wisb-Guardian-Express

I'm teaching a course called "Dystopia and American Anxiety" this spring.  The idea came to me while brainstorming with friends on Facebook.  Because dystopia is a genre the frequently plays upon our fears and anxieties, it seemed fitting to put together a course specific to the American side of the skill.  The following is the reading list for the course:


Novels
The Iron Heel by Jack London
The Gold Coast by Kim Stanley Robinson
Make Room! Make Room! by Harry Harrison
The Female Man by Joanna Russ
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

Short Stories
"A Sojourn in the City of Amalgamation" by Oliver Bolokitten
"The Lottery" by Shirley Jackson
"The Machine Stops" by E. M. Forster
"The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" by Ursula K. Le Guin
"The Calorie Man" by Paolo Bacigalupi
"I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream" by Harlan Ellison
"Bloodchild" by Octavia Butler

Non-Fiction (critical texts, newspaper articles, and excerpts from various books)
"Theses on Dystopia 2001" by Darko Suvin
"Evidence against the views of the abolitionists:  consisting of physical and moral proofs, of the natural inferiority of the Negroes" by Richard H. Colfax
"Introduction:  Dystopia and Histories" from Dark Horizons by Raffaella Baccolini and Tom Moylan
"New Maps of Hell" from Scraps of the the Untainted Sky by Tom Moylan
"The Dystopian Turn" from Scraps of the Untainted Sky by Tom Moylan
"Overpopulation Threatens World" by Ralph Segman
"Overpopulation Called Deadlier Killer Than A-Bomb" by Unknown
"Monsanto's Harvest of Fear" by Donald L. Barlett and James B. Steele
"Farewell Address" by President Dwight D. Eisenhower
"Interview w/ Noam Chomsky" by David Barsamian
"Profits of War:  The Fruits of the Permanent Military-Industrial Complex" by William Hartung
"The Delicate Balance of Terror" by Albert Wohlstetter
"Soviets to Renew Testing A-Weapons; Kennedy Sees Nuclear Holocaust" by Chalmers M. Roberts
"Smart Machines, and Why We Fear Them" by Astro Teller
Gender Trouble by Judith Butler

Thanks to everyone who helped with suggestions!

The 2013 WISB Awards are fast approaching, but I want to know what your favorite reads, views, and so on were this year.

So this post is for you, dear readers.  Let me know what you loved reading, watching, listening to, and so on and so forth.  Go on, leave a comment!

But why fantasy?

Is it enough to say that people the world over (including myself) have been fascinated with elves and dragons since Tolkien published his master-work and so we can simply continue in his footsteps? Haven’t many authors have done exactly that?

Surely, fantasy is an easy field to write – and do well in?

After all, the scientific understanding for writing, say, hard sci-fi is not necessary. And, because fantasy isn’t exactly high-brow, knowledge of fancy literary theories isn’t necessary, either – in fact it may even be a hindrance.

I’d argue that fantasy is hard to do decently precisely because of the reasons above.

So many people have done it to death, that the reader is jaded by the recycled materials. There is no powerful central scientific concept to bedazzle the reader, nor is there the fig-leaf of fancy
techniques to cover up the fact that a book sucks. An entire house of leaves might not be enough, in fact*.

There is only story, and the writer’s skill in creating a believable world wherein the reader can suspend disbelief in a fantastic reality. My aim when writing is precisely that: to weave a world around the reader, starting with the mundane, and slowly stirring in the spice of magic.

I’m a fan of the (slightly) slow start. Tolkien did it with the hobbits of Hobbiton, and Donaldson did it with the gritty reality that Thomas Covenant faced as a leper … before pulling out the big guns in the form of the Ringwraiths and Lord Foul, amongst others. It is all about the suspension of disbelief and achieving it before moving on with the story.

The story should have wonder built into it. It’s the writer’s responsibility to reveal enough of the plot to the reader so that she doesn’t feel lost, so that she feels that there is a sense of where the story is going … but not so much that the reader closes the book in disgust because it is so predictable. There needs to be, especially in fantasy writing, a sense of mystery, of something otherworldly just beneath the fabric of the mundane - if only we know the right mystical words to speak, or symbols to draw.

