Category: Mystery

Art

From There To Here, the Curious Path to Granger’s Crossing

It’s a good question: how does a veteran science fiction writer come to write an historical mystery-slash-love story? Especially one set in a period and place wherein, as far as I can find, no one else has bothered to set fiction. 

There are clear parallels between historical fiction and science fiction (clearer still between historical and fantasy) in that, depending on how far back and where you go, world building becomes a major component, and science fiction is very much about world building. Though the emphasis on that has of late verged on too much. We still have to create character, develop plot, and have something meaningful to say.

Like most people who grew up learning anything about St.Louis and its origins, I knew the basic story. In 1763, Lafayette and Company came up the Mississippi River and established a trading post on a bluff which quickly became the town of St. Louis, named in honor of Saint Louis the IX (though it didn’t hurt, I’m sure, that Louis XV was still king of France). The Chouteaus developed the place into a vital confluence of trade and in 1804 it became one of the main entry points for the westward expansion of the United States after Napoleon sold the territory of Louisiana to Jefferson in a fire sale at bargain prices.

Like most students of my generation, that was about it. Things became more interesting in the 1960s when one of our mayors, Cervantes, went on a campaign to celebrate “our Spanish heritage.” Like many people living here at the time, I scratched my head and said “what Spanish heritage?” After all, this is St. Louis, there are streets with French names, towns to the south have French names, it was the Louisiana Purchase, we lived in a French Catholic city with universities named for French Jesuits…and on and on. Mayor Cervantes was going on about something that ran counter to our sense of self. What Spanish heritage?

Well. Like anyplace that has been around more than a minute, the history is far more involved—and interesting—than that which we learned in grade school. But I had to arrive at it by decades of roundabout study, which leaves me wondering why history is so often taught the way it is. Prior to my research, early St. Louis history for me began with the Founding and ended with the Purchase, with a brief note about Lewis and Clarke. Next time it entered my notice was with Dred Scott and then, almost as briefly, the Civil War. Next up was the building of the Gateway Arch. We are too often contemptuous the history of our birthplace and generally know more about other cities than we do of our own.

My entry point, though, was stranger than most, perhaps. 

Many years ago, I worked as lab manager in a photo shop. Shaw Camera. One of the two best jobs I ever had. We were a custom black & white lab and we had a host of amazing customers. One of them was the city water department, which possessed a huge archive of photographs going back easily to the mid-19th century. They embarked on a project to have their glass plates printed and new copy negatives made.

One day they brought in a series of plates of the construction of Eads Bridge. They were surreal in the way a lifelong SF reader might find them, stirring connections to Jules Verne. The pictures of the bridge, rising from the waters of the river, the early stages of the anchors, the steel. I made a separate set of prints and gave them to my friend, SF writer Allen Steele, and we spent an evening going over them and speculating and doing some story construction based on those images. The idea of writing a novel based around that place and time took root. I started doing research.

That novel has yet to be written, but I did a lot of research into St. Louis of the 19th Century. (I still have some hopes of getting around to that book, so I still have all the research.) In the meantime, other projects came up.

I developed an idea for an alternate history novel set in St. Louis. I won’t here detail all the byways that took, but I did write that one, plus two more. While working on it, I continued my research. Since it was alternate history, I went all the way to the Founding to make sure my divergent history made sense.

And in the course of that stumbled on the colonial period.

Did you know there had been a battle of the revolutionary war fought in St. Louis? I didn’t. At best I recalled something adjacent having to do with George Rogers Clarke and Vincennes, but had no idea anything directly involved St. Louis.

And that’s where the Spanish heritage came into it. If it hadn’t been for the Spanish lt. governor, De Leyba, the battle might have been a non-event. The Spanish were the allies of the American rebels and De Leyba insisted St. Louis fight.

It was a one day affair, mainly. There are a number of personal journal accounts, many of which contradict in certain details. And there had been an assault across the river at the same time against Cahokia. The battle itself was interesting, but did not in itself suggest a whole novel to me. But there had been an American presence and…

Step by step, sidewise and widdershins, the elements of what became Granger’s Crossing came together. I was toying with switching genres and thought to do mysteries. I wrote two, one contemporary, the other historical. For a long time, neither attracted any interest.

But the more I looked into the period, the more interesting it all became, and multiple stories suggested themselves. The first is almost entirely fictional. But the background, the setting, is as close as I could make it to what was actually there. 

St. Louis at that time was a village, hovering around a thousand people. Three major north-south streets, farmland shooting west, a pond and stream along which a mill was eventually built, surrounded by now-gone mounds left by a native civilization long absent, and just south of the Missouri River, it became the center of the fur traffic in the midwest, overseen by a number of prominent people, but dominated by the Chouteaus, who were a political as well as financial dynasty. It was the town to which French settlers moved in the wake of the Seven Years’ War from the east side of the Mississippi, and younger than Ste Genevieve to the south, which was eventually inundated by the river and forced to move inland. From its founding in 1763 almost to the advent of the Purchase, the population remained roughly the same, but that is deceptive, since it was a trade center and a good number of people came and went, both trappers and Indians, occasionally driving the population up considerably in some months.

