Home from China

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And did I walk upon the Great Wall?

Yes, children, I did.

I was on one of the restored/reconstructed sections, obviously. But it was still a moving experience and possibly the one single experience that the traveler to China must have or else regret missing forever. Samuel Johnson (did you know?) was among the many who yearned to see the Great Wall but could not. As James Boswell recorded:

“Johnson once talked with uncommon animation of traveling into distant countries; and that an acquisition of dignity of character was derived from it.  He expressed a particular enthusiasm with respect to visiting the wall of China. I catched it for the moment, and said I really believed I should go and see the wall of China had I not children, of whom it was my duty to take care. ‘Sir, (said Johnson,) by doing so, you would do what would be of importance in raising your children to eminence. There would be a lustre reflected upon them from your spirit and curiosity. They would be at all times regarded as the children of a man who had gone to view the wall of China. I am serious, Sir.'”

The wall was, as you can probably tell from the photograph, thronged with tourists, almost all of them Chinese. The young bounded onward, pausing every now and then to take a selfie. The old clutched the rail, climbed a step at a time, and took frequent rests. Somewhere in between, I ascended through four guard houses, rising to the highest point visible from where I started.  Occasionally, Chinese tourists would stop me with a request that I pose with them for a photo.  Not, obviously, because I was so famous there that they recognized me but because anyone of non-Asian descent is in most parts of that country a sight worth seeing.

Halfway up my trek, a crowd almost stopped all forward passage.  There were three young women, quite lovely and very dark-skinned, having their pictures taken. Tourists would thank them and leap back into the crowd, to be replaced by someone new wanting to record his or her glancing meeting with them.  I had to admire their courtesy to utter strangers.  They were remarkably good sports about a situation that must have happened to them quite a lot.

When I got to the furthest point in my excursion, I could see the wall stretching out ahead, down and then up again to the next mountain ridge and felt the urge to go on and on, deeper and deeper into China.  But that wasn't practical.  So instead -- and I realize this was whimsical of me, but we are all allowed our foibles now and then -- I clutched the cold stones of the wall, every one of them scratched with the names of visitors, overwhelmingly in Chinese.  I stared out into the mountains and at the Great Wall stretching ahead of me.  And I whispered to the unheeding air, "Sam, I am here."


And I've got a lot of catching up to do, so . . .

The Great Firewall of China is no joke.  I could not update my blog during my journeys in China. So I'm going to be doing a series of posts retracing my steps across that great nation, starting this Wednesday with my return to Chengdu.

In between, if I can find the time, I'll be posting non-Chinese blogs.  Just because there's a lot of stuff going on.

Stay tuned.

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Where's Michael?

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As always, I'm on the road again.  This road trip, however, will be even more extroardinary than usual.  Marianne and I will be spending almost three weeks in China with a group of friends that includes Ellen Datlow and Eileen Gunn.

Let me repeat that: China.

The next three weeks will either be a series of nightly or near-nightly exuberant posts on the wonders of that great land... or else a monotonous unchanging view of the map above, I don't know which.  The Great Firewall of China is no myth.  On my first visit I discovered that I could not even see this blog, much less update it.

But I think I have a work-around.  I've got a son in the States and IF his email account is accessible and IF he has the time and remembers the passcodes AND the Sun and Moon and Planets all align... Then you can share my adventure with me.

Fingers crossed, guys!

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Lehl jsem si na kámen osamění a už se nevrátím

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I'm in Czech print again!  My story "For I have Lain Me Down on the stone of Loneliness and I'll Not Be Back Again" appears in the November 2014 issue of XB-1, a zine that make me rue my monolinguality every time I see an issue.

I wonder how much trouble the opening epigram gave the translator. It's an old song or poem by our old friend Anonymous called "The Irish Dancer, " which goes:

Ich am of Irlaunde,
And of the holy londe
        Of Irlande.
Gode sire, pray ich the,
For of saynte chairitéCome ant daunce with me
        In Irlaunde.

A French editor once told me that I am second only to Howard Waldrop in being deeply hated by his translators.  Late one night, he told me, he got a call from one who was in tears because she was unable to discover what Mötley Crüe meant.

"It's a band," he said.


Above: The title of this post is, of course, the story's title in Czech.

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My First Comics Script

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One of the first things a novice playwright has to learn is that if a character is to age or reappear in different costume, the events on stage must go on long enough without him/her for the necessary costume or makeup change.  It's not as glamorous as the arranging of incident and emotion, but without it the play simply will not work.

A few months back, I wrote my first comic book script.  It's for a Locust Moon Comics/Dark Horse Comics anthology, a sequel to Once Upon A Time Machine. Which will feature Greek myths and legends retold with a science fiction twist.