Oddly enough, many of the best writers of horror get this right. A particularly powerful scene that still stays with me was from Stephen King’s The Shining. One of his characters was busy clipping a hedge, and the hedge animals come to life, stalking him. King crafts the scene wonderfully, animating the creatures in tiny stages, drawing the reader along from where the character thinks the altered hedge-animal is a trick of his mind to where the hedge – lion actually sticks its paw out of its tended patch and the reader experiences a little climax of horror together with the character.
In my opinion, the worst sort of fantasy is the sort that pulls a new over-powered hero or villain out of a hat every chapter, and each absurd twist in the plot features the writer wracking her brain for some way to top the previously unbeatable new character. What is the point of that? The reader can practically see the gears moving behind the crudely cut-out stage props as they lurch across the page in the guise of characters that we are supposed to care about. Now, I don’t mind a good zombie story, but I prefer my characters a little more rounded.

In The Man from the Tower, there is really only one (two at the outside) character that is ‘overpowered’ – and this is only in the context of the book, since there are other fantasy universes that he’d be a wimp in – and that’s the primary antagonist.

Part of the fun of writing it was to take a pretty ordinary hero, stick him in way over his head, and watch as he tries to flounder in deep waters without a deus ex machina courtesy of the author, to save him.

If you’d like to see whether I managed to get it right or not, post a comment on this blog. I’d like to give a copy of The Man from the Tower in .pdf form to the first five posters that have something to say.

Thanks for reading.

* Although, writers like Atwood have shown themselves adept at both utilizing literary techniques AND weaving a good story. I do not pretend to belong to that stratosphere.

When I presumed to make Yeshua bar Yosef (Christ) a character in my recently released time-travel novel TimeWarp, Inc., I had to make numerous decisions regarding how to portray him.

The physical part wasn't as difficult as one might imagine.  Though the New Testament leaves us with no physical description of the man, Isaiah 53:2 described the coming Messiah as rather ordinary looking.  No Max von Sydows or Jeffrey Hunters here.  I set aside the classical image of a blond-haired, blue-eyed European-looking gent for a swarthier dark-brown or black-haired fellow more in keeping with the Jews who inhabited Lower Galilee at the time.  Short-cropped hair and beards were the style among Jewish men then, so goodby to the luxuriant locks seen in so many paintings and movies.  One more fact: most skulls unearthed from the first-century holy land were rounder than the traditional long-faced image.  Decidedly so.

I also made my character well-formed.  Physically powerful, even.  This was not the namby-
pamby weakling depicted in Renaissance art.  Jesus was in the building trade.  That's hard work, especially back then.  Mathew 13:55 describes Jesus as the son of a tekton, while the Gospel Mark 6:3 calls Christ himself a tekton, the classical Greek term meaning, among other things, a builder or artisan.  That's a skilled jack-of-all-trades, rather than the translated "carpenter" we're accustomed to reading and hearing about.  In short, a tekton worked with wood, stone, even metals.  And, since the Romanized capital of Galilee, Sepphoris, lay only a few miles from Jesus' village of Nazareth, he and his father Joseph must have traveled there for the kind of gainful employment a village of four hundred people could not provide.  Greco-Roman cities were constructed largely of stone--black basalt from Capernaum in this case.  By necessity, Jeshua bar Yosef undoubtedly possessed masonry skills.  Strength too.  Ever try to lift a stone block?

Maybe I should say something about TimeWarp, Inc.  It is basically the story of an agnostic ex-soldier from the 21st century who travels back in time, where he meets and becomes Christ's best friend during the latter part of the "lost years" between Jesus' birth and ministry.  The Jeshua bar Yosef the reader meets is a year or so from going out into the world to proselytize.  He is a young man, not yet thirty.  Reading between the lines of the Gospels, it's easy to picture a Jesus who not only had his share of friends but also possessed a keen mind and sense of humor...which is exactly how I portrayed him.

What else do we know about Christ?  Here again, we must look between the scriptural lines.  We've read about his knowledge of the Torah in Luke, but what else can we be sure of?  (One) He spoke both Aramaic and Hebrew, as was common among Jews in Roman-occupied Palestine.  (Two) He probably also spoke Latin and possibly Greek.  Plying his trade in Sepphoris, Jesus would almost certainly have had to converse in the Roman tongue, and don't forget Greek was the trade language of the region, plus Alexander the Great conquered the area about 200 years before Jesus was born.  Also, most educated Romans were bilingual, speaking Greek fluently.  Moreover the Gospels were originally written in Greek.  (3) Christ had a keen understanding of human nature.  If the Gospels tell us anything, they tell us that.  (4) Jesus was almost Lincolnesque in his ability to tell stories or, in this case, parables: simple, easy-to-remember, image-filled allegories.  But, unlike our 16th President's tales, which were usually communicated for the sake of humor, Jesus' stories were meant to convey a subtle message central to the man's teachings.  If you want a good laugh, check out the practice parable the pre-ministry Jesus comes up with in Chapter Fifty-One.

