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.

Wednesday

They grouped in the road at the top of the rise and looked back. The storm front towered above them and the wind was cool on their sweating faces. They slumped bleary-eyed in their saddles and looked at one another. Shrouded in the black thunderheads the distant lightning glowed mutely like welding seen through foundry smoke. As if repairs were under way at some flawed place in the iron dark of the world.
– Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses

Happy birthday, Mr. McCarthy, sir.

My own day was largely uneventful, at least until my evening commute when the train car I was in flooded. I didn’t notice it for the longest time — long enough that my bag, which I make a habit of placing under my seat, got wet, and then so did my pants leg when I lifted the bag off the floor. I hoped at first that somebody had just spilled a large drink, but when I stood up before my station I saw that it was down the entire length of the car, a long puddle of water. At a guess, the toilet in the bathroom (which, as it happens, was in that car) overflowed.

There’s nothing quite like overflow from a communal toilet underfoot to liven up your evening commute.

Have I mentioned lately how much I don’t like the LIRR?

Beyond that, it was just a typical day, although I did manage to get a fair amount of work done, which was nice. And I finished reading John le Carré’s Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy. I decided to read it after seeing the trailer for the upcoming new movie version. (It was already made into a miniseries starring the late Alec Guinness.) I liked it a lot…but also didn’t. It can be kind of boring and obtuse at times, although I think somewhat deliberately, since it suggests that’s an awful lot of what spycraft is, sifting through old files, making connections, ferreting out the truth. There’s a lot to really like about the novel, which is full of inventive jargon, often suspensful, and often quite dryly funny. But my opinion’s split.

I do think I’ll watch the miniseries and movie, though.

And that was Wednesday: mass transit toilet water and Cold War espionage.

A night at the library

I spent another day wrasslin’ with a manuscript, taking all my corrections and putting them back into a Word document to send to the authors. We’ll see how quick they can respond, and if they agree to all my changes.

A few other e-mails aside, and a quick escape for lunch, that was pretty much my day. My evening was spent at an event called Speculating on Fiction at the New York Public Library. The guests included John Scalzi, Scott Westerfeld, Cat Valente, and of course my favorite author, Lev Grossman. Gavin Grant of Small Beer Press emceed, and Brian Slattery and friends provided music.

It was a lot of fun. John Sclazi was quite entertaining, essentially just repeating the story he tells here about The Shadow War of the Night Dragons, Book One: The Dead City. Cat Valente was maybe the best reader of her work, making me wonder what’s wrong with me that I’ve never read any of it yet, and Scott Westerfeld not for the first time made me want to read his Leviathan series. And even Grossman was good, reading from the forthcoming Magicians sequel, which, at least in the section he read, focuses more closely on one of the first book’s most woefully mistreated characters, Julia. It wasn’t good enough to convince me to actually read the new book — I don’t think anything could do that — but he didn’t seem out of place on the stage or anything like that.

(I did note that only one person had a question for him during the Q&A, about how he manages being a full-time critic for Time with writing a novel. But the man’s not tedious idiot. Anybody can write a lousy book. A really, really, really lousy book.)

Wednesday various