Why I love 1940s science fiction

Is this the best first line ever?

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Torchwood

Was it just me, or did the Torchwood: Children of Earth miniseries kick total ass?

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Go figure

So i picked up a Theodore Sturgeon anthology at one of my all time favorite used book stores today.

What a surprise.

Ninety per cent of the stories in it sucked.

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This has turkey written all over it

I'm not a big fan of movie remakes in general, and when someone decides to redo one of the best movies of all time, they better have a damn good approach. This just ain't gonna do it.

In nice stroke of plotting, the filmmakers come up with a reasonable explanation for why Klaatu looks human: He's really an entity made of light, and decides to visit Earth in human form to experience life the way the locals do! He comes in a gooey womb-like bio-suit which incubates him for a while before peeling off to reveal Keanu Reeves. If this still sounds hokey, remember that in the old version, Klaatu stepped off the ship fully formed in a silver nylon spacesuit.

Really!? He's made of light!* And he wants to experience human life like a local? Let's just hope he doesn't drink any green alcohol or get hooked on television, maybe he'll be OK. (Noted - it looks like a remake of that movie is coming out next year. Oy.)

It gets better.

"In re-imagining this picture, we had an opportunity to capture a real kind of angst that people are living with today, a very present concern that the way we are living may have disastrous consequences for the planet," Reeves said. "I feel like this movie is responding to those anxieties. It's holding a mirror up to our relationship with nature and asking us to look at our impact on the planet, for the survival of our species and others."

Great. Not only are they remaking one of the classics, they're throwing in a remake of An Inconvenient Truth for the same price.

I think i'll stay home and watch this on DVD.

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* One of the best parts of the science fiction game, for me, as a reader and viewer, is the "how did that get to be that way" challenge. It's not necessary, and seldom desirable, to spell out all the details of how the miners on Voltan 6 were transformed into worker drones of the intergalactic bee hive as a result of breathing in the virus laden dust 600 feet below the surface of their arid planet which had been deposited there millenia earlier in the first wave of insectoid colonization. A skilled writer who understands the tropes of the genre well can provide enough information while telling the story that we can figure that out for ourselves.

The inability to do that is what killed Contact, for example. Well, that and Matthew McConaughey.

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Culture

Had dinner last night with a few friends and fellow bloggers, and at some point one of us (not me) made a reference to threadfall, from Dragonriders of Pern, the science fantasy series by Anne McCaffery.

The sad thing is, all of us got it.

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John Kessel at Quail Ridge Books tonight

I've been a fan of John Kessel's science fiction since i found his story "The Lecturer" in Michael Bishop's essential mid-80s anthology Light Years and Dark. Kessel doesn't publish a lot of fiction. A few stories a year, perhaps, and a novel, it seems, every decade or so. But as Spencer Tracy is supposed to have once remarked of Katherine Hepburn, "what there is, is cherce." His work almost always appears on the Nebula Awards ballot, and in the best of the year anthologies. He won a Nebula for his story "Another Orphan," in which a Chicago commodities trader awakes one morning and discovers he's become a minor character in the novel Moby Dick.

Kessel's new book, The Baum Plan for Financial Independence and Other Stories has just been published. He'll be reading from it tonight at Quail Ridge Books in Raleigh, and on Tuesday, April 22 at the Regulator, on Ninth St. A review/interview with MetroNC is available here. Another, in ForeWord magazine, is here.

John has graciously taken time out of his schedule to answer a few of my questions, as well, and i'm sharing that conversation here. With luck, part 2 will appear next Tuesday.

DE: By my count, this is your second story collection since your last novel, "Corrupting Dr. Nice." What is it about the story format that appeals to you so much? Do any of these pieces fit into a larger work that we haven't seen yet?

JK: I have always liked the short story a lot. I grew up reading classic sf stories in anthologies and magazines of the 1950s and 60s. I like the compression of the short story, the way it can produce strong effects in a small space. The intensity and clarity, yet allusiveness, of a good short story is something unavailable to the novel. When a story is done right, it is a complete and perfect work of art. Though I’d hesitate to claim that for my own work, I do aspire to produce such stories.

