Category: Literature

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.

blog

Stacks and Time (or Time and Stacks, whichever…)

I am probably never going to read all the books I own.

The last few years I’ve been dealing more and more with that realization.  I have thousands, maybe several thousand, and the ones in the house are certainly not all that I’ve ever owned.  I have culled a few times over the years and I’ve slowed down acquiring new ones, but it’s a kind of compulsion.  I mentioned once in a post, I think, that owning books for me is a sign of wealth.  By that standard, I’m moderately well off.

Here’s the thing now.  I don’t read particularly fast.  I can be dogged, and from time to time manage to read a book in one day, but honestly my average lo these last few decades is about one or two a week.  This is down considerably from the few years between 16 and 19 when I could speed read.  I took a course in high school that increased my reading and comprehension to a ridiculous level.  The machine they used to bring us up to speed only tracked at two thousand words a minute and I went past that.  At peak, I was probably reading close to three thousand words a minute, which is about eight to ten pages, depending on typeface.  I was reading all my assignments in home room or study hall.  A book a day? How about an average SF novel in an hour or two?  I’ve talked about my senior year before, during which I cut maybe two thirds of it.  Most days I walked up the street to the local library and spent the day reading.  By the time I graduated high school I was reading a book a day there and another one at home in the evening.

The problem with that is, I have pretty much forgotten all those books.

Oh, some of them stuck, certainly.  I went through most of the “classics” section at the library and I can conjure images from a good number of them, but the rest?  I know I read a great many ACE Doubles, a lot of Ballantine SF works, and so forth, and any number of detective and Other, but do I have any memory of them?

I post my reading lists on-line now.  I have two accounts, one at Shelfari and one at Goodreads.  You may notice that the numbers are different.  I did a much more thorough job of recovering lists of past reading for Goodreads, so there are several hundred more books there than Shelfari.  (I keep the Shelfari account because I’ve been participating in some of the discussion threads.)  Even so, the Goodreads list is incomplete—because I cannot remember all those books.  It lists about 2700 titles.  I conservatively estimate that this is short by nearly a thousand.  Partly, I’m making myself be honest.  I know of a couple of hundred titles that I did read, but I frankly can’t remember anything about them beyond the title (most of Thomas Hardy, a number Theodore Dreiser novels, Trollope, and the like) and so I won’t list them unless I either suddenly remember something about them or reread them.

Then there are all those paperbacks I flew through that I can’t even remember the titles.  Now and then, in conversation, one of them will pop up and I’ll have an “oh, yeah, that one” moment, but to be truthful I think a book should stick somewhere in your memory for you to claim it.

Why can’t I remember them?  Probably because I went through them so fast there was no time to form a longterm impression.  Some of them were over my head and I passed through them without having grasped them (I read Joyce during that senior year and it made no impression other than the sense of being completely out of my depth—I’ve since reread Ulysses and so I can claim it).  I read a number of science books that left behind a lot of general scientific information, but nothing about the specific texts.  And then there was a considerable amount of what one might call “trash” fiction—which term I loathe, but I use it here as a handy marker, since I think everyone, whether they admit it or not, knows exactly what I mean.  For instance,  Anne and Serge Golon’s  Angelique series.  I don’t think I read them all, but I read a number, and aside from a vague costume drama residue and a lot of erotic imagery, not a bit of their plots or characters remain in memory. The same can be said of any number of antebellum novels, like the Kyle Onstott/Lance Horner Falconhurst series, some of which I read back in grade school, but again, little of that stuck.  (There was a fad for these things in the mid to late Sixties and several writers indulged–Ashley Carter comes to mind, and Boyd Upchurch.  Ah, well.)

Sometime after I turned 21 I consciously slowed my reading down.  I realized even then that I was retaining little.  Oh, it stuck for a while, it was the perfect “cramming” technique, but even then I could barely remember what I’d read two years prior.  That, and I was simply not enjoying it.  Everything reduced to “textual experiences” that held none of the real pleasure of reading a good book.

So I went too far in the other direction.  In a good year I read between 70 and 80 books cover to cover now.  If I estimated all reading, it probably comes up to the equivalent maybe 120 or so.  A far cry from when I read four or five hundred a year.

