personal

A fantastic day

All day long, and even since late last night when I think it first happened, I’ve had what I think is maybe the single itchiest mosquito bite on the inside of my left leg. It’s driven me quite mad throughout the day.

But this evening, despite all that, I went back to the Center for Fiction in Manhattan for a panel discussion on Why Fantasy Matters. It was about as interesting, but a lot more on point, as the utopia/dystopia panel on Monday. I’m a big fan of Kelly Link, and I quite enjoyed Naomi Novik’s first Temeraire book. And if I’ve yet to read anything by Felix Gilman and my experience with Lev Grossman’s writing has been less than terrific, everybody had a lot of interesting things to say about the genre. Including Grossman, who I actually quite like as critic of (and apologist for) fantasy, and whose much better known novels I may just have to pretend don’t exist. (Seriously, if I haven’t made it clear, I hated The Magicians.)

Two things I particularly liked. First, Grossman’s acknowledgment that “one thinks a lot of grandiose and unacceptable things as one is starting a novel.” And Novik’s writing advice: find writing that you like and critique it. I find this is one of — possibly the only, but certainly one of — the benefits of having a slush pile, as I do with Kaleidotrope. Figuring out why a piece of fiction does or doesn’t work, and putting that critique into words, can be valuable experience for a writer. (It also doesn’t hurt to see the other side of the rejection letter. It’s almost never fun for anybody.) You can learn just as much, if not more, from giving critique as from receiving it, Novik said (to a nodding Kelly Link beside her).

There are a few more events this month at the Center that I may be going to, but that’s it for this week. Onward to a perfectly ordinary, realistic Thursday.

Regular old Tuesday

I wore a jacket today. Of course, that’s the closest thing to exciting that happened all day.

I did finish reading N.K. Jemsin’s Hugo-nominated novel The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms, which was part of the voter packet, for the awards I ended up not voting on. I actually finished reading the novel last night, except for a couple of lines, but my e-book app suggested I still had several pages to go. Had I actually flipped those pages, I would have discovered they were taken up mostly with (fairly unnecessary) glossaries and other appendices.

Still, I liked the book. It’s inventive and entertaining, imagining not just a fantasy world but a cosmology of gods and gods imprisoned in semi-mortal form. I’m not rushing on to read the sequel — which, as I understand it, takes place in the same world but is a stand-alone book — but mostly just because I need a brief break from fantasy novels.

I started Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder this morning.

If the world ended on a Monday, would anybody notice?

I wish I’d worn a jacket today.

It got cooler unexpectedly — although unexpected only if you discount the fact it probably ought to have been cooler a whole lot sooner, that days with highs of 80 degrees (something like 25 Celsius?) maybe aren’t the norm for late September or early October. But just a week ago, I was wearing short-sleeved shirts to work, and I didn’t think I needed more than the long-sleeved shirt (plus T-shirt beneath) I decided to wear today. It was a little cool, but I figured once the sun came up, I’d be fine.

And I was, but I kind of wish I’d worn a jacket. The sun didn’t come up all that much.

Metaphorically, though, it came up pretty nicely.

Oh, sure, there was that police shooting around the corner from my office. I mean literally around the corner. It happened last night apparently, and today it was just a crime scene investigation that had the block cordoned off and blocked to traffic. But still: yikes.

Otherwise, though, things were good, even for a Monday. I discovered first thing that Kaleidotrope had again been reviewed in Locus. The review, of the past two issues, is kind a mixed bag — Rich Horton singles out a couple of stories for praise, but he’s not uncritical of them — but it was still great to see the zine reviewed in those pages. (Even if the physical pages proved exceptionally difficult to track down. I eventually purchased the PDF direct from Locus, decided to re-up my lapse subscription in the process.)

Then this evening, after work, I attended a short panel discussion ostensibly on Utopia/Dystopia at the Center for Fiction. It was the start of a month-long series on fantasy and science fiction at the Center, most of which I’m actually (right now) planning on attending, and it was interesting, if not exactly what was advertised. Though authors Anna North, Kathleen Ann Goonan, and Charles Yu seemed to be, occasionally, trying to steer the conversation back towards all things utopian and dystopian, I’m not sure moderator DongWon Song was on the same page as everyone else. The discussion, for the most part, was a lot broader, about being a science fiction writer and the differences (real and market-imposed) between it and “mainstream” or “literary” fiction.

