Chrononautic Log

February 28, 2003

Courtesy of Alan de Niro, courtesy of Jed Hartman:

The only thing we have to offer new, kids, is our individual selves. The most revolutionary act we can perform, as writers, is to cross genres, graft idioms from other kinds of work onto the SF subject matter. Style IS content.

—— CHEAP TRUTH #15

Enough with the manifestoes. The work is the manifesto.

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February 27, 2003

Courtesy of William Gibson, we have Antonio Gaudi’s vision for the World Trade Center site. A thousand-foot “American Hotel”, topped by a grand observatory, a theatre, and an exhibition hall, all in Gaudi’s trademark organic style.

Gaudi planned to travel to New York City to oversee the construction of the hotel with its huge halls, balconies, and the decorations he would improvise from debris discovered on New York City’s streets. He was hoping to hire, as he did in Catalonia, an army of artists and architects, in this case from New York, to bring the interior and exterior detailing of his fantastic vision to fruition.

That was 1908. Before the Empire State Building. Before the Woolworth Building. Before, in fact, the skyscraper, as we know it.

Gaudi’s journey to New York was cancelled abruptly... the project stopped with no reason given. The site remained unchanged until the early 1960s. While the reasons for the abandonment of the project remain the ultimate enigma of this enterprise, it might be safe to surmise that this vision of Gaudi was ahead of its time.

Today we could build it, though. Today it would be easy.

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February 26, 2003

Salon is running an entertainingly bitchy, yet insightful article on Star Trek, and specifically on this touring exhibit of Star Trek paraphernalia, currently in orbit around London.

They really knew about the future in the ‘60s. They really cared about it. It was, of course, a time when people still believed in it, a time when “Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow” was not necessarily a self-consciously retro slogan. Perhaps that is why the original series, with its female crew members (albeit in submissive jobs) and racial harmony (ditto — except for Spock, the Jewish Vulcan), was rather more adventurous and progressive for its time than its spayed spinoffs.

It’s easy to laugh at the costumes, the sets, the dialogue, and, absolutely, the acting —

[Shatner] was (and is) an outrageous ham, applying the “skills” he developed performing in Canada's Shakespearean theater (“I combine English technique with American virility”) as indiscriminately to “Star Trek” scripts as LBJ did Agent Orange to the jungles of Southeast Asia...

— but there’s no denying that the original Star Trek had an originality — a kind of honesty, even — that has been lacking lately, not only in all the follow-on shows, however polished, but in pretty much all the pop-science-fiction that has made it to the screen, large or small. (Yes, even Babylon 5.)

Since Star Trek (and Star Wars, too, of course) surveyed the territory, the film and TV industries have been largely content to stay within that territory, and put up strip malls and office parks and tract houses on it, too. But despite all their faults, the crew of NCC-1701 really were going where no man had gone before.

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February 25, 2003

Rob “aphrael” West* has ported his journal from K5 over to discontent: Bound in a Nutshell. Good stuff, including the more personal stuff that he doesn’t think is suitable for K5. He’s using Blogger for the moment, so no comments, but I expect you’ll be able to find him here, if you need to.

Rob knows more than I do about half of the things I'm interested in, and he’s a much more reasonable person. I recommend him.

* In addition to his pithy comments here, some of you may remember Rob from that big round table in the Chinese restaurant at Conjosé.

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Well, no, actually, not compared to most of my virtual neighbors.

But — maybe it's the weather; we've finally got some sun, even if it's still damn cold by this California boy's standards — this weekend was more productive than most of them have been, lately.

Got "Long Past Midnight" in the mail to Mr. Rowe yesterday, just in time for the deadline. Felt a little silly spending $4 on Priority Mail for a market that only pays $10 — my first thought was the totally nonsensical "gosh, at $4 a submission they must be making a lot of money", before I remembered it was the Post Office making the money — but not very silly since the money is obviously not the point.

