The Dream of Perpetual Motion

The Dream of Perpetual Motion by Dexter Palmer
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A surreal, dark fantasy.  Thrilling, fascinating, horrible.  Great use of language and theme.  Beautifully brutal world-building.  Confident writing voice that can tell the reader what will happen chapters before describing the journey, heightening, not decreasing, the tension.


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The Windup Girl

Paolo Bacigalupi strikes a sweet spot for a brand of fiction I like to call survivalist SF. He starts with a premise that's been used since the Golden Age of science fiction: humanity is on the brink of extinction. Not only does Bacigalupi use this familiar predicament to write a super exciting story with great characters, but he builds an intriguing history of how humanity has gotten itself into such a mess.

Bacigalupi does a far better job than I ever could detailing the privations suffered by survivors in Bangkok, and dropping intriguing nuggets of information on blister rust, cibiscosis, Calorie Men, White Shirts, and Yellow Cards. I'd rather focus on what makes the Windup Girl stand out in the field of survivalist SF.

When reading science fiction about life after large scale disaster, I sometimes end up depressed, dreading the story, and counting the pages until I make it to the grueling end. I didn't have this reaction to the Windup Girl because the story is just as much about the beginning of a new chapter in humanity as it is about the end of the old. As in much survivalist SF, most characters in the Windup Girl are motivated to save their own skin, and convergence of their struggle to survive meets in vicious conflict. But not all characters are driven solely by the urge to save their own lives- some are worried for their families, their friends, their people, their country, and some even risk their lives for personal and religious values.

And perhaps the thing that tickled me the most about the Windup Girl was Bacigalupi's use of motif. From the dangerous, coiled DNA of a mutating plague, to kink spring energy technology, to the stutter-stop movements of the title character, to the tightly wound plot, Bacigalupi really embraced the idea of winding things up- and the repeated motif brought a touch of literary quality that put his book above much of the other survivalist SF I've read.

There were a few minor disappointments as I read the novel. Bacigalupi's portrayal of Buddhism proved that he has observed the difference between street Buddhism in Thailand and the Western intellectual interpretation practiced, for instance, at a well-to-do Zen center in downtown San Francisco. However, Bacigalupi's attempt to make Buddhist characters despise engineered beings based on lack of a soul was not at all consistent with Buddhism, and seemed a little silly to me. And one final point: although the prose was good throughout the novel, the use of the word "blossom" to describe every blow, gunshot, or injury drove me a little crazy.

The Windup Girl ranks 2,918 in Books on Amazon.com. It is not available for the Kindle.

Coyote

Coyote by Allen Steele is the first in a series of seven (as of March 3, 2009) science fiction books. In print, Coyote has an Amazon sales rank of #145,794 in books, and it ranks #28,867 in the Kindle store.

I read Coyote neither in print nor in Kindle format, but listened to it as an audiobook read by Peter Gamin. There is a cool introduction to the audiobook in which Allen Steele discusses the origin of the series. However, Peter Gamin really annoyed me as narrator. His reading style was emotionless, reminding me of a computer converting text to speech. Worse, when he attempted to change his voice to depict Spanish-speaking or female characters, his voice had a mocking quality which, I'm sure, was unintentional- but, nevertheless, detracted from the story.

Like the hills and valleys on the planet Coyote, the first novel of the Coyote series had its high points and low points. The opening of the book was written in present tense. I'd guess Steele made the present tense decision in order to add even more tension to the already nail-biting events of the opening. I was about to despair that the entire book would be in the present tense, but was relieved to find that large stretches of the book, such as journal entries, were written in the storytelling past tense.

The opening also suffered from an overly black and white political landscape. The conflict between the mean-for-no-reason establishment, and the tragic Dissident Intellectuals being shipped like Jews to concentration camps, was painted in broad, uninteresting strokes just to establish the good guys and bad guys. However, once I suspended disbelief and accepted the naively conceived political climate, I found myself looking for any excuse to listen to more Coyote. Steele ratcheted the tension of the "Journey from Earth" with a visceral sense of dread that left my heart racing.

Coyote seems to me a fantasy novel wearing science fiction clothing. Sure, there are space ships, biostasis fields, and Savants (people who have traded in their bodies for machines)- but the mysteries for those who journey to Coyote do not lie in the wonder of technology or human aspiration and reason. Visions, ghosts, dreams, and, ironically, a fantasy novel written by one of the colonists, are key to the novel's sense of wonder. What's more, those who reach the planet aren't setting up state-of-the-art research labs- they are farmers, barkeeps, adventurers. And the world they attempt to colonize is filled with fantastical beasts. The creatures on Coyote reminded me of those in John Varley's Gaea Trilogy, in which space explorers land on a new planet to find centaurs and flying angels. Steele does not use traditional fantasy archetypes to populate his alien planet the way Varley did, but descriptions of his creatures have more in common with fantasy than they do science fiction.

