If You Give a Robot a Gun . . .

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People who download books illegally hate it when I point out that they're functional Communists -- and lazy, unthinking Communists at that, because the system doesn't work if you don't have a Communist society in place.  Achieving which, history has shown, is a prolonged, messy process involving many, many corpses.  They want to bypass all that and get right to the Getting Stuff For Free part.

The self-righteousness these Commies display, however, does prove one thing:  Given the opportunity to steal with impunity, a great number of people will spontaneously generate justifications for doing so.

So I view the fact that we're getting very close to having  affordable, general-purpose humanoid robots with mixed feelings.  Because they won't just be able to wash dishes, vacuum rugs, and mow the lawn for you.  Give one of them a gun and send it out into the night and it can stick up gas stations and relieve pedestrians of their watches and wallets.

The first time this happens, it's going to be a major news event.  The next few hundred are going to be a crime wave.  By the time it's the standard strategy for every teenager who thinks that he or she deserves a bigger allowance, it's going to be business as usual.  When it's so common that the police stop responding to calls, armed robbery will be legalized.

Because money wants to be free.  It's only fair.  If this were a Libertarian (or Communist or Insert Your Favorite Ideology Here) society, I wouldn't need to do this.  So, really, you brought this on yourself.

 Above:  A Terminator with a gun.  Not that it needs one. 

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Raise a Glass of Dandelion Wine . . .

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I was quoted in today's front-page Philadelphia Inquirer article marking the death of Ray Bradbury, and thankfully though my comments did not rise to the soaring heights that the best tributes reached, neither did I say anything stupid.  Nor did anyone else, though the bracketed insertion into one of the observations that Darrell Schweitzer made ("showing by example that it was not merely OK but a superior means of storytelling for the [science-fantasy] writer to get in touch with genuine feelings") showed that the newspaper writer entirely missed what Darrell was saying.

No, not just for the science-fantasy writer.  For any writer.

Bradbury was unique in that his fame transcended genre while he remained adamantly within that genre.  Asimov, Heinlein, and Clarke became world-famous -- but as genre writers.  Vonnegut became world-famous -- but only by denying that he was a science fiction writer.  Bradbury was acknowledged to be a major American writer -- no genre qualifiers -- while never denying that what he wrote was (for the most part; and definitely for the better parts) science fantasy and horror.

Good on you, Ray.  Wherever the barque of your fate takes you now, may the wind be at your back and water foaming white to either side.

You can read the Inquirer article here.

And other tributes to Bradbury pretty much everywhere.

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From Science Fiction & Fantasy to Fiction & Literature

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I was in a bookstore today and after checking out the SF&F section to see if there was anything new I needed, cruised the Fiction & Literature section.  Kurt Vonegut's Cat's Cradle caught my eye because it's a science fiction novel that's routinely shelved as literature.  So I did a quick scan of the shelves to see what other undeniably genre books were there.  Not a careful one, mind.  I'm sure I missed a lot.  Here's what I did note, however:

Frankenstein by Mary Shelly
Dracula by Bram Stoker
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
Orlando by Virginia Woolf
Anthem by Ayn Rand
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court by Mark Twain
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka
Against the Day by Thomas Pynchon
Haroun and the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
The Collected Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
and three shelves of Stephen King's works.

To say nothing of books you might well quibble about on various grounds, such as Gulliver's Travels, The Inferno, Alice In Wonderland, and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club.

The thing is that while all these books are undeniably genre, it does not surprise anybody to see them shelved in Fiction & Literature.  Because they're all three:  Fiction, Literature, and either Science Fiction or Fantasy, depending.

Which led me to muse upon Vonnegut's famous apostasy, when he denied writing science fiction in order to be accepted by what we rather quaintly like to refer to as "the mainstream."  He left a lot of hurt feelings in his wake.  But his work was always headed for a place on the Literature & Fiction shelves, the same way that Philip K. Dick's and H.P. Lovecraft's works are headed there today.  I think he just wanted to see it happen while he was still alive.

Above:  Half a face from a children's ride in the Ekaterinburg city zoo.  Not terribly relevant to the conversation, admittedly.  But I'm feeling whimsical today.

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Engels Park

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During the Cold War, here in America, everything the Soviets did was inferior and wrong.  When they managed to do something that was undeniably better than what we had -- the Moscow Metro stations, for example -- they did it for the wrong reasons.  As propaganda, usually.

