Fantastical Andrew Fox

Andrew | February 5, 2012

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Why Are YA Books Becoming More Popular With Adult Readers?

The question of my title is of more than passing interest to me, as I take the plunge into writing children’s books and young adult novels in 2012. Whereas sales for adult fiction titles have remained flat or declined in recent years, a good bit of that slack has been recovered in sales of YA books, as two news articles, one from 2008 and the other from 2010, make note of:

From “YA Books Gaining Adult Readers: Genre Lines Blur Between Adult and YA Fiction” (June 26, 2008, Lisa Rufle Suite 101):

“YA Book Sales Increasing Despite a General Decrease in Overall Book Sales

“From a publisher’s standpoint, it is clear that YA books are selling better than their adult counterparts. According to the Book Industry Study Group, sales of YA books have increased by 23 percent since 1993 while adult book sales have decreased in the same time period by one percent. Clearly there are a lot of people reading and buying YA books, and for the publishers this is a good thing.”

From “Can a Young Adult Fantasy Possibly Be the Best Novel of the Year?!” (March 16, 2010, Chauncey Mabe, Open Page):

“Last week the Los Angeles Times reported the startlingly good news that while adult hardcover sales declined almost 18 percent the first half of 2009, sales of children’s and young adult hardcovers soared nearly 31 percent. Before we celebrate an explosion in teen reading, though, it’s worth noting that many of those books were bought and read by adults.”

It’s that last line of the second article that catches my attention. Any visitor to a bookstore within the last couple of years (including Borders Books and Music in their final, dying months) could not help but notice the vastly increased shelf space and more prominent placement given to YA fiction. Articles focusing on the bookselling industry teem with anecdotes of adults reading YA bestsellers, such as the Hunger Games Trilogy, on subways and buses. I have my own suspicions why this trend has been gathering momentum, but I wanted to survey opinion across the trade journals and blogs to see what other commentators had to say. Here’s a bit of what I found, starting with more from “YA Books Gaining Adult Readers: Genre Lines Blur Between Adult and YA Fiction:”

“With the popularity of the Gossip Girl, It Girl and the Clique series, young adult books are becoming more widely read by adults, for their racy content and unique style. … Everything from homosexuality, rape, abuse, self-mutilation, mental illness/suicide, eating disorders and any kind of addiction imaginable became plots or sub-plots of YA novels.”

“YA Books are the New Chick Lit

“It was only a few years ago when the genre of ‘chick lit’ (novels geared toward 20-something females) was all the rage. It was difficult to pass a bookstore or turn on the television without hearing about Bridget Jones’ s Diary, The Devil Wears Prada or Sex and the City. … So what is it about the YA genre that has adults and teens alike flocking the shelves for the latest book in the Gossip Girl series? Mainly because it fills a gap that ex-chick lit readers have been hungry for.

“Consider the subject matter disclosed in a large majority of popular YA fiction, most of it resembles at its core, the things that made chick lit and other adult fiction so popular: a mix of social and societal trends and a light, easy-reading appeal. Factor in the steamy R-rated scenes and it’s easy to understand the appeal YA has on a large audience.”

From “Young Adult Novels Heating Up the Charts: Publishers, Stores Embracing Trend” (November 16, 2011, The Boston Globe):

“It all began with the Twilight series, which has the first of its two final movie installments, The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn – Part 1, hitting movie theaters this weekend. The book ignited a publishing industry trend that continues to see adults purchasing books written for teens. … [P]ublishers have had to define YA and pinpoint why the best-selling titles appeal to more than just one generation. … [I]t’s not only about having a teen narrator or main character, it’s about having characters who live in the moment. In an adult novel, ‘You’re reflective about why you behaved the way you behaved.’ But in YA, there’s no need for that kind of accountability. As Winchester young adult writer Elaine Dimopoulos bluntly states, it’s about self-absorption. Dimopoulos, who was last year’s children’s writer-in-residence at the Boston Public Library, has long been a fan of the YA model. ‘There’s almost an egocentric feel to the book. You’re deep inside the protagonist’s head,’ she says, explaining the appeal. … [Cambridge writer M.T.] Anderson, 44, believes one of the myriad reasons his peers in Generation X started turning to YA is to escape their destinies. ‘We as a generation are having trouble coming to grips with being adults.’”

From “Why Adults Read Young Adult and Children’s Literature” (September 21, 2010, Kansas City infoZine):

“The phenomenon of adults reading literature targeted toward younger readers is nothing new, [Philip] Nel said. He pointed to Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which were read by both children and adults when the books were published in the late 19th century. … Nel said this demanding characteristic of younger readers helps authors create some of the appealing qualities of young adult and children’s literature: attention to narrative, a powerful story, a sense of wonder, efficient story-telling and developed and credible characters. ‘I think in some ways literature for children can bring adults back to the pleasures of reading, because literature for children is much more connected to and invested in the pleasure of reading,’ Nel said. … ‘It’s not the “dumbing-down” of America,’ Nel said. ‘Children’s literature is always read by adults. They write it, edit it, market it, sell the manuscript for it. Children’s literature is universal.’”