But I’m enjoying each one now, and remembering them more clearly.  I would hate to read certain books too fast—books that should be savored.

So I won’t be getting through my stacks.  Ever.  But I find I am appreciating the journey a lot better.

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Books, 2011

It seems unlikely I’ll finish another book before this Sunday—if I do it will probably be Stefanie Pintoff‘s second Simon Ziele mystery, A Curtain Falls.  I read the first in the series, In The Shadow of Gotham, not too long ago and enjoyed it.  It’s a period mystery, set in 1905, and features a progressive police detective from New York—Ziele—who teams up with an amateur criminologist, Alistair Sinclair, who is attempting to construct a science of criminal behavior.  Ms. Pintoff avoids many pitfalls by keeping the level of expertise firmly locked in 1905 and Sinclair makes as many if not more wrong conclusions as right, but it was an entertaining piece of work and the evocation of 1905 New York was excellent.  Somewhat more engaging than a similarly period series by Rhys Bowen, the Molly Murphy mysteries, which are also rich in period detail, but a bit more of a stretch about an Irish immigrant who falls into the detective business rather by accident and then tries to make a go of it. These are set during and after the McKinley presidency and one book even deals directly with his assassination.  For a peek into the more bohemian parts of New York, they are wonderful.  Ms Bowen sells the conceit well, but once you put one of them down you have to wonder just how likely it would be.

I found myself reading a lot of mysteries this past year.  As I’ve been moving into that genre—two of the novels in the hands of my new agent are mysteries, one a historical, the other contemporary, and I have every intention of continuing them as series (and even the alternate history is largely a mystery thriller)—I decided I needed to become better acquainted with what’s being done.  I read a couple of the more obvious ones—Laura Lippmann and Tess Gerritsen made the list, as did a couple of Michael Connelly’s and one James Patterson—but I also found some less obvious ones (at least to me).

One series I’ve become quite taken with is Margaret Maron‘s Deborah Knott series, beginning with Bootlegger’s Daughter.  I’ve read eleven of these, all this past year.  They are charming.  Deborah Knott is the only daughter of a man who was once the biggest bootlegger in North Carolina and adjoining states.  He’s out of the business—sort of—and she has become an attorney.  By the end of the first novel she’s decided to run for a local judgeship and through the rest of the series she is a judge.  This is of the “stumble into murders” kind of cozy mystery writing.  It’s as much about the people of the area and the history as it is about solving a murder and the first-person narrative is comfortable and evocative.  I found myself devouring one of these over a weekend like popcorn.

I also continued reading Laurie King’s Mary Russell books, ending this year with The Pirate King, which is a comedy.  Not quite as successful as the rest of the series, but not bad.  I caught up on her Kate Martinelli novels, too.

Among the other mysteries this past year I read another of Cara Black‘s Paris mysteries featuring Aimee LeDuc, private investigator.  This one was set on the Ile St. Louis and I read it as much for that as for the mystery, since I have upcoming scenes in one of my novels set there.  If you like Paris and you like tough female detectives of the Honey West pedigree, these are worth the time.  (I recall the first one of these I read annoyed me because it involved a WWII Occupation mystery.  Some of this is becoming a stretch by now—these people are getting ancient and dying and I have to wonder how credible contemporary plots concerning survivors from 1942 can continue to be, but…)

I mentioned I read a James Patterson.  I’ve been hearing so much about this guy that I decided I had to read one.  I won’t even mention which one, it was terrible from the first chapter.  Cliched writing, facile plotting, and predictable…everything.  I put it down wondering, what is supposed to be so great about this guy?  But he comes out of a marketing background and the sheer volume he produces—much of it now with other writers—must simply overwhelm the public.

However, both Dennis Lehane and Michael Connelly did not disappoint, although in Lehane’s case the level of mayhem seemed borderline cartoonish.  Nevertheless, he held my attention, quickened my pulse a couple of times.  Connelly proved solid, at least in the one I read, Blood Work.  In Lehane’s case, I found a curiosity, a historical novel, The Given Day, which is on my list for next year.  So as this is about what I read in 2011, you’ll have to wait.

