Can admirable characters get it wrong?

What's the easiest way to make a character seem smart?

Show the character understanding something the reader knows, but that the rest of the people in the narrative don't.  An ancient doctor understands sterilization. A politician in 1913 Great Britain knows that a hugely destructive world war is just around the corner. One character knows another is going to die because of a dream, or a portent, or something his grandmother once said.  The hero knows what is going to happen because of an ancient prophecy, and only fools ignore ancient prophecies.

Note that I said "easiest" way, not "best".  This technique is the opposite of dramatic irony, where the reader knows more about what's happening than the characters do. In science fiction, in fact, the main character often not only knows more than the other characters, he knows more than the reader, and, when you look at it strictly, than the writer. I don't know what the rhetorical term for this type of negative irony is. I just know there is way too much of it.

No one knows the future. That fact is easy to forget, once it's the past. Then even fools know it.

To show a character being intelligent, you have to show that character...thinking. Taking pieces of evidence available to the reader and the other characters, putting them together in a new configuration, and formulating plans based on that.  The actions the character takes may turn out badly--one can only play the odds. There are no guarantees. In fact, showing a character make a plan, have something go wrong because of unanticipated circumstances, and then rework the plan to take those circumstances into account is showing a truly intelligent character.

Now add other intelligent characters trying to achieve their own goals, and you have something like literature.

The undiscovery of Vitamin C and financial crashes

The other day I wrote about the complex story of scurvy and Vitamin C. But, of course, it's not just an interesting story of the ambiguities of scientific discovery and the unobviousness of explanations, it's also a metaphor for the collapse of complex systems (like our financial system).

But what isn't a metaphor for the collapse of our financial system?

Consider:  when sailing journeys took months away from shore, and blockading ships might stay on station for years, the discovery that something in fresh citrus juice prevented scurvy was incredibly valuable, and gave the British navy a distinct edge in performance. No one was going to monkey with it, though no one really understood what the causes of scurvy were, or how the juice prevented it.
When steamships cut travel time, fresh food (which also contains Vitamin C) was more available, and there was no long-term blockade duty, the need to specifically protect against scurvy grew much less. No one still knew the causes, but they had other things to think about.

So they thought about buying from domestic citrus producers, and shifted from high Vitamin C Sicilian lemons to much less effective West Indies limes. They improved production and storage, using copper vessels, and reduced Vitamin C further.

The safety margin had been reduced, but it didn't become obvious until someone made another long trip away from fresh food--in this case, exploring the Antarctic.  And scurvy again became a problem. Fortunately, in this case, the problem was limited to a few self-torturers obsessed with testing human survival.

A few years ago, we opened up the wall of our kitchen to do some work, and discovered that someone (in our family mythology, "Uncle Louie"--many people have a relative who overclaims his ability, but gets used because he's free) had casually cut through all the studs to run a waste stack vent pipe.  The only thing supporting that corner of the house turned out to be the cast-iron waste pipe from the upstairs bathroom.  Undiscovered, this could have led to serious damage at that end of the house.

We're coming out of a period where we made a lot of things easier at the cost of unknowingly assuming huge amounts of risk. But, when times are good, those who carefully hedge against risks show lower returns. I don't have a solution to this, except to suggest a little humbleness as to what can be known ahead of time.  Everything that was a complete mystery before is obvious after. Try to remember how little was known before.  Vitamin C didn't get isolated until the early 1930s.

On the other hand, there was nothing "unknown" about the risk of cutting through support studs on a balloon frame house.  Uncle Louie has no excuse.

The difficulties of understanding Vitamin C (or anything, for that matter)

When you learn things from your science textbook, it all seems so clear that it's a complete mystery why no one figured it out right away.  Of course life doesn't spontaneously generate. Of course gravity accounts for the movement of the planets. Of course scurvy is caused by a lack of Vitamin C.

Maciej Ceglowski recently wrote a superb essay about Scott's tragic expedition to the Antarctic, and  the contribution of scurvy, among many other problems, to that disaster. What, you say the scurvy problem had been solved back during the Napoleonic wars by the British navy? Why then are these limeys losing teeth over a century later?

