Barry Longyear R. I. P.

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Barry Longyear is dead. I wasn't going to note his passing because he and I were never close. We bumped into each other on panels at Worldcons a couple of times, but that was it. However, the current issue of Locus has, in addition to its obituary, only one appreciation, though a good one written by his agent, Richard Curtis. His star has since faded, but Longyear was once considered to be one of the greats in science fiction. He deserves more than that.

So I'll say a very few words here. If early on you're offended, please keep reading. I promise all will be made right. 

Back in the 1970s, Longyear was one of George Scithers' two most celebrated discoveries, along with John M. Ford, in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine. As a writer, his every story, especially the Circusworld ones set on the planet Baraboo, hit the sweet spot with fans. As a human being, he was an absolute asshole.

The stories of the man's offensive behavior and curmudgeonly insults of his writing peers (in all fairness, he did punch up as well as down, though at some of the most beloved figures in the field) were legion. Thankfully, time has erased most of the specifics for me. Though I vividly remember the fanzine article he wrote about the Hugo Award, where he said that if he won one and had only enough room in his suitcase for the trophy or his soiled underwear, he would choose the underwear.

But then he went into rehab.

He went in belligerent and offensive, and he came out likeable. Again, I never knew Barry Longyear very well. But anyone could see that person he used to be was not the real him. The real him, it turned out, was a nice guy.

That nice guy, according to the Locus obit, founded Dragon Slayers, a Narcotics Anonymous group that he selflessly helped run for decades. That tells us a lot.

Longyear's career highpoint came when his novella, Enemy Mine, in which a human and an alien at war with each other must make common cause in order to survive. won the Hugo, Nebula, Locus, and John W. Campbell Awards. A low point ensued when it was made into a movie. Word at the time was that the suits looked at the script and said, "Where's the mine?" and so one was inserted. Reportedly, the whole thing went down from there. The movie was a flop and by all accounts deserved to be one.

Curtis relates, I'm sure correctly, that Longyear wrote two sequels to the story and his own version of what the movie should have been. A year ago, Twentieth Century Studios decided they wanted to do a remake of the movie. Contracts were signed in time for the ailing author to know that there was a good chance his story would be done up as it deserved. I could have wished that he had lived long enough to see the movie and that the movie was everything it should have been. But writers live on hope, and Longyear lived long enough to experience that hope one last time.

Go with God, Barry. I hope your movie is one of the great ones.

Above: The picture of Barry Longyear was taken from Hazelden Publishing.

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Books I Have And You Don't: Penna School Report 1869--a Commonplace Book

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This entry in the series may be cheating a little... But most readers of this blog are on the bookish side, so coming up with something none of you have is a challenge.

 Anyway, sometime in the 19th century, either one or two men... And here I have to pause because Albert B. Flagg and Indecipherable M. Stone both put their names and addresses (22 Derby Street, Jamestown, NY) in the front endpapers. They both, or presumably one of them, were or was the editor.

So, as I was saying, someone(s) took a book he or neither of them gave a fart about and turned it into an anthology of stories clipped from the newspaper.  Back then, newspapers published overt fictions with titles like (chosen at random):

[WRITTEN FOR THE NEW YORK WEEKLY]

THE INDIAN'S REVENGE

A TALE OF ILLINOIS

BY FRANK E. T[AGESPOT]E CLAIRE

"an  o'er true tale"

Which begins:

The scene of this sketch is laid on the Illinois river, something over a hundred miles from its mouth, where the town of Meredosia now stands. The time of which we write, the pioneer days of the Pioneer State, prior to its admission into the Union.

There are also poems and non-fiction articles that the compiler(s) found amusing.

And it has to be said that most of these gems of prose and poetry so carefully preserved from the winds of time are dreadful. So much so that I have never read the whole book through and can only sample it in small sips.

Yet, every now and again, I pick up the product of the (surely young) Mssrs. Flagg and Stone and am transported back to their time. When newspapers printed fiction. And readers cared enough to want to preserve what they felt were the best of that.

