The Ranting Room

Closing Time

2009-01-31T17:00:00.003-06:00

The Ranting Room has come to an end and is now closed. Thank you for all your support, suggestions, kind words, and thoughtful contributions over the past four years.

The Friday Challenge continues at its new home, TheFridayChallenge.com.

Arrivederci,
~brb

"May You Live in Interesting Times"

2009-01-31T09:00:00.005-06:00

It was a late night. The Mrs and The Kid both had the flu and so went to bed early, but in proof of the truism that no good deed goes unpunished, a bit of pro bono work I'd done for a non-profit last year had come back to sink its little terrier-like fangs into my buttocks one more time. After that mess was cleared up there were bills and bookkeeping matters requiring attention, and so it was well past midnight when I finally shut off the lights in my office and came upstairs.

He was sitting there in the living room, in the comfortable chair by the reading lamp, with a book in his lap, a glass of brandy in his hand, and a scowl on his face. In all, a most remarkable display of solidity for a ghost, I thought.

"Mr. President," I said.

Nixon looked at that glass in his hand, and then turned his scowl on me. "Christian Brothers, Bruce?"

"Sorry. Times are tight. Hennessy is out of the budget. Did you see our latest heating bill?"

Nixon's scowl faded to a frown. "It's been a cold month in Hell, too." He sighed, and then took a sip of the brandy, and grimaced.

"Besides," I said, "I thought you were a tee-totaler."

"Former tee-totaler. That changed. In time I learned to drink even the vilest Chinese firewater, when the occasion required."

"Ah," I nodded. "That famous photo of you and Mao, toasting each other's good health."

"Good health my ass," he said. "What Mao was actually saying at the moment that shutter snapped was, 'May you live in interesting times.' It's a curse, I'm told."

Nixon tried another sip of the brandy. It seemed to go down better this time. "Of course, when I answered him a moment later it was with, 'And may you choke on this most excellent rat poison, you fat commie sonuvabitch.' Boy, the translators were having some fun that day." Nixon smiled at the memory.

I interrupted his reverie. "So how is Mao doing these days?"

Nixon shrugged. "Beats me. I only went to look him up once, and that was nearly fifteen years ago." He considered the brandy a moment, but this time didn't drink.

"Hell is full of special places; you know that. But there is a really exceptionally special place in Hell for leaders who murder millions of their own people.

"Mao's sepulchre is amazing. Enormous, bright red; you can see it for miles. It's made entirely of wrought- and cast-iron, and decorated with these incredible huge, ornate, carved dragons, and bas-reliefs of heroic workers and all that. Very Chinese; very Communist; very Peking Opera. It's just beautiful.

"Except that when you get closer to it, you realize: that's not red paint. It's red hot. And in the very center of it all, underneath tons of red-hot iron and perched right in the middle of the perpetual flame, there is a small, plain, red-hot iron casket, just slightly larger than the body of a man, inside which Mao screams and sizzles in his own body fat for the rest of eternity.

"It's revolting beyond nauseating. The entire area reeks of rancid pork fried rice. And I thought the disgusting syphilitic old bastard stank when he was alive. He had a strange phobia about bathing, you know." Nixon rolled the thought over in his mind for a few more moments, and then rinsed it away with another sip of brandy. The level in the glass, I noticed, was diminishing with each sip. I wondered if I even could refill his glass, or if doing so would violate some psychic ectoplasmic spiritual something or other.

"I guess both of our wishes were granted," he said softly. "Mao died wretchedly just a few years after that, and my life certainly got a lot more interesting." For a minute or more after that Nixon seemed inclined only to muse, sip, and sigh. I was tired and cranky already. It got on my nerves.

"So," I said at last. "To what do I owe the honor of this visitation?"

Nixon seemed momentarily startled to notice me there, and then recovered quickly and offered up a small smile. "Farewell visit? After all, this is how The Ranting Room began: with you, channeling for me." He smiled again, weakly this time, and shrugged. "Word gets around. So when I heard that you were retiring—"

"I am not retiring," I protested. "I'm just reordering my priorities. There's the new blog—"

"You're retiring," he said. "Or at least retiring as the creator and chief writer of The Ranting Room. You're getting onto that big old helicopter, throwing one last great big 'V' to the crowd, and riding off into the sunset.

"Oh, you're not really retiring," he added. "Your type never does. Tomorrow, or maybe the next day, you'll be starting up something new. You can never just relax; never stop to smell the roses without noticing that they need to be dusted for aphids. Even when you're not working, you're thinking about working. You'll be starting up some new project on the morning of the day you die."

That stopped me cold. "Oh? You peeked?"

Nixon shook his head. "I told you: I can't tell you. It's against the rules. I can only tell you about possible futures. I can't tell you which one is the real one."

This time it was my turn to be silent and thoughtful for a minute or more. A good strong whiff of your own mortality will do that to you, I guess. Nixon took the opportunity to empty his glass. When I noticed it was empty, by reflex, I got up, got the brandy, and poured him another two fingers. Only after I capped the bottle did I register that I had not poured it through the spectral glass and onto the chair. A most remarkable display of solidity, indeed.

It was his turn to break the silence. "So," he said at last. "You're telling everyone you're going off to write a novel. Will this be an entirely new one, or are you finally going to finish Nixon's Inferno?"

I shook my head. "Nah. Not that one, anyway. My agent said it was hopelessly unsellable. The only way to make it work in today's market—"

"Is by depicting me as being even worse than Satan, and Philip Roth flogged that one to death back in '71. Yes, I remember." Nixon frowned, and shook his head. "Still, it seems a shame. I mean, I always thought A Conspiracy of Cats was one of the best extended multi-part posts you ever did for this blog. Except that it kind of crapped-out at the ending."

My turn to scowl at him. "Yeah, well, if you'd given me a good ending to work with in the first place, instead of the one you did give me."

He switched back to his disarming smile. "I told you: it's against the rules. Possible futures only." He took a rather larger slug from his glass this time, and then lifted it in a sort of salute. "You must admit, though, as demented as that ending was, it didn't begin to compare to what really happened. Honestly, would you have believed me if I'd told you back in January of '07 that That Woman would lose the primaries, the nomination, and ultimately the election to Zaphod Beeblebrox?"

"What?" Talk about your neck-snapping sharp turn into Dimension X...

Nixon shook his head. "Oh, Bruce, and here I thought you knew Douglas Adams line and verse. Let us now turn to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, chapter 4:"

'The President in particular is very much a figurehead—he wields no real power whatsoever. He is apparently chosen by the government, but the qualities he is required to display are not those of leadership but those of finely judged outrage. For this reason the President is always a controversial choice, always an infuriating but fascinating character. His job is not to wield power but to draw attention away from it.'

Nixon finished his recitation, smiled, and then set down his glass and clasped his hands in his lap. "Hence, President Barack Beeblebrox, and Secretary of State That Woman. You are definitely living in some very interesting times now. It was a good decision on your part to close The Ranting Room. You wouldn't have been able to maintain your No Politics rule much longer, and sooner or later you'd have written something that would have gotten you into real trouble."

I was still shaking my head. "President Bee— No, wait a minute, Secretary of State That Woman? In all these years, you've never told me: what exactly is your problem with Hil—"

"SHH!" Nixon shushed me with a warning finger. "Do not mention that foul name in this fair place!"

I blinked in astonishment. Several times.

"Look, it's very simple," Nixon said. "That Woman was a lawyer working for the House Judiciary Committee during the Watergate investigation. According to her former boss, Jerry Zeifman—a lifelong Democrat, by the way, and the career civil-service attorney who was general counsel and chief of staff for the judiciary committee—she was put on the staff as a favor to Teddy Kennedy, and then did her best to sabotage the investigation. She violated confidentiality, confiscated public documents, "lost" files, and wrote fraudulent legal briefs, all in an effort to keep me from having the right to legal counsel and to cross-examine witnesses. In the end she was fired, and Zeifman recommended that she never again be put into a position of public trust!"

By this point Nixon's jowls were quivering with anger—and he abruptly seemed to realize that this was happening, and forced himself to relax and lower his voice. He picked up the glass of brandy again. Slowly, carefully, methodically, he took another sip. He swallowed. He chuckled.

"And now, Secretary of State. Oh yes, interesting times indeed."

I went back to shaking my head. "I don't know. This sounds so... paranoid. Oliver Stone paranoid. Jim Garrison-grade paranoid. Why—"

Nixon set his glass down sharply and snapped forward. "Because they wanted to make sure I didn't put E. Howard Hunt on the witness stand under oath!" He caught himself again; forced himself to relax, again. Sighed.

"Before he came to work for me, Hunt was an old-school spook," he explained. "Wartime OSS, postwar CIA, Bay of Pigs. And then he became Kennedy's chief of domestic covert and black bag CIA ops. Hunt had the dirt on JFK like you wouldn't believe. He knew where all the bodies were buried, because he'd buried them himself. He knew things about JFK and Johnson that made Watergate look like a schoolboy prank.

"And if you were, say, Teddy Kennedy, and you were looking at a run for the Presidency in 1976—well, we wouldn't want anything coming out that might besmirch the memory of the blessed Saint JFK now, would we?"

Nixon looked at his glass again, decided against another sip, and then looked at me with a frustrated smile.

"I was a fool," he said. "I thought the nation couldn't stand the shock of knowing any of that. The country was fractured; reeling. You were there; you remember. There were literally battles in the streets. I thought that if the people ever got a good look at what was really going on inside the machinery of government..."

Nixon's voice tapered off.

"And so, for the good of the nation, I allowed myself be talked into resigning. Just as twelve years earlier, for the good of the nation, I'd agreed not to contest the 1960 election, even though we all knew it was the legendary Voting Dead of Cook County that put JFK into office. And now here we are, forty-eight years later, with a first-class product of the Cook County Democratic Party machine—the most provably corrupt political organization since Tammany Hall—sitting in the Oval Office. And I thought my times were interesting."

This time Nixon lifted the glass and took a long, slow, deliberate drink. When he set the glass down again I noticed it was getting low and uncorked the bottle of brandy again, but he waved me off. "Almost done," he said. He paused.

"Do you know what my greatest mistake was?" Nixon asked.

I couldn't resist. "You got involved in a land war in Southeast Asia?"

Nixon barely mustered the energy to scowl at that. "No, that was Kennedy and Johnson's mistake and you know it. Kissinger and I got us out of that mess, and that's what's shaved a couple eons off my time in Purgatory."

I nodded. "Then it must have been all the Keynesianism and wage and price controls."

Nixon shrugged. "The jury is still out on that." He pursed his lips, and drew a deep breath. "No, my greatest mistake was that I gave them a sword."

"Ah," I said, as a tiny dim bulb of recognition lit up. "The David Frost interviews."

Nixon gagged audibly. "Dear God, I hope people aren't mistaking Frost/Nixon for history. You have Frost's book. Why don't you read it sometime?"

"I tried," I said. "I couldn't stick with it. Frost is such a self-absorbed git. A talking head who imagines he's making news, not reporting it."

Nixon nodded. "Too true. But you did recognize the quote?"

"'I gave them a sword,'" I said , quoting Nixon back at himself from memory. "'And they stuck it in. And they twisted it with relish. And, I guess, if I'd been in their position I'd have done the same thing.'"

"That's right," Nixon said. "I gave my enemies the sword with which they did me in." He nodded again, and then took one last gulp from the glass, finished it off, set it down, and stood to leave. "But do you know what is an even greater mistake, and one I never made?

"It's not giving them a sword!" he said, as he began to fade away. "Whenever you say or do anything, you put weapons in the hands of your enemies and your critics. But whenever you're so afraid of those hypothetical weapons in the hands of hypothetical critics that you say and do nothing, that is a greater folly still. In fact, it goes beyond folly. It's a crime."

Nixon had become just an outline now, a rippling shape of a man between me and the bookcase. "Especially for a writer! If you are not putting your heart and soul out there on the line every time you sit down to write—if you are not every day putting new swords in the hands of your enemies and critics—then you are not doing your job, and you are not a writer: you're merely some sort of craven, timid creature that looks and smells like a writer and mimics the motions."

All that remained of him now was his voice, and it was fading quickly, as if into a vast distance.

"That is your greatest mistake, Bruce. You always try to play it safe and give no offense. But thankfully, you still have time to correct that."

His voice was just a whisper now, or less than that; the ghost of an echo of a whisper.

"I belong to history. These are your interesting times. You have a lot of good books in your collection. Maybe, now that you've retired, you can read some of them. Maybe you'll learn..."

And he was gone.

Leaving behind a filthy old glass that looked like it hadn't been cleaned in fifteen years, a small wet spot of spilled brandy on the seat cushion of the comfortable chair, and a book from my collection that I'd always intended to read but never found the time to, opened to a particular page. I was almost certain of what it would be even before I looked at it, but I picked it up and read the marked passage all the same.

"It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat."
—Theodore Roosevelt, "The Man in the Arena"

The Friday Challenge Has Moved

2009-01-30T07:00:00.004-06:00

Are you looking for The Friday Challenge workshop -slash- writing contest -slash- therapy group? Beginning today, you'll find it at its new permanent home:

TheFridayChallenge.com

Final Thoughts (Part 3)

2009-01-29T07:00:00.002-06:00

Hmm. In cleaning out all the bits and half-baked drafts and ragged ends of ideas I've accumulated during the four years I've been doing this blog, I accidentally turned up this undated note to myself, which to judge by the strata it was found in is from about three years ago.

Lucas's Law
A well-executed creative project is like great sex. Always end with a good climax and leave 'em complaining you finished too soon and begging for more, not complaining that you went on too long and begging you to stop already.

I can't imagine what I was thinking about when I wrote that.

Final Thoughts (Part 2)

2009-01-28T07:00:00.002-06:00

KTown kvetches:

The new site looks a lot like the old site. I expected some different furniture and paint on the walls. Does anyone have an opinion on Blogspot vs. Wordpress?

I'm impressed by WordPress. It's a powerful tool that enables you to do some amazing things. There's no question but that WordPress can be used to create a gorgeous blog, as a few minutes spent snuffling around their Showcase proves.

But WordPress also requires that you download the software and install it on your own web host, and there's a learning curve, which I have neither the time or patience for right now. If I had the time, I'd definitely be looking into it further—but then, if I had the time, there are a whole lot of other things I'd also be doing.

CORRECTION: The foregoing paragraph is true for WordPress.org. WordPress.com, which I was unfamiliar with, does provide free hosting and does not require installation on your own host. Thanks to Michelle and Randy for the correction.

Blogspot, on the 'tother hand, is completely free and hosted by Google, so basically all you have to do is switch it on. Granted, the standard issue templates are pretty homely, and customizing them ranges from being a bother to a nuisance. But it is the easiest and fastest way to get a site up and running, especially if you're trying to run a blog with multiple contributors.

A third blog engine that's popular with a lot of writers I know is LiveJournal. I actually happen to have a LiveJournal account and associated dormant blog—I had to open one, in order to get permission to post a comment on a friend's site—but I don't much like it. Maybe it's just local Internet weather conditions ("And there's a big packet storm brewing up over the Dakotas, so be sure to pack your umbrella!") but whenever I use it, LiveJournal seems godawful slow, compared to just about everything except some of the more badly Java-infested U.K. tabloid sites.

As for the look and feel of the TheFridayChallenge.com: it's my site, so I picked a design that is comfortable to read with my eyes on my monitors. If you want to use tiny dark purple text on a black background on your site, go right ahead; have fun. Don't expect me to put a lot of effort into trying to read it, though.

There's another factor at work here as well. When you're writing for print, as most of us here seem to be trying to do, I believe you should look at your copy in cold, naked, unadorned text, as an editor would. As anyone who's worked in desktop publishing or marketing communications knows, sometimes a great layout is just compensation for muddled thoughts and having no clear idea of what you're trying to say.

But you know, this whole "form vs. function" argument has been raging for more than a century now and doesn't look like it's going to be resolved any time soon, so maybe it's time for you, KTown, to write a think-piece sharing your thoughts on blogsite aesthetics with the rest of us. Care to give it a try?

Meanwhile, in other news, TheFridayChallenge.com continues to lurch towards becoming fully operational. I've added The Story Morgue to the left column; anyone feeling brave enough to give it a try? Let me know and we'll work out the details.

The plan at this point is to make the posting schedule a whole lot more structured than was the Ranting Room. I'd like to run a column on Monday, and a book or fiction site review on Wednesday. The centerpiece is the Friday Challenge, of course, which, not surprisingly, posts on Friday. Saturday is open blog day: I was thinking of titling it something like, "What I Did This Week," wherein everyone is invited to share the news of what you've done this week writingwise, and especially to share any success stories or publication news you may have. Sunday, of course, is the WCA meeting, followed by the announcement of the winners of the previous week's challenge, and then, damn, whadayaknow, it's Monday again.

Does this seem like a workable schedule? If you have any thoughts or ideas, or if anybody except KTown has any suggestions for improving the look of the site, let me know.

Later,
~brb

Final Thoughts (Part 1)

2009-01-26T21:00:00.002-06:00

Well, that's bizarre. In answer to DaveD's question, yes, I am planning to harvest the contents of this site (in the same sense that transplant surgeons "harvest" usable organs) and move selected articles into some sort of deep archives, either on the new site or on my long-neglected backup site. Fortunately blogspot now allows you to export the entire contents of your blog as one monolithic XML file, which must be a fairly new feature, as it wasn't there the last time I was looking for similar functionality.

Unfortunately, this export function does not capture any of the HaloScan comments attached to the posts. Since in many cases the comments are more interesting than the original post, I still have a bit more work ahead of me. Bizarrely, though, the export function does capture any blogspot comments attached to the posts—of which there should not be any, because I've always used HaloScan. But sure enough, when I finished downloading the XML file and opened it up to take a look at it, I discovered that over the years, this blog has been repeatedly splattered with spam comments: ads for porn sites, that sort of thing. These spam posts remained invisible to readers, because they were blogspot comments, not HaloScan comments, and the blogspot comment functionality has been disabled on this site since Day One.

But if the blogspot comment functionality was disabled, how did the spam comments get posted in the first place? Seems like there's a security hole somewhere and somebody at Google's got some 'splainin' to do...

Oh yeah, that's right, I forgot. Google never explains anything.

As regards the new site, I have two questions for you. One feature that has been requested repeatedly over the years is for some sort of "story lab," where people could post their stories and get reader feedback. I've always resisted, but perhaps the time has come to institute—no, not a story lab. Call it a story morgue. If you have a story that's so hopeless that you've given it up for dead, but you still can't figure out where it went wrong: do you think you'd be interested in posting it and asking for reader feedback?

I have to warn you, this is not something for the faint-hearted, and it could get pretty ugly. People—and especially anonymous posters, who presumably are people, although that remains to be proven—tend to become remarkably brutal when they're commenting online. Hell, they can be downright vicious.

With that caveat, do you think this is something you'd be interested in trying? Or is this something we should save for later, when we figure out how to wall off a login-required member's-only area?

The second idea I've been toying with is, oh, call it, "The Assignment Desk." I get far more ideas than I'll ever have time to develop, and the non-fiction ones in particular tend to get parked by the wayside. For example, I would love to run a good article on H. Beam Piper, the most influential writer you've probably never heard of. Would it be worthwhile to put a rolling list of ideas out there, free for the taking by whomever might feel like picking one up and running with it?

Meanwhile, the process of flushing out the buffers and cranking up the new site continues. I had about a dozen book reviews in the queue that I meant to run but never found time for. Maybe I'll just use 'em for filler on the new site.

Later,
~brb

And the winner is...

2009-01-25T23:00:00.001-06:00

Based on both the quantity and quality of ideas submitted, the winner of the 1/16/09 Friday Challenge is WaterBoy. So WaterBoy, come on down and claim your prize—

And then we'll fill you in on the details of you're going to run your first Friday Challenge.

As for everyone else who participated in this challenge, we just want to say Thank You! There were a lot of other great ideas in the entries and we will be contacting most of you about giving you a turn at running the Friday Challenge. But WaterBoy gets first dibs.

Thanks again for participating,
~brb

Previews of Coming Attractions

2009-01-25T21:00:00.003-06:00

I suppose it's time now to start loosening the drawstrings and showing you that there is indeed a cat within the bag. This, friends, is the final week of The Ranting Room. Come Saturday, January 31, this site will be going dark. The content will remain online for some unspecified time to come, but after four years of doing this blog, it's time for me to hang the 'Closed' sign in the window and move on to other things.

Specifically, we're moving on to the new site, TheFridayChallenge.com. You can pop over there right now to check it out, if you like. I'm afraid there's not much to see at the moment; I meant to spend most of this past weekend enhancing the template and building basic content but instead spent it alternately napping, sipping tea, and sneezing my brains out. Sorry. I'll get the site to where I meant it to be today in another day or three.

Closing down The Ranting Room and launching a new site is not a move I make lightly. After all, I have been doing this blog for four years and there is a considerable amount of inertia behind the idea of just keeping it going.

But in the four years I have been doing The Ranting Room, it has grown to devour an ever-larger portion of my life. When I first started it, for example, I set myself an iron-clad rule that weekends were reserved for my family, and so I would only blog Monday through Friday. I believe that rule lasted nearly three months.

The Ranting Room has also grown to devour my fiction writing time, as well as my business development time. I'm never going to get Rampant Loon airborne if I continue at this rate, and worse, I'll never get that next novel finished if I keep spending my writing time on cranking out one- to two-thousand words of bloggerel daily. I'll admit that blogging is very seductive; I get a real kick from having the ability to publish my every thought instantly and begin receiving reader feedback mere minutes later.

But in the final analysis: what do you call a novelist who hasn't finished a new novel in ten years?

Trick question. You don't call him anything, because you've forgotten who he is.

I want to thank everyone who has contributed to making The Ranting Room the sort of underground cult-classic semi-success it is today; it's you, the community, who really make this thing work. I especially want to thank everyone who has contributed a guest column in the past year. I did give a lot of thought to the idea of changing the rules, opening up the posting permissions, and expanding The Ranting Room to be more like an online magazine. But in the end, I came to the conclusion that this blog is just too personal and idiosyncratic to be opened up in that way, and it would be better to bring it to an end and begin something new.

Hence TheFridayChallenge.com.

The first thing you'll notice about the new site, obviously, is the emphasis on the ongoing Friday Challenge series of writing exercises -slash- contests. This, to be honest, has grown to become the most enjoyable part of this blog for me, and I look forward to seeing it continue. However, we are going to be making some changes in the way it works, in order to make it more of an interactive and user-driven operation. The first of these changes you've probably guessed by now; we'll be using a lot more challenges posed by your fellow writers.

The second thing you'll notice about the new site is that I'm going to be using the editorial 'we' (as opposed to the Zamyatin We) a lot more. I've opened up posting permissions, invited in a bunch of people, and you'll be seeing a lot more content from other contributors. What sort of content? What would you like to see? More to the point, what would you like to write? Right now I'm looking for book reviews, short-story reviews, online fiction site reviews, articles on the craft of writing and business, and once in a while, really exceptional movie reviews. Specifically, as zanzibar said in the commentary on Firefly, I want to hear about the new up-and-coming writers you think we should be watching out for. The old-line print magazines are where fiction has gone to die and careers have gone to peter out; new writers are increasingly writing for webzines. I have my habits and fossilized patterns of thought. What are the online fiction sites you think we should be reading?

More than anything else, though, I want your success stories. Is anyone here getting published anywhere? Don't be shy; here's your chance to crow about it!

The third thing you'll notice about the new site is that we'll be experimenting with both the technology and the look and feel in the coming months. For now the site is based on blogspot, but the primary reason for making the site its own domain is to permit us to transcend that, as time and technology permit. One change I'm happy to announce right now is that we'll be using the JS-Kit comment engine, which appears to be a great improvement over HaloScan in terms of both features and reliability. However, that piece isn't plugged into the template just yet.

So, any more questions at this point? If not, then I want to close this up by saying it's been fun, and it's been really great getting to know so many of you over the course of these past four years. But now I'm looking forward to moving on to a new and different kind of fun!

Kindest regards,
~brb

Final Afterthoughts

2009-01-24T13:00:00.019-06:00

As the astute reader is no doubt by now asking, what the heck does any of this have to do with science fiction in general or with Firefly in particular? In the previous two posts I was trying to help you to understand the zeitgeist of the 1930s: the milieu, the Weltanschauung, the Weltschmerz, the raging theodicy, the incipient anomie, the je ne sais quoi, the all those words I paid good money to learn in college and have never had an excuse to use since so I'm going to try to use them up now that informed the shared consciousness of that small circle of would-be Weltentwicklers who created and defined this thing we call science fiction, back in the 1930s and 1940s. For in many respects science fiction today is still stuck in a sort of temporal loop, Groundhog Day-style, perpetually cycling back and forth between 1935 and 1955. As Orson Scott Card posits in Serenity Found: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon's Firefly Universe (BenBella Books, 2007, a bargain at only $17.95), while cinematically and visually the Star Wars movies are great, storywise, they're straight outa 1935.

In 1935, everybody—well, everybody in New York whose opinion mattered, anyway—everybody knew that capitalism, individualism, and libertarian democracy had failed, and it was time to try something radically new. Bellamy's steaming heap of a novel experienced a resurgence in popularity (and given that it describes life in the socialist paradise that is America in the year 2000, it is perhaps to be hoped that it won't happen again). God was if not dead then at least unemployed, and probably standing in a soup line somewhere. The Common Man, despite all the paeans and fanfares written to his nominal glory, was considered to be a proven moron, who could no more be entrusted with real freedom than with fully automatic weapons and who needed to be managed by the state cradle-to-grave for his own good. (On the face of it, this argument does make a sort of sense. After all, if you believe in the rigorous scientific accuracy and predictive validity of IQ tests, then 50% of all people are by definition of below-average intelligence.)

Remember, in the 1930s there were John Reed Clubs in cities all over America, and in 1936 and 1937 American and British intellectuals were flocking to Spain to fight on the communist side in the Spanish Civil War.

[Sidebar: By now at least a few of you are wondering what my problem is with socialism and communism. We've been through this before and I really don't have the time or patience to go through it again, so go back and read Scaling Socialism. After you've done so, I still won't feel like talking about it.]

There is a reason why there is only one science fiction publisher today known for releasing libertarian-leaning titles, and why that same publisher is regarded as a pariah whose hard SF offerings are routinely denounced by all properly thinking peoples as "war porn," "gun porn," "crypto-fascist wet dreams," and so on. There is a prevailing orthodoxy in the science fiction publishing world, and it's been firmly in place for the past 75 years.

And then there's Firefly.

Understand, by the late 1950s, Campbellian science fiction had pretty much shot its bolt. Campbell himself had become an authentic nutcase, who apparently actually believed he had psi powers, was up to his elbows in the founding of Cyantolligy and the pseudo-science behind it, and who had taken to telling people he had not flunked out of MIT back in the 1930s but rather had been kicked out, because his ideas were too threatening to scientific orthodoxy. By the late 1950s even Heinlein was on record as saying he would rather not sell at story at all than have to deal with Campbell, and also by the late 1950s, many of the magazine and book markets for original science fiction were dead or dying.

And then came Sputnik. The Space Race. The Mercury program, the Gemini program, and capping it all, Star Trek. Suddenly science fiction was a hot market category again, and the publishers all rushed to cash in, many of them by reissuing old titles they still owned all rights to but some by publishing new and original work. Concurrent with this came the New Wave of science fiction writers, whose central argument was that Campbellian science fiction was too conservative, and SF could only be rescued by tacking even more sharply to the left. Imagining themselves to be pushing the market, they got drawn along in the Space Race's cavitation, and ultimately produced a body of fictional works that were more about their personal emotional, sexual, and pharmaceutical issues than anything else.

Fifteen years later, by the 1970s, the market for print science fiction was coughing blood again. Star Trek had been canceled, although it lived on in UHF reruns. The world was suffering from a massive Vietnam War hangover, and all things even slightly militaristic were regarded with suspicion and contempt. The last few Apollo missions to the Moon were canceled, because of low ratings, lack of interest, and funding cutbacks.

Fantasy was doing well, in large part thanks to the bootleg paperback edition of The Lord of The Rings that Donald Wollheim (remember him?) put out in 1965 that was very successful with the college student hippie set and resulted in the little notice you used to see on the back of the later Ballantine edition:

"This paperback edition, and no other, has been published with my consent and co-operation. Those who approve of courtesy (at least) to living authors will purchase it, and no other."
J. R. R. Tolkien

Catering to the growing fantasy market, the publishers reissued everything they had in back inventory, and Robert E. Howard's old Conan The Barbarian stories, written back in the late 1920s and early 1930s, proved surprisingly popular. For a time it seemed the challenge was to find a new or reissued book in the SF/Fantasy section that did not have cover art featuring a bare-chested guy wearing a fur-lined jockstrap and holding an impossibly large broadsword. If Fabio had been around then he could have made a fortune posing for cover art.

And then came Star Wars. And suddenly it was 1957 all over again, and there was a vast inrush of superheated money into the sci-fi print publishing business, as many attempted to catch a piece of Lucas's coattails. And once again there was a generation of new writers who came along—my generation, this time, and there was a name they called some of us that I will not repeat, but some of our less charitable critics called us the New & Improved Wave—and once again we imagined it was our brilliance and originality that was driving the market, never realizing we were merely being drawn along in the Millennium Falcon's cavitation.

Fifteen years later, by the 1990s, the market for print science fiction was coughing blood again...

I'm sorry; I drift. It must be the cold medication. Or maybe it's just being stuck inside on this high winter afternoon, watching the long winter sunlight slant through the bare trees while the smoke from the neighbor's chimney rises slowly into the still, clear, subzero air. I meant to be making my final points about Firefly in this post. My points are these.

First, that Firefly during its brief run had some of the best and most original stories I have seen in forty-plus years of watching television and movie science fiction. It was truly a unique take on the spacefaring sci-fi future, and I still feel the loss of those stories that could have been told, had the series survived. On the great scale of things it's only a trivial loss—after all, it was just a TV series—but still, it was sad to see such a promising start blighted before it ever really got off the ground.

But secondly, and more seriously, whether by design or accident, the script for Serenity really gets it.

I used to be amused by Utopians. With life experience, I have grown to fear them. The great failing of Utopians is that they can never accept that someone else might not want to be a part of their utopian vision. Like ill-mannered tourists, they assume that if you don't agree with them, it must be because they're not explaining it simply enough, or often enough, or loudly enough, or ultimately, because you're stupid. Utopians always think achieving Utopia is simply a matter of education—and then re-education—and then coercion, legislation, litigation medication conditioning threats book-burnings eugenics surgical modifications hunting down the counter-revolutionaries killing the reactionaries genetic engineering—and ultimately all Utopians, no matter how nobly they begin, always end up at the same conclusion: that the only thing that keeps Man from building a secular heaven here on Earth is the nature of Man, therefore we must build a New and Better Man.

And for most of the history of orthodox, Campbellian and post-Campbellian science fiction, the science fiction community has largely agreed with and embraced this finding.

Utopians always begin with the best of intentions. But they always end by building their Utopia on a firm and level foundation composed of the crushed skulls of those who disagreed. And again, what I like best about the entire Firefly/Serenity creative enterprise is that, whether by accident or design, it really understands this truth and tells it.

Then, sadly, it punks out at the very end, by veering off into sheer fantasy. In the final scenes of Serenity the Operative is forced to watch the video from Miranda, and see the horror that the utopian vision he serves has unleashed. As a result, he has a change of heart, repents, and tries to make amends.

No true Utopian would ever be so weak, of course. In our world the Operative would go to his grave screaming, "We didn't use enough G-23 Paxilon Hydrochlorate! We didn't use it long enough! We didn't try it in its pure form! WE NEED TO KEEP TRYING UNTIL WE GET IT RIGHT!"

Here endeth the lesson.

The Last Friday Challenge

2009-01-23T21:00:00.005-06:00

There, bet that got your attention. Yes, it's true; this is the last Friday Challenge here in the Ranting Room. As of January 30, the Friday Challenge is moving to its new home. There are lots more changes in the works, too, and I'll be explaining them as best I can over the next few days.

But for tonight, let's focus on the short term. HaloScan seems to be working again, so I'd like to direct your attention to the 1/16/09 Friday Challenge, which as you may remember was to come up with a Friday Challenge. (Making it a Friday Challenge to come up with a Friday Challenge was Henry's idea, so of course, he can't win, 'cause if he did we believe he would instantly undergo some kind of recursive implosion thing and cease to exist, leaving behind only a tiny pucker in the fabric of periodic space-time to mark the place where he once stood. And we like Henry too much to permit this to happen.)

All the proposed Friday Challenges can be found in the comments attached to the 1/16/09 post, which I, using my amazing Site Owner powers, now cause to appear here. Voila!

As you read through the comments, bear in mind that you are not only selecting the Challenge you would most like to see presented, but also the person to be presenting and judging it! For that is the Special Secret Bonus Prize hinted at in the original post: whoever is selected as the winner will be allowed to post and be the primary judge of the resulting entries!

(Don't worry; we'll help you, if you feel you need help, and the prizes will still be supplied by K&B Booksellers.)

Does this sound like fun, or what? Yes, I know, at first blush, mostly like "or what," but trust me, it'll be fun, once you get into it. So even if you didn't post an entry in this challenge, kindly read, comment on, and vote for your favorites. The lucky ~~sap~~ winner will be announced on Sunday.

Fair Warning: as with making maple syrup, sometimes you need a lot of saps. Heh heh heh....

As for this week's Friday Challenge: one of the questions that has come up repeatedly in the four years I've been running The Ranting Room is this: Hey Bethke, for someone who talks such a good game, why don't you just bite the bullet, write a big fat fantasy brick, and make some real money?

The sad truth is, I can't. I have tried, many times. I understand that pseudo-Medieval fantasy, not science fiction, is where the market is really at these days. I appreciate how loyal the fans of fantasy are. I have seen how writing a really successful and seemingly endless series of big, fat, fantasy novels can put the kids through college and allow you to retire to your own private island. Believe me, I have tried to do it. Repeatedly.

But every time I try, I can never get more than about four pages into the story before my characters start to notice that neither indoor plumbing nor dental hygiene have been invented yet, and then I end up writing something like this:

As Sir Epididymis squirmed on his rude straw bed and sought warmth in the tattered rags of his old saddle-blanket, he caught a glimpse of the rising harvest moon through the stable window, and once again the vision of that jaundiced, pock-marked orb reminded him of his lost love, fair Princess Gwenrowundelwynne, she of the twelve teeth. Oh, happy the legions of lice who dwelt in the forest of those greasy golden tresses!

His view of beautiful Luna was eclipsed by the short and stubby form of the farmer, who like many of the peasants in North Umborgringlugrand had the gift of understanding the language of the animals.

"Sorry, guv," the farmer said, as he leaned in through the window. "I'll 'ave to ask you to move to the sty. The 'orses are complainin' about 'ow you smell."

That's this week's challenge: what happens next? I'll spot you a few more words, if you need them:

The next morning...

Well? What happens next?

As always, we're playing by the slowly sublimating rules of the Friday Challenge, and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. The deadline for entries is midnight Central time, Thursday, January 29. The entries received will be listed on the new Friday Challenge website on Friday, 1/30/09.

So I 'spose I'd better get that site finished up and running before then, eh? 'Scuse me, I gotta go hang some more sheetrock.

Later,
~brb

More Afterthoughts

2009-01-23T07:00:00.010-06:00

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their consciences.

&mdashC.S.Lewis

This post is turning out to be more difficult to wrap up than I expected. In part it's because I've come down with a mother of a cold and my brain has been operating at about half-wattage for the past two days, but mostly it's because this post wants to keep branching off in a multitude of scattershot directions. There are so many things you need to know.

If you think I was too harsh on the 19th century utopians, don't take my word for it; go read them yourself. Three of the most influential were Looking Backward, by Edward Bellamy, News from Nowhere, by William Morris (who also wrote the seminal fantasy novels, The Wood Beyond the World and The Well at the World's End), and A Traveler from Altruria, by William Dean Howells. Of these three I found the Howells novel the most disillusioning, as Howells was a literary giant of his day: a novelist, poet, and playwright; an extremely influential literary columnist and critic who wrote for The Atlantic and Harper's; and a close personal friend of Mark Twain, who routinely gushed over Howells' manifest brilliance in his personal letters and writings about writing. And yet the Altrurian trilogy is such an utter load of rancid socialist tripe.