Also got a fair bit of revising done on "The Third Party", which started out as a mere prologue to the as-yet-untitled STL sociopolitical space opera, but it's taken on a life of its own that will probably bring it up to Part One status eventually. Trying to make it work as a novelette; at one point had the word count as low as 10,600 but it's now creeping back up toward 12,000. I think if I can get it out there collecting rejection slips I'll feel liberated to move on to the next part of the novel, or at least to telling that part from some different points of view.

Oh, and I sent a postcard to Liz Holliday with a query about "Find Relics Fast!" (prequel to "The Third Party"), which she's supposedly had since early last November. Gave her two different email addresses she can answer at, so if I don't hear back it's not the fault of my faulty anti-spam protections.

So I'm feeling a little more like a writer and a little less like a would-be writer this week.

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February 24, 2003

For those of you who know Tehran, Dad tells me my memory of where our apartment was is a little off:

"Actually, we lived just a block north of Takht-e-Jamshid (or however it's spelled), on Kucheh Iranshahr (Iranshar?) ('Iranshahr Alley').

"The US Consulate was up the street (north) on Iranshahr, and the US Embassy was down the street (east) on Takht-e-Jamshid, so we were on kind of a hot corner when any kind of anti-American activity was afoot."

I expected to find they'd renamed Iranshahr, too, but apparently not. There's a hotel on it. It doesn't look half bad, though I've been fooled by hotel websites more than once.

I'm trying to find a decent map of Tehran that I can stick a virtual pin into, but go figure, they're either not detailed enough, or in Farsi. Go figure.

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For those of you who haven't already seen it over at Electrolite: an introvert's manifesto, from those clever folks at the Atlantic.

Extroverts have little or no grasp of introversion. They assume that company, especially their own, is always welcome. They cannot imagine why someone would need to be alone; indeed, they often take umbrage at the suggestion. As often as I have tried to explain the matter to extroverts, I have never sensed that any of them really understood. They listen for a moment and then go back to barking and yipping.

One is, sometimes, sorely tempted to kick them. One refrains. One hopes they'll read this article.

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February 22, 2003

These days I only manage to get out to the slopes about once each winter, but I’ve been skiing since I was four or five. When I first learned to ski, we were living in Tehran, a few blocks off Takht-i-Jamshid, now Taleqani Street.

My dad drew this cartoon in 1978, the year we came back to the US. My mom and I had our own skis, my sister wasn’t born yet, and we didn’t bring our own sheep, but aside from that, the cartoon’s pretty close to how I remember it. I’ll let Dad explain:

“The Farsi names... are the three main ski areas near Tehran: Ab Ali (where we all learned to ski), Dizin (where we did most of our skiing) and Shemshak. Our family never actually had a chance to ski at Shemshak, but some of the folks did.

“And, of course, the ‘e’ in ‘eSKI IRAN’ is there because that's how the Iranians pronounced it, as in ‘eSport’ or ‘eStupid’.”

Ab Ali, Dizin and Shemshak are all still open. Someday, when this war is over, I’d like to go back.

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February 21, 2003

Maybe it was already over for us in Indochina when Alden Pyle’s body washed up under the bridge at Dakao, his lungs all full of mud; maybe it caved in with Dien Ben Phu. But the first happened in a novel, and while the second happened on the ground it happened to the French, and Washington gave it no more substance than if Graham Greene had made it up, too.

——Michael Herr, Dispatches

I first encountered The Quiet American between the pages of two other excellent books, Michael Herr’s Dispatches and John le Carré’s The Honourable Schoolboy. In both, Greene’s novel is a constant subtle presence in the minds of the other characters — real in Herr’s book, fictional in le Carré’s — coloring their actions and their views of the world; almost a character in its own right.

Dispatches and Schoolboy are both old favorites, books I go back to year after year. If I ever write anything half as good (okay, three-fourths; a man’s reach should exceed his grasp) I’ll have no regrets about my writing career. For some reason, though, I didn’t get around to reading Quiet American until three or four years ago, and I only read it once. I’m not sure why.

Partly, I suppose, it’s that at the time, for various personal reasons, I couldn’t sympathize with Thomas Fowler; I felt the same way about Fowler’s relationship with Phuong that Alden Pyle did. But then — particularly after reading Dispatches and Schoolboy — I wasn't about to sympathize with Pyle, either.

