Doing It Right, Maybe

Science fiction, if you’re doing it right, is reality in tight focus.

That’s the only sentence left from my first draft of this post, which for me was getting on a soapbox and complaining. (Okay, so I threw in a few more sentences once I got rolling, but I really did want to change the tone from a grumpy tirade to something more.) I looked it over and decided that complaining will get me (and you, and everybody else) nowhere. I want to do more. I want to actually understand what’s going on.

In the past couple of years, I’ve had a number of students who’ve wanted to indulge in the accoutrements of science fiction without really taking advantage of what can, potentially, be at the heart of this form. They want the smell of the burger, but not the meat – or, when it comes to science fiction, they want the rockets, ray guns and robots, but not the who, what, when, where, and why. They want to play in the dirt, but they don’t want to tell you what’s in the dirt, or where it came from, or why anyone would want to play in it in the first place. It’s a game. It’s a joke. It’s an evasion.

Escape literature is one thing. It helps define what we’re escaping from. Evasion literature is another. It altogether denies the thing we’re escaping from.

So … why? Why go for the easy stuff, other than that it’s easy? The problem I have with a literature of evasion is that it always travels on the same tracks, stops at all the same stations. It moves right on schedule. The changes are superficial. Red shirts become blue shirts. Desert planets become ocean planets. Robots become scary aliens, and vice versa. But it’s always the same trip taking us to same place. So what?

So bloody what?

A literature allegedly devoted to wonder and awe cannot run on schedule. It cannot rely on conventions. It should not settle for competency and mediocrity, even if that’s what sells. This is not to say there should be no schedules, no conventions, no competency. But somewhere, somehow, someone’s got to mess with the rules, switch the tracks, surprise us without getting us all killed. Someone has to write more than a variation to a theme, perhaps change the theme altogether. And when that theme becomes a convention, subvert that one as well.

Then again – we’re talking about young writers here. And I have to remember what was important for me as a young writer. In honesty, I have to say that nothing mattered to me more than what was called at the time “emotional expression.” I think that’s what we still call it. We want feelings to guide every element of storytelling we take on: character, setting, motivation, conflict and complications, resolution. In one sense, we’re right. Feelings are what we have to return to when we’ve labored at everything else. And labor we must, because none of this easy, especially for writers whose main influences are graphic stories, TV, and – dare I say it? – popular fiction.

I don’t want to denigrate “popular” fiction categorically. The best of what sells is usually something that transcends category, and in doing so creates its own niche. But it also narrows one’s perception as to what can be done in the field of written prose, not to mention science fiction in particular. There are books in the “unpopular” category that can do as much to widen a young writer’s perspectives as anything sitting in the racks at the airport concourse newsstand.

The problem with young writers relying so greatly on “feelings” alone is that young writers, in general, have a blurry, indistinct notion of what those feelings are. They are too busy “feeling” them to successfully render them on a page. It’s like trying to render a self-portrait without the aid of a mirror, and more – while one is in the process of doing something else, like running, or operating heavy machinery, or making a salad, or playing a video game.

It’s the process of writing, the actual work of putting the thing together word by word, that helps makes sense (every way in which that term can be used) of the raw feelings we feel so desperate to convey in our work.

When we’re young, we don’t know so much about writing – no mystery in that. We learn by doing, and the more we do, the more we learn. Or so we hope.

The truth that gets forgotten or overlooked is that when we’re young, we don’t know much about feelings, either. We know we have them, and that they shape us and direct us, but that’s not saying a lot. We can fly as passengers in a plane and know nothing of the basics of aerodynamics, either. We still get to places, though we don’t know how.

Writing is a place we can learn more about our feelings. We can examine them, test them, put them to work. We may not be conscious that this is what we’re doing, but we do it. We write to learn, whether we’re aware of it or not.

