Victorian Era

"On Dec. 8, 1881, a fire consumed Vienna's elegant Ringtheater during an opera performance. Hours later, when nearly 400 bodies had been removed from the smoldering ruin, the policeman heading the recovery operation reported to the emperor's famously tender-hearted cousin, Archduke Albrecht, 'All saved, Your Imperial Highness.' In old Vienna, one maintained a good facade no matter how awful the truth."

-- Barrymore Laurence Scherer, Wall Street Journal, March 30, 2011

Fascinating.

Yog-Sothoth

An audio treat can be found at Pseudopod.org.

http://pseudopod.org/2009/06/20/flash-stepfathers/

I laughed. I laughed more. I learned nothing about life. The writing was excellent.

You can listen live or download it for your mp3 player. They also have a podcast, if you want to hear a horror story each week. Their usual story is not as humorous as Stepfathers, however.

Nature of God

I read an editorial today about a debate between Christopher Hitchens and Heather Mac Donald as to whether Christians are evil or merely stupid and unthinking. It reminded me of a debate from Catch 22 between Yossarian and his lover, Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife. The whole scene is great, but I'll start just before the punch line. Yossarian is talking about God.

-----------------------

'You know, we mustn't let Him get away with it. Oh, no,we certainly mustn't let Him get away scot free for all the sorrow He's caused us. Someday I'm going to make Him pay. I know when. On the Judgement Day. Yes, that's the day I'll be close enough to reach out and grab that little yokel by His neck and --

' 'Stop it! Stop it!' Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife screamed suddenly, and began beating him ineffectually about the head with both fists. 'Stop it!'

Yossarian ducked behind his arm for protection while she slammed away at him in feminine fury for a few seconds, and then he caught her determinedly by the wrists and forced her gently back down on the bed. 'What the hell are you so upset about?' he asked her bewilderedly in a tone of contrite amusement. 'I thought you didn't believe in God.'

'I don't,' she sobbed, bursting violently into tears. 'But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just God, a merciful God. He's not the mean and stupid God you make Him out to be.'

Normal or Paranormal?

My wife, Julia, sometimes reads paranormal novels. Last night she was particularly piqued at one that she was reading. She was thinking of putting it down because it was so derivative of another that she had read. The protagonist was "Mary Sue," who can do anything. In addition, too many subplots cluttered the book. Finally, Julia thought that the author had a big problem with telling and showing.

Here is a description and a pacing problem in a sliver of a scene. Raphael's brother tells him that a woman Raphael likes has been killed.

Blood drained from Raphael's face. "Renee?"

His brother raced down the stairs. When Raphael returned he looked grim. "Too late. There's people in front of the shop. She's been found."

Since the the first line has Raphael speaking, and the next line says, "His brother," the reader likely reads that Raphael's brother raced down the stairs. But no, Raphael has raced down the stairs. Another problem is that in one line Raphael races down the stairs, and in the next line he trudges back, without even a paragraph break or hint that time has passed.

The biggest "showing vs. telling" problem happened at an important place--the climax of the story. The story had been, in its own way, leading toward a huge battle. The battle started with blood and fur flying. Then we read this paragraph at the climactic moment of the climactic scene.

A loud snarling split the air. Her gaze whipped to the open doorway. Three large gray wolves entered the courtyard. Relief filled her. Damien's brothers joined the fight. It was soon over, and Adam and his clones were dead.

At the physical climax of the book, "It was soon over." Wow.

Let me say that I am not a fan of fight scenes that go on forever. But the climax of the book is no place for narration. That's got to be scene, baby, scene!

Originality

In Life on the Mississippi, Mark Twain wrote about his love for the river's beauty. But then he became a pilot.

The river transformed into currents that revealed the bottom contours, snags to navigate by, depth measurements at crossings, portents of future weather on the wind and in the clouds, and everything else that went into his two years of training to be a pilot. He could no longer see or hear the river's poetry.

We cannot write anything that is original. I realize this, but I slipped. I thought I had written something original. But now I see that Mark Twain nailed the point that I explored in my poem, Scholar. He even discussed how a doctor would see a beautiful woman as the sum of her hideous parts.

Damn you, Mark Twain!

Desperate Attempts

I previously mentioned that I am reading Empires of the Sea. I just found something that interested me greatly.