What have I learned so far?  Some obvious things, of course.  The dialogue has to be concise, to avoid filling the panels up with words. A wordless panel or one with a single word or short sentence can have enormous power -- but when you've only got so much space to work with and a great deal of information to convey, you have to use that trick sparingly.

Less obviously, the process of writing a story is very different when it has to come out to a specific number of pages. With a prose story, I simply let the story find its own length.  For the script, however, the story I set out to tell was too long, so its plot and intent and outcome had to be changed completely in order for it to flow properly.  Most surprisingly for this tyro, the bottom of each page had to be stronger, more emphatic than the top or middle, so that the reader would carry a clear understanding of exactly what's happening to the next page.

I expect to learn a lot more when the book comes out and I get to see my words transformed into images.  But that won't be for a while yet.  The stories are still being drawn.


And a word about the coming month...

On Saturday, Marianne and I fly to to China with a group of friends including Ellen Datlow and Eileen Gunn.  We'll be gone for most of April.

If I can, I'll keep my blog updated.  It's quite possible I'll be blogging more than usual -- I'll certainly have a lot of wonderful things to blog about.  But it's also possible that I won't be able to.  The Great Firewall of China is not a myth.

Wish me well, and keep your fingers crossed!

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Living the Glitterati Dream

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Sometimes everything comes together.  You walk out on stage, you hit your mark, and the audience loves you.  That's how Saturday's event celebrating the "Philadelphia Issue" of Asimov's Science Fiction went.

A good-sized crowd turned up, and a distinguished one. How distinguished? There were more writers in the audience than at the table, along with fans, academics, and folks of serious accomplishment in unrelated fields.  Everybody on the panel was witty and nobody hogged the microphone.  Afterward, enough copies of the magazine were sold to make the Barnes & Noble people very happy indeed.

That's us up above.  Left to right: Gregory Frost, Your Humble Narrator, Sheila Williams, Fran Wilde, Emily Hockaday, and Tom Purdom.  For those who don't already have the April/May 2015 Asimov's, it contains Fran's “How to Walk Through Historic Graveyards in the Post-Digital Age,” Tom's "Day Job," and a wonderfully light-hearted romp penned by Greg and myself, titled "Lock Up Your Chickens and Daughters -- H'ard and Andy Are Come to Town!" 

Believe it or not, we even had one of the protagonists of a story present.  Andy Duncan, who is one half of the inspirations for my collaboration with Greg (the other is Howard Waldrop), spent most of an hour with a slightly bemused expression as he autographed our story.

If you've been paying attention, that's seven autographs obtainable (for those who quite sensibly got the editor and editorial assistant to sign their issues) for the price of a single magazine. Which then became quite a neat little snapshot of a moment of literary history, a gathering of individuals which will never be recreated in the same configuration.


Above:  Photo by M. C. Porter.

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[dream diary]

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March 26, 2015:


Dreaming, I witnessed this exchange.

Kid: I brought you a half a bag of coffee.

Man: Thanks.

Kid: Hey, hey, hey, hey! That's not a gift. It'll cost you two dollars. That's a good deal.

Man: I'm sure it is. No dice.

Kid: I've also got a goat.

Man: I know you do. I've seen it.

Kid: It's yours for fifty bucks. I'll throw in the coffee free.

Man: What would I want with a goat? Forget it.

Kid: You can have them both for nothing if you just tell me one thing: Are you or are you not my father?

(Long silence.)

Man: I'll get my checkbook.

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Misha Cyberpunk Strikes Again!

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I'm in Russian print again!

If you've never been to Russia, you can't imagine how happy this makes me.  Russia is a wonderful-awful place, terrifying and beautiful, and it has owned a piece of my heart ever since the moment I first set foot on it.

Now Eksmo has published Dancing With Bears in Russian translation.  This is the culmination of the first cycle of the travels of Post-Utopian con men Darger and Surplus.  They met in "The Dog Said Bow-Wow," accidentally set fire to London, and then set off for Moscow to run their biggest scam ever.  Being infinitely distractible, however, they bounced around Europe for several years having adventures (only a few of which I've recorded so far), but always headed for Moscow.

And now, at last, they have arrived.


Oh, and that cryptic title above...?

I am not the only one to comment on how to an American my last name translated into Russian looks a lot like Cyberpunk.  Back in the late Eighties or early Nineties, in fact, I invented a character, a precocious teenaged Soviet hacker, who went by the handle Misha Cyberpunk.  Alas, though I could imagine him clearly enough, the story about him never came fully into focus.  The age of the heroic hacker came and went and even if I came up with a satisfying plot now, the story would be a period piece.  So "Red Star" will never be written.

But good old Misha never quite got put back in the box. So every time I'm published in Russia, I think of him.

End of explanation.

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