Coyote is a great world for adventure, for stretching out the cramped limbs of your imagination. If, as the ending of the first novel implied, politics are going to play a large role in the Coyote series, I hope Steele portrays political conflict with a deeper and more realistic investigation into the motives of the "bad guys."

La Jetée

This weekend I watched a unique, post-apocalyptic, French science fiction film. When Chris Marker made La Jetée in 1962, motion picture technology was churning out such films as To Kill a Mockingbird and Dr. No, but Marker chose to shoot his film as a series of black and white still shots. With only one brief exception, the entire 28 minutes of La Jetée is a slide show of images with narration and orchestral soundtrack. The only dialog is some creepy muttering in German that the original French audience was not meant to understand (and neither did I).

The result of Marker's still-shot and narrative techniques is the manipulation of time- a manipulation in beautiful harmony with the time travel plot at the heart of the story.

The 1962 vision of a scary future is the aftermath of World War III. Germans occupied Paris, took prisoners- then victors and captors alike suffered the same fate of radiation poisoning and slow starvation. Desperate to survive, German scientists single out a French prisoner with a strong link to his past, to send on a torturous journey back in time to a France that had not yet been destroyed in order to obtain food, medicine, and aid. The prisoner's link to the past is the memory of a woman, and each trip back to the time of his childhood, he is drawn to her. The still shots of Paris before its destruction are full of life, light, and hope, in strong contrast to the post-apocalyptic world the prisoner has just left. I especially loved the series of stills in which the prisoner and the woman explore a natural history museum. The taxidermied species on display are a beautiful metaphor for the prisoner. Even the title of the film, while ostensibly referring to the pier on which the film opens, has a second meaning that refers to the prisoner- one thrown out, cast out, tossed back in time.

Although there was a lot of potential for this film to be corny- still shots, narration, ideas, such as WW III, which no longer seem fresh to modern audiences- it was overall a beautiful and intense experience. With the exception of some decidedly 1962-esque visions of humanity's future, La Jetée has aged pretty well. The film also lives on as the inspiration for the well-known 1995 science fiction film, Twelve Monkeys.

Anathem a Modern-Day Number of the Beast

I was a big fan of Neal Stephenson during his cyber phase (Snow Crash, The Diamond Age). I completely skipped out on his historical phase (Cryptonomicon and the Baroque Cycle), but wanted to catch up with his most recent book, Anathem, which I can only hope is the beginning of a new philosophical phase.

In my review below I've kept spoilers to a minimum, but it would be impossible to discuss such a lengthy book without delving past the initial mysteries. So be warned that there are some spoilers below.

I was particularly tickled by Anathem because of the way it treated alternate universes. That's not to discount the fact that I got a huge kick out of Stephenson's invented language. Of course Stephenson also wove physics, technology, and mathematics into his adventure- and he drew the plot together with a fascinating dose of philosophy and spirituality. This may sound like a lot of topics to cover while writing the story of an alien invasion- but Stephenson took 960 pages to draw all these subjects into an intriguing plot, and he made (nearly) every page exciting while doing it.

For years I cited Robert Heinlein as my favorite science fiction writer. He largely won that place through Number of the Beast, in which he explored the consequences of small party that learned to travel between the multitude of alternate universes. Heinlein leaned toward a fantasy aesthetic in his interpretation of alternate universes, having his party travel to worlds such as Oz, become real because his characters imagined them. I was enamoured by the idea that imaginary people could dream imaginary characters into existence- especially when those characters shared my own fictional references.

Stephenson does not fail to pull the heart strings of the familiar when writing a tale of alternate universe interaction. But first he extrapolates a carefully researched scientific and philosophical framework to explain how interaction between different universes becomes possible.

Another difference between Number of the Beast and Anathem- Heinlein starts his adventure from our universe, and travels to a multitude of others. In Anathem, the story begins in Arbre, a world hauntingly similar to ours- but which is clearly not Earth past, present, or future. Stephenson creates this sense of other-worldliness through the vocabulary of his created Arbran language. After spending months reading Anathem, "reticulum" seems a perfectly valid synonym for the Internet, and I might almost ask my husband if he felt like going to see a "speely" (movie). Continuing his manipulation of linguistics, Stephenson then cleverly creates a sense of pleasant notstalgia and connection when Earth words (in French) begin to seep into the Arbran vocabulary. Stephenson then deepens this sense of familiarity using the same trick Heinlein used- by tipping his hat to golden age spec fiction. Gets me every time.

Released in September 2008, Anathem is now 17th on Amazon's science fiction bestseller list. Interestingly, as of today, the Kindle edition of the book is not even in the top 100 of the Kindle's science fiction bestseller list. I, myself, read the book in print. The discrepancy may be explained by the fact that the Calcas (mathematical proofs) in the back of the book are more comfortable to flip to (and in some cases easier to view) in paper format. Perhaps readers were lured by the bundling of the book with companion CD (IOLET: Music from the World of Anathem) when the book was released. Perhaps there is simply more satisfaction weighing a huge, 960-page book in one's hands than comparing its storage space to other books saved to memory. At any rate, Anathem is selling much better in print than in Kindle format.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I've been reading a lot of door-stoppers lately. It was fun to take a break and enjoy something short and satisfying.