And one of the things that has most intrigued me about science fiction in particular, apart from the process of fiction-making at any level, is its natural tendency to put what we know to the test. When Philip K. Dick tried to “explain” science fiction in his speech, “How to Build a Universe that Doesn’t Fall Apart Two Days Later,” included in the collection I Hope I Shall Arrive Soon, he boiled it down to two questions: 1.) What is Reality? and 2.) “What constitutes an authentic human being?” – this second I place in quotes because Dick’s wording is important. Dick has perhaps oversimplified the issue and defined what science fiction is for him, though not for everyone else, but a truth hovers over his assessment. Science fiction does – or at least can – include as much metaphysics as physics, but is not necessarily about the metaphysics. It’s about us. It’s about what we believe and what we desire – and what we feel. It’s about all the things we look for and often discover when we read what’s often referred to as “realistic” fiction, but then takes that and applies an even sharper lens to this “reality.” It allows for alternatives to the status quo. It allows for glimpses into what we cannot know – the future – through what we do know, or think we know.

At its best, science fiction can do this.

Would that we do it more often, especially now, when “status quo” and conventions have become the objects of constant struggles – when science and technology may play an even more important role in shaping a world culture than even money and power. Science fiction need not be a limitation, not a simplification, of human experience, but an opportunity to expand our experience and comprehension of it.

And our feelings toward it.

If we do it right.

Sixty Years (and a day) Ago Today…

(Notes toward something bigger – if I get the chance to write it)

Sixty years and one day ago (March 8, 1957), Robert Bloch delivered a paper at the University College of the University of Chicago. He was one of four authors asked to make presentations on the subject of science fiction and social criticism. The other three were Robert A. Heinlein, C. M. Kornbluth and Alfred Bester.

Among such luminaries, you would think, perhaps, Bloch would take a back seat, but it is Bloch’s essay which spoke most clearly to me when I read it again just recently.

The best way to appreciate it, of course, is to find a copy of The Science Fiction Novel: Imagination and Social Criticism (1959, Advent:Chicago, Third Edition 1969). You’ll avoid any impressions gathered more from my selections and interpretations.

Every now and then, I stick my nose in a book and find something interesting. There’s no rhyme or reason to it; no plan. I grab a book off the shelf because I hear it calling to me. Many books call to me, and they do it all the time. But some call louder than others.

I’ll look at a book and it looks back at me. You have a few dozen other things to read, but you pull it off the shelf because it looks back at you in that certain way. I’m sure it’s happened to you as well.

With this book – well, the series occurred in the 1950s, when science fiction (at least in the short form), was a bastion of social criticism. Literary trends were moving away from the gritty realism of the pre-war years. And U. of C. was a natural place to have this kind of confab, because the faculty and students (if not the administration) always leaned pretty strongly to the left (except in the Economics department, even pre-Milton Friedman). U. of C. also had one of the first science fiction clubs in the area. The stars were aligned.

Heinlein’s speech reads like a speech from Robert Heinlein. The funny thing about Heinlein is that, whether you find him entertaining or infuriating (or both), he writes like a man who has worked out his story and is damn well going to stick to it. It reads like either an “official statement,” a cover story, or an alibi. You can chain him to a rack, apply red-hot pokers to any part of him, but he won’t break his story, so don’t even try.

Kornbluth starts out stating that there’s no social criticism in science fiction, then he goes into a very effective close reading of 1984. What he accomplishes, mostly, is demonstrating that he maintains high literary standards, knows the territory of any able literary critic of the time, and concludes that most contemporary science fiction, with notable exceptions, doesn’t quite make the grade.

Bester, in his sly way, tries to dissuade his audience from looking to science fiction for social criticism. He values science fiction as a necessary diversion. He’s not writing off science fiction, because that diversion, he believes, is important to intellectual growth. It’s as if he’s trying to say, if you’ll excuse my summarizing, that science fiction works better when it doesn’t deliberately try to address important topics, but rather, unconsciously, touches the sympathetic vibrations of the human experience.

Bloch, however, is forever casting a leering eye at the entire process. He jokes and puns, as if he wishes to impress you that he is the least serious of this volume’s contributors, but almost from the outset he delivers the most serious message of them all.

