Wild Minds and Discognition

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Look what arrived in the mail yesterday!

I suppose this requires some explanation. Steven Shaviro (it says on the back cover) is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He has a particular interest in the philosophy of thought and admires science fiction. Discognition is an exploration of sentience through the medium of several science fiction texts.

Why science fiction? Because in matters regarding consciousness, awareness, feeling, knowing, and the like, there is consensus on pretty much nothing. SF, which has the freedom of doing without things like evidence or proof, is free to speculate wildly. And thus, for those who wish to think about such matters, it provides a means of thinking beyond the boundaries of what is known.

Back in 1995, I attended the World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow. I was staying in a cheap B&B on Renfrew Street at the highest point of the city and from there could look down on its streets and byways. I saw how the M8 Motorway cut through a vibrant city and how it was lined by vacant buildings for a block to either side. This wasn't supposed to happen when the road was built. It was an unforeseen consequence nonetheless.

Later, I was on a panel on neural enhancement. It went well. We all said interesting things. At the end we were asked to sum up our thoughts and I said that the advantages of neural enhancement were so great that it was going to be inevitable. "But," I said, "we have to be extremely cautious and careful in its adaption, or we'll end up driving an M8 Motorway right up the center of our minds."

This insight stayed with me. I mused over it for a couple of years and then I wrote "Wild Minds," a story that still pleases me today.

Some time later, Shaviro wrote about my story on his blog, putting its issues in context. This became the core of chapter 5 of his book.

You can read that post here.

I haven't read all of the book yet, but the chapter Shaviro dedicates to Peter Watts' Blindsight is good enough that I rather wish it had been extended to include Echopraxia, the sequel-or-maybe-second-half-I'm-not-sure-which to the first book.

So it's a good book, I think, and I'm looking forward to reading the rest of it.

As for the chapter dedicated to my story... it's always a pleasant surprise to have somebody take one's thoughts seriously.


And for new writers...

Here's something I didn't know until I sold "Wild Minds" to Sheila Williams at Asimov's. I'll start by giving you the opening of the story:

I met her at a businesspersons' orgy in London.  The room was in the back of a pub that was all brass and beveled glass, nostalgia and dark oak.  The doorkeeper hesitated when it saw how many times I'd attended in the last month.  But then I suggested it scroll up my travel schedule, and it saw that I wasn't acting out a sex-addiction script, but properly maintaining my forebrain and hindbrain balances.  So it let me in.
 Inside, the light was dimly textured and occasionally mirrored.  Friendly hands helped me off with my clothing.  "I'm Thom," I murmured, and "Annalouise . . . Enoch . . . Abdul . . . Magdalena . . . Claire," those nearest quietly replied.  Time passed.
 I noticed Hellene not because she was beautiful – who pays attention to beauty after the first hour? – but because it took her so long to find release.  By the time she was done, there was a whole new crowd; only she and I remained of all who had been in the room when I entered. 

In the halfway room, we talked.

When next I saw her after selling the story, Sheila looked amused. "You know, Michael," she said, "I don't normally buy a story that opens with a sex scene. That's almost invariably the mark of amateur writing." 

Which was the fist I knew about that. But I know it now and so, too, do you.

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This Glitterati Life: Part 6,788

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I went to a pre-opening party at the Stanek Gallery last Thursday. It was for a group showing of Philadelphia artists, including Kyle Cassidy.  That's him up above, posing before one of the photos from his book Armed America. He tells me that the dog in the foreground with the anxious look on his face actually wanted to leap up on him. So he'd line up the shot, get the dog down and in place, and then would have a window of one full second before the dog leaped up on him again.

Ah, the glamorous life of an artist!

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Spilling Sunflower Oil at Roscon

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«Annushka has already bought the sunflower oil, and has not only bought it, but has already spilled it. So the meeting will not take place...»

Media cons are new to Russia -- the media half of Roscon is only the second such convention in that country, I was told. But the fans took to it immediately, and the costumes were as good as any I've seen anywhere.

