Chrononautic Log

November 29, 2005

Pursuant to this discussion at Meghan’s (“Deja vu all over again”) and this discussion at Justine’s (“Nothing changes”): here is, not a list of my ten favorite novels, but rather, a list of a dozen or so books that are among the ones that first come to mind when I start thinking about what might go on a list of my ten favorite novels. Books that I go back to again and again, that I’ve read at least half a dozen times each over the last ten years; the kind of books, in one respect or another, that I’d like to write. (In particular, note that, though I do think they’re all damned good books, I’m not saying they’re necessarily dozen best books I’ve ever read. It would be easy to come up with another list of a dozen books that I think are as good but which, for whatever reason, haven’t had the same long-lasting effect on me.)

• Banks, The Player of Games
• Burgess, A Dead Man in Deptford
• Chabon, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
• Gibson, Neuromancer
• Høeg, Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow) aka Smilla’s Sense of Snow)
• Le Carré, The Honorable Schoolboy
• Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness
• McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
• Miéville, The Scar
• Ondaatje, The English Patient
• Williams, Metropolitan / City on Fire
• Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun

Now, the first thing you’ll note about this list is that all the books on it are thoughtful, quirky, stand-alone thrillers with strong settings and distinctive characters and a clear authorial voice. (Except for the couple of them that aren’t thrillers).

No.

The first thing you’ll note about this list is that the ratio of Y to X chromosomes is very nearly one to one. What’s up with that?

The conversations at Meghan’s and Justine’s were mostly about editorial bias. I like to think that’s something I’m relatively free of — but of course I would say that, wouldn’t I? And among the stories I have published / am publishing, a fair proportion of my favorites are by women — but of course I would say that, too, wouldn’t I?

Still — I think part of being a good editor must be the ability to recognize a story that’s a superior story of its type, even if that type doesn’t happen to be a favorite of yours. And so even if it were true (which I’m far from convinced it is) that women strongly tended to write certain sorts of stories and men strongly tended to write certain other sorts of stories, then an editor committed to presenting a diverse collection of stories should feel confident that picking the “best” stories in the slush pile ought to lead to, or at least not lead away from, having a diverse collection of authors.

But. I still find that list a bit disturbing. Is it that not as many books like those are written by women? Is it simply, as Alan put it, that there “aren’t more things being written that I like?” Do I just like the wrong kind of books?

Or is it — most disturbing possibility — that there are a whole bunch of books out there like that, written by women, that I haven’t read, that I’ve been subconsciously assuming are not like that, because they’re written by women?

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Fair warning: If anyone should try to use this post as a jumping-off point for complaints about how all those books by women that are supposed to be so good are boring and overrated, to that person no mercy will be shown. Not my point at all. Be told.

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November 28, 2005

• High-speed ferry rides, slept through: 1.
• Canadian border guards sure they’d seen me somewhere before, bags searched by: 1.
• Kung Pao chicken, dishes of, eaten: 0.
• Spicy chicken with bamboo shoots and a few peanuts, passed off as Kung Pao chicken, dishes of, eaten: 1.
• David Marusek novels, Counting Heads, recommended by Kelly Link, read: 1.
• David Marusek novels, endings to, understood: 0.
• David Marusek novels, enjoyed anyway: 1.
• Heart of Darkness-style alternate histories supposed to be finished this fall but derailed by weird resonance with Gulf hurricane events, finally finished: 0.
• Vaguely Borgesian short story, feedback-incorporating rewrites to, completed: 0.
• Twenty Epics, two remaining stories for, edits completed: 0.
• Twenty Epics, additional stories laid out in InDesign for: 2.
• Twenty Epics, stories remaining to be edited and/or laid out: 14.
• Novel, “Planet of the Amazon Women,” loose sequel to, actual words added: 360.
• Miscellaneous DOD and MOD documents relating to either naval Courts of Inquiry or procedures for notifying next of kin of the death of a loved one, said novel, research for, downloaded: 9.
• Novelette, months-old GvG rewrite requests for, finally completed and re-submitted: 1.
• Turkey dinners: 0.
• Haircuts: 1.

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November 24, 2005

Dear readers,

I’m writing this from an undisclosed location north of the 48th parallel, where I’m hiding out waiting for the holiday weekend to blow over. But I am thankful, and not just that I didn’t have to get on an airplane yesterday and don’t have to hit the malls tomorrow. I’m thankful that the luck of the draw, and some smart choices my parents made, and some lucky choices I made myself, have conspired to put me in a position to know all y’all and a few other people like you.