After making a few initial jokes and puns, he very briefly outlines a number of American novels that may be considered social criticism. He then presents a long list of science fiction novels and places them into three categories: Man Against Nature, Man Against Himself, and Man Against Man.

Throughout his speech he mentions exceptions, but he finds the majority of science fiction novels that engage in what can be considered social criticism somewhat simplistic

 And just how does this wide assortment of writers view the world of the present and the extrapolated society of the future? Ignoring the extra-terrestrial invaders, ignoring the gadgetry, ignoring the universal disaster background, one encounters a fundamental dramatic premise known to all eminent critics who are six years old or older. The world is plainly divided into ‘cops and robbers,’ ‘cowboys and Indians’ or ‘good guys and bad guys.’

There’s a reason, of course. People who have come to revere science almost as a religion place great faith in the ability of technologists to safeguard our future.”

The criticism, as it were, in many “socially critical” science fiction novels, is that the bad guys are not paying enough attention – or too much attention, in the wrong way – to science.

Bloch lists and annotates a number of common elements he finds in these novels. All the words in caps come from Bloch, so excuse me if I don’t put them all in quotes. 1.) There’s a TOTALITARIAN STATE; 2.) there’s an UNDERGROUND bent on toppling said state; 3.) the use by one side or the other of FORCIBLE PSYCHOTHERAPUTIC TECHNIQUES; 4.) the assumption that SCIENCE WILL GO ALONG WITH THE GAG – especially when it involves brainwashing; 5.) ECONOMIC INCENTIVE – the motivation on either side of the battle is to make a buck (Milton Friedman would be proud); 6.) A VARIATION OF PRESENT DAY ‘ANGLO-SAXON’ CULTURE WILL CONTINUE TO RULE THE WORLD; 7.) when it comes to space exploration WE WILL COLONIZE AND RULE THE NATIVES; 8.) THE FUTURE HOLDS LITTLE  BASIC CHANGE in human nature; 9.) INDIVIDUALISM IS DEAD.

The hero rebels, yes – but not superimpose his own notions upon society; merely to restore the ‘normal’ culture and value-standards of the mass-minds of the twentieth century. You won’t find him fighting in defense of incest, homosexuality, free love, nihilism, the Single Tax, abolition of individual property-rights, euthanasia or the castration of the tonsils of Elvis Presley. Stripped right down to the bare essentials, our hero just wants to kick the rascals out and put in a sound business administration …

When we review these premises, we discover that most social criticism in science fiction novels is not directed against present-day society at all … Our authors, by and large, seem to believe wholly in the profit-incentive; in the trend to superimpose obedience and conformity by means of forcible conditioning; in the enduring liaison between the government, the military and scientists and technologists; in Anglo-Saxon cultural supremacy, if not necessarily outright ‘white supremacy’; in the sexual, aesthetic and religious mores of the day. Their criticism of the totalitarian states they envision is merely a matter of degree. They attempt to show the apparent dangers of allowing one group to ‘go a little too far’; actually, reduced to its essence, they merely echo Lord Acton’s dictum that ‘Absolute power corrupts absolutely.’

Hence the necessity of rebellion in the form of some sort of Underground movement. But this is always assumed to be just a temporary measure; ruthless because one must ‘fight fire with fire’ and the ends justify the means. The implication is that once Law and order are restored, everything will settle down to a general approximation of life as it is lived today – if not in actuality, at least in the pages of Better Homes and Gardens.

Science fiction, as it were, rebels against the status quo when it is not the currently-recognized status quo.

When it comes to scientific and technological progress, the science fiction of his day is brilliantly inventive. But whether it occurs fifty, one hundred, or a thousand years in the future, the basic social structure remains the same – or an effort is made to restore it.

But when it comes to a question of personal ethics, when it comes to a question of social justice – again and again we run right smack into our old friend Mike Hammer [Mickey Spillane was referenced earlier] in disguise.