I am not about to deny the horrors of the Soviet Union.  The millions of deaths from forced collectivism, government-caused famine, and the Terror were very real.  Still . . . everything?  Without exception?

One morning in Ekaterinburg, I went for a walk and come upon Engels Park.  It was sad and wonderful, the ruins of a place that had been lovingly created to give children a playground worthy of their imaginations. 

The centerpiece of this was a locomotive.  A real one, not mock, which had been made safe for children and then painted bright colors.  There was also a brick spiral with window-crenelations which could be used as a fort or a house, a ramp which I'm guessing was for winter sledding, some standard playground equipment, a railroad car separate from the locomotive, a cluster of brick castle-towers that looked like chess pieces, and much else as well.

In the wake of Perestroika, everything fell apart, including Engels Park, most of which was defaced by vandalism and graffiti. During Soviet Times, everybody celebrated Lenin's birthday by "voluntarily" beautifying public spaces.  "It was exactly like a day of work," one woman old me, "only without pay."  Now that Russia is capitalist, volunteerism seems to be as much a discredited relic of the past as Communism itself.  Nobody plays Ivanhoe in the towers because they're filled with rubble and liquor bottles.  Half the playground equipment is broken.

But I believe that someday Engels Park will make a comeback.  In my own Philadelphia neighborhood, Gorgas Park was sad and rundown when I moved here, thirty-some years ago and today it's something to be proud of.  Engels Park is a small gem -- it just needs some polishing.  Which, as Ekaterinburg continues to grow more prosperous, it will eventually get.  After all, somebody is keeping that locomotive painted.

And even in Cold War times it was generally acknowledged -- grudgingly, perhaps -- that the Russians were pretty good to their children.

Above:  I could have taken a lot more pictures of broken things, but my heart wasn't in it.

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Pity The Poor Robot

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It's always sad to encounter a destitute robot.  Here's one I saw begging for rubles on the streets of Ekaterinburg.

And speaking of what I'm writing these days . . .

One of the many ways you can divide stories is into those that require some analytic thought on the part of the readers if they want to fully understand them and those whose intentions should be lucidly spelled out so that nobody could possibly miss them.  A good example of the former would be Gene Wolfe's "Fifth Head of Cerberus," which can be reread many times without exhausting its riches.  For the latter . . .  One of G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown mysteries, say.  Or pretty much anything by P.G. Wodehouse.

Neither mode is the "right" way to write, of course.  Or the right thing to read.  Sometimes you're in the mood for something difficult and involving.  Other times you want something that goes down easy.  Always, you want the story to be good of its kind.

I've been thinking about this particular dichotomy because I've recently finished one of each type of story and for one of them the editor (after indicating he would buy it) had a couple of questions about the plot.  Had it been the for-lack-of-a-better-word art story, I probably would have gone with what I'd written.  But the story in question being a for-lack-of-a-better-word entertainment, I'm going to have to spend a few hours today revising it to make sure that there's no possible room for misinterpretation.

And I conclude . . .

If there's one thing both types of story have in common -- other than that they should be written as well as possible -- it's this:  When the final draft is finished, it's important to read the whole thing through out loud.  It's astonishing how every mistake and infelicity of language pops out at you when you do.

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Lenin Gambles With History

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One of the astonishing things about contemporary Russia is how thoroughly its public spaces have been colonized by advertising.  Which leads to some odd juxtapositions.  Such as the photo above of the statue of Lenin in 1905 Square, Ekaterinburg, taking a chance on our brave new world.

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Home Again

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If writers have one character flaw (and most people agree that this is understating the case), it is that we have a weakness for the picturesque.  Which, at its worst, can make us unintentionally condescending -- "Look at the quaint Wisconsonite, with his wheel of cheese!"  So I was careful not to snap pix of the street-sweepers in Ekaterinburg, even though some of them had a distinctly raffish air about them.

But I could not resist taking the above shot because it was as good as an essay on how technology gets absorbed into a culture at different rates.  A besom and a cell phone!  Nobody called this one.

And I am back home again . . .

It's a long trek, five-twelfths of the way around the globe.  But Marianne and I made it in twenty-two hours, which is not bad time at all.  It's wearying, though.  So I'm going to spend the day lazing about, going through the mail, paying bills, and the like.  My apologies for blogging so briefly.  I'll be back in form on Monday.

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