As such, it was interesting, but nothing especially new. The debate over where genre begins and ends, the benefits and drawbacks to writing within it, has been raging for years.

Still, it was interesting. Charles Yu’s How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe was one of the best books I read last year, and I enjoyed Goonan’s Queen City Jazz well enough years ago. (I thoroughly gave up on the first of the sequels just this year, however, and I felt a little guilty about that sitting there. I may feel guiltier on Wednesday, when the panel on fantasy includes Lev Grossman.) I’d never heard of North before, though I thought she spoke quite knowledgeably about science fiction, and she seemed the most determined to (subtly but repeatedly) steer the conversation back towards the end of the world.

No small surprise since that’s kind of what her book is about.

Still, these seemed like good people to be talking about utopia and dystopia and the contrast between the two. That what they mostly discussed seemed closer in spirit to the topic of Margaret Atwood’s upcoming talk — one of the few Center events this month I think I won’t be attending — was amusing, especially since it was only back in March that I went to hear Atwood herself speak about utopias and dystopias. (She favors the term of her own coinage, ustopias.)

Noonan defended her most recent novel, which apparently posits an alternate history, as not a utopia, as if that in and of itself was a dirty word. Changing some things just creates new problems, she said — I think rightly — which led later into a discussion of whether utopias are even possible. The odds of something terrible happening, even if it’s not specifically another ice age (North) or nanotech gone wild (Goonan) or “time travel as a means of regret” (Yu), are a lot better than a perfect world. The real world, after all, isn’t perfect, and it’s full of fallible people.

In many stories, in fact, dystopias are the price the characters (and/or world) pay for the creation (or failed creation) of someone else’s utopia. Perhaps every dystopia is simply a failed utopia, or the nostalgia for a lost one. Specific examples cited by the authors (and by the one audience member who really asked a question about the topic) included Ursula K. Le Guin’s “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country, H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine, Atwood’s own The Handmaid’s Tale. These are often utopias at first glance — Wells’ Eloi, for instance, who live a life of comfort and ease — with a dystopia lurking beneath — the Morlocks, literally beneath, toiling in slavery underground. Or they are stark dystopias — Atwood’s repressive Republic of Gilead — brought about when someone — in this case the leaders of Gilead — attempt to impose their brand of utopia on the world. As North pointed out, the villains in dystopias tend to think they’re creating utopias, much like supervillains in comics.

“There’s always a mad scientist,” added Goonan.

Yu’s book, by contrast, is more a “personal dystopia,” or rather “not a dystopia, but just a super-sad universe.” Still, he talked about being liberated in his writing when he actually created that universe, gave it structure, form, and rules. “I was bound by my own constraints,” he said, and that’s what was so freeing as a writer.

So, in all, it was an interesting evening, if not exactly what I’d been led to expect. I didn’t stay for the book signing or wine reception afterward, but I’m glad I went all the same.

Even if, on the walk back to my subway, I kind of wish I’d worn a jacket.

Sunday, that’s my fun day

I did the Sunday crossword puzzle today. I wasn’t impressed by it at all. You can read more about the puzzle, along with answers, here, if you’re so inclined. It’s come to this: I’m regularly — like, once a week, only very occasionally more — reading a crossword puzzle blog.

I watched yesterday’s season finale of Doctor Who. I thought it was entertaining, and did a reasonable enough job of bringing some big things to a satisfying enough conclusion, but…okay, minor spoilers here: I’m not so sure I like how they took what’s basically a running dumb meta joke about the television series — one that Moffat himself made before, actually, in “The Girl in the Fireplace” — and make it canon. See, it’s not like anyone calls him that; that’s just what the show is called. Minor quibble, so a minor spoiler. If you haven’t seen the episode, I’m actually still being really vague. Maybe too vague even if you have seen it. Have any of you seen it? Ultimately, I really enjoyed the episode, even if I feel like (more minor spoilers) Moffat went back to last season’s finale a bit much — “The Wedding of River Song” bears at least a passing resemblance to “The Big Bang” — and even if I’m not so sure splitting the season as they did really worked in their favor. “A Good Man Goes to War” is a good finale, and “Let’s Kill Hitler” is a good place to start again, but there’s a loss of overall momentum by splitting them apart. Still, whatever else, you certainly can’t fault Moffat for not telling ambitious enough stories.