Not to say I do not also admire novels and aspire to write them. Just as my short time travel stories featuring the cynical Detlev Gruber are set against the same background as my novel Corrupting Dr. Nice, so the lunar stories in The Baum Plan for Financial Independence are related to a novel I have worked on set in this world of lunar colonies, including the Society of Cousins. “Sunlight or Rock” is actually the first chapter of that book. But it‘s far from being a book yet.

DE: At least two of these stories (Baum Plan, and It's All True) were originally published online. We've seen the hysteria in the music business over the failure to figure out a business model for the 21st century. How do you think digital distribution is affecting/will affect the fiction publishing business? For myself, I still prefer the bookstore and the serendipity of finding something on the shelf that I can pick up and hold in my hands. We're losing that with music (in many towns, we've already lost that.) Will fiction go the same way?

JK: I love books as physical objects, and I think I always will. I think we have a ways to go before digital books or alternatives replace them. But it’s clear that the status quo is not going to persist indefinitely. I do think something will be lost when readers can no longer, for instance, wander through the stacks of a great library looking at the books ranked on the shelves. Many times in doing research I would go to a section of the library looking for a particular book from the catalog, and end up checking out a book that sat next to it on the shelf. I don’t think digital indexing yet allows that easily if at all.

I was happy to see those stories published online (at SciFiction, edited by Ellen Datlow) but that website, though it paid well, was pretty much a PR arm of the SciFi channel, and thus never was expected to earn money. So when the channel retrenched, the web magazine ended. Until someone figures out a good business plan to make a profit publishing fiction online (such as Fictionwise, which has a dozen of my stories available, and which will offer The Baum Plan for download) I do wonder how this will play out.

As a story writer and reader, I just want there to be a market enabling such work to reach an audience. It would be nice if that market paid well enough for everyone to make a profit. I’m prepared to move to new platforms if that’s necessary.

DE: The stories that make up The Lunar Quartet (I believe this is the first time they're published together?), make up the heart of the book. I think they're your most direct exploration of gender issues to date. I've just finished reading the Alice Sheldon biography "James Tiptree, Jr: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon." What are some of your thoughts on how the role of gender in science fiction has changed over the 40 years since the first Tiptree stories appeared in print?

JK: I read Tiptree in the 1970s before he was revealed to be Alice Sheldon. Along with Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, and later writers like Karen Joy Fowler and Maureen McHugh, Sheldon has been a great influence on me. Add in Octavia Butler, Nancy Kress, Gwyneth Jones, Kelly Link, and a dozen others, and you realize how much the sf field has been changed by women writers and the exploration of gender issues. Along with my becoming the father of a daughter, this has caused me to think a lot about gender and male/female relations over the last fifteen years or so.

I think this exploration has been one of the most exciting things to happen to SF in my lifetime. Not all the stories that have come out of that have been great, but that’s true of any movement. By this point, it’s not exactly a movement anyway—I don’t see many writers attempting to write to a program or ideology. That’s what makes this work so interesting. It would be hard to write a serious sf or fantasy story today without thinking at least a little about gender issues.

DE:The underlying question of all SF is, I think, "what if?" It's why, even though much of your work doesn't have a lot of science fiction elements in it, it’s definitely SF. I'm thinking about a story like "The Franchise," which asks the question, "what if George H.W. Bush and Fidel Castro had been better baseball players, and pursued their careers in the big leagues rather than their respective capitols. When did you realize that you were asking these "what ifs" that could only be answered in using the language of science fiction? Or, in layman's terms, "where do you get your ideas?"

JK: Since as far back as the 1970s, I’ve thought that much of my fiction is as much fantasy as it is sf. But the term “fantasy” has come to be owned over that period by Tolkienesque “secondary universe” or medieval fantasy. I don’t write that. So I suppose I’d call my own work in the non-technological mode “speculative fiction” or “slipstream.”