Now, though, I seem to have reached what Michael Ondaatje called the age where I identify with cynical villains in books, and I’m going to have to give Quiet American another try. Much of the credit for that will have to go to Michael Caine and Brendan Fraser, not to mention Philip Noyce.

A lot of reviewers have bitched about Fraser in the Alden Pyle role, and I’m not really sure why; maybe they just have trouble taking him seriously. For my part I thought he was an excellent choice: fresh-faced, naive, and optimistic, so it’s all the more shocking when you realize just what he’s gotten himself — and Indochina — into.

Dispatches and Schoolboy left me disgusted with the mendacity and deliberate ignorance that kept the US in Vietnam. What Fraser’s performance in Quiet American did for me was get past all that, to remind me of the honest good intentions that got us in there in the first place, and make me appreciate the tragedy latent in those good intentions, and in the moral compromises that they inevitably led to. You can sympathize with Fraser’s Pyle even as you’re convinced that he’s dead, dead wrong.

As for Michael Caine, I’ve always liked him, even when he was playing unlikeable characters, and his Thomas Fowler is far from unlikeable. One of the aspects of the novel that I expected to most irritate me in the film is the way the character of Phuong is made to be — rather explicitly — a stand-in for the whole country of Vietnam; I’m almost sure that’s what she was to Greene, a symbol, a way of concretizing the conflict between Fowler and Pyle, making the political and intellectual into something personal, sensual.

What Caine does with his performance is make Fowler’s love for Phuong human and individual — he’s in love with her, not just with Vietnam. Which in turn makes her more individual as well. And then when Fowler does finally take a stand on what’s happening to Vietnam, the country isn’t just a stand-in for Phuong, either. But you can see that he sees that his personal entanglement with her (and with Pyle) makes his motives suspect, clouds the morality of his actions. Pyle does the wrong thing for the right reasons; Fowler can’t even be sure of his reasons.

Noyce’s film may not be a neatly wrapped rhetorical package. But Umberto Eco, I think it was, described the novel as “a machine for generating interpretations,” and the best film adaptations, I think, are the ones that expand the scope of possible interpretations their originals generate. On that score, I think the film does a pretty good job.

Now I’ll have to go back to the novel and see if I’m right. If I am, The Quiet American may yet find a permanent place on my bookshelf.

‘Pity you ran out of steam,’ Ming bawled, to Jerry and anyone else who cared to listen. ‘Nobody’s brought off the eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can’'t, too much popery.’

——John le Carré, The Honourable Schoolboy

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Got impatient last week and sent out a story I knew wasn't the best story it could be; three people have read it and all of them were confused. So I wasn't really surprised to find a Gordon van Gelder Alas-O-GramTM in my mailbox last night; just angry at myself. I know better.

Still, “I didn't fully get caught up in the storyline” is the first piece of actual advice I've gotten from Gordon. That's something, even if I should have expected it.

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February 14, 2003

...but favorite Canadian - I - don't - know - personally Stephen Notley just summed up perfectly how I feel about geopolitics right now.

Particularly after waking up to a headline like Bush urges UN to confront Iraq or “fade into history.”

Maybe that's what this is really about.

Molly Ivins sums up the situation from the American perspective: “When all your friends think you're about to do something stupid, it might be wise to listen to them.” Unfortunately, instead our government is apparently listening to people whose idea of diplomacy is to demand that NATO develop a strategy to contain France. As Ms. Ivins says, “Couldn't they at least read How to Win Friends and Influence People?”

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February 10, 2003

From Brendan Beely, Rob “aphrael” West's younger brother, currently in Afghanistan with the 82nd airborne, pictures.

I had a dream a couple of weeks ago, compounded probably from childhood memories of Iran, the month I spent in Granada and Córdoba after Oxford, and Ali Khamraev's The Seventh Bullet.

In the dream, I was travelling through an Afghanistan without the bandits, civil war, not-so-civil war, famine and downed MiGs. An Afghanistan with no more poverty than, say, Estonia. An Afghanistan where you could rent a car in Kabul, head up to Mazar-e-Sharif, maybe drive out to Balkh to have a picnic and see the ruins.