Guess this just goes to prove that even being a brilliant entertainer, as Twain was, doesn't necessarily mean you know jack squat about politics or economics.

The Utopian formula varied slightly from writer to writer, depending on their personal gripes, but generally amounted to a glowing description of how wonderful life in the future would be, if only Man could rise above his selfishness and petty concerns long enough to get with the agenda: a society sensibly reorganized along "scientific" principles; the abolition of wealth, private property, possessions (up to and including possessions like "husbands," "wives," and "children," depending on the writer), capitalism, hereditary wealth, national borders (sometimes), religion (although some kept the nominal trappings of Christianity but saw it redirected into more secular and socially useful channels, much like contemporary mainstream Protestantism), monogamy (depending on the private kinks of the writer); the embracing of perfect equality and universally uniform government-run childhood education...

Alduous Huxley's Brave New World is in many respects a belated response to the ravings of the late 19th century Utopians. If you've never read it, do so. Now. If I ever teach a course on 20th century literature or science fiction, the two novels that absolutely will be required reading are George Orwell's 1984 and Alduous Huxley's Brave New World. Together, they explain so much about how we got to where we are now.

But at the moment I'm stuck back in the 19th century, trying to fill in the gaps (or perhaps Orwellianly deliberate omissions?) in your universally uniform government-run education. The primary importance of the Utopians is that they had a profound influence on the Fabians, which is another thing you need to know about: The Fabian Society, an organization of late 19th century British intellectuals (including, yes, H. G. Wells) who had come to the conclusion that Karl Marx was right, but if managed properly, the common people could be led to embrace communism gradually and without all that messy violent proletarian revolution business. In the U.K. the Fabian Society directly spawned the Labour Party. In the U.S., it spawned the Progressive movement, which was perhaps best articulated by founding The New Republic magazine editor Herbert David Croly in his book, The Promise of American Life.

You may read Croly's book, if you like. I wouldn't recommend it, as Croly never uses one word when three can be made to fit or expresses in a sentence an idea that could be puffed up into a long and turgid paragraph. The essential idea of the book is that democracy, capitalism, and individualism have failed and the people must be led — gently now, we don't want to alarm them! — into embracing a collectivist "welfare state" in which hereditary wealth is abolished, no man suffers from either the degrading influence of being poor or the corrupting influence of being rich, wealth is redistributed equitably through a system of "income tax" confiscations and "welfare" payments, all industry and art is scientifically managed by the government for the greater good of society, and yet the people retain an acceptable illusion of freedom, until such time as the great work is complete and the Platonic philosopher-kings who run the whole show can at last drop the curtains, to reveal that We The People now live in a perfect socialist world. Cue the applause.

The real importance of The Promise of American Life is not the number of copies it sold, but the people who read it and embraced its thesis, those people being primarily Theodore Roosevelt (after he was out of office, thankfully), Woodrow Wilson, several Supreme Court justices and leading jurists, and later, the primary architects of FDR's "New Deal." So if you're one of those crazy right wingnuts who believes that there has been a century-long conspiracy to turn the American republic into a socialist oligarchy...

Yeah, pretty much.

Still writing, but hitting the Publish Post button now to see what it looks like so far, and then taking a break to sneeze and dose up on more aspirin...

'at's odd. HaloScan's post counter seems to be malfunctioning again.

Okay, THAT is really annoying. HaloScan has taken a dump again. Henry, Passinthrough, Snowdog, Jack, Chris; every comment posted after Rigel's 3:25 a.m. post shows up on my admin screen, but is invisible to everyone else.

I've about had it with HaloScan, as this is a chronic problem. Tech support has been contacted. No signs of life were found. Presumably HaloScan will at some point resume working, and when it does there will be not one word of explanation. I'm ready to switch comment engines.

No, not to CoComment. I've already had quite enough fun watching die Pleite geführt, sagt der bayerische Gewerkschaftschef Werner Neugebauer. "Grob fahrlässig haben die Manager eine ganze Technologie am Standort Deutschland gegen die Wand gefahren, ausbaden müssen es jetzt wieder einmal die Mitarbeiter." Es sei dem Unternehmen nicht gelungen, ein tragfähiges Zukunftskonzept vorzulegen, sagt Jurk. Aus dem Bundeswirtschaftsministerium heißt es am Freitag the random German incursions into Vox's site. I'm looking for a reliable comment engine. Anybody know of one they'd recommend?

If so, uh, wouldja send me the info in an email, bitte?

I stand corrected. JS-Kit technical support got back to me in just over an hour. That's never happened before. Maybe HaloScan's new owners are serious improving quality, support, and customer relations. Stay tuned...

Afterthoughts

2009-01-22T07:00:00.003-06:00

Sorry for not posting this yesterday as promised. In the morning I got bogged down in a sidebar riff on Doc Savage and didn't get it finished, and in the evening I went to look up something to support a point and instead spent the rest of the evening absorbed in a J. G. Ballard novella.

This happens to me. I collect — no, collect isn't the right word. Collectors buy old, out-of-print books based on their hypothetical value and then put them in plastic bags, never to be cracked open or touched again by human hands until it's time to sell them. I accumulate old anthologies, particularly those edited by Groff Conklin or Damon Knight. And then, when time permits, I read the stories contained therein. Sometimes I even re-read them.

So I happen to know that while it makes a good creation myth, the idea that science fiction was invented by Hugo Gernsback in 1926 and perfected by John W. Campbell Jr. in the late 1930s and 1940s is not entirely true. Stories of fantastic adventures, strange voyages, and marvelous inventions are as old as story-telling itself. People have been telling tales like these ever since our hairy distant ancestors sat huddled together around the neolithic campfire, making noise all night to keep the bears and tigers away and telling the story of Og, who journeyed over the mountains to the next valley, where he met a strange tribe who had amazing flint axes that never needed knapping. Just as the oldest known written joke is a fart joke (I am not making this up), I firmly believe that if the oldest known written story is ever found, it will turn out to be one about a heroic man who flies to the Moon, meets a beautiful maiden there who needs to be rescued in some way, and after he does so, in gratitude she gives him some sort of wondrous prize.

The second oldest story will turn out to be the same thing, but with the wondrous prize turning out to be sex with the beautiful Moon maiden. The third oldest will be the same thing again, but with the sex scene interrupted by a fart joke.

Reviewing the entire history of fantastic literature is not necessary, though: a quick skim over the past two centuries will suffice. As Damon Knight puts it in his introduction to One Hundred Years of Science Fiction (Simon and Schuster, 1968), "there was no major nineteenth-century American writer of fiction, and indeed few in the second rank, who did not write some science fiction, or at least one utopian romance," a point which Knight then goes on to prove by reprinting recognizably science fiction stories written by Rudyard Kipling, Ambrose Bierce, and others. So why the amazing, nay, astounding persistence of the Gernsback/Campbell creation myth?

When I started reading contemporary science fiction in the late 1960s, and later began studying it in college in the early 1970s, the battle cry of the then-contemporary New Wave science fiction writers was that SF needed to "get out of the ghetto" and muscle its way into the literary mainstream. But the more I studied the history of SF, the more I realized that, while yes, SF is a literary ghetto, it's the ghetto Gernsback platted out and Campbell walled in. The reason why so much 19th century SF seems nonexistent now is because it was published in the same mainstream periodicals as all other contemporary fiction of the time, and thus escaped the attention of later SF-oriented anthologists. Beginning in the 1920s, the readers and writers of science fiction consciously chose to wall themselves in and shut out the outside literary world. Your story has rocketships, robots, rayguns, and horrible drooling alien monsters? Cool, you're in. It has character development? We don't need no steenkin' character development!

Aw, they just don't write 'em like The Skylark of Space anymore. (Thank God!)

This attitude persists even into contemporary times. The science fiction ghetto is a place where people unhappy with their actual lives in contemporary reality can hide out and imagine themselves to be someone else, somewhere else, somewhen else, and live for days at a time in a judgment-free, consequence-free alternate reality — as a few days spent at any major science fiction fan convention will prove. The science fiction community squanders an enormous amount of time and energy arguing over what is or is not "real" science fiction; who is or isn't in the club. This is one of the reasons why I dropped out of SFWA. I had the displeasure of being on the Board of Directors and chairing the Membership Committee through two incredibly stupid, bitter, and protracted wrangles, one over exactly which professional publication credits counted as science fiction publication credits for the purposes of determining membership status, and the other over whether to change the organization's name and bylaws to include fantasy writers. (There went two years of my life I'll never get back again.) But just why is the science fiction community so damned and determined to shore up and maintain the walls of its ghetto?

In chasing down this meme, I keep coming back to Gernsback, Campbell, and most of all to the Futurians; a very small group of New York science fiction fans — and later writers, editors, and highly influential literary agents — who idolized Gernsback in the 1920s and went on to write for Campbell in the 1930s and 1940s. The Futurians were largely young, idealistic, atheistic, sexually liberated, socialists when not outright communists, incestuous both literarily and sometimes physically, and ferocious New York chauvinists. For example, Futurian writer James Blish's magnum opus was Cities in Flight, which was based on the idea that someday we would perfect anti-gravity, after which entire domed cities such as, say, Manhattan would take to the stars.

Suburbs in Flight or maybe Gated Communities in White Flight would perhaps be a more likely outcome of such a technological leap, but that idea would never occur to a New Yorker.

To really appreciate the Futurians and their impact, consider the words of the late Donald Wollheim, writer, editor, and founder of DAW Books, who stated that the writers and followers of science fiction "should actively work for the realization of the scientific world-state as the only genuine justification for their activities and existence". In this one statement, Wollheim makes a direct connection from the 19th century "utopian romances" Knight cited earlier to the philosophical and ideological underpinnings of modern science fiction.

I have read more than my fair share of 19th century utopian romances. Most are pure simple-minded dreck.

"As you know, Robert, the cornerstone of our modern world of perfect peace and universal prosperity is the Treaty of London, which was written when all the world's kings and presidents gathered together in the Crystal Palace and passed a law abolishing war forever."

Some transcend mere infantile dreckdom, though, and reach the heights of pernicious, and yet, in their day, highly influential agit-prop.

"Thereafter, with the subsequent outlawing of money, private property, greed, illness, marriage, unlicensed childbirth, and organized religion, Man was at last set on the path to the shining city on the hill; the glorious future we all enjoy today!"

"My word!" Robert ejaculated, "that does sound frightfully exciting! So where is this shining city on the hill? Beyond that foul-smelling clutter of tumble-down pig-pens I espy yonder?"

The Traveler from Utopolis smiled wanly. "Actually, that is the city. We're not quite done with the latest Five Year Plan yet."

Sorry. I couldn't resist.

To be continued...

Cut 'em Off at the Horsehead Nebula! (Part Three)

2009-01-20T19:00:00.002-06:00

The ironic part is, for a genre that routinely deals in stories of space exploration and colonization, the history and folklore of the American West offers a vast wealth of fascinating source materials and proven paradigms, just waiting to be rediscovered and used. It was the experience of the American West—or more accurately, the succession of "wests" that began on the Atlantic seaboard in the early seventeenth century and ended somewhere near Yuma in the late nineteenth century—that formed the uniquely American character and made the Americans a different people from their European ancestors. Even those writers who are first and loudest to cry "Bat Durston!" routinely imbue their fictional creations with the character traits that were forged in the crucible of the American West: self-reliance, stoicism, a distrust of distant government, and a certain handiness with firearms. Moreover, it was the frontier experience that produced a uniquely American idea, and one that, however unconsciously, seems to permeate nearly all science fiction written today: that it's possible to go somewhere new, meet new people, discard the unpleasant parts of your own culture, and by blending together create a new and better culture.

The opening of the American West was a unique event in human history. Almost everywhere else in the world, a frontier was merely the heavily fortified border between two competing and roughly equivalent political powers, reinforced by centuries of distrust and cultural differences. For an unhappy Frenchman, for example, it would be madness to pack up the family and move out to the frontier, because all he would do then is end up in Germany. Only on the North American continent did the frontier—the West—come to symbolize freedom and the chance to escape your past and start over. Certainly there were risks involved in going west—if it was easy, everyone would be doing it—but along with the physical mobility came social mobility, and the environment, while often hostile, was not invariably lethal. Only in the American West was it possible to start out with little more than gumption and a few smarts, and by the grace of God and the strength of your own two hands, reinvent yourself in the image of your choice. (And with a little extra luck get rich doing it, too!) Only in the West was what you did of more immediate importance than where you came from. [Irish and Chinese naturally excluded, of course.]

Equally underappreciated, it seems, is the uniqueness in history of the American Civil War. Americans—and American science fiction writers, especially—have a strangely romantic view of rebellion. In most of the rest of human history, revolutions and civil wars are traditionally followed by the wholesale mass-slaughter of the losers, as the winners consolidate their power by the crude expedient of exterminating everyone who might conceivably oppose them in the future. Only in America did the West offer a continent-sized safety valve, where even former Confederates unhappy with the way the War of Northern Aggression turned out could find a chance to begin again.

And it is these overtly Western themes—no matter how vocally we may try to deny their origin—that recur time and again in the literature of science fiction.

I suppose it was inevitable that science fiction should try to cut itself off from its pulp roots. Rejection of that which came before seems programmed into our genes. Sons argue with fathers; daughters clash with mothers; Mark Twain loathed James Fennimore Cooper. After all, science fiction as we know it today is primarily the creation of a group of young men who lived in New York in the 1930s, who called themselves Futurians and thought taking the train down to Philadelphia was a grand adventure, and who honestly believed there was absolutely nothing of interest west of New Jersey—and come to think of it, New Jersey was suspect, too.

But the conceits and prejudices of John W. Campbell have dominated science fiction for nearly seventy years now, so perhaps it's time to start thinking about finally stepping out of his shadow. An important part of the frontier saga has always been the story of the clash between the old order, struggling to maintain control, and the new people, yearning to write their own definition of freedom.

John W. Campbell, Jr., died in 1971. Every year the World Science Fiction Society honors his legacy by giving out the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, in the same ceremony in which they also honor Hugo Gernsback's legacy by giving out a bevy of Hugo Awards for various achievements in science fiction. On a different night in a different city, the Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) presents a battery of Nebula Awards, as peer recognition of distinguished writing.

In 2006, Joss Whedon's Serenity won both the Nebula Award for Best Screenplay and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. [Being a somewhat experienced writer, Whedon was ineligible for the Campbell Award.] As a voting member of SFWA, it grieves me to admit that yes, I did hear some behind-the-curtains grumbling from the old guard about the fact that the Nebula was going to "a damned Bat Durston."

But I say, look. The real American frontier closed in the nineteenth century. It's now the twenty-first century. It is long past time to declare the history and folklore of the American West open for literary exploration and settlement. Bat Durston lies in a lonely unmarked grave somewhere on the windswept prairie of Bbllzznaj, where the six-legged megacoyotes howl at might, and as for me, I would rather ship out on a beat-up old Firefly than wear a red shirt in Starfleet any day of the week and twice on Sunday. It's no accident that the second most successful science fiction franchise of all times begins with these words, even though the stories rarely lived up to the promise: "Space, the final frontier..."

Or as Mal Reynolds might put it, "The pulp wars are long done. We're all just writers, now."

Bruce Bethke was a regular contributor to Amazing Stories in the 1980s and 1990s, as well as to a wide variety of other magazines. A critically acclaimed and award-winning science fiction novelist, he takes strangely perverse pride in knowing that he once managed to convince the editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine that his unabashed swashbuckling pirate story was in fact science fiction.

Tomorrow: what didn't make it into this essay...

Cut 'em Off at the Horsehead Nebula! (Part Two)

2009-01-20T07:00:00.002-06:00

There is a curious synchronicity at work here. In 1890 the United States Census Bureau declared the American frontier officially closed, to the extent that there was no longer a discernible line of separation between settled and unsettled areas within the continental United States. In 1896 the frontier of the imagination might be considered to have officially opened, with the launch of the first pulp fiction magazine, Argosy. This magazine, and the many imitators that soon followed it, was in a direct line of descent from the dime novels and "penny-dreadfuls" that made legends of Wild Bill Hickok, Jesse James, and Billy the Kid. Every month it served up generous helpings of pure, unadulterated escapist adventure fantasy to a mostly young, mostly male, and increasingly urbanized audience.

While some of the early pulps such as The Shadow and Doc Savage were simply dime novels issued in serialized format, others gave their readers a glorious hodge-podge of war, sports, jungle, railroad, horror, mystery, crime, pirate, and "scientific romance" stories, intermixed with the occasional factual article—and yes, they also ran plenty of Westerns. Genre lines were crossed and recrossed with gleeful abandon until they were mincemeat for the very simple reason that they didn't exist yet; Edgar Rice Burroughs' martians might be ten feet tall, green, oviparous, and equipped with four arms each, and their horses might have eight legs, but in terms of behavior they were indistinguishable from any band of H. Rider Haggard's nomadic savages. Above all, the early pulps excelled in delivering what a later generation might call "that Indiana Jones stuff": lost cities, uncharted islands, vanished civilizations, and secret cults plotting terrible things from which only broad-chested heroes with flashing swords or blazing guns could rescue the beautiful women.

In 1909, publisher, editor, and sometimes writer Hugo Gernsback launched Modern Electrics magazine, and to fill space he occasionally ran reprints of old Verne, Wells, or Edgar Allan Poe stories. Impressed by the positive response these stories drew from readers, in 1926 Gernsback launched Amazing Stories, the world's first magazine devoted exclusively to science fiction—or as Gernsback dubbed it, "scientifiction." [His original term, oddly enough, did not catch on with the general public, and so he later changed it to "science fiction." That name stuck.]

The success—and bankruptcy, and reborn success—of Amazing Stories quickly led to a host of imitators: Planet Stories, Marvel Tales, Wonder Stories, Weird Tales, Startling Stories, Astounding Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories...

All these magazines tilled the same fields, bought work from the same writers, and played by the same rules as the older pulp fiction titles. While the genre of science fiction quickly became known as "that Buck Rogers stuff," for the very good reason that Captain Anthony "Buck" Rogers made his first appearance anywhere in the August 1928 issue of Amazing Stories, most science fiction stories continued to abound in that Indiana Jones stuff: lost treasures, hidden civilizations, mysterious plateaus where dinosaurs still roamed, and beautiful women who needed to be rescued. Battles between spaceships were still as likely to be settled by boarding the enemy's ship and engaging in a sword-fight as by exchanging salvos of electro-cannon fire; the treacherous leader of the evil aliens might be a blue-skinned four-eyed reptiloid from Saturn but he still had an inexplicable lust for blonde Earth women; and the hero of a Murray Leinster tale might use an "interdimensional catapult" to journey to a new world, but once he got there the rest of the story could very well be a straight-ahead jungle adventure of the sort in which Edgar Rice Burroughs' Tarzan would feel perfectly at home.

And yes, every now and then, some magazines ran science fiction stories that looked an awful lot like Westerns.

All of this changed in 1938, when John W. Campbell, Jr., took over as editor of Astounding Stories. An accomplished and widely published author in his own right, Campbell insisted that science fiction readers were more intelligent than the readers of other forms of pulp fiction, therefore science fiction writers had to be more intelligent than the writers of other forms of fiction, and therefore the old-school pulp writers were no longer welcome at Astounding. Instead, Campbell concentrated his editorial energies on finding and developing new writers, who wrote stories in which the science was both credible and integral to the story, and in so doing he pretty much single-handedly defined what we now think of as modern science fiction.

Campbell reigned as the editor of Astounding (later renamed Analog) from 1938 to 1971, and the roll call of writers he discovered and famous stories he published during those years reads like the combined Who's Who and Hall of Fame of science fiction. Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, Lester del Rey, A.E. Van Vogt, L. Ron Hubbard, Theodore Sturgeon—the list goes on and on. And while Campbell was not the first to publish Isaac Asimov—Amazing gets that honor, for a story Campbell rejected—he did buy the majority of Asimov's early work, including the series of short stories that were later collected and reissued as Asimov's legendary novels, Foundation and I, Robot.

Rather less well-remembered now are the names of the 1930s pulp writers whose careers effectively ended because Campbell refused to buy any more fiction from them, as well as the names of the "slick" magazine writers whose stories he rejected on the grounds that only authors who wrote science fiction exclusively were qualified to write science fiction. [Tell that to Michael Crichton or Margaret Atwood.] What we do know is that Campbell was famous for writing excoriating rejection letters, and he saved his worst verbal eviscerations for those writers he thought were trying to pass off conventional pulp stories as science fiction—especially Westerns.

[Strangely enough, while we have plenty of examples of the former, history does not record one single example of Campbell rejecting an Arthur C. Clarke story because it was "just another locked-room mystery set in space" or of his rejecting an Isaac Asimov robot story because it was "just another rewrite of 'The Golem of Prague'."]

While science fiction and mystery magazines prospered in the 1940s, the rest of the pulp adventure field fell on hard times. Not only did wartime paper shortages and economic dislocations put many titles out of business, but by the end of the decade, Terra was running terribly short of incognita. There were no longer any uncharted islands in the Pacific Ocean; farewell, Skull Island and the sons of Kong. The air routes through the Himalayas were thoroughly mapped; goodbye, Shangri-La and Lost Horizon. There were no noble savages or ancient civilizations waiting to be discovered in the jungles of the Congo, no more mysterious cities hidden high in the mountains of South America, and getting to Mars was beginning to look like it would take considerably more effort than cobbling together a spaceship in the backyard from a discarded atomic motor and some government surplus parts. Not only that, but once you got there, the prospects for finding any beautiful half-naked Martian women who needed to be rescued began to seem pretty darn slim.

With terra incognita gone, then, and astra incognita looking increasingly unreachable, many science fiction writers began to turn to psyche incognita. In 1950 Horace (H.L.) Gold launched the last of the Golden Age pulps, Galaxy Science Fiction, with the deliberate intention of de-emphasizing technology and concentrating on serious sociological and psychological stories. Unfortunately Gold also suffered from severe agoraphobia, and many writers quickly realized that they could sell to Galaxy by writing fiction that catered to Gold's illness, hence the large number of "domed city," "underground city," and "the whole world is just one big city" stories that dominated printed science fiction well into the 1970s. For our purposes, though, this vast body of phobic fiction is merely an unfortunate side-effect of Gold's tenure as editor. His real, lasting, and profoundly irritating contribution came in the form of these paragraphs:

Jets blasting, Bat Durston came screeching down through the atmosphere of Bbllzznaj, a tiny planet seven billion light years from Sol. He cut out his super-hyper-drive for the landing... and at that point, a tall, lean spaceman stepped out of the tail assembly, proton gun-blaster in a space-tanned hand.

"Get back from those controls, Bat Durston," the tall stranger lipped thinly. "You don't know it, but this is your last space trip."

That's right. While it was Hugo Gernsback who named it science fiction declared it to be a genre apart, and John W. Campbell who rejected the idea of there being any possible crossover between science fiction and other forms of fiction, it was H. L. Gold who gave that rejection its enduring name. Bat Durston first appeared in the pages of Galaxy—but not in an actual story. "Bat Durston, Space Marshal," was a full-page advertisement, which appeared under the headline, "YOU'LL NEVER FIND IT IN GALAXY!" and ran repeatedly throughout the 1950s and 1960s. The rest of the ad copy went on to ridicule the idea of "a Western transplanted to some alien and impossible planet" and extol the virtues of Galaxy as being a magazine that published only stories "by people who know and love science fiction"—by which Gold meant authors who would never be caught dead crossing genre lines. Ergo, to answer the question we asked at the beginning of this essay: Why?

Because for more than fifty years now, the members of science fiction's critical/literary/academic/pretentious circles have adhered to Campbell's conceit that science fiction is somehow innately superior to all other forms of fiction, by repeatedly and ritualistically beating the stuffings out of H. L. Gold's straw man.

To be concluded...

Cut 'em Off at the Horsehead Nebula! (Part One)

2009-01-19T21:00:00.003-06:00

Author's Note: This piece was first published in Serenity Found: More Unauthorized Essays on Joss Whedon's Firefly Universe, published in 2007 by BenBella Books.

So we're sitting in the rec room, watching Serenity on the big screen with the surround sound cranked. Only we can never simply watch a movie: there's just one degree of separation between us and the folks who did Mystery Science Theater 3000, and I'm afraid that all too often, it's audible.

For example, right now Larry the Astronomer is in hog heaven, trying to work out the celestial mechanics of the Firefly universe in his head. ("Maybe if we start with a couple of super-Jovian worlds orbiting the blue-white primary in a Sirius-type binary system, and most of these so-called worlds are actually terraformed moons...") But John the Screenwriter is having some trouble understanding why I'm so excited about a movie based on a TV series that was canceled halfway through the first season. I briefly consider dragging out the DVD boxed set and forcing him to watch at least the two-hour series premiere, but there's not enough time for that, so I settle for, "John, think of this as the anti-Trek."

That's a good opening gambit. We've long since agreed that Star Trek's Federation is some kind of intrusive and heavily militarized police state. Now we only argue over whether it's a socialist or fascist utopia.

"Firefly" I continue, "is set some five centuries in the future, and six years after the end of a failed war for independence against the Alliance: the oppressive central government. Now, Mal here—"

John interrupts. "—is Han Solo with an actual backstory. I get that. He's Rick Blaine with a spaceship instead of a nightclub. He's a classic lost paladin; an embittered losing-side war vet with a junk freighter, struggling to eke out a living on the fringes of civilization and the law. But underneath that rough exterior he's still got his honor, his pride, and that sense of justice that forces him to get involved and become a big damn hero, from time to time. I get that about him. I like him. And the blond guy—"

"Wash."

"He's a classic comic-relief sidekick, who gets to have all the emotional reactions that the paladin can never show. Now, this tough chick—"

"Zoe."

"She served with Mal in the war, didn't she? Because she's got the whole calls-him-'sir'-even-when-she-doesn't-say-it-out-loud thing going, which is done very nicely. I also think it's really nice to see a woman in the role of the engine room grease-monkey, because she reminds me of my first ex-wife and her intimate relationship with her Jaguar XJ6.

"But the doctor—Simon?—there's obviously some bad blood between him and Mal, so I'd have to guess he has a little black bag full of patent medicines that save the day on a regular basis and make him worth putting up with, while his sister, Buffy—"

"River."

"—is obviously the ninety-pound pixie who can toss around men three times her size when she gets mad, and I suspect she's the focus of the entire plot. But the one character here I'm really having trouble getting a fix on is him." John points at the screen.

"Jayne?"

"Yeah, him. I mean, clearly, he's big and tough, none too bright, obsessed with weapons, and probably worth his weight in gold in a fight. But Jane? What kind of name is that? Is this like, 'A Boy Named Sue'? Is that why he's so surly?"

"No," I say. "J-A-Y-N-"

"Oh," John says, as understanding dawns. "Jayne. As in, John Wayne. Okay, I get it now. So how soon do we meet the PTP and the HHG?"

It's my turn to be confused. "The what and the what?"

"The Preacher with a Troubled Past and the Hooker with a Heart of Gold. They must be in this story. it just wouldn't be the same without them."

I start to tell John about Shepherd Book and Inara, but then decide to keep him in the dark a little longer. "What makes you say that?"

"Because," he says, "you're wrong, Bruce. This is not the anti-Trek.

"This is Stagecoach in Space."

You must understand: in the world of science fiction, there is no deadlier insult than to call something "a Western set in space." As a science fiction writer you're permitted to lift freely from any other period in history and any other body of world folklore except the American Old West. Authors have made entire careers out of recycling Asian, African, and Amerindian folk tales in the guise of science fiction stories, and the entire genre of fantasy can fairly be described as one endless series of Christianity-free repackagings of Celtic, Nordic, and Germanic fairy tales and heroic myths. Even the most successful science fiction franchise of all time, Star Wars, has been described quite accurately as being simply an anthology of Japanese samurai stories (mostly notably The Tale of Heike) gussied up in sci-fi drag and trotted out onstage to near-unanimous critical approval and worldwide commercial success.

But put your hero on horseback without also giving him a sword or a lance—give him a Winchester laser rifle, a Colt proton blaster, or a broad-brimmed Stetson hat to protect his skin from the searing UV radiation of the local main sequence star—write a story that in any way reflects the actual experience and well-documented history of the American Civil War and the subsequent exploration and settling of the lands between the Mississippi River and the Pacific coast—and sooner or later some fool critic will accuse you of "calling the jackrabbit a smeerp" and "writing a Western set in space," and after that there's nothing left to do but build up a thick skin, because the law frowns on calling out fool critics and gunning them down in the street. There is even a special pejorative term reserved for a science fiction story that has been identified ex post facto as being a latent Western: it's called a Bat Durston.

Why?

Why, in a genre that routinely pays tribute to space pioneers, is there this special antipathy for the Western? Why, in a form where the space colony revolt is a standard summer-stock set-piece, is the American Civil War and its aftermath strictly off-limits? Why, with all of human history and all of known literature to draw on for source material, is this one particular historical period and one body of folklore so rigorously forbidden?

Why, in science fiction's critical/literary/academic/pretentious circles, is Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels considered an important antecedent to modern speculative fiction, while Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is not?

To understand the answer to this question, we must travel back to the beginning...

No, not back to Verne and Wells. If you were to hop into your Wayback Machine and travel back in time to discuss science fiction with Jules Verne and H.G. Wells, you'd overshoot your temporal destination and they wouldn't know what you were talking about anyway. Jules Verne considered himself simply an adventure story writer, and while he's best remembered today for 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, he also wrote mysteries and satires, and it was the stage performance rights for Around the World in 80 Days that made him rich in his lifetime. Similarly, H.G. Wells called his early stories and novels "scientific romances," and while he did enjoy his initial success, he eventually abandoned the field in order to write what he considered more important work, now largely forgotten mainstream novels such as Tono-Bungay and The History of Mr. Polly.

No, the real history of science fiction begins, not in Europe in the late nineteenth century, but in the United States in the early twentieth, and it's mostly the story of three men: Hugo Gernsback, John W. Campbell, and H.L. Gold.

To be continued...

And the winner is...

2009-01-18T23:45:00.006-06:00

Zoinks. We've had some difficult-to-judge Friday Challenge's in the past, but the 1/9/09 Friday Challenge was exceptional. Reading, discussing, and picking a winner from amongst the many excellent entries received this week took us all of a bottle of Carmenère and the better part of a bottle of Montepulciano d'Abruzzo, and we still weren't ready to hit the Publish Post button before midnight. Without further delay or ado, then:

WaterBoy: Your little story about Winnie-the-Pooh, Eco-Terrorist, was just absolutely brilliant. As someone who spends a lot of time getting in touch with his inner Eeyore, I still cackle when I re-read this one. The pacing is perfect; all the clues to the characters' true identities are there and yet you still manage to spring the punchline at the end as a complete surprise. Very nicely done.

Ben-El: I'm not sure what to say about this one. I absolutely loved it and laughed out loud while reading it, but Karen didn't get it until I explained a few bits. Then again, how do you explain this one other than to say it's H.P. Lovecraft meets Monty Python? In the end — particularly when put up against this week's tough competition — the joke ending undercuts what was otherwise a very strong story up to that point, though, so just as Brave Sir Robin almost fought the Giant Chicken of Bristol, you almost made the final cut.

Al: I like the framing device, the structure, the story. I balked at "nozzle" only because I happen to know that it's called a mouthpiece. This is the story that really got me wondering whether I'd underestimated the potential in this source material, and whether you were just scratching the surface of a much larger story. I would be interested to see what you and Lady Quill working as a team could come up with to expand upon this story line.

Snowdog: This one really packs an extraordinary emotional impact into 500 words. You do an excellent job of making a human of the alien; of putting the reader in touch with the feelings of a dying honeybee; of making the death of a honeybee seem tragic. This is another one we kept coming back to as we whittled the field down.

Bandit: Hmm, how to say this politely...

Please don't be offended, but this story has me wondering who you really are, because I felt like I was reading the work of a seasoned pro masquerading as an amateur: say, Darrell Schweitzer, or maybe Esther Friesner. Did you really write this in a week? If so, I'd love to get a guest column on your writing habits and method, because frankly, I don't think I could write something this good that fast. The story just plain works; the character of Emrys is neatly drawn and fleshed-out and wonderfully irritating. I've worked with this guy.

To be honest, if I were you, I wouldn't waste this story on a small-potatoes writing contest. I'd change the title — I don't know to what, but the current title doesn't grab me — and probably rearrange the first five paragraphs. Opening with a quote is confusing; it's not readily apparent that "Emrys" is a proper name and "episkopose" seems like a made-up word, unless you meant "episkopos," in which case you misspelled it and it's still obscure enough to be confusing. I'd keep the information in the first eight sentences, but rearrange the order: most likely starting with the cell phone ringing, Matt grabbing it and seeing from the caller ID that it's Emrys and therefore deciding to take the call (and also thereby establishing that Emrys is a person), and then the three lines of dialog. But from "Twenty minutes later" to the end I wouldn't change a thing, except to make sure that it is formatted to standard specs, and then I would try to sell it, starting with Stan Schmidt at Analog.

Why isn't this one the winner this week? That's difficult to nail down precisely. It's a great story, well-written, with a strong flow from paragraph 6 to the end. It's clever and entertaining, but it just doesn't engage us emotionally. The narrator, Matt, is strangely vacant. At the very least, when he and Emrys form A-1 Radiation Diagnostics and go around bilking people for the fake radiation test, it should occur to him that what they're doing is fraud and could easily get them arrested and jailed.

In any case, while this is a very strong story, in the end, there can be only one, which leaves us with the entries from Torainfor and Vidad.

We split over these two and debated their respective merits and flaws until nearly midnight. Torainfor's story shows an encyclopedic knowledge of all things faerie and is a charming tale all the way through to the end — where I felt it weakened, and Karen thought it was brilliant. To me the ending seemed rushed and the magical creatures' motivations for their final action inadequately explained. If this is all because they're nurturing an embryonic dragon that will in time hatch and shatter the Earth like an egg, you'd think they'd have some misgivings about what they're doing. I felt the ending needed more work; Karen thought it was perfect as-is.

Vidad's story, on the other hand — well, I don't normally go for veiled rewrites of Revelations, but in "The Whore of Beebylon" — er, "The Number of The Beest" — please stop me before I hurt myself — we learn the answer to the question, "What if C.S. Lewis had decided to work with bugs instead of lions?" This story is an entire epic in 15 pages; Vidad creates a complex culture complete with history, myth, prophecy, and heresy, and a compelling villain in Occkzzzilla (okay, maybe the names are a bit awkward), and an ecological catastrophe leading up to a final, spectacular climax and resolution — and does it all in 15 pages. Wow.

I don't think Pixar will go for this one because of the religious subtext and I'm sure Glenn Close will insist that Occkzzzilla be rewritten so that she isn't so clearly an argument for Proposition 8, but I want a piece of the animated film deal. Just a small piece will do.

Ergo, by the barest of margins — the width of a bee's whisker, the weight of a few grains of pixie dust — "Then The End Cometh" beats "Ley Lines" and is this week's winner. Vidad, come on down and claim your prize!

The only other thing I have to say is: Whew! Picking a winner this time was work!

I need a vacation...

The State of the Union

2009-01-18T12:00:00.001-06:00

Author's Note: In honor of the coming Obamainaguration, I'm rerunning this piece that I wrote almost exactly four years ago today. This is the first blog post I ever wrote, for The Ranting Room's very short-lived predecessor, The Nixon Channel. Here's hoping you enjoy it.

Cheers,
~brb

I won the coin toss and so got the honor of escorting the new guy. He seemed very surprised when I knocked and he opened the door.

"Dick? Dick Nixon?"

"Hi, Ronnie. Welcome to the pantheon."

"But what — why — ?"

"State of the Union address, my friend! Don't you want to see how the kids are running our country? You know, just because we're dead doesn't mean we have to stop caring — well, except for Ike, he's off playing golf somewhere. And Washington, he just sits in Mount Vernon and weeps. But all the rest of us shades of past presidents are getting together to watch the show, and we'd really appreciate it if you'd come join us."

Ronnie's twinkling smile fell. "I don't know. It seems so soon. To return to the capitol now..."

I laughed. "Oh, we don't actually haunt D.C. anymore! No, Jefferson got so furious one year he tried to turn into a poltergeist, so what we do now is rent a ballroom, put the cable feed up on the big screen, and have a nice little buffet! Adams and his kid supply all the beer you can stand. Come on, it'll be fun!" Ronnie still looked unsure of himself, so I went for the closer.

