I have a story in April 2012’s issue of Schlock Magazine!
It’s “How to Kill a Cultureshifter,” a pulp “meta-adventure” about cultural ley-lines and transforming monsters. It’s a fun way to kill a half hour if you’re bored at work.
The rest of the issue has stories of reincarnation, transformation, and other changes in life. Check out everyone else’s work, too!
Cover image is copyright Jennings Falzon.
I read these two awhile ago, but putting my thoughts to “paper” has taken me some time for them.
If you’re unfamiliar with it, THE FOREVER WAR, the 1976 Best Novel, is Joe Haldeman’s “Vietnam in Space,” a fantastic anti-war opus that uses the disorientation and trauma felt by soldiers in an interstellar war as a metaphor for the disorientation and trauma of soldiers returning from the US’s war in Vietnam. Haldeman himself is a Vietnam veteran, and that personal experience with the horrors of war is certainly felt within the novel. It is particularly amazing how this book contrasts with STARSHIP TROOPERS, but I’ll save that for another time. THE FOREVER WAR uses time dilation from interstellar relativistic travel as a metaphor for the effects of having been in a war zone. Where soldiers returning from Vietnam may have felt isolated and traumatized by their experiences, the soldiers in THE FOREVER WAR are temporally isolated. In their experience, just a few months have passed, but in the decades or even centuries of time that have passed on Earth, a great many things have changed. One part of the novel is even titled “You Can Never Go Back,” which is about returning to Earth. This title is borrowed as a revolutionary slogan by Kim Stanley Robinson in his MARS books, interestingly enough.
FOREVER PEACE, though it shares a title and theme with THE FOREVER WAR, is not a sequel to Haldeman’s earlier winner. It won for Best Novel in 1998. It’s got a lot to do with drone-based warfare and how technologies that encourage empathy could eventually also promote pacifism. It’s also notable because it features an African American protagonist, though I can’t say that this book is really about the African American experience. I think that detail is just nice, since it adds some diversity. I’m tired of the assumption that white is the default main character skin colour.
I think you can compare these two books in a simple, useful way. FOREVER PEACE is an “idea book,” where compelling characters, technologies, and events interact in such a way as to make a point about human nature in the future. In this case it’s about peace. I don’t usually love books with that kind of goal, but that’s a matter of personal preference. It’s a skillfully crafted novel.
THE FOREVER WAR, on the other hand, is about the visceral emotional experience of being in a war situation, being pulled out of time, and being unable to relate to the greater cultural context of the war that you’re a part of. The feeling of having terrible things happen to you for reasons that society has long left behind. To give it a name, it’s an “experience book,” much in the same way that STARSHIP TROOPERS is an experience book. It’s to give you the feeling of having done something. In this case, it should convince most everyone that they really don’t want to have the experiences depicted. I gravitate toward this model much more easily; I feel like I’m being put in the shoes of the main character and getting a clear depiction of what he or she feels during the course of events.
I rather prefer the “experience book” model, but the problem is that it doesn’t always work well for idealistic books. If you want to write a novel about the end of all war, that’s an experience nobody’s ever had. So you’re stuck with the “idea book” model, which doesn’t always feel as real to me. As a result, THE FOREVER WAR stuck with me a lot more than FOREVER PEACE, though both were masterworks.
I’d like to introduce “Advice by Ada,” a tumblr written by one of my good writer friends, Ms. “EKG,” which does not, in fact, stand for “Electrocardiogram.” In this case.
Advice by Ada is an etiquette letter answering blog, much like “Dear Prudence” or “Dear Abby.”
But it is written by Ada Lovelace. And it is for robots.
It can be so difficult to navigate today’s culture, when you are a robot. Advice by Ada is here to help.
It feels important to me to keep cataloging my experiences as I try to read all of the Hugo Award-winning books. Before, I was kind of reviewing them, but I think it should be a little different than that. I’m beginning to see these books as my sensei in becoming a fully trained science fiction writer. Instead of having one master to teach me the techniques I need to learn, I have many.
Vernor Vinge is one of the masters who I feel a close affinity with. Like me, he is a scientist who balances his science fiction writing career with an actual academic science career. I see certain flourishes within his writing that betray both the commitment to detail as well as the appreciation of wonder which is common to many scientists.