From “Why Adults Should Read Young Adult Novels: The Top Five Reasons” (September 14, 2011, Bridgette Wagner, Yahoo! Voices):

Several of Wagner’s Five Reasons deal with enabling parents or those who work with teenagers to get a better perspective on how teens think and what sorts of issues they have to deal with, but it’s her fourth reason that resonates most with me:

“4. Many Times, These Books can be Easier to Read Through
If you are looking for a lighter, easier read, then a young adult book may be the best option for you. Depending on the genre and type of book you pick, you may find yourself with something quirky and fun, such as the ‘Mediator’ Series by Meg Cabot. Of course this isn’t true for all young adult novels, as many of them can be just as complex and thick as adult novels.”

These are all interesting explanations to ponder, and there is no reason why they can’t be simultaneously valid; social trends rarely are mono-causal. When I examine my own reading habits, I can track a definite change which occurred over my transition from a young single man to a married middle-aged man with three active children. When I was a single guy in my twenties, I could devote entire evenings and even full weekends to reading a novel, if I chose to (and I often did). I would take my latest big, thick novel or big, thick literary biography to lunch and dinner with me and to coffee shops in between meals, or sit on a park bench in nice weather and read for hours at a stretch. I was free to devote unbroken hours to devouring a text, giving it my full, undivided attention. The same remained true, to a somewhat lesser extent, when Dara and I were first married, but before Levi came along (it helped that Dara was also an enthusiastic reader).

When Levi was first born and I was helping with his feedings and spending a good bit of one-on-one time with him, I was still able to engage in a lot of intensive reading. During his first few months with us, I read all of the first volume of Shelby Foote’s massive three-volume history of the Civil War, and I have very pleasant memories of reading a couple of Barry N. Malzberg’s SF novels while sitting with Levi on our backyard swing, feeding him a bottle with one hand and juggling my book and mug of coffee with the other.

However, when Asher came along fifteen months later, I found my situation to be entirely different. Just as I had with Levi, I assisted with a lot of Asher’s feedings and spent a good deal of time with him on my lap. However, I also had Levi to deal with, and Levi had just started walking and running. Although I tried repeating my fondly remembered reading experiences while caring for Asher (at least starting the second volume of Shelby Foote’s trilogy), a few attempts made it clear this would be impossible — dividing my attention between the newborn on my lap and the toddler running around on the lawn and sticking twigs and bugs in his mouth meant there was no, absolutely no attention left over to devote to a book (not even a comic book). Judah joined the family twenty-two months later, and the demands on my attention became even more extreme. Putting the boys to sleep was a lengthy and enervating process, and more often than not I found myself with no focused consciousness left for reading at night (or I simply fell asleep in the boys’ bed). I spent almost five years doing hardly any pleasure reading at all.

Finally, this past summer, I cut the umbilical cord and made the boys start going to bed without my staying in their room with them. This freed up about an hour of reading time before I needed to go to sleep myself. As much as I missed the nightly physical closeness with my sons, I found this to be a delightful change and eagerly tackled many of the books I had put aside over the past half-decade. However, given that my newly freed-up reading time was much more limited than the unhindered, unrushed swathes of time I had formerly been able to devote to a book, I found myself judging which books I was willing to start in a different light. The big, thick books I had so blithely taken on in my twenties and thirties I now regarded with caution. After all, one of those eight-hundred-page behemoths could soak up a month or six weeks of my precious reading time. Also, given my increased family and work responsibilities, I might find myself needing to go a week or more without picking up a book, and if that book were overly convoluted or complex, I might lose the thread of the narrative in the meantime.

So I now choose any lengthy books very carefully, selecting only those I have an overwhelming desire to read. I mostly gravitate towards shorter novels, especially science fiction novels written between the 1950s and 1970s, when writers, aiming their novels at either paperback original publication or for serialization in one of the monthly magazines, kept their stories to under 75,000 words. This is a pleasing package for me in my current circumstances, in that I can finish a book in about five days and enjoy at least one complete reading experience per week.

I think the current offerings in the YA fiction field are satisfying many of the same reading needs which were once satisfied by the pulp fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s and the slim paperback originals of the 1950s through the 1970s, before massive books came into vogue. I suspect that many adults, particularly those with families or needing to work multiple jobs or engage in long commutes, enjoy reading for pleasure but find their available reading time chopped up into small, unpredictable chunks. They have neither the time, the focused attention, nor the energy required to fully engage with, say, the latest doorstop literary novel from Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen (and Mockingjay, the latest book in the YA Hunger Games Trilogy, handily outsold Franzen’s The Corrections in hardback). They may have given up reading fiction in favor of watching television or playing interactive computer games. But the emergence of a whole new genre of shorter, more tightly plotted, less discursive novels, featuring highly appealing protagonists faced with a host of (what were formerly considered) adult dilemmas seems to have brought a number of these lapsed readers back into the habit of reading for pleasure.

What do you think? Are any of you big readers of YA fiction (either fantastical or mundane)? Is it the shorter, more digestible length that appeals to you, or the adolescent protagonists, the more tightly focused plots, the salacious subject matter, or a combination of all the above?