"The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" was written by F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1921. The story does just what my favorite science fiction always accomplishes- illuminates the human experience by looking at it from an unusual perspective. In the case of Benjamin Button, this perspective is, literally, backwards.

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime

Where we're working in a mine
For our robot overlords
Did I say "overlords"? I meant "protectors"

-Jonathan Coulton

You may already know Jonathan Coulton from his famous song "Still Alive" at the end of the Orange Box video game. Or you may know "Code Monkey," theme song for the animated TV show of the same name. If you don't know Coulton, let me introduce you. He's a real treat for spec fiction fans and music fans, alike.

Coulton writes decent melodies and has a decent voice. But I wouldn't be blogging about him if it weren't for his lyrics, because the lyrics are where he really shines. I can listen to his songs over and over, because the disarming tunes do such a fantastic job of highlighting the lyrics- most of which never fail to make me laugh. Coulton writes songs about being a programmer, being a husband, and the drudgery of office life. But sometimes he puts a fun spec fictional twist to the tune, as in "Chiron Beta Prime" and, my personal favorite Coulton song, "Re: Your Brains," in which a zombie supervisor attempts to negotiate with the surviving human workers barricaded inside their office building.

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime!

SF and mystery mags now available on Kindle

Dell Publications has joined Amazon's Kindle subscription list. Now you can subscribe to Asimov's and Analog on the Kindle. For mystery lovers, Alfred Hitchcock and Ellery Queen are also available.

The RepRap Project

Science fiction is quickly becoming fact thanks to the desktop manufacturing RepRap project. For some time authors such as Cory Doctorow have been spinning tales about technology that allows individuals to cheaply manufacture items they design (or whose design they download for free, purchase, or steal). Doctorow's short stories "Printcrime" and "After the Siege" (see my discussion of the stories) go into great detail about the trouble we could get into when such technology becomes commonplace. For now, let's just bask in the shiny, new hope for a better tomorrow and the really cool technology.

How does the RepRap work? Using the desktop printer as a model, the RepRap "prints" layered pieces of plastic that can be assembled into a finished product. The use of metal and other materials are also under development so that more complex parts, such as circuits, can be manufactured.

One of the neat things about the RepRap project, is that their current milestone goal is to ensure that the RepRap can manufacture itself. Users who can ante the 400 Euros for raw material costs will be able to use the RepRap to build a copy of itself. The project intends to give the design for self-replication away for free using an open source model.

Dune, Doom, and Destiny

It's embarrassing. How many times have I conversed with science fiction fans and writers, only to stop short when they assume I have, of course, read Dune.

I actually read the opening chapters of Dune several times. On each read, as Paul Atreides arrived on the desert planet Arrakis, and as the sense of doom surrounding his father and family built to the point of no return, a parallel sense of doom built in my personal life. Nothing truly awful ever happened to me. Usually my personal doom was an impending move, or a life change that made me anxious. In most cases the life change physically separated me from my paperback copy of Dune, which ended up packed in a cardboard box for so many months I lost the thread of the narrative. Dune became a source of superstition for me, a book that, when paired with me, lead to shaky and uncertain times.

To break my string of bad luck, and since my paperback copy still hasn't found its way back to me, I bought Dune in audio book format, and savored the whole novel slowly, with great pleasure. Even now that my life is tranquil, my heart still beats to the sense of doom Herbert builds in the opening chapters. The sense of doom surrounding Paul's father, and the escalating sense of Paul's inevitable destiny, rise to a fever pitch. So when it's finally time for an old life to collapse and a new future to rise out of the ashes, the effect is cathartic.

The inevitable sense of destiny, set in motion by a doom so heavy the hero cannot possibly escape it, is a critical element of any epic story. Empathy with the hero strengthens as the reader mentally squirms to find a way out of the inevitable. Herbert built this sense of empathy so well, and I empathized and identified so strongly, that it took me over ten years to accept my fate, and to finish Dune.

Kindle sci-fi and fantasy bestsellers

We had a request to follow up on what's happening with the Amazon Kindle's spec fiction bestseller lists. It is three months to the day I posted about the front runners at the Kindle's launch, so it seems like a good time take another look.

In science fiction, classics continue to dominate the top sellers, with Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse Five occupying the number one slot, and Orwell's 1984 right behind at second. In November these two classics rated in the top 300 of overall Kindle sales, and both have now moved up to around the top 200 in Kindle sales. Video game tie-ins have given way to the newest military SF by Nebula winner Elizabeth Moon, and yet another science fiction classic, Brave New World.

