Category Archives for science fiction

My literary life: A photo essay

After completing a commercial project today, I drove across town to Avoca Coffee Roasters for a cappuccino or two. Delicious coffee and they dress them up with artful milk flowers, like this:

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Avoca is a nice little hipster coffee shop, a nice place to sip your drink, read, scribble in your notebook, and listen to an ambient selection of hip-hop and techno dance pop, and maybe a little Eminem. Or I guess that’s what the kids call it these days.

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I went here for the coffee and the experience. I flipped through the Dallas Observer and read a few pages of Rudy Rucker’s Postsingular, a trippy SF novel about out-of-control nanomachines and out-of-control people and other dimensions inhabited by “angels”.  I would stop to write in my notebook and it occurred to me that this is sort of how I imagined my literary life—sitting into cafes, sipping cappuccinos and writing. It’s a pretentious realization, I know. But, pretentious or not, it was a nice, pleasant diversion after a busy work day. And if having that sort of moment is pretentious, so what?

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John Scalzi on Writing

I have to recommend John Scalzi’s blog Whatever for any writer—fiction no matter the genre (and I’m not really sure why you don’t read science fiction), non fiction, copywriting, or whatever. Not only does he share insights about writing, but also gives other writers plugs. He’s also funny.

And an example of how the SF & F community seems much more willing to pay it forward with other writers than writers in other genres.

Scalzi also recently posted an interview in which he talks about his background as a journalist and film critic, and about the most important event of his life–getting laid off at AOL and deciding to become a freelance writer. At that point he took control of his career. Something writers need to do more of, even this on.

So, enjoy this video.

—Todd

How Many Words Must a Writer Write Down To Know He or She Has Written a Novel?

Word Count

Word Count

I once read somewhere Mark Twain kept a running word count in the margins of his manuscripts. Word counts are probably a weird obsession held largely by writers. We survive by them. Sometimes we’re paid by the number of words we write. Sometimes we use the count to measure a good day’s work, whether those words add up to a few sentences or several pages.

Word counts also tell us—somewhat arbitrarily—what sort of work we have written. Is it a Tweet (which actually is even more micro, down to the character)? Is it an essay? A short story? A novella? A novel?

A few months ago, a writer friend of mine Gerald Warfield and I shoptalked about just such things. We couldn’t come up with a solid answer. But a blog post from Writer’s Digest gives some novel advice at least, breaking down some average word counts for novels of different lengths.

The link is here. Of course, it’s not the end-all declaration of authority, but it must count for something.

—Todd

None but a blockhead

One of my new favorite writers is John Scalzi. Besides writing some good SF, he also writes a blog—Whatever—in which he writes, well, whatever he wants. Often his posts, to my delight, are a look inside another writer’s life; it’s the sort of site that’s often encouraging and inspirational, but grounded in the realities of writing for a living. And it helps me feel not quite so alone in my ambitions and worries and even my small triumphs as a writer.

One of today’s posts addressed an issue most writers have to struggle with—money. Specifically saying it’s OK and good to actually make money from writing. It doesn’t make you a hack or sell-out. Upbringing (“money is the root of all evil”) combined with university English courses and professors and fellow students that romanticized the suffering, always struggling pauper writer/artist, it’s hard to break free of such a negative mindset toward money. So, I wanted to share Scalzi’s post below for those, like me, who have struggled constantly with this issue:

 A Moment of Financial Clarification

The End of the World as We Know It

After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A NovelAfter the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall: A Novel by Nancy Kress

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the best short novels I’ve read.

I love Kress’ prose style, and the multi-voiced narrative really works well.

From Locus magazine (June 2012):

“In addition to being a graduate level class on how and why non-linear story structures work, After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall is a swift and engaging story about the end of the world as we know it.”

View all my reviews

Happy Birthday Mr. Burroughs

Today is Edgar Rice Burroughs‘ birthday (born 1875).

As Hollywood via Disney reminded us this spring, Tarzan’s creator also created a certain Martian warlord, John Carter, and reacquainted some of us with the warrior’s exploits, and maybe a new generation to Burroughs’ characters and fiction with the release of  John Carter, an entertaining, action-packed and visually stimulating—especially if you saw it in 3D—movie that  was, however, panned by some critics as  ”. . .  bloated, dreary and humorless” (USA Today).

Those critics are themselves probably bloated, dreary and humorless. And likely never cared for Burroughs and his fertile imagination in the first place. Or if they did at one time care, have obviously lost that sense of wonder and adventure.

As far as the movie goes, Roger Ebert—as usual—best understands it, its genre and the expectations it should have fulfilled as a movie based on classic pulp SF, as he writes in his review of the film:

Does John Carter get the job done for the weekend action audience? Yes, I suppose it does. The massive city on legs that stomps across the landscape is well-done. The Tharks are ingenious, although I’m not sure why they need tusks. Lynn Collins makes a terrific heroine. And I enjoyed the story outside the story, about how Burroughs wrote a journal about what he saw and appears briefly as character. He may even turn up in sequels. After all, he wrote some.

