Speak Stiltedly and Wear a Yellow Shirt

Word of the day: teratogenic

I found Komarr remaindered at Buck-a-Book - they seem to get a lot of Tor and Baen hardcovers. All my unsuccessful experiments with Catherine Asaro have been $2 deals at Buck-a-Book. Komarr wasn’t a buck, but it was cheaper than A Civil Campaign, which was also there and going for $6.99. I couldn’t really front $7 for a book I’ve read twice already - my company could go out of business any month now - but I couldn’t pass up my favorite LMB book, even in space-wasting hardcover format.

I was immediately faced with the problem of stopping myself from rereading Komarr over the weekend. There aren’t many books I’ve reread; A Civil Campaign got its second go-around because I hoped to get more out of it with a stronger background in Miles Vorkosigan. The Martian Chronicles was more of a study of the short story format than a return to a beloved tome.

If I do get into a rereading relationship with a book, it quickly spirals out of control. There was a point in my life when I had to stop reading LotR because I knew what the next sentence would be. For a number of years now, I’ve read Pride and Prejudice whenever I’ve been hard up for a book, and once purely out of technical interest in the third person omniscient POV. I was a long-time rereader of the Martian tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs, until I started writing myself and couldn’t take the pulps anymore. Along with the occasional revisit of Watership Down and Jane Eyre, that about covers my adult rereading.

Sometimes I wonder whether children’s books are better than adult books. My memory is fuzzy, but it seems to me that rereading was the rule rather than the exception when I was a child. Charlotte’s Web was no one-time deal, and my Little House books show a great deal of wear, and not just from Veronica dropping them in the bathtub. I had a very strange experience with The Last Battle (the final Chronicle of Narnia), probably the only time I’ve reread a book end-on, though I almost did with Komarr the first time.

Which brings me back to the topic - I resolved my Komarr problem by giving in ten minutes later and starting it on the T. It’s still a good book, though it surprised me this time how very much it was about Ekaterin - more characterization than I remembered and proportionally less busy-ness. Even Miles wasn’t as frantic as usual. I’m not complaining, but there is a part of me that still hasn’t adjusted to characterization in scifi.

On the technical side, I noticed the POV shifting back and forth between Ekaterin and Miles every chapter or so, and not a few spots where the mental commentary was very heavily interspersed with the dialogue. Somehow this didn’t throw off the pacing. I wonder whether it’s trying to break myself of the same habit that made me notice in the first place, whether I picked it up from her, and, therefore, whether I should stop trying to break a habit that hasn’t done LMB any harm. Probably not, eh?

I’ve mentioned Komarr a few other times: in comparison to Memory and regarding decking the shark. Since my favorite line was in the latter, here’s my second-favorite: “The next number up,” he breathed, “is ‘one.’”

Komarr is an allegedly dark book, at least when looking back from A Civil Campaign, but I like it that way. Miles outdoes even himself in misdirected love, Ekaterin is too burned to be afraid, and both of them are well acquainted with the evil still residing in Pandora’s box. It’s not angst, though; it’s plot - an impossible situation, but one that comes from the outside. SF is not a genre for inner flailing.

Is it, though, a genre for rereading? I’ll have to see how long Komarr manages to sit on the shelf.
(more…)

The zendom mod quiz seems to
have been outed; for a track-the-meme experiment, I’m already way behind.
Today I managed, after a long time dreaming of the day, to exempt myself
permanently from my own site statistics. I’ll write up the details eventually and
stick them in the technical difficulties section. I
should rename and rearrange that while I’m at it.

Also new and exciting are the
Golden Rules of Fandom on EEVIYE.

Via Liz:

Which Alan Rickman Character Are You?

Yes, I cheated. I stared out as Snape, but that was just too much of a Being Like Liz thing. I was aiming for Brandon but he turned out not to be an answer.

Meanwhile, back at the blogsticker factory:

It’s good to know I’m still in love with Christopher Plummer.

Dr. Deb had never seen The Sound of Music until last night. Now, I would have said it wasn’t physically possible to grow up in the U.S. (outside of Amish country) without seeing The Sound of Music at least ten times, more likely twenty, but she’d somehow escaped America’s Favorite Musical. She wished she hadn’t asked when I showed up with the requested three-hour tape, but she made it through the movie without too terribly much moaning and groaning. I’m getting old; the first words out of my mouth were “The Baroness is cool,” and that was in the title credits. (Aside: this does not mean I’m going to start writing Bitter Jilted Janeway fic.)

Now I know why Dr. Deb has a space-alien approach to relationships - she didn’t grow up in love with Christopher Plummer. There’s just something about the Captain - something you get from Orson Wells as Rochester, or Colin Firth as Darcy, or Alan Rickman as pretty much anybody. They’re not handsome men, but they have that animal magnetism thing going - the sort of thing you imagine Miles Vorkosigan exuding. Maybe you can’t do it if you’re a pretty-boy. I get the feeling real live men never exude that way, even the ones who can do it for the camera.