In fantasy, Gregory Maguire's Wicked continues to hold its own near the top of the bestseller list. Wicked has fallen from #1 to #2 in fantasy, and has fallen from the top 150 to the top 250 in Kindle's overall sales. Number three in fantasy is World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks, and number four is Gaiman's Stardust.

Here's an interesting piece of zeitgeist: the stunning success of the Dresden Files series on the spec fiction Kindle bestseller lists. Author Jim Butcher's Storm Front occupies the number 4 slot in science fiction and the number 5 slot in fantasy. Not only that, his White Night: A Novel of the Dresden Files is number one in fantasy. Not too shabby.

In horror, King continues to dominate, with three of the top five bestsellers. King's novels alternate with books by Kim Harrison.

Who is Dagny Taggart?: a love story

It took me a long time to read Atlas Shrugged- no surprise, since Wikipedia counts it at 645,000 words. It also took awhile for me to shake out of the polarized morality of Ayn Rand's world and get a grip on what I'd read.

Atlas Shrugged is a romance novel. Set aside what you've heard about Rand's philosophical masterpiece and look at the protagonist's path. Our beautiful young heroine, Dagny Taggart, is torn between her ardent lovers. All three men want her desperately. But when Dagny first encounters the man of her dreams, she swoons, and he holds her in his arms and gently carries her to his bed.

The difference between Atlas Shrugged and the typical Harlequin romance, is that Dagney runs a railroad. Dagney's profession isn't just a way to get our heroine into a demure gray suit that she sheds to show her stunning sexuality in a black party dress (although that does happen). And her profession is not meant to later attest to what's "really important" to her (ie., her femininity and role as a lover and wife). In fact, Dagney's profession is so intrinsically bound to her personality, her character, her essence, that Dagney is her profession. What's more, the men who fall at her feet, one by one, are in love with her precisely because she embodies the spirit of competence and professionalism.

Turns out Dagney embodies one more important ideal, the ideal beyond Objectivism that lies at the heart of the book: Dagney represents the potential of the individual to love herself.

The magic of Atlas Shrugged is the fact that Rand was able to embody her ideal in her main character, and at the same time, make that protagonist so human, so real, so worthy of the reader's understanding and compassion. Dagney's journey is the journey of coming to embrace the ideal of self-love, and at the same time, she has always been the ideal. It's beautiful and skillful writing.

Unfortunately, as Rand builds to the climax of the novel, she devolves into droning, boring exposition, in which Galt gives a speech to extemporize Rand's philosophy (Wikipedia counts this dreadful speech at 56 pages long, and though Wikipedia mentioned Atlas Shrugged is one of the longest novels ever written, it fails to mention this is one of the longest chunks of exposition anyone has ever been forced to read). Rand's attempt to explain her philosophy in prose deadens the innate feeling of "rightness" she had cultivated in the reader by simply following Dagney's journey. This made the ending of the book resonate a bit less for me. But the self-discovery journey in which Dagney learns what she is truly worth, learns that she is Love, was intense and captivating.

Probability Moon

My copy of Probability Moon is a First Edition July 2000 stamped WITHDRAWN from the Palmyra Town Library. I picked it up in a used book store in Palmyra in the summer of 2005.

Why did Probability Moon get such a short shelf life?

The answer was clear in the first few chapters of the book: the beginning of Probability Moon stinks. As it happens, Kress's Beggars in Spain is on my top ten favorite science fiction books of all time. So, I slogged through the awkward space-tech info dump, the stock characters on the space ship bridge, the introduction to an alien world where the entire society seemed trivial and immature.

Recently (see Stardust in our eyes) I cited a bad opening as the reason I can't seem to read Neil Gaiman's Stardust. So why did I not only read all of Probability Moon, but enjoy it? I was hooked the moment that Syree, the stock military smart chick, expressed her first weakness.

See, Syree lost a leg in battle. They army grew her a new leg, cloned on the "skinless back of a permanently immobilized dog without an immune system. The dog was the problem. Syree could not get the dog out of her mind. She found she could not- could not- put her full weight on her left leg." Syree's limp ended her army career, and began my fascination with Probability Moon.

Probability Moon got better and better as it neared its exciting conclusion, and all that info dump at the beginning paid off in a satisfying ending that successfully married science with story. However, Kress's info dump habit never got any better. Up until the last, I felt like there were jolting moments of "As you know Bob" and similar Turkey City Lexicon violations.

After the Siege

The final story in Cory Doctorow's Overclocked: Stories of the Future Present is the perfect ending to the book. It revisits themes from some of my favorite stories in the collection, and takes the reader on a journey uniquely that of protagonist, Valentina.