The story is much more complex than that, it turns out.  Preventing scurvy was a pressing issue in sailing vessels on long voyages, but seemed less important on faster steam ships. For a variety of reasons, including where the citrus fruit came from and how it was processed, the British ended up with less and less effective versions of their scurvy preventer, but access to fresh food (most of it containing some Vitamin C) concealed this.

Until people started exploring the polar regions, and coming down with scurvy. What was wrong?

What if it was a disease carried by germs? Many otherwise mysterious diseases were explicable by this mechanism, so scurvy might well be one too.

Well, "might be" to you.  Physicians always "know" the causes of what ails us. Always. It's their essential nature. So physicians knew that scurvy was caused by spoiled meat, despite the huge ambiguities in the evidence.

Now, in fact, the role of scurvy in the Scott disaster is minor, and not even completely demonstrated. But the story of how confusing and unobvious the evidence was for Vitamin C deficiency as the cause of scurvy is the interesting part. Recommended.

(via the everflowing Kottke)

Our rats are getting fat

Via everyone's favorite drug discovery blog, In the Pipeline, the news that the rats and mice we depend on to understand the effectiveness of drugs and other metabolically significant interventions are pathetic, out-of-shape, metabolically deranged lardballs.

The authors of the study paper describe your typical laboratory rodent as "sedentary, obese, glucose intolerant, and on a trajectory to premature death". This matters because almost every metabolic pathway is affected by this situation: "cellular physiology, vulnerability to oxidative stress, inflammation, and associated diseases".

Of course, as everyone instantly points out, this makes these rodents excellent subjects for testing drugs and procedures intended for our increasingly sedentary and obese population. But no one should be happy about that. At the very least, we should know when a drug has been tested on (or controlled against) a rodent with a stressed metabolism, because its effect in normal-weight humans might be quite different. And there are still some of us around.

This leads to several related thoughts:

• "Sedentary and obese" is a different state than "active and normal weight". The differences are many, sometimes unexpected, and often profound.
• Being sedentary and obese has many unpleasant side effects:  note the "trajectory to premature death" part. The differences between "sedentary and obese" and "active and normal weight" are negative, not neutral.
• It's easy to become sedentary and obese. It doesn't require television or ads by snack companies.
• As a result, changing from "sedentary and obese" to "active and normal weight" will no doubt entail a huge amount of work and cost from the managers of these animals.

What distinguishes us from lab rats is (presumably) our conscious ability to alter our circumstances.  Don't be a lab rat.

How's the weather inside?

The main point of a building is to keep the weather (particularly water) out. But as we gain control over airflow, temperature, and moisture, we might be seeing more things like this:

This is a movie about a tornado generated inside the Mercedes Benz Museum in Stuttgart.  It gets an award from the Guinness Book of World Records at the end, for some the insanely specific record of World's Largest Artificial Tornado, so the end of the video is a couple of German car executives holding plaques (more here).

Robert Heinlein once wrote an odd little story called "Our Fair City", which involves using an intelligent-seeming urban vortex called Kitten as a weapon against political corruption. Not worth seeking out, if you're wondering--I have it in a collection called 6xH. That whirlwind gets decorated with streamers and balloons, an addition the Germans haven't seemed to have thought of. So, the first step is for that tornado to be a permanent feature, a natural consequence of the ventilation of the building.

As buildings get duller and larger, it might be possible to spiff them up with all manner of localized weather patterns: mist pouring down the stairs, glaciers in the upper hallways, lighting storms enlivening the cafeteria. And the eternal tornado in the lobby, the tutelary diety of the company, mascot of the soccer team, to whom employees come with requests for promotions, window space, and office supplies. Going home will seem a comedown from the meteorological mysticism of the workplace. Employers seeking ways to retain and motivate employees take note.

(via BLDGBLOG)

The place of houses

Since I've been thinking about cities (and planning to fit realistic future cities into my fiction), I've also been thinking about buildings, more specifically domestic architecture.

Consider the humble single family house. In my town, Cambridge, single family houses are relatively rare: only 14% of the housing stock consists of them.  In Manhattan, obviously, the number is far lower.  But in much of the United States, single-family houses are the order of the day.

On my shelves are a number of architectural field guides. One I've used, both for touring and for realistic portrayal of period houses in fiction, is Virginia and Lee McAlester's A Field Guide to American Houses.