I also watched another episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, which I’ve slowly been re-watching (again). There’s not much to say about it — except that, even in the first season when it was still finding itself and defining its characters, the show feels true to itself and well defined. As opposed to, say, those other two Trek spin-offs, Voyager and Enterprise. I’ve slowly been watching Enterprise as well recently, for the first time, and there I do think I’ll have more to say at some point. It’s too problematic a show, despite my genuine appreciation for some of what it does, for me not to say something more. (I’m not sure I can bring myself to rewatch Voyager. I quit pretty early on the first time around.)

I played Portal a little more. I’m very late to the party with this, but it really is a great game. Maddening, challenging, often laugh-out-loud funny — I’d highly recommend it if you’re one of the few people who have yet to play it. (Or was I the last?) I’m very nearly finished, but I tell you: I could have picked a better time — like when I didn’t have an issue of Kaleidotrope to finish laying out — to download a really complicated computer game.

And lest you think I spent all day playing games and watching TV — oh, I also re-watched the pilot episode of Fraiser for some reason. But! I also replaced the air filter on my car, so there’s that — I wrote this:

The aliens built John Wilkes Booth to kill us all, but the man fell in love with the theater and became a celebrated actor of the American stage. It wasn’t until 1865 that the aliens were able to correct for the glitch in his genetic engineering, to overwrite the false memories they had implanted in the humanoid Booth, and redirect him toward their original course of action. By that point, though, the best Booth could do was assassinate a sitting president — which always seems like a big deal in theory, but in practice, in the greater scheme of things, doesn’t often amount to much at all.

And even there, Booth nearly gave the game away when he jumped to the stage and his new programming temporarily shorted out along with his broken leg. Eyewitnesses, and posterity, would later report that Booth had shouted “Sic semper tyrannis” — “thus always to tyrants” — but it was really the alien language of his creators that he shouted, not classical Latin, warning everyone assembled at Ford’s Theater of the giant mothership poised to descend upon the Earth and the alien armada lying in wait somewhere in orbit around Neptune.

It’s questionable what any of the other patrons of the theater that evening could have done with that knowledge even if they had understood Booth, or recognized the string of coordinates his fleeing outburst had inadvertently revealed. Even then, America’s space program was still in its infancy. The operational base on Mars was still manned only by automated drones — Seward’s Second Folly, detractors called it, none too originally — and the Civil War with the lunar colonies had driven Lincoln to distraction.

And yet the aliens called it off, their plans to destroy us all, to subjugate and terraform the planet to their liking, to infiltrate humanity with genetic spies sent to do their bidding. How close to that precipice we came in 1865, we may never know. We can only be glad that the aliens lacked the temerity for a full assault when Booth (and his robotic conspirators) failed to deliver on their earlier promise. What the aliens had cooking in their labs, America of that turbulent age would never know.

Only a century later, in 1963, when the aliens returned to unleash mechanical spiders to kill President Kennedy, would we meet the true face of this global threat.

Of course, they weren’t the same aliens. That accounts for some of it. Conspiracy theorists have tried for years to draw parallels between Lincoln and Kennedy’s assassinations, but the simple truth remains: the aliens that attacked them both were different.

Only the time-traveling werewolf Nazis were the same.

Yeah, I think there was maybe some Doctor Who on the brain there.

ETA: I finished Portal. It would appear the cake is a lie.

Satursomeday

I spent the day mostly doing what I planned on doing yesterday: working on the layout of Kaleidotrope‘s next issue, the last one that’s likely to need this particular type of layout. I started, way back in 2006, creating issues entirely in Microsoft Word, but at least half of them have since been built in Microsoft Publisher. It doesn’t have all the bells and whistles of a Quark or PageMaker, but it also didn’t come with their hefty price tags. I didn’t finish, and I’m still waiting on a couple of stories, but I’m keeping my fingers crossed that I can have copies in the mail and to reviewers before the month’s end.

Maybe by then the weather will actually start seeming like October.

Otherwise… I mowed the front and back lawn, hopefully for the last time this season. (Fall’s gotta start sometime right?) I bought some overpriced caramel corn outside the post office to support the local Cub Scouts. I got a shirt back from the cleaners completely ripped down the back, with the not at all satisfactory explanation that “it must have come to them like that.” (They didn’t charge me, but the shirt’s ruined, thrown in the garbage.) And I watched The 39 Steps, a thoroughly enjoyable Hitchcock thriller.

A quiet not especially eventful Saturday — the shirt and lawn notwithstanding — but a decent one.