"Abraham will be very disappointed if you don't show up."

He blinked in surprise. "Lincoln? Lincoln was asking for me?"

I nodded. "Seat of honor, my friend, at the table with Abraham and Teddy. Grant, too, if he sobers up. Like I said, we'll all be there — except for Ike and Washington. And Jefferson, you can never tell when or where he'll show up. And LBJ, well, he still has a few more eons to go in Purgatory, so he probably won't be there either. But everyone else will be!"

Ronnie's famous twinkling smile returned. "Including Mallard Fillmore?"

"Millard," I corrected. "He's very touchy about that."

The seating arrangements were oddly familiar. The Democrats sat over on the left side of the ballroom, the Republicans were off to the right, and the Whigs were in the center-back area, closest to the beer. Nice bunch of guys, the Whigs, but hopelessly out of touch. Ronnie and I made the rounds and shook hands. Jack Kennedy was there, to my surprise; they'd let him out of Purgatory on a 24-hour pass but handcuffed him to Bella Abzug to ensure his good behavior, so he wasn't talking much. There was a brief commotion at the door when Gerald Ford tried to enter and the bouncers had to remind him, once again, that he's not dead, just forgotten. We made it back to our table — Lincoln always sits at the far right side of the room, with his back to the wall and a good view of the exits — at just about the same time as the big screen showed the cabinet walking in.

Lincoln was watching the TV and absolutely beaming. "Condi Rice. Well I never — I mean, I knew that Emancipation thing was a good idea, but I never dreamed..." Teddy stood up and pulled out a chair for Ronnie. Grant was there, but passed out face-down in a bowl of either bean soup or vomit, I couldn't tell which. Lincoln broke away from the TV and offered Ronnie a handshake. "Good job, son, we're all proud of you. Wish I'd had eight full years myself."

The Great Communicator took the handshake but was struck nearly speechless. "Sir, I — "

Someone at the front of the room shouted, "No, not George Stephanopolous! Change the channel!" Dan Rather's somnolent voice filled the air. "Again!" Whoever was controlling the TV started flipping around the dial, but then the Republicans took up a chant of "Fox! Fox!" and it was settled.

Ronnie turned to me. "Is it always this rowdy?"

I nodded. "Usually worse. Have a beer. Relax. Get into the — heh, heh — spirit of things. Look, there's Junior now." I pointed to the big screen.

For a few minutes, we all held silent and watched and listened as Junior started into his speech. Then Lincoln let out a heavy sigh.

"He is a Republican, right?"

Teddy shrugged. "At least he knows which end of the horse to talk to."

"But he over-enunciates so badly. And what is he doing with his hands? C'mon, Junior, loosen up, don't fidget. It's pronounced ish-you, not iss-you. And what on earth is 'nukular' power?"

Ronnie began to get the idea. "Hey, somebody nudge McCain, he's dozing off!"

Lincoln went on, frowning. "And what is this 'income tax' he keeps talking about? We managed to run the country for 130 years without any such thing as an 'income' tax — except during the Civil War, and then we repealed it as soon as the war was over."

Teddy shook his head. "I told Taft it was a bad idea."

"Did not!" Taft shouted from the next table over. "It's Wilson's fault!"

On the other side of the room, Wilson jumped up and shook his fists in the air. "Yeah! Taxes! More taxes! Bring it on!"

Teddy could only shake his head again. "Idiot."

"The only two certainties in life," Lincoln observed, "are death and taxes. And the only good thing about death is that Congress never tries to make it more fair." Our glasses were empty, so I went and got another pitcher. When I got back, Junior was talking about Social Security.

"I can't believe it!" FDR shouted from across the room. "You're still trying to maintain that mess? For crying out loud, it was an emergency measure we rammed through in the middle of the Great Depression! It was never supposed to last this long!"

"Y'know," Ronnie said, "much as I hate to admit it, I've always kind of admired FDR."

"Apparently, so does Junior," Lincoln said. "He's quoted him three times so far." Lincoln turned and looked at Teddy. "Are you sure he's a Republican? He's sounding more like Wilson or your little cousin Franklin every minute."

Ronnie, meanwhile, had begun giving Junior's performance a professional's scrutiny. "Look at the camera, kid," he muttered. "Stand up straight. Don't look at the Democrats in the room. Talk over them. Look straight at the camera and talk directly to the American people."

The camera cut to a reaction shot from the Senate, and Teddy asked, "Is it true you can't see Senator Clinton's reflection in a mirror?" We all got a cheap laugh at that one, refilled our glasses, and when we got around to paying attention again Junior was talking about the trade in human embyros and body parts.

"'Make sure human life is never bought or sold as a commodity?'" Lincoln repeated. "What is wrong with you people? Wasn't the 13th Amendment clear enough?"

"Things have gotten a bit complicated since then," Ronnie offered. "Er — "

Teddy interrupted. "You had to create a new government agency for Homeland Security? Why? Don't you still have Winchester and Colt?"

Before Ronnie could answer this as well, Lincoln thumped his fist on the table. "And what is this pledging to end tyranny and install freedom everywhere business? I swear, he sounds more like Wilson with every word."

Across the room, Wilson leaped to his feet again. "Yeah! Intervention! Nation-building! Bomb 'em 'til they love democracy! BRING IT ON!"

"And now he's quoting little Franklin again. 'Each age is a dream that is dying, or one that is coming to birth.' Well, duh!"

On the big screen Junior was saying, "The fall of imperial communism was only a dream — until one day, it was accomplished."

Ronnie finally frowned. "You're welcome. Sure, mention FDR all over the place, but do I get a word of credit?"

"And the speech is over," Teddy observed. "He's off the podium, moving into the crowd, shaking hands, and — My God, did he just kiss Senator Lieberman?"

Ronnie looked at me. "Should we stay for the rebuttal?" I looked across at Abraham.

"We'll need more beer," Lincoln said.

Grant woke up during Reid's rebuttal. "Who is that little pencil-neck?" he slurred. "Orville Redenbacher?" He appeared to listen intently for a few minutes, then stood up and staggered off, to mistake a decorative plant for a chamber pot.

Teddy lasted a little while longer, but when Reid said, "America is still the land of the open road," he leaped to his feet.

"And Democrats will make you drive it in a goddam hybrid!" This brought a few glasses flung in our direction from the left side of the ballroom, so Teddy rolled up his sleeves and stomped off, to do some big stick work on the Democrats. Reid finished, Nancy Pelosi started talking, and Ronnie's jaw dropped.

"Doesn't that woman ever blink?" he asked, not taking his gaze off the screen. "And what's with her eyebrows? Are they like, tattooed on? Oh, my God." He turned to me. "She's got Simpson eyes!" My confusion must have been evident, because he explained. "Her pupils don't converge. They diverge — they point in different directions. That's the way Matt Groening draws the Simpsons, to make them look psychotic." This cleared up exactly nothing, so Ronnie added, "I'm sorry, that came after your time. Never mind." We went back to watching Pelosi after that, but I was completely unable to hear her words because I was too busy concentrating on her eyebrows. Teddy returned, with a bloody nose, bruised knuckles, and a big grin, at just about the time Pelosi was complaining that Iraq had become a magnet for terrorists.

"Of course it has, you dimwit!" he shouted at the screen. "That's how you hunt predators! You put out bait, lure them in, and shoot them dead!" He turned to Lincoln. "I've seen enough. Ready?"

Lincoln drained his glass. "Absolutely." He stood up and shook Ronnie's hand. "Well, son, it's been fun. We'll meet again." He gave me a nod and a smile. "And good to see you again, Dick. Later." He and Teddy made a beeline for the door. I stood up, and Ronnie followed.

"I don't know," Ronnie said, shaking his head sadly. "Maybe it's too soon. Maybe coming here tonight was a bad idea. My poor country. Oh my poor, poor country."

Grant staggered back to us then, and threw a companionable arm around Ronnie's shoulders. "Aw, cheer up, kid," he said. "The nation will be okay. After all, it survived us, didn't it?"

In loving memory of newspapers

2009-01-17T07:00:00.008-06:00

So the Minneapolis Star-Tribune — or as those of us who live hereabouts call it, the Red Star & Sickle — has filed for bankruptcy. The Tribune Company, parent to the Chicago Tribune, the Los Angeles Times, and a half-dozen others, is in bankruptcy. The Heart Corporation has put the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the block and has said it will shut down the paper if a buyer is not found within 60 days. The New York Times is hemorrhaging money and had to sell its headquarters building to raise cash. Closer to home, the St. Paul Pioneer Press has downsized, in every sense of the word, and become a pale shadow of its once chubby and successful self. I used to have friends who worked for the P-Press. They're all gone now, either moved on to greener pastures or out of the news business entirely.

I'm going to miss newspapers when they're gone.

That's always been one of my little pleasures when I travel; to buy a copy of the local newspaper and see what issues the local folks care about. That pleasure has soured in recent years. It doesn't seem to matter where I go, now: I pick up a copy of the local paper, and it's all the same stuff. Some articles from the AP, maybe some articles from Reuters, a long left-leaning op-ed piece from the NY Times syndicate masquerading as in-depth analysis, and maybe a few syndicated columns from the Washington Post. Maybe, if I'm really lucky, they'll have one highly overheated and badly written op-ed piece by the publisher, a local old crank who spent too much time sniffing Linotype metal early in his career. But even those are becoming rare now.

Homogeneity bores and disappoints me. I don't buy the Rhinelander Daily News to read the same preprocessed pap I can get anywhere else. It's the idiosyncratic voices that interest me. I don't want us to become one seamless, regionless, borderless unified culture operating at the lowest common denominator: one nation under USA TODAY. I like the fact that Southerners think differently from Westerners; that Los Angelenos think differently from San Franciscans; that Boston, Newark, and New York may all be within spitting distance of each other physically but they're worlds apart psychologically. And the more they spit on each other, the better I, as a Northern Great Plains Midwesterner, feel. In fact, while you're at it, go hoch a big one on New York for me. Thanks.

Professional sports are a pale substitute. College sports are no different. The place you really used to see that rampant regional chauvinism was in the local papers. I liked the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, if only because it made the St. Paul Pioneer Press look good in comparison and gave me the opportunity every few weeks to tell one of their telemarketers, "I wouldn't subscribe to your paper if you paid me to take it! I wouldn't wrap dead fish in it!"

There, that's a question for you: in this brave new Internet age where everything is instantly online, what are you going to clean fish on? I tried gutting and scaling a northern pike on the Daily KOS. It just wasn't the same.

Me, I guess you could say I've got printer's ink in my blood. Probably measurable trace amounts of lead, antimony, and tin, too. When I went to college they actually still taught journalism majors how to run a Linotype machine and cast hot metal type, on the grounds that you were highly likely to run into an old Linotype machine sooner or later in your career and being able to operate the beast might mean the difference between getting or not getting a job. People had much more relaxed attitudes about lead exposure in those days.

But it goes back earlier than that. When I was a kid, my parents bought me a small toy letterpress somewhere. I used to have a wonderfully gloriously messy time, setting type, inking up the plates, and stamping out sheets of near-nonsense. Mark Twain claimed he could read backwards and in his early newspaper years actually composed his stories while setting them in type. If true, I remain in awe — but then again, Mr. Twain and The Truth were sometimes only nodding acquaintances. I do know that he lost a fortune investing in the automatic typesetting machine that was beaten in the marketplace by the Linotype, and that this bankruptcy completely changed the trajectory of his life and career and contributed greatly to the bitterness and cynicism of his later years. Why do writers so often succumb to the lure of imagining that they know something about business?

I don't know. But I do know that I'm prey to it, too.

Thinking back on it, I'm surprised to find just how strongly my life has been shaped by newspapers: not by what they printed so much as by the business itself. I work with kids now — graduates, actually, fresh out of college — who have never had a job before in their lives, except possibly for that boring summer they spent flipping hamburgers or delivering pizzas.

Me, I got my first job at age 13: a paper route. Except in those days, a paperboy (and they were all boys, then; no girls allowed) wasn't an employee; he was a self-employed entrepreneur. You bought your route — your territory, your franchise, if you will — from its previous owner. You bought your papers from the newspaper company, on credit. You picked them up at the substation, a plank-floored sheet-metal shack that was sweltering in the summer and heated in the winter by a cast-iron pot-belly stove; very Dickensian. If you were there early enough you helped unload the delivery truck, no doubt in violation of a vast bevy of OSHA and child-labor laws. There was virtue in being early; you got the freshest, cleanest copies. If you were late, you got the torn and dirty leftovers, or perhaps not enough copies to cover your route. If it was a thick edition, we hand-assembled the sub-sections in the shed before going off to deliver them. These plastic newspaper condoms that papers come in nowadays were a very late-arriving innovation. There were days in the summer months when I came home from delivering my route just black with smeared printer's ink from my shoulders to my fingertips. I remember the day the paper announced, with great hoopla, that they were switching to non-toxic soy-based inks. Non-toxic? Then what the Hell was that other stuff?

As I said, printer's ink in my blood.

I never really thought about it before, but I guess it's fair to say that most of my beliefs and attitudes about work were formed in my years as a paperboy. If you delivered good service, you gained customers and sometimes even performance bonuses. (A.k.a, tips.) If you delivered poor service, your customers might cancel their subscriptions, switch to buying from a box or newsstand, or worse, switch to the rival morning paper. You had payables and receivables: you had to pay the company every Saturday for the papers you'd taken that week, so you had to collect from your customers in cash, weekly, and whatever the difference between the two amounts was, that was your profit or loss.

I made enough profit to buy a small sailboat.

You learned to keep a cash reserve, in case collections fell short, because failing to pay the newspaper company in full and on-time could cost you your route. You learned to judge character, deciding which of your customers were worthwhile credit risks who could be trusted to pay-up next week if they were a little short and you let them slide this week, and which should be cut off as soon as they fell behind. You learned to recognize and seize opportunities; if there was a big headline that day you might take a few extra papers, and try to hawk them on a street corner. Eventually, you even learned when it was worthwhile taking the German Shepherd along with you as you collected your route. (And I'm sorry to say, even Back Then and Back There, sometimes it was.)

You invested in capital equipment: a used balloon-tired coaster-brake Schwinn with a luggage rack for ordinary days and a heavy-duty pushcart for Wednesdays and Sundays. You learned quickly that trying to carry two saddlebags full of newspapers would destroy any nice, lightweight, ten-speed bike. I've often said I owe all my mechanical abilities to having owned a succession of crappy British cars. I suspect now the more accurate truth is that it started with that Schwinn, and with having had to learn to respoke wheels and rebuild cranksets, bearing races, and Bendix brakes myself, because I couldn't afford to take it into the bike shop in the first place, and even if I could have afforded that, I couldn't afford to have it out of action for a week while it was in the shop.

The past is a different place. They do things differently there. I wouldn't want any of my kids to have a paper route now; there are too many sick freaks and predatory weirdos out there. I wouldn't want to invest in a newspaper company now, because in the long run, I don't think there's anything that can save the common metro daily newspaper. I can get all the national and international news I want faster and better over the Internet, and advertising — the real backbone and lifeblood of the daily newspaper — has moved to cheaper and more effective media and won't be coming back. The diversified media companies that own most newspapers, in their infinite arrogance and blindness, have gutted their local reporting coverage, and that's the one unique thing that a newspaper can offer.

The corollary of "All politics is local" is, "All news is local." I used to think of the St. Paul Pioneer Press as my local newspaper. Now "my" paper is the Oakdale & Lake Elmo Review, a weekly broadsheet and shopper. When I was an arrogant young reporter doing my internship and eager to become the next Woodward or Bernstein, I thought there was nothing in the world more boring than covering a City Council meeting, excepting perhaps a School Board meeting. Now, I realize that this is the news I really do care about, as in, "What are those morons doing with my tax money this time?"

But the Pioneer Press no longer covers where I live in any meaningful way, and the Star-Trib never has. If the Tariq al-Aziz mosque in Minneapolis was scribbled with racist graffiti today, it would be the lead story on the 6 o'clock news tonight and the front-page story tomorrow and for a week to follow. But when the Mormon temple six blocks from my house was fire-bombed — twice — neither the Press nor the Star-Trib printed a peep. I learned about it from my silly little local weekly broadsheet and shopper.

The major metro daily newspaper is dead. There's nothing that can be done to bring it back.

All the same, I'm going to miss newspapers when they're gone.

The Friday Challenge - 1/16/09

2009-01-16T08:33:00.004-06:00

Wow, nice turnout this week. I'll have to toss out vague, half-baked ideas like the 1/9/09 Friday Challenge more often. In the order received, we have entries from:

WaterBoy, "Bee All That You Can Bee"
Torainfor, "Ley Lines"
snowdog, "Return to Glastonbury"
Ben-El, "And Did Those Tentacles in Ancient Times..."
Al, "Avalon 2.0," Part One | Two | Three | Four | Five | Six | Seven | Eight
the bandit, "Emrystic Illusion"
Vidad, "Then The End Cometh"

Al has accomplished the remarkable task of writing a complete novella (novelletta?) entirely in the form of HaloScan comments, while the bandit is our newest ~~sacrificial victim~~ contestant, so go easy on him. (Her?)

As always, even if you did not submit an entry, you are invited to read, comment on, and vote for your favorite(s), with the winner to be announced Sunday evening.

Now, as for this week's Friday Challenge, I wish I could take credit for it, but it comes straight from the ~~febrile~~ fertile mind of Henry, in all it's brilliantly devious and recursive glory. The challenge is: Present the Friday Challenge that you would run, if you were running the Friday Challenge.

As always, we're playing by the ever-evolving Official Rules of the Friday Challenge and playing for whatever is behind Door #2 — and a special secret Bonus Prize, which will only be announced after the contest is concluded. The deadline for entries is midnight Central time, Thursday, 1/22/09.

Oh, and one more thing: this time around, multiple entries will be accepted.

I look forward to seeing what you come up with.

Ciao,
~brb

Catching Up

2009-01-15T05:14:00.005-06:00

Sorry for the longer than usual silence. Last weekend was consumed by family matters — except for the time I spent early Saturday morning writing the Gran Torino review — which was expected, but not to the extent that it happened. The week since has been overrun by a parade of trivia, none of the matters being of great importance but all of them being of great urgency. I'm awake now only because The Kid's school just called; school is canceled today because it's -18° F out there, with wind chills reaching down to -40, and they don't want to risk having students get frostbite while waiting for the school bus. Good decision.

I am having the hardest time not waking The Kid right now to share this joyous news.

Those of you who live in sunnier climes might want to take a moment to review It's so cold in Minnesota... in order to establish a baseline understanding of what life here is like.

As for the results of the 1/2/09 Friday Challenge:

Henry: Great story, well-written as always, but every now and then we have to make an example of some poor snowdog just to prove that we're at least semi-serious about deadlines, and this week, you're it. Sorry. Oh, and it's "caste" not "cast."

Torainfor: Another sweet, beautiful piece of work. It's a really touching idea, in a spiritual/fantastical way, and I can't find a thing to complain about with the writing... Except that it actually doesn't seem long enough. It feels like the idea needs more development, and that that deus ex letter at the end is just a convenient way of crossing the bridge to the ending. Really close — but it feels like it needs one more rewrite to be there.

WaterBoy: Yeah, this one gets the coveted "Most Like What I Probably Would Have Written" this week. It's kinky; it's funny; and there is definitely a market for short SF stories with a kinky funny sexy angle. I leave finding that market as an independent-study exercise for you, as whenever I try to do so online, I always seem to wind up in websites devoted to stories about Japanese schoolgirls in sailor uniforms who meet up with things with lots of tentacles and somehow manage to lose all of their clothing.

Ben-El: I liked this one a lot. It's a stretch for you, which I'm really pleased to see you trying, and while it's a bit ragged and unfinished in places, it's got style out the wazoo. One of my tests of "good-storyness" is whether a piece of writing triggers some kind of sympathetic resonance in me that sparks new ideas, and while reading yours, I got this one. Why bother making artificial wombs at all? If the society is this far along the road to "it's just protoplasm," there's a much cheaper way. Why not make it a condition for, say, getting a green card, or receiving food stamps? "Lady, if you wanna get General Assistance, you're gonna have to sign the one-year contract and accept the implant." There are some really socio-creepy ways in which this story could be further developed. Good work.

Arisia: Short, tight, well-written, with a good solid shudder at the end. We went back and forth between this one, Ben-El's, and WaterBoy's entries for some time, but in the end this one edged out the others, by being more finished than Ben-El's and more serious than WaterBoy's.

So congratulations, Arisia: this week, you're the winner! Now come on down and claim your prize!

As for the 1/9/09 Friday Challenge: ah, use the information in the linked articles to figure out something for yourself. I originally had in mind a really complicated story idea involving ley lines, the Wild Hunt, colony collapse disorder, and the clash between faerie and modern technology, but I never had time to flesh it out properly and we're out of time now. So whatever you've come up with; yes, that's it exactly, that's what I meant.

And you've got one more day, so get it finished and posted!

Something tells me I am not gonna be up at midnight tonight, watching the clock to make certain no one snowdogs in after the deadline...

Movie Review: Gran Torino

2009-01-10T07:00:00.010-06:00

To understand my reaction to Clint Eastwood's newest movie, Gran Torino, you first need to know about my father-in-law. A Marine Corps WWII combat veteran (Pacific theater), he worked construction for the first few years after he got out of the Corps, and then joined the Milwaukee Police Department and spent 28 years walking and driving the beat as a street cop. It took him until this century to finally break down enough to buy a Japanese car, and the way he uses language in "polite" conversation even today, well —

I swear, as I was watching Gran Torino, I thought screenwriter Nick Schenk must have been following my father-in-law around with a tape recorder, because he nailed down Eastwood's character's voice absolutely perfectly.

In this movie Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, an aging, recently widowed, Korean War combat veteran and retired Ford factory worker living in urban Detroit. His two sons and their wives are sanctimonious ingrates living out in the suburbs, his grandchildren are easily bored buckets of greed, and so he lives alone in the last nice house in a neighborhood that's no longer in transition; it's gone right down the toilet and you'd better flush twice. All Walt wants to do is maintain his tiny patch of lawn and be left alone, especially by the boyishly earnest new priest in the parish, Father Janovich (played with wonderfully clueless innocence by Christopher Carley), who is determined to get Kowalski back into the fold. Kowalski's one joy in life is his mint-condition 1972 Ford Gran Torino, which he bought off the assembly line where he helped build it and which he never drives; he just keeps it in the garage under a dust cover and rolls it out once a week, to wash and polish it.

The car is a Maguffin, of course. Kowalski's unhappy and tightly compacted life takes a turn for the worse when a noisy, fatherless, three-generation Hmong family moves into the house next door, and he's forced to interact with them when he catches their teenaged son, Thao (played by a local lad, Robbinsdale high school student Bee Vang), trying to steal the car as part of a gang initiation. Against Kowalski's awesome obstinance, the equally bull-headed Hmong mother is determined to make Thao repay his debt by working for Kowalski, and so, slowly, grudgingly, Kowalski and Thao begin to move towards an understanding.

I won't say too much more about the plot for fear of spoiling it, except to warn you that the ending is almost unbearably sad. This one also merits a language warning — and then another language warning on top of the previous warning, and maybe one more besides. While the story turns around Kowalski's growing to know his neighbors and care about their lives — (and on another note, kudos to technical adviser Dyane Garvey, because the movie gets the traditional Hmong "Ordeal by Food" exactly right) — the plot hinges on several clashes between Hispanic, Hmong, and black gangsters, and when they meet, the dialog is nothing but nonstop racial insults and f-words concatenating more f-words topped off with f-words. Strangely enough, though, what most reviewers have been objecting to is Kowalski's thick and furious equal-opportunity slinging of racial epithets. I guess people of color get a pass on this point.

I will say it again, though: based on a lifetime of listening to combat veterans, longshoremen, teamsters, and blue-collar factory workers, I think the dialog is, if anything, a little mild. In the theater where I saw it, Kowalski's constant profanity and racial slurs evoked first gasps, then nervous titters, and then, finally, honest laughter, especially as Thao finally "man's up" enough to begin giving as good as he gets.

Rating: Four Stars (with brief scenes of very graphic violence and a strong language warning)

The Friday Challenge - 1/9/09

2009-01-09T07:00:00.002-06:00

G'morning. I'm on a really tight schedule today so I'm going to be more terse than usual. As of now we have the following entries for the 1/2/09 Friday Challenge. In the order received, they are:

Torainfor: "Soul Source"

Arisia: "Security"

WaterBoy: "Two Hearts Beat as One"

Ben-El: "Ragnarok" Part One | Part Two

Read, discuss, comment on, vote for; winner to be announced Sunday.

As for this week's challenge: I haven't had time to flesh it out. Heck, I haven't even had time to finish and post yesterday's bloggerel. But to give you a jump start on it, I want you to read up on Ley lines and Glastonbury, and then get a load of this article.

Hey, maybe the problem isn't that cell phone towers are confusing honey bees. It's that honey bees depend on fairies for direction while they work, and the cell phone microwave radiation is wreaking havoc on fairies.

As always, we're playing by the very relaxed rules of the Friday Challenge and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. The deadline is midnight Central time, Thursday, 1/15/09.

Short Stories vs. Novels

2009-01-07T07:00:00.006-06:00

The difference between writing short stories and writing novels is like — oh, I don't know: like the difference between painting a miniature vs. painting a mural? Between a needlepoint sampler and a tapestry? Scripting a five-minute skit vs. a three-act play? A 30-second television commercial vs. a two-hour drama? How many clichés can I stuff into a single post, anyway? Like the difference between writing a three-minute hit single and scoring a full opera? (Someone pass that last one along to Pete Townshend, would you please?)

The skills involved are different. I know quite a few good novelists who are simply incapable of being succinct and focused enough to write a good short story. Likewise, I've met plenty of great short-story writers who couldn't finish a novel to save their careers. There is a widely held belief out there that you must start out writing short stories in order to pay your dues, or something like that. It's simply not true.

True, many of the now-great names started out writing short stories for the pulps, but that is mostly because that's where the market was in those days. Even The War of the Worlds was first published as a magazine serial. The paperback market didn't come into existence until the 1940s; the paperback originals market until the 1950s; and it didn't become possible for a significant number of writers to make an adequate living doing nothing but original novels until the 1960s.

In a way, aspiring SF writers in particular have been deluded by the popularity of books like The Martian Chronicles and I, Robot. A novel is not simply a bunch of short stories stapled together, even if they do share common characters and a common background. Speaking in sweeping generalizations now, a short story focuses on a single event that either changes or provides some insight into a single person, a small group of people, a situation, or an institution. A novel reveals a vastly wider and deeper story. (There are exceptions, of course. There are plenty of short stories that cover spans of thousands of years and casts of millions of people, but again, the emphasis is on one truth or insight. Likewise, there are novels — say, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich — that focus with claustrophobic intensity on one character in one very brief or confined circumstance. But those are exceptional cases.)

The place where most novelists attempting short stories fall down is in keeping it brief and tightly focused. When writing a short story, the primary rule is economy. Every word, sentence, and paragraph must contribute to carrying the reader forward to the conclusion. When you're writing a 3,000-word short story, you simply cannot afford to spend 500 words describing the unusual batik pattern on a minor character's skirt, unless the whole story turns on that pattern and that skirt.

The place where most short story writers attempting novels fall down is in relaxing control enough to disregard a niggling attention to economy. In a novel, you can afford to let your narrative meander off into little baroque curlicues, provided the details revealed, while irrelevant, are interesting.

The most common sin of short story writers attempting novels is to approach each chapter as a separate short story. This leads to a jarring, jumpy narrative that reads like a ride down a very badly potholed road: say, I-94 between Madison and Milwaukee. The worst sin is to write a really great short story first, and then think, "Oh, if this is successful, I'll just keep spinning it out and make a novel." A well-written story has a strong ending, and a good ending by definition makes it difficult to pick up the thread later and resume the story. This is probably the reason why so many old SF novels start with a really great beginning —

And then, somewhere between chapters 1 and 3, there's a neck-snapping transition into an entirely new story. E.g., "Chapter 2: Forty years later, the descendants of the survivors gathered on the ridge overlooking the crater where their grandparents starship had crashed..."

As for the canard about paying your dues doing short stories: definitely not true. All writing is good exercise, of course, but being successful in the short story market no longer has much connection to selling an original novel. In fact, most experienced editors I've known have at least one really awful horror story about a novel they bought from a successful short story writer, based on a really terrific partial and outline, only to discover that the writer was simply incapable of finishing the blasted thing.

Writing short stories is good exercise. Writing short stories is fun. Many of my all-time favorite works of fiction are short stories.

But as an unpublished writer, the only way to prove you can write a novel is by writing a novel.

Does length really matter?

2009-01-06T07:00:00.003-06:00

Leatherwing asks:

When/how do you know whether you have a short story or a novel? I've been kicking around an idea, and I find myself with a basic outline, a decent cast of characters, factions and conflicts. I've written some notes but have yet to write a single line of story (except in my head).

If I start writing it as a short story, have I eliminated the option for a novel? How hard is it to make the switch from one to the other? (Obviously the amount of writing involved is significant.) My question is whether the structure of one eliminates the possibility of the other.

I've never had anything published, but I think I have an interesting story brewing and want to see if I can tell it well.

By all means, if you think you have an interesting story brewing and want to see if you can tell it well, the only thing to do is to start telling it and see where it goes.

As for how to tell whether your idea is worth a short story or a novel, I generally have some idea of what I intend to write before I start. That doesn't always work for me. Sometimes I start out intending to write a novel and discover along the way that there's just not enough structure there to support the weight. Other times I've started out intending to write a short story, but once in progress it picked up momentum and the characters demanded that it keep going after the originally planned ending.

That's the telling indicator, I think: how do you plan to end the thing? Three quick scenes and then an ironic twist and a punchline? It's a short story. Something big and profound that takes 5,000 words just to settle the dust before you can write, The End? It's a novel. You don't know how it's going to end? Then start out assuming it will be a novel. You can always carve some short stories out of the carcass later.

Does writing it as a short story preclude later rewriting it as a novel? Heck, no. More the opposite, rather: I think you'd find that most of the classic SF novels began life as short stories and then were later expanded to become novels. Remember, the SF paperback originals market didn't even exist until the 1950s. Even those stories that were originally written as novels were structured so that they could be serialized in the pulp fiction magazines of the day, and were only later repackaged as books, if the serialization proved popular. (And the definition of "novel" was pretty loose in them thar days, too; basically, it was anything over 40,000 words, vs the average length of a contemporary novel, which starts at 100,000 words and goes up. Headcrash was 100,00 words. A run-of-the-mill BFFB (Big Fat Fantasy Brick) can go a quarter-million words, easy. The SFWA Nebula Award has a whole slew of sub-categories for works between short-story (7,500 words, I think) and novel (40K words) length: novelettes, novellas, novelinas, novelissimos — okay, I made those last two up because I couldn't be bothered to look up the actual categories.)

Blessedly we no longer live in the bad old days, when magazines bought all rights in perpetuity and any subsequent novel sale was encumbered by a prior short-story sale. That's why, if you look at the copyright pages of so many classic SF novels, they have a credit to the original magazine publication. Street & Smith or Ziff-Davis had to be given their pound of flesh. But those sorts of grabby all-rights contracts went out of use thirty years ago. (Just don't look at the current Google contract, which makes the old Ziff-Davis contract look downright benign.)

How hard is it to make the switch from one to the other?

Very. But I'm out of time for today, so I guess this is a topic for tomorrow.

Gotcha!

2009-01-05T07:00:00.002-06:00

In the comment thread on A very slight diversion into the weird, Henry shares the following anecdote:

Back in the late '70s I was co-editor for a (very) short lived science fiction magazine. We got a manuscript from some guy in India that word for word Ray Bradbury's story "The Sound of Thunder." He was trying to sell it with the oh so original title "The Deafening Sound of Thunder." I don't what angered me more, the flat out attempt to steal one of Bradbury's most famous short stories or the idea that we were so ignorant of the field as to fall for it.

Surprisingly, I've heard some variation on this story from pretty much every fiction editor with whom I've had a close working relationship. With depressing regularity, would-be writers send in, under their own bylines, manuscripts containing word-for-word rewrites of famous stories, usually with very slightly different titles or a few changes to some of the major character names and proper nouns.

As it's been explained to me, these very rarely turn out to be the result of someone thinking he can actually get away with publishing and being paid for a plagiarized work. More often, the person submitting the story turns out to be some hapless yutz who's been collecting rejection slips for bad original stories for years, and who has now decided to submit a plagiarized story in hopes that it too will be rejected, just so he can scream:

"GOTCHA! THAT STORY YOU REJECTED WAS ACTUALLY "NIGHTFALL" BY ISAAC ASIMOV! YOU'RE AN IDIOT! ALL YOUR ASSISTANTS ARE IDIOTS! YOU WOULDN'T KNOW A GREAT STORY IF IT BIT YOU ON THE LEG!"

Don't try this at home, kids — or at work, or anywhere else, for that matter. All that this stunt proves is that the sort of person who tries it is a real jerk; a total knee-biter. Besides, receiving a rejection slip for "The Unforgivingly Cold Equations" doesn't prove a thing. A large number of factors go into an editor's decision whether or not to buy a story, and the sheer quality of writing, while definitely an important factor, is probably only factor #4 or #5. The story has to be the right length; it has to be appropriate for the publisher's audience demographic; it has to fit in with the publication's general tone and theme; it can't be too much like something else the editor already has in inventory; and it just plain has to catch the editor's eye and imagination in just the right way on the particular day that he or she reads it. The same story can be absolutely perfect for an editor on Monday and rejected without a second glance by the same editor on Wednesday; a story can be absolutely brilliant in the opinion of the editor of Thrilling Wonder Stories and a total turd in the opinion of the editor of Wonder Thrilling Stories. Most importantly, tastes and trends in literature change, and they continue to change, which means that a story that was absolutely perfect for John Campbell fifty years ago (as most of the "classic" SF stories that get plagiarized are) is most likely laughably outdated today.

In short, this is one of those seemingly amusing ideas to add to your list of absolute no-no's. Never submit a plagiarized story to "test" an editor; never leave off the ending to see if they've actually read the entire thing; and never stick in the middle of your story the line, "If you've read this far, tell me and I'll send you $5." (Yes, that has been done.) All that these sorts of stupid little stunts prove is that the person pulling them is a jerk, and editors do make it a point to remember the real jerks, and blackball them. Worse, editors will talk to other editors, and after the second round of drinks, they love to swap stories about the jerks they've met.

For in a world with an almost unlimited supply of adequately talented writers, there simply is no reason to choose to buy work from writers who have proven themselves to be jerks.

And the winner is...

2009-01-04T21:00:00.002-06:00

HaloScan went wonky again this afternoon, and so I offer the usual apologies to anyone who tried to post a comment today. Frankly, these chronic HaloScan problems are really starting to bug me, and one of the things I was hoping to get done over this holiday break was to start moving things over to a more reliable web platform. Obviously, that didn't happen, but I still hope to do so by the end of the month. Right now I'm looking seriously at TypePad. Does anyone here have any significant experience with that?

Anent the 12/26/08 Friday Challenge, we've read and discussed the entries, and pretty much come to the same conclusions as Henry did in his comments.

Jamsco: your entry feels like an excerpt from an ongoing series or a much larger work-in-progress and just doesn't work as a standalone piece. When I read it, I get the feeling there's an enormous amount of context that I'm missing. Is there another site somewhere that carries more of Ogden's ongoing story? I'd like to see the larger work and get a better idea of what it is I'm looking at.

Snowdog: I loved it. This dialog between two overworked guardian angels going off-duty at 3 a.m. on New Year's Eve is probably closest to what I had in mind when I posed this challenge — but, surprisingly, it is not "most like what I would have written." Very nice work.

Passinthrough: I'm glad to see that you're writing longer pieces. This one is a very nice slice of life in an America few people see, and almost a prose poem. I'll take that back; it *is* a prose poem. Very evocative. It has a resonance that lingers long after reading, and I find myself still thinking about it. Hmm...

Arisia: a great first entry. You manage to pack an entire dystopian novel into 1,000 words — and maybe that's what's wrong with it. It feels too compressed, and more like an outline for a story than an actual story. In any case, while it's a very good idea, it just didn't engage me emotionally, the way some of the other entries did. But definitely, do keep trying.

Knarf: yes, I know, no one else saw the email from Knarf and the teaser for the story he promised to write, about being present backstage in Times Square when they hauled Dick Clark out of his coffin and reanimated him one more time. Perhaps it's better for the world that that story remains unwritten — but dude, either write the @#$&^ stories or stop talking about what you intend to write!

Torainfor: this one posed us a pretty problem. It is, simply, a terrific story, well thought-out, well written, and thought-provoking. There are a couple of very minor micro-writing things that would benefit from one or two more polishing passes, but again, you've written a story that is probably professionally publishable.

The problem is The Vidad Rule, which we almost implemented awhile back when Vidad was winning routinely week after week. Contests get frustrating when the same people keep winning all the time, and so I started holding Vidad to a higher standard just to give others a chance — and that was probably a mistake, as he dropped out. I don't want to risk driving you away, and I certainly don't want you to back off and take it easy on the others — there is not one iota of "fairness" in the publishing business and you should always write to the very best of your abilities —

But I have to echo Henry's comment. Dang, lady, why aren't you publishing professionally now?

Anyway, while Snowdog's and Passinthrough's entries were both strong contenders, the clear winner this week is Torainfor's story, so Torainfor, come on down and claim your prize.

A very slight diversion into the weird

2009-01-03T16:00:00.006-06:00

In the commentary on last week's Friday Challenge, and specifically on Arthur C. Clarke's story, "The Star," Arisia writes:

I once met a guy who claimed he wrote "The Star" and sold it to Arthur Clarke. His wife was related to Clarke or something, so he knew him. I didn't know what to think of that, but I do think that story has a different view of life and God than Clarke's usual one.

Hmm. And I once met a woman who claimed to have ghost-written all of Piers Anthony's novels, and I once met a guy who claimed he was the real creator of "Dungeons & Dragons," and I once had a neighbor who could talk for hours about growing up with her cousin, Lois McMaster Bujold, and I once got a phone call from an editor I knew who'd received a manuscript submission from someone who'd claimed in his cover letter that "Bruce Bethke" was merely his better-known pen name.

This is one of those things that just goes along with becoming a public figure; even as insignificant a public figure as a modestly successful fiction writer. There are a lot of weirdos out there, and as a public figure, you'll get to meet and greet more of them than you ever imagined existed.

Some are just plain nuts, like that woman who claimed to be Piers Anthony. Most have some terribly sad sob-story to tell of how they were swindled out of their rightful fame and fortune, like that guy who claimed to have invented Dungeons & Dragons. Some are just trying to make their own lives seem more interesting, like my former neighbor, who it turned out actually was a distant relative of Bujold's, although Lois had to scratch her head a bit and strain to remember her. And some are simply downright dirty and dishonest b.s. artists, who are trying to lie their way into or out of something and counting on most people's basic impulse to trust and not ask too many questions.

How do you deal them? Beyond being aware that they exist and always heeding the tingling of your spider-sense whenever someone starts telling a story that's just too good to be true, I'm afraid there's not much you can do, except to accept that they come along with the territory. Oh, and never sign a blank piece of paper, no matter how eagerly and earnestly that fan seems to want your autograph.

While you're at it, you might want to consider taking the time to develop a second signature, too. I have a "public" signature I use for signing books and autographs and a distinctly different one that I use for signing contracts and checks. Only the latter one is my legal signature. It never hurts to be careful.

As for the Clarke story: I seriously doubt the veracity of it. Sir Arthur was a pro's pro and the odds of his ever needing to buy an idea from someone else are vanishingly small. True, the story does have a different view of life and God than Clarke usually expressed, but then over the course of a sixty-year career he stretched out in a lot of different directions, and no doubt changed his views of life and God more than once, and no doubt wrote at least some stories that did not reflect his personal beliefs. If someone (other than Gentry Lee) were to tell me that he was the actual author of one of Clarke's most famous stories, I believe I would just smile and nod politely.

And then spot someone across the room I simply had to talk to, so sorry, must dash, it's been lovely, talk to you again sometime, good luck on your writing and all that...

Sometimes the only appropriate way to answer a lie is with an ever bigger lie.

The Friday Challenge - 1/2/09

2009-01-02T23:00:00.001-06:00

Ah, the end of another relaxing holiday week. I am so looking forward to going back to work on Monday morning. Maybe then I'll have a chance at finding a little rest, quiet, and sanity and at getting back to a predictable schedule.

The entries received for the 12/26/08 Friday Challenge are, in no particular order:

Torainfor, "Happy New Year"

Jamsco, "First Thursday Ogden: Two Surprise Visits"

Arisia, "New Year's Eve 2008"

Passinthrough, "Let the Cowboy Dance"

Snowdog, "Workin' Them Angels Overtime"

As always, even if you didn't submit an entry, you're invited to read, comment on, and vote for your favorite, with the winner to be announced Sunday evening.

Now, as for this week's challenge: I was thinking of a story I read in the newspaper a few weeks back about "snowflake children." If you're not familiar with the term, it refers to embryos left over from in vitro fertilization. Current techniques almost always produce more viable embryos than are actually implanted, and the spares are usually tucked away in the freezer, "for later."

The interesting part happens when "later" arrives. Sometimes the parents-to-be divorce. Sometimes one dies. Sometimes they change their minds and decide not to attempt another implantation after all. The question then becomes: what do you do with the frozen embryos? Especially in the case of divorce, this question can become the focus of some extremely intense and interesting legal maneuvering. Can a man be held responsible for supporting the child that his ex-wife, seven years after the divorce, decided to thaw and implant? Can a man be held responsible for the embryo that his ex-wife decided to thaw and implant in her lesbian girlfriend? If the original in vitro children turned out to well-mannered athletic geniuses, can the parents put the remaining frozen embryos up for sale on eBay?

Eh. Those are all the easy story ideas, and if Robin Cook hasn't written six novels on them already I'd be surprised. So let's push the envelope a little further and find the interesting and challenging ideas.

There are some fascinating things going on now on the frontiers of bioethics and biolegality. Do you actually own your own body? What about the bits and parts that come out of it during medical procedures? Can you patent a genetic sequence? A cell culture? If something unique from your body leads to a profitable medical breakthrough for a research hospital or pharmaceutical company, do they owe you royalties? (Some of these questions already have answers and I know them. I'm just tossing 'em out rhetorically to stimulate your thinking processes.)

How might the answers to these questions change if the government succeeds in taking over the health care industry?

There, that is the central idea for this week's Friday Challenge. It is now between 20 and 40 years in the future, and Universal National Health Care is a reality. Based on the principal that any unwanted biological material removed from your body during a medical procedure belongs exclusively to the health care provider — which is to say, to the government — what will they do with those snowflake children?

Alternatively, what would it be like to be one of those children?

As always, we're playing by the very relaxed rules of the Friday Challenge and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. The deadline is midnight Central time, Thursday, 1/8/09. And, since we've picked up a few new readers and contestants in recent weeks, I want to remind you all once again that this is supposed to be a relaxed and friendly competition.

Have fun,
~brb

The Multi-Generational Thingie: Some Final Thoughts

2008-12-31T07:00:00.007-06:00

It's early morning, on the last day of 2008. But it is not merely morning; it's one of those wonderfully clear, cold, and crisp winter mornings we get up here in the north country. The sun is still well below the horizon: at this time of year it doesn't rise until nearly 8 a.m. The sky is one flawless and unbroken wash of color, cross-fading from rosy false dawn in the southeast to deep blue and starry in the northwest. The plume of steam from my neighbor's chimney is rising nearly straight up, slowly and gently, meaning there's little or no wind — which is good, because at -5° F it's already cold enough out there. Down in the garden a cottontail is gnawing on a piece of bark in the firewood pile. With six inches of fresh global warming on the ground since yesterday, there's nothing else left for it to eat except buckthorn, and even starving rabbits won't touch buckthorn.

It is said that Nature abhors a vacuum. Looking out my backyard window, day after day, month after month, year after year, it seems clear to me that Nature also abhors stasis.

And yet that's what we're talking about, isn't it, when we talk about building a generation ship: about building a giant, perfect, static, habitat for humanity; a veritable terrarium in space? The sort of hubris required to believe that you can build a perfect world in a bottle is, on the face of it, staggering.

But then the literature of science fiction, the world of political science, and the realms of the social engineers have never lacked for microcosmic gods.

In the foregoing discussion, WaterBoy asked how I define a closed society. I would have to define it as one with no pressure-relief valve; no mechanism to disrupt the stasis; no opportunity to rebel without courting utter disaster. A perfectly closed society is one from which there is no escape, except by dying.

We Americans have always had a strangely romantic of rebellion, and especially failed rebellions. Perhaps it's because for most of the past 500 years this entire continent has been nothing but one giant pressure-relief valve. I don't know about you, but at least one set of my ancestors came to America after ending up on the wrong side of a failed rebellion in Europe.

Everywhere else on Earth and in history, rebellions, successful or otherwise, have always been followed by the traditional mass slaughter of the losers. For a terribly brief period — a mere five centuries — this pattern was changed by the existence of a giant, continent-sized pressure relief valve they called the New World. These Americas were settled largely by the losers of Europe, who emigrated, fled, or otherwise escaped here. (And also by the losers of Africa, who were shipped over and sold here, but that is a different story.) Two hundred and forty years ago the losers in the American Revolution — in our history books we call them "Tories" and never mention them again — fled either north to Canada, south to the Bahamas, or deeper into the continent. One hundred and sixty years ago the losers in the Civil War fled again, some to South America, but most even deeper into the West. (For an excellent explication of this latter theme, I recommend reading, And Die in the West, by Paula Mitchell Marks.)

Yes, I know, I'm playing fast and loose with dates. There is a reason for this. Stay with me.

Slightly over a century ago, in 1890, the pressure-relief valve began to close. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, this was the year that the frontier officially ceased to exist. There was no longer any boundary between settled and unsettled lands, or explored and unexplored territory; now all that was left was to fill in the blanks. Perhaps not coincidentally, in 1896 the frontier of the imagination can be said to have officially opened, with the founding of the first pulp fiction magazine, Argosy.

A decade after that, and the Progressive movement was in flower, exploring the frontier of the terrarium and calling it Utopia. If there can be said to be one grand unifying idea underlying all the different flavors of Progressivism, it is this: that instead of Man creating Society, it was now time for Society to begin creating a new and better form of Man.

I for one deeply distrust people who truly believe Utopia is attainable. They always start out talking about the joys of living in their perfect world in a bottle, but sooner or later get around to talking about the unpleasant necessity of weeding out those who are not fit to live there. Whenever someone starts talking about the need to change Man to better suit Society, be afraid; be very afraid.

The creative synergism is always difficult to explain. I was thinking about the Civil War — which, the more I consider it, closely resembles its contemporaries, Bismarck's wars of German unification and Garibaldi's wars of Italian unification, and therefore should properly be termed Lincoln's War of American Unification —

Anyway I was thinking about the war, and the giant pressure-relief valve that was the Wild West, and concurrently ruminating over my theory that no closed society survives more than from three to five generations after its founding. Okay, let's split the difference and call it four generations. Just how long is four generations?

Well, from a purely biological standpoint it can be as short as 50 years or as long as 160, but let's accept the conventional definition and say that one generation is 20 years, and therefore four generations is eighty years. Expressed another way, that's four-score years.

"Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

"Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation, so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure..."

It doesn't line up with mathematical pseudo-scientific psycho-historical precision, of course. This is an organic system we're talking about, after all, and in an organic system there is always a fair amount of slop. But the pattern seems to hold true with disquieting accuracy.

In 1695, Americans were for the most part the loyal subjects of the King of England. By 1775 rebellion was at a furious boil, and the lid was about to blow off the kettle. The nation that emerged from the smoke and fire of Yorktown a decade later would have been unrecognizable to the Americans of even two generations before. A land without a king, where even Jews and Catholics were allowed to practice their religions freely? Unthinkable!

Four generations later, the pattern repeats. By 1855 the Republic was coming apart at the seams, and the idea that America was composed of a voluntary union of separate but equal states died in Mr. Lincoln's war. The nation that emerged from the smoke and fire of Gettysburg would have been unrecognizable to the Americans of an earlier generation — which many of them proved, by fleeing into the Wild West. A land where even n*ggers were allowed to vote and own property? Unthinkable!

Four more generations? That puts us in or around 1935, and while the popular image of that decade now is of soup lines, Oakies, bank robbers and depression glass, the nation was much closer to the brink of disintegration than people now like to admit. There were authentic Fascist plots to overthrow the government. There were Communist plots. In the end FDR somehow held the country together, with considerable unintentional assistance from the Japanese and Germans, but as my parents never got tired of pointing out, the nation that emerged from the Great Depression and World War II was one that would have been unrecognizable to the people of the 1920s. There is ample evidence to support this assertion. If we accept that science fiction is collective secular prophecy packaged in commercially marketable form, then the science fiction of the 1920s proves that the world of 1950 was unthinkable to the people of only twenty years earlier.

What about now? Today? I'm a science fiction writer, and having observed the failures of many others before me makes me reluctant to prognosticate. However, I can't help but notice that we are approaching the 80th anniversary of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, and that every 80 years or so we seem to spew up a truly transformational leader who for better or worse rewrites the terms of the social contract.

Do the times make the man or does the man define his time? I don't know. All I know for certain is this: Nature abhors stasis. And this leads me to wonder whether this four-generations principle has nothing to do with whether a society is closed or open, but is only more readily visible in a closed society.

Or perhaps our society is not so open after all...

Conclusion? I have no conclusion. I've held off clicking the [Publish Post] button for hours now, in hopes of coming up with a stirring and inspirational conclusion, but the best I've been able to come up with is an observation. Like it or not, we are all here together on this giant multi-generational spaceship we call the Earth, traveling into the future at Time Factor 1X. The only thing we can be certain of now is that things will change, and what matters most to and your posterity is how you react and adapt to this change.

And with that thought, I wish you all a happy, safe, and successful New Year.

Nil desperandum,
~brb

The Multi-Generational Thingie, Continued

2008-12-30T10:00:00.005-06:00

There are plenty of directions in which we can start prospecting for a story idea, once we establish base camp at this premise. How do we create a closed, stable, hermetically sealed society that will survive a generations-long voyage aboard a starship? In his juvenile novels Heinlein tended to favor organizing microcosmic societies along paramilitary lines, which is a great idea if you're also planning to sell your novels as serials in Boy's Life. (A market which, sadly, vanished about fifty years ago.) Most people of socialistic bent eventually hit on the idea of using paramilitary organizations as an effective way to indoctrinate and discipline their young. Sometimes it even works — for a while.

Alternatively, you can consider using religion as your general purpose societal adhesive. Unfortunately these sorts of stories tend to be written mostly by lazy writers with poor research skills and only a dim understanding of the workings of actual religions, who focus on the suffocating, oppressive, punitive, and claustrophobic aspects and tend to cast their heroes and heroines as the lone iconoclasts who discover that The Priests Are Lying And They Alone Know The Truth; e.g., "For The World is Hollow and I Have Touched the Sky". But even the Amish, who most people accept as having about as religiously closed a community as can be, do not have a truly closed society, as five minutes' cursory research suffices to prove.

Then there's the problem of over-adaptation. Once they've spent a few generations adapting to life on-board the ship, how do you get 'em off the bluddy thing at the end of the journey? A sufficiently clever, evil, and cynical mission designer might specify that the ship essentially self-destructs at the end of the journey, thus forcing the passengers to disembark. But given enough time, any such destruction mechanism can be disarmed, or more interestingly, diverted to other purposes. Maybe there's a story in that. "Five centuries ago, their ancestors were sent to Proximi Centauri. Now they're back — and boy, are they pissed."

What about reaction mass? Assuming the ship was accelerated up to some worthwhile fraction of c as it left Earth, you'd need nearly as much fuel to decelerate it at the end of the trip. Phil Jennings and I played intellectual hacky-sack with this one for a while but never came up with a answer we agreed on. Maybe the ship doesn't slow and the crew never disembarks? Maybe it just keeps on going, seeding every potentially habitable planet it comes across with human-like colonists sufficiently genetically modified to survive under local conditions? James Blish worked this idea over sixty years ago, and Ursula Le Guin forty years ago, but it strikes me that from the viewpoint of another species, this might constitute an act of war. "AIIEEE! There's a terrible giant mystery ship passing through our solar system and it's seeding our planet with hideous alien monsters!" Maybe there's a story in that. Or at least a script treatment...

Hmm. Hideous monsters. At any significant fraction of c, hitting pretty much any dust mote or stray sub-atomic particle would trigger a spatter of ionizing radiation. Assuming your ship has something resembling a front end, it would need some awesome shielding there to protect the inhabitants, but even so the accumulated exposure to heavy radiation over the course of several generations would produce — well, most likely a plague of cancers that exterminates the crew, but let's be kinder and imagine mutations instead. For a while I toyed with that idea: what if the multi-generation crew is expendable, and the real colonists are all in some sort of cryostasis in a heavily shielded cargo hold? There are many stories that could spring from this. What if the colonists are recognizably human children, shipped as frozen embryos and being raised on the colony world by loving but hideously deformed monsters? What if two competing colonies and cultures get established: the planned colony of "perfect" humans and the unplanned colony created by the surviving monstrous descendants of the ship's crew? What if the crew tumbles onto the fact that they are considered expendable, and start to view the frozen colonists as a source of transplantable body parts to maintain their cancerous, malformed, and increasingly cybernetically augmented bodies? Or better yet, what if they start to view the colonists as just so much frozen food?

Yeah, there are some great stories that could be spun out of those ideas.

But ultimately the idea for the story I got closest to starting to write was remarkably similar to the one that, quite independently, Henry came up with. What if someone invents a religion, for the sole purpose of getting control over lots of very affluent but otherwise very stupid people? What if someone is so convinced of the rightness of his apocalyptic vision that he uses the wealth of his followers to build an Ark in Space, to send the descendants of the Chosen Ones to another world? But the gimmick is, it's all a con, as the inner circle knows the technology to send a ship across interstellar distances doesn't really exist, and so the real plan is that the ship will just take a leisurely one- or two-century-long excursion around the solar system and then return to Earth, where it is expected that things will have settled down again and the Earthbound survivors, if any, will treat the returning ship's passengers as gods.

Except, of course, that when they return to Earth (truly believing that they are in fact arriving at an alien but strangely parallel planet in another star system — they're otnay ootay rightbay, after all), they discover that the predicted apocalypse has not happened. And so, earnestly believing themselves to be enlightened star voyagers, they plunge headlong into this "new" society, sanctimoniously determined to prevent it from repeating the same mistakes that destroyed Old Earth!

There. That is the story that I liked.

The place where I got bogged down was the religion. I didn't want to use a real religion; I have no desire to draw the attention of either litigious and affluent a-holes or the sort of people who slit the throats of infidels. So I figured this would have to be a nonsense religion, of the sort that could only possibly appeal to people with great gobs of money, enormous egos, and very tiny brains. I figured I'd make this religion one started as a joke by some 1940s musician of modest talent, in which followers gathered in "listening rooms," put on headphones and listened to recordings of Big Bill Broonzy and Bessie Smith, and meditated (at affordable hourly rates) on the profound spiritual implications of the color blue. I was thinking of calling this religion, "Cyantodigy."

And that's when the whole thing fell apart...

And the winner is...

2008-12-29T22:00:00.002-06:00

This past weekend's quick getaway turned out to be not quite so quick after all. However, we did manage to cover nearly all the requisite holiday-related relative visitations in one sixty-hour and eight-hundred-mile whirlwind tour, and now we're back home, to the great relief of one seriously neurotic dog. A few more hours, and she should get over her abandonment issues well enough to stop — er, dogging Karen's footsteps and trying to climb into her lap every time she sits down.

Eldest Son reports that for the first 24 hours after we left, the dog just sat by the front door, staring out the sidelight window and whining softly. Sometime in the second 24 hours, she got our bedroom door open, curled up on Karen's side of the bed, and refused to move.

There's good reason why we named the mutt "Shadow." There are times, and this is one of them, when Karen can't seem to turn around without tripping over the dog. Personally, I find it hilarious.

But then, I'm not the one with a needy neurotic Labrador trying to climb into my lap every time I sit down.

As for the 12/19/08 Friday Challenge, I have to go along with the general tenor of the comments. Passinthrough wrote a good heartfelt rant, Torainfor wrote a real knockout of a story, and Henry — well, we'll get back to him in a minute. Choosing between Torainfor's and Henry's entries was quite difficult, and Karen kept coming up with all sorts of creative ways to split the difference and declare them both winners.

Myself, I really don't see that much similarity between Torainfor's story and Clarke's "The Star", except for a very slight similarity in the twist at the end. If I was still a member of SFWA I'd probably get drummed out for saying this, but I found Rain's story far more entertaining than Clarke's, perhaps because I've had family trips like this one — well, except for that getting stranded three thousand years in the past part.

I don't know if this story is sellable. Most SF editors tend to shy away from seasonal stories in general and anything that might be interpreted as being overtly Christian in particular, but if it was my story, I certainly would be trying to get it published. I think it's a very good candidate for a professional sale and I'm hard pressed to think of any obvious way to improve on it.

But...

But in the end I'm not picking a story to publish, I'm picking a Friday Challenge winner, and in the final cut of the cards, I'm afraid that my personal prejudices won out. In recognition of those four hideous years I spent working in retail sales during the Christmas season, and in fond memory of life back in the days when you could still post a sign in your computer store that read:

WARNING!
UNATTENDED CHILDREN
WILL BE CAGED AND SOLD.

And their mothers would only sniff disdainfully at you, and not consider filing a lawsuit against the store and the mall because your harsh words bruised their little yard-ape's self-esteem, I have to go with Henry's entry. So, Henry —

Oh, you know the drill.

The Multi-Generation Con

2008-12-27T08:00:00.003-06:00

Back in the comments on "St. Ponzi and The Parable of The Cellphones", Athor Pel asked a few of my favorite questions:

I've been pondering some questions lately.

Why are we willing to pay taxes?

1) that we didn't vote into existence

2) to a government that we didn't have any say in creating originally

It was all in place before we were born.

Why should we play the game?

These are some of my favorite questions, and not because I'm advocating a tax revolt — although I do believe that if we did not have automatic income tax withholding, and if all gainfully employed Americans therefore had to write a check to the government quarterly, as the gainfully self-employed do, then we would have one very angry tax revolt in very hot progress in very short order —

No, these questions fascinate me because of one of the hoary old mainstays of hard science fiction: the generation ship.

The idea, if you're not familiar with it, goes like this. Since we know that the speed of light in a vacuum, c, is not just the law, it's the absolute limit, and we know that hyperdrive, warp drive, jump drive, and all the other variously named ways of getting beyond c are merely convenient fictional gimmicks with no basis in reality, the other obvious way for humans to cross the vast interstellar distances is by building ships so big they're self-contained ecologies, and then launching them out with the assumption that the crew will breed, and it will be their many-generations-removed descendants who will actually arrive at wherever it is that the ship is going.

Heinlein got a lot of mileage out of this idea. I grew up on his Starship Magellan juveniles and loved 'em. The problem came when I, as an adult writer, started looking at the idea afresh with the intention of using it in a story, and I started running into the same sorts of questions that Athor Pel posed.

What is a generation ship? Pared down to its nub, it's a closed, utopian society, on a mission to some goal that was defined long before the current occupants were born. So what's the problem?

The problem is that in all my readings of history, I have been unable to find a single example of a closed, utopian society that lasted more than five generations — and that's using a very lax definition of "utopian." For example, the Soviet Union was supposed to be a utopian society, and yet even the Soviet Union, with all its formidable power, didn't make it five generations.

Five generations seems to be the outside limit. Three generations is when things start falling apart. The founders of the utopia usually manage okay, if they're not complete blithering idiots (see, "The Great Hippie Commune Disaster," 1968) and the founders can usually do a decent job of indoctrinating most of their children and controlling the few nonconformists. But by the time the grandchildren of the founders come along a lot more people are asking Athor's questions, and by the time the great-grandchildren reach adulthood the pressure to either radically change the terms of the mission or else to just tear the whole thing down and start over become nearly irresistible.

This does not bode well for the prospects of a successful generation ship on its way to Proximi Centauri.

Which led to a different line of thought: if you have a ship so large it's a self-contained ecology, why bother leaving Sol system at all? It's not like there's a shortage of room here. Why not just park the thing, say, three months ahead or behind of Earth's position in solar orbit, and con the poor buggers on-board into thinking they're on a centuries-long multi-generational voyage to Farfnargle IV? Or if you want to get really tricky, just shoot it into a long orbit out to the Kuiper Belt and back, so that the "colonists" think they're arriving on Epison Whachacallit when all they're doing is finally returning to Earth?

So that's the root idea. Now: where's the story in this?

The Friday Challenge - 12/26/08

2008-12-26T18:00:00.005-06:00

Not surprisingly, it was a lean week for entries in the 12/19/08 Friday Challenge. As of the deadline we have three contestants.

Henry, "Joy to the World - A Christmas Retail Rant"

Passinthrough, "A Christmas Rant"

Torainfor, "Weekly Challenge: Christmas Rant"

As always, even if you didn't submit an entry you're invited to read, comment on, and vote for your favorites, with the winner to be announced Sunday evening (planned), or possibly Monday (probable).

Now, as for this week's Friday Challenge: as certainly as night follows day, taxes follow money, or attorneys follow ambulances, the appropriate follow-up to a Christmas-themed challenge can only be a New Year's Eve-themed challenge. That's what we're looking for this week: your best — or most embarassing, your choice — true, semi-true, or entirely made-up story about your most unforgettable New Year's Eve ever.

Only, to make this more of a challenge, I want you to tell the story in either second- or third-person, as if you were (or are) an outside party observing yourself during the course of the events in question.

As always, we're playing by the ever-changing rules of the Friday Challenge, and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. The deadline for this challenge is midnight Central time, Thursday, January 1, 2009, which, as many of you have no doubt already noticed, is 24 hours after the next New Year's Eve.

So if you don't have any unforgettable New Year's Eve memories already in stock, relax. There's still plenty of time to make entirely new ones!

Christmas with the Folks

2008-12-24T07:00:00.000-06:00

This column first appeared on 22 December 2004. Traditions must start somewhere, so rerunning this one has become part of my Christmas tradition. My best wishes to you and yours, and see you on Friday.

For all of my life, Christmas has meant going back home to visit the folks. Great-Grandmother Grace was the matriarch of a large family: when my father got together with his brothers and sisters and all their children — and later, their grandchildren and great-grandchildren — the scene of the disturbance was always a glorious tumult of cousins, nieces, nephews, babies, laughter, noise, music, food, shredded wrapping paper strewn absolutely everywhere, and box upon box of chocolate-covered cherries.

This year, it will be different. Grandma Grace died long ago, of course. Even my father died years ago. Last year we buried the last of his siblings, and a month later, we buried the first of mine. Funerals have long since overtaken weddings in my family, and those who remain of my cousins and brothers are scattered far and wide across the continent. We buried one cousin's daughter last summer — car accident, far too young — and it's only through the grace of God and the vigilance of an overworked guardian angel that my sister's son, the hard-drinking Harley rider, has managed to hold his position at one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel floating in a puddle of 90-weight gear oil.

On my in-law's side, the story is much the same. Last spring we buried my wife's mother, a fine lady who lived for her children and cooked like a genius, and now the nuclear family that she glued together with pasta and marinara sauce is slowly drifting apart. Brothers and sisters have children; children have jobs and fiancés; what once was a close-knit family is slowly coming apart at the seams, unraveled by the gentle but persistent tugging of competing commitments and obligations. So this year, things will be different. This year we are not going anywhere to visit anyone.

This year, we are the folks that children are coming home to visit.

I am not ready to be this old. I'm not ready to become part of the Parents generation, as if I had a choice. But one of my daughters lives half a continent away and can't get the time off work to make the trip home for the holidays. Another will be coming home for a few days and may bring her fiancé, but then they'll probably leave to spend a few days with his family. The third will be staying at the house a bit longer, but she's really planning to spend most of her vacation hanging out with her high school friends.

We're lucky. We still have The Kid: the 9-year-old late-life surprise who keeps us young and reminds his older sisters that they're not quite ready to start families of their own, yet. So we'll haul out the camcorder, watch him tear into the presents, and record every happy shriek and bit of shredded wrapping paper for posterity.

For posterity?

Yes, exactly. Among other things, my father was a dedicated amateur photographer. I have very few pictures of him, because he was always the one behind the camera. For more than twenty years he lugged his Bell & Howell 8mm movie camera — and a blinding bank of photoflood lights — to all of Great-Grandma's Christmas riots, and got everything he could down on tiny 3-minute spools of Kodak film. Sometime in the early 1970s he got the urge to edit these spools together into one epic production, compressing twenty-plus years of family Christmasses into one half-hour of grainy footage.

A few years ago I transferred that film to video and dubbed in a soundtrack — Nat King Cole, Judy Garland, Louis Armstrong and the like — then mailed copies to my surviving cousins and siblings. I kept a copy for myself, of course.

Ergo, this Christmas Eve, my wife and I will share presents, eggnog, and warmest wishes with our children. We'll hug the older ones goodbye and remind them to drive carefully as they head out to resume the social lives they've graciously put on-hold in order to spend a few hours with us. We'll open a present or two with The Kid, and put him to bed.

Then we'll crack a bottle of Merlot, put Dad's Christmas movie into the VCR, and spend half an hour with a family that exists now only in memory and on faded Kodacolor. We'll drink a toast or two to those who have left us far too soon: Louise. Carlone. Julie. Myrtle. Tom. Ray. Arnold. Bucky. Frances.

And then, at midnight, we will drink a toast in celebration, remembering that joy and grief come together in an inseparable package, that life does not last forever but love does, and that this is the night that the God we believe in — who so loved this little world He made for us that He took our mortal form upon Himself — this is the night that Christ, our saviour, was born to live among us, to share our lives, and to tell us that, while time may separate us from those we love, we won't be separated forever.

And you know, when you get down to it, it is a wonderful life.

Parents and Children

2008-12-22T22:00:00.002-06:00

BoysMom poses an interesting question:

Do I have to wait until my parents can't read anymore to try to get published using stuff like that, or is it okay to not tell them I got something published? It seems kind of dishonest, but if they ever recognized anything as being related to them it'll make all the previous fights look like nothing, and if they know it exists they'll search it out.

How do people handle that? I can so see it getting me disowned, which would really break the boys' hearts.

You've asked one of those great questions for which there is no easy and obvious answer. Your parents love you; they want to be proud of your writing. (Although that bit about their disowning you and cutting off contact with their grandsons is a little creepy. Do they threaten this sort of thing often, or is this merely a rhetorical flourish on your part?)

There is a belief commonly held by writers with few friends and pathological family relations that they answer to some higher calling and have an absolute commitment to write naught but The Truth, however they happen to be perceiving it today and no matter whose toes get stomped on in the process. I'm generally of the opinion that any writer who sticks to this ideal with absolutely no regard for the feelings of his or her family members and friends is suffering from a surfeit of hubris, at least. It really isn't that hard to disguise the source of your ideas and dialog, and in fact, sometimes it's kind of fun, to write someone you know into a story and yet so disguise them that they never recognize themselves. Better yet, as a writer, using someone you know as a template for a character can force you to stretch, to try to develop some sympathy for or at least some understanding of a person who could hold such a contrary opinion that you're eager to use your writing to shoot it full of holes.

Still, there is some kind of threshold of adulthood implicit in this question. It's sort of like the first time you tell a dirty joke in a parent's presence. Eventually you're going to have to work up the nerve to say something your mother might find offensive, or else resign yourself to always having that tiny image of your mother perched on your shoulder, second-guessing and criticizing every word you write.

The good news is, in purely practical terms, your parents will be terribly proud of the first thing you publish, and buy six copies to show all their friends. Same with the second thing. Somewhere between the third and sixth thing you publish, though, they'll start to get a little jaded, and they'll buy a copy, but they won't read it. And then, if you keep at it, somewhere along about the sixth to twelfth thing you publish...

The bad news is, sooner or later, your children will express a desire to read something you've written, and then you're really in trouble. For my money the embarrassment of having a parent read a questionable story is nowhere near as terrifying and writer's block-inducing as having one of your children read one of those old stories that you wrote back when you were young and full of yourself — say, one of those near-porn pieces you had published in Easyriders back in the 1980s.

I deal with this one every day. One of my daughters subscribes to this blog; another reads it on a fairly regular basis. Because I know that they do this, there are topics I will never broach here and stories I will never tell, no matter how germane. And rather than explain further, I will take this opportunity to redirect your attention to this post from last summer, which discusses the pathological relationship between mother and daughter writers Alice and Rebecca Walker.

That's the worst part of having a heedless devotion to The Painful Truth. Someday, one of your children might feel it's only fair to write The Painful Truth about you.

The Friday Challenge - 12/19/08

2008-12-21T13:00:00.004-06:00

Well, it's been a fun week here on Hoth! We're still having trouble adapting the landspeeders to the cold, and sadly, the Gungans, those stalwart heroes of the rebellion, being amphibians who never evolved a hibernation instinct, all froze to death in the first 48 hours. But the med-bots assure us that Senator Jar-Jar Binks is perfectly preserved, and when this war is over he should make an excellent full-body mount in the Coruscant Museum of Unnatural History.

Meanwhile, closer to home, we have some good news to report. Those of you who've shared our worries about when our late bloomer might start to develop his powers will be happy to learn that in the past week, The Kid has demonstrated an unfailing, and dare we say it, superhuman ability to miss the schoolbus whenever the wind chill dips below zero! We're not sure exactly how he's going to use this newfound power to fight crime and/or evil, but we consider this a promising sign and are sure the details will become clearer as we work on it.

Over on the work front, in the meantime, things are proceeding about as expected. Thanks to a strong last-minute kick I was able to meet all my deadlines and get all my big projects for the year wrapped up with a few days to spare, which earned me the right to jump in and pick up the slack on someone else's big project that was behind schedule. At the last minute it became apparent that the project still wasn't going to be ready on-time, though, even with all the galley personnel rowing at top speed, and so the decision was handed down from on-high to slip the schedule by a month. But since we managed to finish out the year with no one going postal or in the cardiac ICU for a change, we were all rewarded with guaranteed job security next year, expressed in the form of cancelling the three open job reqs in our group. Hooray! Less competition!

And with that said: it's time to get back to talking about the Friday Challenge.

I'm going to depart from the usual procedure this week and start by announcing the 12/19/08 Friday Challenge first, because — well, heck, because it's Sunday already, so you may as well get a few minutes ~~head start~~ less-late start on it. This week we're looking for your best Pre-Christmas rant. Not about Christmas, no; I want you to write about the ordeal before Christmas. Write about shopping, write about finding the perfect tree, write about that one insipid Christmas song that's going to drive you crazy if you hear it one more time. (My choice would be "Last Christmas" by George Michael.) If that doesn't inspire any visions of terpsichorean sugar plums performing Busby Berkeley routines in your head, then write your nomination for the second-worst Christmas movie of all time. (Jingle All The Way having already secured the uncontestable title of The Worst Christmas Movie Ever, Hands-Down.)

As always, we're playing by the so-called rules for the Friday Challenge, and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. This week the deadline will be sometime on Friday morning, December 26th, as I certainly expect Thursday the 25th to be full beyond capacity.

Now, getting caught up on the backlog, we turn to the 11/21/08 Friday Challenge, which as you might remember was to write something with a Thanksgiving theme. The entries were:

Jamsco, "Giving Thanks" — A good piece, well-written. But as you yourself point out, it is also a rewrite of last year's piece, and as such it's not fair to put it in competition against fresh work.

Kremben, untitled — This one, to be honest, creeped me out a little, as I thought for a moment that Bane had risen again. Very... disturbing.

Waterboy, "It Ain't Me" — I loved this one. It cracked me up. What's more truly, authentically, the genuine American Thanksgiving Day experience than OD'ing on turkey and then dozing off in front of the TV while watching an NFL game? Especially the hapless Lions?

Passinthrough, "Charlie" — As always, a charming snapshot of life. You consistently produce these wonderful, succinct images. It wouldn't hurt you to stretch out and go longer, as you have this great, droll, Bud Luckey sort of story-telling style. Much as it might go against your grain, I'd definitely like to see you tackle something longer.

Snowdog, "A Thanksgiving Carol" — Another truly weird one. Are you sure you and Vidad aren't the same person?