In his introduction to the story, Doctorow explains how this story grew out of the strange marriage of his interest in copyright and patent law and the horrific WWII stories his grandmother (no coincidence, her name is Valentina) told him as they walked the streets of St. Petersburg. The story that results uses the idea from the first short in the collection, "Printcrime," of a futuristic printer that can make household items- clothes, furniture, food, medicine. Inevitably, pirated copies of household goods abound, and the government cracks down on stolen intellectual property turned boxer shorts and beer. In "After the Siege," Doctorow goes a step further, and sets us in world clearly the parallel to Eastern Europe between WWI and WWII. In this post-war world, printers serve the everyday needs of the people, from food and tasty sweets to hearing aids for deaf children, but they also construct buildings- hospitals, schools, even a movie theater. Life is good, until the foreign power who created the technology gets mad that the Eastern European nation didn't pay them for the new life they're printing. After all these folks are pirating their new standard of living- they're thieves. The rich foreign power (let's stop kidding around and call it a futuristic U.S.) bombs the heck out of the Eastern Europeans who pirated their technology, and releases a malware (think software virus) that leaves the population without functioning printers- and, in effect, without hospitals, medicine, clothing, or even food. The evil futuristic U.S. is more than willing to beat, starve, and bomb the poorer nation into respecting copyright.

So, what does the starving, limping nation do? It fights back!

Doctorow does a pretty good job of weaving these high-level concepts with the low-level view of protagonist, Valentina. Like her literary cousin, Anda ("Anda's Game"), Valentina loves sweets. She likes going to the movies, talking with her friends. Then her life is gutted by the bombing of her city and the war. She follows a pretty grim path during the siege, fighting off zombies (the enemy releases a new strain of the zombiism virus), digging trenches, losing teeth and fingers, working corpse duty for an extra half ration of pebble-weighted bread. There's a dark shadow of survival horror in here, based on what Doctorow's grandmother lived through, but also reminiscent of the gut-level shock in "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth."

"After the Siege" starts with flying cars and candy forests, a cinema whose seats fly out like the senate seats in Star Wars, Episode II. Later there will be vampires- would it surprise you if I said there was also a wizard? Like the rest of the fantastical elements in this tale, the wizard has its roots in Doctorow's practical vision of the future.

But don't think that practicality keeps the sense of magic from sparkling through even the darkest alleys of "After the Seige."

I'd asses this story much the way I'd asses the collection as a whole: a morass of excellent ideas, an unabashed fascination with copyright law, and a good dose of excitement. "After the Siege," like most of Doctorow's stories, goes a few pages longer than I would like. I guess someone with such a strong vision of the future can't leave his readers without a glimpse at what's in store for his characters' tomorrows. Despite this and a few small stylistic lapses, the collection had something to say and sent the reader on some fun and thrilling adventures while saying it. That's good science fiction!

The Prestige- Men and Magic

This weekend for Saturday movie night I was drawn into the dangerous world of magic and illusion by The Prestige. This Oscar-nominated film promised a lot of fun: rival magicians, beautiful assistants, magic tricks, secret codes, mystery- but there was a lot more to The Prestige than smoke and mirrors. Director Christopher Nolan delivered a story within a story within a story, giving the film a complexity and texture reminiscent of Nolan's Memento, while keeping a tight focus on the storyline and delivering viewers with both a behind-the-scenes look at illusion and a thrilling dose of real magic.

The Prestige is based on a book by Christopher Priest and was adapted for film by Christopher Nolan and his brother, Johnathan (fans of Memento will remember that Christopher's screenplay was based on Johnathan's short story "Memento Mori"). When these brothers put their heads together nothing is exactly as it seems- an ideal setting for a story about magicians.

Anyone who has seen a magician perform can understand the thrill, the showmanship, the titillating sense of danger as the magician is strapped into a straight jacket or prepares to saw his lovely assistant in two. The Prestige makes us experience the real risk of performing these tricks. I loved the shorthand of the disappearing doves and birds to express the brutal side of the magician's craft, and I loved the parallel drawn between the magicians' birds and the women in their lives. Science fiction fans will also be thrilled to meet Nikola Tesla (played by David Bowie) and learn how the Tesla coil figures into the rivalry as The Great Danton tries to discover the secret of The Professor's greatest trick, "The Transported Man."

Fans of Memento will notice that The Prestige is more explicit than Memento. In an attempt to make sure the audience "gets" the ending, some exposition occurs at the climax of the film that may bother people who would rather puzzle the mystery out for themselves. Characters also explicitly tell the audience that obsession is ruining both "The Great Danton" and "The Professor- a fact the filmmakers had already made obvious and hardly needed to mention in dialog. Aside from these minor quibbles, this film was fun, exciting, and managed the daunting task of avoiding black hats and white hats. There are no good guys or bad guys in this film- only men, and magic.

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

No, this isn't a tale about a group of anti-socials who use their technological skills to take over the world (muhaha). It's the second story in Cory Doctorow's collection, Overclocked, and it's the most emotionally powerful story from the author I've read to date.

In his introduction Doctorow tells us he's done some time as a sysadmin. What shines through in this story isn't only a knowledge of the profession, but familiarity with the people who work in the field. This allows Doctorow to create characters so real they feel like the actual people in black t-shirts who keep the network running at your office. Great characterization from start to finish makes this a gripping story.

Some pretty bad stuff goes down in "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth." We're talking end-of-the-human-race scenarios, scary stuff. The journey through these terrifying times is made more visceral by experiencing it through the eyes of protagonist, Felix. When Felix gets his first taste of the disaster that's just struck, I felt it on my skin, in my belly. For a moment I was just as scared and sickened as he was.

It's no surprise Felix and the survivors he gathers around him look for a tech-savvy solution to the crisis. What's interesting is how conflicted these solutions are, and the personalities that suggest them. Once again Doctorow made me unsure which of the conflicting viewpoints was the "right" one. I could understand where both parties were coming from, and I looked to the journey of the story to help me out of the moral dilemma. That's great writing.

As in "I, Rowboat", the ending of "When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth" gave me the feeling of a beautiful bird with salt poured on its tail- the ending went too far past the main events of the story, weighed it down, and didn't let it take off in spiritual flight. I forgave the heavy ending in this case because the central question of the story did concern rebuilding and the future of civilization, and because the rest of the story was so darn good. Highly recommended.

Why Write This Story?

Of all the potential story ideas we cracked out of coconuts in yesterday's post, the one that got under my skin was Joe-Bob VanDermeer's situation (he's got a last name now, that's how you know it's getting serious).

We've discussed how a science fiction writer can get ideas. Now, how does the writer choose which idea becomes a story?

The answer is as diverse as the writer. No doubt an action-adventure oriented sf writer (think Michael Crichton) would have gone for bioweapon smuggling in coconut shells. Other writers may have been attracted to the idea of crime rings selling illicit tubs of petroleum based Tide on the black market. Some would have gone for a futuristic Great Gatsby in which rich women trapped in their personal corporate hells let loose at wild parties where they dance wearing nothing but coconut shells. After a brainstorming session, one of the resulting ideas keeps popping up in the writer's head- in the shower, commuting to work, peeling potatoes- a certain situation will worm its way into the brain and get lodged there. The only way to get it back out is to write it. Joe-Bob got stuck in my head, and he'll be the subject of my next story.

Can a writer know that a story will be a best-seller (or a seller, at all) before writing it? Not unless it's possible to ride on the confidence of name recognition and previous success. But, wait a minute, doesn't the writer want some kind of guarantee all the work of writing the story will be worthwhile? Yes, of course! I'll explain how you find the guarantee in a minute.

Over the last twenty-four hours Joe-Bob VanDermeer has been simmering in my brain. Here's what I know about him:

1. He hates coconut-based biodiesel with a passion and refuses to buy a vehicle that runs on it because he and his father were counting on ethanol (corn-based fuel) making them enough money to keep the family farm. The U.S. has turned its back on the small, independent American farmer by approving vehicles that run on Copranol instead of Ethanol- allowing poor nations overseas to get "rich" while Joe-Bob struggles to hold the family's land. To make matters worse for Joe-Bob, vehicles that don't run on Copranol are no longer made- and neither is Copranol-free diesel.
   
2. He's a die-hard Lutheran. He believes the conception of his son is a miracle. He identifies with Abraham as a hero figure, but is not so crazy as to think he is Abraham and his child is Isaac.
3. He wants the child to be a boy so much, that he refuses to believe he's going to have a daughter even after Peggy's sonogram. Though this appears sheerly sexist, we will learn that Joe-Bob's family life is extremely female-dominated. He's craving male companionship and misses the father-son relationship he had with his (dead) dad.
   
4. He loves his family with all his heart.

Joe-Bob is precisely the kind of person I wouldn't be friends with- provincial, hyper-religious, suspicious and jealous of foreign people and ideas, sexist. But he's only got one job in the female-dominated process of bringing his "miracle" child into the world- to get Peggy to the hospital for the delivery. He's determined to bring his son into the world his own way- to drive Peggy to the hospital on coconut-free diesel. Trouble is, regular diesel doesn't exist, anymore. I know Joe-Bob is going to go on a search to find it, I know Peggy's going into labor early- forcing his hand. I know at the last minute Joe-Bob's going to remember his father's old tractor, and that the couple will be tooling down the highway in an antique John Deere, stopping up traffic from Boonsville to Urbandale. The image of Joe-Bob and his pregnant wife put-putting to the emergency room in a tractor makes me love him, and makes me intrigued to learn more about the woman sitting beside him, knee jammed against the tiller.

The ideas that came together to form the scenes above came from researching solutions to our current environmental problems. Then like tinder they were sparked by images from my childhood in Iowa: eating dust on stretches of highway while creeping behind tractors who shouldn't have been on the road, my grandfather's farm, government cars with corn ears painted on the doors (Ethanol advertisements), and by stories from my husband's grandmother about the birth of her children, stories of friends who have had sonograms. The only person who could possibly write Joe-Bob Vandermeer's story is me. That's what I'm selling, that's what I'm offering to my readers- a story that only I can write. That's how I know its worth creating, and worth sharing with the world.