How, in this marvelous world of the future, does one go about settling an argument?

With the same old punch in the jaw … the same old kick in the guts … the same old bullet in the same old belly.

The suggestion throughout his talk is that if the world can change in such striking ways technologically, why would it not change human behavior as well? And why doesn’t the current (for his time) science fiction novel address this possibility?

The science fiction field has often been likened to a literary world in miniature. But one searches in vain through that world for a Jesus Christ … a Sydney carton… or even a George Babbitt or a Leopold Bloom.

The common man is seldom the hero; if so, he doesn’t remain so very long, but becomes a Key Figure …

Isaac Asimov recently pointed out that science fiction heroes are permitted to be intelligent. This is admirable. And yet, emotionally, most of them are primitive and immature.

Where is the science fiction novel with the ordinary family man as hero … or the teacher … or the creative artist … or the philosopher? Where is the science fiction novel that contents itself with showing us the everyday world of the future, devoid of Master Spies and Master Technicians and Master Psychologists and Master Criminals?

He hastens to mention the exceptions. He also hastens to exclude short fiction from his admitted generalizations. And he states a possible reason for the shortcoming of science fiction novels (as opposed to short fiction): publishers won’t allow much more than this sheltering of the status quo in its content; readers won’t buy such highfalutin (and “radical”) books.

And here I am, in 2017, sixty years into Robert Bloch’s future, fascinated that Bloch is the only author among the four concerned that in the decades proceeding from 1957 a few differences may arise in the social order and that science fiction might address those differences.

Bloch himself, on the subject, seems rather sanguine.

But is science fiction, therefore, failing in its function of social criticism?

Quite the contrary.

When a literature of imaginative speculation steadfastly adheres to the conventional outlook of the community regarding heroes and standards of values, it is indeed offering the most important kind of social criticism – unconscious social criticism.

With its totalitarian societies, its repudiation of individual activity in every role save that of the self-appointed leader and avenger, science fiction dramatizes the dilemma which torments modern man. It provides a very accurate mirror of our own problems, and of our own beliefs which fail to solve these problems.

Gazing into that mirror, we might find it profitable to indulge in a bit of that reflection.

Of course, much in this essay puts me in mind of the recent battles within the science fiction community: the calls by some to return the field to its 1950s “heyday,” or perhaps to “make science fiction great again.” What does that really mean?

I wouldn’t speculate as to whether Bloch would be gratified to see a move to greater representation of diversity in the field, but I wonder if the generalizations he made in 1957 would be true in 2017. Maybe not in the media, which still seems tied to the conventions of the previous century, but at least in its literature. Wouldn’t it?

And what about now? What generalizations could we make about science fiction and social criticism today?

And, presuming that we have made some progress, how does the future look from here? It may still prove profitable to regard that mirror reflection.

And I Thought I Had a Bad Year …

We are sitting here, with the end of 2016 in sight. I haven’t had the best of years, but who am I to complain? The planet has had a really miserable year.

This in itself should be something of a lesson: I am not alone.

And you, I hasten to add, can take comfort from it as well: You are not alone, either.

We have each other.

For better or worse.

If you’re reading this, I presume you are not dead. Not everyone who experienced 2016 can make that claim. Not only did many people of note expire sometime between January 1 and now; many people whose obituary would not make the major news media, but people near and dear, either to myself or to friends and family, haven’t made it to raise a glass as this year passes into the rearview landscape. Many of them died in dreadful, painful, unnecessary ways. We are poorer for their absence.

And many of our fellow humans who occupy this planet apparently have mistaken the rearview for the windshield. Reactionary forces are hard at work across the globe, on a mission to make one part of it or another “great,” and add “again” to that, because the rearview mirror is a rose-colored glass, alas.

Those who oppose the reactionaries are not without fault. Many of them followed the notion that whatever didn’t agree with their consensus was irrelevant. They believed this even with significant evidence to the contrary.

So here we are. What do we do now?

