Ambrose & Elsewhere

Over the past week I was doing line-edits of Blood of Ambrose and a new(ish) Morlock story for Black Gate and I was forcibly reminded that I cannot read my own work attentively. I don’t mean that I find it unbearable (though that’s a point of view, I guess). But if I sit down and try to proofread something I’ve written, soon I start fiddling with the writing, and I drift away from the text-as-it-is toward some glowing Platonic ideal of the-text-as-it-was-meant-to-be. It’s a pleasant state, a very pleasant state–in some ways better than the urgent fever of initial composition. But it’s the worst possible state of mind to spot, say, the dozen or so instances where I wrote “they” but should have written “the” (or vice versa). The best way for me to tackle that assignment is with a hardcopy and a pen and work in short stretches, but even that doesn’t always keep me on task.

So it was as a fellow sufferer that I saw recently some graffiti in a building where I teach a class. Someone had written, in bold black marker and carefully formed capitals,

Maybe some oblique political comment here, but the main thing is that all the Palindroning about the Weathermen lately has been reminding me of the old video-from-before-they-were-videos of “Subterranean Homesick Blues”… and, in turn, of the Weird Al parody, “Bob” which (as the huge hand of fate would have it) is made up entirely of palindromes.

To celebrate her second collection of stories, Kelly Link is giving away (most) of her first collection, Magic for Beginners, as a digital download.

I will not lie to you: most fiction that could be classed as interstitial makes me merely tired. But Link pulls off some very cool things, especially in the famous title story. And it’s free!

[Seen at GalleyCat.]

In the course of eviscerating one of Robert Sheckley’s early stories, James Blish penned (or typed, more probably) the immortal line “they look like rabbits, but if you call them smeerps that makes it science fiction.” This made its way into the famed (and partly infamous) Turkey City Lexicon as an injunction against “false exoticism.”

I thought about this recently when xkcd published the fiction rule of thumb” (embedded approvingly by John Scalzi on Whatever):

The first time I saw it I sort of shrugged: I know where the complaint comes from. You don’t call a rabbit a smeerp.

But it bugged me, too, because you also shouldn’t call a smeerp a rabbit. Say your heroes ride vipplequangs around, and a vipplequang is like a horse–except it’s a kind of lizard and whenever the three moons are aligned in the sky it turns into a relentlessly carnivorous land-fish that is prone to devouring its rider. Should you call it a horse just to make it easier on the reader? Obviously not. It doesn’t really do that, for one thing, if the peculiarities of vipplequangs are important for some story you’re telling.

Also, people read SF/F, in part, to enter a landscape that has vipplequangs not just horses and smeerps not just rabbits–other worlds, with real exoticism, not false exoticism. SF/F that doesn’t meet that test, that makes imaginary reality into an unfunhouse mirror of the mundane, may have other virtues that make up for this glurky sucking quality that reeks of fail. Or, you know, may not. It’s a case-by-case thing.

Either way, I argue that the proposed rule-of-thumb be rejected. Everyone gets to make up as many words as they want for their stories; success or failure depends on whether it’s well done or badly done, nothing else. (And, from what I’ve seen, Stephenson does it well in Anathem and xkcd’s criticism is the sound of someone not getting it. But I’ve only read excerpts so far, so take that with a pinch of salted thumb.)

1. A Meme

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

* Grab the nearest book.
* Open the book to page 56.
* Find the fifth sentence.
* Post the text of the next two to five sentences in your journal along with these instructions.
* Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

Seen latest at rimrunner‘s LJ.

I often do the book meme, but I never post it. That’s because the books stacked around my computer are for mostly for work, and not the fun amusing parts of work either. The sentences always turn out to be boring or pretentious.

But today I had a stack of to-be-read-mixed-with-have-read books sitting next to me, and on top of it was Binary Star #1: “Destiny Times Three” by Fritz Leiber & “Riding the Torch” by Norman Spinrad.

“Give me Leiber Three or give me death!” I shrieked (not really meaning it) and plunged in.

He plummeted, frantically squeezing the controls of the flying togs he was not wearing.

That’s perfect by itself. I refuse to break the spell by quoting the next 1-4 sentences.

2. A Theme

Everyone’s checking the “search inside” function of Amazon’s page for The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror to see if they’re mentioned in it. Who am I to start acting like a maverick this late in my go-along-to-get-along life? I checked it in the sublime confidence that I would not be mentioned. But I was, twice–not in the usual “And as for that rat-bastard Enge…” way.

3. A Bad Dream

Except I was awake while it happened. Today I had to do some career paperwork that involved numerical summaries of my teaching evaluations by students for the past five years or so. I have mixed feelings about teaching evaluations. On the one hand, a student is usually in no position to say whether a subject has been adequately treated. On the other hand, they can say if they’ve learned something; their opinions about texts, and lecture styles etc. can be very shrewd–useful even when (perhaps especially when) they’re negative. So I usually look at the comments and leave the numbers alone.

But now I had a couple pages of these numbers and they were devastating. My score had been slowly but inexorably declining over the years; last year was the lowest score yet. In one course I scored a flat 1. Every student in a class had given me the lowest score!

God, I was depressed. Sometimes I worry that, by the 17th time I’ve taught Latin or Myth or what have you I might be phoning it in. (You know the old joke about the old prof: “Last night I dreamed that I was lecturing to my class and when I woke, by God, sir, I was!”) I stumbled through the rest of the afternoon thinking that maybe I should go into some other line of work, one where I was less likely to harm people. Sniper, maybe, or bank robber. Mime. Anything.