In 1565 the Ottoman Empire decided to push into the western Mediterranean. In order to do this, they had to take Malta from the knights of the Order of St. John. Jean Parisot de La Valette led the Order of St. John.

The knights faced long odds. On the heights, the Turks took Fort St. Elmo over a period of weeks amid scenes of thousands of men burned alive by oil and pitch, killed by musket (arquebus) and cannon, and mutilated by the sword. Both sides tortured prisoners to death and massacred the helpless in combat.

After St. Elmo, the Turks laid seige to the other two fortresses on the island, replaying the carnage.

Here is the quote about La Valette that fascinated me (p. 163).

The grand master was seen everywhere, accompanied by two pages carrying his helmet and pike, and by a jester, whose duties included informing him of what was happening at various posts and "trying to amuse him with his quips--although there was little enough to laugh about."

Amazing.

Lepanto

I love the poem, Lepanto. Maybe it is a guy poem, thick with war and heroism. The poem is written about the battle of Lepanto, at which the western fleets crushed the Ottoman navy, halting their westward expansion.

I am currently reading Empires of the Sea, written about that struggle between the Ottomans and the Christian west. If you have any love for history at all, you would enjoy the book. Roger Crowley, the author, brings the scene to life. He does an excellent job of hopping around the landscape, giving the reader a complete appreciation of the motive forces behind the two empires.

Crowley's writing is smooth. The pages slip by and the reader wants more. And the more I read, the more the poem comes to life for me.

"All for the Best"

I loved the poem on this page.

I'll say no more.

Intertropical Convergence Zone

Chiaroscuro's issue 37 contains Nadia Bulkin's Intertropical Convergence Zone. ICZ puts us in the position of the assistant to the General who takes over a Pacific Rim country. The narrator travels into familiary literary territory--from seeing the General as the only hope, to seeing the General as only being somewhat better than the opposition.

But the story is really about how the assistant begins as a believer and is sucked into grey areas until he has fully crossed into the black. It is about losing one's soul in a cause that seemed good at the time. And, in fact, though the end result for the general population may still be preferable, the individual sacrifice (in the most literal sense) required is much too great.

**The Spoiler at the bottom goes here***

ICZ is an excellent journey into a living hell, by one who had only the best intentions.











***Spoiler***
My favorite parts of the story were the images of innocence and corruption. Under the guidance of a shaman-type the general eats a bullet that killed a powerful enemy. He eats a powerful talisman that the assistant killed an innocent person to obtain--in the heat of combat. He eats the liver of an animal that the assistant coldly obtained by murdering a helpless innocent. Finally, he eats the assistant's daughter's heart.

When the general begins to draw pictures for the narrator that the daughter previously drew, the narrator's sense of damnation is palpable.

Light and Dark

Over my lifetime I read a few short stories here and there, but mostly stuck to novels.

I would be pleased to continue reading and writing novels, but to establish writing credentials, I think I have to publish short stories. I enjoy writing short stories, but I agree with Orson Scott Card--it takes about as much conceptual work and research to write a short story as to write a novel, and novels are so much more lucrative.

To learn more about short stories, I seek the best speculative fiction short stories and learn from them. Even among the best collections I find many stories that I consider marginal. Naturally, every story is not for every reader but, in my opinion, some bad writing sits in high places.

Chizine: Treatments of Light and Shade in Words, publishes excellent dark speculative fiction short stories and poetry.

Kirt Dinan's Longtime Gone won Chizine's short story contest in 2007. I read it last week. It grabbed me and held me. It took me into another world. It was not strictly constructed on scenes, as I prefer, but it absorbed me--the best short story I have read in a long time.

Enjoy.

Review, Really!

I have just read a story by an author who, in my view, gave me a realistic view of Jurassic Park. My favorite story in the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction's July issue is The Dinosaur Train, by James L. Cambias.

There are few dinosaurs in Cambias's world. Of course Disney has some. And the teen protagonist's grandfather owns a dinosaur circus. When one of grandpa's dinosaurs gets sick, he feeds her a concoction containing some leaves and Dr Pepper, as instructed by the woman who sold him the dinosaurs decades before.

The dinosaur throws the Dr. Pepper concoction up at a performance of the circus show. At another time a scientist says that it sounds like the dinosaur has a spleen infection like he recently saw and diagnoses a common antibiotic. That is exactly how doctors work. "Hm, sounds like it's probably X. Try the usual solution."