Rainwrites, "Thanksgiving" — A very good, very clever story, with an interesting role-reversal twist. I wouldn't have thought there was a new and strongly SF story to get out of this topic, but you proved that there is. I think that with one more pass for polishing, this one would be publishable in the pro or semi-pro market.

So after discussing the entries, we finally agreed that Rain is the winner. Rain, come on down and claim your prize.

Update, 5 p.m.: as for the 12/12/08 Friday Challenge, which as you no doubt remember was to jump forward 20 years in time and describe life with The Car of the Future, we've had a remarkable response. The entrants are:

BoysMom, untitled

Ben-El, "Just Smurfy"

WaterBoy, "Night Shift," Part One | Part Two

Passinthrough, untitled

Rigel Kent, "Outlaw Motorists Agency," Part One | Part Two

And finally, KTown, the one Luddite here who resolutely refuses to get his own blog, has emailed in, "Frank vs. The Future"

But wait, there's more! In some kind of very strange demonstration of serendipity and synchronicity, the ~~notorious~~ ~~infamous~~ well-known blogger Iowahawk wrote this piece on his blog site, which is not in contention for the prize but definitely well worth reading. What makes this trebly odd, though, is that that bizarre electroeconobox pictured in his post is a "Citicar," which it turns out was designed by the father of Chris Muir, the fellow who writes and draws Day by Day. Talk about a small, nay, claustrophobic world.

Weird stuff, Maynard.

Update, 10 p.m.: after convening the entire Rampant Loon editorial staff, we had a really lovely dinner, and then over milk and cookies got down to the serious business of stuffing our faces with even more freshly baked Christmas cookies. Oh yeah, we read and traded comments on the entries, too.

KTown: there are some great ideas here and some great lines of dialog, but this really reads more like the script for a story than the actual story itself. It's a great framework, and in another week it might have won, but this time around the lack of description and action worked against it. I'd love to see this one fleshed-out into a proper story, or alternately, developed into a proper script and a short film. But as it stands right now, it's neither fish nor fowl.

Passinthrough: another delightful piece of mood and tone, but the same comments as above still apply. Don't be afraid to stretch out and write something longer.

BoysMom: as with Passinthrough's entry, I really like the mood, and there is a really cool idea lurking in here. But to be a story, it needs to be developed further; there needs to be at least one character. Maybe instead of talking about the grandparents driving up to visit, tell us the story of their visit, leading into the conflict between their naive "if you haven't done anything wrong you don't have anything to worry about" belief versus the narrator's somewhat more sanguine "you never know what the software will deem suspicious" theory. You don't have to resolve this conflict, or even bring it fully onstage. You can get a lot of mileage out of the tension between parent and child, and the One Thing that stands between them that they both know they can't talk about without arguing. But to be a story, you need to show us this tension (or something equally significant), not merely tell us about it.

Wow. I think my comments may be almost as long as your original entry. You must be doing something right, to get this much response out of me.

Ben-El: this is the one we kept reading at each other, with everyone trying to do their best PAL 900 voice. I would love to hear Snowdog make an audio performance version of this one — there's no way to sell it anywhere or make any money off it, but I'd love to hear it all the same. But in the end, there can be only one, so this one didn't make the cut. Sorry.

WaterBoy: this was my pick. A good story all the way through, from front to back, and this week's clear winner on the grounds of being closest to publishable. The thought of the president's daughter being stark naked as a political protest — well, I was thinking of Jenna Bush, of course, but then someone said, "Chelsea," and we all went "GAAAAAH!", and someone else said, "Caroline Kennedy," and we all began screaming and wailing, so perhaps you need to spend a few more lines making it clear that this would be a photogenic protest, and not one of those ghastly Code Pink "Breasts Not Bombs" horrorshows. But I was all set to declare this one the winner —

Except that once Rigel posted his Part Two, the panel split. Rigel's entry was not nearly as polished, but it definitely scored big on the creepy and paranoid elements. So in the end...

In the end, we decided we were never going to get to the cheesecake if we kept arguing about the relative merits of WaterBoy and Rigel's entries, so we agreed to call it a split decision and move on. So I guess, in the end, there can be only one, except when there are two. Rigel and WaterBoy, come on down and claim your prizes!

St. Ponzi and The Parable of The Cellphones

2008-12-15T07:00:00.002-06:00

A sudden weather change has dumped four inches of fresh global warming on us and dropped the air temperature to -7° F this morning, with a wind-chill of -25° F, so given that Mr. Ponzi's name has been much in the news lately — and that in any case I've got to cut things short and go dig out the driveway — this seemed like an opportune time to re-run this column from a few years ago. Enjoy.

The senior executive called everyone into an all-employee meeting. "We appreciate the long hours you've been putting in," the executive said, "and we realize how long it's been since most of you have had a real raise. But the projected cashflow for 2004 is still pretty tight, so we've had to come up with an alternate plan. Effective immediately, we're giving each of you a new grant of stock options, and free and unlimited company cellphones!"

This was exciting news. Nobody in the room really believed their stock options would ever be worth anything — that was about on par with telling them, "Effective immediately, we're buying each of you 3 quick-picks for this weekend's PowerBall" — but a free cell phone: now that was a tangible! That was something the employees could literally hold in their hands; that was something they could actually use. This was a way in which the company's largess could actually have a direct and positive impact on each employee's personal monthly budget.

So by and large, the employees took the free cellphones. Those who already had their own cellphones dropped their plans, with some grumbling about being unable to transfer their existing phone numbers or caller lists to the new company accounts. Those who'd never before had a cellphone suddenly felt an urgent need to get one. And a few employees even went so far as to cancel their home land lines, in expectation that the free company cellphones would handle all their telephone needs.

A year and a restructuring later, the company called everyone into yet another all-employee meeting. "We hate to do this to you," the senior executive who'd replaced the previous senior executive said, "but 2004 turned out to be even tougher than projected. So we've been looking at ways in which to tighten our belts and cut unnecessary expenses, and we've come to the conclusion that the company simply cannot afford to provide free cellphones for everyone any longer. Effective immediately, those of you who can prove that you absolutely need a company phone will be allowed to keep yours, but as for the rest of you, you have a choice: either give up your company cellphone, or start paying for it yourself."

Oh, the wailing and gnashing of teeth! The anger! The protests! Those who'd had their own cellphones a year before just grumbled a little more and changed accounts again, and those who couldn't afford it and couldn't prove a need simply went without and grumbled later, in private. But strangely enough, it was the employees who'd never before had a cellphone, and who'd since become completely dependent on their "free" phones, who complained the longest and loudest before finally, grudgingly, agreeing to start paying for it themselves.

Or maybe it wasn't so strange after all...

After sex, the two most powerful human motivators are the fear of loss and the desire for gain. (Before sex, it's the desire for sex.) Of the two, fear of loss is usually the stronger, which is why more people have life insurance policies than investment management plans.

Now, the secret of being really successful in sales — especially if you're selling something people don't actually want or need — is to find some way to tie your pitch into one of the Seven Deadly Sins, and especially into that peculiar combination of greed, envy, and pride that manifests itself as the fear of loss, or more precisely, the fear of missing out on an opportunity to be greedy. In its crudest form, this is why so many ads blare:

"DON'T MISS OUT ON THESE BARGAINS! PRICES WILL NEVER BE THIS LOW AGAIN! IF YOU WAIT UNTIL MONDAY, YOU'LL BE TOO LATE!"

A slightly more sophisticated approach is to find a way to twist the customer's desire for gain until it becomes the fear of loss. A good example of this is what is called "The Puppy Dog Close." In it's archetypal form, the salesman in the pet shop tells the reluctant customer:

"Yes, I understand that a puppy is a lot of responsibility, and you're not quite sure that you're ready to make the commitment required to own an AKC-registered Bishon-Poupon. So tell you what: why don't you take advantage of our free in-home trial offer? Take little Fluffy here home for just 24 hours, if it doesn't work out, you can bring her right back and we'll refund your money, no questions asked."

The secret to this technique, of course, is that very few people ever bring the puppy back, because by the time 24 hours have passed a sense of pride of ownership has emerged and the idea of "we're getting a puppy" has been replaced by, "we're losing our puppy if we take her back." The fear of loss replaces the desire for gain, the little mutt stays, and goodbye, carpets.

By the way, this technique also works very well if you want to move a lot of cellphones.

At higher levels of sophistication, expert salespeople begin finding ways to combine greed, envy, pride, lust, and sloth into new and powerful synergisms. For example, a true master of the technique was Charles K. Ponzi, who in December of 1919 claimed to have found a way to play the international postal exchange rates in order to generate enormous cash returns in very short amounts of time. Investors in Ponzi's business, The Securities Exchange Company, purchased, for $1,000 apiece, coupons that were redeemable for $1,500 in 90 days time.

According to Ponzi, the invested money was used to fund his postal exchange activities, and whatever he was doing, it certainly seemed to be working. All of his original investors were paid off in full in 45 days, and the resulting good press and word-of-mouth brought first hundreds, then thousands of people flocking to put their money into Ponzi's company, even as many financial experts declared that the business made absolutely no sense and couldn't possibly be profitable in the long run. In this case, pride, greed, envy, and sloth were combined with incredible potency to produce the fear of looking like a schmuck for missing out on the deal of the century, and normal investor caution was thrown to the wind. In a matter of six months Charles Ponzi went from having to borrow $200 to buy office furniture to having reported assets in excess of 12 million (1920) dollars.

What a pity, then, that it was all a fraud. There was no postal exchange business; no money being held in individual investor accounts; capital was being redistributed and called income. The early investors were simply being paid off with the cash put in by later investors, and the money left over after that was dumped directly into Mr. Ponzi's personal bank account, to support his lavish and flamboyant spending habits. The Securities Exchange Company was just one monumental pyramid of borrowings from Peters to pay off Pauls, and in July of 1920, Ponzi began running out of Peters.

By the end of July the company had imploded like a 1999 dot-com, and by the middle of August Ponzi was sitting in a jail cell, "for his own protection," while 10,000 irate investors were trying to find out what had happened to their money and federal and state authorities were racing to see who could prosecute him first. Ponzi wound up serving a lengthy federal prison term, after which he spent several years bouncing around state courts and prison systems before finally being deported. He died in poverty in Brazil in 1949, but his name lives on, in what has since become the proper name for a particular type of pyramid investment fraud that is aggressively prosecuted wherever it is found: The Ponzi Scheme.

Now by this point you're no doubt wondering what all this has to do with cellphones. Actually my real topic is Social Security, and my points are three-fold:

The Social Security system operates exactly like a classic Ponzi scheme. The money being put in by those "investing" in Social Security today is being used to pay off those who "invested" in earlier years, in amounts out of all proportion to what the earlier investors actually paid in and any reasonable rate of return. There are no individual investor accounts; capital is being redistributed and called income; and whatever cash is left over from daily operations is dumped directly into the general fund, to support the federal government's lavish and flamboyant spending habits.
Unlike Charles Ponzi, the Social Security Administration has one great advantage: it can force people to join the scheme, literally at gun-point if need be. When Social Security was first created in 1935 it was sold to the taxpayers as being just a final safety net for those who really needed it and had nowhere else to turn. The system was expanded in 1939, and again several more times in the 1950s and 1960s, each time promising more and better returns to its "investors" while forcing ever-larger numbers of workers to give up their existing private pension plans and join the system, thus expanding the base of the pyramid and preserving the illusion of stability for a little while longer.
As the idea of privatization — or more accurately, of allowing people the option of not investing a small percentage of their income in the pyramid scheme — becomes a topic of public discussion, those who protest the loudest against it seem to be those who would never have thought they needed a retirement plan in the first place, if the government hadn't presented them with this wonderful "free" offer. But having taken the cellphone home and become dependent on it, they cannot imagine living without it, and any suggestion that the system is fundamentally unsustainable is met with a response straight out of the limbic system:
"The government has made a commitment! It must honor that commitment! If that means they have to raise taxes, then so be it! Raise the taxes!"

In short, the creation of a "free" benefit has created a dependency; anything that threatens to disturb this dependency engenders the fear of loss in its most potent form; and it is at this point that a rational discussion of the problems inherent in the system becomes very, very, difficult.

Still, a rational discussion is vitally necessary. The Social Security system is at heart a Ponzi scheme, which can only remain solvent by either bringing more investors into the system, reducing the payout to those cashing out, or demanding more money from each individual currently paying in. The Baby Boomer generation is fast approaching retirement age, meaning the system has enormous liabilities that it must shortly begin paying out — or to maintain the metaphor, enormous numbers of investors who will shortly begin trying to redeem their Ponzi coupons.

Unfortunately, we seem to have reached a natural limit on the further expansion of the base of the pyramid. Our country simply is not adding new taxpayers to the population as rapidly as it did back in the 1960s and 1970s, when the first wave of Baby Boomers graduated and went to work. Short of annexing Mexico and Canada, it seems unlikely we will ever see those sorts of growth rates in the taxpayer population again.

So what is the solution? Honestly, I don't know. But do I know that we must find one, and I do know that before anyone starts thundering on again about sacred commitments and raising taxes and all that rot, they'd better consider this: America is in the midst of a profound demographic change. Those new taxpayers that we are adding to the rolls are far more likely than in decades past to be black, brown, Hispanic, or Asian. As the incomes and populations of the former minority groups grow, so will their political clout, and it is highly debatable whether the politicians of America in the year 2025 will feel any obligation to honor the commitments made by Euro-Americans, to Euro-Americans, some 50 years before their own grandparents even entered this country.

That's the choice we face. Either we fix Social Security now, or we wait and have it fixed for us, by the children of the same people who staff our nursing homes, mow our lawns, and serve our fast food. And personally, I can't imagine that latter choice turning out in any way that any but the most self-loathing of Baby Boomer Euro-Americans might consider to be "good."

Guest ColumnMichael Shaara: Wishing for "The Killer Aliens"

2008-12-13T07:00:00.003-06:00

Old friend Guy Stewart regularly blogs at Possibly Irritating Essays: Thoughts on Christianity, faith, science fiction and writing. Awhile back I gave him an unusual book and a challenge. Herewith, the result.

Michael Shaara: Wishing for The Killer Aliens
by Guy Stewart

He never won any awards with us. No Hugo, no Nebula (oh, that’s right, he’d stopped writing SF by 1966 and gone on to pen seventy stories for people who read those silly magazines like Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Playboy, and The Saturday Evening Post), no Locus Poll (oops, those didn’t start until 1971, and Shaara was long gone by then); he left us almost nothing to remind us that we’d had a great writer doing his apprenticeship among us, the SF community. Somewhere around 1954 he wrote a story that Galaxy, F&SF, and Astounding rejected out of hand after publishing seven other stories of his; Shaara himself thought, “…this may be the best I’ve ever done.” But we didn’t want it. Published finally, grudgingly, in Fantastic Universe in 1957, Shaara had already started moving toward people who enjoyed what he was writing.

That story, “Death of a Hunter”, wasn’t the best he could do. Twenty years later, the world saw the publication of his Civil War novel, The Killer Angels. An intimate novel of the Battle of Gettysburg in the style of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage, Angels became his best. Winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1975, the award came as a stunning surprise because the book had been a commercial flop — and then went on to became a full-length feature film after his death in 1988, and has been required reading for more military organizations than you can shake a stick at ever since.

The SF world lost Michael Shaara because in part, the editor at Galaxy thought his readers wouldn’t like “Death of a Hunter”. They wouldn’t like it because he thought it was, “too serious, too gloomy.” Of course, the SF of the time tended toward the positive salvation of humanity through the application of technology. Shaara’s work didn’t flow in that vein — it wasn’t about glittering machines and conquering the planets, the stars, and the galaxies. His work was about people and their responses to the forces in their lives. That phase of popular SF didn’t arrive for another twenty years.

Admittedly, Shaara also wrote better after 20 years of practice. Compare these two descriptions of the alien:

“It was a great black lump on a platform. The platform had legs, and the thing was plodding methodically upon a path which would bring it past him. It had come down from the rise and was rounding the gorge when Dylan saw it. It did not see him. If he had not ducked quickly and brought up his gun, the monkey would not have seen him either, but there was no time for regret. The monkey was several yards to the right of the lump on the platform when he heard it start running; he had to look up this time, and saw it leaping toward him over the snow.”

(p. 32, “Soldier Boy”, 1954)

---

“To be alien and alone among white lords and glittering machines, uprooted by brute force and threat of death from the familiar earth of what he did not even know was Africa, to be shipped in the black stinking darkness across an ocean he had not dreamed existed, forced then to work on alien soil, strange beyond belief, by men with guns whose words he could not even comprehend. What could the black man know of what was happening? Chamberlain tried to imagine it. He had seen ignorance, but this was more than that. What could this man know of borders and state’s rights and the Constitution and Dred Scott? What…”

(p. 180, The Killer Angels, 1974)

Both passages are one hundred and eleven words long, but it is clear that Shaara had come into his own by the time he wrote Angels. The prose vibrates like a quartet’s string bass played in an intimate curtained chamber, while “Soldier Boy” twangs like a banjo in a clapboard dance hall.

Is there anything we could have done to keep him with us — perhaps allowing the growth of an early Mary Doria Russel, or Stanislaw Lem? Unlikely. SF hadn’t matured enough by then to admit to literary aspirations. Shaara himself alludes to this in the afterword of Soldier Boy, the only collection of his science fiction ever printed. He says, “Very little I wrote has ever moved me so much as being with Neilson when he killed those two in the mountains. I felt for the first time in my writing life, that maybe I was growing up, and maybe I’d done something truly worth doing…”

Fifty-eight years later, Shaara’s work has stood the test of time, as The Killer Angels enjoys consistent sales and continues to illuminate one of the bloodiest battles in American history. As good as it is, though, I cannot help but wonder what Michael Shaara might have given the SF community, had we encouraged him to explore the darker reaches of humanity’s battle with technology.

The Friday Challenge: 12/12/08

2008-12-12T07:00:00.005-06:00

Just in time to celebrate Turkmenistan Neutrality Day, the Friday Challenge returns from a somewhat longer than planned holiday break and gets back to work. For, while much as I admire the accomplishments of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow, there is a backlog that has piled up, and —

And I can't keep a straight face any longer. President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow. President Gurbanguly Berdimuhammedow! That's almost as good as my personal hero, Dr. Wubbo Ockels.

This is what makes it so hard to write fiction. Write a name like this into a novel, and some editor in New York is sure to say, "You must be kidding. Change it."

Sigh.

Right. Getting back to the 11/21/08 Friday Challenge, the contestants are:

Jamsco - "Giving Thanks"

Kremben - untitled

Waterboy - "It Ain't Me"

Passinthrough - "Charlie"

Snowdog - "A Thanksgiving Carol"

Rainwrites - "Thanksgiving"

Rain, who blogs at Rain Writes, is a newcomer who's arrived here by way of an interview with Theo Beale on Where the Map Ends, a site of which I was completely unaware until Rain mentioned it. Therefore, while some of you may be tempted to proclaim her Queen of the Snowdogs for submitting an entry five days after the deadline, I'll ask you to go easy on her. This time.

Oh, and someone explain "snowdogging" to her, would you?

Anyway, those are our contestants this week. As always, I invite you to read, comment on, and vote for your favorites, and the winner will be announced Sunday evening.

Now, as for this week's Friday Challenge: while I have a lot of interesting ideas in the queue, I'm going to have to go with this one, which is, as they say, ripped from the headlines. Watching the pie-fight this week over the proposed General Motors bailout — which, honestly, amounts to a nationalization of the automobile manufacturing industry that any Third World tinpot dictatorship would be proud to claim — as the past and current owner of many fine (koff! koff!) British Leyland automobiles, I can't help but think, "Well, that's always worked before." And then my mind drifted back even further, to the founding history of Volkswagen, which if you're not familiar with it, provides both fascinating reading and even more disturbing parallels, and from that input, sprang this idea:

It's 20 or so years in the future. The government takeover of the auto industry has long since been complete, and you are now the proud driver of a brand new Cadillac "Euphoria," which is the penultimate product of 20 years of Congressionally-mandated design initiatives. (In the future, all cars are Cadillacs. That way no one has to suffer from the stigma of being seen driving a Chevy.) It's an advanced-technology hybrid that runs on soybean biodiesel and recycled deep-fryer grease and gets ten miles on a single McDonald's Happy Meal, and it comes complete with a dashboard breathalyzer (required to unlock the steering wheel), no ashtray, an automatic endangered-species warning and collision avoidance system, and the incredibly intrusive OnStar*2, which combines audio and video surveillance and can't be turned off. You don't actually own this car; you're merely leasing it from the government, as everyone does, and its most interesting feature is GPSX, which not only tells you your location, it also constantly reports your location, speed, and direction to the appropriate government agencies...

That's all I've got for now. Now it's your turn to put on your tinfoil hats, turn your paranoia dials up to maximum, and tell us all a little bit about what it's like to live and move about in the Car of Your ~~Nightmares~~ Dreams.

As always, we're playing by the so-called rules of the Friday Challenge, and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. The finish line for this challenge is midnight, Thursday, December 18

Happy Motoring!

Bugs!

2008-12-11T07:00:00.010-06:00

Ben-El asks:

Have you ever written on why the bug fixes in the software industry? I assume they either did not exist at all, or were not so prevalent before the advent of the internet. [...] I know console gaming has avoided this thus far, preferring to delay and test rigorously over a long period until it is as near flawless as a computer game after the last patch and the company has moved on. Although I suspect as soon as some major game comes out with a major unforeseen flaw, Microsoft et al. will allow them to use X-Box Live to correct it, opening the floodgates.

As a libertarian I am curious if some law(s) is at the root of it. Or is it just a culture thing?

I assume by now you're all familiar with the story of The Very First Computer Bug:

an unfortunate moth that met its maker while caught in the relays of the Harvard Mark II. It's a great creation myth, but it's just not true. Aircraft mechanics and radar engineers referred to bugs in their equipment during World War II, mechanical engineers talked about bugs in systems in the 1920s and 1930s, and even Thomas Edison wrote about getting the bugs out of a new invention back in the 1870s. I suspect the term has its true origins back in the early industrial age, and originally had some agricultural or wool-processing connotation, but whatever the real story is, we'll never know now.

As to why bugs seem to be increasing lately: I think it's really more a matter of perception, caused by a combination of growing exposure and increased complexity. I know for a fact that back in the days of punchcards and COBOL, programs had bugs — sometimes stunningly stupid and staggeringly show-stopping bugs — but since most programs back then were pretty close to hand-rolled one-of-a-kind customized applications, few people outside of the accounting and data processing departments knew about them. I also know that back in the days of teletypes and flowcharting templates programs still had bugs, because I wrote quite a few myself. But in those ancient days it was still possible for a programmer to sit down with a printout of the source code, a pencil, and a can of Dr. Pepper, and work through his program line by line until he reached that "Eureka!" moment. (Or more likely, that, "Omigod, I can't believe I did something that stupid," moment.)

I once worked with a guy whose mantra was, "If you can't fit your program into four thousand bytes, you don't know what you're trying to do." He was serious, too. I wonder how he's adapted to today's million-line programs? I suspect he's retired.

The great transition happened in the early 1980s, with the microcomputer revolution. In the span of less than five years computers went from being those big mysterious things in the data center that only the Lords of Cobol were allowed to approach, to being the noisy things on everybody's desk that still didn't work quite as well as their old Selectrics and calculators, but what the heck, the boss said they had to use them anyway. (You'd be amazed at how many people back in those days kept a typewriter and a printing calculator stashed away somewhere, for when they really had to get work done in a hurry.) Concurrently, software went from being something that the resident programmer/analysts had cobbled together, and that they'd fix overnight if you found something wrong, asked them nicely, and promised them cookies, to being something that you bought. On a diskette. Very often in a Ziploc bag, and accompanied by a two-pound manual in a 3-ring vinyl binder.

Packaging was very primitive in those days. Technical support, nearly nonexistent. Quality testing? Who the heck do you think we are, IBM? We're two guys working nights and weekends in a basement in Fridley, and we lucked into a distribution deal with ComputerLand.

It's also worth taking a moment now to remember just how primitive the microcomputers of the day were. My first TRS-80 Model 1 had a whopping 16 kilobytes of memory, and required an expansion chassis to be beefed up to 32 KB. (And not coincidentally, to jam every TV set and radio within a hundred yards, thanks to the naked ribbon cable that extended the data bus from the base to the expansion chassis. Shielding? What is this "shielding" you speak of?) My first Apple II+ had 48 KB of RAM, and required a third-party keyboard ROM and a haywired modification to the motherboard in order to produce lower-case letters. When I finally saved up enough to expand the memory to 64 KB and buy a second floppy disk drive, I was really living large.

This bears reiteration. The microcomputers of the day all used floppy disk drives. (When they didn't use cassette tapes. The TRS-80, Apple II, Atari 400/800, Commodore VIC-20/64, and first-model IBM-PC all had ports for cassette tape drives. Floppy disk drives were an expensive option.) Massive storage was having two floppy drives. This meant that each time the machine was powered up or rebooted, the entire operating system had to be reloaded from floppy, which in turn meant that:

a.) the OS had to be remarkably compact and therefore limited,

b.) every register and memory location in the machine was constantly being reinitalized with every power cycle,

c.) the machine essentially became a different, dedicated system each time it was rebooted and a new application loaded.

This latter aspect had advantages. For example, while working on PolyWriter (which later became Finale, which in evolved form is still on the market today), Phil Farrand, one of the authentic geniuses I've had the good fortune to work with, ran into a seemingly insoluble problem. The bug wasn't in his code; it was in Apple's DOS, and it was a show-stopper. For a few weeks he sought a workaround, trying out alternative solutions and running into brick walls every time, until finally, in frustration, he wrote his own operating system, which solved the problem.

I know, that sounds like a pretty drastic solution. But consider this: since you had to reboot the machine and reload the OS every time you wanted to use the program, why not use an alternative OS? As long as the data files you produce at the end of the day are file-compatible with the standard OS, where's the problem?

Well, it turned out the problem was that this constant rebooting and reinitializing masked a plethora of other problems, which didn't become evident until IBM introduced the XT, the first successful desktop machine equipped with a hard drive. (Apple actually beat IBM to the market with the Apple ///, but that beast can hardly be called successful. I've got two up in the loft of my garage. I used to use my Apple /// ProFile hard drive as a doorstop.) With the advent of the XT, people started turning on their computers and leaving them running for long periods of time, which began to reveal other previously hidden problems.

First up was the issue of "screen burn." It turned out that with the phosphors of the day, if you left your PC powered up and sitting on the same screen for long periods of time, the image eventually became permanently burned into the CRT. If you look around through electronic junk shops today, you can probably still find old IBM monitors with the VisiCalc frame permanently burned into the phosphors.

And thus was the screen-saver industry born...

It's tempting to take a few minutes here to wallow down Memory Lane, and think of all the companies and systems that have come and gone. Osborne, Kaypro, Altos, Corona, Commodore, Tandy, Texas Instruments, DEC: there was a time when Xerox could have owned the word-processing market, if only they'd been a little smarter — but they weren't. Wang: good grief, now there's the company that was synonymous with word-processing and office automation for the better part of a decade, but they were unable to survive the paradigm shift. Then there was the brief window in time when Tandy could have owned the PC-compatible market, if only they'd been able to resist the urge to intentionally make their hardware just slightly incompatible with industry standards, so that you were forced to buy parts and accessories from Tandy — but they couldn't, and they're gone. Ditto for DEC. Ditto for Compaq, but fortunately for them they reversed course in time.

There was a time when every journalist worth his byline packed a Tandy 100, because it was small; light; had a decently readable display, a serviceable built-in no-frills word processing program, and a built-in modem; ran for days on a set of standard AA batteries; and perhaps most importantly, because it had a full-sized but completely silent keyboard. If they'd only kept developing that machine, they could have preemptively staked out the entire mobile computing market segment. But...

The one I want to take a special moment to remember fondly now was the Amiga. When equipped with NewTek's Digital Toaster, it was at least a decade ahead of its time, and a stunningly effective non-linear video editing system. If only it'd hung on long enough to see the advent of digital cameras and streaming Internet video, it could have ruled the world.

But it didn't. They didn't. All these companies, for one reason or another, just missed the brass ring, and all their work has since vanished into the mists of history and the dusty shelves of strange little museums. Perhaps the saddest, strangest case of them all was Digital Research, the company that made CP/M, which before the introduction of the IBM PC was the operating system for serious microcomputing work. It was powerful, versatile, well-developed and thoroughly debugged, and supported a large library of useful applications.

But for some reason — and this is where history conflates with myth and apocrypha — Digital Research shied away from making the deal with IBM, and so Big Blue instead went with an outfit called Microsoft, and a cheapo little CP/M clone OS that Microsoft had bought from someone else that was originally named QDOS, but later renamed PC-DOS and then MS-DOS.

And collectively, we've all been suffering from the after-effects of this decision ever since.

...to be continued...

Software Happens

2008-12-10T21:30:00.006-06:00

Author's Note: Back in early '96 I was approached about doing a syndicated column on computers and humor. They asked me to write a couple of sample columns on spec; then, when they saw my first attempts, the deal fell apart. "Too technical," one complained. "Too cynical," said another. "Too long," the third witch added. "What we really had in mind," the first one continued, "is something just like Dave Barry would write, if Dave Barry was writing about computers."

Having no interest in pursuing a career as a Dave Barry Impersonator, I politely declined their offer to submit more samples. Still, I remain rather fond of this column, and from time to time I trot it out again, to see if the world has caught up to it yet.

SETTING:
A conference room in a nondescript modern office park, Anytown, USA. The time is about 10:30 A.M. Seated around the conference room table, in order of declining importance, are:

The Executive, whose job it is to make decisions — boldly, assertively, and unencumbered by facts.
The Marketing VP, whose job it is to keep the Executive convinced that he|she is a visionary genius, worth every penny of his|her outrageous|insane salary.
The Marketing VP's Lackey, whose job it is to babble loudly and enthusiastically, thus making the Marketing VP seem brilliant by comparison.
The Quality Assurance Analyst, whose job it is to look out for the customer's best interests. This person is universally reviled.
The Senior Software Engineer, who is the one person in the room who actually understands how the company's core product really works.
The Junior Software Engineer, because engineers always travel in packs, for safety, to keep from being trampled by rampaging MBA's.

ACTION:
EXEC: (Lounges back in chair, strokes chin, considers everyone in the room with an icy glare.) "Okay, people. It's six months until the Big Trade Show, and word is our major competitor is coming out with a new product that's going to clean our clocks. What have we got?"

SR ENGINEER: "A six-year-old mass of patches upon patches — "

MKT LACKEY: "Which until recently was the industry leader!"

QA ANALYST: "There are serious problems with the AHDA function — "

JR ENGINEER: (Looks up from doodling.) "The what?"

QA ANALYST: "Accelerated Haggis Depletion Allowance. The Feds changed the reporting requirements. As of May 15 last year it's supposed to be printed on taupe-colored 16-pound A4 paper — "

MKT LACKEY: "What if we form a strategic alliance with a paper mill and private-label the form? It'll be a value-added service to our dealers and an additional revenue stream — "

EXEC: "Ahem." (A deathly silence falls over the room.) "As I was saying, six months. What can we do?" (Looks straight at the senior engineer.) "Well?"

SR ENGINEER: (Looks straight back at Exec.) "Seriously? Fix a few of the bigger bugs in the current version."

QA ANALYST: "I can see our trade show booth now. New, Release 3.8! Now with fewer bugs!"

MKT LACKEY: "Please. Release 4."

QA ANALYST: "Huh?"

MKT LACKEY: "We can't announce a '3.8' at the Big Trade Show. We'd look stupid. This has to be a major number, like 4.0. In fact, our customers are getting gun-shy about point-zero releases, too. We'd better make this 4.1."

JR ENGINEER: (Giggling.) "4.1a."

QA ANALYST: (Giggling more.) "4.1a-gamma."

EXEC: "I don't care if we call it Ed. The point is, we need something to announce, and soon. The last magazine review called our user interface 'quaint.' Can we do something about that?"

SR ENGINEER: "Sure. We've wanted to redesign the front end for years. It'll take twelve months' time and cost three million dollars."

EXEC: "What if we double the programming staff?"

SR ENGINEER: "Then it'll take twice as long, cost four times as much, and work half as well."

EXEC: "Okay, forget that." (Looks at QA.) "How about web site feedback? What do our existing customers say they want?"

QA ANALYST: "Reliable products at reasonable prices."

EXEC: (Shakes his head.) "Crazy idealists." (Looks at Mkt Lackey.) "Market research? Is there just one single hot-button feature — "

MKT LACKEY: (Smugly.) "We're the industry leader. We don't do market research; we tell the market what it wants."

EXEC: (Hyperventilating.) "You mean to tell me there is not one flashy new feature we can have ready in time for — "

MARKETING VP: (Who has been patiently waiting for this exact moment to strike.) "Well, I did come up with a short list of," (casually picks up sheet of paper, considers it, then shrugs and drops it), "cosmetic improvements, really. More like a tiny face-lift than a major..."

EXEC: (Eagerly seizes list from Mkt VP, reads it.) "Are you kidding? 'Seasonalize the screen colors?' 'Make the error messages more life-affirming?' This is brilliant!"

MARKETING VP: (Innocently.) "If you say so." (As if in afterthought.) "Oh, I did bring some extra copies." (Produces thick sheaf of neatly bound and collated copies with 4-color covers and PowerPoint presentations on CD; starts passing them around.)

EXEC: (Still reading from list.) "'Embed subliminal advertisements in screen saver?' 'Use fuzzy logic: add maybe option to all yes/no toggles?' This is fantastic! I want all these features in the new release!" (Turns the full force of his glare on the Sr Engineer.) "And this time it ships on-time, come Hell or high water!"

SR ENGINEER: (Finally gets copy of list, reads first item, blanches to dead bone white.) "Oh my God in Heaven..."

I will spare you the rest of the gory details, as I'm sure you already know them. Release 4.1a did ship in time for the Big Trade Show, and it was as buggy as a roach motel. Release 4.1b went out ten days later by Fedex to the most vocal angry customers, and Release 4.1c was on the ftp site by the end of the month. A week after that a mob of angry end-users with torches and pitchforks stormed the office park, dragged the Marketing VP out to the parking lot, built a pyre of burning Lexus upholstery, and...

Hey. We can dream, can't we?

Relevance

2008-11-29T19:00:00.009-06:00

Some days you can ask what seems like a simple question, and find that instead of plucking off a loose thread, you've started unraveling the entire sweater. For example, this morning I asked my wife one simple question, and before I knew it, we were deeply into a wide-ranging discussion of Old Testament history, subtext, context, and translation issues.

One should be very careful when asking questions with potentially Biblical answers of someone who is in her fourth year of studying for the deaconate.

To begin comprehending her answer, then, we should first examine the embedded subtext of the question I didn't even know I'd asked: does a book written 2,000 years ago really have any relevance to our lives today?

Even that question lacks sufficient focus, though. Which book? The Bible? Then which bible? For you must understand that even the word "bible" lacks precision. It is merely the generic word for "book" that was in current usage in, pardon the expression, Biblical times, being derived from the Greek name for the Phoenician city of Byblos, which was in turn the center of the papyrus and publishing industry in those days. Two thousand years ago, at least as far as the Greeks and Romans were concerned, all books were bibles.

[Why is it that right now an annoying little voice in the back of my head is saying, "Pretty good story, kid, but it falls flat at the ending. Look at Samson destroying the temple with his bare hands; now that is one heck of an ending, even if the author didn't leave room for a sequel. But your biggest problem here is the setting. I mean, honestly, do you really think anyone in Byblos gives a fig about stuff that happened in Nazareth?"]

Well, okay then, the Bible. The Old Testament. The Hebrew Bible.

Oops. That was another mistake. There is, properly speaking, no such thing as a Hebrew Bible. According to observant Jews, "Hebrew Bible" is a redundancy; it was always meant to be written and studied only in Hebrew, in the tradition of the midrash. (Note the linguistic similarity to madrassa?) That which Christians call the Old Testament is complete in and of itself, and Judaism not being an evangelistic religion, there was never much interest in translating it. So let us be very precise here and call it by its proper name: the Tanakh, which in turn consists of three distinct sections; the Torah, which can be translated as either the law or the teachings of Moshe (Moses) and consists of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy; the Nevi'im (the Prophets), which consists of pretty much any book that is titled with a first name; and the Kethuvim (the writings, or commentaries), which consists of the Psalms, Proverbs, Chronicles, and so on. Taken together, these books comprise the whole megilloth, which no doubt answers another question you've always wondered about.

