I decided to go in for a new head shot recently. It’s been over six years since my most recent head shots, and not only have I gotten more wizened over that time, but I also have a new book coming out in the next few months.
As with my last photos, my new head shot is he work of the incomparable Pat Rose. You can check out her amazing work here: she’s an institution of Portland portraiture. Having my photo taken by her feels a lot like I imagine sitting for a painted portrait would feel, and at the end of it all she produces an image that is wonderful and painterly as though Jan Van Eyck had painted me.
So, in honor of the coming Exit Black (and of my advancing age), I give you “Portrait of Joe Pitkin, aged 52”. . .
Hello, literarians and assorted (and beloved) fellow weirdos!
I received an email from my publisher, Blackstone, yesterday with a publication schedule for my second novel, Exit Black. I’m excited to announce that my little bundle of joy is due to come out in February of 2024 (or, to use Cesare Emiliani’s Holocene Calendar, February 12024). I promise not to pester you about it every day for the next eight months!
I also promise not to ever refer to Exit Black as “my little bundle of joy” again. But it sure is a little bundle of something–little bundle of action? Little bundle of thrills? Little bundle of artfully strung-together words? That last one feels a little too on-the-nose.
I experienced a weird constellation of three events last week. First, my editor, my agent, and I hashed out the jacket copy for my upcoming novel, Exit Black. It was weird to realize that I was basically helping write ad copy for a book that I labored over for two years. Second, I sent out a query to a literary agent for the book I drafted after Exit Black, called Pacifica. (My current excellent and extant agent, Scott, works on film and TV projects, and Pacifica definitely isn’t movie material, so I am looking for a bookish agent as well).
And third, I was driving down Broadway in Portland when I saw this bumper sticker ahead of me:
Millennials and Zoomers–and their parents who might have watched Spongebob Squarepants with them twenty years ago–will recognize this as Squidward Tentacles’ self portrait, “Bold and Brash.” I was happily shocked to see it on a bumper sticker. And I realized when I saw it that this publication process I am experiencing with my books is drawing up all of my deeply Squidwardian impulses: my vanity, my hunger for approval, my inner conflict about how art intersects with commerce. Squidward, c’est moi.
If you need a blast from the past, or you somehow never saw the original, here is a clip of me Squidward from the episode “Artist Unknown:”
I’m late bringing this news to The Subway Test–a sign of the recent moribunditude of my blog. But last year I entered the Aura Estrada Short Story Contest at Boston Review and…I didn’t win. But my story, called “Nomenclator of the Revolution,” was a finalist for the award, and that means the story will be appearing in Boston Review soon!
One of the reasons I feel so proud to have “Nomenclator” coming out in Boston Review–besides the obvious, that Boston Review is an excellent publication which has hosted writing from titans like Rita Dove, John Updike, Susan Sontag, and Saul Bellow–is that “Nomenclator” had been rejected by 26 other magazines before it was accepted at Boston Review.
Which is another way of saying don’t invest too much meaning in any particular rejection of your work. When a story of mine is rejected a few times–say, half a dozen rejections or so–I do need to look hard at what I’m sending out. Maybe the piece isn’t ready. Maybe it’s not as good as I would like to believe it is. But once in a while, I scrutinize the much-rejected story and it still looks good to me. It’s hard to assess my own work honestly. But if I really believe the story is good, then I’ll keep sending it out until I find someone who agrees with me.
One of my formative memories as a writer was seeing the great poet William Stafford read at the end of his career. He would have been 75 or 76 years old at the time–a wizened, kindly fellow who I appreciated only later as one of the most important poetic voices in the 20th century. At one point in the reading, he introduced one of his poems by reciting the names of all the magazines and journals that had rejected it. The list was long–I don’t remember how many publications were on it–but, journal names being what they are, the list sounded like a poem of its own. I didn’t have the courage to tell Stafford how important his reading had been to me, and he died mot much later. But thank you, William Stafford, for reading that list when I was 19 years old.
But the novel I’m working on now, Pacifica, begins each of its 74 chapters with an epigraph. Much like the computer game Civilization, each chapter is named after one of the technologies that have made modern humanity possible. And, much like Civilization, each technology is accompanied by an apposite quote. Leonard Nimoy was the gold standard narrator for those quotes in Civilization IV (though Sean Bean has his moments in Civilization VI).
One of the most fun parts of drafting Pacifica has been finding the right quotes for each chapter. I picked from books and poems that I love (as well as a few books that I hated) to put together what I imagined as a kind of collage or mosaic of human knowledge. I imagined the task as something like a literary version of the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, where The Beatles assembled a photo-collage crowd of their favorite thinkers and artists and goofball influences.
Many technologies were easy to find quotes for. Especially for early technologies like pottery, masonry, and currency, there are a thousand great writers who had something pithy to say. Mostly I would page through books in my office, or CTRL-F through digitized books in Archive.org, to find quotes that spoke to the technology in question and also, hopefully, to the action of the chapter. Sometimes I had to draw the connections myself, in which case the quote turned into something of a writing prompt; other times the quote fit the chapter in deep and unexpected ways that I couldn’t have engineered if I tried.
Some of the later technologies were much harder: for instance, no one from Homer to Virginia Woolf seems to have much to say about the superconductor. Who could I quote for a tech like that?