That leaves one glaring question about my character.  Was he divine?  That is left pretty much up to the reader.  TimeWarp, Inc. is not a biblical supplement.  It is a story, a novel about time travel, after all.  Jesus, though painstakingly researched, is one of many characters, some from the 21st century, others from the time of Herod Antipas.  I will say, however, that the question of Jesus' divinity is a running argument among the time travelers--particularly my agnostic hero and his Christian girlfriend--throughout the book.

About the Book
When historian Gwen Hoffman first meets time traveler Mike Garvin, an ex-Special Forces weapons sergeant back from ancient Gaul where he was embedded as a centurion in Julius Caesar's elite 10th Legion, she is more than a little put off. Scarred and dangerous-looking, the man appears more thug than time traveler. Yet he is the person TimeWarp, Inc. is sending back in time to protect Jeshua bar Yosef (Christ) from twenty-first century assassins; the man Gwen was assigned to prepare for life in first-century Galilee. Gwen, of course, has no idea she and Garvin will become lovers. Nor does she realize she herself will end up in Roman Palestine, where she will not only meet Jesus but face danger alongside Mike in the adventure of a lifetime...

You can find out more about the author and the book here.

There are a lot of things I don't remember about finding out I had cancer in 2002.  But I do remember the day I began treatments:  today.  That's right.  Two days before Christmas, I had my first round of ABVD (adriamycin, bleomycin, vinblastine, and dacarbazine -- a.k.a. four ways to poison yourself in order to get healthy).  One of these drugs (vinblastine), as it turns out, is a kind of orange-red, which runs through your system and turns your pee, well, orange.  The doctors like to tell you this beforehand, because usually orange or red pee means something has gone seriously wrong with your innards.  Ironically, peeing orange after a treatment of vinblastine still means something is going on in your innards, but in a kind of good way (good bad?  Grey.  We'll go with that).  This was one of the few things I laughed about when I went through the chemo process.  After all, it is kind of hilarious, no?

In any case, I had my first treatment on Dec. 23rd, 2002 and spent Christmas feeling somewhat like garbage.  I'm fortunate in that most of the immediate side effects attributed to ABVD were fairly mild.  There was no intense vomiting (though I'd get a little nauseous at times).  I did feel like I'd gone to a party the night before, drank enough alcohol to kill a horse, and then woke up the following morning feeling pretty much as you'd expect:  extremely exhausted with a side of craptacular.

Beyond that, I don't remember much.  I remember that the nurse who worked at the oncologist's office was an incredibly nice lady with a lovely attitude and that my mom sat with me through most of the treatment (I owe a lot to my mom, if I'm being honest -- she took the brunt of all the financial stress, scheduling, and so on while I tried to combat my disease; she's a hero in my book and a testament to how important it is to have family (however you define it) during times like this).  And I remember feeling like crap while the drugs were funneling into my veins.  You literally feel them eating away at you, like those overnight effects of a nasty cold where you just know that you're going to wake up feeling awful.  The only good thing about chemo, I guess, is that they give you good pain killers and a lot of excuses to sleep and sleep and sleep.  I slept a lot... Oh, and you can pretty much eat whatever you want, so long as you get the necessary nutrients.  Why?  Because chemo ruins your appetite and tends to eat away at your body mass.  Anything to keep your weight from crashing and your body from completely eating itself alive is generally OK.  I made a lot of fruit smoothies...

So there you have it.  I'll blog about how I was diagnosed in the future.  But since today is kind of a milestone -- ten years, baby -- I thought I'd blog about it.  Plus, I recently had my ten year "checkup," in which my oncologist in Florida basically said "well, it ain't back, so you're good to go."  I like such appointments!

There's much more to tell, for sure.  I'll do my best to collect my memories.

P.S.:  Earlier this year, I was inspired by Jay Lake to blog about my experiences with cancer.  Jay has shared many of his experiences on his blog and was kind enough to talk about how terminal cancer affects him as a writer on my podcast.  He's an extraordinary human being.  I recommend you check out his books.