You are right that I generally start with some “what if” speculation, and I proceed as rigorously as I can from that initial idea. The way that a sf writer, if he were writing about a Mars colony, would do tons of research on the Martian environment and the technologies that would be necessary to live there, so I, in writing a story like “Pride and Prometheus,” (which conflates Frankenstein with Pride and Prejudice) did a lot of research on life in the early 19th century England, and carefully fit my story into the actual narratives of Shelley and Austen, making it work as much as possible into the received framework of those tales, and using details of that actual language, social environment, and science of the times.

This is another way of saying, I think, that even when I’m writing literary fantasies, I still think like a science fiction writer. Kim Stanley Robinson has said that the closest genre to science fiction is historical fiction. I think he’s got a point. I am always concerned with grounding my speculations in the real world. To my mind, that makes them more interesting. The juxtaposition of the strange with the mundane is what gives sf much of its force.

And these speculations are irresistible to me. A story about the imaginary baseball careers of Bush and Castro offers great opportunity to explore politics and history and the American mythology of the hero, just as crashing together the husband-seeking heroines of Jane Austen with the bride-seeking Frankenstein’s monster offers an opportunity to think about men and women, what they want from one another, what they expect from marriage. When I come up with something like that, I can’t help but write about it.

John's at Quail Ridge Books tonight, reading from The Baum Plan. By the way, the book is available as a free download from Small Beer Press. But support a local author and buy a damn copy, OK?

Continue reading John Kessel at Quail Ridge Books tonight

End of an era

He was never my favorite SF writer growing up. I think Asimov's geeky sense of humor and Bradbury's overwhelming nostalgia for the years before puberty resonated better with my 12 year old self. But it would be remiss of me not to note the passing of Arthur C. Clarke, whose story/script for 2001: A Space Odyssey, released almost exactly 40 years ago, finally and permanently brought science fiction into the mainstream of American culture.

Rest in peace.

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Insights

I've always enjoyed reading William Gibson, despite the fact that one of his short stories was turned into one of the worst movies ever made. Chalk that one up to some godawful casting and a director who simply didn't get it. I've always thought that Bladerunner, a movie which did get it, at least in presenting a future which felt exactly like you thought the future would feel, owed as much to the vision which Gibson was articulating back in the early 80s as to anything that was actually on Philip K. Dick's pages.

So, in the four days that Soon-to-be Mrs. Dependable and i have been down at our oceanfront hideaway taking care of final details for our upcoming nuptials (the officiant and the cake are confirmed, i've located the best oysterman and shrimp seller and figured out the workings of both the hot tub and the multi-zone stereo system), i've had enough time listen to the surf and chow down on Spook Country, the latest from the master of cyberpunk.

this is, i'm pretty sure,Gibson's first novel (not counting The Difference Engine) set in the past, February 2006, to be precise. In his fiction, Gibson has always been describing, perhaps midwifing, a certain late 20th, early 21st century world that has, after a long and painful delivery, finished being born. (He has some wry comments early in the novel about how it doesn't really matter how wrong many of the details were in those 70s and 80s pieces. Part of the process, really.)

But more so than just capturing the feel of the times, which would not make him a special writer no matter how well he did that, Gibson usually rewards his readers with at least one insight of staggering proportions. Spook Country doesn't disappoint. ("She" is one of the main protagonists, former singer in a postpunk band; "Inchmale" is a former bandmate, and a peripheral character in the novel.)

She remembered Inchmale describing Stockholm syndrome, the fondness and loyalty one could supposedly come to feel for even the most brutal captor. . . . Inchmale thought that America had developed Stochkholm syndrome for its own government, post 9/11.

Worth the price of admission

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Infodump

I still read a fair amount of science fiction, though not as much as i did even ten years ago. I make sure to keep up with Gardner Dozois' Year's Best SF and SFWA's annual Nebula Award volumes. And anything new from Gene Wolfe.

I was thinking maybe it had something to do with how our world has changed so much over the past 2 decades, and maybe SF hasn't kept pace. William Gibson, for example, is writing about virtually the same world he wrote about in the early 80s, except now he's our most realistic, and best, narrator of the world as it is. Pattern Recognition was barely SF, and the reviews i've read of Spook Country have me thinking it's more of the same. (Don't misunderstand; Pattern Recognition is one of the best novels i've read in the past 10 years.)