Spain took over because when France lost the war, Louis XV ceded the Louisiana territory to them rather than see it fall into British hands. Since the British then dominated Canada and started building forts in the north, there was bound to be conflict, and in 1780 a half-hearted bid was made by the British to take St. Louis. That would have seriously crippled Spanish trade. They failed. The habitants of St. Louis fought them off, even though outnumbered. The fact is, the combatants the British fielded were not regulars but largely local Indian tribes that, while ostensibly fighting for the British, were there for their own reasons, and when victory was neither quick nor easy, they left the field.

Into this, I introduced my main character, Ulysses Granger, a young lieutenant in the Continental army, seconded to Clarke’s militia as an observer, along with his best friend, Ham Inwood. When Ham goes missing, Granger comes looking for him, and finds his body, clearly murdered rather than a casualty of combat.

Due to the necessities of war, it is three years before Granger can return to start trying to find out what happened to Ham.

That was the point of departure for the novel. 

I said that historical fiction shares a common trait with science fiction. The further back in time one goes, the more alien the world encountered. Granted, people are people, but customs and resource contour our reactions, and in truth claiming that “people are all the same” is a facile and almost worthless aphorism when trying to reconstruct a time and place. Quite a lot of how people lived ends up being conclusions drawn from conjecture and reconstruction. You have to sit back from studying what is available, close your eyes, and try to build the world suggested.

The temptation to overlay contemporary ideas of right and wrong should be fought. Not that certain principles would not be found harmonious across time, but they would not necessarily manifest the same way, and certain questions likely would not even arise.

In the end, though, it is fiction, and it must speak to us now. Just as when one goes the other direction to imagine a future that may or may not happen, care must be taken to remember that change is a constant, and what we take for granted now may not remain relevant tomorrow.

I found a few books that proved very helpful in pointing my the right directions. The World, the Flesh, and the Devil by Patricia Cleary; Beyond the Frontier: A History of St. Louis to 1821 by Frederick A. Hodes; Francois Valle and His World by Carl J. Elkberg; Founding St. Louis by J. Frederik Fausz. Those dealt primarily with St. Louis. I used a number of broader histories to place it all in the broader context of the Revolutionary War, but those books, with their excellent references, took me through and into details that helped make the novel better, and I than them for their work.

So now the book is in the world. I am working on a sequel, set a couple years after the events in Granger’s Crossing, this one based on an actual murder, though I am delighting in looking somewhat past what was recorded and creating what I hope will be a richer mystery. 

And then there are the other novels which led me to this one. It’s been a strange path to get here. One of the pleasures has been to answer that question from my childhood: “What Spanish heritage?” Indeed.

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Have I Mentioned…?

Did I mention I have a new book? It launches in April, the 25th to be exact, and I’d like to tell you something about.

Granger’s Crossing is a departure for me. At least, at first glance. After decades of writing and publishing science fiction, I took a shot at historical fiction.  In fact, this novel came directly out of another project, which was science fiction.

Quite some time ago I had an idea for an alternate history. I poked around for a good departure point and settled on the Louisiana Purchase. What if, I asked, it had never happened? What if Napoleon had never sold it to the United States? What if the continent had remained divided between France and the United States at the Mississippi?

After digging around I found what I considered a reasonable justification for this scenario and then went on to flesh out the novel, which took me in some fascinating directions.

One thing it gave me was more than a passing appreciation of early St. Louis history. After completing the first novel, I thought (quite arrogantly) hey, I could probably write a halfway decent historical novel.

On such unexamined assumptions surprising things are born.

This is NOT the alternate history. This one is the historical, though that doesn’t mean it is any less speculative.

One of the most under-attended periods of American history seems to be the Revolutionary War in the West. The eastern seaboard draws all our attention. That, after all, is where all the myth-making occurred—Philadelphia, Boston, New York, the Chesapeake, Baltimore. The prominent names are all  there—Washington, Hamilton, Greene. The West seems less important, but the Mississippi River was important and the proximity of Spanish Territory played into strategic equations more than is taught in the average high school history class. 

Even in my home I was surprised at how few people knew there had been a major battle. 

Looking into it led me into a deeper exploration of that whole period of St. Louis history and the shape of a story began to coalesce. 

I have never understood the general indifference toward history, particularly among people who otherwise love good stories. Pick up a volume of history and give it more than a little attention, and stories are everywhere. 

In constructing the plot for Granger’s Crossing, I found a cast of characters almost begging for attention. I had no shortage of actual people living in St. Louis at the time to fill out the substance and flavor of the village. 

At some point in the alchemical process of creating fiction, my hero, Ulysses Granger, took form. Step by step, I found cause for him to be there. I felt comfortable using a murder mystery template, at least to start the action, and once I found The Body, the plot began to take on a life of its own.

Given the circumstances—the Battle of St. Louis, known then as L’Annee du coup, in 1780—I had to establish a reason for my Continental soldier to either stay or return to St. Louis, which led to further research. The issues around the rivers at the time and the various interests involved, American, Spanish, French, British, provided the canvas on which to depict my characters, their motives, the challenges. 

Somewhat to my surprise, the world of young Ulysses Granger took on the familiar attractions of the worlds I had explored in my science fiction. In that, I find historical fiction mirrored by science fiction. In a way, both are history and both require an attention to detail and an ability to imagine displacements from the present. Halfway into the writing, it felt familiar, at least in the sense of examining places and people wholly unfamiliar to me.