At least I got the mountains right.

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February 7, 2003

A genius named Lisa Mirabile, a library sciences student at Simmons College in Boston, has produced a detailed index to Michael Ondaatje's the English Patient. The index itself is a treat:

lovers
  forgiveness granted to, 170
  English patient and Katharine become, 236
  Hana and Kip as, 125-130, 225-226

low-altitude bombs (dormant), 183

luck, role in Kip's safe defusion of Erith bomb, 193, 198

lyres played by Bedouin, 21-22

And the accompanying essay has some choice things to say about writers horrified by the idea that their works might be approached in some manner not officially approved.

(I must note, however, that Ms. Mirabile is incorrect on the subject of the vascular sizood.)

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February 6, 2003

I’ve sat down to start writing this three or four times, and somehow it always ends up off in some irrelevant tangential rant. Probably goes to show that I haven’t really figured out what I think, yet. And maybe I shouldn’t try; maybe I don’t need to.

But it’s been bothering me since — oh, since fifth grade, say. What this SF thing is all about. What it has to do with me. And whether I’m okay with that.

This is the first year that SF’s actually going to figure into my tax return; seems like I ought to at least take a minute to step back and ask whether I know what I’m doing.

So Strange Horizons ran this article, a couple of weeks back. (Fred Bush, “Speculative Fiction: A Dozen Doorways,” 1/20/03.) A list of a dozen or so reading suggestions to get your grown-up friends and family started on speculative fiction. It’s not the list I’d make, but that’s just a matter of reading taste.

No, what I really wonder is: Why make the list at all? Why try to get someone into SF in the first place?

Mr. Bush seems to think we should do so for the sake of the genre. “Without new readers, the field of speculative fiction is doomed.” It’s true, of course, over the long run — but is it any skin off my nose? I know, that sounds pretty ungrateful, pretty antisocial, coming from someone who’s trying to start a career in writing the stuff, but — well, here’s another thing Mr. Bush says:

This is not the time to trot out your Gene Wolfe dekalogy, brilliant though it is, because it’ll require too much effort for someone to decipher the text and they’ll never read another piece of spec fic again.

I’m sorry; all I can say is Screw that. If I can’t get them to read Gene Wolfe, what’s the point?

There isn’t anyone I can look in the eye and say, “Y’know, you’d be happier — or more fulfilled — or a better human being — if you read ‘speculative fiction’.” On the contrary, there’s plenty of SF that I think would probably make their lives worse. And while I have nothing but good wishes for, e.g., Octavia Butler, Cory Doctorow, Joe Haldeman and Tad Williams (certainly I don’t put them in the category I just mentioned), I’m not into their stuff and getting someone else into it isn’t going to give that someone and me any more to talk about. On the other hand, I think my buddy Andy, over in Tuscaloosa getting his MFA, would benefit greatly from getting over his anti-SF prejudices long enough to read The Book of the New Sun... after which, as far as I’m concerned he’s welcome to climb back under them.

You see, the genre — or rather, marketing category — known as ‘SF’ is just (okay, this may be what my ex-Navy coworkers call a CLM, a Career-Limiting Move, but it’s bound to come out sooner or later) too broad for me to feel much loyalty to it. What messianic fervor I have, with regard to my reading tastes — and it’s not what it was ten or even five years ago, as I’ve grown up enough to come to terms with the idea that a difference in tastes is not always indicative of a character flaw — is more specific: I’d like more of the people I know to read Gene Wolfe and China Miéville, Maureen McHugh and Kelly Link, but I’d also like more of them to read Michael Chabon, John le Carre, Sven Lindqvist, Michael Ondaatje and Paul Watkins.

The other problem with Mr. Bush’s idea is that it assumes the reason our friends are not already addicted to SF is that they just haven’t been properly exposed to it yet. But from where I’m standing SF’s real problem seems to be, not attracting new readers, but hanging on to the readers it’s got. I’ve lost count of the number of friends who’ve told me SF is something they used to read. Something they grew out of.

