Three Typescript Pages

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I was sorting through a pile of partial manuscripts, tossing those which weren't needed anymore into the recycling bin, when I came across a couple of intensely doodled pages and thought I'd share them with you.

Above:  Page 6 of what was in the process of becoming "Slow Life."  You can see my thought processes at work.  Also the fact that I can't remember the elementary school formula for converting Celsius to Fahrenheit.    I thought sure I'd know that by now.

 

This one's pretty cool, actually.  It was drawn on the back of a typescript page for "Slow Life" and I was trying to work out the chronology of the ballooning section and make sure I included details I hadn't mentioned yet.  Either that or I was avoiding actual work by doodling.  Either one is eminently possible.

If only I could draw, this would be worth saving!

This is the first page of "Tin Marsh."  Here I absolutely, no question about it, was doodling. 

I'm sure this thought occurred to me at the time, but it's a pity I couldn't fit giant alien lizards into the story.  Pretty much any story can be improved by the addition of giant alien lizards.

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A Massive Failure of Science Fiction's Imagination

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I've been looking for an article or video clip that would, in a sensible and nonpartisan way, examine Newt Gingrich's proposal for a permanent moon base which would evolve into a lunar colony.  The clip above of Neile deGrasse Tyson does a pretty good job.

There's also an interview with Warren Ellis which (no surprise) does get a little hard on Mr. Gingrich.  But I include it because Ellis goes into the nuts-and-bolts about the difficulties, and mentions the Outer Space Treaty, which makes Luna becoming the 51st state unlikely.  You can find it here.

Here's the short take on a moon colony:

Could we do it?  Yes, if we really wanted to.

Is it likely to happen anytime soon?  No, because there's not the enthusiasm for it.

I don't want to bash Mr. Gingrich here, and I don't want to go into the politics of the proposal.  What interests is the fact that I didn't feel even a twinge of enthusiasm for the idea.  That caught me by surprise.  So I examined the idea and realized that it was because the vision being offered up for our consideration was straight out of Robert Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.

Heinlein's book was published in 1966.  Only four years short of half a century ago.

Now, Heinlein put a great deal of his career into plotting a plausible path for humanity's emergence into outer space.  But he never meant it to be the last word.  And there's been a lot of technological and scientific growth since then.  Yet when a space enthusiast, running for president, reaches for a workable vision to inspire the electorate, he has to go four and a half decades into the past for it.

This is a massive failure of imagination on the part of science fiction.

I understand how this came about.  After Heinlein's book appeared, NASA was roaring into the future by itself and it only made sense to let them do it, while writing fiction set after the deed was already done.  Even Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars books, which demonstrate, step by step how to terraform that planet, assume the hard work of moving large numbers of people into interplanetary space has already been accomplished.

But now that the space program has lagged and only a few diehard holdouts -- most of them specifically fans of Heinlein -- believe in the dream anymore, that gap has become more and more obvious.

Somebody really ought to do something about that.


And since you ask . . .

Why not me?  Because that's not where my talents lie.  But, for what little it's worth, here's my own admittedly sketchy and not at all inspiring synopsis of how it could be done.

1.  Start with John Barnes's idea of sending hundreds of cheap probes everywhere in the Solar System.  "Build a big enough database," he said, "and it will tell you what to do.

2.  Send robots first to construct whatever colonies the database tells you to build.

3.  Learn enough about ecosystems to have self-contained farms producing food and oxygen before the human being arrives.

4.  (And this is implicit in the previous three items.)  Accept that the first permanent Moonbase or Marsbase of Whereverbase is probably not going to happen in our lifetimes.

That last doesn't have to be true.  But it will be unless somebody comes up with a viable and inspiring alternative.


And speaking of limericks . . .

The Blue Ribbon And Not At All Nepotistic Jury of Family will be announcing the winner of the low-rent SF and/or Isaac Asimov limerick contest on Wednesday.  Brilliant writers of light poetics have only today and tomorrow in which to pull off a last minute upset.

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Pushkin the American

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I have a story coming out soon in the latest Postscript anthology, #26/27 Unfit for Eden. It's the second of two stories that I dreamed up while I was in Yekaterinburg, Russia.  The first one was "Libertarian Russia," and every time I meet a émigré Russian who's read it, he or she inevitably takes me aside to demand I explain what I meant by it.

I'm expecting an intensified version of this reaction for the second story.  It's called "Pushkin the American."

Here's how it begins:

The American, whose name has since been forgotten, came to Yekaterinburg in the Ural Mountains in the year 1817.  He was a young man and whatever disgrace had driven him so far had been left behind in his native Philadelphia.  Somehow he had found work as the secretary of an American industrialist who, along with his wife, was making a tour of Russia with a particular eye to the natural riches of the Ural Mountains.

You probably know this already, but suggesting that Pushkin was an American is like saying that Shakespeare was French or George Washington was a spy for the British, or possibly some combination of the two.  It's every bit as impossible as a libertarian Russia, while running the risk of being taken as an insult to a national hero.

But of course the story has nothing to do with Pushkin at all.  I conceived of it on my last day in Yekaterinburg.  I'd been pushing myself hard, trying to see as much as I could during my stay and suddenly, less than half a mile from a museum that held some Kandinsky paintings I very much wanted to see, discovered I could go no further.  Totally exhausted, and feeling that strange psychological pressure that comes from being immersed in a language you cannot speak, I asked myself:  What if I couldn't go home?  I'd have to get a menial job in order to support myself and I'd also have to learn Russian.  But if I was ever to become a writer again -- ever to become myself again -- I'd have to know Russian as well as a Russian does.  I tried to imagine what that would be like.

Of course, nobody would want to read a story about Swanwick the Russian.  But the idea had its talons in my imagination.  So I wrote about Pushkin the American instead.

