Exile on Ninth Street

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.)

Here is this week’s Booking Through Thursday:

Do you carry books with you when you’re out and about in the world?

And, do you ever try to hide the covers?

Yes, I carry books when I’m out and about. Of late, when I go to substitute teach, along with my lunch in my backpack, I carry Year’s Best SF 12 to read on my breaks.

It’s a short story anthology from 2006 and includes Nancy Kress, Joe Haldeman, and Ian MacLeod.

Short stories are really good for the hour or so of planning period time I usually have available for myself. Much better than reading the same copy of Wired or Time or Newsweek found in the teacher’s lounge.

No, I don’t hide the covers of books I carry around, unless it’s a big stack in the shopping bag from the bookstore I’ve bought them from.

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.

View all my reviews

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.

View all my reviews

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/

Finished reading Dune this week. Up next is Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War.

Recently found this video of Haldeman talking about writing at MIT:

http://mitworld.mit.edu/video/415