I also continued my Ross McDonald reading with The Drowning Pool.  I have a bunch more of these to read, but they are so far all gems.  Ross McDonald is I think underappreciated.  He was a master of the noirish and hardboiled style.  Which segues into a classic I read which I’d never read before, James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce.  I don’t know exactly what I expected, based on The Postman Always Rings Twice and Double Indemnity, but it wasn’t this, and it was a surprise.  It’s not a mystery—at least not in the detective sense—and yet you can fully feel the noirish elements come through in this story of a woman during the Depression who boots out her philandering husband and then has to make a go of it on her own.  She subsequently becomes a very successful restaurateur, but her attempts to live up to the standards her daughter—a true enfant terrible—thinks she should embrace end up bringing her down, even as the daughter grows up to get just about everything she wants.  At the end Mildred is back with the husband and you get the sense that she’s going to build it all up again—and this time make it stick, since the daughter has finally been banished.  I put it down with a “Jaysus” reaction.

I can also recommend new writer Rebecca Cantrell‘s series, beginning with A Trace of Smoke about a female reporter in pre-war Berlin.  This would be a decent companion piece to Philip Kerr’s  Bernie Gunther series.

I read my first Val McDermid novel, A Distant Echo, which I highly recommend.  It details the consequences of a false police accusation on four friends over the years.  They find the corpse of a barmaid in a cemetery, but as the police have no leads going anywhere else these four become the prime suspects.  Of course, nothing connects them to her murder, either.  But the press gets ahold of it and their lives all take unexpected turns.  Then, years later, someone starts killing them and two of them work to solve the crime.

Among the non-mysteries I read this past year were also a couple that I ought to have but never got around to.  I read Richard Powers’ The Gold Bug Variations, which is a kind of tour-de-force of kitchen sink writing that ties Bach’s music into the unraveling of the genetic code, all through the lens of a woman trying to solve the puzzle of a scientist who should have been one of the luminaries of the discovery of DNA but instead suffered the end of his career and ignominy.  Tight, colorful writing, bizarre connections.  It reminded me of Thomas Pynchon, only more controlled and with a readily-discernible plot.

I also read Charlotte’s Web for the first time ever.  I am woefully under-read in childrens and YA literature.  During the time of my life I should have been reading this, I was deep into comics and then my mother’s book-of-the-month club books, which were all adult.  At the same time I discovered science fiction and, well, that’s one category of Jeopardy I always fail.  Along with that one I also read—for the first time ever—The Phantom Tollbooth.  I doubt this is going to signal a spree of children-and-YA reading, but both of those books were well worth the read, especially the Juster.

I only read one Dickens this year, The Old Curiosity Shop, which has to be one of the most maudlin of his novels.  I kept thinking about Little Nell “Will you bloody die already!”  But I can see how this would have been a show-stopper when it came out.  It may be one of the best treatments from the period of addictive behavior, especially of gambling addiction.

I finally read Michael Moorcock’s Mother London, which has been on my shelf for a decade at least.  It’s not an easy one to get into, but once you realize what’s going on—a trio of telepaths who don’t quite realize that this is what they are finding solace with each other through the changing landscape of wartime and post-war London—it is marvelous.  Moorcock is deceptive in that he has written some real crap (The Blood Red Game should be avoided).  But he is a truly fine stylist and a first-rate imaginative intellect when he chooses to be and Mother London is a fine novel that should be considered a classic.

And speaking of London during the war, I read Connie Willis’s massive opus, both volumes—Blackout and All Clear—and can recommend it to anyone who is seriously into WWII history.  She has clearly done her homework and her decision to write about the Blitz from the viewpoint of the residents, albeit using her time traveling historians as vehicles, has produced a fascinating take on London at the time.  (I must say, though, that one of Willis’s hallmark plot devices—the continual miscommunication and near misses of people trying to find each other—which has worked effectively in the past, is growing wearisome by now.  We get it, reality does not follow a neat plot logic, people fail, messages don’t get delivered, etc etc—but enough is enough already.)  This may be the end of the Mr. Dunworthy stories, though.  May be.  This is time travel, after all.