The Russians are one of the most literary peoples on earth.  I hope they understand that this story was written with nothing but admiration for their literature and their culture.


And as long I brought it up . . .

Here's the table of contents for the anthology.  If you can't find something there to like, you're far, far pickier than I am.

# Michael Bishop - Unfit for Eden

# Darrell Schweitzer - True Blue

# Mike Chinn - Saving Prince Romero

# Richard Calder - Madeline Smith

# Quentin S. Crisp - Non-Attachment

# Matthew Hughes - The Scribe of Betelgeuse V

# Eric Brown - The Room Beyond

# Thomas Olde Heuvelt - The Boy Who Cast No Shadow

# Christopher Harman - The Reader

# Robert Reed - Emergence

# Greg Ouiring - The Man Who Hated Shakespeare

# Amber D. Sistla - The Summer of Our Discontent

# Mike Resnick - A Weighty Affair

# George Hulseman - The Sea Witch

# Vaughan Stanger - First and Third

# Lavie Tidhar - Black Gods Kiss

# Robert T. Jeschonek - Warning! Do Not Read This Story!

# Steven Utley - Crime and Punishment

# Simon Unsworth - Borough Station

# Jessica Reisman - The Bottom Garden

# Kit Reed - Tasmin

# Andrew Drummond - Dr. Calvin’s Grand Illuminated Bestial Pleasure Dome

# Michael Swanwick - Pushkin the American

# Michael Kelly - Conversations with the Dead

# Eric Schaller - The Parasite

# Neal Barrett, Jr. - Trash

# Matthew Bialer - Found Fresh Footprints Again

Above:  There's the cover.  

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Space Nazis

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I took the day off yesterday but even so I've managed to finish two stories this week, the second one just a few minutes ago.  Now both of them go into the pie closet to cool off.  I'll take a critical look at 'em in a week or three.

Meanwhile, here's a trailer for a movie that, fingers crossed, might turn out to be good trashy fun.  On the basis of this one trailer, it looks like a sure thing.  Unhappily, some of the other trailers I've seen are not so encouraging.  We'll all have to keep our fingers crossed.

Except for those of us who don't like kitschy melodramatic fun.  But for them there's always Merchant Ivory.

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A Happy Day on Mud Level Road

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Marianne woke up this morning with the desire to see a snowy owl.  So we jumped in the car and drove off to Cumberland county, near Carlyle, where one had recently been seen.  We found the intersection of Duncan and Mud Level Roads and . . . nothing.

At this point, I could build up suspense by detailing which roads we went down and where we got lost and . . .  But what the heck.  We finally regained Mud Level Road and found a knot of birders watching what turned out to be a prairie falcon (common enough in the West, but astonishing in Pennsylvania).  Not long thereafter, a man who was what Marianne calls a "Saint Matthew birder" -- a proselytizer, out of love of the Good -- gave us detailed instructions to where a Townsend's warbler had been seen, pointed out that there were horned larks in the stubbled field alongside us, and then drove off.  Only to reappear, driving backwards, less than a minute later, to tell us that the owl had been seen on Duncan Road.

So we drove until we saw a knot of cars pulled off the road and there, visible in the distance a mile away, was . . . a small white dot.  Not a good enough viewing, even through binoculars, to be sure of anything.  Luckily, some Amish birders were there and offered to let us look through their spotting scope.  (Birders are awfully likeable people.)  So we hung about, looking and admiring and talking with other birders, for quite some time.

After which, we followed the directions to the house of a man who took birding very seriously and allowed visitors (for the occasion) to watch his feeders from his porch.  There, we and he and a class from Dickinson College saw:

hairy woodpeckers
downy woodpeckers
cardinals
tufted titmice
mice
white-breasted nuthatches
blackcapped chickadees
white throated sparrows
a carolina wren
juncoes
and the Townsend's warbler

Mostly, though, I was impressed by how kind and friendly everybody we met was.  Of course, they were birders and that explains a lot.  The countryside was beautiful too.

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The Russian Clown Slava Polunin

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I spent the day writing, so I have no adventures to relate, other than the adventure of writing hard and well and productively.  Which is half of what I live for, but not much fun for others to watch or to hear about.

So posted above is a clip of the great Russian clown Slava.  He lives in that dark and beautiful space where despair and wonder meet.  And should he ever wander into one of my fantasy novels, he'll find a warm welcome there.

Title Above:  If I ever wrote a story about Slava, that's what I'd call it.  But it would be a sad story, so out of respect to to the man, the story will never exist.  Save possibly in an anthology in the Library of Dreams.

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Elephant in the Snow

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A gray sky, melting snow, and lots and lots of fog.  It's a formula for beauty.  But I spent most of the day indoors, working on a new story that's just reached that point where everything starts to fall together and you can imagine it being done soon.  Maybe even this week.  Maybe even tomorrow.

But that's not all I did today.   I've just sold three stories to Tor.com!  In one day!  I'm betting that, so far, that's a record. 



And speaking of limericks . . .

The Isaac Asimov/Science Fiction Day Limerick Competition has only eight more days to run.  I gave it all of January because I figured that some people might need the time.  But as it turns out, the kind of people who write limericks are naturally quick-witted because the bulk of the entries were made in the first day or two.

But there's still time for more!  Here are the rules, as I originally states them:

The limerick must be clean, formally correct, and witty.  The judgment of the Blue Ribbon and Not at All Nepotistic Jury of Family will be final.  You can post your entry here or in response to any other blog entry for the rest of the month.  And I'll announce the winner on February 1.


Above:  I spotted this elephant today in Chestnut Hill.  Drugs may well have been involved.  Not on my part, however.

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