(One of the curious things I found is that of all the things one might expect the “Americans” to have brought to the region, the one thing they did provide was record-keeping. A lot of it, although most of it appears to be a byproduct of, essentially, title searches.)

This is exciting. This is one of the chief pleasures of fiction, the chance to see life through eyes other than our own. This is a culture we can only assume to be familiar, but really it is in many ways quite alien and in that quite exotic. 

It took a few years to get this “right,” and by right I mean a satisfying narrative experience. Finding the beginning histories of my home town proved a delight and a pleasure. You can look at this place, where cultures met and intermingled in curious ways, and wonder how we came to be. As the population changed due to immigration and the long-distance decisions by powers not present on the ground, I found this period a kind of oasis in time, a singular setting for an evolving identity. Granger himself is very much an outsider, giving him a vantage point from which to see St. Louis as an observer. Though with Martine, the woman who takes center stage in his life, he is more intimately connected. 

It will be interesting (to me and hopefully others) to see how Granger changes at time goes on. Yes, that means I have more stories about him to tell.

I am delighted that Blank Slate Press is publishing the novel. Their enthusiasm has been infectious. My thanks to them all.

The official release date in April 25th. There will be a bookstore event at Left Bank Books in St. Louis. Call them for details (314-367-6731) and please consider attending.

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Still Reaching, Still Dreaming

Everywhere else there is news of calamity, sadness, tension, idiocy. It’s Sunday, a beautiful morning.  Something else, then. Something reaffirming, that there is still space for dreams, room for better, and the substance of higher aspirations.

 

(Image courtesy of Linda Overton)

Art

It Hurts

By now, I’m sure, many people know about the debate between Bill Nye and Ken Ham.  Bill Nye, he of the bow tie, the science guy, stepped up to the podium to have it out, toe-to-toe, with Ken Ham, erstwhile champion of creationism, founder of the Creation Museum in Kentucky which has been the subject of continual mirthful derision by anyone with even a scintilla of understanding about science.  They were to debate evolution versus creationism, which in my mind is like debating the similarities between Einstein and Sasquatch.  Other than the assertion by certain folks that they are somehow (a) equivalent and (b)…well, really, there is no “b” in this formulation.

Apparently even a poll conducted on Christian Today shows that Bill Nye pretty much mopped the floor with Ken Ham, who answered not one single question put to him by Nye in any useful way. Only 9% of respondents apparently saw Ham as the winner.  Of course that won’t be the end of it.  After the debate, a number of self-styled Christians presented questions for Nye which they, presumably, thought would stump him.  Buzzfeed posted several.  Go take a look, then come on back.  (You can also see the entire debate there.)

What’s that phrase? “The stupid…it hurts.”

Was that unkind?  Sorry.  (Not really.)   But while any single one of these can be dismissed as, oh, lack of attention, missed something in biology class (or astronomy), didn’t see that special on NOVA, collectively this amounts to willful ignorance at best.

“If humans came from monkeys, why are there still monkeys?”  Seriously?  Do you really not know how dumb that is?  You came from your parents—we all did—so why are there still parents?  Sorry, that was flip, but it does, actually, point up the problem, albeit in a rather crude and simplistic way.

And noetics?  That isn’t part of any segment of this debate, so…?

There was a time I would get mightily energized by this kind of thing.  I admit I had a deep-seated interest in being on the “right” side of this debate.  I still do, but it hardly gets me out the door anymore because I realized somewhere along the way that what we’ve been witnessing in the efforts of people like Ken Ham, as strenuous and perhaps sincere as they are, is the death spasm of a world view that doesn’t work.  It never did, but there was a time that understanding that didn’t make much difference, except to a few intellectual outliers here and there.  The fever pitch of condemnation coming from them is the sound of panic as the world prepares to leave them behind.

No, I’m not talking about the death of religion.  I do not believe that is possible.  I’m only talking about a very public formulation of a view of religion that has as its primary purpose nothing more than the regimentation of the faithful and the casting out of the new.  I’m talking about a narrative that seeks to impose and deny.  Impose its substance and form and deny any countervailing view.  I’m talking, really, about style.

Style is about identity.  When we talk about it that way, as style, it seems insignificant in the larger scheme of things.  Fashion.  And much of it is ephemeral.  But shift it to something else, as in artistic expression, and it takes on a bit more meaning.  The style of a writer is that writer’s voice, personality—identity.  There is something so deeply personal about style in this sense and we all recognize it.  We instantly recognize a musician with whom we are familiar by the style of playing.  Unknown canvases by painters declare identity in the manner of brushstroke or photographs betray their creators by the particular angle, frame, contrast.  Style at this level is inextricably linked to identity and when that style is declared no longer valid, a kind of death attends.

Because this is æsthetics, something utterly vital and intrinsic to our sense of self, yet so rarely discussed when any list of what makes us human gets trotted out for debate.  How we see the world and how we react to what we see, this is æsthetics in action and it defines us.  It defines us culturally, historically, and individually.  You can see it in that list of questions, in many ways so pathetic, when the question is framed in terms of awe and wonder.  A sunset, the amazingness of the world—even that fey reference to noetics—these are questions of reaction and interpretation to sensory experience, filtered through a value system that provides us with a quality of self grounded in our relation to the matrix of reality through which we move:  æsthetics.