And for those of you unfamiliar with the John Carter storyline, here’s Ebert again to summarize it:

Burroughs’ hero is a Civil War veteran who finds himself in the Monument Valley, where he has an encounter that transports him to the red planet Mars. This is not the Mars that NASA’s Rovers are poking into, but the Mars envisioned at the time Burroughs was writing, which the astronomer Percival Lowell claimed was criss-crossed by a system of canals. Luckily for Carter, it has an atmosphere that he can breathe and surface temperatures allowing him do without a shirt.

Maybe one day I’ll tackle the merits of John Carter (the movie), but today’s post is simply to share some tidbits about Burroughs, the writer: He and his family, for instance, in 1914 moved to Oak Park, Ill., where Ernest Hemingway, a teenager at the time the  Burroughs’ family arrived, was born and raised. Hemingway may have out of curiosity, Hemingway biographer Kenneth S. Lynn writes, “familiarized himself with Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novels . . . .” though the Hemingway family, mother Grace in particular, were Anglophiles who packed the bookshelves with Dickens, Shakespeare and the rest of the literary crew from across the Pond.

(I like to think Hemingway read Burroughs; he was a voracious reader, and how could Tarzan or any other of Burroughs’ heroes not appeal to Hemingway’s sense of budding masculinity? Then again, Hemingway dismissed fantasy and science fiction as genres; of course he dismissed most writers as terrible at one point or another in his lifetime no matter how good or bad.)

Another aside: Frank Lloyd Wright also moved to, lived and worked in Oak Park ( a suburb of Chicago) around the time Hemingway was born (July 21, 1899). What an intellectually stimulating neighborhood that must have been!

Now back to Burroughs.  Martian princess Dejah Thoris was his first successful character—he had written earlier stories—created in 1911. The princess,  Burroughs’ official website says, attracted the attention of All-Story magazine editor Thomas Metcalf, who “liked the tale and offered Burroughs $400, an extravagant sum. The story, renamed ‘Under the Moons of Mars,’ was serialized from February to July of 1912.”

Burroughs’ most famous creation, Tarzan of the Apes, swung into action in 1912.  According to the website:

Burroughs received $700 for the tale — and his career was off and running. Burroughs quickly discovered (probably to his secret delight, and certainly to the delight of countless readers) that he had many more tales to tell. There would be the inevitable Tarzan and Mars sequels but Burroughs’ imagination needed even more worlds in which to roam, and so in the next few years he would try his hand at almost every type of story imaginable.

Burroughs died March 19, 1950 in Encino, Calif.

___

*Editor’s note: If you’re out and about this weekend, and because you hopefully have a long three-day weekend (you slackers), maybe you can also celebrate the beginning of National Literacy Month by reading Burroughs.

“How did you get into this stuff?”

Perdido Street Station (New Crobuzon, #1)Perdido Street Station by China Miéville

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

How did I get into this stuff? I ask, paraphrasing China Mieville’s question to himself in the New Yorker’s Science Fiction issue.

Robert E. Howard. Conan the Barbarian. Monsters and swashbuckling battles. Comics. Star Wars. D&D. That’s just the short list of how I got into fantasy and science fiction.

Let’s backtrack to D&D. At the root of Perdido Street Station‘s story is a Dungeons & Dragons adventure, full of magic, monsters, swashbuckling battles, and adventurers willing to do “anything for gold and experience” (p. 383).

Of course, it’s much more complex than a Saturday night gaming session (paper, pencils, dice and miniatures subbing for digital images)—not that a session of D&D can’t be as complex as a novel. But, unless you play the game long enough with the same group, and survive the DM’s whims, it’s hard to fulfill the promises of a lengthy novel, the depth of character, an evolving plot and subplot that can be fully explored. A fully-realized world.

And a fully-realized world, a city—New Crobuzon—as alive and bustling as any real city, and peopled with just as fantastic creatures as a real city: the tortured Remade, the mysterious Jack Half-a-Prayer, the birdlike garuda, the monstrous psyche-sucking slake-moths that the main characters must finally destroy.

Which is the basic plot, one that could rival and perhaps surpass any the most sadistic Dungeon Master could create: one the human scientist Isaac undertakes after the garuda Yagharek, exiled from his people for taking away another’s choice, hires Isaac to rebuild his wings so he can fly once again. Isaac takes up the task, and in his experiments to learn how to engineer the wings, accidentally unleashes a terror that stalks the city. Reluctant at first to fight the slake-moths, Isaac is driven into the battle not only to help the garuda, but also to save his girlfriend, and test out the crisis engine that could lead him to scientific notoriety.

One one the things that drew me to reading more of Mieville’s novels, after being completely rocked by his Hugo-winning The City & The City, was learning Mieville grew up playing D&D. It’s clear the game is a serious influence, on his imagination, but Perdido Street Station takes you beyond the limiting world of elves and dwarves and dragons into a blend of magic and science and mixed technologies–the characters arm themselves with flintlocks, but are aided by steam- and magic-driven construct/robots. Mieville is well known for his efforts to genre-bust, and Perdido Street does that very well.