But I also see other things, hard-won lessons that I can learn not only for my writing but for the kind of person I want to be. Let’s get it out of the way: I think both of these books are fantastic. They are in the same series, and share a charater. A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY is a prequel to A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, and set 20,000 years earlier. Still, I recommend reading them in publication order. The experience is more satisfying, and when you’re dealing with space sagas this sweeping, you don’t want to blunt the full force of the awesome.
But there are two characters who really struck me, one from each book, as different sides to the coin of having broad-based interests. In A FIRE UPON THE DEEP, the “Tines,” a race of pack-animals whose minds are spread across a pack of multiple creatures, one of these packs, Scriber, is a dilletante with bunches of actually rather good ideas, but who is ultimately ineffective and a tragic joke. They look crazy to his contemporaries, who are stuck in a middle ages level of technology, and he’s too unwise himself to bring them to fruition.
In A DEEPNESS IN THE SKY, there is the spider-creature Sherkaner Underhill, the veritable Einstein of his race, who has as many ideas from as many realms as the Scriber of the previous book. Except that Sherkaner has certain advantages that Scriber lacks. For one thing, Sherkaner meets people who have both the willingness and the wherewithal to research his ideas. So much depends on who we meet in life. For another, Sherkaner is careful, and patient. He sticks to his guns when it matters, and he knows when to admit he is wrong.
I’m a person who often has these “flights of ideas,” almost like a neurology patient with a tumor pressing on the part of his brain where stupid inventions come from. I am a scientist, and a writer, and a founder of an organization that seeks to be a public commons for information. Each of these characters is something I could become, if I make the right (or wrong) choices. It’s not the inherent dilletante creativity that makes Scriber so ineffective, nor is there something particularly special about Sherkaner that makes his ideas more likely to work. The difference is in how they approach actualizing their ideas. Through these two characters, I’ve learned an important lesson.
I’m posting this picture because I’m thinking a lot about the idea of chronic disease care in the 21st century (and beyond). Chronic disease are a huge problem, and they’re not something that I think has a lot of high-profile science fiction treatment, despite being a defining economic and political trend of our time.
So what do you guys think chronic disease care will look like in 50 or even 100 years?
When I was 11, my sister lived in New York City, on West 76th St. It was a big world to live in, much bigger than the sprawling suburban identity that my childhood was subsumed within. Where we had a small wood at the foot of a hill behind our house, she had a kitchen that would have been fired as a closet in Westchester.
I would go and stay with her for the occasional weekend, spending Friday afternoon on her candlewax-besodden laptop and then finding our way to some kind of religio-social event later that evening. Sometimes on those evenings, I would wander to what was then the largest bookstore I had ever seen, on Broadway.
The year before, I had been introduced to “large” books by a teacher who knew I was far beyond the short things she had the other students read on a weekly basis. In the course of fifth grade, I’d read WATERSHIP DOWN, A WIZARD OF EARTHSEA, THE HOBBIT, and DUNE.
I felt it was time to branch out and start picking the books on my own. After all, I was in SIXTH grade now. A veritable adult. I needed to establish my own preferences. So, in that palatial bookstore on the Upper West Side, I ventured past the “X-Phile” fan books and found my way into the world of commercial genre fiction, a world from which I have no desire to separate myself, almost 15 years later.
And the first book I picked up, the book I didn’t understand at all at the time, was BLUE MARS. I don’t remember why I didn’t buy the first two books of the series (RED and GREEN MARS), but for some reason my 11-year-old mind wanted to read this book about a fully developed Martian society.
And I read it, and didn’t understand even an iota of it. It was full of heady ideas. The technology I understood, and I thought it was just another sci fi novel where the author loses thought for his characters for love of scientific accuracy.
Now, as an “adult” I find myself reading RED and GREEN MARS for this Hugo-reading-quest I have undertaken. And in reading these, I’ve come to recognize the depth of character and human understanding that Kim Stanley Robinson betrays within this series.
