Genre, again

As usual, when I was at Readercon a few weeks ago, there were panels on genre, and, again as usual, the highly literary panel participants viewed genre with suspicion and disdain, wondering at how restrictive genre definitions are.

Just as you can't analyze rising healthcare costs without looking at jobs, you can't analyze genre without looking at readers.  But if you sit in on these panels, you'll invariably hear a lot of discussion (don't get me wrong: intelligent and thoughtful discussion) about what the writer does, how the writer achieves effects, what the writer wants to convey. The reader, both individually and en masse, gets short shrift (BTW, I just looked up this term I've been using much of my life, and discover it refers to a shortened form of last rites, or shriving, used at busy and time-crunched Elizabethan executions: "Chop chop, buddy, there's people waiting." So not only are we executing our readers, we're doing it on the cheap.)

But I think I'm getting distracted. This is the genre of blogpost, which rewards a good subject line and a tightly focused, pithy couple of paragraphcs on a specificy topic. Genre will keep me focused. In genre there is strength.

OK. Too late for pithy. What is genre? I presume there a million definitions or descriptions.  There are a few ways of looking at it, some of which I might explore at some point.  Let me just list one here.

Genre is a contract between a reader and a writer. The reader agrees to give up some portion of a limited lifespan in return for some entertainment of a certain defined type from the writer. Genre defines the kind of entertainment. The writer violates this contract only at peril, and can succeed only by giving way more than the reader expected, while simultaneously scratching the same itch the original genre was going to scratch.  This is key to successful genre violation by a clever writer: it has to satisfy the original need, only in a different and unexpected way. 

Say the reader sits down to read a good mystery, one that reveals all sorts of things about a specific milieu the reader is unfamiliar with, puts characters under stress so that they reveal things they would rather keep hidden, and, at the end, unites all sorts of disparate and seemingly contradictory observations with a single explanation. Instead, the writer shows how all the events were caused by a combat between angels and demons.

I don't care if the writer has provided Paradise Lost. The contract has been grossly violated. Even if the reader believes in angels and demons, this isn't why they are here. That isn't why money was transfered. That isn't why time was set aside to be spent. And the original itch, the tension and resolution of a mystery, has not been scratched.

So that's why when Milton sits on a panel and says "Yeah, I called it The Chancel Mystery, but I gave those ungrateful wretches Paradise Lost, for heaven's sake. Why are they bitching?"

Genre allows us to determine which itch is being scratched. And, sure, there is an itch for "deeply perceptive literature". But even people who like deeply perceptive literature usually also like a brisk well-written mystery, or a romance, or a space opera too, depending on their mood, the number of unstressed brain cells available, and whether they're at the beach or in their best reading chair.

 So, sure, genre can be a straitjacket to a writer longing for some flexibility. And these distinctions can be determined by marketing, rather than inner reader needs. Still, before writers get all bent out of shape about genres, they need to see whether they've been holding up their end of the contract.

The plight of the secret teacher's pet

SF has a lot of tropes, that is, standard plot devices, character types, or backgrounds that are used to move stories forward.

A genre is itself just a trope writ large, so it should come as no surprise to find that SF is completely trope-ridden. It's not a bug, its an exoskeletal alien.

I've been trying to read more SF, particularly in its short forms, than I usually do. The result is a kind of queasy feeling of getting overstuffed with tropes.

One I've encountered a couple of times recently is what I call the "secret teacher's pet". You can read that as the pet of the secret teacher, or the teacher's pet who is a secret. It works either way, or, rather, both are true simultaneously.

This is how it works. The protagonist is in a school or other training situation. Since the vast majority of the readership is still in school, this is a background with some emotional heft. The protagonist is too smart, too mercurial, too virtuous, or too dedicated to fit into the normal training program. After various dramatic failures, protagonist is going to wash out and have to leave in disgrace.

Only, guess what? The protagonist's very failure to master the approved curriculum of the school is what marks him or her as someone appropriate for a higher level of training. The ugly duckling becomes a swan.The class clown becomes the teacher's pet.

To me there is something unsastisfying in the idea that the point is to appeal to a level of administration above the one you normally encounter. But appealing to the administration is still the point of the exercise. As in Gnostic sects of Late Antiquity, outer practices delude the untrained, and only initiates understand the inner truth. Gnostics were a lot more like cliques of high school mean girls than most people who idealize them as an alternative to Christianity are willing to admit.

The story gets extra points if the protagonist is young, and manages to get the crusty old instructor to throw her head back and laugh at the protagonist's impudence, just as the protagonist is sure he is going to be thrown out of school. Just getting her to laugh isn't enough. Head back, or no points. I'm a tough grader.

I suppose now that I've gone off on it, I'm going to have to write a story using this particular trope. That's a way of learning where it gets its power, and maybe putting a bit of a spin on it. But I'm not making any promises.