And then there's Annushka (above), who introduced herself to me by asking if I'd read The Master and Margarita.

Have I read Mikhail Bulgakov's masterpiece? On my first stay in Moscow, immediately after unpacking our bags in our Garden Ring flat, the first thing Marianne and I went to see was Red Square. Then we went to Patriarch's Ponds, the city park where the novel opens. The editor Berlioz is talking with the young poet Ponyrev when the Devil walks up and deals himself into the conversation, casually mentioning that on of them will soon be decapitated.

Offended, Berlioz hurries away and, as was obliquely predicted, slips on the sunflower oil that Annushka had spilled and falls headfirst in front of an oncoming trolley.

Thus begins the wild ride that is one of the great fantasies of the Twentieth Century.

The woman who was Annushka, it turned out, belongs to a fan group dedicated to promoting the novel and its author. In addition to which, they engage in a certain amount of cosplay as its characters.

This is yet another reason why Russia is a great country.


And on the way back to our flat...

We arrived in Moscow late in the afternoon and after visiting Red Square and Patriarch's Ponds, it was time to buy some food for supper in our flat. But rather than head back directly, Marianne and I took a roundabout way, so we wouldn't be traveling on the same streets over and over. As we went, we consulted our guidebook to see what we were passing. One thing we saw was the Tunisian Embassy, which had formerly been Lavrentiy Beria's house. Beria was a very bad man. According to the book, when the yard was dug up to replace some plumbing, human bones were found. When a basement wall was knocked down to renovate the area, it was found to be filled with... more human bones.

Midway back to our flat, we passed Bulgakov's apartment. Which meant that all the time he was writing about the Devil in Moscow, he was only a short walk from where Beria lived.

This is yet another reason why the Soviet Union was a terrifying place.

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My Story -- and What's Wrong With It

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What do people do for fun in Russia?

How about write a story in an hour? I am not making this up. At Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention, I saw a line of serious young people tapping away at a line of laptops. They were given a list of five themes created by writer Eugeny Lukin, pulled a number out of a hat to see which one they had to write on, and set to work. There were more people involved than the photo above suggests, too. When one group finished, the next group stepped in.

I didn't exactly volunteer to take part in the competition. But somehow I found myself behind a laptop.

The theme I was given was "The End of the World 2." Which, it was explained to me, was the apocalypse that occurs after the world has already ended.

I've got to say that apocalypse fiction is no longer my cup of meat. That's a theme for young writers, I think. But I set to work. And I finished my story in the hour given me. It began:

Terraforming Mars was a snap by comparison. We’d brought in iceteroids and slammed them into the planet where we wanted oceans to be. We sailed enormous mirrors, tacking back and forth across its orbit to heat up the surface. We manufactured greenhouse gases. We seeded the soil with microbes, designer worms, and intelligently-designed ants. Start to finish, it took only five thousand years. 

By the time Mars was done, Earth was uninhabitable.

You can read the entire story in English or Russian here.

So what are the story's major deficiencies? Well...

1. The opening paragraphs. You're expecting me to say that opening with an info-dump is wrong. Not so! You need only look at Larry Niven's early short stories, which often began with a brief science lesson necessary for the reader to understand what follows, and which worked just fine. Or at the way Rod Serling opened each Twilight Zone episode with a short chat that cut out twenty minutes narrative exposition so the show could cut straight to the exciting parts. Info-dumps are a useful, if commonly maligned, tool.

No, what's wrong is that, not having looked into terraforming for several decades, I have only the haziest sense of of how it would work. Eukaryotes are involved, I believe, but how and at what stage are beyond me. And since there was no public wi-fi at the convention hotel, I couldn't look it up online. So the first significant flaw is: insufficient research.

If I were going to try to sell the story, I'd do the research and rewrite it first. Sometimes a story will come to you so fast that there's not the time to do the research. But there's always the time to retrofit it.

2. The time-span. Originally, I had the terraforming take fifty thousand years, which I suspect is pretty fast for completely altering an entire planet. But then I realized that fifty thousand years was too long a period to have people similar to contemporary humans and one hour was too short a time to write something long enough to establish a radically different society. So I cheated and cut the time scale down by an order of magnitude.

If you've got a good enough story going, the reader will forgive this sort of thing. But, really, it's playing with the net down.

3. The immortals. To dramatize the predicament these people are caught in, I had to have one of them recently come to realize with despair that Earth could not be terraformed. But if they've been working on this for thousands of years and human lifespans are still what they are now, the characters would have been born into a hopeless situation and know it already. I made them immortals who had been caught up in the details of their work for too long. This is kind of a cheat, since it's not implicit in the original idea.

The characters are also ciphers. But that's okay for this kind of story. Not every work of fiction needs to be Remembrance of Times Past.

4. The ending. I pulled in an aliens ex machina there, simply because the clock was ticking and I could think of no other way to come up with an interesting ending. Or, rather, to do so would have required a much longer story and there simply wasn't the time.

You can get away with this sort of thing if the story is entertaining enough. Someone will buy it, readers will enjoy it well enough, and then it will be forgotten. But if you aspire to "honor, power, riches, fame, and the love of women," as Freud put it (substitute "men" for "women," if you wish), then you have to aim higher and try harder.

I came in second in the competition, by the way, which is an honorable rank. I don't think anybody -- myself included -- would have been happy if an outsider had walked away with first place.

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A Woman, Weeping . . .

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Long airline flights offer the opportunity to catch up on movies one really ought to have seen but couldn’t manage the enthusiasm to travel all the way to the multiplex for. Recently, I went to Russia. On the way back, I saw Saving Mr. Banks. This is my belated review.

A Woman, Weeping . . .

Saving Mr. Banks begins in Heaven – or so the sunlit clouds would suggest. The camera descends to Earth to show a happy little girl with her loving father in the middle of an impossibly idyllic childhood. Then it cuts to the profoundly unhappy woman she will become.

The hatchet job has begun.

P. L. Travers, the revered author of the Mary Poppins books, is in this accounting in desperate need of scratch. Nevertheless, she resists the largess offered by Disney Studio for the right to make a movie of her life’s work. “Don’t say money! It’s a filthy, disgusting word!” she tells her lawyer. Who, like virtually every other person in this movie, is firmly on Disney’s side.

Looming poverty, however, is in the saddle and Travers must go where it drives her. She accepts a consulting fee for the script, while withholding the right to make the movie.

When Travers arrives in Los Angeles, she thinks it ugly. She hates the chlorine smell of its swimming pools. She does not tolerate fools gladly. She doesn’t want to see Disneyland. She won’t let people call her by her first name. She crams the stuffed toys and corporate kitsch thronging her hotel room out of sight in the closet. She demands script approval. She uses big words. She has a mind and a will of her own. She is everything that can be wrong about a woman.

She is, in short, badly in need of a man who’ll tell her what to do.

Luckily, Walt is on the job. He begins the seduction by holding Travers’ hands and calling her Pamela.  There is a devilish gleam in his eyes.

Travers and the writers proceed to make each others’ lives unbearable. The Banks home as they envision it is far too palatial. She doesn’t approve of the suggestion that Bert and Mary Poppins might be romantically involved. She’s gone off the color red and won’t have it in the movie at all. She is in every instance perfectly unreasonable.

Save for the one aspect of the conflict which is never mentioned: That Mary Poppins as conceived by Travers and Mary Poppins as Disney wishes her to be are not only different people but entirely different creatures. Disney envisions a chipper magical fixer-upper of broken middle class families. Travers’ creation is something deeper, profounder, more mythic.

Meanwhile, back in the past, the father, at first as charming as only a scripted actor can be, begins to fall apart, prey to the twin scourges of alcohol and whimsy. These sections grow increasingly awful and correspondingly more painful to watch. Until finally the point has been bludgeoned home: P. L. Travers has father issues and that is why she is such a miserable old hag.