I’d be even more thankful if the Hunan Village over here on Fisgard Street made kung pao chicken the way Mom used to make it, but I guess you can’t have everything.

Enjoy your holiday, everybody. Don’t eat too much, unless it’s really good. (In which case, go crazy.)

Love,

David

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November 21, 2005

Having been asked to do so by Michael Bérubé and John McGowan —

I assured John that I would do so at my first opportunity, which would be now. He replied that it might be a good idea to ask all bloggers to issue similar disavowals, so that we can use the power of the blogosphere to identify, by elimination, the person who first spoke to Woodward. So if you have a blog, won’t you please take a moment to tell the world that you didn’t have anything to do with leaking Plame’s name to Bob Woodward? I know that many of you have other things to do, but I’m kind of hoping that by the end of the week, we can narrow it down to this guy, who’s probably blogging as usual from his secret undisclosed location.

— and in the interests of helping to narrow the field of suspects, I’d just like to state, for the record, that I am also not Bob Woodward’s informant in the matter of Valerie Plame. Like Michael, I would like

to assure my loyal readers that I had no hand in disclosing Plame’s identity, or, indeed, in seeking retribution against Joseph Wilson or anyone else who, in 2002-03, doubted the Bush Administration’s claims about Saddam’s attempts to buy aluminum tubes, eat Nigerian yellowcake, develop weapons of mass destruction related program activities, or request assistance in moving fifty million dollars out of the country by means of unsolicited emails.

Whew! It feels good to get that cleared up.

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November 18, 2005

I’m not really into the whole “blogosphere” thing — I’m more into the blog-augmented* monkeysphere — so I haven’t really paid any attention to this conservative new media thing calling itself Open Source Media. And I don’t figure to start. But this account by Jim Lowney of the OSM launch party at Manhattan’s W Hotel was, in a quiet way, pretty damn funny.

Nothing I could say would change Boston guy’s mind that there was some media conspiracy being led by the New York Times. Even worse, Blair still hadn’t delivered my martini.

The conversation went around in circles with me asking about how OSM could do it better and what exactly was wrong with the Times. Finally my drink arrived but any enjoyment was short lived.

“You are of the second millennium,” Boston guy spat at me, in French no less.

“Excuse me, but you don’t know anything about me.”

“I can tell by your reactions.”

What really made me laugh, though, was what it all adds up to. A business opportunity, to be sure, but not one for OSM’s investors.

“What kind of business?” she asked.

“Big business,” he lied.

“Oh, I like big,” she smiled.

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* N.B.: First person to shorten that to “blogmented” gets a smack upside the head.

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November 17, 2005

I’m late in jumping on the “Maureen Dowd is being a twit” bandwagon, but this piss-take from Samantha Bonar of the LA Times (via BoingBoing) did make me laugh:

Researchers have apparently found that men prefer long-term relationships with subordinates rather than co-workers or supervisors. Women, however, showed no significant preference for socially dominant men, or for socially inferior men. They appear to hanker for their peers — while, sadly, their peers are at Applebee’s hitting on the women who bring them their burgers and pies. . . .

In addition, British researchers have recently “discovered” that the higher a woman’s IQ, the fewer prospects she has for marriage. (Jane Austen could have told them that.) To be a droll, dry, wry, sarcastic or clever woman is deadly, apparently. (Yes, you may point out the example of Mr. Darcy, who loved Elizabeth Bennet’s witty repartee, but I still say he’s secretly gay.)

In other words, you can be tall, blond, thin and a former runway model, but that all counts for naught if you are smart and successful and, thus, annoying. . . .

I have therefore decided to modify my romantic résumé . . . I also have decided to limit my vocabulary to 10 monosyllabic words (not counting contractions and articles) . . . But for the most part, I plan to not speak. I will alternate between giggling and tittering. I will be vacuous as I vacuum.

The payoff will be a man who loves and wants me. Whoever “me” is. I’m sure he can fill me in on that. Hee hee.