Release of The Other Half of the Sky

Today is the official publication date of Athena Andreadis's and Kay Holt's anthology of space opera stories featuring strong female characters, The Other Half of the Sky.  I'm pleased that my story "Bad Day on Boscobel" is one of them.

Aside from me, the anthology includes stories from Melissa Scott, Nisi Shawl, Sue Lange, Vandana Singh, Joan Slonczewski, Terry Boren, Aliette de Bodard, Ken Liu, Alex Dally MacFarlane, Martha Wells, Kelly Jennings, C. W. Johnson, Cat Rambo, Christine Lucas, and Jack McDevitt.

Reviews and interviews about the anthology.

Some long ago reading: House of Rain, by Craig Childs

When I was in Moab a few months ago, after my hike through the Maze, my friend Paul and I stopped by the wonderful Back of Beyond Books on Main Street and I picked up a copy of House of Rain, by Craig Childs. It is about the Anasazi, whose territory we had been hiking through. I meant to write about it then, but it has been sitting on my desk since, and it's about time it moved from there to the shelf where it belongs.

Ah, that term, "Anasazi". Paul was immediately suspicious. It's an obsolete term, no longer used by the up-to-date.  It refers to the inhabitants of the Colorado Plateau before about the thirteenth century. The more correct term nowadays is "Ancestral Puebloans".

This change is more than political correctness, by the way, though one is always suspicious of rectification of the names. The name Anasazi was given to the ruins by Navaho pothunters, and means something like "enemy ancestors": Navaho are relatively recent on the plateau, and part of a complex system of alliance and hostility.

Childs has a nuanced defense of his use of the term. I won't go into it, because I know the real reason he used it: marketing. It's a totally cool name, and nothing else even comes close. Technical correctness, if you can achieve such a thing, has to run a distant second to that.

The books is half history and half Childs' strenuous and, to be frank, intimidating travels through the plateau, riding cloudbursts, climbing cliffs, enduring bitter cold and brutal heat.

And he travels with eccentrics and obsessives, people who think the Anasazi (let's stick with that, understanding its limitations) did everything in pairs, or people who think they extended far outside of the territory usually assigned to them, or laid out travel routes across hundreds of miles.  Even as he goes on trips with these guys, and ably explains their theories, its pretty clear that Childs thinks they are cracked.

And Childs tries to boost the Anasazi as some transcendent notion, some way of living and perceiving that remained as a constant through the centuries.

Maybe. I tend not to be romantic about these things. Anasazi are interesting because they left picturesque stone ruins in some of the most dramatic landscapes on the planet. They make great photographs, and a great thing to come upon during a hike. And they did this in what is now the United States, so they get a lot of push from the National Park Service.

Does that make them interesting in some deeper sense? Well...no. Childs does his impressive best, and the book is a fun read, but if you think it will tell you something significant, you're wrong. There are many peoples in the world, and many interesting ways of living, and the Anasazi, finally, are just one of them.

But this is one of those situational books. Hanging out having a beer in Moab? Hiking through Grand Gulch, visiting Mesa Verde or Chaco, climbing down from Maze Overlook? Thent his is the book you want. It will make you feel you are doing something other than just being a tourist or a hiker. It may not have the same resonance at home.

Invisible infrastructure

Yesterday I got a notice from the Massachusetts Water Resources Authority about a bunch of work underway in my area: sewer separations, "floatables control" (screening out leaves and other crap that doesn't sink), outfall construction. Despite the fact that it was a legally mandated communication, I read it with some interest.

We live in Northwest Cambridge, a flat area left by sedimentation of a glacial lake: in earlier eras it was known as Great Swamp, though, compared to some "great swamps" in the Midwest, like the Great Black Swamp that once occupied northwest Ohio (1,500 square miles of it), it was pretty small potatoes. Cambridge has always promoted itself with great effectiveness.

Bush-league or not, the area is flat and low, and Alewife Brook, which drains it, only drops 16 feet from Fresh Pond to the Mystic River.  Not only does it flood easily as a result, it has always served as the main drain for all of the industries (slaughter houses, tanneries, brickyards, chemical plants) that occupied the drained swampland.

The industries are so long gone that a local developer considers "Tannery Brook" a classy name for some condos. It is all now residential. Classy development out from Harvard Square stopped when it reached the heights of the Fresh Pond moraine, with nicer developer-type names like Avon Hill and Strawberry Hill. I live where the employees of Avon Hill families lived.

Until recently, our sewers were not separate from our storm sewers, which meant that, when it rained, raw sewage would get dumped into Alewife Brook, and then run to the Mystic, and to Boston Harbor, doing its bit to help Dukakis lose in 1988. Slowly, bit by bit, that situation has been corrected, with slow and steady work to help water quality, prevent backups into basements, and minimize flooding.

Until I get one of these notices, this is all pretty invisible.  Sometimes a street is blocked, and people are digging a big hole. But who knows what's going on down there?