When you look through it, you see specific regions and periods of style that architects and builders worked within.  Some of this was based on the requirements of local climate (rain, snow, heat, etc.), as well as local material (brick, stone, wood), but much of it was just style.  One builder trained with another, clients saw houses they liked and demanded ones that were similar. And these styles lasted for quite some time.  You see a Greek Revival house in my neighborhood, you can peg it to the 1830s or 40s.  An elaborate Queen Anne Revival from the 1880s to the turn of the century.  What I learned to call a foursquare ("Vernacular Prairie Style" according to the McAlesters) is more common in the Midwest, where I grew up, than here in New England, but you're looking at something from the turn of the century through the 1920s.

The book peters out after the Second World War, leaving what the book somewhat wanly calls "Neoeclectic".  And so it has been ever since.

Now, I'm not writing this to bemoan the loss of classifiable domestic archictetural styles (or at least, not primarily). it's just that, once you see the consistency of these styles specific to certain times and places, their disappearance is worthy of comment.

That's not to say that a tract house in 1955 is the same as one in 2005.  Clearly there are differences.  But they are mostly in terms of size (both of living space and garage space) and function (bathroom equipment, indoor gyms, entertainment centers). The applique ornament of pediments, columns, and mansard roofs gets smeared on in pretty much the same way over that time.  Not a single one of these house's is worth a second's detour to look at--and I am an avid architectural hobbyist.

Fashions change more and more quickly as time goes by.  The reason there are so many "revival" styles in our popular culture, is that in the past a style had a few years to elaborate, sink into people's lives, get associated with events and personalities, and appear in literature, books, and movies. Do styles now change too quickly to influence houses?  You can get rid of a pair of jeans of outdated cut or a poster of a forgotten band, but what do you do with a house? It continues to proclaim your outdated taste for decades.  Better to have a generic non-style, one that has cut itself loose from any specific history.

Or is there some larger cultural change at work? Does architecture no longer speak of us to ourselves, and of ourselves to others?  If so, why?  Is it because we spend most of our time inside watching one screen or another?

Where do I live? The house I own was built in the 1930s and is of no particular style that I can detect.  It has side gables, and a slight overhang on the roof.  My invaluable Survey of Architectural History in Cambridge:  Northwest Cambridge classifies the houses on my little street as "suburban homes built in the Depression years", which isn't much more than I already know.

Before the house, I lived on the third floor of a 1920s triple decker (a local form of multifamily housing that has served as the first dwelling for many new families).  It had square columns separating the living and dining rooms, hexagonal panes in the bowfronts, elaborate door and window trim, and a built-in hutch (another common local feature). It was the most beautiful place I have ever lived, but too small for our growing family.  I love my little house, which I've done a lot of work on, but I still think of that sun-washed apartment.  An elegant space is not to be undervalued as a source of happiness.

The Fall of Which Rome?

When people talk about the Fall of the American Empire, they are usually analogizing the state of American now (we've been doing this from about 1950) to the state of the Roman Empire at some point in the 400s. In fact, most people's knowledge of that period tends to be murky at best, but what they mean is the end of a powerful and dominant empire, and its replacement by something else.  This will happen to us in the near future, they say...ignoring how long it actually took the western Empire to collapse, and the Eastern Empire to retrench and restructure.

But I don't see a collapse of that sort as a near-term possibility. The Rome I fear we are actually like is that of the 1st century BCE: the late Republic.  That Rome remained strong on the periphery, and collapsed in the center through vicious infighting through what was once called the Roman Revolution.  The old ramshackle republican system was replaced by a military dictatorship where "the image of a free constitution was preserved with decent reverence". That collapse doesn't have the clean (if misleading) visuals of barbarians streaming through the gates, and so doesn't get used as journalistic shorthand for what we face.

Interestingly, our fiction is more cognizant of the resemblance than our journalism.  Colleen McCullough's "First Man in Rome" series, Robert Harris's Cicero novels, Steven Saylor's Gordianus the Finder mysteries, and the TV series Rome have all been popular, and speak of the corruption and downfall that characterized the period.

Was the Roman Revolution inevitable?  Did the Republic have to end?  Was the price paid for the Republic's dissolution a good one?  Many citizens, cut off from public participation in any event, certainly must have thought the price was more than fair, giving them prosperity and personal security.