And that’s wrong. Somebody broke them, and there’s nowhere to send out for repairs. Forget prolonging life, forget curing the common cold - if you want to improve the human condition, then find the gene for Christopher Plummer and start transplanting those stem cells.

First of all, there was a very good story in the July/August Analog: “Falling Onto Mars” by Geoffrey A. Landis. It’s only four pages long, so you can read it standing up in Borders.

I find something dissatisfying about the stories that are part of series, even when interesting in themselves, like Brenda W. Clough’s second story about Captain Titus Oakes. The big disappointment, though, was “Mammoth Dawn,” by Kevin J. Anderson and Gregory Benford. As an adventure it was well-written, but I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what the theme was supposed to be. Were the bad guys bad because of what they did, or were they bad because of what they thought? One usually resorts to demonizing the enemy when one can’t win the argument on the basis of reason - and I didn’t see the hero winning any arguments. In fact, rather than have him win an argument with his Evo opponent, the narrator instead decides that the Evo is just jealous that his name wasn’t included on a scientific paper years before. This is an ad hominem argument, not a story. All the more so when the bad guys do their thing later in the story - it’s never made clear why they do it, or how their cause could possibly profit from it. All it is is demonizing a caricature - I don’t know why or how I was supposed to enjoy this story.

I did finish the story, though. I usually read through Analog, just out of curiosity. It’s the rare story I won’t finish, and one of those was last year’s “Sunday Night Yams at Minnie and Earl’s,” which was the overwhelming favorite novella of the year, according to the voting results on page 8. That put me in mind of American Gods, the hit of last year and a book I found almost entirely uninspiring.

I was beginning to believe that I was the only person who disliked American Gods, but I’ve found some company: Josh Lacey in The Richmond Review.

He goes on to say something that I was also thinking: “An ambitious failure is more interesting than a cautious success,” but I wonder why an ambitious failure is taken as a grand success in the first place. Is it just grade inflation, or is it a clash of genres in which my side (sf/f) lost but prefers to pretend it won?

I read The Big U because of its connection to The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind. As such, it was quite interesting, but as a novel, it was a little disjointed. The POV character was rather fuzzy (which makes me want to say it was in first person, but I think it only strayed in and out of first person). Probably Neal Stephenson’s first novel (copyrighted 1984), it was out of print a while - the copy I picked up was a new trade paper reprint.

Yes, I braved another fantasy, The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay, an 80’s classic, or so the jacket informed me. I stopped early on, but picked it up again the same day wondering what happened. Shanghaiing a bunch of Canadians for nefarious magical purposes sounds like a neat idea, but it took me a while to be able to tell them apart, or care if I could. The natives, on the other hand, were far more interesting, and I really began to enjoy the book when I got to a section with only one Canadian and a whole tribe of locals. Unfortunately that was near the end and I doubt I’ll dig up the other two volumes of the trilogy. (Dr. Deb passed this one on to me.)

The non-Canadian side of the book was a kind of primordial AU, of which all our other Earths are supposed to be pale reflections. Notable pale reflections are Tolkien’s Middle-Earth and Norse mythology. This is an interesting, fanficcish approach to the problem of all fantasy being derivative of the same - and certainly Guy Gavriel Kay does Odin better than Neil Gaiman (more on which next time), but he cannot out-Tolkien Tolkien, whatever he may name his orcs, his elves, his Angband and his Morgoth.

Just for example, Tolkien conveyed song, legend and the passage of time without repeating, over and over, that it had been a thousand or twelve hundred years since such-and-such happened. His dark power crept slowly into Mordor; it didn’t pop out a mountain and point a dramatic, smoky finger at the West (here the South). It most certainly did not spend its time raping young women, nor, had it done so, would that have been the symbol of ultimate evil for Tolkien. Did evil change so much between 1954 and 1984?

Speaking of 1984, that’s also the date of publication of The Practice Effect. I suspect this one as well of being a first novel. Although Sundiver and Startide Rising were published before it, they are such better books, structurally speaking, that it’s hard to believe this one came after them. That said, I did enjoy it more than Brin’s other books - though he fought himself the whole way, he managed to write a pulp classic, complete with jealous scientific rivals, a princess, a familiar, a medieval society, noble thieves, magic, attempted rape and a pseudo-scientific explanation of it all at the end.

The hero makes no attempt to stop the rape, which is interrupted instead by some friends of his whom he does then go out of his way to defend. The princess gets laid up for an indefinite period of time (one of the things not handled well was the passage of time) by blisters. Frodo and Sam trudging through Mordor it ain’t. The final revelation could have stood a bit more foreshadowing, and some consequences of the theory, such as changes to the English language, weren’t worked out properly - but as a one-book pulp revival, its adventurous spirit outweighs its flaws.