Category: Book Love, Publishing | Tags: book business

Andrew | February 1, 2012

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The Good Humor Man Gets 9 Star Review

A very complimentary review of The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 appeared recently on the Canadian book review site BilblioBabes. They gave the book nine out of ten stars. Some of the language in their appraisal was a bit salty, but I’ll quote below the Family Friendly bits:

“It’s very well done weirdness, I can tell you that much. Every bizarre element wound up having an integral part in the story, somehow. Which is actually mighty impressive when you consider that some key plot points are: Elvis Presley’s belly fat in a jar; a mysterious government funded wasting disease; a 500lb food Nazi and his clones; and a church dedicated to the cannula. Imagine, if you will for a moment, being heavily intoxicated and lying in a bed with 3 other people while trying to explain this book. …”

And yes, I know I’m being a bit overly prudish for the guy who posted a photo of a young (and perky!) Alice Krige’s secondary sexual characteristics in my recent review of Ghost Story. No need to write any snarky comments on my hypocrisy, my friends (although snarky comments do help make this website more fun)…

And thanks to all my readers up there in the Great White North!

Category: Reviews and Such, Science Fiction | Tags: The Good Humor Man or Calorie 3501

Andrew | January 30, 2012

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Geezers and Ghosts

Ghost Story
Universal Pictures, 1981
Directed by John Irvin
Screenplay by Lawrence D. Cohen, based on the novel by Peter Straub
Starring Fred Astaire, Melvyn Douglas, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., John Houseman, Craig Wasson, Alice Krige, and Patricia Neal
Music by Philippe Sarde

I’ve been curious to see the 1981 horror film Ghost Story for a long time. I’ve always enjoyed watching films featuring major Hollywood stars of the Studio Age in their advanced years (personal favorites of the “geezer genre” include Burt Lancaster in Atlantic City and Melvin Douglas in Being There, with an appreciative nod to Edward G. Robinson in Soylent Green). Ghost Story is replete with major Hollywood stars in their dotage; it was the final film for Fred Astaire, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and Melvyn Douglas, and it also features Patricia Neal, who was the most amazingly unearthly aspect of When the Earth Stood Still. This past week, Dara and I changed our TV programming providers from Verizon Satellite to Comcast; when I discovered that Ghost Story was one of the “free movies” included with our package, I insisted that we watch it.

Ghost Story was released a year later than Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining, also an adaptation of a popular horror novel by a bestselling American horror author (Stephen King, rather than Peter Straub), and also involving spectral doings, deaths from decades past, and insanity played out against a wintertime backdrop. The Kubrick version of The Shining, whatever its debatable merits as an adaptation of King’s novel, still retains the capacity to spook and unsettle me, even after repeated viewings. Ghost Story, on the other hand, provided me with no chills at all. Which is not to say the film was not enjoyable; simply that it wasn’t scary.

Horror is an interest of mine, so I did a little thinking regarding why Ghost Story, despite the considerable acting talents involved, failed to register at all on the Scare-O-Meter (unlike earlier films involving hauntings, such as The Haunting and The Legend of Hell House, based on novels by Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, respectively). The film’s failing to rouse any sense of fright or even unease in me wasn’t due to the performances (with one exception — in the 1920s flashback scene, when each of the members of the Chowder Club is piss-faced drunk, they all giggle like little girls, indistinguishable from one another, which is extremely weird, but not in the way director John Irvin intended, I’m sure). Fred Astaire has never been a favorite of mine as a dramatic actor (as opposed to a dancing and singing romantic comedy star), although he isn’t bad in Ghost Story, and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. is given regrettably little to do in his final film role (he gets killed off early). Craig Wasson plays a dual role, two brothers, one of whom is the film’s earliest (and most graphically slain) casualty. A face many viewers of a certain age will remember from extensive TV roles in the 1970s (including recurring roles as good-natured schlubs in The Bob Newhart Show and M*A*S*H), he is perfectly adequate for his role here, which doesn’t ask too much from him (probably the most grueling aspect of his performance is the lingering embarrassment he must’ve suffered over having his groin exposed in a bizarrely gratuitous flash of full-frontal nudity as he tumbles forty stories to his death after a supernatural shock sends him crashing through the window of his luxury apartment in Manhattan; I muttered to Dara, “Well, there’s your R rating right there”).

Two of the film’s performances are very good, however. Melvyn Douglas, far more so than any of his three venerable male co-stars, conveys very poignantly the helpless terror and shame of becoming physically debilitated by advanced age, and because he portrays that helplessness so well, the build-up to his death scene is much more gripping than the lead-ins to the deaths of any of the other male characters.

By far the best thing about the film (and maybe the only reason to watch it, unless you are a diehard fan of Astaire, Fairbanks, Douglas, or Houseman) is the performance of Alice Krige as Eva Galli / Alma Mobley. She is stunningly gorgeous in this film, both in the 1920s flashback scenes and in the modern day scenes, but she is no porcelain doll. She is able to combine an outer beauty with an inner ravenousness, an impetuous, unpredictable erotic hunger she shows both as a mortal and as a ghost. This inner intensity, which she whips out like a rapier from a hidden scabbard, grants Ghost Story its only flashes of creepiness, which are unfortunately batted aside by the combined, countervailing efforts of the director, the screenwriter, and the score’s composer. Interestingly, Krige would receive near universal critical acclaim for her only other genre portrayal, in the otherwise mundane Star Trek: First Contact. Her Borg Queen is every bit as unpredictable, sexually dangerous, and alluringly lethal as her Alma Mobley. She should have done more roles of this type; she can do everything that Tilda Swinton can do, but isn’t nearly as well known or active.