I’m not making a list. What I do suggest is that we don’t screw up as much as we did in 2016.

Did we screw up?

Take a look around.

And make no mistake, it is our screw-up. Collectively. We didn’t all screw up in the same way. Each in our own unique way, we screwed up to the point that it profits us not to look for any particular group (or even groups) upon whom to fix blame.

A bunch of suckers got conned.

A bunch of grifters worked the marks, and worked them good.

A bunch of folks who were smart enough not to get conned looked the other way or pretended that a significant number of their fellow humans would not fall for the con. Or worse: that the suckers didn’t really matter.

A bunch of folks raised on “good guys and bad guys” scenarios, figured out who the villains were and pointed their fingers at them because that’s what you’re supposed to do just before you say “Bang! You’re dead.” Except the villains didn’t always fall down.

There’s enough blame to go around.

When the suckers fall for the con, we all pay the bill. And it looks like we’ll be paying this bill off for some time. Thank goodness for installment plans and credit.

What I’ll be doing, I hope, is to redeem myself a little from my own screw ups. I want to do more of what I have been doing, with maybe a little more success. I work in that field of the arts that prides itself, rightfully or wrongfully, in looking at the world clearly and honestly, reporting back the good news, the bad news and what hasn’t been deemed news yet, if ever. We may take sides, but we do so ready to critique ignorance, hypocrisy, magical thinking and outright delusional beliefs wherever we find them, even among those on our own side.

I want to count myself among the artists with an eye on tomorrow as well as today, and one who is ready whenever the opportunity presents itself to say, “It doesn’t have to be this way! We can do better.”

I live in a nation that has never respected education. Not really. We’ve given it lip service. We confuse it with “training.” We confuse it with measurements.

We also pride ourselves in “independent thinking,” but for many of us, when we think, we’re doing so with anything but independence; and when we’re independent, we’re being so without thinking.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

I have not been a fan of the film Easy Rider. The story always seemed to me, even back in the day, when it was immensely popular, a mere excuse to go out and do some beautiful location cinematography. A product of the intensely wishful thinking of a segment of an oversized generation – an effort at creating a romantic mythology. We like doing that a lot. When reality gets pretty ugly we go looking for myths and pretend they’re realities.

But hey, a number of Roger Corman vets worked on it. It’s not so much the document of an era as a document of a state of mind. It’s not that I think it’s a bad film so much as it is a film that never really spoke to me. I was looking for another myth.

However, this year, this 2016, made me think of the film’s penultimate scene. Billy, the character played by Dennis Hopper, tells Wyatt, the character played by Peter Fonda (also known in the story as Captain America), that they had “made it.”

Wyatt stares away thoughtfully and shakes his head. “We blew it, Billy.” It’s a line I always heard as what Pauline Kael labeled “fashionably bleak.” It was hipster existentialism, a set-up for the romanticized nihilism of the ending – our heroes blown away by rednecks. A phony, forced, convenient, stacked deck of an ending.

I hear the line differently now. I hear it speaking to us in 2016, soon to be 2017. The two protagonists have been pursuing a dream of freedom by separating themselves from the rest of the world. They divorced themselves from society, even while engaging with it. They sought what another cultural antihero of the era (Gnossos, in Richard Fariña’s novel Been Down So Long it Looks Like Up to Me) called “exemption.”

In our ways, we’ve all been on a similar journey, pursuing dreams, often without regard to the realities that surround them. We’re big on dreams in this culture. We brand them – “The American Dream” – not that we ever agree on what that dream is.

If we then become angry and dissatisfied with our fellow humans for taking their pursuit of dreams past realities, into illusions, and then straight to out-and-out delusions, we have only ourselves to blame.

In pursuit of making a dream into a reality, we sometimes find ourselves “reversing polarities,” as we say in the trade, turning reality into a dream.

Wyatt is right. We blew it. They didn’t blow it. We all put our knives in Caesar’s back.

We all, as the Three Stooges noted, in a somewhat different situation, put the yeast in.