I read a couple of newer novels that I want to recommend, both more or less science fiction.  The first is The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer.  This is a steampunk take on The Tempest.  Sort of.  I don’t wish to get into it too deeply, but I was taken with it primarily because it is steampunk without zombies!  I am growing tired of the monster-of-the-week in genre fiction.  Vampires, now zombies.  Dead things that move around do not fascinate me and too often they entail grue for the sake of grue.  Enough already!  (I put aside two steampunk novels that looked otherwise intriguing because, within 10 pages, there are zombies.)  To me, good steampunk is in the vein of The Difference Engine.  And Palmer delivers.  The writing is elegant, the world evocative, the symbolism and metaphors nicely deployed.  Not the best it could be, but high up on my scale.

The other is by a good friend of mine, Carolyn Ives Gilman.  Isles of the Forsaken is a novel with which I’ve been familiar for a long time.  It was the first manuscript Carolyn gave me for a critique.  It has finally come out—though this is but the first half—and it is wonderful.  Set on a world that is like but not like ours, during a period much like the hegemony of Great Britain in the 19th Century, it is about the clash of cultures.  Bear in mind, who is the good guy and who is the bad guy is pretty much dependent on the reader’s expectations.  This is fine stuff.

I didn’t read much science fiction this past year.  Out of the 79 I read cover to cover, only 16 were definitely SF.  I can recommend Leviathan Wakes by James S. Correy—a very good thriller, a shitkicker, well-written and realized.  First one of a series (of course—I miss they dominance of the stand-alone anymore).  I also read Keith Roberts’ Pavane, a classic alternate history, and a fine, fine piece of writing it is.

The other SF novel I’m recommending is Gene Wolfe’s Home Fires.  It’s been a while since Gene has done a straightfoward science fiction novel (if any of his work can ever be called straightforward!) and this one is a subtle study of mismatched personalities and desires that will not be thwarted.  It’s love story with a relativistic time-dilation element complicating it.  Now, I tend to like almost anything Gene does, so take this recommendation in that context, but I think it may be one of his best.  He has pulled back from the epic vistas of some of his earlier SFnal efforts, like The Book of the Long Sun and such and centered this through one viewpoint character and closely-controlled scenario that is almost claustrophobic compared to his other work.  But it works.

I read some flops, but I won’t go into them here—except for the comments on Patterson above—because I’m not sure if the books were really bad or if they just bounced off.  (One of them I thought a derivative bit of schlock, phoned in by an author who has done excellent work in the past, but just took a stroll on this one.)  There was another that was a convoluted bit of experimental strain that couldn’t decide if it was a mystery, Kafkaesque, Pynchonesque, or an exercise in abstruse symbolism.

I will read less next year.  I already know that.  I have several bricks on the pile that will require long hours and extra attention.  At least, it is my plan to get through some of them, but we’ll see how that works out.

Among the others that I enjoyed and can recommend I offer: Counting Heads by David Marusek,  Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil by John Berendt, A Conspiracy of Paper by David Liss, The Gift by Lewis Hyde, On Mozart by Anthony Burgess, and Birth of the Modern by Paul Johnson.  Allen Steele has a new one out, Hex, set in his Coyote universe and well worth the read.  Scott Philips also has a new one out, The Adjustment, which is a fine example of Scott’s idiosyncratic noir style.

Notice that the book links included all go to Left Bank Books.  I’m going to be doing that from now on, at least where I don’t link directly to an author’s page.  Support your local bookstore.  You’ll miss them when they’re gone, so don’t let them be gone.  Believe me, there really isn’t much Amazon can offer you that a good independent bookstore can’t, and that sucking sound of local tax revenue leaving your community and your state is the sound that accompanies our current fiscal woes.

End of sales pitch.  I’ll talk about the other things in 2011 later.

 

Art

Many Lives

This is just very yeah.

When asked why I write, I have many answers, but this captures the entire inner gestalt of why.