So given these promising elements (including a perfectly serviceable story and set-up), why isn’t the film creepier? One choice the director, John Irvin (mostly known for war and action films, as well as period dramas made for British television), made which unfortunately hasn’t held up well was to go for shock rather than suspense. He relied almost entirely for his horror on the work of his makeup artists and special effects prosthetics craftsmen. Their work may have served quite well to shock back in 1981, but, like much of the horror makeup and prosthetics work of the period, it hasn’t aged well, having been technologically overtaken, first by improved makeup and prosthetics, and later by CGI effects. Also, his decision to go for shock rather than the slow build of suspense meant that he pretty much abandoned any stab at ambiguity early on. We viewers know quite clearly that the Eva of the 1920s and the Alma of the present are one and the same person, and that this specter is haunting the male characters of the film. The film’s creepiness would have been heightened if, at least for part of the film, the Eva-Alma connection had been uncertain. I haven’t read the Peter Straub novel, so I can’t say how Straub handled this in the source material. Similarly, I don’t know whether several face-plantingly-stupid acts on the parts of the main characters have their basis in the novel or were introduced by screenwriter Lawrence D. Cohen. Yes, it is stupid for Astaire’s, Houseman’s, and Wasson’s characters to go by themselves to the abandoned house once rented by Alma (particularly since Astaire and Wasson have already had run-ins with Alma’s psychotic mortal assistants in that same ruined house). But characters do stupid things in horror films; I can accept that, sort of. What I found unacceptable is that these three characters (at least one of whom, Houseman’s lawyer character, is supposed to be smarter than the average bear) take that risk for no discernable reason at all; they never say a word about what they hope to accomplish by going to the haunted house, aside from maybe running into the ghost that has already killed three of their friends and relatives. They just go, because the movie is entering its final reel and so must move on to some sort of a climax.

One of the biggest detriments to any build of a creepy atmosphere is the film’s score, which seems almost to have been written for another movie entirely. It would have been appropriate, perhaps, for a straightforward period drama, maybe one of the shows John Irvin directed for British television. But a film that needed a spare, subtle score instead was saddled with a richly orchestral, string-heavy score straight out of one of Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley movies. I’m tempted to think French composer Philippe Sarde phoned this one in. After all, he was incredibly busy in 1981, writing the scores for five other films aside from Ghost Story: Tales of Ordinary Madness (based on the short fiction of Charles Bukowski), Beau-pere (a Gallic riff on Nabokov’s Lolita, very well done), Coup de Torchon (based on Jim Thompson’s hard-boiled thriller Pop. 1280), the romantic drama Hotel des Ameriques, and the caveman potboiler Quest for Fire (based on a 1911 Belgian novel). A very eclectic set of motion pictures. I think he got his scores mixed up and sent over the sheet music for Hotel des Ameriques to Ghost Story producer Burt Weissbourd. Oh, well; accidents happen.

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Reviews and Such | Tags: movies

Andrew | January 26, 2012

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A Cozy, Humane Apocalypse: On the Beach

On the Beach
By Nevil Shute
Original edition: Heinemann, 1957
Most recent edition: Vintage International, 2010
Original film adaptation: United Artists, 1959; produced and directed by Stanley Kramer; screenplay by John Paxton; starring Gregory Peck, Ava Gardner, Fred Astaire, and Anthony Perkins

How can a novel about the man-induced extinction of all higher life forms on Earth be a ringing affirmation of the decency of humankind?

This may seem a very difficult – indeed, a peculiar – trick to pull off. But Nevil Shute’s 1957 bestselling novel about the aftermath of an atomic war manages to do it, and in resounding fashion.

The novel’s plot is straightforward; no clever plot twists will claim the reader’s attention, and the inevitable end of all animal life on the planet higher than that of the insects is not averted in the final pages by some Act of God or Act of Science. Shute, writing in the mid-1950s, set his novel only a decade hence, in 1964. By that time, he postulated, even small, poor, formerly insignificant nations would have atomic weapons. Bulgaria drops the first atomic bomb of the one-month-long World War Three, which occurs entirely in the Northern Hemisphere. Egypt uses Russian-made bombers to launch an atomic attack on an American city, which the Americans mistake for a Soviet attack. The Americans retaliate. In quick order, the USSR and China are launching cobalt bombs at each other, seeking to extinguish one another’s populations in North-Central Asia. The resulting radioactive dust clouds wipe out all human and most animal life in the Northern Hemisphere. Atmospheric exchanges gradually draw the radioactive clouds into the Southern Hemisphere. About two and a half years after the one-month war, the only remaining survivors of humanity live in the southernmost parts of Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and South America. The survivors in Oceania will last the longest. When the novel begins, the residents of Melbourne, Australia are aware that the cloud is scheduled to reach them in less than nine months.

The novel primarily focuses on five characters: Dwight Towers, captain of the American nuclear submarine USS Scorpion, which he has placed under the command of the Royal Australian Navy; Moira Davidson, a young Australian woman who becomes Dwight’s companion; Peter Holmes, an Australian naval officer assigned to the Scorpion as a liaison officer, and his wife Mary, who reside with their infant daughter in a suburb outside Melbourne; and John Osborne, Moira’s cousin, an Australian scientist who joins the crew of the Scorpion on the submarine’s reconnaissance mission to the west coast of the continental United States, Alaska, and Hawaii. As skillfully as each of these major characters is delineated, one of the novel’s primary pleasures is Shute’s brief portrayals of minor characters and how they cope with the coming end of the world. This panoply of character sketches adds greatly to the novel’s rich texture and gives weight to Shute’s ultimately optimistic vision of his fellow men.