The growing deadlock of our own representative republic, with its gargantuan yet petty squabbles over self-inflicted wounds like absurd healthcare financing structures, unsustainable entitlement programs, and increasingly untouchable public sector employees, certainly seems bound for some tour de force "solution" that will lead to a state none of us expect, or want.

Reading about the pompous Marius, the sinister Sulla, the smart-then-surprisingly-dumb Pompey won't provide any kind of specific guide to our era, though it's fascinating. But it's important to see how choices can get made by default, how people can put exaggerated faith in institutions that don't maintain themselves without work, and how a loss of freedom can be greeted with relief by a people who don't see themselves as giving anything important up.

Long science fiction series and hypersystematization

At Boskone I was on a panel about long SF series (despite the fact that I have never written one). Fellow panelists were John Douglas (once an editor of mine), Rosemary Kirstein, and Alastair Reynolds.

To succeed, a long SF series has to keep showing you new facets of the world. Sure, people like to settle in with familiar characters, and, to some extent, relive past adventures. Still, a good SF series is more like a work of architecture, rather than a painting (I wish I'd thought of this while on the panel). You can't see it all from one vantage point. You have to move through it, and while you are seeing it from one angle, there are things you can't see, though you might remember them.

The totality of that integration is a genuine aesthetic pleasure, one that gets shared on a narrative basis with an integrated multivolume work like Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  The first three books of the quartet show you the same time and place from different points of view, all of which are to some extent incompatible. You read them in order, so each one denounces and corrects the previous version.  It's all about love, one says. No, you got it all wrong, Balthazar says in his "great interlinear". No, it was actually all about politics says the third. Then the fourth book goes on, accepting all that but never resolving the various strands. It is that last element that is not like a work of science fiction.

Science fiction books provide the basic equation that moving through plot means acquiring knowledge, and that the knowledge translates into the power to move to another level, where you may well acquire more knowledge. SF narratives tend to have that open-ended structure, as each answer entails further questions.  That is one reason some personalities find it so compelling.

This penchant for systematic investigation does have its downsides. Systematizing science fiction authors often reach a state of hypersystematization, where, like conspiracy cranks, everything needs to be explained in terms of everything else. Isaac Asimov, for example, reached this phase late in his career, when he felt the need for a unified field theory of Isaac Asimov:  he tried to make out that every single one of his novels was actually a facet of a single universe.

Larry Niven seemed to get trapped inside his own creation of Known Space, and has long depended on collaborators to help him find a way out.  So science fiction is also the home of shared worlds, where collections of writers play in a single universe, sometimes created collaboratively, sometimes leased from a single writer, like Niven, who has grown tired of pushing narrative through the increasingly narrow holes left in his own creation.

And you do get clubs, cults, collections of obsessive fans. That's just the nature of the root psychology of our field. The prototype is probably fans of Sherlock Holmes, with their finicky attention to the Canon, and the contradictions in it. The commentary on Star Trek, Tolkein, etc., dwarf all other commentaries in literature. You could establish entire civilizations based on them.

So, in SF, long series are not just a lazy way of reusing a background that took a lot of work. They are a different literary experience, one that seems long, but is actually thick.  I don't think I have the stamina for doing one, but admire those who can manage it. It is a different type of work.

The cost of urban preservation

I like a nice old sandstone Richardsonian Romanesque office building, with columns, cornices, and elaborate entryways.  Like this one:

But I don't have to pay to maintain the thing, install modern fire-control equipment, remove asbestos, or try to rent to finicky commercial tenants who care more about the conformation of the space they lease than they do about architectural detail.

So I found the discussion about the Northwestern Guaranty Loan Building in Minneapolis, on one of my favorite sites, Shorpy, extremely enlightening.  The building was torn down in 1961, in one of those fits of urban renewal that characterized the era.  One hates the soul-sucking monstrosity that replaced it (as posted in a comment by bipto), while understanding the gigantic expense that would have been required to keep it operational, as pointed out by Minnie A. Politan and Anonymous Tipster.  If you've ever done even minor work on your house, you know how much things like that can run.

So I am a bit chastened, after my rambling rant yesterday about the beauty of cities.  No wonder city centers of older cities are somewhat theme-park-like.  How else can you pay to maintain all those old facades, while removing dangerously obsolete wiring and keeping the roof from falling in?  You have the pimp the buildings out to preserve them. No matter what structure you see, anywhere in the world, you have to reflect that the world is doing its best to destroy it. Keeping it standing takes vigilance, and money.  A lot of money. The struggle is eternal.