Would you clone yourself if you have the opportunity to do so?  I sometimes think it would be strange to clone myself (the scifi kind of cloning, where clones are literal, full-grown copies).  What kind of strange conversations would we have?  Would we each develop differently over time so that the only resemblance between us was physical?

Science fiction writers have asked these questions for decades.  Why?  I don't know.  Maybe we're secretly narcissists?  Or maybe there's just something fascinating about the idea that humanity is duplicable.  After all, if science fiction is, as many suggest, a genre deeply concerned with the human condition, then cloning is merely a "new" avenue through which we can interrogate what it is
that makes us human.  Cloning rests alongside intelligent robots, aliens, androids, and all manner of intelligent non-humans to remind us that whatever it is that makes us human and unique is hard to pinpoint.  If our minds and bodies can be duplicated, then what makes you "you" and me "me"?

This is why I find narratives about cloning, androids, aliens, and so on compelling.  Dawn by Octavia Butler, for example, considers whether humanity still exists when its genetics have been tampered with by an alien race (even for its own good).  Butler's narrative is rife with deep questions about human existence:  Is there something inherently wrong with humanity on a genetic level?  Do we cease to be human if we fix those genetic errors and mix ourselves with other species?  Does humanity deserve to exist if its genetics lead it toward self-destruction?
Or there are books like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, Marseguro by Edward  Willett, or Tobias Buckell's Xenowealth Saga.  Each interrogates the human condition in unique and vibrant ways, from questioning our compulsion towards enslavement and extermination (Dick) to the place of genetic modification in the human spectrum (Willett) to the integration of humans with machines and computers (Buckell).  Science fiction loves these sorts of questions.  It thrives on them, more so now than ever before -- because we're already asking ourselves these questions in real life.  If you clone a person or modify their genetics, are they still human?  Why or why not?  When we create artificial lifeforms with free will, do we have to rethink our legal framework?  If so, how do we change it?  If we're not already asking ourselves these questions today, we will have to sooner or later.  Humanity will have to change as we "play God."

And so I have to ask myself what I'd think if I met a clone of myself.  Would I react with violence, as so many humans in SF narratives have done, or would I react with philosophical confusion and curiosity?  I don't know.  What about you?

Fact One:  Apparently button-up shirts, nice ties, nice sweaters, and nice slacks are my new thing.  They're so much "my new thing" that I'm wearing them even though I have no intention of leaving the house (I'm currently sitting at a table on a houseboat that overlooks the Columbia).

Hello!  I'm a houseboat on the Columbia.  You'll have to excuse me for not having anything green growing.  It's winter, which typically means that nature decides to hibernate...unless you live in Florida, where nature is constantly trying to kill you...

There's still time to get to the shops and buy that special gift for your estranged husband or twice-removed cousin.  Okay, let's face it.  You're not buying gifts for them.  If you've popped onto this page, it's for one of three reasons:

1. You read this blog.
2. You told me to write on this topic.
3. You've got a weird scifi and fantasy geek child or friend and you have no idea what to get them.

The news that Game of Thrones is "in production" is nothing new.  That doesn't mean this little video from HBO isn't exciting!

Enjoy!

Now the most important question of the day:
How much are you looking forward to Season Three?

Guess what?  My coalpunk short story, "In the Shadows of the Empire of Coal," was recently published in Issue 1.11 of Bruce Bethke's Stupefying Stories!  I'm super excited about it (duh) and how you'll all snatch up a copy ($1.99 on Kindle or Nook -- iTunes links pending still).

If you really love me, you'll buy a copy and write a review.

Excuse me while I go squee in the corner!

I just donated, and you should too.  Need I say more?

Fine.  I will.

Triumph Over Tragedy is an SF/F anthology containing short stories from Elizabeth Bear, Robert Silverberg, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Tobias Buckell, Alex Bledsoe, Timothy Zahn, Philip Athans, and about two-dozen other folks.  In other words, there is a lot of freaking stuff in this book from a lot of freaking great folks.

The best part is that all the proceeds go to the Red Cross to help victims of Sandy.  R. T. Kaelin (the editor) is trying to raise $10,000.  They're at $1,234, with 27 days to go (that number will probably change by tomorrow).

So go donate.  December is the month of giving.  Some folks need $50 more than I do.