In Shute’s novel, contrary to depictions of societal chaos in the preponderance of post-atomic war and apocalyptic fiction and film, civilization does not break down in the face of the coming extinction of humanity. Life continues on mostly as it did pre-war in Melbourne and its surrounding suburbs and farms, the main difference being a lack of petrol, which has necessitated the replacement of most automobiles with bicycles or horse-drawn carts (although the local availability of coal means that the electric trains and trolleys have continued to run). The other major difference, unremarked upon by any characters in the book but obvious to the readers, is an increased kindness and thoughtfulness, expressed in words and acts shared between friends, family members, merchants and customers, and strangers. Virtually all of the characters, major and minor, determine for themselves to carry on as best they can to the end, remaining as true as possible to their best selves and to whatever they view as their most central duties and responsibilities. It is this quiet heroism, heroism in a minor key – not simply stoicism in the face of impending death but a nearly universal decision to try to brighten the remaining lives around them and to face the end with shared decency – that gives a novel which would otherwise be unrelentingly grim and dispiriting a powerful, memorable surge of uplift. Through his skillful use of understatement, Shute provides uplift without schmaltz (a feat the film version only rarely manages). One has the sense that even those characters who do not expect themselves to be judged by God in an afterlife expect to be judged by themselves in their final moments, and they attempt to live their last months accordingly.

I came to love and respect each of the characters in a way I have rarely loved and respected fictional characters. Most of the characters manage to get through their days in reasonably good psychological shape through heavy reliance on denial. They tell themselves the radioactive cloud will fail to reach Melbourne, or that the “Jorgensen Effect” will cleanse the atmosphere of most radioactivity before too much air is recirculated between the Northern Hemisphere and Southern Australia, or that death will be merely a prelude to a return home to beloved family. But Shute shows us that his people are very self-aware of their use of denial, and they very gently and compassionately support one another in that therapeutic deployment of fantasy. Moira, who has never married nor ever been meaningfully in love, falls deeply in love with Dwight. Dwight, however, left a wife, Sharon, and two young children behind in Connecticut. His sense of honor and his still very much alive feelings of love for and commitment to his family do not allow him to consummate a romance with Moira, despite the very strong attraction he feels toward her, and his growing gratitude for her kindnesses and nobility of spirit.

When they first meet, Moira is almost continuously drunk, having no notion what to do with herself in the few months remaining to her. Yet her relationship with Dwight quickly matures her. Despite her overwhelming desire for him, she refuses to degrade him and herself by pushing herself upon him before his grief has expended itself (which, given the few months left to them, it never will). He keeps himself from emotionally falling to pieces by pretending that his family are still alive and waiting for him back in Connecticut. Moira mends Dwight’s shirts and sweater for him, telling him she wouldn’t want to send him back to Sharon looking shabby, and she helps him find a fishing rod and a rare pogo stick as gifts for his son and daughter, gifts that he stores in his tiny quarters aboard the Scorpion. To his credit, Dwight recognizes the emotional strain his decision to remain faithful to his dead wife is placing upon Moira. Each time they make plans to do things together, he asks her if she will be all right with things, meaning a failure to consummate their romance. Near the end, when they take a weekend trip into the mountains for the first days of the trout fishing season, they book two separate cabins. Yet neither allows the awkwardness of their situation to diminish their enjoyment of the beautiful scenery, the challenges of catching fish, and the camaraderie they experience with the numerous other guests at the cabins. Once the cloud of radiation has settled thickly onto the Melbourne area, and only hours of life remain for most, Moira asks Dwight if she may accompany him and his crew aboard the Scorpion while they take the submarine into international waters to scuttle her and end their own lives. Dwight, in a decision that may come across as cruel, opts to remain true to the regulations of the U.S. Navy and refuses her request; he is also concerned about being fair to his men, whom he had not allowed to bring their own girlfriends along. Moira does not hold this against him, recognizing that he is remaining true to his code, and that if he were to abandon that code, even at the very end, he would no longer be the same man she had fallen in love with. She finds a place on a bluff overlooking the passage to the open sea where she can watch the Scorpion pass by.

Moira is not the only major character to show extraordinary kindness under conditions of duress. Throughout the book, Peter indulges his wife Mary’s desire to improve their garden, despite the fact that neither of them will get to see their newly planted bulbs bloom or the newly planted trees mature. One of Peter’s last acts, after he has already begun suffering the symptoms of radiation sickness, is to drive into downtown Melbourne and find the garden swing she has wanted so badly, so that she might be able to look at it through the window of their apartment while confined to bed in her final hours. The argument between Peter and Mary which takes place before he ships out on the Scorpion‘s two-month-long reconnaissance, sparked by Peter’s gentle insistence that Mary know how to properly administer poison to their infant daughter should he fail to return and be unavailable to do it when the deadly cloud arrives, is made much more stunning in its impact because it is virtually the only violent emotional outburst in the entire book. (Mary’s character was ill-served by the 1959 Stanley Kramer film version. Under the dictates of John Paxton’s screenplay, newcomer Donna Anderson played Mary as a neurotic, unstable, immature woman, who does not achieve the grace exhibited by the novel’s Mary until the film’s closing scenes.) Even John, the major character with the fewest emotional ties and the most detached personality, tenderly takes care of his elderly mother in her final, ailing hours.