As my friend James Patrick Kelly pointed out on our Boskone panel about cities, most science fiction writers don't know any economics.  If you really want beauty, you have to be willing to pay for it.

The economic city vs. the political city

Several people have written cogent comments on my posts on science fictional cities (The city in science fiction and Charter cities).  I am intrigued by the concept of Charter Cities, or maybe Challenge Cities: the equivalent of "stadtluft macht frei" (city air makes you free) of the European Middle Ages, where you could escape bound status by fleeing to a city.

Of course, in that era, rulers had to do that to make sure cities were inhabited at all, because their death rates were so much higher than that of the surrounding countryside.  If there wasn't in-migration, their populations would have dropped.

So I really am thinking about the possibility of being able to escape to a jurisdiction with another economic system without having to migrate to some other continent.  It's the ultimate in diversity.  But, of course, cities are never purely economic entitities.  And, despite what some extreme libertarians would like to think, you can't build a public life on purely economic relations. Politics--power--always raises its head.  Coalitions form.  People regulate each other.  Each group tries to zone for the lifestyle it considers ideal. A successful city without significant political power seems unlikely.

And this is all to ignore the notion of the city as aesthetic object, which is an significant omission.  We have forgotten, since cities were always objects of power and of wealth, but are now seldom objects of beauty, save in fugitive and chance ways.  Beauty involves making a set of consistent choices, and that implies that other choices are not made.  There are many diverse beautiful objects, but each beautiful object is jealously non-diverse.  Just as, in the pre-modern era, tyrannies tended to permit women more freedom than democracies, so beauty depends, at least in part, in a constriction of freedom.

Of course, that might imply that there have been, somewhere, unfree cities that were beautiful.  I can't think of any.  Kim Jong-il's Pyongyang?  Ceaucescu's Bucharest? Stalin's Moscow?  Not promising notions.  Still, I think there is something to a constriction that requires a theme-and-variations approach to structure.  But it can't be imposed by some external force.  It may be a choice that can no longer be made.

Or is it just the need to deal with cars?  If so, that's another choice we're stuck with.  No one's building any cities that can't accommodate cars.  That would be like building a beautiful house without indoor plumbing.  And I say this as someone who seldom drives.

So, cities of wealth, cities of power, cities of culture.  A lot to play with here.

The artist and the real day job

At Arisia (a local science fiction convention) I attended a panel on living your creative dream. The people on the panel were musicians, clothing makers, and craftsmen who had found a way to support themselves with their art, sometimes with the help of a money-earning spouse.  Everyone on the panel seemed tremendously happy, and it was inspiring to listen to.

Unfortunately, it had nothing to do with my actual life. I earn very little from my writing. I don't have a freelancer's temperament. And while my spouse does many things, earn enough money to support the family is definitely not one of them.  I admire and respect those who make it on their art, whether it's writing, or sculpture, or music.  It's just that, after many years, I've been forced to admit that I'm not one of them.

So I have a real day job.  I am a marketing director for a financial services firm.  It's a small firm, and I lost my one staff member in a recent budget cut.  I'm good at my job, and try to devote my days to fulfilling its requirements, and selling our company's products. To all appearances, I am a regular middle-class office worker who keeps regular hours and goes to the gym at lunch.

For a long time I was...I wouldn't say resentful of the need for a day job...but certainly not delighted by it. I figured that real artists, if they did have a day job, got one that indicated their denial of its necessity. They worked in a bookstore, or did fill-in design work, or something like that. They lived like graduate students and didn't give in.

I need to feed my children, have health insurance, and lay away money so I'm not impoverished in my declining years.  And I...OK, I might as well admit it...like living well.  I like not worrying about money, I like being able to go to out to dinner with friends, I like being able to afford car repairs, I like taking a vacation now and then.  So, I suspect, do you.

I also want to work on what's intimately important to me--in my case, my writing.  So (most likely, if you are reading this) do you.

Here's what I can tell you: it can be done. You can work a real grownup day job, with responsibilities, fellow employees who rely on your work, a 401(k), standing committees, office politics, and not enough time off.  And you can feel the passionate joy of creation.  I won't pretend it's easy. The occasional bout of despair is inescapable.

I just wanted to let you know you are not alone.

Charter cities

Yesterday, I talked about the place of the city in science fiction, as was discussed on a panel at Boskone.

A topic I did not raise was the Charter City, as proposed by Paul Romer, in Prospect . Nations are often stuck in development hell because of bad institutions. But because of skewed incentives, there is no way to incrementally improve those institutions.  You're stuck in a kind of local minimum, which takes too much energy to jump out of. Romer's proposal is to allow extraterritorial cities with good institutions (profit motive, rule of law, security of property rights, the kinds of things we take for granted and can afford to take lightly) to operate within territorial nations.  Allow free migration between those cities and their mainland, and see what happens.

Now we've really created a plot engine.  Because there is nothing straightforward about this.  Is this neocolonialism under another label?  Violations of national sovereignty "for your own good" are rightly regarded with suspicion.  But I'm a fiction writer, not a development economist. As far as a writer is concerned, a contradiction in a concept is a plot twist, not a bug.

I suppose the city of Todos Santos in Niven and Pournelle's Oath of Fealty is, in a sense, a predecessor to this concept (I actually found the book dull and never finished it--but now that I'm thinking about it I will try again).  But there are any number of voluntary systems that could be set up, and set into competition.  Of course, national governments would play along, until such time as it did not benefit them to do so.

The model is Hong Kong, sitting right on the border of China and showing the benefits of capitalism. For one reason or another, it was never forcibly brought into the Chinese sphere. It did have the advantage of a well-structured state (thought given to occasional paroxisms like the Cultural Revolution) to serve as counterparty, not a failed or warlord state.

One interesting suggestion in the comments to the Romer article was to allow such a voluntary city near New Orleans, in the United States.  I think that makes perfect sense.  All jurisdictions should face the prospect of competition. If we are sponsoring charter cities abroad, we should accept them within our own national boundaries as well.

The issue, of course, is the use of coercion and force, when the territorial government loses that competition. States like to maintain a monopoly on the use of force, and they use it against entities that damage their interest. Stalin forced the collectivization of farming not because he thought it would increase productivity, but in order to assure political control of the countryside. He could extort enough food to feed the potentially volatile cities, and rely on the dispersed peasants to be unable to organize to resist. That there were alternative models that would have made everyone materially better off was not relevant to him.  Successful charter cities would face expropriation, invasion, blockade, and deliberately incented immigration, among other threats.

But wealthy, successfuly charter cities would also face the temptation to intervene in the territorial government to get themselves a better deal, instead of just outcompeting it. A capitalist is someone who competes to earn a profit so that he can afford to buy a way out of competition. The system that prevents businesspeople from being able to buy a pass from competition without also taking away the incentives to competition is a delicately balanced one. Subconscious cultuarl assumptions play a big role in how the balance is maintained.

So here's the story:  The Franchise State.  There are several collections of cities (Chinese state-guided development model, North American free competition model, maybe even a European social democracy model, plus a grab bag of other schemes) sometimes right next to each other.  They recruit not only from their hinterland, but from other areas as well, subverting immigration control.  Someone will need to protect them, and keep them from being taken over by conspiracies, combinations, cartels, and other extra-market organizations, as would be inevitable otherwise.  The wealthy city would be tempted to bribe local strongmen for protection, since maintaining your own military is expensive.  Such a city is like a natural resource, and would encourage rent-seeking and stationary bandits, recapitulating the rise of government in the first place.

Refugees crowd the approaches to the city, which has become fussy about who it lets in. Standards have increased, and those who got aboard first are anxious to maintain their favorable position. One can hypothesize a guild of Disruptors, secret officials specifically trained to break down cartels and mutual backscratching arrangements in favor of naked competition.

This all provides an alternate model to the national territorial state, which we have all be indoctrinated to value. But seeing the charter city folks as pure-of-heart libertarians devoted to pure competition runs up against the inevitable temptations of success.  On the panel I set down a challenge: can anyone right a genuinely complex science fictional city?  I think Romer's Charter City concept provides a good template for one, if not for an actual city existing in some actual location.

