Proximal Eye – Page 9 – Mark W Tiedemann

On Time and Attention

November 20, 2018 No Comments

My word. It’s November and this is the first post I’ve made since…May. Shame on me. It’s not that I haven’t read anything worthy of comment. On the contrary, I see several titles on my read list I had ever intention of reviewing here, but… It has been an unpleasant year. The deaths have mounted. Friends. In June, Harlan Ellison passed away. I’m told he died in his sleep, a remarkably peaceful exit for such an iconoclastic, enormous personality. I’ve met few others for whom it can be said that he made every second count. That he considered me a friend still humbles me. Before Harlan, Vic Milan died. He was one of the first professional SF writers I ever met. We were roughly the same age. Then in the last month or so two friends outside the field died. Both were younger than me. I have no larger point here other than to say that attention to other things

Reaching For Stars

May 25, 2018 No Comments

Let me get straight to the point: Mary Robinette Kowal’s new novel, The Calculating Stars, is one of the best alternate histories I have read since… It is 1952. Dewey is president. Elma York and her husband, Nathaniel, are on vacation in the Poconos. They both work for the newly-formed National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Nathaniel is the chief engineer and has a reputation for putting up America’s first satellites. Elma is a mathematician, a superb one. She is also a former WASP pilot, which fact figures prominently in all that follows. In the midst of their idyllic vacation, a meteor slams into the Atlantic just off the east coast. It destroys Washington D.C. and wreaks havoc up and down the seaboard. Elma and Nathaniel manage to get out and to her plane and west until a fighter squardon challenges them, learns who they are, and escorts them to Wright-Patterson Air Base, the only fully operational military base within range.

Below Dragons, There Be

April 18, 2018 No Comments

Empire City suffers under circumstance unprecedented in history. Or does it? Depending on how one takes one’s metaphors, it may be that the pair of dragons, which rose one day out of the sea to take up a circling position above the metropolis, occasionally spitting fire down at random targets, is just another form of an old problem, one going back to Ur or Sodom and Gomorrah or Rome or London or Sarajevo, each in their own way suffering calamity that subsequently defined them. Dragons come in many forms—earthquakes, vulcanism, sacking, a blitz, snipers. As buildings burn, collapse, streets are torn up, and safety becomes a once-long-ago idea, what the people in those cities do determines whether the city survives or fades into myth. Individuals are often remembered. Gilgamesh, Lot, Nero, Churchill— Duncan Ripple, Swanny Dahlberg, Abby. Who? One day in the future, they will be remembered as the heroes of Empire City. They, the last of Late Capitalism’s Royalty, who

Shifting Ground, Changing Paths, Constructed Worlds

March 7, 2018 No Comments

We talk a great deal about World Building in science fiction and fantasy, but more often than not I suspect it refers to the equivalent of interior design and decoration. If the motifs of costume and manners conforms to a general tableaux of architecture, climate, and the suggestion of a history a bit more than two months old, with none of the corners out of place, it is hailed as an example of world building. In fact, it may well be nothing more than sticking antlers on the dog, painting the castle mauve, and handing out swords to characters who would be otherwise right at home in any particular middle period Court one cared to name, and reviving institutions we are well rid of and renaming them or layering them with mystical significance or “bloodline” gravitas. World building worthy of the description requires more, and some understanding of how a holism evolves. (I find it noteworthy that when discussing this,

Music and Popular Trends

March 2, 2018 No Comments

Anyone who knows me for any length of time eventually learns of my sometimes intransigent tastes in music. (Not only music, but whereas other art forms prompt conversations about form and substance that remain largely theoretical, analytical, and impersonal, when it comes to music, especially popular music, things can get a bit touchy.) I have a minor musical background, I play (or play AT) keyboard and guitar, and in my youth I had fantasies of being a rock star. I grew up with a wide range of influences, although in the end it was a pretty static assembly. My parents had about fifty records. A wide mix, ranging from Strauss waltzes and Grieg, to Chet Atkins, Bobby Darin, movie soundtracks, Peggy Lee, one odd Tennessee Ernie Ford record, and Les Paul. A few other oddments, including some Gershwin, Nat King Cole, and a couple of jazz records I do not remember clearly. But there were also music programs on television