Not getting to live all the lives I wanted to. I know what she means. I assumed at one time I would be a writer, an actor, a musician, a producer-director, and all the other things that attach to these ambitions. In a way, I did get to do them, but not the way I thought I would.

Anyway, this is marvelous.

culture

Tilting At Icons: Christopher Hitchens 1949 – 2011

Unless you’ve been living on Mars or under a layer of primordial loam these past few decades, you know who Christopher Hitchens is. He has died. He was an unapologetic pragmatist, atheist, and iconoclast to the end. For an extended obit, go here.

I only knew Hitchens through his work, of which I’ve become quite impressed and even fond in the last few years. He did not tilt pointlessly at windmills. Rather, he spoke truth in the face of sham, questioned revered assumptions, and generally made us all twitch over some specious bit of received wisdom we thought reliable. And he did it in ways and under conditions that often ran counter to public courtesy. “Speaking ill of the dead” was never something he avoided, especially when death seemed about to bestow what in his opinion was an unearned and poorly-considered status on someone. For instance, Jerry Falwell. When most other commentators were suspending whatever critical commentary they might have indulged simply because the man had died, Hitch continued to go after him, unwilling to allow his death to gloss over what Hitch considered monstrosities of ego and policy. Here he is jousting with Sean Hannity:

He had a talent for giving as good if not better than he got from some of the most practiced mouthpieces in the media, rarely ever being shut down or bested in highly-charged, barbed exchanges with pundits attempting to just shut him up. His language skills matched a razor-sharp intellect and he had no qualms about speaking his mind, usually in a way that allowed little purchase for facile counterpolemic.

Here he is at length, discussing his book God Is Not Great, which brought him into line with Richard Dawkins as one of the most hated of the so-called “New Atheists.”

Before all this he had the temerity to attack one of the most unexamined and misunderstood of our modern icons, Mother Theresa. He got a lot of flack for his unflinching analysis of her cult and her hypocrisies. Even non-Catholics balk at saying much of anything negative about her, which is a curious effect of the kind of image-making Theresa used and was used on her. The rush to beatification had all the earmarks of desperation—the need for a popular public figure of piety to bolster the flagging reputation of Mother Church—and it seems to have worked even for those who would otherwise have nothing to do with Catholicism. Mother Theresa has become the byword for a kind of innocent generosity, a pure aching love for humanity that ignores specifics and embraces the general as if the most simpleminded of approaches to problems has a special sanctity. Hitch was one of the few who dared to actually look at the practice of her organization and present the contradictions and, indeed, the grotesqueness at the heart of her philosophy.

He also baffled many of his supporters by doing something I admire above all else. He held views that he deemed right regardless of the political spectrum along which they fell. So he could be a socialist and a hawk. He could be a severe critic of the military-intelligence combine and a patriot. His politics was all over the map in terms of Left-Right and to me it showed the silliness of doctrinaire positioning. He had no patience with idiocy, no matter the side to which it was attached.

Through all this, he was also a generous and polite debater. In a lengthy exchange with Al Sharpton he was never less than cordial, even if unyielding on his principles. He showed us how to do it and not be a bully.

Unless he felt he was being played.

Even when I disagreed with him I admired him. I would say Rest In Peace, but he would not have accepted the implications underlying the sentiment.

I’ll miss him.

career

The Wrong One

So…I’m again rewriting the historical mystery.  Thought I was done with this draft and had only to await the edits from my most excellent agent, but alas, I have this impish ethical streak that won’t let me just slide…

Basically, I came up with a minor, almost throwaway, solution to a tiny plot problem as part of the whole revamp and happily sent the novel forth.  But then that solution began to grow in my imagination, like a tumor, until I realized that I had a much bigger problem arising from the solution.  Not to worry!  It would form the basis for the next book in the series!

That settled, I went about doing other things.

Only my unconscious kept churning on it and wouldn’t let me drop it like that.  I had created a growing organism within the body of my novel that had to be dealt with.  Argh!

