It’s the story, stupid!
Wherein I discover the world of Mundane SF
Futzing around with Technorati tags this AM, I found a link to writer Ian McDonald’s lengthy discussion of Mundane SF. As I mentioned recently, I always seem to be months if not years behind the times, and this is not exception. So if I betray my ignorance of the issues in this brief position piece, remember: you cannot embarrass me with my lack of knowledge because I have no shame. But you knew that.
Mundane SF comes to us from writer Geoff Ryman. (The linked page will lead you to the Mundane Manifesto as well as Ryman’s blog.) In essence, Ryman espouses a theory of SF which sticks strictly (think Madame Madge Dominatrix ‘strictly’) to the realm of the possible. No more faster-than-light travel, no wormhole travel, no interstellar trade with aliens, no time travel — nothing fun. It’s diamond-Hard SF.
If you write SF, Ian McDonald’s thoughtful discussion (linked above) is well worth your time. Here’s the line that had me applauding:
“It’s not just the Mundane Manifesto is totally unnecessary to produce the type of science-fiction it celebrates (one very very much worth celebrating, and that is due it’s time in the sun) , it’s that the genre has a much richer palate of colours. It’s a poor manifesto that would venerate Verne (tech-speculation) but consigns much of H.G. Wells’ core texts to the ‘bonfire of stupidities’ (interplanetary war, aliens, time-travel…). To me, one of the strengths of SF is that it is an allegorical literature: parables and myths of our age.” (emphasis mine)
A few of you out there have read my stuff; you folks will recognize why something like a “Mundane Manifesto” gets my blood pressure up. I could sally forth against Mundane SF, but as an unpublished author my words don’t carry much clout. YET. (Muwahahaha.) So, here’s one small voice making a pitch for reason.
The object of writing is entertainment.
There. I’ve said it. We’re not politicians and we’re not social planners. You can’t blame us for fostering an irresponsible attitude towards the environment. (So goes the claim of the Mundaners — by willy-nilly planet-hopping, we encourage the idea that we can rape this planet and move on to the next.) We’re performance artists, nothing more.
I’m not saying there’s anything bad about Mundane SF. I’m sure it has a healthy audience of readers — all those hard SF wonks who jeered when Han Solo used ‘parsec’ as a unit of time.
Just leave us allegorists alone, will you?
D.
Here’s how f’d up I am
So f’d up I can’t even mention him by name . . .
I mean, where did all this superstition come from? I know where I get my paranoia, but the superstition? It’s being a surgeon that does it. You begin believing in lucky charms. If you have a pediatric airway emergency on your hands, you begin praying — hell, you enter into full balls-to-the-walls bargain mode with God — no matter how agnostic you might be. You avoid black cats. You step over sidewalk cracks. You worry when the umbrella opens by accident indoors.
And you always, always knock on wood when you say something good.
Here’s the deal. A certain someone has been spending way too much time talking about his wonderful marriage. I like this guy, like him enough that what he’s doing is scaring the hell out of me. He’s calling down the bad juju.
Let me repeat: this is MY problem. Intellectually, I know that. Emotionally, I’m still rattled.
Fact: every time I tell someone how great my marriage is, Karen and I end up in knock-down take-no-prisoners warfare for at least a week. This generally follows within twenty-four hours of my verbal excess. True, we’ve always bounced back*, but you have to understand: we both learned to fight dirty as kids (Karen even moreso than me) so it’s never pretty.
Fact: we only fight about once a year, which is about how long it takes me to forget that I should keep my mouth zipped.
So, if that certain someone happens to wander this way and read this, please, please, for the love of God, knock on wood.
Your thoroughly f’d up friend,
D.
P.S.: NO GUESSES in the comments thread. I’m being purposefully vague to keep the bad juju confused.
*Knocking on wood, knocking on wood, knocking on wood.
Natalie Portman — shaved
I’m still curious whether outrageous name-dropping can bump traffic. Didn’t work using ‘Scott Savol’, but then, I guess he’s old news.
The Sunday New York Times has a cool story on the film V, an adaptation of Alan Moore’s graphic novel from the 1980s. The movie is slated for release in November. (You might need to subscribe to their site to read the article — I’m not sure.) Natalie Portman, head shaved, plays V’s apprentice, Evie.
The NYT story, by Sarah Lyall, makes a good point:
“In today’s skittish atmosphere, it takes a certain courage – or foolhardiness- to make a film that might be seen as endorsing terrorism, or at the very least, bomb-fueled anarchy. At a time when many studio films avoid what might offend, the makers of “Vendetta” have stepped out onto a lonely limb.”
My question: when will someone make a movie out of Moore’s other classic, Watchmen?
D.
Start at the fifth book in the series? Why the hell not!
Wolves Eat Dogs by Martin Cruz Smith
Arkady Renko and I go way back. Gorky Park came out in ’82, and, poor student that I was, I bought it as a paperback in ’84.