But i'm in a SF reading group with Joe and a few other people, and our current volume (name withheld to protect the innocent) opened my eyes.

Infodumps.

You see, in a good SF novel, there are one or two changes from the world in which we live, and these changes have percolated, resonated, and steamrollered through the novel's society, changing it in ways that make it unrecognizable to our own. Or so many authors believe. And the narrative device by which these changes are made known is often the infodump. In a less skilled hand, the infodump is analogous to a brick wall across the freeway, simply impassable. Why this should be, i can't say. The infodump was an essential part of golden era SF, and Asimov and Heinlein, who were not terrific prose stylists, handled it easily. But in much of what i've read from some of today's young masters, the infodump, and its close cousin the Laundry List of Things That Make This City Different, are just indigestible. My friend Terry has a theory. As the price of mass-market paberpacks has increased to $8 and $9, both publishers and readers feel that a book's heft is indicative of its value. Think of J. G. Ballard's early 60s catastrophe novels (The Wind From Nowhere) pumped up to the size of Sherri Tepper's Grass. It's like SF's own steroids era. A lot of stuff that could (and would have been 40 years ago) edited out, is not only kept in, but artificially inflated to the size of a Macy's parade balloon.

Which got me thinking about a novel i could write.

A guy walks into a bar. It's a bar on an alien planet in a far solar system being terraformed. He orders a beer. As the bartender pulls the tap, he starts telling the guy about how the grain that made the beer isn't barley, but a genetically modified rice brought over on the first ship 40 years prior, although the hops are actually Cascade from the Yakima Valley, which happened to thrive in the moist soil and the often overcast long days. The yeast, however, is native to the planet, but so similar to Saccharomyces cerevisiae that neither biology nor cosmology can explain how two planets, 150 light years apart, could produce nearly identical organisms. He goes on to describe to farms in the Southern hemisphere where the grain is grown, and the semi-intelligent native species that have been domesticated as labor to keep the farms productive, the presence of an underground movement dedicated to ending the exploitation of the native species, how things are Different in the rock and sand factories up north, where the natives can't survive the long winters. There's a sidetrack to a history of the various governors the planet has had, and the different structures the government has experimented with, including references to the times back on Old Earth that similar structures were used with varying degrees of success. Thinking about the Free Labor movement gets the bartender to ruminate on the 25 hour day, 8 day week of the planet, how there's only one day off during the week, how the days of the week and the hours of the day got their names (because they're not the same as the ones we, the readers, know. How could they be? there's 8 of them).

Two hundred pages later the bartender says "Here's your beer. That'll be 4 Leinsters."

The guy reaches into his manpurse for some cash, and starts ruminating about money, and the faces on the various bills and why they were chosen for which denomination, and the other history of the planet and the terraforming project which, as a former foreman for the Really Big Company which had roots on Old Earth, he has the special inside knowledge of.

One hundred and thirty pages later, he utters the phrase which gives the novel its name, "Keep the Change."

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Centennials

Today is July 7, 2007. For a lot of people, it's a propitious day to get married, especially in Vegas. You know, it's 07/07/07.

Last time that date rolled around, a hundred years ago, Las Vegas wasn't even a gleam in Meyer Lansky's eye.

When i was a kid, hundred year anniversaries, especially those related to the Civil War, seemed to pop up with regularity. The hundredth anniversary of this death or that battle made history sound unthinkably distant.

I guess that's why today's centennial of the birth of science fiction writer Robert A. Heinlein has me feeling very old. I was reading Heinlein as a kid. Although i think his best work was behind him by the time i first encountered Stranger in a Strange Land as a 15 year old in 1971, he was still an active presence in the SF world, and new books with his name on them appeared pretty regularly during that period.

There's plenty of time and space to discuss Heinlein's craft, his politics, and the significance of his work in our culture. For today, though, let's just wish the old man a happy one hundredth birthday.

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