Undeserved Credit

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Did you know that Jules Verne didn't invent all of the things we credit him for?  A lot of them -- like the modern submarine -- were on the drawing boards of engineers and designers at the time he wrote about them.  He simply took the one step further of pretending that they already existed.

Ever since then, science fiction writers have had the pleasant perk of getting credit for things that other people did before the writers wrote about them.

The most recent beneficiary of this process?  Me.

NASA is currently testing the Environmentally Non-Disturbing Under-ice Robotic Antarctic Explorer robot probe.  The ENDURANCE is an underwater vehicle whose descendants may someday explore the deep oceans of Europa (and whose namers are the front-runner for this year's Tortured Rationale for Acronym Silliness Haward).  The news item in Space.Com mentions my own Mitsubishi robot turbot, which was used in "Slow Life" to explore the oceans of Titan.

Very cool.  I like it.  But let's be honest here.  I stole the idea from Mitsubishi.  As per the BBC News item about their most recent, museum-grade robot fish.  

And they're not alone.  China's making great strides on the robofish front.  As is MIT.  I wasn't able to find any web footage of Mitsubishi's cool new fish, but here's the YouTube footage of what the Boys from Cambridge were able to come up with:

Not that I mind getting credit for other people's hard work.  I get a big kick out of it.  Just so long as we're all aware of exactly who's doing the heavy lifting here.

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Diagramming Babel (Part 28)

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Diagram 28.  We're almost done with these things.  How will I fill my Wednesdays then?

From top to bottom, left to right, in four segments:

a) "Put the ring back"

b)

"Firestone -- 

capable of producing

heat.  One

wonders..."

friends

DS

E

                      Will

Fl.

WILL

WILL

WILL

OUTWARD

SECRET

CRYPTIC

Why is that drawer closed?

It contains he ring you tried 

to steal last time you were 

here.

How do you know?

E. told me.  We have brunch together.

(Absorbed.  Grinned.  "Why Dame Serena.  I believe

begin to think that you like me."

Horse hooky.

Annotations;

The diagrams came first, of course.  The bits of dialog are scribbled down, inspired by them. You can tell how quickly they were done by the way I never got around to b).

The diagram with W (Will) at the center maps out the relationships between characters.  In this section Will is interacting with DS (Dame Serena), E (not Esme this time, but Eitri), and Fl. (whose name I'll withhold for reasons of plot).    The section was feeling a little unmotivated, so I drew this diagram in order to define the relationships between DS, E, and Fl.  

Dame Serena, I decided was too aristocratic to have any significant relationship with Fl.  But Fl. and Eitri would have to be seriously in cahoots.  And -- here's the big revelation for me -- Dame Serena and Eitri were friends.  Aha!  From this came the bit about brunch.  Which revelation helped to define the formidable Dame Serena.

As for why Will should have three separate plotlines and why his outward arc should also be secret and cryptic . . . we're rushing into the end-game of the novel here.  This is not the moment to reveal that Norman Bates's mother is himself in drag.

Et un bon mouche . . . 

In the April issue of F&SF, which arrived in my mailbox this morning, is a review by James Sallis of my What Can Be Saved from the Wreckage?:  James Branch Cabell in the Twenty-FIrst Century.   Most of the review is a graceful synopsis of the argument (particularly useful since so few people will see the book), peppered with a few bits of information from Sallis's own horde of lore (such as the fact that Heinlein described Stranger in a Strange Land as a Cabellesque satire).  It concludes:

Cabell is a problematic author, and to all appearances was a difficult man, but for those interested in learning more abut Cabell there can hardly be a better or more readable beginning than Swanwick's monograph.

All of which I mention not to promote the book (it hardly needs it), but to marvel at receiving so positive and intelligent a review for something that was published in an edition of 200.  Sometimes the world is full of pleasant surprises.

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This Gliterati Life

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It's still High Promo Season, and so I'm out flogging The Dragons of Babel every chance I get. Last Friday I did a reading for Philly Fantastic, the local monthly series currently being held in the Center City Barnes and Noble. There was a snowstorm that day and the turnout was light, so instead of adapting a chapter of the novel, I read a shorter piece, "The Scarecrow's Boy," which I'd originally written for Boskone.

Afterwards, as is traditional for Philly Fantastic, everybody went out to dinner together. After various small adventures, we wound up at the Pen and Pencil Club, a private club for journalists and their friends.

Now, when you think of a club -- of a Philadelphia club in particular, because this is an old, old club town -- you probably think brandy snifters, butlers, and leather armchairs. Not so for the Pen and Pencil. It serves a scruffier, more ink-stained ilk. Note the sign above. It reads:

NO CREDIT CARDS
NO BUD
NO RED BULL

I think I've found my home.

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Brezhnev's Cadillac

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I googled Brezhnev and Cadillac the other day and discovered, to my dismay, that Friday's entry was the second item to pop up.  Worse, the best part of the story was nowhere to be found.

So, because apparently it appears nowhere else on the Web, here is a very short (but absolutely true!) version, courtesy of Professor Sergei N. Khrushchev and my own less reliable memory:

Brezhnev loved and collected fine automobiles, so when Richard Nixon came to Moscow for a summit in 1972, he requested as a present a black Eldorado Cadillac, which apparently he considered the best car in the world.  When it was presented to him, he happily got in behind the wheel.  Then he said that Nixon should get in beside him.  And when Nixon did, off he drove!

For three hours, while the security people fretted, the head of the Soviet Union drove the head of the Free World through Moscow and into the surrounding countryside.

True story.

Sometime after the summit was over, it was discovered that for proper operation the Caddy required a grade of gasoline not available in the USSR. So Brezhnev's people had to wire the Americans for a barrel.