And I wonder, how did I read BLUE MARS and not catch this? It makes me think of the children in GREEN MARS, which I am currently reading. They are born to these celebrities, famous settlers who have faded themselves into the background after the harrowing events of RED MARS. These children have no idea the cultural context for the events that have happened around them, having been simply an idea of their parents at the time of RED MARS. Much in the way that I was, reading BLUE MARS out of series, with no context for how these tired old scientists had struggled to build a world that left behind the problems of Earth. Older, wiser, still growing, I’ve come to appreciate it more.
This series has waited quite patiently as I’ve grown into it. I hope I continue to do so.
"Artificial Ineptitude," by John Skylar 
My first published story.
Thanks to the editors over at The Cynic Online!
It’s an old story of mine, and I think I’ve moved beyond it a bit as a writer, but I think it’s a story that needed to be told. I’m so happy to see it in print.
At NYCC, I went to a panel involving Cory Doctorow and Intel’s “Chief Futurist.”
During the panel, the idea of what it is a science fiction writer does—something that I think about and talk about basically all the time—was brought up.
The basic notion that the panelists put forward is that there’s nobody who should even try to predict the future, because for one thing your book ought to last and you’re going to be wrong, but for another thing, you want your message to be more than just “this is what is going to happen.”
Instead, Doctorow suggested that a science fiction writer, among other things, could steer the future. This runs a little different to what I’ve heard elsewhere. Other writers like to say that they write science fiction that’s actually about the present. In NEUROMANCER by William Gibson you can see some of that, with the feel that’s lot like the video game arcades of the 1980s. But that same book has elements that steer the future. Doctorow related that people tell Gibson all the time that he writes dystopian fiction, but when he looks back on 1984 he wonders why they feel that way. In the early 1980s he wrote a book about a future where the Earth hadn’t been destroyed by nuclear war. Seems pretty optimistic in that context, no?
The point is that the science fiction writer can load their present hopes into the writing, and their present fears, creating a future shaped by these uncertainties. You can take away all the possibilities that aren’t triumphant or terrifying, and leave only the future that has the most exciting rewards and the most dangerous risks. You can show people what the extremes lead to. It’s an interesting conception, and I think it bridges the gap between this notion of “predicting” and the other notion of “writing about the present.”
It looks like I left off posting Hugo award book reviews after I read SPIN, by Robert Charles Wilson.
I read PALADIN OF SOULS after I read SPIN, but I said I’d review HOMINIDS next, so that’s what I’ll do.
HOMINIDS, as you can see, is a Hugo award winner for Best Novel written by Robert J. Sawyer. It won the Hugo in 2003. It’s about a neanderthal from a parallel universe full of neanderthals who comes to the homo sapiens sapiens’ universe.
I think it’s interesting to line this book up against SPIN, because Robert J. Sawyer and Robert Charles Wilson are both prominent science fiction writers who are also Canadians. Since I’m a Canadian-American and I want to be a science fiction author too, I was really excited to read both of these books.
When I finished SPIN, I was blown away by its quality. When I finished HOMINIDS, I was glad it was over. It made me wonder how these two books could have won the same award. HOMINIDS had a lot of promise when I first started it…but then…it didn’t.
It fuses quantum mechanics with neanderthals and tries to portray scientists as real people, especially female scientists. All good…in principle. It fails in the implementation.
It fails at the quantum mechanics pretty spectacularly. It’s just scientifically wrong.
It treats the neanderthals as magic noble savages who have a perfect society because they don’t have religion, which really doesn’t have anything to do with neanderthals, does it?
It turns one of the female scientists into a complete sex object who uses her appeal to manipulate men, and it turns the other into a rape victim that it uses to justify its claims that the religion-free neanderthals are simply better for no apparent biological or anthropological reason.
And then the big, strong neanderthal physicist comes in to protect the little, weak rape victim, just like all men should, right?
I found the book’s politics and misogyny-disguised-as-feminism to be a big let down.
Wouldn’t read again.
Cover of Spin
Right, so the quest to read the Hugos continues.
I finished SPIN, by Robert Charles Wilson. Great book! It’s a mixture of hard science fiction and literary fiction. Strong characters and a world that obeys normal laws of science.
Unfortunately, this is often the exception in SF.
Beyond that, Wilson is a master of information control and when you turn the corners in his book, you see something of what you expected, but it’s never quite what you were bargaining for.
On to Sawyer’s HOMINIDS.
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