It’s mostly a riveting book, although it slows about midway (it’s 623 pages in the paperback edition I read) and Mieville does seem to to linger on repetitious descriptions of the psyche stealing slake-moths (although his descriptions of them exploding in the end were exquisite), but overall the novel pulls you in and holds you and reminds you of why you got into this stuff (fantasy & science fiction) in the first place: it’s a riveting tale with fascinating characters and it draws you into its world.

And I’ll let Mieville ask you the final question: “How did they [readers] get out of it?”

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Pollysyllabic Spree End of Year update

New Year’ Eve 2011 update of Books Bought, Books Read (with commentary as warranted):

Books bought since Oct. 1, 2011:

  • The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
  • Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
  • Wild Cards, Volume One, edited by George R.R. Martin (A collaborative novel-in-stories about alien viruses, a foppish alien, jokers—and maybe some smoker and midnight tokers—and reluctant superheroes know as Aces. Currently reading this novel. Interesting that SF and fantasy novelists, as well as other genre novelists seem to collaborate and create. Something not often seen with “literary” fiction.)
  • Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (Who wouldn’t want to be as cool, well-fed and well traveled as Bourdain?)
  • Forty Signs of Rain by Kim Stanley Robinson
  • Metaphase by Vonda McIntyre (third in her Starfarers series)
  • The Year’s Best Science Fiction, Twenty-fifth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois
  • Year’s Best SF 9, edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer
  • The Edge of Ruin by Melinda Snodgrass (second in her Edge series)
  • Marsbound, Starbound and Earthbound by Joe Haldeman (a trilogy)
  • Make a Scene: Crafting a Powerful Story One Scene at a Time by Jordan Rosenfeld
  • World-Building: A Writer’s guide to constructing star systems and life-supporting planets by Stephen L. Gillett
  • A Novel in a Year by Louise Doughty
  • Creative Visualization by Shakti Gawain

In the SF Masterworks series:

  • Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)
  • Gateway by Frederik Pohl
  • Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (looking forward to reading this after reading the original short story)
  • Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick
  • The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson
  • Rendezvous with Rama by Arthur C. Clarke

Books Read:

  • The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman (Time keeps on slipping, slipping . . .)
  • Healthy Aging: A Lifelong Guide to Your Well-Being by Andrew Weil, M.D. (Has a good exercise routine for us old farts.)
  • The Edge of Reason by Melinda Snodgrass (An excellent, fast-paced urban fantasy novel featuring a battle between magic and reason.)
  • Babel-17 by Samuel Delany (My first of Delany’s novels. A wild ride with hints of pre-cyberpunk. Also concerned with the nature of language, in this case a language that has to be understood in order to deal with a potential alien threat.)

 

 

Flash fiction: The Watchers

In the early part of the twenty-first century there were people who believed we were being watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man’s; those people were dismissed as loons, quacks who went out to New Mexico and watched for the Grays to emerge from Area 51.

At the time, I thought such people were at the very least misinformed, pretty damn weird, and probably sold jars of lime Gatorade to tourists believing they were buying alien urine. So it goes.

***

In my late forties I decided to begin taking a morning constitutional on the advice from the books of health gurus—to some these gurus are quacks as well—and on one of these walks, on a crisp cloudless October morning, in a quaint middle-class neighborhood west of my flat, I passed by a nice red-brick house of a family I knew only slightly, when I heard a slight rustling from their hedges.

I stopped and listened, thinking it was only a squirrel or a bird, or perhaps a lizard. But the sunlight dappling through the shade tree in the front yard revealed something else—an azure sparkle through the leaves. At first I dismissed it as perhaps some piece of trash, a beer can perhaps, caught in the leaves.

Later, after we knew the truth of the mattter, some who saw the pictures I took with my camera phone said they heard hissing in the night sky. Others heard nothing, but reported a mass of comets sho0ting through the sky,  an unusual enough phenomenon little reported by the media, which was too busy analyzing Kanye West’s decision to go into fashion design.

Anyhow, I started on my way once more, but then the rustling in the hedges erupted again. I stopped and turned and watched. Something was rising steadily above the leaves and limbs. I brought my camera into focus.

A glowing blue globe peeked from over the edge of the hedge. I trembled but felt compelled to approached, almost as if the Thing were laying some kind of Jedi-mindtrick on me.

The Thing rose silently. There were no visible means of propulsion. Clearly, a technology superior to any on Earth—as far a we know (who, after all, really knows just what the frak is going on at Area 51).

I moved closer. It hovered in place over the hedge. I saw no massive hole, no sign of impact whatsoever. It made no threatening moves, no sound, but I knew better. I knew from sci-fi flicks that nothing good could come of this.

I knew the invasion was on, and at the moment, was its only witness on this too quiet street . . .

Books bought, books checked-out, books read: End of Summer, beginning of Fall 2011

An update to my pollysyllabic spree:

Books bought

  • The Accidental Time Machine by Joe Haldeman
  • Year’s Best SF 14

Books checked out

  • In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto by Michael Pollan
  • Healthy Aging by Andrew Weil

Books read

  • The Windup Girl by Paolo Bacigalupi
  • Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury
  • Embassytown by China Mieville
  • Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke