My annual science fictional final exam: signing up for panels at Readercon

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Readercon is my favorite local science fiction convention. It has a considerably more academic/litcrit slant than most cons, and focuses entirely on written fiction.

That's all fine.  But it does have the longest, and most intimidating panel sign up I have ever encountered.  It takes me more than an hour to fill out.  Just reading and comprehending the dense paragraph describing each panel takes me back to the SAT.  I always feel a bit of relief when I get to the end and don't see lines of ovals to fill in with a #2 pencil.

Plus, it has you rate each potential panel A+, A, or B, but does not limit the number of A+ ratings you can give. The obvious strategy, if you want to be on a panel, is to rate them all A+, and then beg out of whatever does not appeal. Every year I try to be honest, and every year I end up on one panel about "Semicolons and Other Narrative Partial Stops" held at 10 am on Sunday. No more!

On the other hand, if I don't even understand the panel description, it seems bad form to get all enthusiastic about it.  There are a lot of people at Readercon who probably do understand it, and can say insightful things about it.

I'm a third of the way through sing up and am exhausted.  I'll have to get back to it some other time.

 

Another example of the poverty of historical explanation: Enigma

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No matter what, we have to believe we know why things happened. Some people believe in vast impersonal historical imperatives, others in sinister conspiracies, yet others in divine providence. 

A couple of months ago, Greg Cochrane, in his interesting and crabby blog West Hunter, brought up an example of the poverty of historical explanation: for a couple of decades after the Second World War, historians wrote accounts of what had happened in that war, and why, without any knowledge of a significant influence on how events turned out, the breaking of the Enigma codes. But no one (as far as I know) said "actually, the defeat of the Germans, and the US victory at Midway, and a whole bunch of other things, seem unbelievably lucky. Is there something we don't know about them? Were there, maybe, some spies who have not yet come to light? Or some other explanation?"

I do remember a good friend saying, after the publication of Winterbotham's The Ultra Secret, the first big public explanation of the breaking of the codes, and the effect that had on the war: "No one understood anything about it!"

Now, maybe, we do. Though the Soviet victory in that war, which really decided things, still makes no sense at all to me. No code breaking for them, no secret weapons, no across-the-ocean safe haven pumping out bombers and cruisers, nothing but beatings, starvation, mass slaughter, burning villages...and victory. Utterly incomprehensible, and utterly fascinating.

If I'm not timing, I'm not working

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I've discovered something about myself--something I could have done with discovering a few decades ago.

I work best when I use a timer.  I have become a devotee of Pomodoro intervals: twenty five minutes of work, followed by five (OK, usually a bit more) minutes of break. Pomodoro Technique has a lot more to it, but I'm not really that strict about it.

But when I time, I work. That doesn't mean I literally don't work when I'm not timing, but the odds definitely go way down. I often delude myself that I'm working only to conclude, on mature consideration, that I'm not. Because the damn timer's not on.

Those twenty-five minute intervals are perfect for me. I work intensely, but that is about the time my mind would start to wander. So I get an official break. I generally follow the rule of sets of four (two hours), with a longer relax in between. If I do it strictly, without cheating, I get an immense amount done.

I often fail. But more and more often, I succeed. My mind is astonishingly disordered. I need external rules to get anything done. I'm fortunate I can dress myself. I am a triumph of technique over essential personality.

But now I am off the timer and should finish. The more strictly I obey the breaks, as well as the work periods, the more I get done. So now I'm done!

A fresh dinner in ancient Rome

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In an intriguing review of an upcoming book, Rome: an Empire's Story, by Greg Woolf, Adrian Goldsworthy (author of a number of books about Rome in my library) notes something interesting about Roman diet and daily life:

Woolf notes that chickens appeared in the Mediterranean world sometime in the middle of the last millennium BC. Quick to breed and relatively easy to maintain, they provided eggs and a source of conveniently small quantities of meat—an important attribute in a world without refrigeration.

It's this kind of observation about daily life that can really bring a past time to life. People made practical choices, based on what made the most sense given their circumstances. One chicken = one dinner. Bigger ruminants make a lot of meat, impossible to store without refrigeration. That's why the ancients largely saved them for sacrifice and mass consumption.

I also didn't know chickens had reached the Mediterranean that late.

I'm always a sucker for another book that might help me understand ancient Rome, so I think I will eventually end up with this one too.

Ow, my eye! Part I

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Retinal detachment is both weird and depressing. For me, it was a spontaneous failure of a part of my body I normally did not worry about. One day my retina was in place, sending signals to my brain, the next it had peeled off, and all I saw was a green, translucent blot. No impact, no external cause.

As soon as my optometrist saw it, she sent me to an ophthalmologist. A charming young guy from his office came and picked me up and drove me up to Andover, about a forty five minute drive from where I live. After a couple of hours of sitting around, the ophthalmologist popped in and injected gas into my eyeball to try to float the retina up in preparation for surgery, to take place two days later. This was less fun than it sounds.

Then the doctor disappeared. I had to sign a long series of sheets detailing the possible procedures he would perform on me in a couple of days.  I had never heard of any of them: scleral buckle, vitrectomy, etc. They might remove my lens, my iris, inject oil into my eye. It all depended on how things looked when he got in there. The sheets I was signing said the doctor had carefully explained things to me, and I was aware of all the risks and possible negative consequences.

Of course, he had done no such thing. To the doc, I was a bunch of supporting tissue dangling from a surgical site. I might have feelings about what was going to be done to me, but I certainly wasn't supposed to have opinions. It was just like clicking Accept on a software contract. What other choice did I have? To give him a little credit, I was an emergency addition to what was clearly a busy schedule, some of it presumably with other people who had serious conditions.

This was a surgery that shouldn't wait. The retina is an impossibly thin and delicate piece of tissue, thinner than plastic wrap. Waiting around could damage it beyond repair. Given a lot of advance planning, I might have reviewed a series of eye surgeons in the Boston area, considered the options for treatment, and chosen someone. But, again, time was tight, and a quick search showed that this guy had the characteristic of most use in cases like this: he does a huge number of these operations, on a daily basis. With any delicate surgery, you want a specialist, who does only that type of surgery, and has done it a lot, so that by the time he gets to you, every kink has been ironed out, every oddball condition seen, and every movement deeply ingrained into his nervous system.

And, of course, I wouldn't trade that amount of experience for a better bedside manner. I presume it's possible to get both.

This is where physician ratings by "consumers" become kind of meaningless. I could rate how well he explained things to me, but how was I to rate how well he did at the thing that mattered, the operation itself? I know how I am recovering (slowly, but steadily). If something goes wrong, was it because of something he did, or because things go wrong no matter how well he did? Could I be recovering faster? When my vision settles, will it be as good as it could have been? Really no way for me to tell. He can be rated only statistically, and I have no way of doing that.

So they sent me home, to sit up and bed and fret. The bubble floated the retina up a bit--there was a bit of translucency in the green, and it got a bit smaller. But not enough to be worth anything. A day later, early in the morning, Mary drove me up to a surgical center in New Hampshire

 

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should: creepymouth commercials

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There seems to have been some minor technical barrier surmounted in animation, and now you can stick realistic-looking moving mouths wherever you want to in an ad.

Unfortunately, there is absolutely no good use for realistic-looking mouths anywhere but on someone who already has a completely functional mouth, in a pretty good spot. So whenever the technology comes up, it is almost miraculously creepy.

Below, a couple of students from Uncanny Valley High, class of 2012:

"Another one of those green beers, Scarecrow?" I stay home on St. Patrick's Day, and now I know why.

Holy ....! PSAs tend to attract a bad element--recent grads with more technical capabilities than sense, a feeling that they don't need to pay attention to consequences because they are doing something socially good, and access to public-service money that needs to get spent so that a box gets checked on some bureaucrat's annual plan. This one is particularly egregious. (via Copyranter, who has just moved to Buzzfeed.  Actually, I bet the three-mouthed beast is from Copyranter too, but I was too traumatized to remember where I saw it). I'm sure newly breastfeeding moms have exactly this nightmare.

When something can be done, it will be done, but that doesn't mean it should be done.

 

A situation is not a story: Martha Marcy May Marlene

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People who join abusive cults voluntarily are likely to have preexisting problems. This is makes it harder to disentangle the origins of their symptoms once they leave.

MMMM is a movie about a situation. A young woman (named Martha, renamed Marcy May in the cult she joins, and answering the phone as Marlene, as all the women in the cult do) escapes after two years and moves in with her older sister and her sister's husband. Martha is skittish, weird, paranoid, and somewhat dopey-seeming. As we see flashbacks to her time in the cult, we see how she was manipulated, abused, and finally ended up participating in some of the cult's violence.

It is all well done, I thought.  But aside from anatomizing the situation, the movie didn't really go anywhere, and I have a genre desire for imposing plots on inchoate reality. Martha's sister and brother-in-law are on vacation in an isolated lake house, and both are dull and flat of affect. No one ever talks about anything interesting. The cult members are likewise deadpan.

So the movie seems really long.  The flashbacks do have a kind of progress to them, but the post-escape scenes do not. The movie does add some ominous touches, as a way of adding suspense, and those are the only trace of narrative energy. Scenes are slow-moving and dull. Maybe the actress who plays Martha, Elizabeth Olsen, acts, maybe she doesn't. I found it hard to be sure.

So: good raw material if you have a project that might include a character who was already damaged and was further damaged by a cult, and who plays a role in an actual plot, but not recommended if you just want to see a movie.

Post-surgery entertainment: Frailty

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I like movies but watch too few of them. Somehow I can't sit still for long enough, or have something else to do. I have to make resolutions to watch them. It's really quite silly.

But after my eye surgery, I was confined to bed, and still am forbidden much movement, so have watched more movies than usual, and even a whole season of Deadwood, in a truly decadent binge.

As I've mentioned before, one thing I really like is movies that are pretty good but not great, that let me rewrite them as they are going on, and serve as inspirations for new plots. Last week I watched a movie that was perfect for that: Frailty, which is about religious revelation and murder in an East Texas town. I liked it, but thought it was only half good, in that it carefully built up a situation that it then blew. Most crucially, it dumped a key character, one with genuine strength of soul that we had every reason to respect, in the toilet, in an ill-advised attempt at a creepy twist ending. And the ending was genuinely creepy. I just thought it was the wrong one.

On a rainy night, a young man, Fenton Meiks (played by Matthew McConaughey) shows up at FBI headquarters to tell FBI Agent Wesley Doyle (the impressive Powers Boothe--also in Deadwood, as it happens) that he knows who a notorious serial killer, the Hand of God, is. And he knows this because of what happened to him in his childhood.

Now, as a movie viewer, you know that, in any kind of movie worth watching, the FBI agent is not just a neutral listener to a confession. He is receiving this confessional because he, in some twisted way, is related to the things being confessed.

And so it is. I won't tell you what the connection is, except that it turns out to be lame and pointless and totally contrived. That revelation comes pretty late in the movie, though, so most of it can be enjoyed before it gets to that point.

As Doyle and Meiks drive out to check out where the bodies are buried (oddly enough, though the Hand of God is billed as a serial killer, only the first of his bodies have been found, an oddity that gets explained later), Meiks tells the story of his childhood. He starts with some idyllic childhood scenes of him and his younger brother Adam, an idyll shattered one morning when their widowed Dad comes into their bedroom and tells them that he has been visited by an angel. This angel has told him that the world is inhabited by a number of demons, looking exactly like normal human beings, that it is his mission to eliminate. And his sons need to help him.

The steady progress of this mission is the main motive spring of the film. Dad finds the instruments of his vengeance (gloves, a pipe, an ax). And he starts kidnapping people, murdering them, and burying them in a rose garden near his house. Young Adam is down with this. Fenton, a bit older, resists, and is savagely punished for his resistance. Things get worse and worse.

Is it crazy to do something crazy if an angel with a flaming sword appears on the underside of the oil pan of a sedan you are repairing and tells you to do it? Well...yes, of course it is. Even Moses asked for some indication of God's bona fides before doing his bidding, but Dad is a sad and lonely widower with two sons that are probably more trouble to raise than it seems, and is happy to have a mission.

I write novels, not screenplays. Novels can handle a lot of narrative complexity. Movies can't.  You can only do so much in 100 minutes. So the movie had no way to tie Agent Doyle to the past story, detail the actual actions of the Hand of God killer, and show the two boys in later life.  But the movie at least toys with an obvious notion for a science fiction writer: what if the demons are real? What if Dad has a real mission, no matter how deranged he seems?

When I was a kid I loved a show called The Invaders. It was about an architect who sees an alien spacecraft one night, and spends the rest of the series trying to persuade people that there are aliens invading the Earth. No one ever believes him. The aliens are always out to get him, and he often has to kill them. When they die they vaporize.

Already rewriting things in my head at age 10 or so, I waited, every week, for him to screw up and kill someone who doesn't vaporize, but just lies there and bleeds on the pavement. How can he possibly maintain a 1000 batting average? What does he do when he realizes he has killed a human being, not an evil alien? What new secrets get revealed by that, and what does he do? Needless to say, it never happened, but I thought something of the same thing watching Dad kidnap people and haul them home to be eliminated. Even if some of them are demons, is he always right?

Plus, the point of killing them off is unexplained. There is no hint of a coming apocalypse, a final struggle, whatever. It's just a form of extreme police enforcement, religious vigilantism. But that Dad is unreflective is totally fine. Bill Paxton, who also directed, does a great job with the role, holy vengeance as everyman. He's a good and loyal employee at the garage where he works, and he's a good and loyal instrument of the Lord.

But Fenton's childhood resisting the demands of his holy serial killer Dad...connected to a more interesting Now story, one where the consequences of that time really come home to roost, and some unexpected truths are revealed...some potential there.

Secular skeptic that I am, I'm probably not the right person to write it. Because I see refusal to play ball as a valid response to an insane request, even from a supernatural being. It's like the ending of one of the best debate-the-meaning-with-your-friends movies ever made, Michael Tolkin's 1991 The Rapture: if God insists on generating an evil world and then following it up with an Apocalypse that is simultaneously arbitrary, cruel, and cheesy, isn't the only existentially valid response to refuse to go along?

Many people would argue that it isn't. Ours is not to reason about the mission God gives us, or to criticize His special effects.

But it's been two decades since The Rapture and one since Frailty, so it's about time for another meditation on what one of us moderns would do if some being stepped out of Scripture, grabbed us by the shoulder, and gave us a mission.

 

Where I've been

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A couple of weeks ago, I suffered a detached retina in my left eye.  That required some fairly significant eye surgery, then a lot of lying propped up in bed with instructions not to move around too much, bend over, or read.

My eye seems to be recovering, though there are no guarantees. And I feel well enough to slide slowly into some of my usual activities.  So I will be writing more as time goes by.

The drone in your future

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Get ready. Within a few years they will be everywhere.

Drones. They'll be flown by national governments, state governments, local governments. By news agencies, archeologists, meteorologists, real estate investors, transportation engineers, paparazzi...the list goes on. Their price is going to keep dropping.

The effects will be dramatic. Local SWAT teams, tick-full of Homeland Security money, will be desperate to acquire them to survey for drugs, bust in doors, and overawe evil doers. A war of assassination will pervail throughout unsettled areas of the world. Outdoor weddings will be less popular. Secure delivery of small parcels will have a new modality. Hobbyists will create ever stranger devices.

And, at some point, things could get rough. Our government is already overarmed, both internationally and domestically.  What happens when you can officially be ordered to stay inside, and that order can be enforced everywhere?

Well, for a long time it's just going to be pointless extra feeds of drone visuals in local news shows and shots of celebrities trying to sunbathe somewhere. And a few bad guys killed in peripheral areas. Maybe that's all it's going to be. I have to say, I don't even know how to prepare.

 

That which does not destroy us: delivering a novel to the workshop

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In my day job, I am a marketing writer. In cartoons like Dilbert, and in much common belief in tech companies, marketing people are blithering idiots who have no idea of what the products do, who the customers are, or even what business they are in.

That hasn't actually been my experience. People actually expect marketing people to know a lot about the business they are writing for. In my case right now, that's a wide range of medical devices, from heart valves to hip implants. So, sometimes people are a little uncomfortable telling me when I have something wrong ("does he really not know that a good market for facet arthroplasty might not develop?") Well, no, I don't. That was just my guess.

But what I say to them when they wonder if I really want to be corrected: "Either you think I'm an idiot, and it's just between us, or you and some thousands of other people think I'm an idiot." There's really no way around it. Unlike most jobs, mine is practiced in the open. By definition, the world sees pretty much everything I produce.

I'm not telling this so that you'll feel sorry for me, or respect me more.  Or both. Paradoxically enough, we do frequently want both of those things simultaneously.

I'm telling you because I just turned in the manuscript of my novel, Timeslip, to my writing workshop, the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop (CSFW). Finally, someone other than me will read this thing.

The CSFW is a powerful tool. It has a procedure set, a corporate culture, and a long-serving subset of members that makes it effective in uncovering a wide set of shortcomings in a manuscript. Like any workshop, it is a great servant but a terrible master. In my experience, they can only make a book better. Not that every suggestion or even observation is good or pertinent.

And it's done in private. No reader will ever have to experience that poorly motivated character or that impossible use of steam power. Just those brave folks of the CSFW.

It's long past the time when luck had anything to do with it, but I won't mind if you wish me some anyway.

 

In search of a fruitful idea, like the Trinity

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In a recent post, I characterized novel ideas as something like fugue subjects, something that can be reversed and transformed and played against itself, in the form of other characters, subplots, locations, etc. If it has that flexibility and extensibility, it can serve as the basis for a novel.

The same is true, I think of a variety of other ideas. Some ideas are fruitful, that is, they lead to other ideas. In another post, I wrote about the writer Ron Carlson's notion that, when writing, you should make sure your narrative choices give you "inventory". You make initial story choices not just on behalf of the plot, but on behalf of the future self that will be writing the rest of the story. You want to keep that person from running out of stuff to use. I've also written about how irritated that person will be if you aren't careful to do that.

In Christian theology, the Trinity plays something of that role (how's that for a dramatic transition?) The Trinity became dominant as a concept, not because it is, in some sense "truer" than, say, Arian monotheism, Monophysite spiritualism, or Nestorian humanism, but because it allowed for an incredibly complex narrative. Someone could always grab some part of that idea and develop an entire theology out of it. As a result, Trinitarian sequels, spin-offs, and fan fiction outcompeted the more closed-off and conclusive narrative notions of other Christological constructs. 

Having explained both post-Nicean theology and novel writing, what can I do next?

I can go in search of a fruitful idea.  I just sent my novel to my workshop, and have new tasks to take on.

The Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy

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I should start this post with my usual boilerplate disclaimer when discussing environmental issues: I live in Cambridge, I ride my bike everywhere, I am concerned about global warming, but more concerned about issues to do with water (both drinking, and the kind that is losing all of its fish).

But I find most of the things people like to propose as ways of solving our problems, like high-speed trains, wind generators, and electric cars, are kind of...silly. There is no way a dollar spent on any of those things generates anything like a dollar's worth of value. They have a vaguely cargo cultish feel to them: useless rituals performed by people who do not understand the real means of production. Wind towers are really just fancy statues of John Frum. These things will bring us Green Cargo.

Well, I started to tell you about how, really, I was one of the great and the good, and now I've gotten all Copenhagen Consensus on you, which just demonstrates my unreliability. You now suspect I am in the pocket of the Heartland Institute.

So, with that preparation, via Knowledge Problem, a notice that the U.K. magazine Spectator has announced the Matt Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy: a  £8500 prize for the best 1,000 to 2,000 word essay the makes

the most brilliant and rational argument — that uses reason and evidence — to gore a sacred cow of the environmental movement. There are many to choose from: the idea that wind power is good for the climate, or that biofuels are good for the rain forest, or that organic farming is good for the planet, or that climate change is a bigger extinction threat than invasive species, or that the most sustainable thing we can do is de-industrialise.

Over $13,000 by today's exchange rate. That's midlist novel advance-level money!

BTW, now you know why midlist authors are pathetic.

I like Matt Ridley's science journalism, and it's a challenge worth taking up. Entries close June 30, 2012.

 

The pain of the endgame

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I've spent the last two weeks slicing and dicing the workshop-bound draft of my young adult novel, Timeslip. A few chunks need to be fixed, but right now I'm doing delicate surgery on the endgame: final confrontations, removals of pieces from the board, and a set up for what will come, I hope, in the next book.

It's harder than I expected. Pretty much everyone of significance in the rest of the book plays a role here somewhere. It takes place in an isolated factory building with some sinister features. But getting everyone there, on stage, then appropriately off, requires a lot of narrative machinery that must then be hidden so the reader doesn't get a glimpse of that sweating, desperate man behind the curtain as he raises and lowers scrims, moves furniture on and off stage, and gets the actors prepped for their entrances and exits.

I try to give my workshop a fairly finished piece. It may still have some deep problems, but it's not for lack of trying on my part. So, even though I suspect this section will require some significant changes once they get through with it, I do want it to work on its own terms, now.

I've learned, both through the response my earlier work has gotten, and what I have responded to from others, that lack of attention to that leads to a kind of weary annoyance that encourages the critic to focus on the wrong thing, and miss significant issues that need to be dealt with.

It's just like in marketing: you make your mockups, drafts, and approaches as polished as possible, even though you know they will get completely hacked up later. Otherwise people end up complaining about the font or telling you that you really should have put something in that last bullet where you indicated there was room for an additional point.

So, I'm later with it than I implied to my workshop, but it's in a good cause. I hope.

A great ad that clarifies why newspapers are dying

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The ad Copyranter described as "the best ad of the year, so far":

It's totally fun, but as an ad for the Grauniad, or any news entity, it seems a bit off kilter. You don't actually see any reporting or investigation, though I suppose the guy in his bathrobe could be a reporter.  All you see is a mass of instant opinion, ending with a Greek-style "you made us borrow too much money" riot that seems to justify murdering mortgage holders.

As a Madisonian nightmare of an overconnected populace run amok, it's dead on.

An idea even sillier than green roofs on buildings

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Green roofs on buses. (via Human Transit)

I have no real technical analysis to add to John Metcalfe's "make the rubble bounce" takedown: weight, watering, safety....

But the fact that any number of media outlets have picked up this notion, roughly similar in realism to the doodles of car-top lasers or backyard rocket launchers found in the notebooks of bored kids in class across our great land, says something.

One thing it says is "reporters are lazy", which you know, because you are lazy, and you would be even if you were a reporter.

The other thing it says is "we're doomed".

There are no good answers out there. We face serious, genuine environmental problems, and we have no idea of what to do about them. Reporters jump on things like planting sedum on top of buses because there really isn't anything else to put in their stories.

Moderating and getting value out of a convention panel

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A lot of smart people go on panels at a science fiction convention. Put a bunch of them on a panel, however, and you often end up with mess.

The same is true of work. Some places have a lot of smart people at them. But these people can ineffectually waste a lot of time if they are not managed properly.

Enter the middle manager (my role for some years). Underappreciated and definitely unsung, but the essential feature of bringing problems and minds together in an organized way.

In the same way, a convention panel needs a moderator. That too is an underappreciated and unsung position. I take it seriously, when I have it. Some people do. Others are pointy haired bosses who ask you ridiculous and unanswerable questions, or, on the other side, lose control and let gabby people sitting in the front row of the audience hold forth endlessly. Poorly managed panels are the devil's playground.

One important thing is not just keeping the panel on topic, allowing flexibility when an interesting and potentially fruitful side topic pops up, but making people interesting, by not allowing them to fall into default positions. It may surprise you to learn that your favorite writer is a bit of blowhard. It is the moderator's job to prevent you from reaching this realization.

I like moderating, and like to think I'm good at it. At least, I take it seriously. But at Boskone, I failed my audience by inadequately controlling my panel. The topic was Global Warming, but with an interesting and idea-generating twist: it wasn't about what to do about it, it was to assume it was going to happen and then discuss what people should do to survive and prosper. Or, as I put it, "global warming for fun and profit". Tell me, panel, where I should put my resources. What decisions should I make, what portfolio should I hold, what things should I look out for?

Fun, right? The panel didn't think so. They pretty much defaulted to discussing giant space shields and other such things. Now, just to be clear, there's nothing wrong with that topic. It just is the one people always talk about. We'd been given the opportunity to approach things from another direction.

I learned a few things about panel and audience management, so it wasn't a total loss. But I still want to know how to Profit from the Coming Disaster. I'll bet you do too.