True coda.

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"Khrushchev? Isn't he a Russian novelist?"

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I won't embarrass him by telling you which of my twenty-something friends guessed that Nikita Khrushchev was a Russian novelist. I'm just glad that things are so changed that he could make that mistake.

When I was young, Khrushchev was a terrifying figure, the man who thumped the table at the UN with his shoe and cried, "We will bury you!" He meant that economically the USSR would leave the West in the lurch, apparently, but it sure didn't feel like that at the time. So when I heard that his son, Professor Sergei N. Khrushchev, was giving a lecture at Rowan University's Glassboro campus on the Cold War, off I went.

I'm writing a novel set in Russia, after all.

The lecture was a benign history of his father and Detente, with an emphasis on the Cold War as a natural thing, countries competing for influence the way plants compete for sunlight. (One man, of about my age, in the audience, called his take "a fairy tale.") For those who lived through it, there were a number of familiar stories -- Brezhnev's Cadillac, and Kosygin discovering that the hot line was not a telephone but a teletype, for two -- and the sort of overview most of use to students unsure as to whether Kosygin was a novelist or a brand of vodka. But there were a couple of interesting tidbits to be gleaned from it:

Khrushchev (who was at Stalingrad, remember) could not stand to watch war movies. They gave him nightmares. He told his son that the movies lied -- that wars were dirtier, bloodier, more brutal, and more dangerous than that.

A young woman asked Sergei Nikitovich if he'd ever met Stalin, and he said that once when he was university student, he was in Red Square for a ceremony, and Stalin was on the reviewing stand atop Lenin's Tomb. He and his friends jumped up and down, shouting, "Comrade Stalin! Comrade Stalin!" and Stalin looked down and waved, saying, "Hello, there." Then the professor smiled down from the stage and said, "So you met me, I met him."

And I got to ask a question I've been wondering about for most of my life: Whether there was anybody in the upper levels of the Soviet Union lobbying for a preemptive first strike against the US, the way that Curtis LeMay and Edward Teller did here for one against the USSR. No, he said, because the United States had a numerical superiority in nuclear weapons of 9.5 to 1. Against those odds, even the hawks weren't willing to risk it.

Afterwards, I bought one of the professor's books and shook his hand. So I am now only two degrees of Kevin Bacon from Stalin.

And you, if you've met me, are at the very most three.

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Diagramming Babel (Part 27)

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Diagram 27.  This was going to be diagram 28, but when I looked at the one I had slotted for this week I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it.  Sorry.  With my handwriting, it’s a miracle I can decipher anything from my notebooks.

This diagram appears to map out Chapter 18, “In the Shadow of the Obsidian Throne.”  Have I mentioned already that the Obsidian Throne, which in its earliest references was merely a signifier for the kingship, turned out to be something far nastier?

From bottom to top:

W

F

ACT 1

“The Midnight Garden

 X

ACT 2.

“Wings

 ?

ACT 3

False escape

 Ff

the fetch

ACT 4.

True escape

 the fetch

F

ACT 5

Aftermath

 

Annotations:

Yes, if I were mentally structuring this as a play, it should have been five scenes, rather than five acts.  But I was chiefly putting myself in the right mindset here.  Something formal and even stately was what I was looking for.  I would’ve made it a gavotte, but I don’t have the vocabulary of dance at my fingertips.  Note that four of the five sections begin with Will encountering a new character and four of the five end with that character’s departure.

The jumps of Dame Serena’s line over those for the fetch (Ff), and F indicate that she doesn’t directly interact with them.

Since the book is reaching toward its conclusion here, I’ll have to be coy.  W is Will, as always, and X was surely Dame Serena, apparently at that point not yet given a name.  The question mark indicates that I still had no idea of how she and Will were going to interact.  But I knew that, as is so often the case with Will and women, he was going to be seriously out of his depth.

You can tell by how legibly this is written that I was in no hurry to start writing that day.  You can tell by the tightness of the structure that I knew most of what was to be done.  So, pretty obviously, I had written most of the Midnight Garden section and was mapping out the entirety of the chapter to see where my problem was.  And, as it turned out, it was in that circled question mark, where awaited the encounter between Dame Serena and Will. 

This diagram achieved two things:  It identified the problem area of the chapter, and it held out the promise of smooth sailing and fast prose, once I got past it.  Since I’m self-employed, you might think of it as a reprimand from the boss followed by the promise of a raise once the job got done.

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How Well Do You Know Greer Gilman?

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I'm fresh back (or, rather, not so fresh at all -- distinctly wasted, in fact) from Boskone, where one of the highlights was a panel titled "Moonwise of Babel," and described in the pocket program simply as "Two fantasists discuss matters that are intensely interesting to them."  Those two fantasists were Greer Gilman (author of Moonwise) and me (author, as you may remember, of The Dragons of Babel).  We discussed fantasy, mythology, and each other's work, and in the course of the hour, a sort of mini-autobiography of Greer emerged.

The conversation was recorded by Farah Mendelsohn and will eventually be published in Foundation.  In the meantime, those who think they know Greer Gilman can test themselves against the following brief four-question quiz:

1.  In her senior year of college, Greer changed her major to English, despite getting straight As in her prior studies.  What had she been studying?

2.  At Cambridge, Greer received a starred first for what field of endeavor?

3.  Greer's first post-collegiate job lasted for seven years.  What was she doing?

4.  Why did she lose that job?

Time's up!  Put down your pencils and close your blue notebooks.  Here are the . . .

Answers:

1.  Biology and genetics.

2.  Practical Criticism.

3.  She was a nanny.

4.  For writing Moonwise.  She lived in her employers' house and the clacking of her mechanical typewriter for hours every night eventually drove them mad.

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