It just so happened that by the time I got to the superconductor chapter of the book, everybody was talking about ChatGPT. At my college, the discussion revolves entirely around students’ using ChatGPT to plagiarize their essays, an issue which seems to me as trivial, in the grand scheme of dangers that ChatGPT represents, as the crew of the Titanic arguing about a shortage of urinal cakes in the men’s rooms of the Saloon Deck.
So I asked ChatGPT to find me some quotes about superconducting. It suggested some quotes from Larry Niven’s Ringworld and Niven’s and Jerry Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye. They weren’t bad references, exactly–those books do mention superconducting–but none of them resonated with me. So I asked about Arthur C. Clarke, a fave of mine: surely, I thought, Clarke must have written somewhere about superconducting.
According to ChatGPT, Clarke has written about superconducting: of the two references ChatGPT gave me, the one which jumped out at me was this one: “Clarke’s short story ‘The Ultimate Melody,’ published in 1957, briefly mentions the use of superconducting materials in the construction of a futuristic musical instrument called the ‘ultimate melody.'” Now that’s a resonant quote–that would work perfectly for Pacifica!
So I looked up the story and read it (like 90% of Clarke’s short fiction, I had never read it before). Here’s the thing, though: there’s absolutely nothing about superconducting in that story! (For that matter, the futuristic musical instrument is called “Ludwig;” the ultimate melody was the ideal music the instrument was designed to find).
And here’s the other thing, which I discovered later: Arthur C. Clarke did write a short story, called “Crusade,” in which superconductivity is a central plot point. ChatGPT didn’t think to mention it (because ChatGPT doesn’t think yet). I tracked that story down with a simple DuckDuckGo search for “Arthur C. Clarke superconducting.” It’s an excellent story, by the way–very Arthur C. Clarke. And that story had the perfect quote, which fits both Pacifica and the life I feel I am living lately: “It was a computer’s paradise. No world could have been more hostile to life.“
So, for now, I agree with John Scalzi’s excellent assessment: “If you want a fast, infinite generator of competently-assembled bullshit, AI is your go-to source. For anything else, you still need a human.” That’s all changing, and changing faster than I would like, but I’m relieved to know that I’m still smarter than a computer for the next year or maybe two.
I’ve had a long spell away from this blog while I was drafting my third novel, Pacifica. But now that Pacifica is (finally, after a thousand sighs) drafted, and as I prepare for the publication of my second novel, Exit Black, by Blackstone this year, I’m able to give a little more attention to this space. I’ve missed being here, and I’ve missed interacting with you through The Subway Test. I hope to connect with you a little more frequently in the coming months!
So, feel free to call me Mr. Gravity for the rest of 2022. Or Professor Gravity if that appeals to you more. On second thought, don’t call me that: a name like Professor Gravity suggests that I might actually understand gravity, and as my physics teacher said long ago, gravity is harder to understand than you think. Just keep calling me Joe.
Many thanks to Brad and Rob for their fine publication, Center Field of Gravity, which I hope you will check out.
I’m pleased to announce that my story “Before Concord” has been chosen as a finalist for the 2022 Gravity Award by the fine folks at Center Field of Gravity. As they say on the Oscars, it’s an honor just to be nominated.
“Before Concord” is a favorite of mine: it’s my first satisfactory attempt at a hard-boiled detective story (though, because I’m me, it’s set on the University Republic of Mars at the end of the 22nd century). With all the novel work I have been doing lately, I’m very happy to see one of my shorter pieces get picked up.
The winner will be announced this Tuesday the 17th of May, and you can read the story in all its nominated glory here.
I’ve been obsessively trawling through news feeds for more articles about the novel coronavirus pandemic, as though somewhere in the thousandth article I will find some life-saving pearl of advice that I didn’t see in the previous 999 articles. I can see that what I’m doing is a strategy–shared by many, I suppose–to offer myself the illusion of control in a cataclysm which is fundamentally beyond anyone’s control. (Of course, while the pandemonium is beyond anyone’s control, it’s not beyond everyone’s collective control: I’m very happy to see the people in my community of Portland, Oregon, starting to close up shop, hunker down in our houses, and practice social distancing even without explicit direction from our psychically damaged and malignant president).
As I hunker down here at my dinner table, reflecting on scary days ahead, I am reminded of a pandemic story I wrote years ago, one of my earliest science fiction efforts. The piece is called “A Murmuration of Starlings;” it was my first sale to a major sci fi publication (AnalogScience Fiction and Fact). While there are a few elements in the story that I would have handled differently if I were writing it today, on the whole I think it has held up quite well. And there is a lot in “Murmuration” that I anticipated correctly about what a pandemic would be like: the focus on social distancing, the eerie calm in once-bustling places, the bemused emails and phone calls.
Starling, by M. Shattock
But, now that a pandemic is truly upon us, I’m more interested in the things I got wrong about the story, the things I failed to imagine. It didn’t occur to me to write about economic collapse, though of course that’s one of the things that’s easiest to notice about our current predicament. I didn’t think at all about the case fatality rate of the disease I was writing about: in the story, 90% of people who were infected died, though it seems to me now that a disease that deadly would burn itself out very quickly. It never occurred to me how much chaos and misery could accompany an infection with a 98% or 99% survival rate. I wish, now that I’m living through a real pandemic, that I had said something about the dithering and denial of the authorities in the early days.
If you don’t happen to have the June 2012 issue of AnalogScience Fiction and Fact lying around, you can read the story here. I can reassure you that there is a redemptive arc to the story, just the sort of thing a reader might need while hunkering down through a real pandemic.
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.
The Subway Test 