Ken Ham’s museum displays exhibits showing humans coexisting with dinosaurs.  At some level, this is a world he wishes to have as real.  What kid doesn’t love dinosaurs at some point?  It’s inexplicable.  I’m continually amazed at what seems to be a persistent fascination across generations.  Part of us really wants there to be dinosaurs.  Not only that, but dinosaurs in our midst, at least at some point.

Dinosaurs aren’t in the Bible.  In fact, I know of no holy book in any culture that mentions them unless you want to see dragons as some neolithic abstraction of dinosaurs.   (They’re not, they emerge out of very different pools of myth, namely serpents, the Worm, but after the discovery and ultimate understanding of fossil dinosaurs dragons became more and more visually conforming to them.)  Yet even the most ardent of creationists are fascinated.  There is no mention of them in Genesis, they would never have fit on the ark, and there’s no mention in that story of any animals left behind (the song about the unicorn notwithstanding).  Had they been, we would have found much, much fresher bones, not buried nearly so deep.

At some point people like Ken Ham came to accept the reality of dinosaurs, not as deceptive deposits from Satan to worry our overly-curious intellects, but as species in their own right.  Intentionally or not, they had to accept science in order to make the effort to write them into their stunted history of the universe, which has opened them to eventual extinction as examples of mainstream thought, much less champions of any kind of reality.

In a way, the debate just passed was totally unfair.  Ken Ham kept pointing to his narrative as its own evidence, offering nothing beyond it to answer the evidence-laden arguments of his opponent.  He wasn’t even in the same debate, really.  He was there to insist that all these things Bill Nye represents should be ignored in favor of a story.  He insists that the story is sufficient and this other thing, this science thing, is nothing but an evil distraction from what he thinks is important.  The sad part is he probably doesn’t even know why that story is important.

It’s important because all wonder-based growth begins as a story.  We’re fascinated, entranced, and there’s magic in the narrative.  So much magic that we want to know more.  And so we go looking and if we look honestly we find so much else that transcends the modest confines of that first story.  We find universes of wonder, which we might never have looked for without first having been delighted by a story.  Ken Ham found a story that amazed him.

But then he stopped.  He stopped looking, because, it seems, he never wanted to leave that first moment of childlike wonder, wanting it to be everything.  It’s sad because while we can revisit it and we can experience the same sensation again and again and again, with new discoveries, if we try to freeze that moment and keep it, unchanging, it either fades…or rots…all on its own.  What some folks do then is build a museum in their hearts to preserve a memory that is no longer there, leaving us with the surrounding edifice and an echo.  Without new sounds, new sights, new growth, the museum calcifies and eventually becomes a fossil, never buried, bleached and empty.

At some point, Ken Ham built that museum out in the open for everyone to visit.

Apparently, fewer and fewer go.  It possesses novelty, but no genuine wonder.  And without wonder, what is there?

 

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Giants

Sequoias, I’ve heard, are bigger.

Still.

Redwood Stand, July 2013

They almost dare you to photograph them in some unique way, as if knowing that, at least at first, you can’t help but shoot the standard-issue, clichéd image of immense stands of imposing forest.  Walking among them I didn’t feel small so much as unimportant.

That’s something of a cliché as well, but it fits.

We left the Elk River center, drove up 101 a short way, passing another beach, through mist and gray that separated where we were from anywhere else we might go.Sacramento 2013_0075

We stopped at the shore, walked between burms of sand, spent time in the non-place of fog and suggestion.  Donna took this image of me walking toward a horizon invisible and remade constantly.  Isolated as it was, the world shifted and altered.

Time to go inland, then.  Time to find the next stretch of imagination-rich landscape for our memories to feast on.  Time to move further into segments of separated repositories of quiet beauty.

People drove by as we pulled off the road, racing from nowhere to elsewhere, not stopping (how could they not stop? Look at what’s here!), leaving us—and a few others who knew the moment—to bask in the details left lying around by happenstance and million-year evolutionary exuberance.  Sure, there was a road through it, but that was its own delight.

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We didn’t hurry, but neither did we linger too long.  We had a very specific goal on this trip, something left over from the last visit to these parts.  Circumstances had forced us then to choose between the redwoods and Crater Lake.  In 2001, we chose Crater Lake.  Now we have come back to see the Other.

The Others.

We drove into the preserve on an ascending road that wrapped around the base of a rise.  Here, fog did not intrude.  Late morning, the sun speared through the canopy, picking out details in such fractal abundance the whole was all you could really see clearly.  There was parking lot at the side of a footbridge over the road leading to the trail.

In stillness that seemed only recently broken by music, the echoes of ancient rhythms twined around the enormous fingers stretched toward light and air, we walked and stopped and walked again and pointed things out to each other and walked and gaped.

Gnarls in Redwood, b&w, July 2013

Redwood Trunk, July 2013

Redwood Bark Detail, July 2013

The trail was about a mile.  There were bugs, of course, little stinging pests, but for the most part it was one of the easiest trails I’ve ever walked.  Every turn brought something extraordinary.