That’s a reality we can face and move on. We blew it. We’ve blown it before. We will surely blow it again along the way. We’re capable of learning from our mistakes, at least in theory. In a reality that is already so filled with deceptions and illusions, we can at least make an effort not to deceive ourselves.

It doesn’t have to be this way.

What Made Valerie Furious?

One of my former students recently posted on his Facebook update: “Advertising/marketing is the art of mind control. It creates the illusion of choice where there is none.”

Well, one can dicker. “Manipulation” over “control,” maybe. “Suggestion” might be substituted – especially by those who work in the industry. Or “increase visibility.” Then there’s “con game,” “scam,” “flim-flam,” “misrepresentation” … These terms can be thrown around – and they are. It’s been some years since I took advertising classes. Yes, I did. And guess what? I got A-plus all the way through. When my advertising instructor at Northwestern heard I was planning to get a degree in English, he looked at me as if I had just set fire to a Dumpster loaded with money.

The words that come to mind, though, when I think of some aspects of advertising and marketing (some aspects – hey, I know people who work in the field, I save my broad brushes for the folks in politics) are “condition” and “train.”

Yeah. “Training.” We hear about training all the time these days. Training is good, right? Training is supposed to be what we’re doing in the schools.

Advertising and marketing people, since the days of Edward Bernays, have been training consumers (by their labels ye shall know them) to, well … to consume.

And they’ve been doing a damn fine job of it, don’t you think? Americans can consume like nobody’s business (and the business of America, after all, is business). We have built mighty cathedrals of consumption, on the ground and in the air – out of brick and out of electrons. Math skills, science skills, language skills, thinking skills – hey, who needs that? Only insofar as they permit us to make more money to consume more stuff.

Oh, yeah – there’s the problem. Consumption needs fuel, and the fuel is money, and recently, outside of a narrow, narrow margin of our more affluent citizens, we don’t have as much scratch to go consuming with anymore.

Fear not: somewhere, brainy people are being grossly underpaid to work out the problem of how to get millions of people to consume more without paying them more, if not by paying them even less. There’s gotta be an algorithm for that.

If you’re old enough to remember the old Mentor Books’ series on the history of Philosophy, you’ll remember we had an Age of Belief, an Age of Adventure, an Age of Reason, an Age of Ideology and, bringing up the rear of the twentieth century, an Age of Analysis (by thy labels ye shall know them).

Well, simpler minds at simpler tasks have managed to cast our current world as an Information Age.

 

So, what do you do in an Information Age?

You gather information. And gather information. And gather more information, to gather even more information. Our answer to everything is to gather more information. The culture has become an intellectual one-trick pony.

Powerful people are spending countless dollars trying to gather information on what you consume in order to get you to consume more of it.

So why the hell do I care? I’m just a writer. An impoverished writer, who don’t know nothing about no things no way, right? I just write about flashy ray guns and flying cars and starships and giant battling robots.

I don’t care. There are plenty of social commentators and critics who’ve got all of this down solid. They can write this whole tirade five days a week, fifty weeks a year. The same damn critique, over and over and over.

And some of them do.

So, why is this under my skin at the moment?

Remember that kid in my story, the one I quoted from in the last post? Val? She sounds furious. Passionately furious.

And part of my job as a science fiction writer is to depict what she’s furious about – to try to capture it in an instant or two, and to do it without too much coaching from the sidelines by the author/narrative voice.

I do so – mostly miserably, at least at first. I hammer and hammer away at the scene until I think I’ve got it as good as I can possibly make it, which I know is probably not good enough.

Before that impassioned scream, that barbaric yawp Valerie made in that French bakery, I wrote a scene inspired by something I noticed in Union Station back in the summer, while I was waiting for a friend who was crossing the country by Amtrak.

I waited, and I heard this strange chattering in my ear. It sounded like a hundred manufactured “human” voices – versions of the same voice – all speaking at once.