This is a gigantic investment, no question. And it needs constant maintenance, correction, and control. If some societal disruption occurs, there will first be small problems, backups and the like, and then bigger ones, as water quality declines and bacteria fill the streams.

So, while I was reading about "CSO Outfall CAM400" I was reflecting on how little my fiction can capture the unglamorous work that actually keeps civilization running. Not AI bounty hunters or negotiators with mysterious aliens, but hardhats with backhoes and bureaucrats with water-quality metrics.

Enough of unsung heroes, though.  Time to go out for a run.  See you later.

Word for the day (and maybe the month): greeble

A couple of weeks ago, I read an interesting piece on a sexed-up image of a drone that seems to have become the canonical image of that increasingly dominant device.

The Atlantic article extensively quotes the man who figured out that the image wasn't actually of a real, existing drone, James Bridle. In the quote, Bridle lists some of the evidence that the image is bogus:

The level of detail is too low: missing hatches on the cockpit and tail, the shape of the air intake, the greebling on the fins and body.

"Greebling"? Both Bridle and the article use the word as if it is something perfectly normal, not worth mentioning. I looked at those fins and body and saw no gremlin bites taken out of the leading edges, or anything else that might be greebling.

Greebling is all those plastic pieces of old Revell battleships that designers glued to spaceships to make them look more complicated, and thus, in some sense, more "realistic". Or, as Pooh-Bah might have described it, "merely corroborative detail to add verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative".

It's interesting that, in a world where all of our personal technology is designed to be utterly smooth, and everything from cars to coffee makers are as sleek as seals, that a whole bunch of crap makes something look like it's real.

Of course, a spaceship doesn't have to streamlined, and presumably you could put a lot of support gear on the outside of your living quarters. But that's not really the point. The point is that our mind likes to see several levels of detail. Gives us something to look at.

But I would argue that the word can also be used in analyzing prose fiction. We often add detail to make things seem real. Consider the following sequence of descriptive sentences:

He poured himself a drink.

He poured himself a glass of whiskey.

He poured the last of the Bulleit rye into the glass without washing it first.

That Bulleit rye (now that I wrote that, I am going to pull the bottle out of my desk drawer and, well pour it into a glass...ah, wonderful. Not quite the last of it, but close...has someone been getting at my private stock?) is greebling. Not only greebling, of course. It tells you something about me, my response to marketing, my socioeconomic status, or at least aspirations, and maybe that I have read way too many old detective novels.

But it is greebling, in the sense that most of us like sentences somewhere between Ernest Hemingway and Henry James. I didn't wander into James territory, because I could not imagine a James character taking a drink in less than a page, and we both have things to do, don't we? But some detail gives us enough to incorporate, without slowing us down too much. It's a delicate dance.  And, as anyone familiar with my work can tell you, I can greeble 'till the cows come home.

The term "greebling" needs to enter literary criticism. Consider this a start.

Back from Rome

Well, for a couple of weeks already, not all of it recovering from jet lag.

We had a great time.  We (me, wife, two teenagers) rented an apartment in Trastevere, on the other side of the Tiber from the center of Rome. It was relatively quiet and relaxed, with a couple of restaurants that became favorites (Ai Marmi, a pizza place with marble tables, was a regular hangout), and our apartment was a few minutes below San Pietro in Montorio, one of the spots where St. Peter was supposedly martyred, and the site of Bramante's elegant little Tempietto, which I would visit in the mornings.

In Classical times, Trastevere was the place where immigrants lived, and where foreigners and slaves convicted of murder were crucified, and their bodies left for the crows. That's why it kind of makes sense that St. Peter was crucified here, though it might have been up closer to the Vatican, where Caligula had built a racetrack.  Who knows?

A few favorite experiences:

Simon and I spent a day riding bicycles along the Appian Way, and then out to the Parco degli Acquedotti, a big park full of ruined aqueducts. There was almost no one around.

Our tour got into the Sistine Chapel early, so that for about half an hour there were only about a dozen people in the big space. It's weirder and more handmade looking than I had expected, but all the famous images are easy to see. The Conclave is meeting there right now.

After wandering around the various structures built into the ruins of the Baths of Diocletian, we got to the church of Santa Maria degli Angeli, a conversion of the baths' frigidarium by Michelangelo, later somewhat modified. The size of the place was astounding, and the marble and gold gave an impression of what the entire place must have looked like in its heyday. But the pattern of the whole neighborhood is based on the extensive structures, most now gone.

The Castel Sant'Angelo has a huge spiral passage inside, once used for the funeral processions of Hadrian's successors. The building has a lot of interesting apartments, some used for a large collection of art about St. Peter, including some striking Russian icons.  And the view from the top is great.