We left this preserve and took a scenic byway through more of the magnificence.IMG_1838

As we drove between curtain walls of the ancient forest, we passed a family stretching out around the base of one of the bigger trees, one of their number stepping back into the road to take the picture.  Donna pulled over, suggesting I ask if they wanted someone else to take it so they could all be in it together.  I sprinted back and just as they were breaking up to return to their cars, I called out and offered.  They regrouped happily, hand in hand, against the tree and I shot pictures with two of their cameras.  (I didn’t know them, I thought it would be impertinent to take a picture for myself.)

One of them hurried to her car, telling me to wait.  She handed me a pile of silver-foiled Hershey kisses.  “That’s where we’re from,” she said, grinning.

“Hershey, Pennsylvania?”

“Yep.  Been a long drive, but boy, was it worth it.”

I couldn’t agree more.  Standing amid these epic trees, you start to feel like a giant yourself, for the simple reason that you can see them for the marvelous things they are.  For a short while they seem to lend you a bit of their grandeur.

Art

…And the Winners Are

I should be writing fiction instead of writing about it, but I must continue my year-end summations.  I’m off tomorrow, so I intend to get down to serious stuff.

Anyway, I read some pretty good novels this past year.  Much as I admire, respect, and feel a duty to read broadly in nonfiction, when it gets down to it, fiction is what I live for.  (Well, Donna comes first, sure, but as we’ve been writing a novel with our lives…ahem)  Fiction takes me away.  It opens things up, offers newness in a way nothing else does.

As I get older I find myself reading more slowly, soaking in the sentences.  This has the consequence of making me impatient with poorly-written material.  Or material that is well enough written but really has little to say.  Not that I’ve always got my nose in weighty tomes or Significant Prose and Important Literature, but there’s gotta be some meat on them bones, know what I mean?

That said, I caught up with what I consider “snack” reading in the form of Margaret Maron’s  “Deborah Knott” series.  A new one just came out, otherwise I could claim to have read all of these.  I don’t know why I’m so taken with these.  They fall into the crime fiction category of “cozies”, a term I learned only in the last couple of years.  It’s about solving the crime and shows little gore.  Not thrillers.  More personal, character-driven excursions.  PG-13 (although Deborah herself…well, you need to read a couple of these).  I like the characters, the setting is a small community in North Carolina, and Maron tilts at obviously long-favored windmills.  She has a separate series set in New York, the Sigrid Harald series, and in the last Knott book—Three Day Town—the two meet.  They are evidently related and from what I’ve seen of the new one, this is a trend that will continue.  The difference in style and approach between the two series is striking.

I also did some “catching up” with older SF that I never read—or, if I had, I’ve forgotten.  In that vein, I read a pair of Doris Piserchia novels—Star Rider and A Billion Days of Earth.  Piserchia could be a good representative of the waning days of New Wave science fiction.  Her skill was in novelty of idea and velocity, whipping you through the story so fast there is no time to notice any flaws.  Both these novels were part of Bantam’s Frederik Pohl Selection series from the early to mid-1970s, a line that included Delany’s Dhalgren and Sterling Lanier’s Hiero’s Journey.  According to Pohl, Dhalgren was the only one of these that actually made money for the publisher, which is unfortunate if true—he published some very good novels.

Also, because I was involved in an event with him at the St. Louis Science Center, I read David Gerrold’s Yesterday’s Children, which is basically a science fiction take on Run Silent, Run Deep, and really demonstrates Gerrold’s skill with psychology.  I also read his Space Skimmer.  Gerrold is most famous for his Star Trek episode, The Trouble With Tribbles—and deservedly so—but he is a really fine novelist and ranges across a  wide spectrum of subject and form.

After that event, I was asked to introduce the screening at the Science Center of the movie Fantastic Voyage, which I hadn’t seen in over 20 years.  To prepare, I read both Asimov’s original novelization and his second version, Fantastic Voyage II, which he published in 1987—because he really wanted to address some of the problems inherent in the original premise.  I was amused at his “solution” to the key problem of miniaturization and mass.  I still possess my original paperback of Fantastic Voyage (a bit worse for wear after 44 years) and enjoyed the return visit.

I also read a couple of Mack Reynolds novels from the Sixties—Commune 2000 A.D. and The Towers of Utopia.  I say “from the Sixties” and my ghod can you tell!  There is a charming-if-maddening naïvete in these novels that make them read like something for children (if not for the almost innocent obsession with sex).  Both are set in the same world, a time when the planet has come under the thrall of a single government.  Everything is fine, needs are met, but of course there are Those Who Don’t Fit In—Libertarians, basically—and revolution is in the offing.  It’s not so much that the premise is bad, but the execution…so Sixties.

Also from that time, though, was The Last Starship From Earth by John Boyd, who had a steady if not stellar career and published some interesting novels.  This one, though—his first—remains the one everyone seems to remember (if they remember him at all).  This is one I think I read when it came out (1968) but I couldn’t remember, so I reread it.  Again, there was that delightful, nostalgic naïvete, the flavor of Something Lost.  But Boyd was not quite so innocent as Reynolds in his understanding of human psychology and the problems of political solidarity (of any kind!) and while the end becomes almost absurdly optimistic and playful, I found the novel to be a fun trip through some really interesting ideas.  It’s an alternate history, but you can’t tell for a good part of the book.  Only toward the end, when time travel becomes a factor in “restoring” history, do the variations make a larger sense.