Adherence to duty, responsibility, and personal code of conduct is exhibited nearly across the board. Shute makes reference to weekend crowds in Melbourne who become riotously drunk and to street sweepers who abandon their jobs in the last weeks, allowing the streets of Melbourne to become filthy and putrid, but the writer does not dwell on these persons who let their community and their fellows down. Instead, he focuses on the trolley driver who insists he will drive his trolley until he is no longer able to, particularly after having already done so for thirty-four years; and on the dairy farmer who promises Peter to make home deliveries of milk to Mary and the baby while Peter is on the other side of the world. There is an amusing, and at the same time very touching, debate in the government over whether or not trout fishing season should be opened a month early. Should the government stick to its traditional calendar, the season would not open until several weeks after the radioactive cloud is expected to arrive. However, if they opt to allow early fishing, the stock of fish could be damaged. They eventually decide to allow the earlier date, with misgivings, but justify their decision as being “just for this one year only.” When Dwight realizes the time has come to scuttle the Scorpion, he issues a formal request to the First Naval Member to withdraw the submarine from Australian command and return her to the U.S. Navy (of which she is the last surviving operational vessel). The elaborate courtesies and formalities the two of them exchange as the senior surviving members of their naval establishments, which have enjoyed a long history of cooperation and fellowship, form a perfect capstone to Shute’s portrayals of the two men. I found this scene to be intensely moving.

Much of this focus on duty, compassion, and the forgoing of satisfaction of immediate desires in favor of remaining true to strongly held personal codes went by the wayside in Stanley Kramer’s film adaptation, apparently to the dismay of Nevil Shute. Kramer tailored the story both to what he assumed to be American audiences’ expectations of a romantic drama and to his own desire to forge an unambiguously antiwar message. The character of John Osborne (renamed Julian Osborne in the script) is changed from an Australian scientist to a stranded British nuclear scientist, who had formerly worked on the British atomic bomb program, this so that Fred Astaire could wallow in drunken guilt over his role in abetting the nuclear holocaust. Kramer and screenwriter John Paxton also opted to spice things up a bit by giving Julian and Moira a failed romantic past (in the novel, they are distant cousins, affectionate with one another but never having shared a romance). The biggest change from the novel is that Dwight and Moira, after a bit of hesitation on Dwight’s part, consummate their romance. According to film lore, Kramer was apprehensive that audiences would not buy Gregory Peck’s ability to resist Ava Gardner’s charms throughout the whole movie, and ticket buyers might leave the show feeling disappointed if Peck and Gardner were not shown to get it on. Peck, reportedly, sided with Shute but was overruled by Kramer. I could have done with the Gregory Peck of his earlier film, Roman Holiday, when he portrayed an American reporter in Rome who becomes entangled with a slumming European princess but who manages to remain a gentleman throughout, recognizing that her duties of state would not allow for a romance with an American commoner. Peck was an absolute natural to play the duty- and memory-bound Dwight Towers; that the film’s producer/director insisted that the cores of both Peck’s and Gardner’s characters be carved out and discarded was a shame.

This is not to say that the 1959 film is without its merits. Its black and white cinematography is crisp, effective, and consistently well framed; the film is a pleasure to watch. Kramer made the decision to move the scene of the Scorpion‘s crew’s discovery of the source of mysterious Morse code transmissions from a naval installation in Seattle, as portrayed in the novel, to an oil refinery in San Diego, a wise choice. The long shots of a sole sailor in a radiation protection suit running down the streets of the massive, abandoned oil refinery are silently eloquent of the strange, quiet death of civilization. Most of the supporting and minor characters are marvelously cast (avoiding the pitfalls, for example, of Fred Astaire’s and Anthony Perkin’s weak English and Australian accents and the absence of any attempt on Ava Gardner’s part to vocalize an Australian accent at all). Several of my favorite scenes involve Paddy Moran’s Stevens, the wine steward of a private club where Julian, Peter, and Dwight go to dine. Stevens is constantly having to right the portraits on the club’s walls of various British royals and military heroes, which go askew any time the doors are pulled shut. Near the film’s end, when he is the last person alive in the club, Stevens takes the opportunity, which he has obviously pined for through decades of service, to have his turn at the billiards table. Filmed without any background music, it is a shattering moment, much more emotionally affecting than the final scene Kramer chose to hit his audiences over the head with, a shot of an abandoned Salvation Army rally with a banner that reads, “There is Still Time… Brother!”