Hey, women readers! (The ones, anyway, that aren’t otherwise attached — or just not into guys — and that may be having doubts about Ms. Bonar’s strategy.) After considerable research of my own, I’ve concluded that brilliant, opinionated, successful women (especially the ones with large vocabularies) are fuckin’ hot. Also that real women are much hotter than airbrushed blonde gynoids with implants and eating disorders. Call me!*

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* Advertised product is not a tall, dark, handsome “bad boy.” Advertised product may be from your side of the tracks. Side effects may include discussions of genre fiction, social history, astrophysics, cognitive science, and postmodernism, as well as reading books, getting up early in the morning, eating dinners at restaurants with tablecloths, spending quiet evenings at home, playing video games, and watching John Sayles and Ang Lee movies “for the fight scenes.” Some customers may also experience a statistically significant decrease in “dancing the night away.” Void where prohibited by law.

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November 15, 2005

Dave Schwartz has had a brilliant idea: the ED SF Project.

By my count there are 320+ stories archived at the site. I’m willing to bet that there are that many SF writers/critics/fans/what have you who have some sort of presence on the web. So I’m thinking, let's all of us write an appreciation of one of the stories.

It doesn’t need to be something long — it could be a few paragraphs, or it could be in-depth; it could be a critical analysis or just a reaction to the story. Just something that focuses on the fiction and shows how much impact the site has had. Remember, this is an appreciation. A celebration. Pick a story you love, or discover a new one by reading through the archives. Discover for yourself just what we’re losing. Then let’s give it the best sendoff possible.

Go read about it. Then sign up. Then do it.

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November 12, 2005

I wrote this 1400-word Borges-lite story last month that I’d like criticized before I inflict it on editors. Anyone got time to savage a helpless ficcion?

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The one about selling a novelette and retiring, I mean.

Still — a disappointment, but not exactly a surprise. SCIFI.COM’s brief statement says it all, really:

As SCIFI.COM gears up to expand with exciting new ventures utilizing the newest technology . . .

The goal of a statement like this, from a PR point of view, is to make you feel like you’re going to get something cool to make up for what you’re losing. The fact that exciting new ventures utilizing the newest technology have zero relevance to SCI FICTION just goes to show, I think, what an odd bird it always was over there.

(And look! Now the old guard can go back to pretending there are no professional online markets, and stop having to say “except for Ellen.”)

All y’ll who had stories up there, I hope you’ll keep an eye on the archives and put them up somewhere if the Channel takes ’em down. Ellen published some fine work there and it’d be a shame to have to go dig it up out of the Wayback Machine all the time.

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Update: It just occurred to me: First Susan’s blog, now SCI FICTION. It’s a sad week for teh intarwebs.

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November 11, 2005

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No, really. MIT researchers say so.

Among a fringe community of paranoids, aluminum helmets serve as the protective measure of choice against invasive radio signals. We investigate the efficacy of three aluminum helmet designs on a sample group of four individuals. Using a $250,000 network analyser, we find that although on average all helmets attenuate invasive radio frequencies in either directions (either emanating from an outside source, or emanating from the cranium of the subject), certain frequencies are in fact greatly amplified. These amplified frequencies coincide with radio bands reserved for government use according to the Federal Communication Commission (FCC). Statistical evidence suggests the use of helmets may in fact enhance the government's invasive abilities. We theorize that the government may in fact have started the helmet craze for this reason.

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November 10, 2005

Publisher’s Publishers Weekly review of Tim’s book: Overwhelmingly negative.

Publisher’s Publishers Weekly review of that other book: Overwhelmingly positive.

Draw your own conclusions.

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Update: Fixed punctuation of PW. I do know better. But it’d be easier to remember if the official punctuation actually made sense. (Contrast: Woman’s Daily, Women’s Daily, Women Daily.)

I need a mental image of the magazine that would really go with the title. Something where publishers would be the content rather than the source or the audience. Publisher pin-ups? Publisher road-tests?

And, for the record, that mispunctuation was in my capacity as a writer, not as a blogger. As a blogger, I just get my facts wrong.

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So the circus has left town. I’ve said all my goodbyes and I’m camping out in the abandoned shell of the Governor’s Club, wondering whether I should try to make it to 4:30 and the reopening of the bar, or head back to my room for a nap. Oh, the suspense! This is the excitement of which great postings are made. But before I resolve this cliffhanger, let’s pretend to do a con report.

The story about the rabbit is true. Also the story about the fairy porn in the pocket program. Also the story about the dragon porn — can you call it porn if it’s so bad you can’t tell if it was actually supposed to be erotic? — the dragon porn in the big New York publisher’s sample book. (Hey-o!) The story about the amazingly bad story written in haste by a posse of mostly-drunk authors outside the GC on Friday night, that one’s unfortunately true as well. (If I’ve left anyone off the copyright list, y’all don’t let them escape, y’hear? Let me know.)

