changing so quickly now that a contemporary story is dated almost before it is finished: if I am a literary novelist writing about a Tinder romance that goes sour, who knows what online romance trend will have replaced Tinder by the time I finish my book five years later? Wouldn’t it be better for me, then, to imagine a near-future dating app, so that when my book comes out I seem “buoyantly dystopic” and “a literary polymath” to reviewers?

I don’t dispute Miller’s reasoning: I hadn’t thought about it before, but surely some of the near-futuristic “serious fiction” out there is meant as a commentary on the pace of change in our lives and how maddening it is for us to try and keep up with it all.

But I’d like to suggest another hypothesis to explain the huge influx of Columbia MFA grads and New Yorker raconteurs into the slums of science fiction. Part of the shift, I’m sure, is that the last two generations of writers have grown up watching science fiction movies and TV with good production values and believable special effects. Science fiction was often regarded as shlocky in the pre-CGI era, and certainly before the breakthrough of Star Wars, partly because so many sci fi movies looked so clunky and fake. (Of course, there were excellent exceptions in the years before Star Wars, movies like 2001:A Space Odyssey, Forbidden Planet, and George Pal’s War of the Worlds, but these were rare glints of gold in a sea of Plan 9 From Outer Space dross).

Today, however, it’s possible for even a modestly-budgeted TV show–to say nothing of a big budget movie–to have the kind of truly believable special effects on which good sci fi viewing depends. And the existence of commercially successful, well-made science fiction movies catalyzes the creation of more such work, attracting writers and filmmakers with serious artistic chops–no one needs feel ashamed anymore that they like science fiction (at least the highbrow literary “speculative fiction” of Margaret Atwood or Michael Chabon).

One might argue that the crossover popularity of a writer like Vonnegut is what opened the floodgates to good science fiction. I disagree: Vonnegut was regarded for most of his career as a literary oddball, someone who would be a major writer if only he didn’t write science fiction. And Vonnegut’s popularity in the seventies did not facilitate the mainstream popularity of other science fiction greats like Ursula Le Guin and Stanislaw Lem (both of whom, thank goodness, have since received some of the attention they deserve).

The fact is that until recently, practically the only speculative writers who were unequivocally welcomed into the literary canon were authors from the non-English speaking world: people like Kafka and Borges, and later García Márquez and Calvino. And some would still argue that their inclusion in the canon is proof that what they were writing was something other than sci fi or fantasy–if you want to make a college English professor flip out, try calling “The Metamorphosis” or “The Library of Babel” a science fiction story.

Am I bitter about it? I suppose I must be–why else would I write 700 more words in defense of science fiction writers? In the long run, though, if David Foster Wallace and Jennifer Egan get the highbrow readers to crack a science fiction novel, if that brings them to look, eventually, at Octavia Butler or John Crowley, then who am I to complain?

 

A Story for the Time of Troubles

31 Wednesday May 2017

Posted by in Musings and ponderation, My Fiction, Science Fiction, The Time of Troubles, Utopia and Dystopia

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I’ve been intending to write a story about asteroid mining for some years now. Last week I put the finishing touches on my best attempt at the topic: what started last year as a first draft of about 3,000 words plumped up over the course of a year into a 10,000 word dreadnought of a story (actually a novelette, for those of you interested in the preposterous nomenclature of fiction) about terrorism, white supremacists, and a floating mountain of pure platinum.

There aren’t many science fiction magazines that will take a story of that length, so if it isn’t picked up it may not see print until I publish a collection of my own stories. But I do hope that it is printed before then, partly because so much of what the story became bubbled up out of my struggling with the political climate of the last year.

While the terrorist enemy of the day is ISIS, science fiction looks beyond today’s social structures, refracting the view of today’s enemies and power relations into a new image that arrests our attention with its logic. What I’ve attempted to do is not exactly a bravura leap of imagination: it’s pretty easy today to see parallels between the medievalist Islamic terrorists of ISIS and their reactionary Christian, white supremacist counterparts. The greatest parallel between them is that for all the hostility they seem to have for one another, their common enemy is liberalism: both groups hate the world of globalized commerce and its perceived moral relativism; both are willing to kill innocent people in order to restore what they believe to be the proper–and long-insulted–social order.

Robert Thivierge

Photo Credit: Robert Thivierge

In the last few weeks it’s been comforting to watch the total shambolic ineptitude of the Trump administration. I have some faith that Trump’s vision of a hyper-nationalist, authoritarian America will fall apart over the next two to three years, if only because Trump and his cronies seem so intent on committing impeachable offenses (and crimes) in plain view. However, Trump’s incompetence will not dismiss the anger and hatred of some of his hardest-core supporters, the white supremacists and neo-fascists who have been so emboldened by Trump’s behavior. In fact, I’ve wondered whether Trump’s inability to govern, his failure to encourage the passage of legislation even with a pliant Republican congress eager to pass tax cuts and repeal Obamacare, may lead to even greater violence and frustration among Trump’s hardest core.

When I sat down to start this latest story, called “Potosí,” over a year ago, the thought of a white supremacist terror group seemed far-fetched, a hearkening back to the worst days of the KKK. Today I wonder whether the story is a little too prescient.