1984: First year of medical school. My mind was ripe for dermestid beetles munching flesh off human skulls. At that age, I hadn’t read much hard-boiled fiction, and the moody, angst-ridden Renko came as a breath of fresh arctic air compared to the science fiction characters I knew from childhood. (True, Neuromancer came out that year. That, too, was a kick in the head.) And the interlude sequence, two-thirds of the way through — when, suddenly, we are brought face to face with Renko’s nemesis, Pribluda — changed forever how I looked at fiction, both as a reader, and as a wannabe writer.
1989: the year of Gorky Park’s first sequel, Polar Star. I was still in medical school (don’t ask). Polar Star proved to me that a sequel could be every bit as good as the first novel. Having read at least one sequel to Dune (gotta be vague, here — I’ve struck those books from memory), I’d had my doubts. Gross-o-meter high point in Polar Star: the slime eels. Yum.
Red Square (1993) : This one almost put me off Smith indefinitely. Then my wife bought Rose (2000: not a Renko novel, but still a keeper). By now I was a grown-up. I’d done a bit of writing, enough that I could recognize Smith as a master technician. So I went back to the Renko series with book four, Havana Bay, and found our Investigator lower than ever. Near the beginning of the story, Renko is assaulted in his apartment. The usual rough stuff, right? No: there’s a twist (no spoilers here) which hooked me in to the rest of the book.
In Wolves Eat Dogs, Renko’s investigation of an apparent suicide leads him to the ruins of Chernobyl. What do you do with a burnout like Renko? Surround him with other burnouts! (I wonder if Smith ever worried whether his readers would say, “Enough already.”) The outskirts of Chernobyl is populated with soldiers, scientists, and folks too old to care about a little radiation. There’s a strong, unspoken feeling that Death stands just behind everyone’s shoulder.
The investigation begins in Moscow, where billionaire Pasha Ivanov, president of NoviRus, has jumped ten stories from the window of his luxury suite. There’s a bottle of salt in Ivanov’s hand, more salt on the windowsill, and a pile of it in the closet. NoviRus Senior Vice President Lev Timofeyev has a bloody nose . . . and before long, he shows up dead in a cemetery near Chernobyl. Unexpectedly dead, that is.
Perennial pain-in-the-ass Renko doesn’t think Ivanov jumped voluntarily. When Timofeyev’s body is found, Renko’s boss ships him down south to the Ukraine for a bit of hot time. In graduate school, we had to wear those little radiation badges so that we’d know when we’d been poisoned. Renko gets a Geiger counter and a bit of advice — don’t eat the locally grown food.
But, wouldn’t you know it, before long the Geiger counter has been retired, Renko’s scarfing down the local produce, lovin’ the local women and scrappin’ with the local brutes. You gotta love him.
Smith does everything right: three-dimensional characterization, clearly written action sequences, crisp dialog, a deft plot, and plenty of poignant drama. Some folks read Elmore Leonard to hone their craft; I read Smith.
D.
P.S. I think I may have gone way beyond the boundaries of good taste tonight with Bare Rump’s Diary. Box me about the ears if you are offended.
If Jesus were alive today . . .
From the New York Times Forums, by way of my wife:
If Jesus were alive today, he would be ethnically profiled and put on the United States’ No Fly list.
Okay, your turn. If Jesus were alive today . . .
(More later. Just taking a blog break from my NiP.)
D.
Scott Savol Exxxplicit Photos
John Scalzi’s blog today made me realize something: Karen and I don’t often say “I love you” to one another. Even when we were dating, one of us always managed to undercut the mood. Candlelight dinner, red wine, rack of lamb —
“Hey! My gawd, we’re having a romantic moment.”
“No, really? How did that happen?”
If I can allow myself to be truthful for one moment, here are the sweet nothings we repeat to one another nowadays:
Doug: Fix this.
Karen: You have no shame.
Ah, the sweet sound of honesty. You have no shame. Hence today’s title, Scott Savol Exxxplicit Photos. Hmm. Maybe I need a link to Scott Savol to really clinch the deal. Here’s a cute mugshot. And here are the Exxplicit Photos I promised.
Thanks to Demented Michelle for this idea. She told me she saw a substantial leap in blog traffic when she mentioned Savol. Failed bench scientist that I am, I feel compelled to test her theory.
Now that I have you all here, I’d like to point out a new link on my right margin. Click on the title below the ’59 T-Bird, and you will be led to my favorite published short story, “The Mechanic”.
Warning: it’s crime fiction, which you would soon have figured out from the URL. Didn’t want you SF fans to keep expecting an alien to pop up.
Crime Scene Scotland didn’t pay me a penny for this story. Told you I was a slut.
D.
Because I’m such a slut
See, I almost said whore. Almost. But a whore expects payment for his services, whereas I give mine up for free.
Here’s the deal. The other day, I learned about Technorati.com on John Scalzi’s The Whatever (linked on the right, if you’re curious). Technorati allows you to find out what other sites are linked to yours. Cool! So that’s how he tracked down my wife’s review.
Anyway, Technorati will put up a link to my blog on their Sci-Fi page as long as I link back to them. So if you just traipsed over here from Technorati, welcome! I’ll write SF for pocket change — I’ll do it for free. Not even a crack whore will do that for you.
Gotta go. Be back real soon.
D.
Paging Miss Manners
Have I mentioned my raging crush on Olivia Hussey?
‘Twas Olivia’s Juliet (in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet) who first made my heart race. How, how could she speak words of love to that pasty-faced, mealy-mouthed Leonard Whiting? Let’s just say I’ve gotten very good at squeezing my eyes shut during Whiting’s stage time. Also, I’ve developed a preternaturally good sense of timing during the balcony scene, allowing me to unstop my ears for Juliet’s, “Swear not by the moon, the inconstant moon.”
Juliet was a sweetie, but it was Olivia’s Mary who won my eternal love.
Here, I was going to run off at the mouth about how Romeo and Juliet is Juliet’s tragedy, and Jesus of Nazareth is Mary’s tragedy; but then I realized I don’t know crap about Romeo and Juliet, nor do I know much about Christianity. Sure, I read the Gospels in college, just to prove a point to Weyton Tam (a high school friend who was certain I’d convert if I read the New Testament), but when you get right down to it the story doesn’t stick to me. I’m sure I’ll get the details wrong — on R&J as well as Testament II — and I’ll have to fall back on that WEAK excuse, “It’s my blog and these are my opinions, even if they are based on my imperfect memory of the facts.”
Well, I don’t need anyone’s help to make me look like a fool, least of all my own.
So instead of drawing ill-advised parallels between Mary and Juliet, I’m going to change the subject and ask your advice on a tangentially related matter.
A patient called in a few days ago, asking for medication for a recurring problem. I phoned in a prescription for the same medications I’ve used in the past — the same ones which have helped her repeatedly — and I had my receptionist squeeze her into the schedule ASAP. Today.
“Hi!” I said. “How are you feeling?”
Her boyfriend, she said, took her to his pastor, who “laid on hands and healed me”. (Mind you, she’d started the medications the day I phoned them in.) As I proceeded to examine her and pronounce her well, she said, “Oh, thank you, Jesus. Praise Jesus. Thank you Jesus.”
I kept a civil tongue. “Whatever works,” I said.
“Have you been saved?”
Not even a I hope you don’t mind my asking but. There it was, in my lap; and you know, I’m tired of saying, “I’m Jewish,” only to be told condescendingly, “Oh, you people are very close to God,” or, “The people of the Book! How fortunate for you!” How good for me, even if I am going to hell.
Instead, I stupidly went for the funny line. (And it wasn’t even all that funny.)
“Trust me, I’m beyond salvation.”
I might as well have bent over.
“Oh, Dr. Hoffman, no one’s too late for salvation. Never ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever.” You get the point.
But, honestly, what am I supposed to say? I’m a Jew (even if I am agnostic, which my rabbi says is perfectly okay — I have a Jewish ethos, and that’s all that matters. Hey, he’s Reformed). I don’t believe in salvation, the divinity of Christ, the resurrection, heaven, or hell. I’m unconvinced as to the historicity of Christ. I appreciate the Christian philosophy as embodied in the Sermon on the Mount, but that’s as far as it goes. If I were forced to convert, like one of my conversos ancestors, I’d become a Jeffersonian Christian.
I’m sure there’s a correct answer to my question. Much of Miss Manners’ book is devoted to polite responses to rude questions. I’ve even read an earlier edition of her book, but — and I know I mentioned this recently — I have a memory like a sieve.
Maybe next time someone asks if I’ve been saved, I should say, “Yes, thank you very much; the Archfiend Himself has drawn my blood, and I have signed my name upon his parchment; yea, I walk with Belial, with Beelzebub, Lord of the Flies; I cavort with the Prince of Light and Darkness, the Foul Redeemer, the Monarch of Hell; and he has cleft me with his member, cold as winter’s ice, and left his mark upon me. How about you?”
I mean, if I’m going to be funny, I might as well be funny.
D.
Born-again virgins and other sex dwarves
Isn’t it nice
Sugar and spice
Luring disco dollies
To a life of vice
Listening to Soft Cell’s Sex Dwarf today, my spaghetti bowl brain meandered over to John Mason, wannabe groom to runaway bride Jennifer Wilbanks. Mason, you’ll recall, declared himself a born-again virgin. Stop snickering. I’ve heard all the jokes, and none of ’em were very funny. Rather than ridicule the guy, I began to wonder what would drive Mason to take a vow of chastity, and to call himself a “born-again virgin.” Ignore for the moment the obvious explanation (he’s a newbie born-again Christian, and thinks “born-again” is a way cool adjective), and consider the possibility that maybe he really, truly wants to be a virgin again.