More importantly, though, the TWENTY EPICS reading went off without a hitch. Unless you count my choice of author pictures for the poster.

Figure 1. The infamous promotional poster. We probably didn’t need a poster in the first place, but I couldn’t help it — I’m a desktop publishing junkie.

I suggested to Meghan that I could swap the pictures out before I put the poster up here, but she thought it would be better if I were to post it as-is, and then she and Alan and Dave could vilify me. Go nuts, kids!

We occupied a corner of the first floor overflow lounge, Sunday morning, and played to a packed house, if by “house” you mean “the circle in which people could sit comfortably around that corner and hear people read.” Dave and Meghan read the beginnings of their stories and Alan read a series of excerpts from his, and everybody seemed to have a good time, even those audience members who hadn’t realized they were going to be read at when they sat down.

The rest of the con wasn’t bad, either. If you weren’t there, we missed you; if you were there, I’m probably missing you already. ’nough said?

All right. The bar opens in ten minutes, and my battery’s running low. I’m sure the usual suspects (over on the left, there, if you’re reading this on my front page) will have more news.

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Update: Added link to JJA’s discussion of the dragon porn excerpt and corrected spelling of “Hey-o.”

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November 9, 2005

So, you finally caved. It took eight years and five separate elections, but the disgruntled Powers that Be finally whipped you back to your kennel. No more monorail. No more grassroots. No more independence. No more ideas that haven’t been preemptively blessed by the mayor and the city council and Paul Allen.

Enjoy your leaky, voter-fleecing football stadium and your meandering light rail and your Vulcan-approved South Lake Union streetcar to nowhere and your hideous waterfront viaduct, you spineless doormats.

You deserve ’em.

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It would explain so much:

Conventional “theories” of history teach that “stuff happened,” which is insolent and implies that we are nothing but random accidents. But Giblets has found definitive proof that history is intelligent, and has worked over the course of millenia towards one singular purpose: the creation of Giblets! Think of everything that had to happen in order for Giblets to be born! Mom Giblets and Dad Giblets had to meet, Grampa Giblets had to flee the great turducken blight back in the Old Country, Napoleon had to destabilize the Gibletsian economy with his unsound policy of weevil regulation. Yes, the birth of Giblets is so unlikely it can only be explained as the supernatural action of a nearly-divine agent acting over the course of thousands of centuries in a way that looks exactly like a bunch of random stuff!

This ingenious new theory will revolutionize the way we see history and indeed life itself! What was the cause of the American Civil War? Giblets. Why did Bismarck publish the Ems dispatch? Because of Giblets. What caused the collapse of the Weimar Republic? Political instability and economic depression which would eventually result in Giblets.

“Are you an offensive figment or a pleasant figment? Discuss.”

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November 2, 2005

Thoughts spurred by Meghan’s thoughts on National Novel Writing Month:

I had a small epiphany this weekend. I wrote about three-fourths of a story in one sitting, over a couple of hours, and could have finished it then and there if I hadn’t been heading off to see Good Night and Good Luck. Contrast with yesterday night when I spent forty-five minutes on two sentences in my novel and ended up scratching them out.

The epiphany was realizing that it’s not that I can’t write quickly —

— it’s that I can’t quickly write anything I actually care about.

And it’s not that the stuff I don’t care about is bad. Maybe a third, maybe half of my small body of published work falls into that category — stories that have been well received and that I’m now rather fond of. They just don’t mean as much to me as the other stories, the ones that took months to write after bubbling up from the broth of ideas that had been simmering for years on the mental back burner.

Okay, I’ll ’fess up. I know I’m supposed to love all my children equally, but I don’t. Here’s the list:

• Easy stories:
  • Long Past Midnight
  • Fetch
  • The Memory of Water
  • The Ideas
• In-between stories:
  • Irrational Histories*
• Hard stories:
  • On the Night
  • Theo’s Girl
  • The Third Party
  • Planet of the Amazon Women

*The Irrational Histories are a special case. They’re easy enough to plot, but insanely research-intensive. So on a minutes/word basis they’re probably somewhere in the middle.

So what’s the pattern?