They were coming from each of the platform entrances. It was an aid for the visually impaired: a voice, electronically neutral-sounding, tells you what platform you’re standing in front of. I assume the visually impaired person’s hearing ability is keen enough to distinguish Platform Twelve from Platform Fourteen, but to me it sounded like a hive of indistinguishable voices, all going at once – this audio-ocean of words and numbers repeated endlessly.

My first thought was that it sounded like a sound installation from a clever conceptual artist.

My second thought was that this is sort of what it sounds like now, everwhere, all the time. And that in the future it will sound like this, but louder. And the voices won’t be coming from the speakers over the platforms in Union Station, but they’ll be inside our heads.

On the train home I wrote this scene, where Charlotte Weber, the story’s protagonist, takes the escalator up to the mezzanine, where the Water Tower Place atrium space begins:

 

As Charlotte rode the escalators to the mezzanine, a wall of giant screen advertisements greeted (or assailed) her, each one with a well-dressed, physically “perfect” spokesperson, coiffed and made up with painstaking (or painful) artistry, and each one with a professionally-modulated voice, speaking from scripts that teams of “content specialists” (there were no writers anymore) slaved upon for months, telling her the wondrous benefits of some company’s product or service – or whatever it was they were trying to sell. Charlotte couldn’t tell. No one could tell. All the faces, all the voices, tried for the same sincerity, the same directness, the same familiarity – as if these professional strangers had known her for years. All the voices on all the screens blended into an empty cacophony and no one message could be heard over another.

Not that it made a difference.

And not that it was any better on the mezzanine. Every shop, every boutique, sported big screens, 3-D and holograms of unnaturally “real” people looking straight at you as they told you what great things to buy.

And so it was on Level Three. And Level Four. All the way up to Level Seven. A hundred shops with a hundred displays that spoke intimately, plaintively, admonishingly to you –

– But never saw you – could never see you.

And that was the way of the world, if you occupied a place high enough in the social scale, in that country, at that time.

Once, if you heard a hundred voices in your head, calling to you, it was conventional practice to seek out help, counseling, medication. In another age, it may have meant you were a prophetess, or were possessed. Now, if you heard all those voices, all it meant was that you were shopping, in real or virtual space.

The only voice Charlotte had trouble hearing was her own.

 

Is it accurate? Does it reflect the world Charlotte occupies, and does her world reflect our own? I honestly don’t know.

This is what I’ve come up with and until I can come up with something better it will have to stand.

All I can say is, later on in this story, Charlotte and her friends visit a little shop on Level Six, a place that sells these little bioengineered “toys,” shaped like dinosaurs, who are supposed to smile and greet you and sing, “Yar-wooo! Yar-woooo!”

Except for the gray, grimacing stegosaur who says, “G’wan! Beat it! Scram! Smelly humans! Keep your hands to yourself!”

It’s not a ray gun. It’s not a flying car. It’s not a starship. It’s not a giant, battling robot.

But it’s what I work with.

 

“What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured.”

- Kurt Vonnegut

On Reading and Re-Reading

An inaugural footnote: Your patience is requested as I adjust myself to what for me will be a new mode of communication. Long have I envied the life of a blogger, but watched them all from afar. Now, I get to make all the same mistakes, and invent some new ones, I'm sure.

I'll go at this in an "I Write As I Please" format to some degree, but will probably focus on my immediate concerns these days: my writing, science fiction,  the teaching of writing, the teaching of writing science fiction, all the various related literatures, arts, cultures popular and obscure, and whatever little details intersect with these interests.

Along with those, I also plan to post some "Dispatches from Sauria" -- unless I decide to create a new blog solely devoted to the saurs and to saurian activity, most likely including the harangues of one Agnes A. Stegosaur It's always good to have someone like Agnes around. If ever I find myself short of an opinion, Agnes is only too ready to provide one. For this I feel truly blessed.

Recently, at Wiscon, I appeared on a panel, "Rereading: What Stands the Test of Time and Why?" It's a topic that seems dear to many bloggers and commentators, especially (if not exclusively) to those in the field of science fiction and fantasy.

