Ambrose & Elsewhere

Some good rumination over opening sentences in a post by Paul Jessup, who links to one by Jay Lake, who links to one by Richard Parks, who links to one by Andy Duncan.

Writers writing about writing don’t always write stuff which is interesting to passersby, but this sort of shop talk (about beginnings, endings, story-architecture, etc.) also interests me as a reader, so I thought I’d indulge myself here. Also, it’s certainly less dull than posting about Heroes again (in summary: now the shark is jumping the show) or complaining about the latest LJ squeakfest I’ve become entangled in.

So: there are three ways to start a story, as I see it.

You grab the reader by the ear with a conversational opener that lures him into a conspiracy with the storyteller: “Call me Ishmael.”

You grab the reader by the eye with a sensory description that begs for further narration and explanation: “The doorknob opened a blue eye and winked at him.”

You push the reader off a cliff so that she finds herself swimming in the thick of the action: “The Skydiver dropped out of hyperspace an even million miles above the neutron star.”

Stories that take a couple of pages to hook the reader usually won’t. But it may be a mistake, as Jay Lake suggests, to try too hard. I like his last lines about first lines: “the first sentence will be what it is. The more you can load there, the better, but don’t force it. Stories, like wine or cheese, have to breathe.”

It looks like the Library of America is going to have a second volume of Philip K. Dick novels edited by Jonathan Lethem. It seems like it was only last Fall I was blogging about the first volume, and it was. They must have gotten great sales from that first volume–makes a great stocking stuffer in the holidays, no doubt.

PKD is the perfect writer for that institution to memorialize in this post-postmodern minute. I am not knocking the process or the result in any way shape or form. But I do have to wonder if PKD, in his most prolonged vacations from reality, foresaw anything like the Nachleben he has been afterliving: a Hollywood big-shot on the one hand, spawning movie after movie, and on the other hand a canonized establishment author, his pulpy paranoid operas (paranoperas?) entombed in those beribboned black permabooks. Not even he could have made this stuff up.

Eh. Not all bad, but lots of badness carried over from the previous season, and there is new badness added to the mix.

On the up side, the plot-line involving the older generation of heroes looks like it may go interesting places.

I’ll put most of the moaning and a spoiler or two behind a cut. Sail the whine dark sea.

Scientists plan to create a supermouse.

The Onion AV Club has been running an interesting feature on its blog where one of the editors, Keith Phipps, reviews in turn each one of the 75 “vintage” (= damn old) paperbacks he bought in a big box from some thrift store. I myself am so vintage (= damn old) that I remember seeing some of these editions on the shelf when they were shiny and new, but I mostly passed them by for matter that was more obviously rewarding (e.g. Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids). It’s been interesting to watch Phipps sift through the dreck for an occasional glimmer of gold. It’s not quite the must-read feature that Nathan Rubin’s My Year of Flops has become, but it’s getting there.

There have been several genre titles so far: Wells’ The Food of the Gods, Delany’s Ballad of Beta-2 etc. This week he tackles The Mighty Swordsmen, a Lancer paperback anthology of heroic fantasy, edited by Hans Stefan Santesson.

Phipps is not especially knowledgeable about fantasy (he cops to not having read any Zelazny or Moorcock except for the stories in this volume), but he gives a not-unsympathetic reading to the REH story included (“Beyond the Black River”), and an unsympathetic reading to a Bjorn Nyberg knockoff, which sounds about right.

Apparently the book includes no Leiber, no C.L. Moore, and no Vance, so Phipps not unreasonably but wrongly concludes “I left The Mighty Swordsmen with more or less the same impression of its sub-genre as I had going in: There’s Howard and then there’s everyone else.”

On deck for future weeks: an Ed McBain “87th Precinct” mystery, Brian Aldiss’ Hothouse and a Lin Carter opus I’ve never heard of called The Valley Where Time Stood Still (a Lost World pastiche, I suspect).

Last weekend I was clearing out a long-neglected corner of our house when I found a letter addressed to me. “Weird,” I said to myself, looking at the envelope. “That looks like my own writing, too.” Then I realized: it was a rejection slip. The postmark was from three years ago. I had gotten it, instantly recognized what it was, and tucked it away in this corner without bothering to open it.

Now I opened it, and saw that it was a rejection for “The Lawless Hours,” the Morlock novella which is out this week in Black Gate 11.

So now I’m using the rejection slip as a bookmark while I read my way through the issue. It’s oddly satisfying, like drinking a toast from the skull of one’s slain enemy. Only not as, you know, morally problematic.

Also synchronicitiferous, I read this morning (courtesy of kythiaranos and “Pat’s Hotlist”) Jonathan McCalmont’s latest screed arguing that fantasy is inherently authoritarian. The synchronicity comes in because (I don’t think this is a spoiler), in “The Lawless Hours” Morlock acts as the catalyst in disrupting an authoritarian regime, though that’s not really what the story is about.

Part of the Politicization of Everything is the way that politics gets treated as the norm of meaningful human interaction. In fact, although politics is necessary for dealing with groups of individuals, it’s a pretty blunt instrument for dealing with the individual (or internal) human interactions that fiction is really about. I would say something like this on McCalmont’s blog, but he’s one of these “But, still…” guys: it doesn’t matter what wealth of contradictory evidence and argument you bring to him; his original position always turns out to be the Only Correct One.

More later, maybe: I’m running late for some human interactions.

In good news for readers of adventure fiction, the late lamented e-zine Flashing Swords, founded by the irreplaceable Howard A. Jones, is relaunching in Fall 2007 with a new slate of editors. Candidly, I don’t know the work of the guys at the top of the pyramid (the pseudonymous CrystalWizard and James Boone Dryden), but the associate editors (Jason M. Waltz a.k.a. “Howard von Darkmoor”, Michael D. Turner, SC Bryce, Steve Goble, TW Williams) make up a pretty damn impressive editorial board all by themselves.

The new front page is here. The discussion forum, for news and whatnot, is at the same address as it used to be. They’re not open to submissions until Nov. 1 (the first issue will be an in-house production), but their guidelines are here.

Funding is always a problem with small magazines, especially e-zines, but the recent and apparently temporary death of Flashing Swords was all the more depressing because it didn’t seem as if it had to be. The zine was a secondary casualty in the tempestuous collapse of the Pitch-Black publishing empire. Maybe this time, standing on its own two feet, Flashing Swords can go on cleaving any heads that need to be cleaved.

[The good news snaffled from Steve Goble’s Swords Against Boredom.]

This probably falls into that very large category of “Things Everybody Knows Except Me” but apparently a group of dedicated fans has been producing a series of webisodes that continue the original “Five Year Mission” of the Enterprise. This entails casting a set of nonprofessional actors as Kirk, Spock, McCoy etc., which I thought would be an intractable problem… But, after watching an episode, I think maybe it’s not, after all.

Spoilers and further base Trekkery behind a cut, to spare the innocent and the easily bored.

Captain’s log. Stardate: as unlikely as any other kind of date while I’m wearing this costume.

a.) “Sword and Planet” stories and Edgar Rice Burroughs have both come up in recent threads on the usually (too) quiet swordandsorcery community.

2.) The wise and the good tell us to “write with nouns and verbs, not with adjectives and adverbs.” Are they right? They are not.

III.) It may be the 21st century, but we will always need those 20th century voles.

And since I can’t reach any of the people I know back home, I’m posting pictures on my stupid blog.