The easy stories are mostly shorter than the hard stories — “The Memory of Water” is novelette-length, and “On the Night” is a short, but otherwise the easies are all shorts and the hards are all novelettes. The easy stories all have more or less realistic, contemporary settings — some of them are more historical and some of them are more fantastic, but still, familiar enough that I didn’t have to worry about what things looked like or whether the worldbuilding made sense. Meanwhile the hard stories are set, two of them, in a late-medieval, early-modern fantasy world that might pass for alternate history if you squint but is mostly made up out of whole cloth, and the other two each on their own far-distant worlds in their own far-distant futures. Lots of worldbuilding, lots of thought about exactly how things look and feel and smell, lots of careful description to make sure it all gets across to the reader. The protagonists in the easy stories are everypeople: Blue-collar utility worker, primate researcher, German army officer, failed writer. The characters in the hard stories have complex back stories, arcs that don’t necessarily start or end within the framework of the story: actor turned rebel, diffident scholar turned government official, disillusioned career soldier far from home, economics professor and undercover revolutionary cadre in love with aristocratic mathematical genius, Russian Muslim ballet dancer and causality researcher. The plots in the easy stories are intimate and almost entirely personal; the plots in the hard stories are personal to the characters but also political, moral, philosophical.

So is it really novels I’m having trouble with, or is it the novels I want to write?

And is there a point in writing a novel, even a good novel, just to have written a novel?

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The San Francisco Chronicle recently published this chart showing the frequency of suicides at each point along the Golden Gate bridge, based on Golden Gate Transportation Authority records using the bridge light poles as reference points.

What you immediately notice, looking at the chart, is that the vast majority of jumpers have jumped from the eastern (inward-facing) side of the bridge. What’s up with that? The caption seems to suggest that this is because the east side is the one with a pedestrian walkway, while the west side has a bike lane; but it can’t always have been that way, and anyway I’ve seen pedestrians on both sides. I suppose it could also be that the east side’s easier to get to from the City (south) end of the bridge, that (again from the south end) the east side is on the right and somehow (since we drive on the right) more natural, or something like that. Is that all there is to it, or are there psychological reasons why a jumper would prefer to be facing the City (and by implication, the world) rather than turning his or her back on it? What are the statistics like for other bridges, I wonder?

(I know whenever I’ve contemplated jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge, I’ve always visualized a spot somewhere in the neighborhood of the fairly popular Pole 103. You?)

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P.S. Please don’t anyone think I’m less than completely serious about this.

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— or so said the Man from Trier. Me, I’m not so sure. And Bruce Sterling, commenting on a piece called “Here comes the Indian consumer” by Morgan Stanley’s Stephen Roach, thinks Karl (and Mr. Roach) may have had it exactly backward . . .

I kinda derive the exact opposite conclusion out of this piece that the author himself derives; [Roach] thinks that booming economies in, say, Mumbai can drag the whole Indian population out of poverty, while, to me, this suggests that certain high-tech areas in the USA could cheerily continue to thrive even while desperate internal migrants from New Orleans and Florida are sleeping on our pavements, a vast and utterly bereft American underclass pillowing their heads on the curbstones in their very millions. Yep, India may really be tomorrow’s developmental model; you gotta watch what you ask for, ’cause you may well get it.

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November 1, 2005

Will Shetterly, following in a long and distinguished tradition, has started a new project, the Full American Translation Bible. It’s a new translation based on the American Standard Version (a 1901 translation, descended from the King James, and respected for its relative literality), informed by Will’s quirky humanist sensibility and stripped of later accretions of Christian theology and ideology.

Every translation is made by people whose purposes affect their translation. The King James Version was commissioned by a king, so it translates basileia ouranos as “kingdom of heaven.” This translation is more likely to use a phrase like “dominion of God” or “universal rule.” The King James Version translates YHWH, the name of God, as “the LORD.” The difference between a name and a title is profound; this translation will use “Yahu.”

You can get a sense of the flavor from the very beginning: The first creation story: the gods make the earth:

¹In the beginning the gods made the sky and the earth. ²The earth was waste and void; and darkness was on the face of the deep, and the spirit of the gods moved on the face of the waters.

He’s only a couple of chapters in, but I’m looking forward to seeing the whole thing completed.

And then I’m looking forward to writing an epic ten-volume Unitarian Universalist apocalyptic epic based on the FAT’s theology. I’m think I’m going to call it No One Gets Left Behind.

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