2017

January 29, 2018 No Comments

Looking at my list, I read, cover-to-cover, 51 books in 2017. That doesn’t seem like much to me, but knowing there are people, even people I know, who haven’t read one book in that time, it’s probably in the top something-or-other of national averages. At 63, I’m not sure I care anymore. It never was about quantity, as I’ve told myself time and again, but there are so many good books and I want to read them all! We have engaged another study group this year. Rousseau. When we agreed to join, we thought we were doing just one of his works, his Second Discourse on Inequality. Come to find out, our guiding light wants to cover all the major Rousseau. Next up is Emile. I haven’t read Emile since high school. I remember little about it, other than it served to enrich a later reading of C. J. Cherryh’s Cyteen. Very well. Rousseau it is. But in 2017, I felt torn between two kinds

Star Wars and Reality

January 3, 2018 No Comments

Back in 1977, Samuel R. Delanyperhaps one of the best science fiction writers of the 20th Century, certainly conceptually in the top 10 of any honest assessmentwrote a review of the first Star Wars film for Cosmos magazine. In it he pointed out that the universe George Lucas had given us was essentially caucasian, largely midwestern, and predominantly male. While Princess Leia was without a doubt one of the more subversive cinema creations in SFdefinitely not a princess, kick-ass, occasionally crude, with all the can-do anyone could possibly want from men with the Right Stuffshe was the only female in the movie other than the tragically short-lived Aunt Ru and the odd extra in the command center on the rebel base. To quote from his review: “Sometime, somewhere, somebody is going to write a review of Star Wars that begins: ‘In Lucass future, the black races and the yellow races have apparently died out and a sort of mid-Western American

Profits, Patents, and Pirates

September 4, 2017 No Comments

Annalee Newitz, cofounder and editor-in-chief of io9, has written a novel that has all the signs of being a major touchpoint in science fiction. Where in previous generations, physics or information technology have been at the heart of seminal works, speculations on nanotech or colonization tools, ecology or libertarian excursions in ruminations about personal power, Autonomous bases its meditations on questions of ownership and resource allocation in a future where both are matters of patent law. If this seems like improbable grounds in which to grow a gripping, nail-biting action plot, reconsider. Wars are fought over exactly these two issues all the time. In fact, it would be difficult to name a war that wasn’t unleashed over both factors. Even those which might be described by other metrics, their prosecution still depended on these things. We live in an age wherein most of the time we hear about such conflicts as courtroom exercises, involving lawyers and academics. Even so, to assume

Stars, Orbits, Crossed Trajectories

June 7, 2017 1 Comment

William Least Heat-Moon is renowned for his travel writing. Blue Highways, his first book, is a marvel of fine prose, careful observation, poignancy, and great storytelling. It is deservedly considered a classic. Books that followed were no less fascinating, and each took an unexpected route to give us a look at life on various roads, some by water, others by history, always with an eye on the landscape. Now he has turned his skills at close observation to fiction. Celestial Mechanics is Heat-Moon’s first novel and it is as unexpected as any of his past works. Silas Fortunato, thirty-three, has come home to inhabit a hundred acres inherited from a deceased aunt, and by happenstance encounters Dolores Heppernan, who goes by Dominique, arguing with an inn-keeper over a misplaced reservation. Silas gives her his room and so begins his pursuit to bind the fey Dominique to him. He is smitten. In an idiosyncratic courtship, he convinces Dominique to marry him and

Strange Inversions

May 31, 2017 No Comments

Jeff Vandermeer has been mining the hills of what for a time was called New Weird for years. His Veniss Underground stories are exemplars of the power of the oblique, the odd, the displaced, the exotic in service to demonstrating one of the principle delights of science fiction, namely that setting is character. His newest novel is another example of how landscape transforms imagination and redirects the focus of our self-reflection. The City—unnamed, unlocated, but somehow American for all its desolate ambiguity—has been reduced to the condition of decimated near-abandonment. We are told the entire world has undergone a series of collapses and that this city is representative of most of it. Those remaining pick over what is left, and there would seem to be plenty. But there is a constant danger, the looming presence of Mord, a giant bear that can fly. It tortures the landscape and the survivors, eats indiscriminately, slams about remaking the skyline according to no

Mark W. Tiedemann

Author. Blogger. Photographer.

The Proximal Eye