The Voice of the Wolfe

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Over at MIT Technology Review, there's an interview with Gene Wolfe by Jason Pontin.  Gene never comes to these things with an agenda, so most of the weight in his interviews falls upon the interviewer -- how knowledgeable he or she is, how interesting the questions are.  So it's to Pontin's credit that he evoked such open responses as:

In The Book of the New Sun, I wanted to show a man who was raised to do terrible things and who reforms himself from inside. And so I thought up the Guild of Torturers and made the man a torturer. And in The Book of the Long Sun, I wanted to show another kind of man, brought up in a bad religion, working his way through it. So I came up with a fake religion in which the personalities of a long-ago tyrant and his family have been elevated to godhood in an artificial world.

and, when asked what self-deceptions being in the Korean War had stripped away from him:

Oh, that I was smarter than other people.

Which I am sure is going to be the source of recurrent arguments among Wolfe scholars for a long, long time to come.  Because, speaking as a smart person myself and one who knows many people much smarter than I am, Gene is one of the two or three smartest people I've ever met.  And yet... I can hear the sincerity in what he said.  He really means that.

I've got two theories as to what's behind that.  One is that he means something like "street smarts," the wisdom of one's everyday choices.  The other is that he's looking on human intelligence and seeing that sub species aeternatis, the range of human intelligence is not really that broad.  Both of these being valid observations.

You can read the entire interview here.

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Giving It Away

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There's this . . . thing going around on the Innertubes, part of a virtual scavenger hunt apparently, where people contact writers they've never met and ask them to write a 140-word flash fiction without offering to pay anything.  And a surprising number of writers oblige them.

That's the writer's option -- you're allowed to value your time and talent however you wish.  I have no beef with those who decide to do it just for fun or in order to do something nice for a stranger.

But it did occur to me that this might be a good time to provide you the simple rule by which you can decide whether or not to honor a request to write something for free.  This happens periodically.  Somebody contacts you to ask if you'll write a story for an anthology to benefit Bedbug Relief or whatever.  It seems a worthy cause.  You scratch your head.

Here's what you do:  Calculate how much that story is worth.  Ten cents a word is a good guess, if it's just an okay story.  (You don't want to donate one of your best because then you're throwing away all chances of being nominated for and possibly winning a major award.)  You lose all the intangibles of exposure in Asimov's or Analog, but what the heck.  Life is too short to worry about intangibles.

Now ask yourself:  Would you write a check in that amount for this particular cause?

If the answer is yes, writing the story makes eminent sense because the story's value is pre-taxes.  It won't add to what you have to pay into Social Security and you don't have to keep records in order to deduct it on your Form 1040.  Just give it away and forget it.

If the answer is no . . .  Well, the answer is obvious.

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Bad News From Japan

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This is not going to make you happy.  Studio Ghibli has announced that they will stop making new movies and focus on simply handling their copyrights.  Given the state of animation art today, the loss of The House That Miyazaki Built is far worse than the loss of Pixar or Disney would be.

Apparently, if you can read Japanese there's enough ambiguity in the phrasing of the announcement to hold out hope that the studio might yet rise from the ashes.  So I shall.  But it's a slim reed nonetheless.

You can read The Telegraph's article here.

The (translated) bare bones announcement can be found here.

And an analysis of the announcement concluding that moviemaking will resume someday can be found here.


And as always . . .

I'm on the road again.  Since I'll be traveling all day and exhausted when I finally reach home, I'm posting my Monday blog the night before.


And as a footnote . . .

There remains one Studio Ghibli film yet to be released, When Marnie Was There. The trailer is more lovely than thrilling, but the movie was directed by Hiromasa Yonebayashi who made The Secret World of Arietty.  So it might well be splendid.

There's an article with Japanese language trailer here.

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The Brilliance of Satoshi Kon

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As always, I'm on the road again.  But for your entertainment and enlightenment, I'm providing you with a link to Tony Zhou's essay on the editing style of master anime artist, Satoshi Kon.

