Exile on Ninth Street

Dear Blog and Blog Reader:

Sorry for the neglect over the past few weeks. There are times I’ve meant to write interesting posts like the one I had in mind of defending genre fiction, science fiction in particular. I’ll put a link here to China Mieville doing a good job of that, or parts of this piece in The Guardian do so.

I really have intended to write more here. But things were happening that weren’t so great. Or maybe they were. I ran away; I came home; I moved to a new place; I don’t know what to make of all that, except to say my Memorial Day weekend was interesting and maybe one day I can write about it.

Speaking of writing, Blog, one chief reason I’ve been neglectful is because I’ve been writing, almost daily, with a few interruptions (see above). When I get on writing jags, I tend to neglect you.

I’ll try to be more attentive, Blog. But I won’t make any promises.

Best,

Todd

The Hemingway Hoax by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What intrigues readers and Hemingway fans so much about the manuscripts lost in Paris in 1922? Hemingway was so obsessed with that episode—his wife at the time, Hadley claims they were stolen—he wrote about it some 40 years later in his posthumously published memoir A Moveable Feast, and the story was recently retold in Paula McLain’s The Paris Wife.

Scholars, biographers and novelists have speculated about the what-could-have-beens if those manuscripts were somehow to surface. It’s a question that intrigues fictional Hemingway scholar John Baird so much that, at least in some universes of Joe Haldeman’s The Hemingway Hoax, he’s cajoled by con man Sylvester Castlemaine to forge those manuscripts, and get the forgeries published as the real thing, a scheme that may alter Earth’s history in several universes.

Once Baird takes on the task, he alerts the attention of the Spacio-Temporal Adjustment Board, a time-space policing agency with a license to kill. An agent of STAB jumps back through time-space to stop Baird by any means necessary.

One trip, one threat of death should be enough to stop Baird, but something happens to throw off the space-time continuum and Baird gets flung from one end of space- time to another, each time persisting in writing the forgery until the interdimensional hitman can convince him otherwise or kill every manifestation of Baird known to exist.

This was a fun read for me, as both a Hemingway and Haldeman fan. It’s always intriguing to think about what direction a writer might have taken if he published once-lost manuscripts or kept working on some manuscript that taxes him so much he gives up wriiting. Haldeman’s story puts forward the question of what effect, if any, does literature or art have on history. It’s a fast-paced witty novel with a twisted plot.

And watch out literary forgers—STAB may just be watching.

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Today, I finished a revision of a science fiction story “My World Is Not Your World“. It’s my first attempt at science fiction. I would love feedback on it. Chief concerns are plot and condensing the story—it’s really long. But take a look if you want; it’s in the PDF above.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Don’t expect Will Smith’s movie I Am Legend  (2007) if you read Richard Matheson’s original 1954 novel. As with any novel-to-film adaptation, directors take poetic license: the film’s vampires, for instance, are soul-less brutes.

Though the film holds up on its own, it’s no match for the novel.

Robert Neville is the only human left in a post-apocalytic world inhabited by vampires. To survive, he locks himself in a boarded, locked and garlic-filled home at night, and stalks around a devastated Los Angeles killing the vampires by day.

While the novel has vampires—a horror staple—it works just as well as science fiction (it’s in fact part of Gollancz’s SF Masterworks series, the books of which I’ve been trying to find and read, in part as another reading project, as well as to learn from SF masters). The vampirism, Neville discovers, is a disease, and an apparently uncurable one.

And though Neville struggles to understand the disease, it turns out (spoiler alert) he’s the legend of which the novel’s title speaks.

The novel is a dark but philosophically powerful book, ultimately humanistic in outlook, despite its ending.

View all my reviews

Participated in another Mind Meld at SF Signal. This one is a reworking of post of mine from a few weeks ago on the plausibility of science in science fiction.

These Mind Melds are fun. Gives you a chance to write and think about a particular genre at the same time.

So go to the link above and enjoy all the pieces on the subject. Weigh in there or here.

By the way, the particular question was mine, too.

As I draft fledgling attempts to write science fiction, I’m finding myself worrying about the believability of my understanding of the science part. I come from a liberal arts background, though I love science and loved my required science classes: I took basic zoology and botany and astronomy, as far as the hard sciences go, and anthropology, as far as the soft sciences go. But, much of my understanding of science comes from studying the history of science in history classes, watching the Science Channel and Mythbusters, and reading mainstream science journalism.

One of my current drafts follows an ordinary guy — a liberal arts type — about 50 years in the future who gets his hands on an invisibility suit. The idea for the suit came from a short article in Science News. What I imagine happening to the guy once he gets hold of the suit . . . well, I’m not sure how plausible the idea is, or why or how it could happen, but somehow I want the suit to allow the wearer to fold space time. Oh, and none of you better steal my idea.

Of course, as I’ve begun to write, I also realize that who the character is and what the character wants is also primary to the story. It’s primary to any story. But for SF the plausibility of the science has to count for something.

I took part in a blogging round table discussion of  favorite movie tie-ins/novelizations at SF Signal. My favorite was Alan Dean Foster’s novelization of the original Star Wars film. That novel is as responsible for introducting me to the SF genre as any book or film and certainly was an early influence on me as a writer. As you’ll see from the other guest posters, Foster is a master of the novelization. Anyhow, go read the post.

Hello all! Below are links to PDFs of some recent writing I’ve been doing. They are science fiction story beginnings drawn from writing prompts by Joe Haldeman.  I am asking/begging/pleading/grovelling for any interested readers out there to give these “shitty” first drafts (as Anne Lamott might say) a look-see and give me feedback, especially to which beginnings you think have the greatest potential for a short story. Remember, these are drafts—I haven’t proofread them for errors.

Trial beginning 1

Trial beginning 2

Trial beginnings 3a and 3b

The Forever War by Joe Haldeman

My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Through the eyes of protagonist William Mandella, Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War gives readers a glimpse of what war in deep space and on distant planets might be like. It’s a theme taken up by countless science fiction writers — Robert Heinlein and Orson Scott Card, to name a few — and no telling how many SF films and tv shows.

Though set in the far future, this novel is comparable to any classic war novel. It’s gritty and unromantic. And given that Haldeman is a Vietnam vet, The Forever War is a novel as much about that war as Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried.

The war Mandella fights against an alien enemy millions of light years from Earth has a spurious beginning — its Gulf of Tonkin incident. The soldiers in Mandella’s unit fight in hostile environments against an often unseen enemy.

Because of the phenomenon of time dilation caused by light speed travel, soldiers age months while Earth ages centuries. When they return home, they find the word vastly changed, an almost completely different culture: one ravaged by overpopulation as well as wars and violence. An experience not unlike that many Vietnam vets had upon their return to the United States. Haldeman in interviews talks about the feeling the went on without him while he was overseas.

The novel, however, is more than a metaphor of Vietnam: Haldeman is prescient about such things as overpopulation, violence and more tolerance of gays.

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Can you tell by my headline which writer I’ve become obsessed with lately? Besides reading his novel The Forever War, I became interested in the fact he writes his science fiction novels, generally set in the far future, in longhand.

In this podcast below, he talks about his process and about writing in longhand:

http://copperrobot.com/2010/09/science-fiction-writer-joe-haldeman-discusses-unplugging-to-create/