Some of these novels suffer from compression.  Today, it’s nothing for a science fiction novel to run 300 to 500 pages, which allows for a full examination of premise and ramification, but Back Then there were constraints, and most of these books were usually only 200 pages, sometimes (often) less, and a great deal got crammed in.  The practiced reader could fill in the gaps, so to speak, but this was one reason so many readers coming late to SF found them ridiculous and indecipherable.

That said, many others seemed to have no trouble with the length given.  Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Ursula Le Guin’s early work—none of it felt particular “slight” by virtue of such compression.  The difference between a fine writer and a merely good one?

Roger Zelazny was one who had no difficulty working within the confines of 60 to 80 thousand words.  I’ve been making my way through his oeuvre for some years now, and he is a gem in the tapestry of SF.  This year, I read Creatures of Light and Darkness, Doorways In The Sand, and My Name Is Legion.  The last was a bit of a clunker, but the other two are classic Zelazny.  (I am not much taken with his most famous series, Amber.  Don’t know why—they’re fun reads, but they leave me flat.)

Another “vintage” writer I’ve been catching up on is James Blish.  Most folks remember him for the series of Star Trek collections he wrote based on the original series.  Blish was a prolific writer who did some solid work in the 50s and 60s, including his other “most famous” work, Cities In Flight.  He was also one of the first serious critics in the field, publishing still-relevant essays as by William Atheling.  His novels, though short, are studies in the efficient telling of idea-centered stories. This year’s reads were The Star Dwellers, its sequel Mission To The Heart Stars, and Titan’s Daughter.  The last is particularly interesting, being a eugenics-and-bigotry story, told very much with the 50s civil rights movement in mind.  Blish, unlike Boyd and Reynolds, was not naïve.

Moving briefly away from SF, I read Anthony Powell’s A Question of Upbringing, the first in his epochal series Dance to the Music of Time.  Some have claimed this is a British Proust.  Frankly, I found it dull and uninteresting.  The kind of thing I have no patience for in so-called “mainstream” literature.  Minute studies of people with whom I have no connection nor, through the instrument of the novel, desire any.  Very well-written, but navel-gazing at its refined best.

On the other hand, I read Jean Genet’s A Thief’s Journal, which is also a minute study of character, but one I rank comparable to Gaddis, Pynchon, Bolano.  The difference between this and the Powell is in its innate ability to twist your sensibilities and take you through An Experience.  Powell’s novel hinted at such, but really came down to just a cataloque of what these people ate and where they went.  The Genet puts you Somewhere Else.  (Which is one of the chief pleasures of science fiction, by the way.)

Which brings me to Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander, the first of his epic Aubrey/Maturin series.  I’ve tried to read this a few times  before.  This year, sitting at home recovering from appendicitis, nothing else to do but eat soup, sleep, and read, I took another crack at it and got through.  I’m a Hornblower fan from long ago.  This is very different from the Forester.  The detail is fit for a historian and, for my money, drags the story, which by the end of the book had me.  I’m told the subsequent books get better and that, really, it is all one long novel interrupted by covers.  I’m not sure I’ll continue it, but I’m glad I finally read it.

I reread Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes and once more felt carried away by the sheer ebullience of his language.

I then read Leigh Brackett’s The Long Tomorrow. This is a post-apocalyptic novel, written in the 50s, but with none of the sentimentality of the usual SFnal doomsday fare.  This is a well-reasoned study of a changed society and Brackett never flinched from looking human fear and prejudice squarely in the face.  This one should be talked about on par with A Canticle For Liebowitz, On The Beach, Fail Safe…Brackett, if she is remembered at all anymore, co-wrote the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back.  She was a first-rate writer and did some great SF, but this one is her masterpiece.

There was a handful of newer works I read that I want to recommend.  Embassytown by China Miéville I have written about already.  I have also written something about Jo Walton’s Among Others.  I may have inadvertently and certainly unintentionally given offense there, but I want to stress just how good a book that is.

But my friend Carolyn Ives Gilman published her epic novel (in two parts) over the last year-and-a-half, the second volume of which is Ison of the Isles.  (The first part is Isles of the Forsaken.)  Go.  Buy.  Read.  Great stuff.

I also read the new Mary Russell/Sherlock Holmes novel, Garment of Shadows, by Laurie R. King.  She continues to delight in this ongoing series about (and ostensibly by) Holmes’ wife.

Our reading group completed Dante’s Commedia finally, after seven years of canto-by-canto reading and analysis.  I intend to do a post or two dedicated solely to that, but I’m still mulling it over.

I haven’t mentioned a number of books which I read and enjoyed.  No slight intended to any of them, but this has gone on long enough and I hit all the points I intended to make and recommended what I wanted to recommend.  I may cover a few of them in a separate post (in fact, I’m looking at my list and seeing a couple that deserve longer treatment) but for now I can wrap this up.

Naturally, I think everyone should go out and buy some of my recommendations.  If you do, do so at Left Bank Books.

Good reading to you.

Absurdity

12-12-12

Because I can’t resist the date.