Satoshi Kon only created a handful of films before he died much too young.  Had he lived, there was the very real possibility of his eventually supplanting Hayao Miyazaki as the best animation artist of his time.

If you're not familiar with Kon's work, I strongly recommend Perfect Blue, Millennium Actress, Tokyo Godfathers, and (my favorite) Paprika.

Zhou's essay, abundantly illustrated with clips, should be required viewing for all aspirant film directors.  You can find it here.

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The Anxiety of Self-Influence

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Long ago, in a galaxy far away, William Gibson told Eileen Gunn that he had discovered the secret of writing:  “You must learn to overcome your very natural, and appropriate, revulsion for your own work.”

This is an extremely useful observation.  But it will only take you so far.  I'm working on the third and final novel of what will inevitably be seen as the Iron Dragon Trilogy and so I did a fast skim of the first two novels.

I didn't have to do this when I was writing The Dragons of Babel because it was not intended to be a sequel to The Iron Dragon's Daughter.  I didn't even decide that the two books were set in the same world until it was halfway written.  (In retrospect, this seems naive.  But it's true.)

So it was a new experience for me, comparing my half-formed notions of what I wanted to write to the finished products of my own imagination and a whole hell of a lot of work.

The result?  I was intimidated.  There were passages that were as good as I could make them.  Rereading them, it seemed like I couldn't hope to do as well.

This sounds like a fancy, a notion, but it's not.  I know at least one writer who gave up on fiction because he believed -- incorrectly, I'm convinced -- that he couldn't write as well as himself anymore.  He read his previous books and was too intimidated to go on.

The lesson to be learned from this was explained to me a third of a century ago by my pal Jack Dann.  "You have to learn to turn off your inner critic while you're writing," he said.

True words.  A story or novel is literally unpublishable until you finish writing it.  For one thing, it has no ending.  You must simply write as well and as honestly as you are capable of.  When it's done, you can turn on the critic and judge whether it's ready for the big time.  But while you're writing, just write.

End of sermon.  Go in peace.


Above:  Detail from the British cover by Geoff Taylor.  One of my favorite covers ever.

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An Unintentional Trilogy

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Here's a rule of thumb for authors' lives:  When we're at our most interesting, we're at our least productive, and when we're at our most productive we're at our least interesting.  When I'm sitting in a teahouse in Chengdu, talking with fellow writers from around the world, or staying in a small room just inside the Silver Gate of Diocletian's Palace in Split, I can guarantee you I'm not getting much writing done.  Conversely, when I'm pounding out five pages a day, I don't have much in way of interesting anecdotes to report.

Before Marianne retired, she used to come home from a long and busy day at the Bureau of Labs and say, "How was your day?"  To which I'd reply by lifting both hands and wriggling the fingers as if typing.

A writer's life can be glamorous and even exciting at times.  But not when he's writing.

All of which is my roundabout way of saying that I'm beginning to hit stride on the new novel.  I began it at the same time I began Chasing the Phoenix (now forthcoming from Tor Books) and set it aside when that novel (in which Darger & Surplus, with perfectly innocent intentions, wind up conquering Post-Utopian China) caught fire and demanded all my thought and attention.

On finishing Phoenix, I took a few months off to work on short fiction.  There's no real money in short fiction, alas, but I learned long ago that I was not put on this planet in order to become rich.  So I might as well do what I love.  Which includes not only novels but the short form as well.

But now the novel I set aside has caught fire and is demanding more and more of my time and attention and even love.  So I may or may not have interesting tales to share with you here in the coming months.  It all depends on how much time I can steal from my chief duty.

Up above is the cloth notebook dedicated to the novel, resting atop a rather large volume I'm reading for research.  Both resting, appropriately enough, on the dragon rug in my living room.


And because some of you will want to know . . .

This book will be my third and last dragon novel.  The working title was originally Mother of Dragons before a certain Old Pal of Mine decided to apply that title to a claimant to the throne of Westeros in his rather successful series of fantasy novels.  So I'll have to come up with something else.