It is hard to see why anybody would want to watch such a sour, unpleasant movie, seesawing as it does between the growing misery of a child and the slow and cynical bullying of her adult self. But then comes a hint: In the back-story it is deftly shown that Travers’ greatest creation is based on her own nanny, thus implying she doesn’t much deserve credit for a character who was as good as dumped into her lap. Further, the nanny is much more like Disney’s Mary Poppins than the one in the books. P. L. Travers got the character wrong! Disney got it right!

Because there must be character growth, Travers begins to bend. She mounts a carousel horse in Disneyland. She sings and dances along with one of the songs. She allows Walt to call her Pamela and then Pam. She agrees that Los Angeles is beautiful. All this can only be the result of Disney magic. That, or Stockholm Syndrome.

At last, Travers has no choice but to flee back home or lose her soul.

Walt, who admits that he “pretty much” always gets what he wants, pursues her back to London. He invites himself into her house. He calls her a dame. He shares his past with her. He moves in close and calls her Mrs. Travers for the first time. He promises to bring her father back to life, whole, healed, and redeemed.

Sitting on a chair opposite the stuffed Mickey which she has taken into her life as her own personal savior, P. L. Travers sells Mary Poppins down the river.

And they all live happily ever after.

Only… not so much.

It’s become legend by now that when the audience left the Hollywood premiere of Mary Poppins, an event to which Travers was not invited but which she managed to get into anyway, she was left weeping in the theater, and not for joy. Walt Disney had made the movie he wanted. His studio raked in a great deal of money. And Julie Andrews, perky and simplistically moral, became Mary Poppins for all but a dedicated minority of readers. Walt’s triumph was all but absolute.

Save for that lone, victimized woman, weeping in the dark.

Saving Mr. Banks resolves that unpleasant image by turning Travers’ tears into a cathartic cleansing of her past. Walt (who has fled her presence with the unseemly haste of a man with a guilty conscience), has made something she lacked the imagination to create herself – a fantasy that reconciles her with her father.

Whatever can be the purpose of this sour and not at all entertaining movie if it is not revenge for Travers spoiling the absoluteness of Disney’s victory over her? I suppose a more generous viewer might see it not as pissing on Travers’ grave but as a corporate act of filial piety toward the studio’s founding father. Either way, it is ruthless.

Did you know that P. L. Travers was a journalist? That she was friends with William Butler Yeats? That she lived for two years on a Navajo reservation? Or that she studied with Gurdjieff? It took me three minutes on Google to discover these facts. Emma Thompson did a marvelous job of portraying the woman she was told to portray (there are no bad performances in this movie) but the woman she portrayed could have done none of these things. She was simply a problem to be solved.

And solved she was. As will be all who get between the Mouse and its appetites.

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Four Days in Russia

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I promised to write a little about my four days in Rublevka and Moscow, where Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention, was held, and though I'm still a little jet-lagged, I'll do my best.  It was a great experience for me. The Russian fans and pros were all warm and welcoming The parties were fun. I won an award (see yesterday's post). And they made such a big fuss over me that I'm going to have to lie down in a dark room with a damp cloth over my ego until the swelling goes down.

Roscon is divided into two separate conventions. Thursday and Friday there was a literary convention of writers, editors, and serious fans, very much focused on the written word. This half was held in a hotel in Rublevka, which is where the wealthy and powerful lived in gated communities. Saturday and Sunday there was a more populist media con held in Moscow. This is a new but very successful addition to the original conference.

Here, off the top of my head are a few of the highlights:

Shish-kabobs on Thursday evening. This event was held in an open-air pavilion surrounded by birch trees and snow. The meat was grilled to perfection and there were drinks on hand. Boy, were there drinks on hand. Whiskey appears to be almost as popular as vodka and there was, of course, kvass. Like any science fiction event anywhere, the focus was on conversation. Imagine a torrent, a tumult, a babel of voices. Then add alcohol. Quite enjoyable.