The old curia, the Senate house, rebuilt during the reign of Diocletian, is a surprisingly large interior space. Trained by Dad, the kids were able to identify a statue of that quirkiest of Emperors, Claudius. We also did the usual Palatine, Colosseum, Forum thing.  The ruins on the Palatine, ranging from Iron Age postholes to massive structures, are hard to figure out, but easy to be impressed by.

Caravaggios, the Via Julia, Santa Maria Maggiore (Big Mary's, as we called it)...a week barely scratches the surface. We didn't overtour or overeat, though the temptation to do both was everpresent. We were lucky in the weather, sunny most days, in the fifties F, with only a brief sprinkle of rain one day. No fights, only a pleasant time with a group of people I like very much, one that I will not always have so close to me.

You can see my architectural bias in what I listed. Parents have not only the right, but the duty to visit their obsessions on their children. What good is a parent without some intense focus? Doesn't matter if the kids never really share it. Someday it will pop up in the least-expected of contexts, and I will live again.

Off to Rome

It's been a busy and stressful couple of weeks, but now I get to take a week off.

Well, not off. I'm taking my wife and children to Rome next week. So it probably won't be relaxing, wrangling everyone, trying to explain the difference between Diocletian and Domitian, and Borromini and Bernini, convincing them that going to the ruins of Ostia is interesting, making walk too much. Our vacations together typically involve a cabin in the Adirondacks.

I've never been to Rome. Maybe it will shake something loose.  Life has been too much on top of me lately.  We can talk when I get back.

But what would *you* do, if you're so smart? Further thoughts on "Cities"

A couple of days ago I went off on Jon Robin Baitz's Other Desert Cities, which I recently saw at the SpeakEasy theater in Boston. Despite some good dialogue, I found the play superficial and more than a little absurd. I spent a bit of time discussing how much I didn't like it.

But, usual, the failures of other writers, while pleasing, should also serve as an exercise for this particular writer. Smacking around a play most of my readers are unlikely to see seems to verge on the self-indulgent.

If I had been given the same idea as Baitz, what would I have done?  And what can I learn from the exercise of playing with it?

To refresh your memory, the play concerns a fragile writer, Brooke, who returns home to her Reaganesque power-couple parents' house in Palm Springs to reveal that she's written a book about the tragic suicide of her antiwar activist older brother, who was involved in a bombing that accidentally killed someone. In addition to her parents Polly and Lyman, the characters are Trip, a brother who is producer of a Judge-Judy-like reality show and Polly's alcoholic sister Silda, Polly's former screenwriting partner.

Two divergent paths come to me immediately. The first is to play with the writer as writer, and dig more deeply into Brooke's writerly self. The second is to dump the writer persona as irrelevant, because, while having your secrets revealed in The New Yorker may be more painful than just having your neighbors know, that's a kind of measurement that's not relevant to a play about intra-family relations.

Though I have to point out, there are no secrets revealed in Brooke's book, as described. All of this painful stuff came out in the news, was talked about, chewed over, had its effects on Polly and Lyman's relations with their buddies the Reagans, everything. Her blame of her parents for those events can't be particularly new either.

There may be other ways to take this too, but I'll go for "writer" first.  Brooke is a writer, a depressive who had a breakdown after the success of her first novel, which everyone in the play insists is brilliant, even at moments when they are angry enough to strangle her. Polly and Silda are both writers, who collaborated on a series of popular movies, until Silda quit. Trip seems to be a writer too. Actually the only non-writer is Lyman, a popular actor in Westerns and other popular films.

All of these writers are competitive, perceptive, and self-dramatizing. Or, at least, they should be. Brooke is blocked and will do anything become unblocked, including exploiting a private and painful tragedy. But instead of admitting this, she claims it is going to help everyone by clearing the air. Just because a writer is perceptive about others doesn't mean she is perceptive about herself.

But that's kind of where it ends. But she's facing, not a passive bunch of middle-aged theatergoers, but her writing mother, aunt, and brother. And, it turns out, her Aunt Silda served as Deep Throat for events that Brooke could not otherwise know anything about. In a sense, Brooke is Silda's cats paw here.

But to what end? First of all, everything in what we hear of Brooke's book was events she personally witnessed. It seems that Silda's intervention is purely stylistic.

Of course not! First off, she does play Brooke. Against Polly--because Polly did something that caused the breakup of their writing team, many years before. It might well have been Polly's drift to self-righteous Reaganism, which makes Silda want to puke.

As Brooke reveals what is in the book, Trip notes that she never talked to him, and he witnessed at least one scene that seems divergent from her story.  But he was young. Does Polly then point out that the scene he says he is remembering is actually from one of those movies that she and Silda scripted? Memory is a tricky thing.

In Baitz's play, it is revealed that, aside from having bad faith, Brooke can't do elementary research, and completely misses the real story. But the "real story" is that her parents are even more vicious than she thinks they are: they let her spiral into suicidal depression as a consequence of a false version of reality. They are much worse than Brooke thought. Baitz seems to miss this inevitable conclusion of his scenario.

Instead, Brooke is a better writer than she is portrayed. She can see where there are gaps in the story, even if she can't figure out what is hidden in them. She reveals her conclusions. They are wrong, but so is the surface story. It is the cause of her brother's suicide that she can't understand.

In Hamlet and his Problems, T. S. Eliot said "Hamlet (the man) is dominated by an emotion which is inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear." So, too, Brooke's older brother. But we're not Shakespeare, so we are going to dig out the invisible facts, to express his unexpressed emotion for him.

Polly and Silda have to fight over their writing breakup, which had to do with the effects their divergent politics had on their work. Trip has to work out why he remembers something the others claim is fiction, and Brooke has to face that she is a writer who will destroy her family rather than be blocked.

And Lyman? Lyman has stopped playing roles. Actors always seem smarter than they actually are, because they have access to all those great words. He has given up on great words. He loved his dead son, he loves his living son and daughter, and his wife, and he's willing to give Silda a pass because she used to write stuff that made him laugh. The actor will serve as the one still point in this scrum of wordsmiths.

Enough. Next time let's check out what happens if Brooke is not a writer.

Ancient geology and modern election results

Today I was delighted to read an account of the Driftless Area, and its effects on election results (HT: Kids Prefer Cheese).

The Driftless Area is a region, mostly in Wisconsin, but also covering parts of Minnesota and Iowa, that escaped glaciation during the last ice age (and thus lacks deposits of glacial drift, hence the name--it still snows a lot there). As a result, its topography is both hillier and more deeply dissected by river valleys than surrounding areas.

It also went for Obama significantly more than neighboring, equally rural areas did. While rural areas across the country (with another exception I'll mention below) went for Romney, these counties went blue. The demographics of the region don't seem to vary much from neighboring areas. What gives?

Maybe some ancient evil that was not extirpated by the busy glaciers...August Derleth could have explained it. And I looked--Sauk City, where he grew up, is right on the edge of the Driftless Area. Coincidence? I don't think so!

I was delighted, because I remember reading the only literary reference to the Driftless Area that I can remember: in #11 of the Man From U.N.C.L.E. books, The Invisibility Affair, by "Thomas Stratton" (a nom d'oncle of Buck Coulson and Gene DeWeese). The book involves an invisible dirigible, the Horicon marsh, and a car trunk full of margarine, among other things. I have cited the book's analysis of laws against selling colored margarine in dairy-producing areas as an example of regulations that claim to protect the public but actually protect some specific interest group, and no, I have never checked whether what it said was true, why do you ask? Ilya Kuryakin would never lie to me. The action takes place in that region of Wisconsin. Unfortunately I got rid of those books years ago, so I can't check whether it is still any good.  I loved those books as a kid.  And look how edumacated they made me!

Oh, the other geological influence on election results? The location of a Cretaceous sea determined where chalk would be deposited, and thus where a band of rich and well-drained soils would appear across the American South and be particularly suitable for large-scale cotton plantations worked by slaves, and thus where, to this day, large numbers of African Americans live, and vote Democrat, turning those counties blue.

Cretaceous seas and missing glaciers: anyone know of any other geological correlations to political alignments?

Why is it always biceps curls?

I'm sure everyone has already seen the pictures of Paul Ryan at the weight bench.

But this isn't really about Paul Ryan. It's about biceps curls, probably the most useless weight exercise going for a regular person who wants to build muscle and stay in shape. I call them "the Doritos of fitness".

For some reason, someone curling a dumbbell has become shorthand for "weightlifting", and thus for "fitness". I guess it's partly the different angles you can photograph someone from.  Squats can be kind of gross from the wrong angle, and someone doing bench presses is lying down. Plus, since those are real exercises, the subject's face gets all red and distended.  And you can't keep doing them for long.

Still, it's time to get things like biceps curls and dumbbell side lifts out of the picture. They work tiny little muscles and really don't do much, which is why people like doing them: they don't make you hurt while you're doing them and they don't leave you exhausted afterward. Work movements, not muscles, and work as much of your body as you can. Do some pull-ups while you're at it.  I think those would make a good replacement for the hackneyed biceps curl.

I'm sure Paul Ryan doesn't spend much time on biceps curls in his routine. I mean, that would be doing something with no real effect just for show, kind of like talking about cutting foreign aid or the public television budget as a way to try to balance the budget....

I survived

The Maze (in Canyonlands NP) is always pitched as one of the most remote areas of the lower 48.  I wouldn't say it was as remote as all that, but once you climb down into it, it would take a long time for help to reach you.

We made it seem more remote by being cheap.  The road to the trailhead requires high-clearance 4WD, and my friend Paul's car is only 2WD.  So we drove as far as we safely could, and walked the rest of the way in.  This included a steep climb down the one gap through the Orange Cliffs, the exposed and hot North Trail Canyon, followed by a brisk six-mile walk along a 4WD road we should have been driving down, circling the increasingly ominous Elaterite Butte. By the time we did 14 miles and got to the Maze Overlook trailhead, it was too late to make the difficult and dangerous climb down, so we dry camped in a side draw.  Did I mention that we had to carry over a gallon of water each, since this is serious desert?

The rest was hairy climbs up and down, and long hikes either on canyon bottoms or on exposed ridges with incredible views. There were only three springs along our routes, so we were constrained on where we could stay.  A two-inch deep pool of water seeping from the earth is a magnificent sight when you've been hiking under dry cliffs all day. And the dripping cascade in Water Canyon was a miracle.

It was great.  Nothing is more enlivening than getting to the far side of a dangerous challenge, and we faced plenty of challenges for our old bones. Now I'm home and Mary is sifting incredibly fine sand out of everything. I thought I'd shaken it all out on the driveway, but it's impossible to get that stuff out.

Anyway, I recommend it, but only if you have a lot of easier canyon and desert hiking under your belt first. And travel with Paul, who makes an incredible camp green chili.

My story in The Other Half of the Sky

A few months ago, my friend and neighbor, Athena Andreadis asked me to contribute a story to an anthology she was putting together. The theme was space opera, a female protagonist who doesn't feel guilty about juggling work vs. family, aimed at adult readers, no "big ideas" or used-up cyber-or-steampunk tropes.

Athena clearly didn't know that I never get asked to contribute to anthologies.

Then I demonstrated why. I was vaguely dissatisfied, pissy, uninspired, and whiny. I couldn't think of anything. I was sick (my eye, for heaven's sake!). I had other important things to do.

Time was getting short. Then, just before the excellent Readercon panel on the anthology, Athena suggested that she would like to see a story about Miriam Kostal, a character in both Carve the Sky (as an older woman) and River of Dust (as a younger woman).

And that did it. I thought about Miriam, and a story occurred to me. Miriam had always been seen by men, particularly men with whom she was sexually involved. This time I showed her from the point of view of a woman, Dunya, a kind of social worker with political refugees, into whose life Miriam erupts.

Athena charitably gave me some extra time, and I just managed to get something in: "Bad Day on Boscobel", set in an asteroid just mentioned as part of the background of Carve. Maybe people should ask me to be in anthologies after all.

The anthology looks fun. Here is the Table of Contents Athena recently posted:

The Other Half of the Sky

Athena Andreadis, Introduction

Melissa Scott, Finders
Alexander Jablokov, Bad Day on Boscobel
Nisi Shawl, In Colors Everywhere
Sue Lange, Mission of Greed
Vandana Singh, Sailing the Antarsa
Joan Slonczewski, Landfall
Terry Boren, This Alakie and the Death of Dima
Aliette de Bodard, The Waiting Stars
Ken Liu, The Shape of Thought
Alex Dally MacFarlane, Under Falna’s Mask
Martha Wells, Mimesis
Kelly Jennings, Velocity’s Ghost
C. W. Johnson, Exit, Interrupted
Cat Rambo, Dagger and Mask
Christine Lucas, Ouroboros
Jack McDevitt, Cathedral

And here is an interesting widget, from Kate Sullivan of Candlemark & Gleam, the publisher of the book, which gives a teaser version of the book:

Everything you need to know about novellas

I just sold a novella I wrote, "Feral Moon". It's a military SF piece about the invasion of Phobos.

In some respects, novellas are the best form for science fiction, long enough to contain a complete plot or a crisp exploration of an idea, short enough to not waste your time on a bunch of useless crap. But there is one thing that is bad about novellas, and that's how much you get paid for them.

Or, as I put it to my friend Greg Feeley at Readercon, while we were discussing that topic: "Novellas: all the work of a novel, all the pay of a short story".

That pretty much covers it. I still like writing them, though.

Readercon, and the past

Readercon is by no means an oldsters convention, but certainly many of us have been going for decades, and we show it. While the phenomenon I am going to discuss isn't exclusive to Readercon, it seems more noticeable there, because I see many of these people only there, once a year. That sampling rate makes all of us seem to age faster than we do.

I was on a panel with a writer who had a fund of good stories about his writing career. I don't know him well, but even so, I had heard some of these stories before. They were polished, and entertaining, and delivered with real verve. It wasn't anything like what you should do on a panel, which is interact with your fellow panelists and what they have said, but that's not such a big deal, or so unusual. I did note that the most dramatic incidents had happened quite a number of years ago.

Later that night, I had beers with a bunch of writers. One of us regaled the others with various entertaining stories. I had not heard many of them, and enjoyed them all, but most took place some time before the turn of the century.

There is nothing wrong with any of this, by the way. I just note it for my own use, which is to keep creating story-worthy incidents. As I've gotten older I've gotten more disciplined and work more. That is good for my income and my career, but it sucks as far as stories go ("want to see this spreadsheet of my task schedule?"). Yet another thing to work on. I'll have to work it into my schedule....

What's happened to you lately?

My Readercon - Friday, continued

The past slides behind me as I forge forward....

So, before I forget all about it, something more about the rest of Readercon. The astute observer will note that I spend too little time on the topics that got discussed, and more on the people I talked to. Readercon is a great place for ideas. But when I get home, they kind of get hazy. My brain is not as retentive as it used to be.

Friday night at Readercon is an event called the Meet the Pros(e) Party. Each of the writers puts a short quotation (sometimes not so short--I've seen dense essays in a microscopic font) on a sticky label, that fans and other writers can then collect. It sounds silly, but it's a great way to go up and talk to people you don't know.

My quotation was actually the first sentence of a military science fiction novella I'm shopping right now: "The corpses fell from interior of the moon like drops of water from an icicle." Nice and cheery.

But, anyway, just one picture from there, courtesy of James Patrick Kelly's Facebook page, of me and my friends Monica Eiland and F. Brett Cox.  That's pretty much all you need to know.

My Readercon - Friday

If I do this with enough speed, I will be done detailing the 2012 Readercon before it is 2013.  One must have ambitions, after all.

Friday I had to work, then zip to Burlington to moderate a panel on "Evaluating Political Fiction", a potentially fraught topic. We were essentially supposed to be helping readers make judgments on the appearance of politics in fiction, when you should just accept it as an amusing quirk on the part of the writer, and when that is impossible, and how writers try to put one over on you.

We had a range of political opinions on the panel, but that played little role, since everyone really did stick to the topic at hand.  Of course, I worked to make sure that was true. I may be fairly liberal politically, but as a panel moderator I am that most science-fictional of entities, the benevolent autocrat.

Or, at least, manager. I've managed staff, and know that most capable employees like their managers to provide resources, a view of the bigger picture, and protection against those who would do them ill. On a panel, I am the same way. A bit later in the convention, I went a few minutes late to a panel with a topic I was interested in, and the moderator had already opened the floor to questions from the audience. That meant that he was lazy and had given up fifteen minutes into the panel. So, no matter how interesting or thoughtful the individual panelists might have been--and there were interesting, even fascinating things being said--the whole was a disaster, DOA. Audience questions and comments are an important part of the deal, but only after the panelists have been permitted to rev the panel energy up enough to keep things moving, and to give the audience something relatively clear to respond to. I left that particular panel as soon as I saw how things had gone. Too bad. A good moderator is essential. I worked for quite a while to make sure I was one.

The panelists on the Evaluating Political Fiction were L. Timmel Duchamp, Rob Killheffer, Vince McCaffery, Anil Menon, and Ruth Sternglantz (this particular panel had many people without web sites, so you'll have to search them out on your own).

Then I had to zip over to a client meeting nearby, and back. I took in a panel by Ellen Kushner on how she put together her half narrated half acted audio books--Ellen is a radio personality as well as a writer, and adept at the technical issues.

Of course, one of the reasons I went was so that I would have something maybe to say on my next panel, Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction AUthor; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? Sadly I know almost nothing about this topic, and should have noticed that I was assigned this when I was asked to carefully review my schedule.  I thought I had. Really. I do have an audiobook out there, Nimbus, and like listenting to podcasts. I still sounded a bit uninformed.  Fortunately the panelists, Mike Allen, Claire Cooney, Jim Freund, Alison Sinclair, and Gregory Wilson more than made up for my deficiencies.

I did get to go out to dinner with Judith Berman (her web site lapsed and was hijacked while she was in Dubai for a couple of years) and her charming son, Sam. I had the panel to get to, so we couldn't go anywhere particularly interesting, but that's not really what matters at these events.

That night was a big social event, Meet the Prose...but I'll have to stretch this out a bit, since that's worth a bit of comment on its own.

My Readercon - Thursday

Jeez, it's been a week and I haven't reported on my Readercon experience.  I'll have to be quick before it all fades into the usual obscurity of things that happened more than a couple of days ago.

This year the con started on Thursday, which seemed absurd to me. But it was well-attended from the start, and I'd say the extension was a great success.

As a local, I could fill in the panels on Thursday night and Friday afternoon, and, in fact, most of my work was done by the time the weekend proper rolled around.

My first panel was about "Managing Motivation to Write", ably run by Steve Kelner, who interviewed me years ago for his book Motivate Your Writing! His wife, mystery writer Toni Kelner, and I are frequently on panels together. Also with us were two writers I had not met before, Matthew Kressel and Ben Loory. Everyone else on the panel was more, well, writerly than I am. I am rarely inspired, work to rules so rigid they probably violate some kind of OSHA regulation, and am often savagely mournful enough that I wish I could get to drinking more than my one or two evening glasses of wine--but, regretably, am too disciplined to do it. Everyone else followed their stories where they led and had all sorts of adventures. They did not outline. I always feel I am the inspiration on such panels. I did not grow up as a writer, and only fell into it later in life.

Anyway, a fun panel, and Steve managed it ably.

Immediately after that I was on a panel with the ominous title of "Is Realistic Fiction Useful?" It was a perennial topic, truth and fiction in "truth" and "fiction". The moderator was Liz Gorinsky, of Tor.com, who had clearly thought a lot about how to keep things moving.  Again, there were a couple of writers I had not met before, Nathan Ballingrud and Grant C. Carrington, as well as Daniel Abraham. I had met Daniel and his frioend and collaborator Ty Franck at a writing workshop in Taos, NM a couple of years ago. It was great to see them both, and Daniel was particularly amusing on the panel. He also writes a book every month or so, and so is a bit intimidating to trade "what have you been up to" news with.

OK, enough for tonight. Anyway, you get the idea--it's surprising how much fun writers are, at least SF and fantasy writers.  If you ever get a chance to buy one a drink, I suggest that you take it.

My Readercon schedule

Most SF writers in my area will be spending this weekend in Burlington, MA at Readercon, everyone's favorite literary SF convention.  If you live around Boston and have never tried it, you should, at least for a day.

This is my schedule, if you want to track me down.

Thursday July 12

8:00 PM    ME    Managing Motivation to Write. Alexander Jablokov, Steve Kelner (leader), Toni L.P. Kelner, Matthew Kressel, Ben Loory. Kipling (an SF writer himself) wrote: "There are nine-and-sixty ways/of composing tribal lays/and every single one of them is right!" Science fiction writers should know this better than most, yet most people don't realize just how different the creative process is for different writers. Join a panel of writers discussing how they keep themselves going, the underlying reasons for why a given tactic works for them, and how it might (or might not) work for others.
 

9:00 PM    G    Why Is Realistic Fiction Useful?. Daniel Abraham, Nathan Ballingrud, Grant C. Carrington, Liz Gorinsky (leader), Alexander Jablokov. In a 2011 blog post, Harry Connolly wrote, "If I want to understand the horrors of war, the pain of divorce, the disappointment of seeing a business fail, I don’t need to read fiction. There’s non-fiction on that very subject.... So forget about justifying the utility of fantasy. How do people justify the utility of realism?" Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried distinguishes between "story truth" and "happening truth"; O'Brien feels that fictionalizing some aspects of his own experience makes them more universal. On the other hand, reality TV, Photoshop, and CGI have proven how blurry the line between fiction and non-fiction can be. How do we tease out these distinctions, and what is realistic fiction's place in the literary landscape?

Friday July 13

2:00 PM    G    Evaluating Political Fiction. L. Timmel Duchamp, Alexander Jablokov (leader), Robert Killheffer, Vincent McCaffrey, Anil Menon, Ruth Sternglantz. This panel examines the intersections among story as political expression, story as entertainment, and story as art and craft. When an author takes a clear political stance within a work of fiction, how does a reader's perception of that stance--and the extent to which we find it compelling or intriguing--affect our sense of whether the work is entertaining or well-crafted? Given the diversity of opinions among readers and the ways that judgments of quality are necessarily influenced by culture and personal experience, should readers aim to achieve consensus about a political work's merits and meanings, or do we need to embrace a more pluralistic understanding of how literary works are both experienced and evaluated? What are best practices for critics, academics, and other professional readers as we navigate these tricky waters?

6:00 PM    ME    Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction Author; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? . Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Jim Freund, Alexander Jablokov, Alison Sinclair, Gregory Wilson (leader). Building on last year's talk at Readercon about promotion for the speculative fiction author and drawing from an upcoming SFWA Bulletin article, Gregory A. Wilson and discussants will focus on the pros and pitfalls of podcasting for fantasy and science fiction authors, looking at some examples of successful podcasts in the field, different types for different purposes, and the basics of getting started with podcasting.

8:00 PM    NH    Group Reading: Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop. Heather Albano, James L. Cambias, F. Brett Cox, Alexander Jablokov, James Patrick Kelly, Steven Popkes, Kenneth Schneyer, Sarah Smith. The members of the oldest extant professional writers group in New England give brief readings from their works.

Saturday July 14

3:00 PM    G    If It Doesn't Sell, What's the Point?. Jeffrey A. Carver, Bernard Dukas, Andrea Hairston, Alexander Jablokov, Barry B. Longyear, Nick Mamatas (leader). Fiction writing is usually considered an art but frequently judged in terms of commerciality rather than artistic achievement. Publishers want to know whether books are selling, and writers want an audience. These days, when rough economic times have hit writers particularly hard, "Why continue?" has become an important and frequently asked question. Are there reasons writers should continue even if their work isn't selling as well as they, or their publishers, would like? Are there times they should stop? Why do we write, anyway? The panelists will consider how writers can make these decisions, and what options are available in the current economic climate.