Will the three books together comprise a trilogy?

Well...  I never intended them to.  But let's be honest.  That's how most readers will receive them.

Here's the brief history:

Twenty-some years ago I was driving to Pittsburgh and talking with Marianne about fantasy and locomotives.  I made a quip about the Baldwin Steam Dragon Works and she laughed.  We drove a mile or so down the Interstate and I said, "Write that down for me, please."

From that seed came The Iron Dragon's Daughter, the tale of a girl who'd been stolen by the elves and forced to work in a Dickensian factory, building dragons.  It was always intended as a stand-alone novel.  Sometimes a fan would ask for a sequel -- but I thought it would be too cruel to take Jane, who had escaped Faerie at last, and throw her back into the hopper of plot.

Then, roughly a decade ago, Marvin Kaye told me at a convention he was putting together an anthology of dragons stories and would like to have one with the same kind of dragon (mechanical, implacable, evil) as in my novel.  I didn't have any ideas for such a story and told him so, but promised that if I came up with one by his deadline, I would send it to him.

The day after I got home, as sometimes happens, the opening scene for exactly such a story came to me.  I wrote it down.  One thing led to another, and I had a novella.  So I sent it to Marvin, and it became part of The Dragon Quintet.  And I had the beginning of another novel.

In TIDD, Jane Alderberry's essential problem is that she's trapped in a world where she doesn't belong.  No matter what she tries, she cannot find a place for herself.   In what became The Dragons of Babel, however, Will le Fey does belong in his world and his task is to find a proper role for him to fill.  This novel too was written as a stand-alone.  But by merely existing, the first novel created a dialogue with the second.  In many ways, the two novels were the opposites of each other.

So now I had Thesis and Antithesis.  Synthesis -- the final volume of a (cough!) trilogy -- hung over the entire enterprise like a third shoe waiting to drop.  But I had no ideas for such a volume.  None at all.

More years passed.  At last, an idea came to me, a way of opening up the rich, self-contradictory world of Faerie in a direction orthogonal to the other two, one which raised the possibility of answering all the questions raised by the first two books, and achieving other goals as well.  So I began writing.  This one is going to be a stand-alone novel as well.  But it's inevitable that readers are going to think of it as the last third of a trilogy.

Now all that's needed is lots and lots of hard work.  And a new title.  I'm thinking of calling this book The Iron Dragon's Mother.  But maybe that would confuse readers?  I don't know.

If anybody out there has a brilliant suggestion, I'd be glad to hear it.

Above:  Top, my novel notebook atop a research book; bottom, notes.

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The Adventures of Mr. Chesterton and Yaa Asantewaa in China

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I'm in print again.  In China!  The story in question is "The Trains That Climb the Winter Tree," which I co-wrote with the brilliant Eileen Gunn, and which features murderous elves, a talking dog named Mr. Chesterton who is more than he appears, sibling loyalty, a toy train that carries the plot to the stars for a confrontation with a murderous avatar of Entropy, and the comic book adventures of Yaa Asantewaa Warrior Queen.  Among other things.  It's an odd story, if a warm-hearted one.  And the publication is Science Fiction World.

I could joke and say that Science Fiction World is my favorite Chinese SF magazine, given that so far as I know it's the only magazine in China dedicated entirely to science fiction.  But in fact, it's one of my favorite SF magazines, period.  I've had several stories published there, and it always elates me when it happens again.  I've even visited their offices in Chengdu.  Somewhere, I've got the photographs to prove it.

I was also, for a time, a monthly columnist for SFW, explaining the world of science fiction to young readers who were going to be taking an increasingly active part in that world.  So I feel that I'm a part of the magazine's extended family.  The strange uncle who shows up once a year and nobody is exactly sure how he's related, perhaps.

So, um, that's all I had to say, really:  That I'm happy and I hope you're happy for me too.

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