I wrote this (somewhat edited) on the topic in the thread of one of my Facebook postings, before attending the panel:

"I don't know what "test of time" means . . . All I know is that mucho folks are digging out old tomes and filling blogs with their opinions as to why this one here is no longer relevant (relevant to what?) or that one there has been unfairly neglected (by whom?").

"I don't believe many of these commentators have an objective criterion to make their determinations -- none of them are holding judgeships in the Great Court of Literature and, when I last checked, no authors have been brought before that body to face charges of 'literary irrelevancy' anyway.

"Some of the immediate motivations for this interest in tests and time vary between spite, indignation and a need to trim down a personal library that's grown way too big to manage anymore. Maybe another motivation: a feeling that folks within our little community are checking out which books will embarrass 'the genre' if ever we achieve another modicum of literary respectability, and said books need to be stricken from the shelves, which is an even sillier (and pettier) reason than spite and indignation.

"What continues to be read by readers continues to be read because for one reason or another (even for no reason at all) these works still speak to them. In my class, "The Cold Equations" still generates intense and lively discussions, and I can't tell you how many pieces in NYRSF, essays and letters of comment alike, have tried to bury that story [And, after attending another panel at Wiscon, I can confirm that academics still cringe at the mention of "The Cold Equations" I can't tell you how thrilling and fascinating it was to watch one particular academic's face twinge into 'cringe mode' as I uttered that title. It was like reciting a magical incantation.].

"I am no fan of 'The Nine Billion Names of God,' and yet when a colleague assailed me (good-naturedly, I confess) about its continued relevancy, it being a "punchline story," as he put it, I defended it by pairing it against a more recent story [the most rewarding "Infinites" by Vandana Singh], and tried to demonstrate how the older story addresses concerns which haven't entirely disappeared in the sixty-odd years since it was first written. My opinion of the story has little to do with the conversation created between stories and readers when you put the two together.

"There's no quicker way to gather negative critical responses than by having your work chosen by the Library of America. There seem to be more people who know what LoA shouldn't publish than agree on what what it should. If I have to read one more blog entry by Joe Sourball going back to read to some personally significant work that first lured him into reading SF, and finding that it creaks and totters, I will barbecue Mr. Sourball's cat personally. I'm participating in the panel because I also find this 'test of time' business puzzling and hope to come out of it better informed about what it's all supposed to mean."

Well, that panel has been and gone, and as always happens after a panel, I couldn't really figure out what I had to say until a few weeks after. The panel itself, through no fault of its own, equipped with a capable, intelligent cast and an equally smart audience, made no further headway on the topic. At cons, panels like this often break down to the audience asking for titles to put on their "to read" (or "not to read") lists.

The one thing that's struck me, though, since attending that panel: You know that whole experience of going back to some favorite book, reading it again (or trying to read it again) and finding it somehow diminished, or lacking (for 'lack' of a better word), or otherwise not living up to one's memories of the book? Never happened to me.

Never. Not once.

Why? Am I so lacking in critical faculties? Were my tastes always so highly refined that I gravitated only toward the greatest of masterpieces? Or am I such a bottom-feeder that anything written above the level of a semi-literate ransom thrills me?

I don't think so, bottom-feeder though I may be. I think it has more to do with the way I read books. It may not be that I'm lacking in critical faculties, but that what faculties I utilize are applied to different ends.

Stating this, though, makes me pause, because it's three in the morning and I'm about to enter a labyrinth of "explanation." Let me see if I can find a quick way to explain what I mean:

The book (or story, or novelette, or poem) is itself. It's also the creative act of its author. It's also the creative act of its reader(s). The reading of the book is the summary of the time, place, author, reader -- all sorts of things along with the book itself. Each reading creates its own individual context, and each of these contexts is fascinating to me (no, not too strong a word) -- even if it's of no interest to anyone else.

I don't read books to "test" them. I read books to read them, and will take my pleasures where I find them.