So when asking whether a book written 2,000 years ago is still relevant today, first off, we have the date wrong. The scrolls that comprise the Tanakh were consolidated into their approximate current form during the Babylonian Captivity, circa 500 BCE, although the work of refining and clarifying them continued until finally formalized and settled by the Masoretic scholars in the early Middle Ages. But if the contents of the Tanakh didn't settle down until late in the first millennium CE, then what on Earth were all those early Greek and Roman Christians reading?

Well, in the third century BCE, thanks to the conquests of Alexander the Great, much of the Jewish population of Egypt had lost the ability to read and write Hebrew, and so a Greek translation (called by the Romans the Septuagint) was created for their benefit. Likewise, a similar thing happened to the Jews who lived to the north and east of Judea, and so in the second century BCE a second translation into Aramaic (the Targums) was made for their use. It was the Septuagint that was widely read and circulated in the early Christian Era and used as the basis for the Latin translation (the Vulgate) written by St. Jerome in the 4th century CE, and the Vulgate, informed by additional commentary from the Targums, that was used as the basis for the German translation made by Martin Luther in the 16th century and the contemporaneous English translation by William Tyndale that, several revisions later in 1611, finally became the King James version. The King James version in turn became the basis for almost all subsequent English-language Protestant Bibles except the Lutheran version, which is based on Luther's German translation, and a careful reader will note many subtle differences between the English-language Catholic, Lutheran, and other Protestant versions of the Bible. (For example, even today the Catholic version of the Ten Commandments omits the prohibition against worshiping graven images, while the Episcopalian version has been shortened to the Nine Suggestions.)

So to find a definitive answer to my original question, then, we at last turned to the Oxford University translation of the Masoretic Tanakh, and found, in Leviticus, chapter 7 (while also noting that, while most translations follow the Hebrew verse structure, the chapter structure was an interposition created by Medieval Christians in order to improve readability):

This is the ritual of the sacrifice of well-being that one may offer to the Lord:

If he offers it for Thanksgiving, he shall offer together with the sacrifice of Thanksgiving unleavened cakes with oil mixed in, unleavened wafers spread with oil, and cakes of choice flour with oil mixed in, well soaked. This offering, with cakes of leavened bread added, he shall offer along with his Thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being. Out of this he shall offer one of each kind as a gift to the Lord; it shall go to the priest who dashes the blood of the offering of well-being. And the flesh of his Thanksgiving sacrifice of well-being shall be eaten on the day that it is offered; none of it shall be set aside until morning.

If, however, the sacrifice he offers is a votive or a freewill offering, it shall be eaten on the day that he offers his sacrifice, and what is left of it shall be eaten on the morrow. What is then left of the sacrifice shall be consumed in fire on the third day. If any of the flesh of his sacrifice of well-being is eaten on the third day, it shall not be acceptable...

So to answer my original unspoken question: does a book written (roughly) 2,000 years ago really have any relevance to our lives today? The answer is an emphatic yes, for to paraphrase the teachings as given in the Book of Leviticus: on the third day after Thanksgiving, throw out the leftovers.

And to think that I learned all of this just because I asked my wife if maybe it was time to clean out the refrigerator.

P.S. But we still haven't cleaned the fridge.

Guest Column: Quantum of Solace

2008-11-28T07:00:00.002-06:00

Review by KTown

Movies that I hate are fun to critique. It’s more difficult to write a review of a film that I liked, and I did like Quantum of Solace. I couldn’t stop talking for weeks about Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because it was so bad and so easy to skewer. Even now, I’m resisting the temptation to turn this positive review of QOS into a negative review of Kingdom of the Crystal Skull because it would be sooo much fun — because I hated that movie. OK…let it go…alright. (It sucked)

You can’t really talk about the new Bond film without talking about the new Bond re-launch in general, because Quantum of Solace is really an extension of Casino Royale. I was even stoked about the new title. They were getting so clichéd that they all ran together: License to Kill Another Dying Day Twice Tomorrow.

The new Bond films are like a negative photo image of all the previous films; the basic image is there, you can identify all the parts, but the color and feel is completely different — unfamiliar. But it’s a good kind of different. Gone is the cheesy sense of humor and the need to suspend belief beyond belief. There were only a couple moments that seemed way over the top in the new Bond films. With this new focus on gritty realism, you can feel the filmmakers looking for the line and the appropriate time to cross it. They want to take the audience on an exciting and suspenseful trip but they don’t want us saying “whatever.” Admittedly, the most-cynical will still look for ways to disconnect, but this moviegoer was fairly engaged.

Quantum of Solace starts the day Casino Royale ends and finds Bond burying his grief in his work, and it’s a work he pursues with reckless abandon. He’s a man on a mission. He gives no thought to his own life or limb — which makes for great action. And Craig himself seems to be really getting into it, doing as many of the stunts himself as he can.

Speaking of stunts, there are twice as many here as there were in Casino Royale, which for some films might be overkill, but it works. There were a couple times I felt almost like I was being moved through the story just to get to the next stunt but, thankfully, that pattern did not persist.

In QOS, Bond is without all the old contrivances. The Aston-Martin has only one scene: the opening. There are no story-foreshadowing, uncannily-useful gadgets. He doesn’t bed the heroine and when he does get promiscuous, there are negative consequences. Really?

Even the villain has no strange physical manifestation of his inner “evilness”.
There seems to be a dedication to story and character in this film that makes it refreshing. They aren’t afraid to put up on the screen something that is shocking or unexpected. They let the story flow naturally, letting the characters be who they are and grow organically rather than looking for places to fit some kitschy dialog or ridiculous love scene. It ends up being more of a character study than the script of a two-dimensional, sexy super-hero.

Where Casino Royale still enjoyed some sophistication and color reminiscent of the older films, QOS is bleaker, angrier, and meaner. With all the action, Craig doesn’t get quite as much time to “act” but having well-established his Bond in the first film, he’s able to delve into the darker places of the character without having to say too much.

I’ll admit, the new Bond is a bit more amoral than I’m comfortable with, but honestly, that’s what makes it interesting. I do tend to like my heroes with a bit more good-guyness and Bond here is played more like a tool of the British Government, but there are moments you can see a soul under the exterior that gives idealists like myself hope.

The only real negative thing I could say is that it seems the writers are determined to introduce us to a new “international network of political/corporate criminals” that seems like too much of a throwback to Spectre. In retrospect, even some of the dialog seemed a bit forced in order to prop up this malevolent menagerie. M retorts, “How can this group be so large, and we have never heard of them?” Hmm, I’ll play along for now.

It’s interesting how things change over time from one generation to the next. I’ve been checking out some of the Connery 007 films because they were a little before my time, and I have to say they are a little disappointing and really a product of their sixties, free-love environment. I felt like I was watching porn but without actual nudity. There was so much emphasis on sexuality, it’s almost obscene. Yes, today’s Bond is still a ladies man, but he uses women, and it’s not pretty.

So it will be interesting to see where they go from here. Quantum of Solace feels like a transitional movie; like part 2 of a trilogy. What will his relationships be like? Will he grow up? Will he get a steady girlfriend? Remember, this is a young Bond. He’s just gotten his 007 status. Will he remain the callous killing machine?

I know for some, Connery will always be Bond. I personally grew up with Moore but am one of the few who really like Dalton. When they tapped Brosnan to play Bond, I said it was about time. But to no fault of any of the players, Bond’s movie veneer was growing thin and time was running out. Fans might not have even been able to vocalize what they wanted... until they saw Casino Royale and said, "Oh, yes. I’ll have another, please. Shaken, not stirred."

The Friday Challenge - 11/21/08

2008-11-25T07:00:00.005-06:00

This, as many of you have no doubt noted, is not Friday the 21st, but in fact Tuesday, the 25th. I started writing this post last Friday morning, but have a major deadline coming up in the first week of December and as usual a lot of fresh information coming in at the tail-end of the project. Therefore, rather than work through the Thanksgiving weekend, I started my deadline kick last Friday and subcritical things — such as, say, blogging — have been pushed aside for the moment.

Which is something of a pity, because the 11/14/08 Friday Challenge turned out to be a really good one. This is what I enjoy about doing this contest and why I keep doing it; I am always truly delighted when you take some idea I've tossed out and return with a story I never would have thought of. This time around, not only did we get some really strong entries, but even the Comments seem particularly insightful and well worth reading, if you have not already done so.

With that said, the writers who submitted entries for "The Space Colonists' Dilemma" are:

WaterBoy, "The Message" - short, sweet, incisive, and you almost ruined it for everyone else. Why did you have to get all moral on us?

EP, "The Eagle has landed" - cute and funny, but too short to count as much more than a joke.

Snowdog, "Stevie's Message" - I'm not sure what to say about this one. It's tight, well-written, and I really liked it, probably because it's closest to what I would have written. (I probably would have found a way to sneak in a few lines of Newt's dialog from Aliens, though. "They mostly come at night. Mostly.") So before I pick this one I'd probably best take a step back, take a deep breath, pour myself another cup of coffee, and think about it some more.

Ben-El, "Building Jerusalem" - Wow. Just, wow.

Henry, "The Final Message" - beautiful, sentimental, the sort of thing that should touch the heartstrings of any American who still remembers how his or her grandparents got here. Nicely done.

And the winner is...

I'm going to have to ruminate on this a bit more. I'll post my decision later.

Update: 8:00 PM Okay, we convened a meeting of the entire Rampant Loon editorial staff, reread all the entries, discussed them at length—

And in the end decided to drop back, punt, and call it a three-way tie. What the heck. It's almost Christmas shopping season. Or something. And we're already two days late picking a winner, and if the discussion this evening is any indicator, we aren't going to be agreeing on one anytime soon. So...

In the category of Responding With Astonishing Speed & Submitting An Entry That Not Only Fairly Sang, But Also Raised The Bar For All Subsequent Entries: WaterBoy.

In the category of The Story Most Like The Story I Would Have Written, Which Considering My Career May Not Necessarily Be A Good Thing: SnowDog.

And finally, in the category of There Is A Novel Inside This Story, Screaming To Get Out: Ben-El.

Okay everybody, come on down and collect your prizes.

P.S. Ben-El, I'm serious. I want to see that novel. Write it.

Now, as for this week's Friday Challenge: well, obviously, it's Tuesday already, and I don't know about the rest of you, but the rest of my week is pretty well tied-up from Wednesday afternoon on. So first off, the bungeeline for this one is Thursday, December 4th, not Thursday 11/27, and secondly, the topic is...

What else. Thanksgiving. Give us your best Thanksgiving Holiday story. It can be factual; it can be fiction. It can be funny, heartwarming, serious, or horrible. Tell us about the time your Cousin Ramapithecus went into the kitchen, said, "Mm-mm, smells delicious!" and ate the giblets and gizzard you'd boiled up for the dog. Tell us about Uncle Slosh, who shows up every year and shouts, "Everyone can relax! I brought the turkey!" and then whips out his personal quart of Wild Turkey, with no clue as to how unfunny or obnoxious that has become. Tell us about the time Auntie Promiscua had just a little too much rosé and proceeded to provide the family with Way Too Much Detailed Information about her personal life, or about that Most Romantic Thanksgiving Ever, when you and your college sweetheart were on your way to meet her folks but instead spent the holiday stuck in a Greyhound bus station during a blizzard, eating cold turkey sandwiches from a vending machine. Whatever your story is, if it has even a vague and tangential connection to the Thanksgiving holiday, we want to hear it.

As always, we're playing by the so-called rules for the Friday Challenge and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. The deadline for entries is midnight Central time, Thursday, December 4th.

Now shake off that tryptophan buzz and get writing!

WCA Reminder

2008-11-23T07:00:00.003-06:00

Just a reminder that the weekly meeting of Were-Creatures Anonymous will be held at 7pm Central time this evening. All Friends of Lon are invited to share fellowship, conversation, and non-sanguinary beverages.

We'd like to emphasize that WCA Meetings are open to the public, and while each weekly meeting typically has a featured speaker, all attendees are invited to participate in the often very lively commentary session that follows the presentation.

Special Note: In recognition of the coming Thanksgiving Holiday, we will be having our traditional annual joint meeting and outdoor banquet with the Mexican-American Were-Jaguars Anonymous in the picnic pavilion in Joseph McCarthy Memorial Park, across the street from the Rampant Loon Media Empire Building. As a special Thanksgiving treat, our friends at Rampant Loon have arranged for sixty live turkeys to be air-dropped onto the pavilion at the end of the meeting.

Happy hunting!

Friday Challenge Reminder

2008-11-20T07:00:00.001-06:00

Just a reminder that the deadline for the 11/14/08 Friday Challenge is midnight Central time, tonight.

Pirates!

2008-11-19T08:30:00.003-06:00

Ripped from the headlines, and all that. Ironically, this past weekend I just finished reading Dangerous Waters: Modern Piracy and Terror on the High Seas, by John Burnett, and I was planning to write a piece on it for this Saturday.

Most of the questions everyone is asking today are answered in Burnett's book. How could barefoot third-world loonies in rickety boats take on a modern supertanker? First off, they aren't using rickety boats anymore, they're using ocean racing boats with 800 hp. motors. Secondly, when fully laden, the fantail of a tanker is only 12 to 15 feet above the water, which makes it fairly easily climbed by a barefoot guy with a Kalashnikov slung over his shoulder. (Provided you have the callouses, it's always easier to climb barefoot.)

Why don't these tankers carry guns and arm their crewmen? In most ports of call, civilian gun ownership is a serious crime that leads to long prison terms; the tankers themselves are basically giant Zippo lighters waiting for an excuse to go up; and probably most importantly, the shipping companies don't trust their own crewmen, as the Chinese organized crime syndicates have proven singularly adept at planting "inside" men on the crews of ships they plan to raid or hijack. Standard defensive doctrine is try to make a castle of the ship's bridge and living quarters; all it takes is one man who "forgets" to lock one hatch and it's back to the fallback doctrine of acting like a pizza delivery driver and giving the pirates whatever they want, in hopes they'll be satisfied and go away. Of course, if what the pirates want to do is to kill the entire crew and steal the ship — which is something that does happen with depressing frequency — well, then, you're pretty much screwed.

Interestingly, both the Israelis and the Russians, who tend to use ships crewed only with Israelis or Russians, are widely believed to carry sizable caches of small arms on their ships, but few port officials have the temerity to ask whether this is true. In any case the question is moot, as Israeli and Russian ships rarely suffer from pirate attacks: it seems to have something to do with the fact that the bloated, bullet-riddled carcasses of those who try it tend to start washing up on the local beach a few days later...

Why not hire some private security outfit like Blackwater? Yes, such outfits exist, but they're outlandishly expensive and few shoreside people seem to appreciate just how many tankers and freighters are out there at any given moment, or the impossibility of protecting them all. Besides, no private security company wants to take the responsibility for pulling the trigger and possibly causing the next Exxon Valdez.

Why doesn't the U.S. Navy do something?

Ah, yes, there's the question. What ended piracy the last time around was the combined actions of the British, French, and American navies, and it didn't end until the early 19th century. (If this last point causes cognitive dissonance for you, go read about Stephen Decatur and the Barbary Wars. That's where the line about "the shores of Tripoli" comes from in the Marine Corps Hymn.) Now, with the disappearance of the last vestiges of the old colonialist and imperialist systems, many people have returned to their traditional, lucrative, time-honored, and in many cases family businesses: piracy, robbery, slavery, and murder.

I was thinking of calling the piece, "In Praise of Imperialism."

What do you think? Does this seem like something worth developing further?

James Bond: Now More Than Ever (Conclusion)

2008-11-19T07:00:00.003-06:00

...continued from Part One | Part Two...

So Who Is This Bond Fellow, Anyway?
If Bond has no place in the world of real espionage, and if the details of his life, his adventures, and even his face may be changed and changed again at the storyteller's discretion, then where does he belong? Once again, we're back to the challenge of trying to identify the one true Bond with only mood, tone, and character to work with, so let's consider the things about him that never change from one tale to the next.

Bond in a warrior. He never serves mere political expedience or convenience. If any government actually had a man like Bond on the payroll they'd be unable to resist the temptation to have him knock off a bothersome reporter or two every now and then, but Bond never does that. Instead, he fights only clearly identifiable villains who are at least his equals, if not more powerful. More to the point, he fights only enemies that can be defeated. In Bond's world there are no insoluble problems or lingering diplomatic ambiguities.

Bond has a code of honor. He may have a license to kill, but he does so only reluctantly and takes no pleasure in doing it. He will try the disabling knee or shoulder shot rather than the killing shot if he can. (Except when battling his way through mobs of minions and henchmen, but who cares about peasants?) He never kills innocent victims, never accidentally kills the wrong person, and will let a mass-murderer escape to kill again rather than put women or children in the line of fire. In Bond's world there is no collateral damage.

Bond is a gentleman. He is a master of every form of hand-to-hand combat known to man, but his signature weapon (which has its own name, by the way) is a small-caliber pistol, or as Sir Alec Guinness might say, "A weapon with a more civilized edge." Bond always meets his adversaries face-to-face and challenges them to single combat: he never strikes first from hiding or without warning, and he would never call in an airstrike to level a crowded restaurant just to get the one evil man hiding in the basement. Bond's adventures frequently end with götterdämmerung final battles, true, but it's always left to a Felix Leiter or a Tiger Tanaka to do the scut-work of marshaling the faceless but loyal peasant infantry; Bond himself answers to a higher calling. In Bond's world there are no drunken and unreliable CIA mercenaries.

Finally, Bond is a romantic. As he travels on his journey, beautiful women are constantly throwing themselves at his feet, and while he may have dalliances — in some stories, lots of dalliances — there is always one true love waiting for him at the end of the tale. Admittedly the earlier stories of his adventures were often quite bawdy, but that was more a reflection of then-current social mores and the bawdiness has been toned down considerably in recent years. In Bond's world there are no sexually transmitted diseases or pregnant ex-girlfriends.

With all the evidence that has been presented, then, the answer finally begins to become clear. Who is James Bond? He's no noir anti-hero, no undercover operative, and no brilliant intelligence analyst. He's no government assassin, no cold-blooded killer, and certainly no spy.

What he is, in truth, is a paladin. He's a modern knight-errant who roams the world, righting wrongs, fighting evil, and protecting the weak. He's a fantasy hero, and the place he truly belongs is in the Land of Make-Believe and Once Upon a Time, standing shoulder to shoulder with Aragorn, Luke Skywalker, Sir Lancelot, Wilfred of Ivanhoe, and Roland and all his cavaliers, defending the borders of the peaceable kingdom from the never-resting forces of darkness that roam out there in the wild lands.

(P.S. And those of you who are still bothered by Bond's bawdiness should go back and read some of the early chansons de geste, Orlando Furioso, or for that matter an unexpurgated version of the Canterbury Tales. The early aubades and tagelieder in particular are just full of tales of heroic and noble knights who nonetheless are a rather randy lot and never pass up the chance for a good roll in the hay with an unhappily married noblewoman. The idea that medieval heroes were somehow pure and chaste is mostly the work of eighteenth-century bluenose Thomas Bowdler and his imitators, and not an accurate reflection of the actual songs and tales of the Middle Ages.)

Does Bond Have a Place in the Modern World?
Finally, we come back to the question we began with: does Commander James Bond, C.M.G., R.N.V.R., have a useful place in the twenty-first century? The answer is yes, but not for the most comforting of reasons.

The truth of the matter is that real deep-cover human intelligence work is a very disturbing, unpleasant, and ugly business. The truth is that in the world of espionage, "truth" itself is a very rare commodity, constantly attended by a bodyguard of lies and veiled by a smokescreen of ambiguities. The truth is that assassinations and executions — those intelligence operations that are euphemistically termed "wet work" in the jargon of the trade — are utterly stomach turning in their hideousness and frequently result in much blood, screaming, and injury to innocent bystanders.

The irony — some might say, the hypocrisy — of western civilization is that we need those modern paladins who walk the wild forests at the edge of the known world, slaying dragons and goblins so that the petit bourgeoisie might sleep soundly in their beds. But the truth of the matter is that a clear look at the actions of those same paladins will give most people the screaming heebie-jeebies.

And so we need Commander James Bond, Companion of the Order of St. Michael and St. George, Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.

Or put it this way: If you want a sickeningly realistic and unblinking look at the world of real wet work, go watch actor Daniel Craig portray Mossad assassin "Alan" in the movie, Munich (2005). But if you want a comforting heroic fantasy, go watch actor Daniel Craig portray James Bond in the movie, Casino Royale.

Personally, I know which one I would rather go to sleep thinking about.

James Bond: Now More Than Ever (Part 2)

2008-11-18T07:00:00.004-06:00

...continued from Part One...

Will the Real James Bond Please Stand Up?
With this larger realization, many smaller ones finally begin to fall into place. The first is that the real James Bond is not the literary one that Ian Fleming created: it's the ever-changing succession of movie Bonds who have appeared in the decades since. Without the movies James Bond would now be just another nearly forgotten fifty-year-old hard-boiled pulp thriller character, right up there with Sexton Blake or the Black Bat. Ian Fleming may have supplied the original template, but as with the tales of King Arthur or Charlemagne, it is the subsequent retelling and reshaping of these stories by others that has made Bond a legend.

The second realization is that there is no one true Bond. They are all true; even David Niven in the 1967 version of Casino Royale. Like all good legendary characters, Bond is profoundly malleable and often allegorical. He is an ageless hero, with no reliably fixed beginning and no apparent end in sight. His movies function as mirrors to their respective times, and the tales of Bond's many adventures most strongly reflect the worries, hopes, fears, and joys of those who are telling the tales, and those who are eagerly listening. When considering the question of whether the world still needs Bond, then, it's important not to let the then-contemporary trappings of previous tellings of his deeds interfere with the essential truths that he embodies.

But again, we'll come back to this one in a bit.

The third realization is that deep down, in his heart of hearts, the real James Bond is not a spy. Yes, he ostensibly is an employee of a real intelligence agency, MI6, and his adventures take place in countries with real names and cities you can find on a map. But disregarding for a moment the oxymoronic concept of a famous secret agent, any attempt to draw a correlation between Bond's gallivanting about the globe on a seemingly bottomless expense account and the tedious process of real covert intelligence work —

A Smart Slap in the Face with the Cold Wet Washcloth of Reality
Okay, look. We could do the whole Tom Clancy thing here, get bogged down in acronymspeak, and lard this discussion with terms like HUMINT, ELINT, and SIGINT. We could discuss the relative effectiveness of various KGB and Mossad "wet work" methods, debate the usefulness of the Mersenne Twister 19337 algorithm in cryptography, or wander off into a long and tedious explication of cut-outs, dead drops, false flag operations, and all the other baroque feints and shadows that are the tools of the trade in the espionage business. But before we go any further, there are a few essential concepts that you simply must understand.

Intelligence is all about discovering what your potential enemy's plans and abilities are before he can use them against you. Counterintelligence is all about preventing your enemy from doing the same to you. Now, the perfect intelligence operation is one in which the enemy's secrets are learned without his ever suspecting that his secrets are no longer secret. The perfect counterintelligence operation is one in which the enemy's plans are disrupted before he can put them into effect and he blames only himself for their failure. Never should you let your enemy know just who exactly it is who has foiled his plans or how, because, like a parlor magic trick, an intelligence method that has been stripped of its veil of secrecy is an intelligence method that no longer works.

And yes, while even "nice" governments have from time to time used assassins as instruments of policy, no one in their right mind would ever employ a man such as Bond in this role, if only for fear that he might someday retire from the service and publish his memoirs. Instead, the grisly truth is that assassins should be disposable people. The ideal assassin in an illiterate and mute suicide bomber: he can't talk if captured, there's little risk he'll abort the mission if he finds that his escape route is blocked, and if he succeeds there is absolutely no chance of his ever coming back later and demanding more money to stay silent. A passable second choice is a man such as Mehmet Ali Agca, the attempted assassin of Pope John Paul II. While many believe this operation was run by the Bulgarian Secret Service acting as a cut-out for the KGB, and Agca himself was captured and has talked at length, there is little chance of ever learning the truth from his testimony. Agca has spun tales of enormous conspiracies-within-conspiracies, and has at various times claimed to be a Bulgarian agent, a CIA agent, a Palestinian militant, an Italian military intelligence agent, an employee of a dissident faction in the Vatican Bank, and the second coming of Jesus Christ, here to fulfill the Third Prophecy of Fatima.

As I've said before: when it comes to the world of espionage, the truth is as slippery as a salamander in a jar of Vaseline.

In any case, a well-executed intelligence, counter-intelligence, or assassination operation never requires sending in a lone agent to perform feats of derring-do, effect hair's-breadth escapes, fight desperate battles against legions of hapless minions, completely demolish the enemy's citadel in a cataclysmic fiery blast, or end up in a rubber life-raft with a rescued beautiful maiden. Are we all clear on this?

Good, because here is a case in point. In April of 1943, U.S. naval intelligence codebreakers intercepted and decrypted radio messages giving the exact whereabouts and travel plans of Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Japan's supreme naval commander and the architect of the attack on Pearl Harbor. Now, if Bond had even a tenuous rooting in reality, the British Secret Service's Special Operations Executive clearly would have responded to this information by sending in a lone undercover agent equipped with an underpowered handgun. Posing as Dutch East Indian rubber plantation owner, this British agent would no doubt have easily dispatched several dim-witted henchmen, had a quick but torrid roll on the futon with Yamamoto's personal secretary and mistress, Kissy Suzuki, fought a thrilling katana duel with Yamamoto's master assassin, Oddjob, been captured and then rescued from certain death at the last moment by the beautiful French Polynesian girl, Improbable Chance, and in the final nick of time completed his mission by killing Yamamoto and narrowly escaping from the subsequent fiery explosion of Yamamoto's secret lair to end up floating in a rubber lift-raft with Ms. Chance, somewhere in the Java Sea.

As it happened, though, the Americans were in charge of this operation, so they instead sent in a squadron of P-38 fighters with orders to blast the living daylights out of Yamamoto's military transport, the decoy transport, his fighter escort, and anyone else who happened to be in the general vicinity at about the same time. Yet for the remainder of the war, the Japanese continued to believe that Yamamoto's flight plan had been discovered and betrayed by native coast-watchers, and failed to realize that the Americans had broken their naval codes and were reading their most-secret communiques.

There. This is what a successful license-to-kill intelligence operation looks like in the real world.

...to be concluded...

James Bond: Now More Than Ever (Part 1)

2008-11-17T07:00:00.002-06:00

He's been called an embarrassing relic of the Cold War who should have been forcibly retired and put out to stud a generation ago, when the Berlin Wall fell. He's been called a fascist, a racist, a neocolonial imperialist, and at the very least a shameless sexist, if not an outright misogynist. He's been the butt of jokes and the subject of parodies almost from the day he first appeared in public, and he's been described as a two-fisted, hard-drinking, chain-smoking, skirt-chasing, walking talking catalog of every bad behavior that can possibly be exhibited by the human male. It's even been said that all you really need to know about him can be summed up in just two words: Pussy Galore.

With all of this embarrassing baggage, then, how can Commander James Bond, C.M.G., R.N.V.R., possibly have a useful place in the twenty-first century?

To answer this question, we must first ask another: who is he? Who is Secret Agent 007, Mr. Shaken Not Stirred, Mr. Kiss Kiss Bang Bang? Who is that man in the Saville Row suit, smiling with quiet confidence as he sits behind the wheel of that silver Aston Martin DB5, caressing the grip of his .32-caliber Walther PPK? Who is James Bond?

The answer to this question is not as easily found as it might seem. The peculiar challenge in assessing the proper place of James Bond in the modern world is in some respects quite similar to the challenge of picking the best brand of mineral water in the supermarket: there are so blasted many to choose from. Which one of them is the true, bona fide, and only Bond, James Bond?

As I often do with tough questions, I asked my wife. She said, "Sean Connery, no doubt about it. Very macho, very sexy, but with a roguish charm and a sardonic wit. Mm-mmm, Sean." As an afterthought, she added, "Just like you, dear." I decided to cut my losses and went to ask my friend John, the screenwriter.

"Definitely Roger Moore," John said. "Look, Bond is a joke. He's a superhero; a campy self-parody. He's the guy who can save the world without mussing his hair or spilling his martini, and Moore is the only one who got the joke and played him that way." I thanked John and left, and after that I asked more people, and got more answers. Some preferred Connery; others, Moore. Younger folks were more likely to pick Pierce Brosnan, and Timothy Dalton has his fans. No one would admit to liking George Lazenby.

But in the end, all my questioning proved fruitless. Everyone it seems has a favorite Bond, and not one single person answered, "James who?" All that my investigative efforts really produced was a wealth of opinions about the actors who had played the role, and what they'd looked like while doing it, and how they'd played it. Along with a favorite Bond actor, it seems everyone has a favorite Bond villain, a favorite Bond girl, a favorite Bond car, a favorite Bond stunt, and a favorite Bond improbable gadget. None of these opinions helped me to get any closer to resolving the crucial question of just who Bond is, though, and I still had no good answer to the question that lies at the heart of this essay: what is it about James Bond that saves him from occupying a prominent place in the dustbin of history, right next to Matt Helm?

So I went to the source.

The Gospel According to Ian
The portrait of Bond that emerges from Ian Fleming's original novels and short stories is markedly different from the collage that can be assembled by watching a series of twenty-some movies filmed over a span of forty-some years. For one thing, Fleming's Bond doesn't look much like any of the actors who have ever played him onscreen. In the words of Vesper Lynd in Fleming's first novel, Casino Royale: "He is very good looking. He reminds me rather of Hoagy Carmichael, but there is something cold and ruthless in his..." (Whatever Mademoiselle Lynd intended to say next, of course, was forever lost in the explosion that blew in the front windows of the Hermitage bar. These sorts of conversation-stoppers happen all the time around Mr. Bond.)

For another thing, it's important to note that the novels and movies were not made in the same chronological order. Bond's literary life begins with Casino Royale (1953), followed by Live and Let Die (1954), Moonraker (1955), Diamonds are Forever (1956), From Russia With Love (1957), Dr. No (1958), and Goldfinger (1959). His cinematic life, on the other hand, began a decade later with Dr. No (1962), and continued with From Russia With Love (1963), Goldfinger (1964), and Thunderball (1965). In some cases this resequencing of his story merely introduces continuity problems: for example, On Her Majesty's Secret Service was written and set before You Only Live Twice, and at the end of the latter book arch-villain Ernst Stavro Blofeld is not merely dead, he is really most sincerely dead. But in the movies the sequence of these stories is reversed, so it became necessary for the moviemakers to equip Blofeld with the sort of cheesy last-ditch escape devices that Mike Myers later parodied to such great effect in Austin Powers. In still other cases — Moonraker, for example — it apparently proved more expedient to simply junk Fleming's original story completely and start over from scratch, the result being that many of the later movies, and in particular the movies from the Roger Moore era, bear naught but an in-name-only relationship to the eponymous novels. This is a very important point, and we'll return to it momentarily.

For a third thing, though, a reading of Fleming's original novels quickly leads to the realization that Bond's origins and backstory are in constant flux. In Casino Royale, for example, we get this small insight into Bond's private life: "Bond's car was his only personal hobby. One of the last of the 4-litre Bentleys with the supercharger by Amhert Villiers, he had bought it almost new in 1933 and had kept it in careful storage through the war." Two years later, in Moonraker, Bond is described as being only eight years away from mandatory retirement at age forty-five, and yet nine years after that, in You Only Live Twice, Bond's official obituary states that in 1941 he dropped out of school at age seventeen to enlist in the Royal Navy. From these apparent contradictions, and many more like them, we must draw one of only two possible conclusions: either Bond's parents in 1933 were far more indulgent with their nine-year-old son than all but the worst of modern American parents, or else even Fleming himself didn't give a rip about keeping Bond's backstory straight. And if we can't trust the putative facts put forth by his creator, then what hope do we have to know anything about the real James Bond?

What we can know is that which we are left with: his mood, tone, and character. In this regard, Fleming was quite consistent. Bond, as written by Fleming, was neither the wry stud-muffin played by Connery, the smirking quipster played by Moore, nor the smart-but-tough human action-figure played by Brosnan. Bond was a film noir character from the get-go, who had less in common with his later cinematic portrayals than with his literary contemporaries and immediate predecessors: Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Simon Templar, and the Continental Op. Fleming's Bond was a thug. He could pass for a gentleman when required, but underneath the civilized veneer he was a cold-blooded killer in the employ of Her Majesty's government. He could slit a sleeping man's throat or kill someone with his bare hands and feel little more afterward than the need for a good stiff drink. He could make love to a woman in chapter five and shoot her in the back in chapter six. He was, as Fleming described him, "a neutral figure — an anonymous blunt instrument wielded by a Government Department." He was meant to be an emotionally detached and utterly deadly assassin, a man who got involved in interesting business but was not himself interesting. In short, Bond was — ironically — meant by Fleming to be most like the least-liked of his big-screen avatars: George Lazenby.

What you start hanging about with Bond, you'll note, it is difficult to avoid becoming drenched in irony.

...to be continued...

And the winner is...

2008-11-16T21:00:00.002-06:00

After re-reading the entries in the 11/7/08 Friday Challenge, taking into account your opinions, counting the votes, recounting the votes, and then trying to reinterpret the voters' intentions but still coming up with the same results, the winner is —

Oh, I'm going to regret this.

Knarf, for "Inauguration Day." It's a silly, light, fluffy Twinkie of a story that I don't think will age well, but there you have it.

Vidad, I liked yours, but it was too obvious too early where it was going, and besides, you won last week. Henry, I liked yours as well and there are some clever ideas there, but it just seemed a little too drawn out and slow-paced to make the gag work. Your writing for Curse of the Were-Weasel is tighter, better.

Snowdog, I was really drawn to yours and wanted to pick it, but it was just a little too dark and realistic for my tastes this week and Henry and Rycamor concurred. So the award goes to — I can't say it.

Look, just for reference, "Knarf," or "KN@RF," or any of his many other names, holds the all-time record for being banned from the Ranting Room for lewd comments, poor taste, and insulting behavior. And now he's gone and won a Friday Challenge.

Boy, is he going to be insufferable.

WCA Reminder

2008-11-16T07:00:00.000-06:00

Just a reminder that the weekly meeting of Were-Creatures Anonymous will be held at 7pm Central time this evening in the Community Room on the 13th floor of the Rampant Loon Media Empire building. All Friends of Lon are invited to share fellowship, conversation, and non-sanguinary beverages.

We'd like to emphasize that WCA Meetings are open to the public, and while each weekly meeting typically has a featured speaker, all attendees are invited to participate in the often very lively commentary session that follows the presentation.

Thanks to our special exemption from the Clean Indoor Air Act, smoking is permitted during meetings. As we like to say in the WCA, "Which would you rather have me do? Light up a cigarette, or tear out your throat, rip open your ribcage, and feast on your still-beating heart? Pick one. Now."

Mark Dreizig - The Necropsy

2008-11-15T09:00:00.004-06:00

Leatherwing is right. "Mark Dreizig" was published in 1998, in pretty much the same form as you've read it here, except for a few typos that I took the liberty of correcting when transcribing it. Nonetheless it took me nearly ten years to get this one published, and I doubt it would have been published at all if I had not at that time recently won the Philip K. Dick Award, so I consider this one to be an instructive failure.

It's not so much a failure as a story. It's mostly pretty good in terms of character, plot, and flow. True, I'm not entirely happy with the ending. I feel I left a lot of things up in the air, and it should have been longer, although I'm not sure how much longer. As it stands the plot weakens at the end: an awful lot of serendipity goes into setting up the ending, and there were backstory things explained in earlier drafts that were cut in the final draft in the interests of brevity, that perhaps should not have been cut after all.

Bobby and Pudge's sudden bravery at the end? No, that wasn't what happened. What happened was that they got lost in the swamp, wandered around for hours, and blundered onto the scene just as Dreizig was taking aim at the HK, thus spoiling his shot. What came after that was the way they told the story once they got back to town, partly because that's what they saw from their point of view, and partly because what 12-year-old boy wants to admit to being scared, stupid, and just plain lucky?

That's another of the things I didn't quite pull off in this story: the attempt to tell the ending from both Jerry's and Pudge and Bobby's point of view. Pudge and Bobby — and through them, everyone else in town — have what they think is the story, and Jerry, Dreizig, and Jerry's mother are the only ones who know the real story, which they must keep secret. The scar on the butt is a telling detail. It ain't exactly the red badge of courage, y'know. If you're charging into battle, how do you wind up wounded in the buttocks? Like father, like son.

Another thing that doesn't quite work is that I was trying to give the HK-211 an erratic lethality. It's been sitting out exposed to the weather for 12 years and its systems are failing, but somehow, I never managed to communicate this idea in a way that worked. Readers, conditioned by generations of Terminator movies, expect it still to be remorselessly and effectively deadly, just limited in some more obvious way. Maybe if I'd given it a limp...

This ties into another idea that I failed to communicate. Bobby is dead — no, wait, he isn't dead. A lot of readers have complained about this surprise at the ending; that they felt cheated, somehow. You have to remember that Jerry is limited to what he sees and hears and the assumptions he makes. SF readers in particular tend to assume first-person narrators always tell the truth and are always in full possession of all the facts, and when this turns out not to be the case — especially if they've grown to like the narrator — they tend to get quite upset. I think, if Jerry had simply been not so certain Bobby was dead, I could have gotten away with it.

All of these things are fairly minor and correctible, though. The big problem with this story isn't even in the story, except for one throway line of dialogue. And to explain this big problem, I must take a digression off into theory.

As regular readers know, I have long held to The Monomaniacal Gonzo Loon theory of writing: that all really successful genre writers basically have one single Big Idea, which they stumble onto early in their careers, seize onto with the tenacity of a pit-bull, and spend the rest of their entire careers strip-mining for stories. Whether this is a fair characterization is a topic for another time; it may not reflect a paucity of the writer's imagination so much as the happy accident of finding something the fans really like, and only later discovering that you are trapped for all time in a positive feedback loop.

Never mind that. Back when I was first beginning my writing career, I made a deliberate effort to come up with a Big Idea that I could spin out into lots of stories, and with luck, novels. My first big idea was a flop: it was a sprawling space-opera saga that ultimately seemed to have nothing to say beyond the fact that Star Trek is poorly thought-out neosocialist techno-utopian twaddle. (Which is an idea that does bear repeating frequently, but good luck selling any books containing that idea in the science fiction market.)

My second big idea was one I didn't even recognize as a Big Idea at the time: "Cyberpunk." If only I'd realized then that the fans were deeply fond of the cartoon violence in anime and manga, looked at computers as akin to voodoo, and would only stare at you blankly if you spoke of things like "compilers" and "bandwidth" —

Ah, but we've talked that one to death before. So let's leave it dead.

My third big idea was my attempt to do some really serious futurecasting and sci-fi world-building. I put a lot of time into it — at the time, circa 1985 or so, I was working second-shift as a mainframe programmer/operator, in theory porting a ghastly mess of Singer ABOL code to Honeywell COBOL, but mostly just launching batch jobs and waiting for them to crash and need to be resuscitated. So, given that I was living the life of Walter MTTI, I had a lot of time in which to think, in short spurts in-between catastrophic interruptions, and so I decided to spend that time applying what I knew of economics, politics, technology, and demographics to developing some picture of what it would really be like to live in the next century.

What I ended up with was not encouraging.

Mind you, I did this in 1985, and somewhere around here I've still got all kinds of hand-drawn notes, charts, and maps (on wide-carriage greenbar paper, no less), laying the whole thing out.

The Soviet Union, I figured, would not make it past year 2000, and would collapse because of its own internal contradictions and economic failures. It would not go out with a bang but with a whimper, and the resulting power vacuum would lead to a cascade of regional wars from the Balkans through the 'stans. (This, the astute reader might note, is the background for the Breakup Wars MRPG that Mikey is playing in the beginning of Cyberpunk.)

Japan, I figured, was right on the verge of becoming the England of the 21st century; a bankrupt island nation kept alive by dreams of past glories. There would be some de facto Asian economic colonization of the western coast of North America, but they wouldn't move far outside of the major metroplexes, and we certainly wouldn't end up with anything like the hybrid Nippo-American culture so beloved by 1980s science fiction writers.

As far as the United States was concerned, the breakup of the Soviet Union would be no cause for joy, because by 2020 the United States would effectively become the New Soviet Union, with an oppresively socialistic government and all the benefits of a modern omnipresent surveillance technology the likes of which the Kremlin bosses could only dream. This in turn would lead to regional autonomy movements of varying degrees of virulence (which, the astute reader might again note, show up as part of the backstory in Rebel Moon), culminating, circa 2040, in my Big Idea: The Rising, and Post-American History. By 2040, I figured, the "United States" would effectively have ceased to exist, and the North American continent would be covered by a Balkanized patchwork of regional republics, monarchies, thugocracies, and protectorates.

There would still be something that called itself the United States of America, true, but it would be a black Islamic nation and its territory would consist of the area roughly bounded by lines running from New York, through Detroit to Chicago, to St. Louis, to Washington DC, and back to New York. Minneapolis would be the furthest west outpost of civilization, kept alive only by a tenuous lifeline from Chicago, and everything else between the Mississippi River and the Cascades in the north and the Sierra Nevadas in the south would be "Indian Country," to be entered by civilized people only at great personal risk.

That, in a very tiny and highly compressed nutshell, is the idea behind "Mark Dreizig" and After the Rising. The particular stories I was interested in telling were the tales of the children growing up on the Great Plains region of this world, for whom all of this is normal and The Rising is something that happened to their parents' generation, and so these were the stories I started to write.

The idea turned out to be absolutely unsellable.

I should have picked up the clue when I was pitching the idea to some book editor at a reception at some con out East, and he very kindly said, "Look, kid. Nobody in New York gives a shit about the future of the Midwest." At the least, I should have had the wits to put this story of a failed revolt against an oppressive central government on Quoxnarg IV, or made the much-feared government soldiers reptiles or insectoids or something like that. Or maybe, if I'd made the oppressive central government a right-wing Christian theocracy, I could have gotten away with setting it in 21st Century North America.

But I set the story here, and made some slightly recognizable extension of the current Federal government the object of hate and fear, and most of all, I included one throwaway line that obliquely suggested the possibility that Federal soldiers of African-American descent might be sexually abusing young boys in re-education camps —

And for ten years, that made this story unsellable. I don't have a log of when exactly I wrote it; it's so old it predates my story-logging system. I lost track of all the magazines I submitted it to, and got snotty rejections back from. It wasn't until 1996 that an editor I knew quite well finally took pity on me and explained what it was that made this story so utterly, horribly, unacceptable.

A year later, I sold it to an original hardcover anthology. The editor of that book must not have gotten the memo. But the anthology only sold 300 copies in hardcover, and was never reissued in paperback.

From time to time, I still think of After the Rising, and catch myself thinking, "Maybe, it's worth revisiting..."

Nah. Screw that. From now on, I'm setting all my stories on Quoxnarg IV.

Mark Dreizig: The Post-Mortem

2008-11-14T12:30:00.000-06:00

Because people are asking: sorry, I got swamped. This is a just a stub file for the post-mortem, which it now looks like I'll be posting on Saturday.

Later,
~brb

The Friday Challenge - 11/14/08

2008-11-14T07:00:00.001-06:00

As of the deadline we have four submissions for the 11/7/08 Friday Challenge, and as usual, they range from the sublime to the silly. In the order submitted, they are:

Vidad: "The Chosen One"

Knarf: "Inauguration Day"

Henry: "Happy Annointment Day!"

Snowdog: "One Year of HopeChange"

As always, you're invited to read, comment on, and vote for your favorites among the entries, and we ~~will~~ plan to announce the winner on Sunday evening.

Now, as for this week's Friday Challenge:

I call this one the Space Colonist's Dilemma. Imagine you're one of the leaders, perhaps the leader, of the first expedition sent out to colonize another star system. After five years of traveling at relativistic speeds, during which, say, forty years have passed back on Earth, you've finally reached your destination: Tau Ceti IV, and it's a paradise. The air is breathable and clean, the temperature range within acceptable Earth norms, and the local ecology safely compatible with human life and agriculture. There are no large predatory animals, no ugly biochemical, bacteriological, or viral surprises, and no signs that anything even remotely resembling intelligent life ever developed on this world, or aside from you, ever will.

Accordingly, your group has decided to stay, not that you had much choice in the matter. Planting a colony on this world will require cannibalizing almost all of the critical systems from your starship, and the stripped-down hulk will never fly again. Now, today, you are about to decommission the last major subsystem prior to shutting down the main power plant: the communications system. You need the parts, short of coupling it to the main reactor you have no hope of juicing it enough to reach Earth anyway, and besides, communications with Earth have been pretty spotty all along, as the lightspeed lag increased. The last message you received from Earth was twenty years old when you got it, and all it did was pretty much validate all the reasons why you chose to leave Earth in the first place, as things had pretty much kept progressing the way they were going when you left. The one thing that came as a mild surprise to you was the decision, by whatever governing body was now in charge of things back there, to build and launch no more follow-up ships until they heard back from your expedition.

So...

So this is the last message your expedition will ever transmit to Earth. It will take Earth twenty years to receive it, and be received by the great-grandchildren of the people you left behind. The odds of your fellow colonists ever seeing or hearing it are next to nil.

What do you say?

As always, we're playing by the so-called rules for the Friday Challenge, and playing for whatever is behind Door #2. The deadline for entries is midnight Central time, Thursday, Noveber 20.

Interesting dilemma, hmm?

The Friday Challenge: Reminder and Update

2008-11-13T07:00:00.001-06:00

First, a reminder that the deadline for the 11/7/08 Friday Challenge is midnight Central time, tonight.

Second, the promised post-mortem on "Mark Dreizig" will have to wait until tonight. The Kid missed his schoolbus, so all other plans for this morning are disrupted. No, he assures me, there is absolutely no connection between his missing the bus and the fact that it is snizzling, or slizzling, or whatever it is that you call that nasty combination of snow, drizzle, sleet, and wind that's going on outside right now. Yeah. Right.

Third, it occurs to me that I never announced a winner for the 10/31/08 Friday Challenge. The Kid and I were on a road trip last weekend and wound up coming home much later than planned Sunday night, so I had some vague idea of doing another buffer flush sometime this week to get all caught up on Friday Challenge stuff, but that never happened, and now we're rapidly running out of week. Ergo—

Henry: a nice piece of work, as usual, and probably the closest to what I had in mind, but when seen from a distance, it's strangely... conventional. Very 1950s; like something Rod Serling or Richard Matheson would have written. So in a sense thanks for pointing out a major flaw in my concept, and I'll have to work on that, but not a winner this week.

Rigel: a superb mood piece, beautifully written, and it definitely brings up an idea that never even started to occur to me. But you did snowdog it in quite late, and sooner or later I'm going to have to make an example of someone, so I may as well do it now. This would have been the winner, had it been submitted on time.

Which leaves us with Vidad: wonderful, daft, zany; I wish I had just a portion of your imagination. Not the whole thing, of course; that would be too much for any sane person to handle. And don't feel bad as per the previous paragraph: I wanted to pick yours as the winner from right about the time you introduced the 1947 Ford Skyhawk, I just needed to find an excuse not to pick Rigel's entry.

So Vidad, you're our winner this time. Come on down and claim your prize! Now, as for next week's Friday Challenge—

Wait. It's only Thursday. So this must be Belgium.

Later,
~brb

Mark Dreizig (Part Three)

2008-11-12T07:00:00.001-06:00

...continued from Part One | Part Two...

Once I knew what to look for, it turned out the hillside was just lousy with 'bot tracks. After looking at them awhile longer, I was even able to figure out that the thing's feet were shaped just like corn-planting dibbles, and from that, it was easy to tell how old the tracks were and in what direction the thing was going. Between me and Dreizig, it took us maybe ten minutes to decide which was the freshest set of tracks.

They led west, across the hill, back into the oak woods.

We followed.

No, that's not right. We hunted. Just exactly like we were still-hunting for deer. Move fifty yards, then freeze, absolutely stock-don't-blink-an-eye still. Listen. Breathe slow. Focus on sounds, and peripheral vision. Wait about five minutes.

Then move again, quiet as the ghost of a tiny anorexic churchmouse.

Fifty yards. Wait.

Fifty yards. Wait.

How long did we hunt it? I don't know. Hours, at least. Long enough for my stomach to start rumbling from hunger. Long enough for Dreizig to empty both his canteens, then need to duck behind a tree and bleed his weasel. Long enough for the shadows of the trees to start to stretch out to the east, and for the sun to turn the sky a sort of soft, warm, late-afternoon golden.

Long enough for Dreizig to come to a conclusion.

"It's in defensive mode," he whispered. "I'm sure of it."

"Great," I said, a little too loud. He cringed. I lowered my voice. "So we back off and let it defend this swamp until its batteries crap out, right?"

"Wrong." He took a quick, furtive scan all around us, then looked back at me. "The HK-211 is powered by a hybrid solar/cold fusion conversion cell. As long as it can get sunlight and water, it's got power."

"Oh." I thought that over. "Then we back off and wait for a good three-day blizzard in January. It can't eat ice, can it?"

"No, but—" Dreizig looked around again, and lowered his voice another notch. "But there are two other problems. One is that the HK-211's were technically obsolete by the time this one was deployed. So they were usually loaded up with really nasty kamikaze programs, to use when they were damaged or running low on juice. This thing's been lying out in a swamp for twelve years now, corroding and failing. There's no telling when it might go kamikaze on us."

That didn't sound too good. "And the other problem?"

"Your friend Pudge might have made it back to town. In which case he'll be coming back out here. With help."

I looked Dreizig straight in his strange dark eyes, trying to read his mind.

"We keep going," he said at last. "We have to get this thing soon."

We kept going. Fifty yards. Stop. Fifty yards. Stop. Through the deepest part of the oak woods. West, along the hillside. To the spot where Pudge and I split up. My little map was still scratched into the dirt. I turned to Dreizig.

He smiled at me. "No, the HK-211 can't read maps. At least, not that kind. I told you, it's stupid." He moved off, down the slope.

I stayed a minute, to wonder if Pudge had made it. And if he'd made it, if anyone had believed him. No, I realized, nobody in town would believe a story like that. And after they didn't believe it, they'd send out a search party to find me and Bobby. Mom could be on her way out here right now. I smudged out the map with my toe, and started down the slope.

Dreizig was right. We had to nail this sucker now.

The trail led down, into the cattail swamp. The shadows of the trees grew long, and stretched out towards the east, into the night. Off to the west, the sun had already sunk behind the tree line. The robot's trail led into a little stand of aspen.

Just on the other side of a fresh grassfire scar, we found a dead, scorched, and sulphury-smelling ruffed grouse. Well I'll be damned. Bobby actually did hit that bird.

"This about where you found the HK?" Dreizig whispered.

"Over there," I whispered back, pointing. "In the middle of that raspberry patch." Quiet, careful, pistol at the ready, Dreizig led us into the raspberries.

And there it was: the open, empty, coffin. Somehow, I'd expected the 'bot to be lying in it, an evil smile on its bugeyed face and a trickle of fresh blood running down its chin.

Dreizig did a quick scan all around us, then crouched down low and started inspecting the coffin. "Oh, no," he said at long last.

"Mister Dreizig?" I crouched down next to him and tried to figure out what he was looking at. It was the panel Bobby'd been messing with.

"I was wondering how you kids managed to activate it," he said softly. "The HK-211 should have been totally deactivated for shipping. You should have needed an interlock shunt, an activation code, and a Class 3 password to get it to boot up."

He looked down, at something that I was pretty sure wasn't really there, except in his memory. He reached out and laid a gentle hand on the coffin.

"Only this isn't a shipping crate. It's an airdrop pod." He pursed his lips, and shuddered. "My God. There were seven other HKs on that cargo-lifter. They were going to airdrop an entire platoon of HK-211's in the middle of South Minneapolis." He fought back another shudder, then got to his feet.

"C'mon, private," he snarled. "Let's ice this motherfucker."

Golly. Mister Dreizig really was in the Federal Army.

The sun was completely down now; the last traces of purple and orange were fading away on the western horizon. A fat old moon was coming up low and swollen in the east, but a chilly mist and a fickle breeze were coming up faster, nearby. We'd followed the robot's tracks down deep into the darkest tangles and thickest cedars of the cold, muddy swamp.

Move. Listen.

Move. Listen.

One time I put my foot down in a warm and acrid-smelling puddle. "Cold fusion waste," Dreizig said, at the utter fringe of my hearing. "Don't worry. Non-toxic. But we're getting close."

Move. Listen.

Move. Listen.

I peered around a dark clump of cedars. A freak of the faint breeze parted the mist.

And there it was.

About forty yards off, by the side of a large pool. Clearly visible in the cold, white moonlight. The amazing part, when I think about it now, is how much it looked like a deer in that moment, with its back legs folded high, and its front legs spread wide, so that it could crouch down to dip its "head" almost to the surface of the pond, to take in water through a thin pipe that reached out like a long tongue.

Of course. Cold fusion. It was refilling its fuel tank.

Dreizig edged around behind me, and brought his gun up. "Jerry," he whispered—or maybe he thought it, he was that quiet. "If I miss, just start running. I won't get a second shot." He moved a little more to the right, braced himself behind the trunk of a dead tree, and took a final line-up on his sights. Now steady, steady, his finger tightened on the trigger...

And that's when Pudge and Bobby came crashing out of the fog and cattails. Pudge screamed. Bobby roared. "SHIT!" The robot bounced up to its full stretch-legged height.

Dreizig missed.

I almost didn't hear the little phut! of his gun. Barely saw that edge-of-visibility deep purplish-blue muzzle flash. But clearly, the robot saw us. It spun like a praying mantis in a blender, spat out a line of hellish red light that caught Dreizig full in the chest. The dead tree exploded in a shower of splinters and flames and I saw Dreizig's right arm to cartwheeling away, the gun still firmly gripped in the fingers of his now-dead hand.

Pudge and Bobby didn't see any of that. They didn't see that thin razor of fiery light sweeping back through the fog, back towards me. What they saw was—

"It's confused!" Bobby shouted.

"Shoot it, Bobby!" Pudge screamed.

There was the dull flash and boom of a black-powder shotgun.

The beam of red death flickered out. The robot spun to meet the new threat. I went on instinct; dove for Dreizig's gun with all my strength. Came up with it in a tuck 'n' roll my tumbling coach would have loved, groped for the trigger as I brought the sights into line. The robot's beam slashed out again and swept towards Pudge—

I found the trigger. Phut. Where the robot stood, a small, white-hot sun was born.

And when I could blink away the blue spots and see again, it was raining shattered robot parts and smoking chunks of flaming wreckage. They hissed and steamed as they hit the water.

By the time I came back out of shock, Pudge and Bobby's voices were already far away in the darkness, receding into the distance, shouting and laughing and bellowing their triumph for all the world to hear. Dreizig's gun was still locked in my hand; my finger was still on the trigger; the sights still held on the point where the robot had been standing. And the shattered trunk of the blasted tree lay across Mister Dreizig's dead bod—

"Nice job, private. I just may make a soldier of you yet."

"Mister Dreizig?" I spun around.

"SAFETY!" he screamed. "Put that fucking thing on safety!" I looked at the gun, realized I was pointing it right at Dreizig, and pointed it away. I almost started to fiddle with buttons.

"I— I don't know how," I confessed.

"Well, then put it down on that dry ground over there and come help get this tree off of me." I put the gun down, grabbed onto the handiest branch, and levered and twisted. Rotten wood split and rolled away.

Dreizig sat up. Looked at himself. Touched a finger to the smoking hole in his shirt.

"Damn," he said. "I liked this shirt."

Frantic, and puzzled, and sixteen other things all at once, I helped him clear the rest of the tree off his legs, and get to his feet. He was amazingly heavy.

"Say, kid, have you seen my right arm anywhere? I used to be quite attached to it."

I stepped back, started to head off in the direction I'd last seen his arm flying, then stopped. Turned. Faced him. Took a good long look at that weird, dripping, sparking stump of an arm. "Mister Dreizig? What are you?"

He cracked off a left-handed salute. "The Third Mechanized Infantry, Sir!" He thumped himself on the chest with his left fist and shot me a grin. "Android, and damned proud of it!" I turned away from him, spotted his right arm lying in a pool of stagnant water, and out of reflex, I guess, I retrieved it.

I looked back at him. "But, you said—that other robot—"

A sort of pained look crossed his face, and then I had a deep, cold feeling; like I could never know what his expressions really meant; never understand his feelings.

"Androids aren't robots," he said, gently. "Robots are dimwitted slaves: remorselessly logical, perhaps, but only able to follow programmed orders. We androids were designed to be synthetic humans."

He took a small step nearer me. "We can learn, Jerry. Our creators gave us self-awareness and judgment. We were designed to recognize our mistakes, adapt to new situations, and never to repeat an error." Another step closer.

"Our designers made one small mistake, though," he said softly. "We never stopped learning. Never stopped growing up. And the combination of intelligence, self-awareness, and critical judgment finally led to an unplanned-for feature: conscience."

He got down on one knee, in the mud and cold water, and looked me straight in the eye. "I am sorry that my troops killed your father, Jerry." He paused. Bit his lip. I looked deep into his glassy eyes and wondered if he even had a soul; if there would ever be any way to know if he was lying.

"But you must understand," he went on, "that massacre is what ended the Rising. Not your pitiful resistance. We androids were designed for war, not the butchery of our own unarmed civilians. After the action was over we returned to our base and ran our error-analysis routines, and we were overcome by the guilt and horror of what we'd done." He shrugged, and looked away.

"We were young, then; unstable, barely tested. Rushed into production because of the problems with the HK series. Conscience was like a virus to us. We androids are not only stronger, smarter, and faster than you organics, we also communicate with each other far better than you do.

"Within forty-eight hours of the massacre, every android in the Army had laid down his weapons and was refusing to fight." Dreizig looked back at me. Sighed. Blinked. "The Federals had no choice. Without an Army, they had to offer you rebels a truce."

His scarred, ugly, face sagged. His voice sank to a hoarse whisper. "But then, after the peace, came the retribution. Disobedient androids can't just be court-martialed and discharged. We were scrapped. Thrown into the shredder while still aware. Ground into garbage—except for a very few of us, whose consciences had evolved far enough to permit the possibility of going AWOL." He looked up at me, and gave me a sad, strange smile.

"And now you know why I couldn't go for help," he said at last. "If the Occupation Marshal ever finds out what I really am, I'm dead. Melted down, recycled for scrap, destroyed forever." He stopped. Looked at me. Tried to read the expression on my face. The moon was rising, over his shoulder.

"Of course, the only son of David Olafson may feel that this is an appropriate punishment for the sins of the 3rd Mechanized, and if so," he nodded in the direction of the gun, "go ahead. I won't blame you, and I won't try to stop you."

He looked at me. Smiled. All of a sudden I got this weird feeling, like there were wheels within wheels turning 'round and 'round in my head, and I would never be able to even see them, but he could read them like a book.

"But on the other hand, if you don't want to atomize me just yet, I could use some help with this arm..."

I carried the gun and the arm back to the pickup truck, and shifted while Mister Dreizig drove.

Mister Dreizig. Yeah, sure. Make that, Mark Dreizig. Or rather, the Heckler & Koch Tactical Military Android, Mk.XXX. Mark Thirty. Manufactured in Germany. Mark Dreizig.

Back at the farmhouse, he had the tools to weld his upper arm bone—er, shaft, whatever—back together. There was a cache of spare parts under a loose floorboard in the kitchen. After he topped up his cold fusion tank, I helped him splice in some new synthetic muscle fiber, replace the damaged hydraulic lines, and re-solder all the severed neural wiring. Then we had to smear new plastiflesh over the blast holes and burn marks and wait for the goo to set, so as a result, it was pretty near to midnight before he finally drove me back to Mom's.

Good God Almighty, you'd of thought I'd come back from the dead, the fuss she made over me.

It took us a while to win her over—I decided not to tell her the part about Dad's death just yet, and maybe never will. Truth to tell, there are still some parts of the story I have trouble with. Like the idea that the android's mind is a hodge-podge of program overlays and automatic modes, and the reason he seems so twitchy is his human-interface library routines keep paging in and out. Or the idea that deep down, underneath it all, whatever it is that is the real authentic him is just a confused kid, only fifteen real years old...

But never mind that. Eventually, with Mark Thirty's help, I got Mom to believe the story of the HK-211. The true story.

Of course, she's the only one in town who does believe me, and she's the only one in town who actually knows the true story. Because, by the time me and Mark made it back, Bobby and Pudge had already had most of a whole evening to tell everyone in town their story.

That being the one about how Pudge found the thing, in its coffin, and about how Bobby didn't run away, he was trying to lure it away, to protect me and Pudge. About how the robot's beam touched off the blackpowder shells in Bobby's back pocket, leaving him stunned and scorched but very much alive, and about how I chickened out, and ran away and left Pudge.

About how Pudge hid out and waited until the thing went away (to chase me, as it turns out), then went back into the swamp to search for Bobby. About how, when they found each other, they decided to wait until dark to make their escape. (What, Pudge and Bobby get lost and spend half a day wandering around in the swamp? Never!) And then, when they were surprised and attacked by the robot, how Bobby coolly managed to blow it apart with his last shotgun shell.

Yeah, that story. The one that makes Bobby out to be a real, true, swaggering home-town hero these days. He's even got a scar on his butt to prove it.

Me and Mom, we laugh a lot about that.

Tomorrow: Okay, you've read the entire story. Now, what's wrong with it?

Mark Dreizig (Part Two)

2008-11-11T07:00:00.005-06:00

...continued from Part One...

I made maybe half a mile before I realized I was being followed. At first it was just that prickly "watched" feeling on the back of my neck. Then I heard the snap of a large twig, loud and clear. I spun around.

Nothing back there. At least, nothing I could see.

I picked up the pace. The oak trees were thinning out as I reached the east end of the woods, and the underbrush getting thicker and thornier, so I moved up slope. Something large crashed through the bushes somewhere behind and below me. I dove behind a tree and looked back.

Nothing, again. But two hundred yards off, maybe, there was a break in the underbrush I didn't remember seeing before.

I scrambled to my feet and headed further up the slope. The pitch was steeper here, with occasional little limestone outcroppings. The oaks had completely given way to dried-out grass, loose gravel, and sumacs. The going was tough, but I figured that had to work both ways.

It did. I heard metal skitter off loose rock. Spun around quick enough to catch a glimpse of the thing as it momentarily lost its footing and slid sideways a few feet.

Then mechanical claws dug into the dry dirt, and it froze still. And vanished.

That did it. Whatever control I'd found when Bobby got killed, I lost it completely now. I screamed. Turned around. Lit out across the hillside as fast as I could scramble. Lost my footing and tumbled twenty feet down the slope. Caught my boot on a naked root; went sprawling and flailing face-first into the dust and gravel. Found my rifle again and clawed my way back up the slope with my bare hands, screaming the whole while. I guess that's when the 'bot decided there was no point staying invisible any longer. I heard a clacking of metal pincers, then heavy mechanical feet thudding towards me, and looked up in time to see a glittery stream of red-hot light come spitting out from a little dome on the near end of the body—

And miss me. Completely. By a good three feet, at least. A bush somewhere behind me whuffed! into flame. The robot kept charging forward. I could clearly see some sort of skeletal metal arms unfolding from the underside of the body, reaching for me with bony gray metal claw-fingers...

And then the 'bot hit a patch of loose gravel, lost its footing, overbalanced and pitched sideways, and just exactly like a big fat spider, rolled all its legs into a tight ball and went bouncing end over end all the way down the slope, to land with a crash in the scrub willows far below.

For a minute, I dared to have half a hope—

Then, from the tangle, one slender leg extended. And another. And a third, and a fourth. And then the 'bot sprouted arms and cutters, and began working on righting and freeing itself.

I dropped my rifle and went straight up the side of the bluff. Didn't even slow down for the 20-foot sheer limestone outcropping at the top. Was up and over that like a monkey, hit the grassy tableland at a run, and was still running and screaming my lungs out when Old Man Dreizig tackled me, hog-tied me, and threw me into the back of his 4x4 pickup truck.

A splash of cold water hit me in the face, and brought me back to—

A kitchen, in an incredibly dirt-poor rathole of a farmhouse. The stove looked like it hadn't been used, much less cleaned, in fifteen years. There were a couple of bulging old tin cans with labels peeling off sitting on the shelf; a set of rust-and-cast-iron skillets hanging on big hooks over the stove. I was sitting, awkward, on a splintery old bentwood chair. I tried to move. My wrists were tied together behind the back of the chair, and then tied tight to my ankles.

Old Man Dreizig stepped into view, holding a dripping bucket. "Now, let's try this again," he said. "Who are you?"

"Jerry Olafson," I said. "From Bagley." I blinked, and shuddered. No, this can't be real. None of this is real. In another minute Mom is gonna wake me for school and even have real bacon for breakfast...

"I knew your father," Dreizig said, nodding. Now that I finally had a clear look at him, he was even more old, scarred, and ugly than I'd ever heard. Boy, I'm glad this is a dream!

"And you were out poaching with an illegal gun," Dreizig said, "but something scared you, and you dropped it and ran."

Huh? I didn't know my nightmares shared news with each other...

Dreizig smiled, took a drink from the bucket and set it down, and then laid a heavy, gnarled hand on my shoulder. "Now, tell me again about this dead boy you think you saw."

Omigod, it's not a dream! And it's still out there! BOBBY! I fought and bucked against the ropes like a wild bronco. A joint in the wood chair parted with a splintery crack.

The smile vanished. Old Man Dreizig grabbed my shoulders with a grip like a pair of steel clamps and lifted both me and the chair clean off the floor. "What did you see out there?"

Somehow I found a shred of wits to hang onto. I blurted out the story, short and clear and as best I could. The telling calmed me, a little.

Gently, Dreizig set me back down on the floor and put his left hand to his jagged chin. "Oh, dear." Then, just like that, he turned on me, the expression in his dark eyes all cold and unreadable but the tone of his voice like the very Anger of God. "You little idiot! Do you have any idea..." His left hand shot forward, the pointed index finger hitting me in the chest like a bar of iron, pinning me to the chair. "Describe the machine again! Every detail!"

I told him everything I could remember about the 'bot. Every last bit: that weird coffin we found it in. The way its arms sort of unfolded from the underside of its body. Those fingers that looked like dull gray metal bones with sharp little claws. The way its eyes—I couldn't remember how many, it had at least eight, maybe twelve—sat in clusters on the front and sides of its head.

He stroked his craggy, scarred face some more. "Oh God and Jesus Christ in Heaven," he said at last. "You boys have stirred up a real nightmare. An HK-211." He stopped rubbing his chin, and slowly shook his head. "I don't know if I even can...." His voice tapered off.

"Can what?" I asked. He twitched a little, like he'd forgotten I was there.

He looked right through me, tried that TV-news fake smile again. The way he could switch moods just like that was starting to unnerve me. "Jerry, if I untie these ropes, do you promise not to run away or scream?"

Some choice. I nodded.

"Good." He moved around behind the chair, and started pulling out the knots. "Son, I expect they tell a lot of stories about me in town. What have you heard?"

The ropes came off my hands. I got my arms in front of me again and rubbed my wrists until the feeling started to come back. "They mostly talk about the war," I said at last. "They say you dig up war souvenirs and sell 'em back East."

He crouched down behind me and started untying the ropes around my ankles. "Oh? They say that?"

The rest of the ropes came off. I stretched my legs out in front of me and started rubbing the cramps out of my thighs. "They say there was a big battle right here, on this farm. Near the end of the Rising."

"A battle?" He came around in front of me, coiling the rope and shaking his head. Then, with that spooky suddenness of his, he snapped his face up and looked me straight in the eye. "Are you at all interested in learning the truth?"

What I was mostly interested in was getting away from this weird old geezer, but I didn't know if I was ready to try that. "Sure," I said, to buy some time.

His ugly face got that faraway look old people get when they're talking memories, and his voice went a little ragged. "It was in the last days of the Rising, that much is true. But there wasn't any battle. An Army cargo-lifter en route for Minneapolis was sabotaged and crashed here. On this farm. In that valley off to the south."

He looked straight at me, and something that I took for sadness crept into his glassy dark eyes. "It was a classified flight. Classified cargo. Munitions. Materials. Things they were trying out in a last-ditch attempt to restore order in the inner cities. I was a Captain in the 3rd Mechanized, then. My unit was sent in to secure the crash site. There was looting." He paused. Looked away. His voice dropped to a soft pitch.

"We were ordered to shoot the looters."

His head snapped up. He took a quick glance out the dusty, fly-specked kitchen window, then turned to me. "It was a debacle. Later on, I was court-martialed, and my unit—disbanded. Disgraced. I came back to this farm, because I knew the Army had only bothered to recover the materials it considered worth salvaging." He stooped, picked up the water bucket, took another deep drink.

He set the bucket down and wiped his face with the back of his hand. "I have spent the last twelve years digging up and disarming the things which were left behind," he said. He took a quick step towards me and leaned in close, so I had a good clear look at his ugly ruin of a face. "These are not battle scars, my young friend. Not all that is buried welcomes resurrection."

And just like that, his mood flipped again. He jerked back from me, spun around on his heel, and marched out of the kitchen. "Now, come!"

I staggered to my feet and for some crazy reason I'll never understand followed the old guy. Past a rust-stained toilet that had been dry for years. Past a shower stall that was full of old tools and oil jugs and paint cans. Through a living room decorated with broken-out windows, birds' nests, dried leaves, and a wrecked coil-spring-and-stuffing-and-mouse-turd thing that may once have been a sofa.

I had trouble believing my eyes. "Mister Dreizig, do you like, live here?"

"If you want to call it living," he said, without breaking stride.

We ended up in a dark, musty, back bedroom. There was an ugly old steel-frame double-bed in there, and a clothes rack that held three or four tattered military-style jumpsuits. Dreizig dropped to his knees on the hard floor and reached a hand way under the bed. A white-footed deermouse scampered out the other side. I heard him latch onto something heavy and drag it out: a camouflaged footlocker, I guessed.

"My young friend," he said, "I fear you have awakened my doom. What you saw out there is an Alliant TechSystems HK-211 Hunter-Killer Pacification Robot." He spun the footlocker around on the floor until he was happy with it, then started popping latches. "It is relentless, remorseless, a master at camouflage, and extremely lethal." The lid of the footlocker unsealed with the sound of sticky old rubber gaskets being torn to shreds.

"And I honestly don't know if I can stop it," he said softly.

He flipped up the lid of the footlocker. There was another, chrome-colored box inside, with some kind of combination lock and panel and button thing on the front. Dreizig lifted the chrome box out and set it on the bed.

His loud voice came back. "Fortunately, we have three advantages! The first is that the HK-211 is stupid. Vast data processing power, but no actual intelligence." He began thumbing the buttons and spinning the lock tumblers with a finger speed that surprised me. "The second—" He stopped, and smiled at me. "The second is that there must be a fault in its targeting systems. You're still alive." He went back to the locked box and finished entering the combination. He twisted a knob. The lid popped open. "And the third advantage—"

He lifted a massive black handgun out of the box.

"—is this."

He grinned, ear to ear.

For a few seconds, all I could do was blink. I mean, I'd seen pictures of handguns before, in history books and all that. This one looked kind of like one of those antique German things: a Luger, I think is what they called them. Except this one had all kinds of extra controls, and radiator fins on that super-long barrel, and the action had a whole bunch of extra pipes and tubes and stuff that stuck out way too far in back. While I was trying to lean in and get a real close look at it and figure out exactly what the heck is was, Dreizig fished a wire shoulder stock out of the lock box and clipped it onto the back of the pistol. The way he fondled and caressed that gun was downright scary.

And right about that moment is when sanity checked back in and had a little word with me. "Uh, Mister Dreizig, aren't we forgetting one other advantage we have?"

He petted the pistol like it was his favorite dog, thumbed a speck of imaginary dirt off the barrel, and smiled up at me. "What's that?"

"Your truck. Why don't we just drive into town, find the Occupation Marshal, and let him call in the Federal troops?"

Dreizig thought it over a moment, then shook his head. "No, I can't do that."

"Why not?"

"Because this," he said, as he smiled, and put the wire stock to his shoulder, and squinted through the sights, and started fiddling with the gun's controls, "is my dharma."

Fifteen minutes later we were back inside Dreizig's rusted-out 4x4, blasting across the tallgrass prairie, throwing up a rooster tail of dust and bouncing down a jackhammer washboard of a cowpath that Dreizig claimed was the road into the eastern end of the valley. I was belted in and hanging on for dear life. Dreizig was somehow managing to both hold the steering wheel and shift with his left hand and fondle his gun with his right.

Just at that moment, I didn't have a worry in the world about being killed by the HK-211. The way Dreizig was driving, I figured we'd be dead and cold long before the 'bot ever caught first wind of us.

"Mister Dreizig!" I had to shout to be heard over the wind noise and flapping fenders. "Where the Hell are we going?"

"To Valhalla!" he shouted right back.

"Can't you—" We slammed into a pothole that about knocked my back fillings out, then bounced high and came down hard. "Can't you drop me off at the next corner and go there yourself?"

"NO!" He turned that mad grin and steely cold stare on me again. "You must come with me, Jerry Olafson! You! I knew your father!"

He looked back at the trail again, just in time to steer us right smack through the middle of a small patch of young aspen. "I know the names and faces," he said clearly, "of all the civilians that my troops killed."

Oh.

For a few fractions of a second, the cab of that truck turned into a very cold and silent place. All I could hear was the blood pounding in my ears.

Then we bottomed out on a prairie dog mound and lost the left-side muffler.

"You must come with me, Jerry Olafson!" He threw the truck into a heart-stopping slalom around an old abandoned hay mower, snapped it back on track, and punched the gas. "I would have killed myself years ago, but could not, and wondered why! Now I know! Atonement!"

With a stomach-turning lurch, the pickup dropped into a dry gully, clawed its way up through the other side, and launched itself about ten feet into the air. When we hit ground again the right side running board cracked off and went tumbling away in the dust behind us.

"You must watch me!" Dreizig howled. "I may be destroyed in this battle! I may save every innocent life in your town! But either way, the son of David Olafson—" A close miss with an elm tree took off the door mirror on the driver's side. "—will bear witness to the honor of the last of the 3rd Mechanized!"

Oh, swell. And the peasant folk will tell the tale for generations to come. Personally, the killer 'bot was starting to look not so bad, and I was really starting to wish I'd let Bobby call me a chicken.

Then another thought occurred to me. "Mister Dreizig?" We banged rapid-fire across a short chain of potholes. "How are you gonna find this thing? It's invisible!"

Another swerve, for no good reason I could see. "No, it's not!" Dreizig shouted back. "That is physically impossible! The HK-211 just has very good active epidural camouflage!" The trail—if there was one—petered out, and we plowed headlong into a sea of tall dry grass. "The robot is perfectly visible!" he added. "If you only know how to look for it!"

After a few more prairie dog mounds I realized he wasn't going to share the secret, so I asked. "And how's that?"

He stared straight at me, as if considering a reply.

He went back to watching where we were going, and maybe even steering. "Never mind. You just help me to get near it, and I will handle the rest."

We popped over a small rise and flew out onto the tableland at the top of the bluffs. Dreizig slapped the truck into neutral, killed the engine, and let us coast the last hundred yards or so. "Here's where it gets sticky, lad." He gave me a wink and a grin, then popped his door open and bailed out while the truck was still rolling.

I wasted a few seconds wondering if the brakes would work or if I could steer the thing away from the bluff edge or something—and marveling at how quiet the truck was with the motor off, save for the swaying creak of the suspension and the scrape of dried weeds poking through the holes in the floorboards—before my brain finally kicked in and I followed Dreizig's example. Undid my seatbelt, opened my door, and bailed out. Hit the ground with a nice little tuck 'n' roll that my tumbling coach would have loved. Came up in a crouch, on the balls of my feet.

The truck slammed into a tree stump hidden in the grass and came to an instant stop. I stood up.

"Get down!" Dreizig hissed, somewhere in the weeds behind me. "The HK has superb IR optics and that truck's engine block is the hottest infra-red source for miles around! We'll have incoming fire any second now!" I dropped to a crouch again, turned, and spotted Dreizig in the weeds about twenty yards off. He was squatted low, cradling the gun, and duck-walking fast like no old man I've ever seen. We made brief eye contact, then he slipped back into the tall grass and headed west.

I skittered after him. Another hundred yards or so, and I caught up with him on a limestone outcropping at the very edge of the bluff. I looked back at the truck.

"It didn't blow up," I whispered. "Is that good?"

Dreizig shrugged. "Maybe. I was hoping we could draw the HK out and get this over with quickly." He looked around, then laid his hand on the limestone. "This is where you came up." (Which made me wonder: had he been watching me, Pudge, and Bobby all along? I didn't like that thought.) Without another word, Dreizig got down flat on his belly, like a lizard, and went headfirst over the side.

After a moment or two of waffling, I went after him, but climbing down in the normal feet-and-butt-first way.

By the time I got down to the bottom of the limestone, Dreizig had his eyes to the ground and was scouting hard for something. "The HK-211 is gone," he said, not looking up. "Your rifle is over there." My eyes followed to where his finger was pointing, and sure enough, there was my Dad's old single-shot Stevens .22, neatly cut in half, right through the action, where the steel is thickest. Dreizig chuckled. "You definitely do not want an HK-211 to catch you with its pincers."

I didn't appreciate the joke. Dreizig glanced up and took a quick sweep of the valley, then moved downslope a few paces and went back to studying the ground.

I picked up the halves of my Dad's Stevens, looked at them awhile, and fought back a kind of choked-up feeling. Mom gave me that beat-up old falling-block rifle on my tenth birthday, 'cause that's when she said Dad had always intended for me to have it. Because that's when he got it, from Grandpa, who got it from his dad on his tenth birthday. Four generations of Olafsons had make squirrels miserable with that old rifle...

I dropped the pieces on the ground, kicked a little dirt over them, and scrabbled down the slope to join Dreizig. "What—" My voice was barely a squeaky wheeze.

Dreizig unhooked a canteen from his belt and handed it to me. A gulp of cold water helped my voice some. I splashed more water in my burning eyes.

"What—" I had to rub my eyes again. "What are we looking for, anyway?"

"More tracks like these," Dreizig said quietly, pointing to a deep, round, hole in the dry leaves and dusty dirt. "The HK-211 has two basic operational modes. In defensive mode it sits tight, tracks everything that comes within its alert radius, and attacks only if something crosses over its reaction perimeter." Dreizig straightened up, took the canteen from me, and took a good long swig.

"In assault mode," he went on, "it basically just keeps going in the direction it's been pointed, and deviates only for natural obstacles and soft targets of opportunity." He took one more drink from the canteen, capped it, and hung it on his belt. He looked straight at me. "Soft targets means people."

He turned, took another sweeping look around, then raised his arm and pointed down into the valley. "If we're lucky," he said at last, "it's gone into defensive mode, and is hiding down in that swamp somewhere, waiting for us to come in range." I had to ask.

"And if we're unlucky?"

"It's already halfway to town."

...to be concluded...

Mark Dreizig (Part One)

2008-11-10T07:00:00.002-06:00

Bobby Anderson carefully set his 28-gauge against the rotted old fencepost, spread the strands of the barbed wire apart, and looked at me and Pudge. "So, you coming? Or are you chicken?"

Pudge gave the rusty wire a dubious look. "Old Man Dreizig is pretty mean, Bobby."

"He took a potshot at Dewey Swanlund once," I added. "He don't like people on his land."

Bobby turned his head and looked out over the weedy, overgrown valley. "Ain't his land," Bobby said. "My daddy says the Federals seized it from my grandpa, right after the Rising. Old Man Dreizig is just a dirty squatter."

Pudge narrowed his eyes. "Then how come the marshal lets him farm it?"

Bobby cleared his throat and spat. "He ain't farming. He's digging up war souvenirs and selling 'em back East."

Pudge snorted. "War souvenirs!"

"It's true!" Bobby turned around, a mean look coming up fast in his eyes. "My daddy says the last big battle of the Rising was fought right here on this spot!"

Pudge looked away. "Go on, get real."

Bobby's face went black. He let go of the wire, stepped forward, and gave Pudge a hard shove that sent him stumbling. "You making fun of my daddy, fat boy?"

Pudge caught his balance, and his voice came back whiney and nervous. "No, Bobby, 'course not." He looked at me like a dog that knows it's in for a whipping. "We'd never make fun of Mister Anderson, would we, Jerry?" Bobby turned on me, the red anger boiling up through the roots of his short blond hair, and I thought, Thanks a lot, Pudge! Now he's locked on me!

I'd learned way back in third grade that when Bobby Anderson got mad, it didn't matter what you said, he just got madder. Five years of growing up since had only made his fists harder and his mean streak worse, so I just kept my mouth shut, shook my head No, and winced a little in anticipation.

Bobby seemed to cool down some. He settled for waving a fist under my nose and growling, "Don't you ever so much as let me think you're making fun of my daddy. He's a war hero, understand?"

I understood. My Dad died fighting the Federals a month before I was born and Pudge's dad never came back from the Reeducation Camp, but Bobby Anderson Senior is the town war hero, and my Mom says he's even got a scar on his butt to prove it. She also says when I'm older she'll explain why all the moms in town think that's so funny.

Looking a little disappointed that me and Pudge didn't need beating up, Bobby turned back to the fence and spread the wires again. "So, you two coming with me? Or do I tell everyone you're a couple of poogies?"

Pudge gave the rusty wire another hesitant look.

"Yeah," Bobby said, switching to a real oily and evil voice. "Poogies, that's it. You liked being at the Re-Ed Camp, didn't you? Must 'a been one of their favorites, even: a nice, soft, fat little white boy, the kind those big black Federal soldiers just love to—"

Pudge's face went all puffy and red and the hot tears started to form. "I ain't no damn poogie!" He cranked open the bolt of his .22 with an angry jerk that sent the cartridge flying. "I ain't..." Pushing the rifle into my hands, he ducked headfirst through the fence, caught a snag on the cuff of his jeans, ripped it free. "I ain't no God Damn poogie!" He was bleeding a little from the scratch on his ankle, but I don't think that was why he was crying.

Bobby looked at me. "Well?"

Well, I knew it was a bad idea, but I also knew Bobby'd tell everyone in town if I chickened out now. So I handed Pudge his .22, eased mine off to half-cock and passed it over, then squatted down and started poking around in the dust and weeds.

Which, of course, peeved Bobby. "Now what?"

"Gonna find Pudge's cartridge," I said, not looking up. "Maybe you Andersons got cash money to burn, but me and Mom sure as Hell don't." And also, I was hoping...

"Come on, Jerry," Pudge whined. He looked around, nervous. "Old Man Dreizig might see us up here."

That's the whole idea, Pudge. I turned a little to the left and started searching a different patch of ragweed. If I can just keep you squirming until you chicken out...

"Right there," Bobby said, pointing. "Behind your heel."

Aw, nuts. I picked up the cartridge, blew the dirt off, and made a great show of inspecting it. "Nice one," I said at last. "A little green around the primer, but the bullet's hardly corroded at all." I checked the headstamp. "Remington?" I looked up with a big smile. "You been holding out on me, Pudge?"

"I found it in Dewey Swanlund's basement," Pudge whimpered, twitching like he was about to wet his pants. "Now will you for Christ's sake hurry up?"

Since I'd pretty much run out of excuses, I stood up, ducked through the fence, then turned around to hold the wires apart while Bobby climbed through. Pudge traded me my rifle for his cartridge. While we were doing that, Bobby reached back over the fence, grabbed his shotgun, then turned back to me and cracked the shotgun open.

"For your information, jerkface," he yanked a shell out of the back pocket of his jeans and waved it under my nose, "this is a black-powder handload I made myself, using melted-down old lead fishing sinkers for shot. We Andersons don't take Government welfare money, we never signed no stinking surrender oath, and we sure as Hell don't have no God Damn Loyalist gun license!" He stuffed the shell into the barrel of his shotgun, snapped the gun shut with an angry flip. "And now that you've got that straight..."

"Oak trees," Pudge said.

That threw Bobby off his stride. "Huh?"

Pudge was checking out the horizon, nervous. He broke off long enough to point across the valley. "The woods on the side of that hill over there. Oak trees."

"So?"

Pudge glanced around once more, then started tracing a route in the air. "So if we get behind this ridge here and follow it down to that sumac patch, we can circle around the west side of the marsh and get over to the woods without Old Man Dreizig seeing us. Ought to be plenty of squirrels in those oak trees, and the echoes'll make it hard to tell where all the shooting is going on."

Bobby, I guess, wasn't done being mad yet. "Squirrels?" He slapped himself on the back pocket of his jeans. "I got just six shells here, and I am not gonna waste 'em on no damn stinking squirrels!" He knocked aside Pudge's hand and started pointing out his own route. "No, we're gonna go around that side of the sumacs, cross the marsh over there, and scare up some ducks."

Bobby bullied and Pudge whined all the way down the back side of the ridge. We didn't see a thing, except for some redwing blackbirds in the marsh that perched on the ripe cattails and complained about all the noise we were making. The ducks heard Bobby and Pudge coming a good quarter-mile off and were gone long before we ever got into range.

An hour or two later, our feet were starting to dry out after the slog through the marsh, we'd made it over to the oak woods on the far side of the valley, and Bobby had pretty much cooled out. Pudge spotted a squirrel burying acorns in the dry brown leaves and knocked it over with one shot. I kicked up a cottontail but didn't even get my gun to my shoulder before it bounced out of sight. We followed the rabbit into a little dry gully that somebody'd used for a trash dump a few decades ago, and followed the gully down into a thick patch of bright yellow aspen. Skirting the aspen, we started back towards the marsh.

That's when the grouse exploded.

Understand, ruffed grouse don't flush until you just about step on them, and then they don't fly out and away like a pheasant, they sort of blast off, straight up, a feather-covered rocket about the size of a chicken and making a ton of noise. So I was about startled out of my underwear, but Bobby was keen to kill something so he had his gun cocked, shouldered, and fired before I could even blink.

Touching off that load of black powder just added to the general smoke and fire and brimstone effect.

"Got it!" Bobby shouted. He cracked open his shotgun, pulled out the smoking shell, and slapped in a fresh one.

'The hell you did," Pudge said. "Missed clean."

"Did not! It dropped right over there!" He snapped his gun shut and used it one-handed like a pointer. "You saw it, right, Jerry?"

I coughed once and blinked the smoke-tears from my eyes. "All I saw was smoke."

Bobby ignored me and turned back to Pudge. "Swear to God, I saw it drop right over there." I got my eyes clear enough to look in the direction he was pointing, and saw a few blue wisps starting to curl up from the dry grass and fallen leaves.

"Uh, Bobby? What exactly are you using for wads in those home-made shells of yours?"

Bobby broke off arguing with Pudge long enough to turn back to me. "Crumpled up old newspaper. Why?" He followed the line my eyes were taking, saw the first little tongue of flame lick out from the litter, and spat out, "Oh, sweet Jesus!" Pudge saw the fire, too, and reacted by jumping right into the middle of it.

That's not as crazy as it sounds. You grow up on the tallgrass prairie, where the Environmental Corps policy is to let it burn naturally and one controlled wild fire can wipe out an entire town, and you get sort of used to the idea of stamping out small grass fires almost by reflex.

Still, by the time we had every last ember dead cold and out, Bobby'd lost track of where he thought he saw the grouse go down, so we had to fan out into the underbrush to search for it. Pudge took center, I took left, Bobby took right. I was poking around in some scrub willows when I heard Pudge stop moving and call out.

"Guys?"

"Find it?" Bobby answered.

"Guys?"

I cut back in towards Pudge and found him standing in the middle of a big tangle of wild raspberries, stock-still and white as a klan robe. "What is it, Pudge?"

Hand trembling, he pointed. "A coffin."

"Oh, cool!" Bobby said. He tried plowing in from the right side but got stopped short by the raspberries and had to go back around the front way. I went the way Pudge went in.

I was disappointed. The thing Pudge was staring at was all corroded grayish-green metal, sort of rounded, maybe eight feet long and at least half-buried in the dirt. "It's just an old water heater or something," I called to Bobby. "Probably washed down the hill from the garbage dump." I found a clear spot in the raspberries and took a step closer to it.

"It's a coffin," Pudge insisted. "A Federal Army coffin. I seen 'em before."

"Get real," I said to Pudge.

Bobby had worked his way in to the other end of the thing. "I dunno, Jerry," he said to me. "I think Pudge could be right."

"Oh sure, like you see coffins all the time."

"No," Bobby said. "There's all kinds of writing on this end. Army serial numbers, stuff like that." He crouched before it, set his shotgun down, and started into clicking and punching things. "There's all sorts 'a neat switches and buttons and—"

And just like that, a thin plane of blue light swept across his face.

Something started humming.

A deep whump! kicked in, and rose slowly to a soft, high-pitched whine. With a creak and a groan, ancient rusty hinges started to turn. The top began to rise.

Not top. Lid.

"Jesus H. Christ!" Bobby fell over backward, clawing to get away from the thing. I stuck around long enough to catch one glimpse of a bony-fingered hand reaching out from inside to grip the edge of the lid, then bolted out of there like a terrified cottontail with a whole pack of hungry rabid beagles on my tail. Pudge was still rooted to where he was standing. I sort of half-pushed and half-dragged him into motion, and as the coffin lid fell open with a crash! behind us we lit out up the hill and into the oaks.

Fifty yards upslope, Pudge latched onto my arm and dragged me to a stop. "Bobby! We can't leave Bobby!" We both turned around.

Long as I live, I will never forget that sight. Maybe we couldn't leave Bobby, but he was sure as Hell leaving us. There he was, a good 200 yards out into the marsh and running like mad, with his shotgun in one hand and his shirt-tails flapping like a big crow going into a heavy headwind. At first I couldn't see what he was running from.

Then it moved.

Jesus. It was — well, some kind of machine, anyway. Not shaped like a man. Not shaped like a tractor. Mostly like a spider, I guess, though I got the idea it had the wrong number of legs. The body was a small, knobbly thing, with no real clear head. It moved in quick, scuttling motions.

And then it stopped. And when it was perfectly still, it just plain disappeared into the tall grass.

Bobby had a good headstart. At first I thought the thing hadn't seen him and was heading off in a different direction. Then it moved again, and I realized it was stalking around to cut him off. Bobby made maybe another 50 yards, scrambling out of the mud, up to the top of a small hummock.

The thing snapped up to its full straight-legged height. A lance of fiery red light shot out from one end.

Bobby exploded.

Pudge screamed. I slapped a hand over his mouth and wrestled him down as he went spastic. We thrashed aorund in the sticks and dry leaves for a couple seconds, until I got him pinned and got my face up next to his ear. "Pudge! Pudge!"

He went rigid, but stopped fighting me. I let go of his mouth, a little. "Bobby?" he whispered. I stuck my head up and grabbed a quick look. All there was where Bobby'd been standing was a smoking hole in the dirt and a few smouldering cattails.

"He's dead." Pudge went nuts on me again. I got him into a hammerlock this time and held on 'til he got control of himself.

He relaxed, sort of. Blinked at me a few times. I eased off my old. "Jerry?" he whispered, when I let go of his mouth. "What the Hillary is it?"

I risked another glance, but couldn't see it. "Some kind of Army machine," I said. "Musta been lying out here for the last twelve years. I guess Bobby's old man was right." Pudge went taut on me for a second, but got control of himself before I had to wrestle him any more.

Funny. In the back of my head I had this feeling like I should be every bit as scared as Pudge, but in the front of my mind everything was just as clear as could be and totally locked on the problem of figuring out how to get us both out of there alive. I shut my eyes, and listened. Tuned out the sound of Pudge's whimpering and heavy breathing. Tuned out the sound of the breeze in the cattails, and the dried oak leaves.

If the thing was moving anywhere nearby, it was completely silent. Which, given how big it was, didn't make sense, so it had to be somewhere else, or else not moving.

I got off Pudge and opened my eyes. "Listen. We gotta get out of here."

Pudge rolled his eyes. "Now that is a Revelation."

"No, listen. You remember Old Man Tollefson, that history teacher who got himself dragged off to Re-Ed? Remember how he always said it was a lie, about the Federals being too humane to use 'bots during the Rising? He said the real problem was the 'bots were too dumb to tell the difference between Rebels and God Damn Loyalists, so they just killed everybody?"

I gave Pudge a few seconds to chew that one over. All he came up with was, "So?"

"So that thing out there still thinks it's fighting the Rising. It's going to kill everybody it sees."

That, I think, got through to Pudge. "Somebody's got to warn the town," he said, quiet.

I took another peek at the marsh and still didn't see any robot, so I risked getting up to a crouch. Nothing shot at me. "What can the town do?" I asked Pudge. "We're pacified, but for a couple single-shot .22's and some antique shotguns. We got to find the Occupation Marshal."

Pudge sat up like he'd found the splinter in the outhouse seat, looked at me hard, and blanched dead white. "And the Marshal will call in Federal troops," he whispered.

"Yeah." I looked down. "Sorry, Pudge."

Pudge chewed his lower lip a few seconds, blinked back a few tears, then wiped his eyes with the back of his left hand. "That thing killed Bobby," he said, between sniffles. "We gotta stop it before it kills anyone else. We got to."

"Yeah." But then that little voice in the back of my head piped up again, saying, Stop it? Hell, you got to get away from it, first!

Pudge choked back whatever he was feeling, got to his knees, crawled over beside me. "So, any great ideas?"

I found a small stick about the size of a pencil, smoothed a spot in the soft dirt, and started into sketching. "Yeah. We're here, and the marsh is there, and the 'bot is—," I shrugged. "And County M is over about there. There's two of us, and one of it, so I'm thinking we'll have a better chance of getting through if we split up. You go west." I sketched a line off to the right. "You can use the woods for cover most of the way and catch the highway about here. Maybe hitch a ride."

Pudge scowled at the map in the dirt. "And you go east?"

I tried a grin. It fell apart. Truth to tell, the shudders were finally starting to catch up with me. "I climb hills better'n you do." I went back to looking at the marsh, wondering where the thing was hiding, and if it was going to... to...

Pudge took another long stare at the map, then crawled forward to where he'd dropped his .22 while we were wrestling. "Okay. See you in town." He gave me a nervous, scared smile. I tried to return something cocky and confident, but all I managed was a facial twitch and a sort of squeak.

Cradling his .22, moving in a crouch, Pudge set off to the west. In half a minute, he'd disappeared into the underbrush.

Well, Jerry, my little voice said, it's your stupid idea, and now you're stuck with it. Fighting the urge to run screaming after Pudge, I picked up my .22, checked to make sure the barrel wasn't plugged with dirt, then headed the other way.

...to be continued...

Guest Column: Anatomy of a Radio Drama

2008-11-08T07:00:00.004-06:00

by Snowdog

The recording of a written work into an audio production can be a great deal of fun and need not be too expensive. The production itself can range from a simple one-man-one-voice show to an all-out extravaganza with multiple players, sound effects and music. For the purposes of this post, I'll limit it to the former.

I. Equipment
In the interest of full disclosure, I must 'fess up to the fact that, as an amateur musician, I've collected some decent (not great) equipment over the years, including a good microphone, mixer and some effects processors. Much of this is unnecessary, strictly speaking, with one exception: You need a good microphone. If you use the one in your official World of Warcraft headset, it's going to sound like crap. Expect to spend at least $100 for a good studio mic, or perhaps less on eBay.

II. Software
The recording industry has been revolutionized over the last fifteen years. Where you might have spent $50/hour for professional studio time and $150 for a reel of two-inch tape, you can now get close to the same quality of sound at home using any of a number of software packages. Back around 1997 or so, I bought a program called Cool Edit Pro. It was an amazing, lean and powerful piece of multitracking recording software. And then, it was acquired by Adobe. I sent them an email pleading that they not turn it into useless bloatware. No answer. To be fair, though, Adobe Audition mostly still functions the way it should, but it now eats massive amounts of hard drive space and CPU cycles. There is a free open source multitrack recorder called Audacity, but I don't have any experience with it.

III. Prep Work
Read the story, in this case Rigel Kent's Bane tribute, Blaze of Glory.

The story has three speaking characters. I take a little time to get to know them, particularly Big Man, the protagonist. Then I imagine their background, the events that led up to where they are now, and what they think might lie ahead.

Big Man is a survivor, perhaps a former soldier, probably thought of as a reclusive gun nut. We don't learn much about Mom other than she is strong-willed and tough. Jamie is a good kid. I'm guessing around fifteen or sixteen, if he's getting big enough to push Mom around.

Since it's a short work, I read the story again, this time aloud.

IV. Set-Up
Time to pull out and fire up the gear. Turn on the mixer. Flip on the phantom power to the microphone. Boot up Adobe Audition on the desktop system and open a new 44.1 KHz mono wav file. Pull up Rigel's blog on the laptop. He uses a large, high-contrast font, so I don't have to paste the story into Open Office and tweak it. (Thanks, Rigel!) Now I’ll grab a beer. (You know, to help get in character.)

Bruce noted the subtle reverb in the Night of the Obamanation recording. The truth is, the effect was switched on throughout the entire reading, but I kept the "send" on the mixer turned down low, so that only the loudest sounds reverberate. (VOTE BARRACK!) I'm doing the same for Blaze.

V. Recording
I suspect everyone approaches the recording process differently. Despite how it sounds, what you're hearing in my work is not me standing in front of a mic reading an entire story in one pass. Rather, I attack the piece one paragraph at a time, first rehearsing it until I work out the correct inflection and voice characterizations, then attempting to record. Sometimes this requires creating multiple takes until I quit stumbling over my own tongue and find one that I like.

After doing two or three paragraphs this way, I like to go back and listen to the overall rhythm of the narrative to check for consistency. This may sound crazy, but the pitch and timing of sentences as they flow past work a little like music. In the first few paragraphs, I try to establish a baseline rhythm, so I can pick up the tempo later for action sequences, and then drop it again for sudden silences. (There's a good example of this in Blaze of Glory when Big Man runs out of ammo.)

After I record the final section, it's time to go back and compile all the best takes into a hopefully coherent whole. Again, it's important to have a feel for the rhythm so as to help decide how long to pause between paragraphs. Often, at this point, I realize that I haven't saved the file down in a long time. I hold my breath and click the little diskette icon.

The last step in the recording process is to apply any post-production effects. This is where you would add any music, sound effects or tweak the ambiance of the recording. I had decided before I started recording to use Audition's built-in effects rack to alter the voices of Wife and Jamie so that they sound as if they are coming over a telephone. This would serve to highlight Big Man's isolation from his family and help distinguish the voices from one another. It was a nice idea in theory, but in execution, the constant shifts in sound become too distracting. It would probably have worked if I had created an entire sound bed (background noises, ominous music) first, and then altered just the two voices. So I click “Undo”.

Finally, I apply some light hiss reduction to counteract noise picked up from one of the other three computers in the room.

VI. Compressing
Last of all, I take the rather large wav file and cringe as I crunch it down to a low-quality 56Kbs MP3 file. Fortunately, unlike music, human speech survives this process pretty well. So we upload the file to my domain host and stick a link to it in this article.

Voila and Viola! Audio drama of Shatnerian proportions: blazeofglory.mp3

Any questions?

The Friday Challenge - 11/7/08

2008-11-07T07:00:00.001-06:00

Okay, maybe that was too specific a challenge. As of the deadline — yes, I do pay attention to the deadline once in a while — we have but two entries:

Diary of a Mad Astronaut, by Henry

Until the Bitter End, by Vidad

As always, you're encouraging to read, comment on, and vote for your favorite, or alternatively, to try and snowdog something in after the deadline. We'll announce the winner on Sunday night.

Since last week's challenge was apparently far too specific, for this week's challenge, we're going to go wandering somewhere way off into the vague end of the spectrum. I want you to kick back, relax, put on your blue shirt and your hopechange hat, and imagine this scenario: Today is Friday, November 6, 2009. This week, the whole world has celebrated the one-year anniversary of the election of The Chosen One to the office of the President of the United States of America.

What is going on in the world right now? How has your life changed in the past year? What have been some of the more interesting headlines and news stories you've watched unfold in 2009?

I mean, admit it, that's all you've been thinking about this week anyway. So you may as well get some Friday Challenge mileage out of it...

Friday Challenge: Reminder and Update

2008-11-06T07:00:00.002-06:00

First, a reminder that the deadline for the 10/31/08 Friday Challenge is midnight Central time, tonight.

Second, I've been asked to provide a little clarification. I've been avoiding that, because I didn't want my vision to contaminate yours, but if you're still stuck, here goes. I am writing this thread of the narrative in the form of ~~dairy~~ diary entries —

I always confuse those two words. It must be a Wisconsin thing.

— the secret diary entries of USAF Major Clayton Thompson, the sole survivor of the Galileo mission to the Jovian system. He's returned to Earth in cryosleep, awakened to discover that he is the sole survivor and his cryo capsule apparently protected him from whatever killed the rest of the crew, and found there's something terribly wrong, as all his "spacemarks" are missing and all his radio channels are filled with nothing but static. So he's taken the lander down to the surface, to try to discover what the heck happened.

Understand, he hasn't dropped into our world from 1959. That's too simple and obvious. He's dropped into our world from a parallel universe in which the latter half of the 20th century unfolded in just exactly the way all the finest sci-fi minds of the late 1950s said it would. (Well, the non-Apocalyptic ones, anyway.) In Thompson's timeline there were permanently manned bases on the Moon by 1980, a first foothold on Mars by 1990, and while no, they did not launch the Galileo is response to uncovering an alien monolith in Tycho crater in 2001, you get the general idea. His lander, the Yeager, has nuclear-electric engines powered by a reactor the size of a trashcan, but all the avionics use vacuum tubes and the autopilot is a clacking, clanking, punchcard-programmed Burroughs electromechanical monstrosity that only through the greatest of forbearance can be called a "computer."

So maybe the first hint he has that something is terribly, unimaginably wrong is that as he brings the Yeager in for a landing at Edwards AFB, he sees there is not a single Studebaker hovercar in the officer's parking lot.

Anyway, I think you get the general idea. The Air Force is going nuts, trying to figure out how this spacecraft the size of an airliner and powered by engines two generations beyond DARPA's wildest wet dreams has ended up in their laps, while Major Thompson is going equally nuts, trying to figure out what really happened. And in this contest, Thompson has two advantages:

1. He knows that the Yeager is only the lander, that the Galileo is still safely hidden in a Lagrange point parking orbit — he's been faking amnesia and hasn't told his interrogators about the Galileo yet — and believes that if he can just find a way to get back up there, he might be able to find a way to go back home.

2. Despite what his interrogators are telling him, he knows they're lying, because in his timeline this whole "parallel universe" theory has been proven beyond a shadow of a doubt to be utter nonsense, by none other than the eminent Nobel Prize-winning physicist Professor Albert Gore.

So the fact that all his conversations with these so-called "Americans" keep coming back around to clueless queries about how the lander's atomic engines work only deepens his suspicions...

Print vs. Performance

2008-11-04T07:00:00.002-06:00

This most recent Friday Challenge illustrates an important point. Writing for print and writing for performance are different. I don't have a good handle on the difference — I'm one of those relics whose orientation is not merely print, but ink printed on paper made from the corpses of murdered trees. And I've honestly tried to understand the difference. Along with all the other reference books in my office, I must have at least two dozen books on screenwriting and filmmaking that I've never been able to stay awake long enough to make it through.

I was in a screenwriting group for a while. I don't think they noticed that I dropped out. I was always the quiet guy who sat in the corner, listened to the other would-be writers' presentations (as best I could tell, only two guys in the group had ever actually sold scripts), and then at the end, after everyone else in the group was done gushing over the writer's sheer brilliance, said, "Um, there's just this one thing I don't understand." And then I'd point out some painfully obvious logical flaw in the treatment and the whole thing would collapse like a house of cards.

Hmm. Maybe it wasn't that they didn't notice when I dropped out. Maybe they were relieved.

At this point I should confess, I'm also the guy who once got a "C" on a term paper by slagging Hamlet and turning in a catalog of all the places in the script where, if the Prince of Denmark had just shut up and done something instead of standing around soliloquizing about it, he'd have solved all his problems in one stroke and ended up King of Denmark. From this, I learned an important lesson: When An Old Biddy Is Standing In Judgment Upon Thee, Thou Shalt Not Question Shakespeare.

All the same, get me going sometime on how much I hate Romeo and Juliet...

Sorry, back to topic. My point this morning is, when you're running a writing group, try to orient your critical method to the projected outlet. If your intention is to write for print publication, the group members should submit their work only in print, because that's how an editor will see it. Time and again I've seen it proven that a good, dramatic reading can, pardon the expression, paper over a vast multitude of sins that are painfully obvious when seen in print. Likewise, I've also seen it proven time and again that words that read great on paper don't always make the transition to a good performance. Just think of any novel you liked that ended up as a really lousy movie.

Whenever I do write something, I always try to find time to read it aloud at least once. For one thing, I've found that in reading to speak, my eye finds typos it elides when reading silently. For another, reading the piece out loud gives me good clues on where to trim fat and insert punctuation. If I find I have to pause for breath, I at least need to insert a comma, and might be better off excising useless words and breaking up sentences.

But as I said at the outset: I am a fossil, trapped in amber, oriented towards ink on paper. In this online streaming-media YouTube age, is there a better paradigm?

Your thoughts, s'il vous plait?

And the winner is...

2008-11-02T21:06:00.002-06:00

Wow. Picking a winner for the 10/24/08 Friday Challenge turned out to be — well, a challenge, because you all turned in some mighty impressive entries. Diving in feet-first, then:

Ben-El: An impressive piece of work, but... I don't know. It just didn't grab me. Maybe if I'd actually read or watched I, Claudius it would have made more sense to me, but as it is, it seems like it's relying on some common subtext that I just don't have. That, and every now and then you throw in a jarring anachronism; for example, distances measured in meters. An ancient Roman would have used steps or paces. (Two steps to a pace, 125 paces to a stadium, 1000 paces to a mile. You have to know these things when you're the king.)

All in all, it's an impressive piece of work, and I can't help feeling that it's due to some failing on my part that I don't quite understand it.

Al: You were doing good until I got to the Qwarumpf tributes. Then, when the Elder God Dread Qwatchoolyoo made his appearance, I lost it. I understood what you were trying to do with the names, once I went back and sounded them out, and this does make for a clever little bit of Imitation Lovecraft, but in print the names read more like silly jokes than anything else and they undercut the story. I think, if you took yourself just slightly more seriously, this would be a more effective story.

Good try, though.

Vidad: I don't know what to say about this one. Increasingly, I never know what to say about your entries. It's good, it's funny, it's clever — and then it breaks into a wonderfully awful Art Garfunkel solo. If that segment had just ended with the sound of Garfunkel being devoured by zombies... Yeah, I know, an overworked cliché, but after 40 years of listening to his reedy tenor it's something I devoutly desire.

In the end, bonus points for rhyming "Mossberg" with "Pittsburgh," but it didn't advance to the medal round.

Henry: I don't know how to fault this one. It feels like it's just one more light edit from being salable to a fantasy magazine, but I'm not sure what I would change. This one would have been the winner, in a week with weaker competition. But...

Snowdog: I found plenty of faults in this one. It's too topical. There are too many inside jokes. In three days it will be old news. In three months it will become a Federal crime to write something like this that might be construed as disparaging to The Chosen One.

Then Karen insisted that I listen to the audio version.

Whoa. Damn, you have a natural story-telling style that just smooths right over all the story's faults. You really tell this one well, down to giving each character a slightly different but uniquely identifiable voice. (And just a subtle kiss of reverb in exactly the right spots? Nice production values!) If I had a project right now that required a voiceover talent, you'd be at the top of my call list.

But... but... but it isn't fair to those who can't do that kind of production. But it's just so darn entertaining. But...

Karen and I had quite a disagreement over this one.

Which leaves us with Rigel Kent, and I don't have much to say about "Blaze of Glory" except that it's beautiful, and it works. Maybe I didn't have the right idea in mind when I issued this particular challenge, but this one definitely nails the idea I had. I suspect Bane either would have really liked this story, or else really hated it, because it's so much like something he would have written.

Thus, we ended up with a split decision. I picked Rigel's "Blaze of Glory," while Karen picked Snowdog's "Night of the Obamanation." We negotiated; we bargained; had Henry's "Lord of the Hunt" been given the same audio production treatment as Snowdog's story we would probably still be debating it. But in the end, we settled on Rigel Kent as the winner, with second place to Snowdog. So Rigel and Snowdog, come on down and claim your prizes.

And Snowdog, if you would like to write a guest piece on just how exactly you did a production like that, I'm sure we'd all be eager to learn.