Two minor characters appear in the film who were not present in the novel: Admiral Bridie of the Royal Australian Navy, played by John Tate, and the admiral’s secretary, Lieutenant Osgood, played by Lola Brooks. I have read nothing that states this was the case, but I suspect Kramer included these two as a sort of apology and amends to Nevil Shute for bowdlerizing the characters of Dwight and Moira. Whenever the two appear together, there are hints of attraction between the admiral and his young, pretty female secretary. Once they have both begun to come down with symptoms of radiation poisoning, after Dwight has pulled the Scorpion from Australian command and there is nothing left to be done in the headquarters of the Royal Australian Navy, Admiral Bridie asks Lieutenant Osgood if she would like to be relieved of her duties and return home. She opts to stay at her post, saying there is no one waiting for her at her home, no husband or boyfriend or family. The admiral asks her if she would care to share a glass of wine with an old man. She says, “No, but I would like to have a glass of wine with you.” The few words and the lingering look that pass between them as they each sip from their glasses of wine speak volumes about the intensity of their mutual attraction and the forbearance each has shown and will show to the end. Neither will step over the line of proper conduct between a senior officer and his subordinate, but they absolutely smolder together. Watching the intensity of their quiet, understated interaction, this viewer was struck by an intimation of what could have been the relationship between Gregory Peck’s Dwight and Ava Gardner’s Moira, a truer reflection of Nevil Shute’s devastatingly poignant novel.

I have not seen the 2000 television version, made for Australian TV. From the description, it seems Shute’s conceit that civilization in the Melbourne area survives, mostly intact, up until the deaths of its inhabitants was done away with. Civilization ends brutally, just as it does in the Mad Max films. Perhaps this choice by the filmmakers, who obviously did not consider Shute’s vision of the end to be plausible, is an indication of how far our faith in the durability of our Western social order has fallen in the half-century since Shute wrote his book.

Category: Book Love, Reviews and Such, Science Fiction | Tags: movies

Andrew | January 22, 2012

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More Handmade Monsters!

Here to save the planet... it's Mothra!

My youngest son, Judah, continues to request handmade monster toys, so I continue to make them. My first efforts were Gorgo and Tarantula (seen here in this earlier post). Gorgo was a simple paper puppet, two layers of construction paper glued together over a straw. Tarantula, however, was a more elaborate project, involving two plastic token cups from Chuck E. Cheese’s, a ball of black yarn, and several dozen black pipe cleaners. I made sure to over-build that sucker, reinforcing his legs six ways to Sunday (or eight ways to Sunday, given the number of legs).

Now I just need those two tiny Japanese twin gals...

Next up, per Judah’s instructions, was Mothra. Making a Mothra isn’t too hard; making a Mothra that won’t get destroyed after one or two sessions of play is a taller order. Mothra’s body is a cardboard toilet paper roll, coated in yellow construction paper, with pipe cleaner legs inserted through holes. Her wings are two layers of construction paper, reinforced on top with “veins” of variously colored pipe cleaners (which also give the wings some stiffness). Her head is construction paper with fuzzy ball eyes and antennae made of Bendaroos (wax-coated string). So far, she has avoided mortal damage, and she has been in Judah’s hands for over a month. So I guess I must’ve built her right.

Ghidorah vs. Godzilla!

Having seen the “Ghidorah Trilogy” (Ghidorah, the Three Headed Monster; Monster Zero; and Destroy All Monsters), of course Judah would want a Ghidorah for his collection (and professionally made Ghidorah toys aren’t too common, at least not here in the States). I’d originally intended to make a simple two-dimensional Ghidorah puppet, along the lines of what I’d done with Gorgo, but then I got a bit more ambitious. I couldn’t figure out a workable way for me to make him fully three-dimensional, but by making his heads, wings, torso, and legs separately and then slotting them together, I was able to make him at least partially three-dimensional, plus able to stand on his own (a definite plus in a household inhabited by a kitten who loves to chew paper).

Another view of the wintry grudge match

I printed out a nice, cartoony drawing of Ghidorah from the deviantart.com site and cut out portions to use for the fronts of Ghidorah’s heads and legs, the most difficult parts to draw, then drew the wings and torso freehand. I did my best to draw the reverse sides of his legs and feet and of his heads and necks on another sheet of construction paper, plus reverse sides of his wings and torso. I then traced the parts onto a sheet of corrugated cardboard, which would give all the parts the necessary stiffness. I cut everything out, glued the construction paper “skins” over the cardboard “skeleton,” and then, after it had all dried, cut slots into the various parts and slotted and glued them together, sort of like how you would put together a cardboard model of an airplane. My finished product didn’t come out exactly proportional (the torso and wings are too big for the heads and legs), but he turned out exactly the right scale to battle Judah’s plastic Godzilla, which is more important. And from certain angles, he is rather impressive, if I do say so myself. Besides, Ghidorah was always sort of a lumpy, ungainly monster, anyway, at least in the original 1960s Toho films.

The best thing about Yongary, Monster From the Deep--the hero's 1964 Corvair convertible

This past week was a bad one, health-wise, for my family. One by one, we all came down with bouts of stomach flu. Judah and Asher caught it nearly simultaneously, and while they were on the mend, I stayed home with them to give Dara a bit of a break. The three of us watched Yongary, Monster From the Deep (1967). This was one giant monster picture I had somehow not managed to see as a kid. Yongary is essentially a South Korean Godzilla, with the monster-loving little kid from Gamera, the Invincible tossed in for good measure. The model cities weren’t bad, at least on par with those seen in the early Gamera movies, but the monster costume was a step down from those featured in the Gamera creature-fests, about as silly looking as the average kaiju in an episode of Ultraman.