And now, ask yourself this question: if you could have it all back in a Samantha Stevens nose-twitch, would you take the offer? Would you recapture your lost innocence?
All of her lovers
All talk of her notes
And the flowers
That they never sent
And wasn’t she easy
And isn’t she
Pretty in pink
The one who insists
He was first in the line
Is the last to
Remember her name
There’s a bit in The Rocky Horror Picture Show where Frank-N-Furter sings, “I want to come again,” and the audience responds, “So does Brad!” The joke being that Frank-N-Furter has just deflowered not only Janet (Susan Sarandon) but also her beau, Brad (Barry Bostwick), and Brad isn’t complaining. Rocky Horror delights in the loss of innocence, and it’s not alone. Think of The Graduate, Summer of ’42, Dangerous Liaisons, and, for you youngsters, American Pie. Here in America, anyway, we really seem to love cherry-popping.
But it’s a love-hate relationship. Apparently, we draw the line at single-digit-age homosexual pedophilia; Fox News convicted Jackson even after he’d been acquitted, and that seemed to be the mob’s reaction, too. Only the cognoscenti — like author-lawyer Andrew Vacchs — seemed unsurprised by the acquittal.
and you shouldn’t have to pay for your love
with your bones and your flesh…
Loss of innocence isn’t necessarily sexual. When Jackson’s “little friends” think back to their time at Neverland, what will sting the most — memories of undercover cuddles (at least), or of their parents, who put them in that position (and for what?)
Deflowering is an inadequate metaphor for loss of virginity, which is itself an inadequate metaphor for the loss of innocence. This has nothing to do with sex. It has everything to do with the sudden ejection from childhood’s illusory sense of security.
Abuse victims lose it in one acid instant. The rest of us lose it by degrees. For me, two moments stand out above all others. The first occurred soon after my high school girlfriend and I broke up. We’d only been together for three years, but at 19, that seemed like forever. There came an evening when we finally said goodbye to one another for good. For keeps. We wouldn’t see each other ever again — quite possible, too, since I was going to college 400 miles away. And I felt like a bird kicked from the nest long before he’d been fledged.
The second time: roughly two years later. I’d been with Karen for about a year, and we were sure we’d get married. We had it all planned out — I’d been accepted to med school at Stanford, and she’d been accepted to Stanford’s graduate program in Chemical Physics. We were down in Southern California visiting my parents over Christmas vacation when she got sick. A bit of numbness at her ankle, spreading up her leg. Once she got to the hospital, things happened fast. On the way to X-ray (this was pre-MRI, mind you), a nurse gave her a shot — “To shrink the tumor,” she said. They let me stay with Karen in the hospital room that night, which surprised me since we weren’t married and this hospital had a bunch of nuns running around in it. They treated us both really nice. This was scary.
I think I had my big moment the following night. The tumor scare had passed, but the diagnoses the doctor tossed around weren’t too reassuring (even at that early date, I think MS was fairly high on the list). So we didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed increasingly likely that it would not go away anytime soon.
That night (don’t laugh) it struck me that life wasn’t fair. Yup. That was the first time it hit home. It should have hit home a long time before that (another story for another time), but I guess it never did.
She waves
She buttons your shirt
The traffic
Is waiting outside
She hands you this coat
She gives you her clothes
These cars collide
Maybe we focus on the sexual angle because that, at least, is a pleasant (or at least humorous!) memory. And, maybe for some people, the loss of virginity does equate with the loss of innocence. But for me, and I suspect for most people, loss of innocence meant coming to terms with the real world. I wouldn’t take that innocence back no matter how much you paid me — because it would only mean having to lose it all over again.
John Mason: abstain all you like. You can’t regain your flower. You wouldn’t want to.
D.
Howdy, neighbor!
A very special welcome for the lovely, talented, and soon to be published novelist Lisa Adams, who I hope will be stopping by sometime soon. She may never come back here, or she may beat me up the next time she sees me. You never know with some folks.
Lisa works as the Yurok Indian Tribe’s in-house counsel. That means we have two lawyers here. Scott, Lisa. Lisa, Scott. This painting is for the both of you:
I’m sure either of you could supply the identity of the judge in question. And I’m certain this is all quite innocent — doubtless he’s reviewing some vital piece of evidence.
I’d write more today, but I was up late last night taking this
out of this
I pinched that X-ray off the web here at emedicine, since in my opinion, image-napping is a far smaller sin than violating doctor-patient confidentiality.
I’ll try to do better tomorrow. Hi Lisa!
D.