Cambias writes about real people dealing with a mostly unknown creature. Cambias's scientists sound like real doctors, not like Crichton's supergeniuses.

Another realistic aspect of Cambias's story is the way that the dinosaur circus drew huge crowds decades ago, when dinosaurs had just been rediscovered, but now the circus is limping along amid a public that has accepted and grown bored with dinosaurs. The unjaded children are the biggest fans, along with the very old, nostalgic fans. Perfect.

Cambias's characters are real. Grandson ready to choose a career, favoring inheriting the dinosaur circus, while his father counsels education. Grandpa, who has spent decades standing up against a government that is looking for an excuse to confiscate his dinos, thinking they can do a better job (I love it!), has been hardened into unreasonable stubborness. Yes, he is the biggest dinosaur of all.

The writing is smooth. The story structure is strong.

I loved it.

Poison Victory

I have always enjoyed history. Among the many areas of history that I love, war is a favorite. From Thermopylae to Predator drones, I enjoy learning about war.

As a young teen, I read B. H. Liddell-Hart's Strategy, Rommel's memoirs, A Stillness at Appomattox, etc.

In elementary school and jr. high my friends and I enjoyed chess. In high school I quickly made friends who played wargames, mostly by Avalon Hill. We played Panzerblitz (German forces on the Russian Front), Third Reich (entire European/Mediterranean theater WWII), 1776, Squad Leader, and lots of others.

In July's issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Albert E. Cowdrey's short story, Poison Victory, brought back all those post-game discussions with my friends. What if Manstein had reached the gates of Moscow before winter? What if Rommel had not been on leave during the Normandy invasion? And so on.

Poison Victory is set in 1949 at a time when the Germans have conquered Russia and Hitler is on his deathbed. By the time Cowdrey delivered the extended war flashback, I was dying to know what elements of alternative history he had introduced.

Cowdrey puts a bright young officer in General Paulus's command at Stalingrad. Due to officer's knowledge and initiative, the battle of Stalingrad is won and the Germans win the war. All that remains is limited Russian partisan resistance supplied by America (I think Kruschev is a partisan leader, though the reference to him is scant).

Poison Victory is excellent. Cowdrey's background in history and the military, as well as a first class speculative fiction resume, qualify him to deliver this smooth, clean story. It is near perfect.

If forced at the point of a panzerfaust to demand more from Cowdrey, I would ask that he develop his leading female character more, so that I could have felt the weight of the fulcrum that lifted the protagonist up and over the climax of the story.

Thank you, Mr. Cowdrey.

I'm Going Door to Door to Make You This Incredible Offer!

Fantasy and Science Fiction Magazine is one of the few top tier magazines in the genre. Right now the magazine is offering a special low price to bloggers like me. The price was right, so I bought it.

They also gave me permission to post the offer, so that readers of the blog can get the same offer. I get no reward from this. F&SF will not pay me anything for advertising. I post this so that my readers can get the reduced price if they want.

Regular offer: https://www.toybox.ca/fsf/blog-buy-sub.htm

PayPal: http://www.sfsite.com/fsf/blog-subscribe.htm

I Love Librivox

Librivox is one of my favorite pasttimes. They take public domain books and make audiobooks from them. First of all, I like audiobooks. When the body is too busy to read, listening to an audiobook is an excellent diversion.

Second, I like Librivox's unusual selection. There are classics that you may not have read, such as Murders in the Rue Morgue and Dracula. There are out of the way works by great authors, like Mark Twain's European travelogue, The Innocents Abroad.

And third is my own odd pleasure. I download books that I want to hear over and over and over until I can quote from them extensively, including The Prince, by Nicolo Machiavelli; The Art of War, by Sun Tzu; and Democracy in America, by Alexis de Tocqueville (I downloaded Miyamoto Musashi's The Book of Five Rings from another site).

Lately, I have been listening to Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Economists have written about how the book can be interpreted as an economic and political allegory especially devoted to monetary policy at the turn of the century. Really! I am listening to the book to see if I missed any of the economic aspects of the book.

Dorothy follows a yellow brick road (the gold standard) wearing silver slippers (free silver movement of William Jennings Bryan). They go to visit a brilliant guy in the land of Oz (oz. is the abbreviation for ounce--as in, an ounce of gold). Oz is the emerald city--the color of greenbacks. But everyone is required to wear green glasses, so that the city looks green (that is, the value of paper money is an illusion that everyone participates in).