Sorry about all this blogging at once, but I’ve gotten behind again during the move from the other blog. Last week the sci-fi section was imported and correctly formatted. If you’re looking for even more of my unpopular opinions, they’re only a click away, along with my long, dramatic struggle to finish Blue Mars. I started the sci-fi blog before this one, so my blog has suddenly aged an extra month (September 2001) - and I bet no one noticed.

So, for those of you new to the sci-fi blog category, this is where I talk about the books I’ve read. Fortunately for me, Hugo and Nebula award-winners don’t jump down your throat when you critique them - yet another advantage of real writing: real opinions. It’s an interesting question whether those people who do the throat-dive to defend fanfic writers from the imagined slights of constructive criticism will react the same way on behalf of, say, David Brin. My email address, if you have complaints, is to the right.

On to business. In the past month, the following books have piled up: Facets, Rock of Ages and Voice of the Whirlwind by Walter Jon Williams, The Big U by Neal Stephenson, The Summer Tree by Guy Gavriel Kay, The Practice Effect by David Brin and a double-edition of Analog. I’ll split them up, WJW first:

Facets is a collection of short stories, my favorite of which was “No Spot of Ground”, a civil war history with General Edgar A. Poe on the front lines fighting for the South. It’s a wonderful story all by itself, but when it turns Poe’s hatred of Whitman into an explanation of the war, it touches on the sublime:

Not that inequality is sublime in itself, but the ability to sum up an alien mindset in one conversation is. For this I consider Jane Austen a great sf writer - she builds a world incredible in its alienness, in its prejudices and social pitfalls, and makes you believe it all really happened.

Among WJW’s short stories, I also enjoyed “Side Effects,” a tale of pharmaceutical testing told in little scenes from doctors’ offices. The one I liked least was “Witness;” between the anti-hero and the superheros, there wasn’t much left that I look for in a story. “Dinosaurs,” on the other hand, was a classic sci-fi tale of a young culture’s encounter with “the ultimate product of nine million years of human evolution.” Most of the rest was the usual hard-bitten cyber-crime drama that was so popular a while back - which is not to say I didn’t enjoy it. I wish more people wrote the stuff I don’t like so well that I almost like it.

Voice of the Whirlwind was more of the hard-bitten stuff I shouldn’t have liked, but enjoyed anyway. Rock of Ages reminded me of LMB, and I was quite enjoying it until it became clear that the hero wasn’t interested in marrying and settling down. Marriage isn’t something I expect to see every day in sci-fi, but when you bring the subject up in the middle of a comedy of manners you raise certain expectations. Nevertheless, it was a fun book, and part of a series about the thief-hero which might interest LMB fans.

I’m still discovering the wonders of OSC’s page. Here’s a stolen survey I thought said a bit more than the general run of blog surveys. It was called Behind the Words.

1. Name the book (or books) that made you say, “I want to do this, I want to write.”

Two people get the blame: Ayn Rand and Lois McMaster Bujold. Rand basically wrote her own scripture in novel form - telling a story powerful enough to reverse people’s political or moral opinions (at least while they’re reading it) is quite the apologia. I’d like to do that. LMB, on the other hand, is someone you want more of, even if you have to go and write it yourself.

2. Please name five books you would like to have with you if you were stranded on a desert island.

I’m going to cheat like OSC with the one-volume editions:

a bible, bilingual with commentary
an etymological dictionary to go with it
a one-volume Lord of the Rings
a big fat edition of Chaucer in the original
The Faerie Queen (which I would, therefore, finally read)

3. If you were a high school English teacher, what five books would you assign?

Lord of the Flies
The Swiss Family Robinson
Pride and Prejudice
1984
The White Mountains trilogy by John Christopher

4. Name three magazines that you read regularly.

Commentary, Analog, Scientific American

5. What CD’s get you in the mood to write?

The Buffy! The Musical soundtrack, ABBA, and any other cheesy 70’s music - it’s not just for filking anymore. But once I start writing, I don’t hear a thing. I can have the radio on for hours and I’ll have no idea whether India blew up Pakistan, because I blocked it all out.

6. What do you read for fun?

I’m not in school so I read what I enjoy or what I’m curious about - mainly sci-fi, science, fanfic, and Victorian literature.

7. How did you first get started writing?

I read way too much J/C fanfic in the course of a slow week at work, and the muse decided to roll her own. I tried to stop her, but she was determined.

8. How did you first get published?

It depends on what you mean. I got my nonfiction published by disagreeing with one of the editors of a newsletter I subscribed to. They published my essay, and later asked me to replace a retiring columnist. My fiction is pretty much unpublished, unless this website counts.