Urban Abstract 2, 2012
Circles and Levels and Clocklike Movement

This particular confluence of numerical coincidence won’t happen again this century.  Proper appreciation must be shown.

Or, as Stephen Jay Gould once said, “I have always and dearly loved calendrical questions because they display all our foibles in revealing miniature.  Where else can we note, so vividly revealed, such an intimate combination of all the tricks that recalcitrant nature plays upon us, linked with all the fallacies of reason, and all the impediments of habit and emotion, that make the fulfillment of our urge to understand even more more difficult…”

It is in our nature to reject coincidence as simply what it is, especially when it comes to cosmic events.  Long ago human beings decided the devices we invented to keep track of time actually meant something to Time itself, as if the universe was somehow required to acknowledge our conceits.

Still, even as a purely invented coincidence, 12-12-12 is kind of cool.  How many babies will be born today and be considered extra special just because?  If someone happens to win a lottery today, the efficacy of numerically based sympathetic magic will be reinforced, even though it will still have exactly the same relationship as the odds of a coin face coming up with each of a hundred tosses as if the collective numbers of heads or tails somehow imposes necessity on each one (namely, zero).

On the other hand, any day you wake up with something to marvel on is a win, so I’ll take my small pleasures where I can.

I’ll be writing up a year-end assessment in a couple of weeks.  Soon it will be 2013—a numerical change about as meaningful as today’s date in the greater scheme of anything.  For instance, it is 2012 in our calendar system (Gregorian—the older Julian is similar, lacking but 13 days, which would make today the last day of November, with today’s numerically alliterative advent still to come) but 5773 in the Hebrew calendar. (A more concurrent calendar is the Holocene, which starts at the beginning of the Holocene Era—ours—by adding ten thousand years.  So it’s 12012 H.E.  I like that.)

It’s 1434 in the Islamic calendar.  Sometimes I ponder the significance of time lapsed in cultural evolution to try to understand where a given institution is along the line.  In this case, I remember where christianity was in 1400 when seeking to comprehend current attitudes and events.  They were on the verge of the Reformation, with seething splinter groups roiling under the surface about to explode into a family feud they’re still trying to settle.  Hm.

One of the youngest calendars is the so-called “Minguo” which is from the Republic of China (Taiwan) and dates from the founding of the Republic in 1912.  Their centenary was just celebrated.  It’s 101 in the ROC Minguo calendar.

We’re fortunate not be stuck using the Unix calendar, which is expressed in seconds.

The true measure of time is change.  Change in the environment, certainly, but for our purposes, changes in ourselves.  There is no calendar for such things.  Some changes are temporary, some seasonal, others permanent.  They may be profound or just occurrences that seem to have little import.  It’s a question of where we’ve been and where we’re going.

Passagway
Passageway

It’s a common fallacy that our lives are telec, that they have a narrative structure, a beginning and an end in terms of purposes and goals.  If they do, it is a fact that we impose such things, but we’re not born with them.  (Born into them, perhaps, in the case of those who arrive swaddled in family expectations actively imposed.)  We have a start and a finish, which is not quite the same thing.  In between, it’s up to us to find meaning and purpose, make it out of whole cloth if we must, but waiting around for cosmic enlightenment to tell us what we’re here for invites a wasted life.  In an attempt to impose structure and suggest meaning, humans have invented numerous things—like calendars, with attendant rituals and anniversaries.  Out of the matrix of such things many of us find relevance among ourselves and that is not a bad thing at all.

In truth, each of us brings to such things what we have and are, whether we accept others’ definitions or not.  I wish people Merry Christmas despite the fact that I impute no validity in the defining mythology, because Christmas is what we make it.  I don’t have a lot of patience for people bent on souring everyone else’s holiday by indulging a political or theological hissy-fit—on either side of the Belief Divide.  I have my own resonances with it and take pleasure from the memory and æstethic significance on which I accrued that meaning.  I watch A Christmas Carol every year, drink egg nog, embrace my friends, and nurture a hearth-glow of fellowship.  I do not have to accept the fables to experience a “holiday spirit” every bit as real as those who do—nor do I appreciate those who insist on dumping cynicism and political scatalogy onto the season in an attempt to ruin it for everyone else in a misguided pursuit of some adherence to reason.  Truth and fact are often only coincidentally related, and the truth of the season is something greater than what is contained in the details of a given story.

The Gift of the Magi is my guiding narrative…for what it may be worth.

Happy Holidays, Merry Christmas, Season’s Wishes, etc etc etc.

Whatever calendar you use, have a good day.

culture

Preferred Position

I really like Neil deGrasse Tyson.  He’s my kinda scientist and he speaks well.  Please watch the entire video before continuing with my little bit.

Okay, there’s a lot in that with which I agree.  In fact, he gets to my preferred stance on the whole issue, that I would rather not have to deal with the categories and all the rhetorically inevitable garbage that comes with them.  The problem is that most people actually won’t let you do that.

If I am asked honestly about my thoughts on whether or not there is a god, my answer is usually predetermined, not by me but by the person asking the question.  You can pick this up from context, from body language, from tone of voice, from a hundred small cues that accumulate into the preferred position of the asker.  And while there are many permutations, and shades of gray, it usually—not always, but usually—comes down to two formats.