The wizard of the greenback illusion is an admitted fraud [they say "humbug"]. They demand that he give them a brain, heart, courage, and a trip to Kansas. He tells them he can't. They insist. He says that he can defraud them, so they agree. The gifts in the movie were different than in the book, but in any case, the gifts he gave were phony solutions. He says to himself, "How can I help being a humbug [fraud], . . . when all these people make me do things that everybody knows can't be done?" That is the politician's problem. The people demand that the government solve all their problems. The politician can solve hardly anything. So he gives the people phony solutions.

How does the wizard/politician leave the scene? He is carried away by an excess of hot air in his balloon.

So if you want some excellent free diversion with your iPod or your computer, I highly recommend http://www.librivox.org/.

Reading Old Sci-Fi

I bought Wastelands, a collection of "after the bomb" stories edited by John Joseph Adams. There are stories from Orson Scott Card, Steven King, Ophelia Butler, George R. R. Martin, and plenty of others.

Some stories are relatively new and some are old. It has been a long time since I read science fiction that was written a few decades ago.

One story that stands out as "old school" has two characters exploring a new, unknown place, casually chatting about their own society's distant history. Sorta' like this. "Hey, don't step on that. You know that the Mayflower Compact was important in U. S. historical development, but the Constitution is, overall, our current governing document."

I pictured a currently set story in which people speak in that manner.

"Jonah, get up, it's time for breakfast. Breakfast is our first meal of the day. I am going to make you a turkey sandwich. Nowadays, we often eat animals. Turkey is a bird--this one was raised for food, in fact. And it was fed on grains grown in large fields. Then it was cooked in a process using heat and packaged and sold to us. The turkey slices look nothing like a real turkey. Oh, and the bread . . . "

I cannot fault authors who wrote stories 30 years ago for writing stories in the way that . . . people wrote stories 30 years ago. Surely, 30 years from now people will look back at our stories with amusement at the way we now write.

Perhaps in 30 years, people will read today's stories and say, "See how almost every word of dialogue is meant to advance the story. People never talk like that! Nowadays we write in the same way that people speak, with sentence fragments and 'uh's,' and non sequitrs all over the place, and endless needless repetitions. Isn't it distracting how in those old stories, the author attempts to manipulate the reader through every twist and turn instead of slowly raising the story up around the reader in a truly natural way, like stories do today?"

I can hardly wait!

Reading

I am reading George R. R. Martin's Songs of Ice and Fire series. GRRM does a great many things right. Here is one of those things.

GRRM understands games quite well. He is able to have one player in the game establish a dominant position that seems secure. Then GRRM is able to convincingly show that the dominant position is balanced on the knife's edge, that perhaps will slice the dominant player in half.

The story of Robb Stark is especially poignant. Stark rallies a large part of the kingdom to himself, building a strong coalition. He uses excellent strategies in winning every battle that he fights. But because he releases a hostage from service, refuses to kill an important prisoner and forsakes his arranged marriage, he ends up losing his ancestral lands, having his forces destroyed, and being killed by treacherous friends.

Along the way, one interesting military game that takes place is as follows. Stark's army is at his relative's stronghold, between his enemy's army and his enemy's lands, all aligned east/west. Stark leaves the stronghold and goes to ravage his enemy's lands to the west. His enemy marches west to find Stark and defeat him. Stark's relative decides that he will not only secure his stronghold, but will stop Stark's enemy from pursuing Stark west . The relative is successful at stopping Stark's enemy.

So Stark's enemy gives up on pursuing Stark and joins the battle in the south, turning the tide and winning the kingdom. If Stark's relative had obeyed orders, Stark's enemy would have pursued Stark and the battle for the kingdom would have come out differently.

However, Stark could have also done a better job. Stark could have told his relative that his plan was to have his enemy pursue him west, so that the relative would not have tried to stop the enemy.

Robert E. Lee made the same kind of mistake before Gettysburg. He gave JEB Stuart, "the eyes of his army," non-specific orders which resulted in Stuart being out of position to contribute to the battle.

In scene after scene, I can almost picture the game theoretic decision matrix that underlies the action. I doubt that GRRM has any formal game theoretic training. He certainly has a clear knowledge of history and an abundance of common sense and logic.