The city in science fiction

At Boskone, I was on several panels, a couple of which had topics to which I could actually make a contribution.  One was The City and Science Fiction.  My fellow panelists were the charming S. C. Butler (I had enjoyed listening to him on a panel about Revenge at last Boskone), my buddy James Patrick Kelly, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and Steven H. Silver, who lives near where I grew up, in the Chicago area.

What was interesting about the discussion was that we were either talking about SF cities from long long ago (like Asimov's Trantor), or more recent fantasy cities (New Crobuzon, Ambergris).  SF cities seem sterile planned Brazilias and Canberras, while fantasy cities manifest history, diversity, and conflict.

But the world is rapidly urbanizing.  We spoke in Boston, a cute, tiny, obsolete town, hedged with development restrictions and out of the main flow of global capital (and a place I love).  What could our experience there tell us about gigantic new Chinese cities springing up seemingly overnight, or giant slum of Kibera, near Nairobi, which has a population of over a million?  Those are crucial urban experiences of the 21st century, and will influence events.

We can't leave thinking and writing about these sorts of things to Bruce Sterling.  He can't do everything, and lately has prefered the Balkans.  I'm not Bruce, but I think it's time I gave it a try.

Reading and signing at Pandemonium, Wednesday at 7

Just a reminder, I will be reading and signing my novel, Brain Thief, at Pandemonium Books and Games, 4 Pleasant St. in Central Square, Cambridge, Wednesday Feb 17, at 7 PM.  It's a small space, so let's fill it up!  I hope to see you there.

Genres and audiences

There has been a lot of discussion about the genre of science fiction lately--though I suppose there always is.  SF as marketing category, SF as set of reading protocols, SF as exemplifying didactic rationalism, even, heaven help us, SF as literature.

Genre (whether film noir, or jazz, or chili) is a good topic to argue about, because there is no bright-line rule dividing it from other examples of the form.  There is always ambiguity.  It is always, in some sense, statistical, and there are any number of edge conditions that those who favor liminal situations and ambiguity are naturally drawn to.

I've been thinking about genre lately.  I write SF, but don't read a lot of it.  I tend to read mysteries, when I read fiction--and Brain Thief is a mystery novel, perhaps before it is a science fiction novel.  But, at least at this point in my attempt to get some clarity, bootlegging yet another genre into the discussion probably is not helpful.

One thing about genre is that you can't understand it without understanding who consumes it.  And the audience is only implicit.  You can watch any number of Busby Berkeley production numbers or Disease of the Week movies without really being able to figure out who they were made for. And every artist is conscious of his or her audience.

And, no matter what its literary pretensions, there is a core audience for science fiction, a rationalist, slightly Aspergers, system-loving, covertly romantic, optimistic group. The core group consumes vast quantities of its favored product.  It's not the same audience in 2010 as it was in 1950, but certainly has some long-term similarities with it.  For example, this audience has always enjoyed communicating within itself.  It has new methods of doing it, but the drive has always been there.

I think understanding this core audience and its responses is the first step to understanding this genre.  When someone claims Margaret Atwood, say, has never written science fiction (she's said this herself), what he really means is, what Atwood has written does fulfil this core audience's needs.  It doesn't matter if the book is set in the future or whatever.  The core audience has a need for mental integration, for underlying system, for extrapolation, for daring and romance, for sacrifice and visual drama, that that particular book does not provide.

This is not the key or the solution.  But without taking the audience into account, and discussing only what is on the page, it's easy to go wrong.  It's the first step to understanding genre.

The real gladiators

Whenever someone refers to football players, or extreme fighters, or NASCAR driver as "gladiators", you can show them this, from Mind Hacks (I don't have access to PubMed and so can't excerpt the original article).  It's an examination of skulls from a gladiator cemetery in Turkey, matching fractures with known gladiator weapons.

Gladiatorial combat was highly structured, with elaborate rules, not just a free for all.  But it had, as its common end, the death of a combatant.  If the body was still twitching, it was dispatched by a hammer blow by an arena employee dressed as an Etruscan god.

There is no comparison between gladiatorial combat and even the most violent sport of modern times, or jousting for that matter.  Take a look at the skull with the trident holes in it and imaging going to see that as standard entertainment. Roman civilization looks superficially like ours, but was deeply different.

If Romans had had realistic simulations of violent death, as we do, would they have needed gladiatorial combats?  Why did they "need" them in the first place?  Other cultures at the time, while having public executions of criminals, mass slaughters of fallen cities, etc., did not have such an elaborate practice of violent death.