The Friday night whiskey tasting. Actually, it wasn't just a tasting but a lecture as well. Andrei Sinitsyn explained the qualities and merits of each bottle before samples were poured. This has become a tradition at Roscon in recent years. In addition to the single-malts that are the backbone of the series, they one Irish whiskey, Writers' Tears, and a bottle of Rittenhouse Rye. Which I don't have to tell you is made in Philadelphia.

Interviewing Sergei Lukyanenko. Sergei is best known in America for his six Night Watch books, but he's written a great deal more as well. Also, he's one hell of a likable guy. Alas, our schedules were so crowded that the only chance I had to interview him was in a very noisy room. I'm hoping I'll be able to transcribe the results without too much difficulty. "How long did it take you to get published from when you started writing?" I asked him.

"Six months," he replied.

Meeting Annushka, who spilled the sunflower oil. The media-focused part of the con had, of course, many young people in really good costumes. I was wandering among them when a young woman carrying a pitcher and several packets of sunflower seeds asked if I was familiar with Mikhail Bulgakov's novel, The Master and Margarita. Then she explained that she was Annushka, the woman who spills the sunflower oil upon which the editor Berlioz slips, sending him under the wheels of an oncoming trolley. Just minutes after the devil predicted his imminent decapitation, at the beginning of the novel.

It turns out that there is a Moscow group of M&M fans and cosplayers dedicated to that great work of literature and they had a display set up at the con. As if I needed another reason to love Russians!

A panel with Sally Green and Nick Perumov.  Ms Green is the author of the very popular Half Bad YA series and Nick's books have sold millions of copies worldwide, though only one title has been published in English. It was held in English and about half of the audience knew the language well enough that they didn't need wait for the translator to have a full understanding of what we all said. Nick, oddly enough, was made the moderator/interviewer, but he managed to slip in some of his own ideas via the questions.

The room was pretty much full -- and this during the media half of the con. The Russians remain ahead of us on the reading front. Our government should probably fund a massive program for us to catch up.

Fiction Writing Contests. There were several. I was volunteered to enter the Write a Story in an Hour contest, and I managed to do so -- just barely. When the story is posted online, I'll blog about it in more detail.

Hanging With the Esli Editorial Staff.  I've had a number of stories published in Esli (the name means "If") over the years, and it's always been a pleasure. The magazine closed in 2012, due to distribution problems, but re-opened last year and looks to be going strong. This is a good thing. Every time I receive a contributor's copy of the magazine, I look over the stories I cannot read and sigh with longing.

The Sunday night banquet. It was zakuski, basically. Lots and lots of little plates of favorite foods, the sort of things that Russians eat at home. Accompanied, of course, with conversation. Among the many people I met there was a professional sports-fisherman -- the best in the world, his friend said proudly. I, being quite possibly the worst fisherman in the world, experienced a moment of fear when we shook hands, that physical contact would cause us both to cancel each other out.

And there was much, much more. I'll most likely write more here soon. Right now I have to see if I can do something about this jet lag. A nap may well be involved.


Above: GUM Department Store as seen from Red Square. I was fortunate enough to walk through the Resurrection Gates at the exact moment when the light was perfect. The airship is by the quite wonderful Tom Kidd. It was photoshopped in by Sarah Smith. The image is posted here with their permission. my own, of course.

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The Grand Roscon Award

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Strange but happy news. I'm just returned from Moscow, where I attended Roscon, the Russian national science fiction convention. One thing they do at national science fiction conventions is to give out awards. In Russia, it's the Roscon Award... for Best Novel, Best Short Story, and so on. I'll be sharing those results as soon as a friend forwards them to me.

One of them I know already, however. It's the Grand Roscon Award for achievement in science fiction. Which this year went to... me.

You have no idea how humbling it is to receive such a thing in a country that is home to Isaac Babel, Victor Pelevin, Anna Akhmatova, and the Strugatsky Brothers.

And now back to battling jet-lag. I'll have more to say about Roscon in the coming week.

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