But when I went to file away the dreaded numerical summaries at the end of a long day, I noticed something. The numerical options went from 4 (poor) to 1 (excellent). My student evaluations had been steadily improving over the years.

What a relief! This does not mean that I’m a better teacher, of course–maybe I’m just an increasingly effective panderer. But, whatever I’m doing, this is one measure that it’s working.

1. Sorry I’ve been so silent here lately. Part of that has been due to technology: my beloved but ailing eMac finally became unusable, so I took part of my advance for Blood of Ambrose and bought a new iMac; several evenings in the past week have been devoted to data recovery, transfer and playing with the new toy acquainting myself with the specifics of this very serious work-related hardware. Then there was the post mortem on the old computer. I feel that it may have been defeated by illogic, as I understand from Star Trek that this is the way most computers bite the dust. My son thinks there was something wrong with the cooling system, pointing to several components that seem to have been scorched. I observed that really persistent illogic has a scorching effect, often causing logic-based entities to emit smoke and sparks. I was gratified to see my son displaying exactly these symptoms, but his cooling system, fortunately, is in perfect order and the damage in his case doesn’t seem to be permanent.

2. I’ve been having a weird series of dreams involving cars. A few nights ago I had a very intricate black-and-white dream like a 1940s noir movie featuring two private detectives who didn’t get along very well and were both engaged in some complicated mix of shadow-job and con-game with the same target. I badly wanted to see how that one worked out, but my alarm woke me up. Last night I dreamed that I was hitchhiking in a brightly colored, rather futuristic Minneapolis. John Scalzi (no, I’ve never met him) drove by and offered me a ride. I told him I needed to go to the Foshay Tower, but we ended up at Como Park, which was much seedier than I remember it and full of homeless people. I’m not sure what this means, but I suspect that it has something to do with general anxiety about my writing career and the chaotic financial markets. (Foshay went broke and lost his property in the Great Depression.)

3. I’ve been slowly becoming a Neal Stephenson fan. I think this guy is up to something interesting, and he might really be going places in this little sf genre. I was on the fence about whether I was going to get Anathem, but the following useful dictionary entry tipped me over into the “buy early and often” category.

Beneath the bloody sky,
upon his mountain throne,
the Stalker waits for wolf-days
and his hands-of-fire bide their time.

When I heard that John McCain had picked a glamorous, gun-toting, motorcycle-riding, crusading woman to be his running mate (named Sara[h] P., no less), I have to admit I got chills–not altogether unpleasant ones. This is an archetype that powerfully appeals to men and, it seems, women.

Now, though, count me among the bemused. Partly it’s that Governor Palin’s executive record isn’t as great as touted. She left her hometown in a fiscal mess which (given the scale of the budgets involved) rivals the nightmare-in-red-ink that Bush-Cheney have inflicted on the federal level. (See the details of one example of mismanagement here.) She has been lying, persistently, flagrantly, and apparently consciencelessly, about her alleged opposition to the “Bridge to Nowhere” and other (more successful) attempts to corral Federal earmark money for the benefit of Alaska. (“Earmarks” is the term used when the money is for Us, the Good People of This Fair State. “Pork-barrel” is when it’s for Them, the Bad People in Some Other State.) I will leave others to sort out the thorny issues of her foreign policy experience (her state was one thin border away from the ravening hordes of Canada, etc.) and the extent to which one can be the “commander in chief” of a military unit which has another actual commander-in-chief. (See some relevant detail here, but it’s only Wikipedia, so apply salt as needed, directly to the wound if it seems advisable.) Suffice it to say that I don’t think these claims are strong.

The real source of my bemusement, though, comes from Palin’s alleged media appeal. She is easier on the eyes than McCain is, or many a politician of the left, right or center. (McCain himself has been visible moved by her.) But, for me, the spell breaks when she opens her mouth. Irrespective of what she says, her delivery is smug, supercilious, irritated, and nasal. Of all the politicians on either side, I’d say the one whose speaking style most resembles hers is Giuliani. If other voters, particularly in the center, see her (or hear her) this way, I don’t know that she will really help McCain to reach outside his base.

He could have done worse (i.e., by picking almost anyone who ran against him in the primary, with the possible exception of Huckabee). But I think that just illustrates how thin the bench is on the Republican side, when you’re talking about politicians who can operate credibly on the national level. (The Democrats are not much better off, and pretty much lucked out with Obama. I know this will probably get me more lectures about how Obama is not the Messiah–a true fact which is utterly irrelevant–but so be it.)

Rumor has it that these guys will be lurking somewhere in the Great Black Swamp tonight. We may have to brave the mosquitoes and the Headless Motorcyclists and whatnot and go see them.

Some new reviews of Black Gate 12 up: by Sherwood Smith at The Fix (thanks sartorias!) and by Lois Tilton at The Internet Review of Science Fiction (registration required).

Both are pretty generous toward my story (so my egocentric universe hasn’t been knocked off its axis), but LT made the interesting observation that, for her, Morlock wasn’t particularly important to the success of the story (“it is not so much the series character of Morlock that makes this stuff worth reading, but the author’s prose and his skill in creating characters”). This runs contrary to most of the reactions I’ve gathered on and off line (e.g. Matt Wuertz’s persuasive call for “more cowbell”), and it may be an outlier, so to speak. LT has a bias about series in general, which she’s pretty frank about, and that may affect her reading here.

But this is the most striking example I’ve seen yet, in reactions to my own stuff, that precisely what does work for some readers is what puts off others. Probably no one could write something that hits 100% of the potential audience.

That is until they read my next multistage standalone story, Morlock Meets Anti-Morlock: the Morlockening, Only Not Really!