Yes, I said argh!  because I wanted to get on with other things.  But.  Not to be. The coup de gras came last weekend over an excellent dinner with my friend Carolyn Gilman (who has a new novel out and you really ought to go get it and read it ’cause it’s really, you know, good).  Carolyn works for the Missouri History Museum and her current project is the Revolutionary War in the West—exactly the place and period in which my novel is set.  In the course of the conversation we stumbled on some little-known—no, that’s an understatement—some previously unexamined aspects of the Battle of St. Louis and George Rogers Clark and all that which irritated my tumor into full-blown eruption and I realized that I had to do this rewrite now!

This made me a bit nervous, as Stacia, my agent, has had what we thought was the second to last draft for a few months now and I had no idea how deep into it she’d gotten and I had to tell her to hold off—

The revisions will make this a much better book and when I described them to Stacia she was not only supportive but excited and so now I’m a hundred pages into a new draft.  I’ll just give you a little hint as to what was wrong and if anyone remembers this after the book comes out you can ask me about it and I’ll recount the tale.  Basically I had the wrong murderer.

Embarrassing, I know, but hey, not even the historical facts I learned from Carolyn are particularly well known and the interpretation she’s putting on them are unique, so I don’t feel like a total slacker.

Anyway, if I’m not posting here much in the next few weeks, this is why.  So have a happy, healthful Turkey Day, everyone.

Art

China Mieville and the Ideology of SF

Now for something fascinating having to do with writing. I just saw this lecture by China Mieville, who I feel is one of the most interesting writers working today. He’s tackling a subject I’ve chewed over quite a lot—the distinction between SF and Fantasy and the theoretical arguments about SF exceptionalism. I have some quibbles, but I would love to sit down with this guy and hash this through, because, to my ear, he’s exactly where I’ve been in terms of what to look at when talking about this.

 

 

I don’t disagree with a single critical element he brings up—and, as he points out, none of what he brings up is particularly new.

One quibble I have is a minor historical point, and this may be a result of my arrival in the genre as a potential practitioner at a time in which advocates of Fantasy were the ones making the grand argument that science fiction was “merely” a subgenre of fantasy—a claim many SF writers (and readers) took loud exception to. Fantasy was gaining ground then in the market and was shoving SF aside as the apparent preferred genre of fantastic literature and was basking in its ascendancy and making claims about how the two really weren’t any different. (Interesting that Darko Suvin’s assertions were published in 1979, about the time this argument was being made most forcefully, a few years before the market reflected the preference of Fantasy over SF.)

For my part, aside from matters of taste, I’ve never really argued that SF is “better” than Fantasy, at least not in any theoretical sense. Only different. I’ve found most examples of hybrids problematic at best, absurd at worst, because of—as Mieville points out—the ideological underpinnings informing them as genres. So the only reason I have ever had a dog in that hunt came from the assertion made by Fantasy advocates about SF being a sub-form and, occasionally, inferior (sometimes by virtue of being hypocritical, sometimes by virtue of an embarrassing specificity).

(As a personal observation, I find I prefer reading SF and find it very difficult to read Fantasy. However, I can watch Fantasy easily and pleasurably. Only when the quite different faculties employed in reading come into play do I find most Fantasy simply unappealing.)

Anyway, I’d like to offer the video above. I found it quite fascinating and lucid and I agreed with about 90% of it.

Art

A Few Thoughts Concerning Margaret Atwood

Actually, just one.  I’d like her to stop trying to be an authority on science fiction.  I haven’t read her new book of essays on the topic, but I’ve heard her in interviews and read some of her thoughts in the past, and based on that she’s pretty much a tourist.  Back when her publisher thought claiming her work was science fiction would hurt her sales, she misunderstood the genre magnificently (“Oh, sci-fi has rockets in it.  I don’t do that.”)  A lot of it reminded me of Susan Sontag’s egregiously off-base attempt to define it.

Of course, being in the same company as Sontag isn’t a bad thing, especially not if you want to remain within the fold of the folks who persistently fail to “get” any kind of genre work.  But it has become obvious that Atwood likes some of the aesthetic possibilities in SF and can’t help using them, and it has become likewise obvious that claiming common cause with SF isn’t hurting her sales, so now she’s a very Out There advocate.