Coconut Bras and Drug Smuggling- Where Science Fiction Ideas Come From

How do science fiction writers get their ideas? It's a question every writer who does a book signing, interview, or question-answer inevitably hears. Today we'll go step by step through the process.

Over the last few posts, I've gone into a lot of detail about environmental responsibility and green cleaning. We've talked global warming, we've talked trash, we've talked about environmental problems now and in the future, and looked at possible solutions.

The science fiction writer researches a topic and gathers as many of these possible solutions around her as possible. Then she examines them, one by one, and tries to think of all the new problems that could come out of those solutions. See, a story isn't a story unless there's a problem.

Let's get more concrete here and talk about coconuts. Yesterday in the segment on green cleaning I mentioned that today's environmentally friendly vegetable based soaps are made out of Copra (oil from the pressed seeds of coconuts). Sounds like a great idea, right? Coconuts are a renewable resource, and the use of soap in place of detergent cuts down on the use of the non-renewable resource, petroleum. An International Herald Tribune article even claims that the oil used to manufacture soaps is also being successfully tested in Samoa as an alternative fuel source for cars and power plants! Hooray for coconuts, they'll save the planet. They grow on trees, for gosh sake. What could possibly go wrong?

Evil giggle of the science fiction writer.

We already know biodiesel fuels have drawbacks. That solvent property that makes coconut oil into great dirt-dissolving soap, actually loosens engine debris which jams filters. Biodiesel breaks down rubber engine components and compromises seals and pumps in automobiles. Lower fuel efficiency, high cost, and sparse availability are also problems. (HowStuffWorks.com ) Can these problems be overcome? Sure. Car manufacturers can design new cars to run on these solvent, lower efficiency fuels. But what about Joe-Bob from Booneville, IA? He's still driving his 1990 Chevy Silverado. The old Silverado's still got life in her, but since everybody in the surrounding cities have switched to new-fangled coconut diesel, Joe-Bob can't find any old-fashioned fuel for his pick-up (biodiesel stalls the Silverado and stops her up good). Joe-Bob's wife is expecting their first son (Joe-Bob knows it's a boy no matter what that crank doctor says in Urbandale). The baby is practically a miracle, since Joe-Bob and his wife have been trying to conceive all seven years of their marriage. Joe-Bob needs the Silverado filled with old-fashioned diesel so he can get Peggy to Urbandale for the delivery without breakdowns. He's going to have to trek all over Dallas County to find the coconut-free diesel he needs- and the fact that his Silverado is out of fuel isn't going to make his journey any easier.

Enough Joe-Bob. Let's go city-chic.

New York goes green. Public transportation runs on coconuts. A heavy tax on petroleum based consumer products makes it cheaper for New Yorkers to buy environmentally responsible cleaning products. It's going to take a lotta coconuts to fuel, bathe, and scrub the city (or the nation!!). So what happens to all the coconut shells? It's not a long-term problem, since the shells will eventually biodegrade. But what if coconut shells became all the environmentally-conscious fashion rage? According to Wikipedia, coconut shells can be used to make buttons, musical instruments, and, my personal favorite, can be used to "theatrical effect" by making an "improvised coconut bra". Can you see it now? Lingerie shops across Manhattan, the dummies in the store front windows are dressed in hula skirts and coconut bras. All the best parties are filled with women who have rigged coconut shells to make a sexy, environmentally-conscious fashion statement. I can hear the jokes about shell size now.

On to more story-centric musing. Wikipedia suggests coconut shells can house small animals or make nifty guitar-esque Asian instruments and drums. The thing that strikes me about the coconut shell is that they can be hollowed. The coconut shell could be made into the perfect drug smuggling scheme. In my future vision, coconut shells, whole or hollowed, are going to be moving across borders for processing and waste disposal. Anything from cocaine to a bio-engineered germ that would kill millions of people (or maybe just wipe out all the cash crop coconut trees) could be smuggled inside a coconut.

My fingers are itching with three or four other more potential problems. Yikes! There's number five. This is how science fiction writers get their ideas. Not all of them make it to the story development phase, but science fiction stories are born as ideas, and this is (more or less) where they come from.

Green Cleaning- Part I (Our Inside and Outside Homes)

When the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced its Fourth Assessment Report on February 2nd, global warming finally made significant headlines in the American press. Global warming was considered a fact of life six years ago when I moved to Italy. I was in Turin for the 2003 European heat wave, one of many climactic crises brought on by global warming. I spent the agonizingly hot days, like many Europeans, with no air conditioning. I lay on the sofa in a half-conscious daze, occasionally remembering to eat gelato. 20,000 Italians who weren't as young and strong as I was died.

The next summer, still in Turin, my husband and I bought an air conditioner. The torture of the past summer overrode knowledge that air conditioning units would only make the heat problems worse in the future.

And isn't that where we all are, those of us with the means to choose whether or not to buy the new A/C, the new car, the next can of furniture polish? See, human beings are wired to survive the day- which is why I bought that A/C, and human beings are also wired to care for themselves and their loved ones. Parents change diapers, people clean their toilets, wash their windows, use wads of paper towels when the cat spits up a hairball. So we're faced with a situation where the products we use to make our inside homes inhabitable are making our outside home uninhabitable. What can we do? More importantly, what will we do?

I think this is a fantastic discussion for people who are writing about the future. Not only will global warming change the fabric of our future world, but the things we do to try to prevent drastic environmental consequences (whether they work, or not) will color our everyday lives. Having lived overseas, I've seen that local climate and culture play a huge role in the way people keep house. I'm talking things that sound insignificant: how people do the laundry, how people clean the bathroom, how people take out trash. We're learning that all these "insignificant" daily acts have a huge impact on the environment.

So this week I'm going to share some of my experiences of the seemingly small differences in how Italians go about their daily lives, and do a little research to learn how things are done in a variety of places. I'll examine why some of these foreign practices are only suited to certain climates and cultures, and discuss the possible impacts of what might happen if selected local practices were implemented on a global basis. How might the typical American house be changed? And to conclude the series, I'll discuss what I learned about green cleaning when I went cold turkey last November, and how green cleaning (which comes from a previous generation, not a foreign culture) could change the touch, the taste, the smell, the experience of living in future homes.

An Interview with Lindsay Noseworth

Today we are joined by Lindsay Noseworth, whose rôles include Master in Arms of the Inconvenience, and the not unburdensome responsibility of being second-in-command of said airship. Mr. Noseworth has stepped up to the plate, as it were- although playing baseball is difficult, if not impossible aboard an airship- to be the role model and all-around conscience of the crew of the Inconvenience, also known as the Chums of Chance. Mr. Noseworth has agreed to discuss events which unfold during "Light Over the Ranges," this being the first of five books contained by the larger, door-stopping tome, Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon.

Heather: Mr. Noseworth, could you tell us a little something about the Chums of Chance?

L.N.: Well, certainly I could, seeing as I, myself, am one of their number. The Chums of Chance is an organization that turns boys into men, and teaches them to fly- that is, to fly on an airship and go on all sorts of adventures some of which, perhaps, you've already read.

Heather: Can you give us some examples?

L.N: Goodness gracious, where to start. There was there was our top-secret assignment in Washington*, during which, by the way, we came across Pugnax.
(*see, The Chums of Chance and the Evil Halfwit)

Heather: And who is Pugnax?

L.N.: Oh, he's just a dog with an annoying habit of lallygagging on deck reading books, and generally getting underfoot and being a nuisance.

Heather: Excuse me, did you say the dog reads?

L.N.: Incessantly. Well, there was the time we went to Mexico**, and the whole mess we had to straighten out in Hawaii***, which happens to be where Miles learned to play the ukelele.
(** see The Chums of Chance in Old Mexico; *** see The Chums of Chance and the Curse of the Great Kahuna)

Heather: Miles Blundell, that would be, correct?

L.N.: Exactly. Fine enough fellow, as they go, but he nearly precipitates disaster upon the Inconvenience, endangering not only the crew but everyone underneath the airship before we've gotten more than a dozen pages into Pynchon's chronicle of our adventures.

Heather: That brings us to an interesting question. Your branch of the Chums of Chance organization has received rather more press, shall we say, than other crews of hardy fellows trying to keep their noses clean as they keep the peace. Would you comment on how Mr. Pynchon's rendering of the tale in question compares to the vast literary output other authors have produced in your honor?

L.N. To be honest, ma'am, I've seen better work than Against the Day. For starters, he left Chums of Chance right out of the title of the book. Going to make it hard to sell, that's for sure. Our young readers won't know the book's about us, and unless they're smarter than me, they won't know what the title means, at all.

Heather: A point well taken. Beyond the title do you have any other complaints?

L.N.: Well, don't get me wrong, Mr. Pynchon has clearly done his best, and put in untold hours scratching his pen. But he could have saved himself a whole lot of work if he'd kept the story more to the Chums of Chance. See, every few chapters, he'll pick some fellow who shares a meal, a song, an afternoon's work with us, and just goes running off from the Inconvenience chasing after this fellow. Not only that, we stop the whole story to go back and learn the details of their lives, and sometimes the details of their parents' lives or their children's lives. And I hate to say it, but not all these characters are folks you'd invite to Sunday dinner, if you know what I mean. Some of them are fools, no better or worse than the rest of us, but some of them are unemployed, have wives who run off with magicians, some are dynamiters, some are murderers-- some are even communists. And I just don't think that's the sort of thing our young readers should have their impressionable young minds exposed to.

Heather: Thanks for shedding light on the novel today, Mr. Noseworth. I trust your crew is, by now, missing your inspiring presence. I leave you to your duties.