Wherever it may come from, there’s a perception out there — and not just among people like my otherwise admirable cousin Drew the ocean-fishing guide (who over Christmas almost refused to join the family outing to see Two Towers on the grounds that he wasn’t into “that Dungeons and Dragons stuff”) but among people who can spell Cthulhu, explain the difference between Valar and Maiar, and argue intelligently whether Gibson’s cyberspace has more or less contemporary relevance than has Stephenson’s Metaverse — that a taste for SF is a sign of arrested development.

This is the point where I’m supposed to get defensive. Where I’m supposed to talk about the literature of ideas, or the wonderful power of storytelling, or the sociopolitical depth in the work of Russ or Delany or Brunner, or the superiority of William Gibson’s prose and grasp of fin-de-millenaire consumer culture over those of Bret Easton Ellis and Don DeLillo. Or something. I’m sure you have your own list. But I can’t do it any more, and I’m tired of trying.

RACHAEL: It seems you feel our work is not a benefit to the public.

DECKARD: Replicants are like any other machine. They're either a benefit or a hazard. If they're a benefit, it's not my problem.

I just want to write — well, I just want to write what I want to write. But I can’t get away from the fact that most of what I want to write does, indelibly, exhibit characteristics that would lead a literary taxonomist to categorize it as some species of the SF genus. (And not one of those chameleon species that can sneak into the New Yorker, either; at least, not today.) I would like, though, to be able to talk to strangers about my work, and not worry whether the label SF — or rather, sci-fi — has already told them all they want to hear. (No matter whether any prejudice they have is the fruit of ignorance, or of bitter experience.) Offhand, I can think of four ways to do that —

— lie about what I write —

— change what I write —

— change the minds of all those strangers —

Or, of course, just stop worrying.

“No, that’s not right. Comic books actually are inferior,” Sammy said. “I really do believe that. It’s — it’s just built into the material. We’re talking about a bunch of guys — and a girl — who run around in their long johns punching people, all right? If the Parnassus people make this Escapist serial, believe me, it’s not going to be any Citizen Kane. Not even Orson Welles could manage that.”

“You’re just making excuses, Clay,” Bacon said, taking them all by surprise but no one more than Sammy, who had never heard his friend sound so serious. “It’s not comic books that you think are inferior, it’s you.”

—— Michael Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

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February 5, 2003

I managed to get in to William Gibson's reading at Elliott Bay last night. Got my Spanish-language copy of Neuromante signed, along with an English-language copy for Lara — and also a copy of the new book, Pattern Recognition, which I felt vaguely obligated to buy. I haven't really started it yet; the section he read, where protagonist Cayce Pollard meets a Russian kid named Voychek who collects Timex / Sinclair ZX81s, was damned funny, but — I'm not sure I go to William Gibson for funny, you know? We'll see.

Anyway, during the question-and-answer period, among other things (like sorting out someone's boy/girl fight over whether Case from Neuromancer, not to be confused with Cayce from Pattern Recognition, is a boy or a girl) he said that with every one of his novels, he gets to a point, usually when he's quite close to the end, where he becomes convinced not only that the book is bad, but that it's the worst book ever written.

He stumbles up from the basement.

His wife says: What's wrong?

It's the worst book ever written, he says.

Oh, good, she says. You're almost done.

Mr. Gibson has a great and wonderful variety of writerly tricks under his sleeve, but this is the one I need to learn: Realizing, when you're almost done, that what you're working on is the worst book ever written.

Not when you're only a third of the way through.

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February 1, 2003

The space shuttle Columbia has broken up in the skies over Texas. Its crew of seven astronauts had no chance of survival. Mission control lost contact with the shuttle around 9 a.m. EST (1400 GMT), about 16 minutes before its planned touchdown in Florida.

——Spaceflight Now

When I first saw the news, over at Electrolite, the top of Patrick's story was a note about the fuel tank insulation foam breaking off during launch and the resulting damage to Columbia's left wing.

Silly me, I read that and thought the shuttle was still up there.

I can't describe how it felt to switch gears from trapped astronauts to already dead astronauts. I'm not even going to try.

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