But she still doesn’t get it. In a recent interview she characterized SF as basically religious, since it speaks to the desire to embrace something vast and elemental and be awed—the way one is supposed to be awed by religious epiphany and ritual evocation of spiritual connection.

There are two things wrong with this.  One, it suggests that the only way humans can experience awe and wonder is within a framework that can only be defined as religious.  Two, it ignores the decades-long assault on paradigms that is the core impulse in written SF.  Religion is nothing without the continuity of its paradigms, preserved as they are by the acceptance of their unassailability.  But, like science, science fiction has no reverence for paradigms that fail to explain anything and the tendency is to go at them tooth and claw in order to rip away the caul that muffles genuine transcendence.  This is not religious in the least—it is, if anything, the aesthetic of the newest gadget, a consumer culture variant that says anything done last year is, you know, Last Year.

That said, science fiction is also like an overcrowded antique shop whose proprietors just can’t bring themselves to throw anything out.  Everything that was ever done in the genre since 1926 is still there, used and reused, and that, too, is very much like science.

Because being “wrong” in the overall sense doesn’t mean all the bits by themselves are in error or are useless.  Alchemy and Chemistry are separated by an insurmountable barrier of fact, but some of the laboratory methodology devised in alchemy is still useful in modern chemistry, at least conceptually.  Einstein superseded Newton in ability to explain the universe at large, but we haven’t tossed Newton in the dustbin when it comes to working out simple cause-and-effect relations on the macro scale.  No one takes Doc Smith’s Lensmen series seriously anymore, but we’re still writing about starships, elite cadres of supercompetent heroes, and interstellar warfare with inscrutable aliens.  We just don’t do it with the kind of naivete E.E. Smith used.

But more than that, the points we’re making are different.  We’ve moved on to more sophisticated themes, or even themes that were not considered at all half a century ago.  John W. Campbell Jr. declared in the pages of Astounding that no aliens could be morally superior to humans.  That’s a laughable, pathetic idea today, but we do still wrestle with the potential relationships.

Ms. Atwood should read more fantasy if she wants to find religious fiction.  Science Fiction is all about how the universe is not dependable, reliable, or amenable to petition.  Religion is about finding a way to stability through the assertion of belief over circumstance.  Science is about figuring out how things work.  Science Fiction is about how to live in the universe science shows us, which offers only the most conditional stability.

To be fair, I understand where she might get that idea, that SF is religious.  It’s the awe, the “sense of wonder”, that is difficult to separate from one of the “varieties of religious experience.”  And it may well be that people turn to religion for exactly that thrill of awe.  But that’s not the point of religion.  And the source of the awe is very different.

I’m glad she likes SF now. But I’m less sanguine about the expectations she will provide those just coming to SF after having read her ideas.  I suspect many of them will be disappointed and give up on it.  In this regard, I see her as very much like Harold Bloom, who dumped all over Harry Potter  because he thought it was inferior to what he regards as worthwhile YA, all the while missing the good part of the whole Harry Potter phenomenon.

On the the other hand, maybe it won’t make any difference.  Maybe no one will really pay any attention.  That, too, will be a shame.

career

There Is Contact…

Hey, something of a more lit’rary nature now.  I have a stored reprinted in the new collection Alien Contact  edited by Marty Halpern.  Here is the cover:

 

I am very jazzed about this for a whole bunch of reasons.  One is that I have had very few stories anthologized this way (as a reprint).  Another is the superb company I’m keeping in here—Le Guin, Swanwick, Silverberg, Cadigan, Gaiman, King, Stross, and so on and so forth.  Still another is that Marty took one of my own personal favorites, Texture of Other Ways.  This is a kind of prequel story to my Secantis Sequence.  This is about the big hairy conference that precedes the events in my novel Compass Reach and sort of sets everything in motion.

I would put a link to direct purchase, but I don’t really want anyone to buy it from Amazon.  I’ve been in a real “support your local independent bookstore” mode for some time now, so until I find a better direct link I’d like to ask you all to go order it from your local indie.  Sorry if this is inconvenient, but that’s how I feel just now.

Anyway, I hope y’all enjoy it, especially if you didn’t catch these stories the first time around.