I once wrote a story about a couple of animal trainers (violent, bizarre, and even sexual animal encounters were another big part of the show) who go off in search of a rumored hippogriff to kill in a show but instead find...well, now that I'm thinking about it, perhaps I should pull it out again.

My one big quote

The scholar John William Burgon is remembered for the last line of his prize poem Petra, describing that inaccessible city: "Rose-red city, half as old as time".  It seems he otherwise had a busy and productive scholarly career, but no one is interested in that.

One line?  At the moment, anyway, my internet fame comes from one line as well:  "The road to truth is long, and lined the entire way with annoying bastards".  It comes from my first book, Carve the Sky.  How it escaped into the wild is unknown, but it certainly has proliferated, most recently in the form of sweatshirts and hoodies.

There are certainly other usable lines in my work.  One a friend always uses is from my Future Boston story, "Focal Plane":  "An efficient technology is like the flu:  sooner or later you end up with it."

Or, boiled down from something Norbert Spillvagen says at the NEO Diner in Brain Thief: "Accept the cowgirl".  Now that I'd like to see on a T-shirt.

And I thought Amazon was my only hope

I checked the Brain Thief page on Amazon today, to see if there were any more reviews, and discovered that Amazon is no longer selling the book.  I have to admit, I sat there stunned for a bit, wondering if the shelf life of books had now gone below a month.  I looked around, and saw that other books, even quite popular ones, were not being sold by Amazon either.  What was the issue?

I found the answer, or at least the beginnings of one, on Tobias Buckell's site (Mr. Buckell is a better site for What's Going On Now, BTW--I'm much better on What Was Going On Then).  He links to a NY Times story that says that Amazon has pulled all books from Macmillan (which includes Tor Books), in an apparent dispute over Kindle pricing.

My book isn't even available on Kindle! Though I hope it will be at some point.  So my poor little book, already struggling to get sold, is now crushed like a butterfly under the gargantuan feet of two struggling saurians.

I hope this gets resolved quickly.  Given the state of the publishing market, this is not what any of us needs.  Meanwhile, if you are buying online, you can get Brain Thief at Barnes & Noble.

My Boskone schedule

I will be at Boskone Feb 12-14.  The usual mix of panels on topics I know nothing about!  But I think I can sign my name, so the autographic session should go just fine.

Friday  6pm        Boston as Setting

        Alexander Jablokov        (M)

        Toni L. P. Kelner    

        Paul G. Tremblay    

    The subway line to Cambridge inspired H.P. Lovecraft to visions of

    subterranean Antarctic horror; Hal Clement drowned Beantown under

    dozens of feet of water. Why Boston? Who's writing about here

    lately? What scenic SFnal possibilities does our fair city present?

    How can you convey its charm to readers who have never felt Boston's

    balmy February breeze?

 Friday  8:30pm     Reading (0.5 hrs)

        Alexander Jablokov    

 Saturday1pm        The Market(s) for Short Fiction

        Neil Clarke        (M)

        Elaine Isaak    

        Alexander Jablokov    

        James Patrick Kelly    

    Magazines, anthologies, the web? Find out where the short stuff

    sells, and how to get a piece of the action.

  Saturday2pm        The City and Science Fiction

        S. C. Butler    

        Alexander Jablokov        (M)

        James Patrick Kelly    

        Patrick Nielsen Hayden    

        Steven H. Silver    

    From the planet-spanning urbs of Trantor or Coruscant to the

    steamfunkier precincts of New Crobuzon to the vastly vertical

    Spearpoint of Alastair Reynolds  forthcoming Terminal World   what s

    your favorite skiffy megalopolis? Would you move there tomorrow?

    Would it actually work as a technological/societal/economic

    artifact? In an advanced, post-scarcity society, would people even

    want to pig-pile together? What will cities be like in the future?

    (And what would you prefer them to be?)

 Saturday4pm        Autographing

 Sunday  1pm        Long Series: What Gives Them Staying Powers?

        Jeffrey A. Carver

        John R. Douglas        (M)

        Alexander Jablokov    

        Rosemary Kirstein    

        Alastair Reynolds    

    Is it just the comfort of returning to a familiar place....or

    something more? Expound.