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Mattie Brahen, Briefly Remembered

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Today, I attended the memorial service for Mattie Brahen, author and the wife of Darrell Schweitzer. Darrell was of course devastated. He wrote a memorial for Mattie and very wisely had the funeral parlor director read it for him, rather than attempt it himself and risk breaking down in public.

The parlor was filled with friends and family. Several came forward to speak. And then it was over. 

At times like these, I feel the loss of Gardner Dozois most acutely. I've heard him speak at several funerals and he had the gift of summing up a life in a handful of words, always ending with, "You could do worse."

Thinking about Mattie, and Darrell, and Gardner afterwords, I speculated about what Gardner might have said were he there. Something, I think, along the lines of;

She read the books she loved. She wrote the books she loved. She sang the songs she loved. She loved the people she loved. You could do worse.

And I honestly don't see how you could do better.

Above: I swiped Mattie's picture from her Facebook page. I honestly don't think she'd have minded.

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One-Day E-Book Sale Tomorrow: The Iron Dragon's Daughter

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Open Road Media is putting the e-book of what may be my most popular novel, The Iron Dragon's Daughter, on sale tomorrow, June 11th, That's one day only. The price will be $1.99. And, with apologies to the rest of the world, this offer is good in the US only.

And here's the entirety of my sales pitch: If you like e-books and are curious about my novel and live in the United States, you might consider buying it.

I don't believe in haranguing readers.

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Stalking the Black Swan

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The other day, on an impulse, Marianne and I went to Bombay Hook Wildlife Refuge in search of the otherwise nonexistent in the America wild black swan. I'm not going to mislead you: The swan did not get caught up in a windstorm in China and miraculously survive a journey across the Pacific Ocean and then over thousands of miles of the body of the United States to end up in Delaware. No. It was almost certainly an escapee or a dump from a private aviary.

Nevertheless, an adventure is an adventure. And, as adventures do, this one involved a lot of voracious insects. But also two separate bald eagles, sitting on two separate mud flats. And two foxes, one of which was obviously working the cars in the hope that someone would throw him a hot dog, a blue grosbeak (seen in the sun, where its plumage dazzled, and in the shade where it didn't), a wild turkey trotting down the road toward us, a green egret, which is a lovely little bird perfectly camouflaged for waterfront foliage, save for its bright yellow feet. We saw them all.

Oh, and the black swan. 

We saw it.

It was kind of frustrating to be looking at such a rarity and have cars rush be without even pausing to ask what Marianne and I were looking at. I waved one car to a stop and, pointing, said, "There's a black swan out there." To which the woman replied, "We've seen a white one and a fox." and drove on. But on the return loop, we looked to see if it was still where we'd last seen it and it was. More pertinently, there was a stopped car and spilling over it five people with cameras and binoculars and spotting scopes all pointed in the same direction.

"You saw the black swan?" either Marianne or I said.

"Oh, yes. Right there. Wonderful."

"That's good." And, feeling much better, we drove on.

And because there's always more than one ending to any true story . . .

On the way home, shortly after Marianne said that the only thing she regretted was not seeing a snapping turtle, I spotted a snapping turtle on the verge of the highway.

Above: Yes, that tiny black silhouette is it. It looks better through binoculars. Someday I should consider getting a real camera with a zoom lens.

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Singular Interviews: MICHAEL MOORCOCK

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Marianne Porter's latest Dragonstairs Press chapbook, Singular Interviews, will be offered for sale at noon Eastern time this coming Saturday, and sell out shortly thereafter. A quarter-century in the making, each of my interviews with a science fiction or fantasy notable is exactly one question long. Meanwhile, here's my favorite of the lot--the single most concise and enlightening summation of Michael Moorcock's oeuvre I've ever encountered. By the man who knows more about it than anyone else.

 

SINGULAR INTERVIEWS:  MICHAEL MOORCOCK

 

QUESTION: When and why did you decide to interconnect all your stories and novels to make of them a single metafiction?

MICHAEL MOORCOCK: I frequently read that my aspiration was to ‘improve’ science fiction in some way by shifting emphasis away from its traditional subject matter and calling for higher standards of writing.  Actually I wanted to introduce the techniques and subject matter of sf and fantasy into ‘literary’ or non-generic work, to broaden the concerns of general fiction which I believed to be moribund.  For all I know this was going to happen anyway so I was perhaps just one of many people trying to do the same but at the time I knew very few people who agreed with me. The likes of Kingsley Amis, in fact, vehemently disagreed with me.  My ambition inspired my criticism and my editorship of NEW WORLDS.  None of this, of course, happened overnight.  It took a few years to develop a coherent sense of exactly how this could be achieved and demonstrated.

I read Zweig’s biography of Balzac when I was 15 and as a journalist learned, like him, to write at high speeds without giving myself time to revise, developing ideas from one story to another rather than refining a single piece, but I was never consciously inspired by him. My first version of The Eternal Champion was written in 1957 when I was 17 and was pretty crudely written but contained the idea, perhaps inspired by Arnold’s Phra the Phoenician, of a protagonist constantly reborn to fight a cause over and over again through different historical periods and locales.  My description of what I called a ‘multiverse’, The Sundered Worlds, a story which looked at a many worlds theory, first explored in fiction by Wells, from as it were the outside as an observable phenomenon, was published in 1963, but I didn’t start to consider my work as one large novel until 1968 when I began A Cure For Cancer, the second Jerry Cornelius book, and realized I could refine ideas over many books by linking them to the same characters in different situations and circumstances. 

I’m not for a moment comparing my work to Balzac’s Human Comedy, but I might have come to it for similar reasons, practical as well as artistic, continuing themes and ideas via the same characters in often very disparate places, historical periods and invented worlds, enabling me to write stories which moved from generic fiction to literary fiction and so break down the barriers between them as editorially I tried to encourage authors to do in New Worlds.  This quickly enabled me to write books which were part realistic and part fantastic and thus carry ideas organically from one sequence of stories, absurdist, fantastic and realistic, to another.  A relatively minor character, such as Colonel Pyat of the Cornelius stories, could become the self-deceiving, unreliable narrator of a realistic examination of the 20^th century roots of the Nazi holocaust, while a character like Elric can appear in a fantasy or a comedy without any apparent incongruity.  They can, like players in a Commedia dell’ Arte sketch, keep their essential personalities and moral character from piece to piece and carry a theme which can be looked at from many different aspects and narratives.  They offer the reader echoes, as it were, which bring a feeling of familiarity without the kind of distracting (and disappointing) rationale which, in my view, frequently ruins a good story.  In this sense they should produce a feeling of resolution more like music than most fiction.  Whether I’ve been successful in this, of course, is for the reader to decide.

 

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J. R. R. Tolkien's Winooski

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Look what I found while going through some old papers!

Here, before your eyes, is where my career as a fantasist began. With a drawing by a junior high school student who had just read the Lord of the Rings trilogy and would never be the same again.

I was in high school in Winooski, Vermont when... But I've already told this story, in an essay titled "A Changeling Returns, written for and published in Meditations on Middle-Earth. Here's the pertinent excerpt:

 

…  in my high school days, my sister Patricia sent home from nursing school a box of paperbacks (I can see that box now, freshly opened and full of promise) which she had read and no longer wanted.  Among them was The Fellowship of the Ring.  I picked it up late one evening, after finishing my homework, meaning to read a chapter or two before sleep.  I stayed up all night.  It wasn’t easy, but by skipping breakfast in the morning and reading every step of the way to school, I managed to finish the last page just as the bell rang for my first class to begin.

Oh, how that book shook and rattled me!  It rang me like a bell.  Even today, when I am three times as old as I was then, I can still hold my breath and hear the faint reverberations from that long, eternal night.  That reading made me a writer, though it took me forever to then learn my craft.  It showed me what literature could do and what it could be.

 

As an adult, I am painfully aware of the deficiencies of that drawing. But it's a good indication of how enthusiastic I was about Tolkien's great work. And, to be fair to the kid who drew it, I haven't gotten any better as a visual artist in the decades since then.

 

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