9. How often do you write?

I try to do that 1000-words-a-day thing, but it hasn’t been working for a while now. So I try to at least edit every day.

10. What are your three favorite forms of procrastination?

Blogging, emailing and watching Buffy.

11. Where do you write?

On the bed or in a chair with my laptop. It’s pretty bad for my posture, but that’s the price I pay for art.

12. Is writing an excruciating process for you or a cathartic one?

No, it’s just writing. When the muse does it all herself, that’s quite enjoyable to watch. When I have to edit the results, it’s not bad either. Sometimes it seems like it goes on forever, though.

13. What would you be doing if you couldn’t be a writer?

What I am doing, I suppose. I was considering farming at one point.

14. How do you know when you’ve written something good?

If reading it gives me that feeling that I get when I read something good by somebody else.

15. What other titles were you considering for your [work with the astoundingly bad title]?

I’m usually good with titles, but “Delta Quadrant Babes in the Mirror Mirror Universe” wasn’t one of my best. The trouble was it was supposed to be more slapstick when I slapped that title on it, and I never thought up a new one.

16. Is writing your day job? If not, what do you do to make a living?

I’m a webmaster, CGI programmer, database administrator, support phone person, linux sysadmin and network administrator, and none of those things are what I was actually hired to do.

17. What was the most unusual job you’ve ever held?

I worked for a company in California that made subdivisions. It was strange for me because in large chunks of New England, you buy a plot of land, get the phone and electric lines connected (and more recently, cable), and otherwise you’re on your own. If you want water, you dig a well, if you want sewage, you lay a leaching field, and if you want natural gas, you buy a tank of propane. The idea that a big company would go in and negotiate with the local government to be reimbursed for laying utilities for you and a hundred other houses at once was just odd.

18. Writers are known to have quirky personality traits. What are yours?

I’m a great believer in rational thought and logical argument. It’s a shame that’s considered a quirk rather than a requirement, but there it is.

19. Do you have pets? If yes, what are their names?

No pets, and you can’t paint the apartment. If you do paint the apartment, it must be white or off-white. Thus sayeth the lease.

20. Please name your five favorite movies.

The Sound of Music
Henry V
Dead Again
The Usual Suspects
Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Date of Birth: the 60’s

Place of Birth: far, far away

Literary Awards: a few ASC awards, mainly

;Education: far too much

Current Home: Boston, Massachusetts

Influences: G. K. Chesterton

As you may or may not recall, I live in an 80-year-old apartment building in Boston. To date, the main danger of living here was the bad wiring - phone lines that go snap-crackle-pop when the temperature changes rapidly, and ungrounded electrical wiring that can’t handle large appliances (like, say, air conditioners).

This morning, however, a new danger of old architecture appeared. I was awoken at the unnatural hour of 6 a.m. by the sound of someone banging on a door and conducting his half of your typical domestic dispute through it. If it had been 6 p.m., I would have gone out there or called the police, but when it’s 6 a.m. on a Sunday and you’re not really awake in the first place, you assume the end of the noise is the end of the problem and go back to sleep.

The police, when they arrived an hour and a half later, waking me up again with the door buzzer, were shocked, shocked I tell you, that no one had gotten involved when this woman’s boyfriend wrecked their apartment and she screamed for help and ran off to them. What terrible neighbors we all must be, to ignore screaming and breaking things.

I figure nobody called because nobody heard it. My apartment is right across the hall and I heard no screaming for help, no breaking things. Once the argument left the hallway, it became inaudible. Even in the hallway stage, it’s doubtful anyone off the floor would have heard enough to wake them. While it’s a bit disturbing to find out for sure that I could scream for help in my apartment and everyone would sleep right through it, I could have guessed that part. What’s worse is that the police would blame my neighbors for being asleep.

The old woman next door turns her television way up, and though you can hear it from the hall, you can’t hear it from inside another apartment. You can hear music through open windows in the summer, but not from the apartment right next to you. The guy upstairs used to drop something heavy (barbells?) on the floor every now and then - that’s all I ever heard of him. You have to actually shake the building to be noticed, and even then people will probably assume it’s the elevator door banging (another 1922 original, like the wiring), which is the only thing besides the fire alarm that’s audible in most parts of the building. It’s a pretty solid building - that always seemed like a plus before.

I was home last night, too, and I completely missed Part I of this domestic dispute, after which the woman apparently decided to barricade herself inside their apartment without a phone - when the guy had the keys to the place anyway. (It’s not entirely clear when the boyfriend destroyed the cell phone, and considering the state of the phone lines, I can’t blame them too much for not getting real telephone service connected.) But can I recommend not doing that in a building where no one can hear you scream?

Or am I supposed to feel guilty for having a telephone, being asleep at six a.m., and not moving in with an idiot?

I don’t stop by Wil Wheaton’s blog often, but I did tonight. Here’s what that led to: