Ambrose & Elsewhere

1. A brain more than 2000 years old has been discovered in a muddy pit. On examination it doesn’t appear to be mine, though, so I guess I’ll have to keep looking. (I know I left it around here somewhere.)

2. Ryan Harvey has posted a couple reviews of the new(ish) Spider collections from Baen at the Blog Gate (here and here). I was just reading the first volume over the weekend and now that my ears have stopped ringing I have to raise my virtual voice in tribute to the Spider. Up to now I’d just thought of Norvell Page as the author of Flame Winds which seemed to me (when I first and last read it decades ago) as just a bombastic ripoff of Harold Lamb’s Genghis Khan: Emperor of All Men.

But the Spider, despite some resemblances to other hero pulps like the iconic The Shadow, is really like nothing else I’ve ever read. The story, as Ryan fairly says, makes no fricking sense. Someone who could pull off the technological and industrial feats involved in creating a crew of gigantic killer robots would not use them for the strangely trivial ends that the villain does in “Satan’s Murder Machines.” The preposterous motive is there only to create a semblance of a mystery where the villain can be unmasked in the final scene, as in countless episodes of Scooby-Doo. The plot is an almost randomly selected string which serves to connect a set of bizarre action scenes where the Spider rams his car (or some other large vehicle) into a killer robot, or, armed only with a knife, he dives into the East River to combat one of the robots, or some of the equally crazy stuff his reckless sweetheart, Nita van Sloan, engages in.

This is pulp at its pulpiest, somewhat past the point of ripeness. Every fourth or fifth sentence ends in an exclamation point–often for no clearly defined reason! But Page is actually a pretty good writer and his evocations of the horrors wrought by the killer robots are genuinely disturbing. Plus, his broadly drawn characters are quite likable. After Nita rescues the Spider (by firing into a group of policemen–injuring no one but disabling their vehicle–and then sweeping her true love away from the scene on the running board of her coupe), the hero has her stop the car so he can give her a kiss. Doc Savage or The Shadow wouldn’t be caught dead doing something like that. (Maybe the radio The Shadow would; he was a bit more suave than his pulpish avatar.) The Spider‘s conflicted relationship with Police Commissioner Kirkpatrick (enemy of the Spider, but friend to the Spider‘s daylight persona, Richard Wentworth) plays out in interesting ways, not all of them involving explosions or gunfire.

Was good. I liked it.

I was not so crazy about the volume’s “foreword”, a fictionalized fragment about Norvell Page which assumes background for him and the Spider rather than providing much. I’d have preferred something less inventive and more informative–even a dramatis personae of regular characters for the series might have been handy.

3. On the political front, I can’t decide which is funnier: Bush having shoes thrown at him or Blagojevich’s comically inept corruption. Each, of course, is a smile painted on a dead clown: the reverberations from Bush’s bloody disasters will be with us for the rest of our lives, and Blago’s epic blundering is just one example of the damage that can be done by power wielded without thought for consequences, something we’re seeing a lot of these days (a point Frank Rich makes pretty well this week, so I won’t dwell on it). But let’s laugh while we can: the next show might not be as funny.

On balance, I decided Black Gate means more to me than Pox Verpulae or whatever his real name is. For those interested, my latest post is here.

[edited to fix link–was typing in haste–still am]

Worlds to re-membrane from Taylor Mali:

[seed at dindrane‘s LJ]

1. The bad news is that Theo, the newest addition to the Black Gate group-blog, is also the odious Vox Day. I object to the politicization of everything, and I think there should be a way for people who disagree strenuously about politics to talk about things that are non-political. But I’m reluctant to share a forum with someone who argues that public education in America is comparable to the forced clitoridectomy practiced in some cultures or that “Any rational human being would harbor more respect for a Nazi than for a feminist”. This kind of malicious filth is making useful public discourse almost impossible in this country.

2. The good news is that the Help Vera community seems to have triumphed. Kudos to the organizers and the contributors: this was a good thing.

At Salon.com (cookies must be enabled) there’s an interview of Laura Miller, talking about her new booklength essay, The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia.

I expected to enjoy the interview more than I did. Both Traister (the interviewer) and Miller are pretty good writers and, although I probably don’t qualify as a “skeptic” in Miller’s terms, I’m interested in reading something about Lewis’ fantasy that doesn’t get all gushy about his theological message. The message is there, no doubt; Lewis considered it important, and so should we in evaluating the books (whether it weighs in their favor or not). But story and imagination have a value separate from theme. A good theme does not redeem a bad story. Nor need a bad theme entirely invalidate an otherwise good story. (See The Worm Ouroboros.)

But I didn’t get much out of the interview, and I’m not sure I’ll get anything from her book. Miller is one of those who missed the Christian message in the Narnia books and when it was pointed out to her she considered it a “betrayal” which resulted in an epochal reassessment of the series.

I have trouble wrapping my head around this for two reasons. I know there are people who read The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and don’t realize that Aslan’s sacrifice on the Stone Table is a retelling of the Crucifixion. I know this, because I have read about it, but I simply don’t understand it. Possibly because I attended a parochial school, the Christian content couldn’t have been more self-evident to me, even as a kid, if Lewis had provided footnotes, or a glossary in the back of the book. (“ASLAN: Christ, now in convenient lion form!”) I guess this is one measure of success in the secularization of American society, that people can fail to recognize religious content unless it comes in the appropriate wrapping. I guess.

But the bigger problem I have with here is the whole idea of a “betrayal”: as if Lewis were obligated not to write the book he intended to write but rather the book Miller wanted him to have written. That misconceives the reader/writer relationship, I think. She’s unwilling to bear any responsibility for her interpretation of the Narnia books: it’s all Lewis’ damn fault.

This issue soured the interview for me (and may keep me from liking the book much). Miller says some oddly naive things, too–as if her perceptions of the books are universal truths, like the existence of salt. Lewis’ “most appealing protagonist” is Lucy, she says. I like Lucy fine; she’s certainly more interesting than the other Pevensies. But my favorite character is Eustace. He’s surly and rude; he does not believe in this stuff; he is evil; he is damned (or at least dragoned); he is redeemable. And he retains his identity after his redemption: he doesn’t just become Pevensie #5. One of the reasons why The Silver Chair is my favorite Narnia book is that the conversations between Eustace and Jill have such a distinctive snap. (Jill is another favorite of mine.)

CSL is not beyond criticism, which is precisely why I’m hoping against hope that Miller’s book is worth reading. But it’s sort of starting to sound like the Gospel of Lewis According to Pullman. Not exactly good news.

Frank Robinson: an unexpected (for me) connection between sf and assassinated SF politician Harvey Milk.

I read Robinson’s The Power as a kid because I had just seen the film version on TV and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. (I rewatched it recently, and it turns out I was wrong about this. Still, it has a certain interest, especially the hallucinatory “DON’T RUN” sequence.)

The book and the movie center on a charismatic villain who wields an unspeakable and ill-defined power over people’s minds and even the physical universe. I haven’t reread the novel for decades, but I still remember a speech one of the secondary characters makes to the hero about the dangers of someone who is too charismatic, using the example of a compelling man whom he admired when he was younger and the loss of identity this caused. (He follows this with a rather forced, “Don’t get me wrong: I like girls” sort of disclaimer.) The movie retained the speech but shortened it and, if I’m remembering right, weakened it somewhat.

In retrospect, it seems obvious that this nightmare comes out of Robinson’s life as a closeted gay man. Any time he was attracted to a man in his life he’d have had to resist the power of that attraction, cloaking it with dread, possibly intensifying if tainting its power. Any time he surrendered to his feelings he risked damaging his social identity.

The Power must have been his way of writing about this (and, no doubt, other things as well: I’m not saying any symbol has to have just one meaning). He couldn’t tell the truth of his experience directly; he had to transmute it into fantasy.

I’m against oppression in general (I make certain exceptions), but I wonder if, as society becomes more open, our fantasies will necessarily become duller and less intense. There may be less incentive to mask emotional reality in imagination, more tendency to memoirize rather than to fantasize.

The Dyson Sphere is roughly the same age as I am. Of course, the Dyson sphere is roughly 1 A.U. in radius and would be the most tremendous achievement of any society producing it, and similar claims are never made about me, at least not when I am sober. On the other hand, as of this writing, I actually exist. Advantage: Enge.

I’m not sure the Dyson Sphere concept makes any sense anyway. If you had the energy and resources to build it, you wouldn’t need it.

[Discoverblog item seen via james_nicoll.]

Facebook (the internet community site) officially passed what arbiters of cool referred to as its “freshness date” early this afternoon. Signs point to one James Enge as the responsible party. “Him joining was just sort of the tipping point for me,” said one of many anonymous hipsters fleeing from the site never to return. The site is expected to shut down shortly due to terminal twelve-minute-ago-ness. Enge, when reached for comment, was too confused to respond coherently. “What’s a ‘wall’? Does someone really have to be my friend to be my ‘friend’? Why do I have to make comments in that illeistic manner?” No one knew what he was talking about.

My latest entry at the Black Gate group blog is up here. It was going to be a double review of REH’s Almuric and Otis Adelbert Kline’s The Swordsman of Mars, both of which I read recently in the handsome trade paperbacks from Planet Stories Library, along with some ruminations about sword-and-planet in particular and genre in general. But it got to be too long, so I’m chopping it into installments.

Charles Stross apparently started an interesting meme in an f-locked post, taken up by jaylake (here) and burger_eater (here). The idea is for interested pro-writers to answer the questions concisely, giving the reader a quick timeline of their career.

“If I were a professional writer,” I thought, “I would do that, even though–”

I interrupted myself to point out, “You are now a professional writer, according to SFWA’s rather odd standards. You’re even an SFWA member: your first issue of the Bulletin came two weeks ago, or have you forgotten already?”

“I had forgotten,” I admitted. “I was going to blog about it so that I wouldn’t forget, but then I forgot to blog.”

“Go, and sin no more.”

“Hey, who the hell do you think you are?”

“I’ve forgotten by now. But wasn’t there something you were going to do?”

Oh. Yeah.

* Age when I decided I wanted to be a writer: 12
* Age when I got my hands on a typewriter and taught myself to use it: 15
* Age when I wrote my first short story: 13
* Age when I wrote my first novel: 17
* Age when I first submitted a short story to a magazine: 26
* Number of rejections prior to first story sale: More than 200, I guess
* Lifetime number of rejections: Probably between 200 and 300–possibly more
* Age when I sold my first short story: 43
* Age when I wrote a saleable novel: 45
* Age when I sold that novel: 48
* Novels written between age 17 and age 45: 5
* Novels written since age 45: parts of 3
* Age now: 48
* Age when the writing money coming in exceeded my day-job: not yet
* Number of books sold: 2 (novels)
* Number of short stories sold: 12
* Number of titles in print: none yet
* Number of titles in production or pre-production: 2 novels

I was going to say, before I was so rudely interrupted, that I don’t think my numbers are necessarily predictive of other people’s success. I was slow off the mark submitting anything for publication, and I finally settled down to the task of writing adventure fantasy for the magazines well after the American magazine market turned against such stories. (I’d put the end-point around the death of Fantastic, in 1980 or so.) And through the plague of Tolkien imitators, a.k.a. the 1980s, I was resolved to not write anything that resembled a trilogy about the Final Conflict Between Good and Evil. I did not resolve to write unreadable semi-gibberish; it just worked out that way.

The purpose of the meme is apparently to warn and frighten, not advise in the usual sense. But I did learn two things from my long career of failure which may be useful for those who want to write professionally (if what I do is professional): know your markets (especially pay attention to emerging markets) and get an agent for booklength work.

For people who just want to spend their life writing, I have only one piece of advice, but you know it already. Write what you want to write. That kind of work can sustain you when no one else likes it, when no one else even gets it. Like I say, I know you know this, but the ghost of Austin Tappan Wright is glaring at me through a nearby window, making me say it again. And we’ve all been there.