writing

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.

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.

Galaxy of the Venom Androids

Today I managed to finish the Sunday crossword, watch this week’s episode of Doctor Who, and write this, based on a number of prompts:

“Donkeys kill more people annually than plane crashes,” said Troy, “and vending machines kill more people annually than both combined. Daffodils are worse than killer bees; cantaloupes are more dangerous than atomic bombs. It’s just statistics, plain and simple. The fact is, people are scared of all the wrong things.”

Perry was letting him talk. Troy could go on for hours, maybe days, if you let him, but telling him to be quiet almost always had the opposite effect. Say anything like “shut the hell up already, would ya?” and Troy would treat that like a personal challenge. Really, you couldn’t win, so it was best to not even try. Let him talk and maybe he’d get tired of his own voice too.

Perry had mentioned, in passing, that he didn’t like flying. He used to do it all the time for business, before the accident. Hop on a jet one day in Atlanta, wake up the next morning in Kazakhstan or…well, okay, fine, actually Wilmington, back home in Delaware. The company never sent Perry overseas, much less to Kazakhstan. Though wouldn’t that have been funny? He was trying not to lie — that was part of what they’d been working on since the accident — but it was really just for effect, just a joke, so really it was okay, right?

The point is, Perry had never liked it, never grown accustomed to the constant travel, the long layovers, the cramped cabins, the other passengers. And he’d never learned to be okay with the feeling that he was putting his life in some over-tired flight crew’s collective hands every time he flew. Every time he saw a flight attendant so much as yawn on the redeye, he’d be awake for hours.

But it wasn’t like he was phobic. He just didn’t like flying.

But there was Troy, ready to jump in with a wealth of whatever he called them, statistics. How much of what he blathered was even true? How much was he making up right there on the spot? And wouldn’t he just shut the hell up already?

Dr. Lemmell was trying to help Perry with these anger issues, what they’d agreed to think of as “anger issues,” and they’d also agreed it was better just letting Troy talk. It wasn’t fair that he was dominating group, and that he did this every time, whether it was Perry’s turn to talk or one of the others. Just last week, Sheldon, that big dumb lump of a guy everybody said was here because he’d murdered somebody, maybe his wife — only that was dumb, because this wasn’t a jail, and even Perry’s accident hadn’t hurt anybody else, too much — Sheldon was talking for maybe the first time in days, sharing something more than a casual grunt or two in session, and Troy had started rattling on about the weather in Venezuela or how you tell if a poison dart frog was really dangerous, or some other kind of nonsense like that. Perry was learning not to bother listening.

He was never going to get out of the ward if he kept focusing his anger on Troy. He’d be stuck here another six months. And then, after that, he’d be right back where they wanted him, in the Galaxy of the Venom Androids, most dangerous place there was. Even worse than the redeye back to Wilmington, statistics be damned. And Perry was not going to let that happen.

You can probably tell what some of the writing prompts were just by reading it. Anyway, that’s pretty okay for a lazy Sunday, right?

Tuesday

I neglected to mention yesterday one of the other weird things that happened, that made the day feel just slightly more unreal that usual. This week marks the United Nations General Assembly, and since our office is only a couple of short blocks from the UN itself, there’s been an increased police presence in the neighborhood. To the point that the streets between 2nd and 1st Avenue are blocked entirely, by both police barricades and officers, except to people working at or around the UN itself.

Our office is on 3rd, the UN is on 1st, and on nice days, I often eat my lunch in a little parklet — basically just a few benches in a building’s courtyard — in between. But not yesterday. “Where you going?” the police officer asked me, as I clearly wasn’t wearing an ID badge. “I guess not over there,” I said. I found another park to eat my chicken sandwich in.

I also received confirmation that my 3-Day Novel submission was received. To which my first thought was, oh yeah, I wrote a 3-day novel. It’s actually all kind of a blur. I still haven’t even re-read it, but I guess this means somebody’s going to. That’s got to be a tough job, reading and judging all of those novels written feverishly over three days. I suppose you score points just for being comprehensible after a certain point.

And that’s about it for today: more about yesterday. We had a roundtable discussion/presentation this afternoon on commissioning new textbooks, which isn’t strictly speaking something I do in my day-to-day, but I am involved in the process as a development editor, and there’s been some weird overlap at times. (I’m not an acquiring editor, but with a few revised editions from our inherited backlist, I’ve kind of become one at times.)

It was too rainy to really go looking for parks to eat my lunch in, but you still can’t miss the police presence in the neighborhood, directing car and foot traffic alike. Today’s the day the General Assembly really kicks off, and with the talk likely to center around Libya and Palestine, it’s little wonder security has been beefed up.

Still plugging away at edits for Kaleidotrope‘s next issue, still not getting enough writing of my own done. But the week is still young…ish.