There are those, few though they may be, who are honestly interested in a philosophical discussion.  This is the “how do you see this god question” conversation, which can lead to very interesting and fruitful dialogues and can be immensely enjoyable and even enriching.  These are people who, while they may have a preferred position, aren’t interested in pushing it on anyone, they really want to explore the topic.  One key feature of such people is that they are not threatened by the unorthodox, the heterodox, the outre, the radical.  They want to have a conversation about this admittedly complex topic.

Then there are those who are looking for a reason to pigeonhole and proselytize.  They don’t want to know your ideas, they want to know if you’re With Them or Against Them.

Atheists and Believers fit into this description and I unhesitatingly claim that there is no functional difference between them if this is all they are interested in.  They don’t want a dialogue, they want a chance to tell you how wrong you are, or hold forth on all the idiots who don’t think like them.

I’ll admit right here that I’ve fallen into that paradigm on many an occasion.  There’s no real defense for it, but there are reasons.  I do get tired of certain positions on certain topics and the shortcut to ending the harangue often seems more desirable than any possible benefit that may come out of trying to address the questioner as if he or she belonged to the first group.

Do I believe there is a god?

Depends on what kind of a god you’re asking me to believe in.  But right there you see the potential for a long explanation.  The concept is not reducible to a simple statement of fact, because all gods have been believed in and it is an insult to suggest that such belief automatically meant one set of acolytes was dumber than another.  When belief faded, the god became an artifact of history.  Do I then belief there never was such a god?  Depends on your requirements for a god.

There are many aspects of the proposition with which I can categorically disagree.  But the thing that makes it impossible to dismiss out of hand is Belief.  To me, asking if I believe there is a god has many of the same characteristics of asking if I believe there’s such a thing as an idea.  You can’t see either one, there’s no physical evidence for them other than how they motivate people, it is easy (and done all the time) to say that ideas aren’t real.

It’s in the realm of human action where the problems with both the discussion and the notion of a god pop up, but to my mind that’s a separate issue.  If someone creates a great good—hospitals, art, music, a new way to see—in the name of a god they believe in, it is easy enough to accept that they drew their inspiration from that god and except for some diehard ideologues no one has an issue with the conflation.  No one goes around beating them up for that belief.  If, on the other hand, some one goes around killing, maiming, stirring social ill-will against groups of people because they claim their god wants them to, everyone gets uncomfortable.  The people who may believe in the same god have a problem, atheists use it as an excuse to deny agency, and the zealot feels justified in his or her isolation and martyrdom.  Nothing is solved.  We seem hard put to separate out the issues because inevitably questions are raised as to the nature of belief and the nature of god.

To me, all gods are real and at the same time they are all irrelevant.  They’re real because people believe in them.  They’re irrelevant because I don’t and do not wish to.  And yet the world functions, regardless which position is true.

You want to know where I think god is?  In the dialogue.  Whatever it may be.  God, however you choose to define it, appears in the midst of honest communication.  When someone like Neil deGrasse Tyson talks to us about the stars, the universe, the cosmos, and we listen—there’s god.

When that doesn’t happen, when people don’t communicate—there is no god.

I invite you all to chew on that idea for a while.

Unless you think ideas aren’t real.

career

Noir at the Bar

There is, in University City, which is attached to St. Louis with Washington University as a buffer, a cool little coffeehouse/restaurant called Meshuggah’s.  They play host to a literary event called Noir at the Bar, which my friend Scott Phillips and a gentleman named Jedediah Ayres manage.  Primarily it’s all about crime fiction, which apparently includes a vast range of macabre material.

They had me in their line-up on February 28th.  I am the first science fiction writer to perform at this event and I think it went rather well.  It was recorded for podcast by Booked and the link to my reading is now up.  Right here.

I had a good time and the other readers were fine, I recommend them.  An evening of good readings and fine company.

Art

A Moment For A Promotional Message

Tomorrow night, Tuesday, February 28th, I’ll be reading at a venue that is somewhat a departure for me.  It will be at a little ongoing literary rumpus called Noir At the Bar—here’s a blog post to give you a taste—in University City, on Delmar, at a little place called Meshuggah’s.  I’ll be there with three other readers—Kevin Lynn Helmick, Caleb J. Ross, and Gordon Highland—and what makes this unusual for me is that Noir at the Bar is, as the name suggests, for NOIR.

Now, yeah, I write mysteries.  After all, my three Asimov robot novels were “robot mysteries.”  Remains is as much a mystery novel as a near-futre SF novel.  Realtime was a police procedural of sorts.  But I haven’t published any straight mysteries.  And having attended a few of these events before, I can state unequivocally that my work is very different from theirs.

Or maybe not.  We’ll see.  But I am the first science fiction writer invited to attend, so it will be interesting to say the least.

I thought I’d write something new for it, but since I’ve been eyebrow deep in finishing the current novel I haven’t had time, so I’m taking a few possibles along to see what will be the best fit.

If any of you in the St. Louis area want to come by and lend some support, I can promise you something different.  It’s a good crowd and the stories are…unique.

So: Meshuggah Cafe, 6269 Delmar, St. Louis, MO, 63130 tomorrow night, 7:00 PM.