Proximal Eye – Page 18 – Mark W Tiedemann

Persistent Ghosts

June 17, 2013 No Comments

Recently I read two novels that, after some thought, work as examples of effective and ineffective sequels. I confess up front I’m stretching things to make a point here and I in no way recommend a similar reading strategy. I’m indulging myself in this in order to explain something. I haven’t read Philip Roth since Portnoy’s Complaint came out in paperback. Yes, I read it that long ago and, yes, I was probably far too young for it. My impression of it at the time is hard to recapture, but it left me kind of stunned. For one, I hadn’t encountered that kind of writing before (not even in some of the porn magazines I’d snuck into the house) and to see it in something on any best seller list was a shock to my 13-year-old psyche. For another, the self-conscious analysis of an adolescent “matter in transition” surprised me. I’m not sure it helped or just made me feel

Great Blunders, Great Wars

June 11, 2013 No Comments

High school history provides us with the basics of World War I and does so by making it appear that something akin to an earthquake happened. Archduke Ferdinand, of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, is assassinated in Sarajevo and a month later Germany invaded France, triggering a catastrophic series of treaty-obligated interventions by Russia, England, and so forth. Simple. Except, what? Why would Germany do that because the heir to a throne not theirs is shot by a lone assassin in a city in a country allied with Austria? The connective tissue was always missing. Something (mumble mutter) to do with Serbia and Austria blaming them for the murder (by an independent terrorist!) and Russia insisting Austria leave Serbia alone, Germany insisting Russia leave Austria alone, France insisting Germany leave Russia alone, and England insisting everyone leave Belgium alone (Belgium? How did Belgium get into this…?), and suddenly you have the international equivalent of a schoolyard pile-on. Many books have been written

Iain Banks Is Gone

June 10, 2013 No Comments

I have nothing much to say that I didn’t already say. He wrote some of my all-time favorite books. I envied the scope and depth of his creations. If I imagined what kind of work I wanted to write in my ideal world, Banks’ Culture stories would be one of the examples. He went much too soon. He thought he’d have more time. We thought so, too. One of the pitfalls of science fiction is that we can read about all these wonderful places and times where things like this can be dealt with and the world is more at our command than it is, but when the book is finished and we close the cover, we still live here. And here we lose people every day to things we know we should be able to beat. Because we’ve seen that future, laid out for us by fine writers and great minds. Some day. Writers like Iain Banks showed us.

Jack Vance: No Place At Saponce

May 30, 2013 5 Comments

Jack Vance wrote idiosyncratically in a field of idiosyncracy. The very lushness of his prose bespoke an era well past its prime that, when sought, could never be found. Azure, jeweler’s brass, roseate and softly crystalline. Contradictions made to coexist and cross-inform. Footprints trace a path along the the receding shore of a sea once filled with more deliberate monsters than now, the waves gilded by a fading sun that somehow shines proudly if wearily, attesting to empires whose ruins are more wondrous than any new powers might contrive. He often wrote of the stuff of melancholy, while avoiding melancholy itself. One could see how tales told about these times and places might turn maudlin for greatness lost, but not yet, not now. Now we must see what fascinations recomplicate in a present not yet to form a past still waiting. Was it science fiction? Fantasy? Did it matter? Suis generis is sometimes used only when imagination fails to pigeon-hole,

Veering Into The Present

May 8, 2013 No Comments

An attractive pitfall of popular history is the Pivotal Moment. The writer centers on an event or an idea that signals a shift in the course of history, leading somewhere other than where it had been heading. The Donation of Constantine, the First Crusade, the invention of moveable type, Galileo’s confrontation with the Church, Newton’s codification of the law of gravity, things like that. The point being made is that these events are so tectonic that Everything Changes. The pitfall is not so much that they are wrong but that they are taken as solely responsible, isolated moments, forks in the road. It is easy to ignore or forget everything else around them. Focusing only on the Emperor Constantine can suggest that without him, Christianity might not have become the official religion of Rome and thus history might have taken a different course. (Personally, I think Constantine’s moving the capital of the empire east was far more significant as something

A Country Of Distant Voices

May 1, 2013 2 Comments

In the opening scene of his new novel, And the Mountains Echoed, Khaled Hosseini shows an Afghan father telling his children a story. The story is about lifes fragility in the face of an unpredictable and unnegotiable universe, the loss of children, and the tenacity of memory. In the story, the father is offered a choicehaving a lost child returned to him to live a life he knows will never be more than difficult, often harsh, or leaving the child in the relative paradise to which it had been spirited while the father is granted the gift of forgetfulness, so he might return home with no memory of loss. The father chooses the latter. But all around him, when he returns, memory remains, part of the landscape, continually troubling his life with fleeting moments of doubt about something he cannot name. He has left his memories far away, in the mountains. But the mountains are always there. So, it turns

Primary Influences

April 21, 2013 3 Comments

Reading and writing are inextricably linked, but it’s a lopsided relationship. One can be a voracious reader without ever feeling the need to write, but being a writer by necessity demands voracious reading. There are some who seem to believe they can write without having to read extensively (or at all!) but I imagine this is a self-correcting delusion. It may be a more obvious problem in this age of self-publishing ease, when one’s shortcomings can make unfortunate and sometimes wide spread public displays, but the simple absence of any kind of artistic æsthetic on which to base the work is fatal to the endeavor. Besides, what would be the point other than a profound narcissism. Part of the fantasy of “being a writer” is to join a fraternity whose past membership has provided the delight you hope to offer, a delight you have presumably found in reading. I imagine that for some writers, the desire grows gradually, a cumulative

Culture’s End (The Ends of Culture)

April 3, 2013 8 Comments

Once in a while, work comes along that, while not doing anything apparently new, turns a settled form inside out and frees possibilities. In writing, this generally means that, in the wake of such work, the things it is possible to say and the ways in which they are said broaden. Branchings occur, reactions, new growth, inspiration ripples along. Iain M. Banks triggered—at least for me—a renewal of an old science fiction mainstay, the Space Opera. Practically from the beginning of the modern form in the 1920s, interstellar adventures have been woven into the DNA of the genre, replete with strange planets, exotic aliens, and occasional examinations of political systems, albeit not on a very sophisticated level. Everything from the Roman Empire to a kind of United Nations model has been used, sometimes to unintentionally silly effect. Given the suppositions on hand, it is not a small task to plausibly imagine such a universe. Some of the best works have

Mark W. Tiedemann

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The Proximal Eye