The worst thing about Yongary, Monster From the Deep--the heroine's absurdly obnoxious little brother, Icho

What made the film stand out in my eyes were two things — the hero drove a splendid 1964 Chevy Corvair convertible, and Icho, the six or seven-year-old kid whom the filmmakers unwisely (and sadistically) foisted on us for much of the film, was simply the most detestable and obnoxious child character I have ever witnessed in any monster movie, ever. Worse than any of the kids in the Gamera movies (even that horrid, virtually unwatchable little Caucasian girl who wore a Scottish tam in War of the Planets). Worse than the kid in Godzilla’s Revenge. Worse, quite possibly, than any of the kids in The Lemon Drop Kids Meet a Brooklyn Gorilla (although I’ll admit I haven’t seen that one, so I can’t say for certain). One gizmo that plays a role in the movie’s plot is an itching ray (yes, an itching ray) developed by the hero (for God knows what reason; he’s already invented it when the film begins, before Yongary ever appears). The first time we meet Icho, he is hiding in the bushes, having stolen his new brother-in-law’s invention, and he zaps his sister and her new husband with the itching ray as they drive past (in that splendid Corvair convertible), forcing them to pull over and jump out of their clothes while they are on their way to their honeymoon. Icho gets even more obnoxious as the film rolls on. At one point, the hero scientist and the military have found a way to render Yongary unconscious, after he has knocked down most of those parts of Seoul that weren’t already knocked down during the Korean War. What does cute little Icho do? He steals the itching ray again, runs to the giant monster’s side, and wakes him up. Just as a goof, you know. Yongary then proceeds to knock down those parts of Seoul he missed the first time around. At that point, I was rooting for the big lizard to squash the kid already. Doesn’t happen. Evil triumphs; Yongary dies.

View from my back deck, January 21, 2012

But enough about itch-inducing child actors. We got a bit of wet snow last night, enough to lightly coat our back yard and replenish our stream. Knowing I’d be posting about giant monster movies, I began wondering whether any of them had taken place in the wintertime, during a heavy snowfall. Dozens of them took place in the desert, in the American Southwest, near where the atomic tests were carried out. All of the Japanese kaiju movies that I can recall took place in the summertime, with the exception of the early parts of Gigantis the Fire Monster / Godzilla Raids Again, the second Godzilla movie, in which Godzilla (or a second Godzilla-like creature, the original having been thoroughly disintegrated by the oxygen destroyer at the close of Godzilla, King of the Monsters) and Anguilus are discovered fighting each other on a northerly, ice-covered island, before they both invade Japan. The Deadly Mantis begins in Antarctica, where the titular giant bug makes his first attack on humanity, but when he gets up to the cities of North America, it is summertime. Much of Ray Harryhausen’s Sinbad and the Eye of the Tiger, which features numerous giant creatures, takes place in a mysterious region of the Arctic, but that’s more a fantasy-adventure film than a traditional “giant monsters attack” movie. I haven’t seen The Beast From Twenty Thousand Fathoms in a long time, and I seem to recall that its climax takes place in Coney Island during a storm. Was it a snowstorm? If anyone has a good memory for this kind of thing, help me out here. I just think it would be neat to see New York City or Washington, DC or Tokyo (or even Seoul) get attacked by a gigantic lizard during a beautiful snowstorm.

(Ah, memory just kicked in; Peter Jackson’s New York City scenes in his recent remake of King Kong took place in the wintertime, one of the nicer touches in that film. Digital effects make much possible that perhaps weren’t so practicable during the era of miniature models.)

Category: Stuff I Like, Uncategorized | Tags: movies, the kids

Andrew | January 19, 2012

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Traveling About the Country Some

Just a mini-post this time around. I learned at work today that I’ll be doing some training-related traveling over the next couple of months. (Always nice to have good ol’ Uncle Sam pay for my gallivanting!) I’ll be in New York City from February 6-9, in New Orleans from February 13-16, and in San Francisco (where I’ve never traveled before) from March 5-8. I sure hope I’ll be able to see some of my science fiction/fantasy and Facebook friends while I’m out and about. I’ve already made plans to see the Tachyon Publications gang in San Francisco while I’m there. I know I missed a few of my New Orleans friends when I was there a couple of months ago for CONtraflow, so I hope to catch up with them this time.

I’ll post more information as it comes available. My friends at Tachyon may be setting up a reading or signing for me at one of the San Francisco SF/fantasy bookstores. If nothing else, at least I should finally be able to set foot in the famous City Lights Bookstore…

Update, 1/27/2012: Ah, my trip to New York City has been canceled for budgetary reasons. Bummer. I’ll just have to find some other excuse to get up that way soon.

Category: Conventions and Fandom, Publishing | Tags: Tachyon Publications

Andrew | January 13, 2012

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Pruning Back the Mega-Novel

images of Krampus, bad luck spirit

Friday the Thirteenth feels like a very appropriate date on which to write a blog post about a book called The Bad Luck Spirits’ Social Aid and Pleasure Club. It also happens to be the day on which I’ve finished my fourth rewrite of my most ambitious, troublesome, labor-intensive, and longest-worked-on manuscript of any I’ve ever started.

Way back around the time I first started participating in George Alec Effinger’s writing workshop in New Orleans, sometime in 1995, mystery novelist Laura Joh Rowland, who had just published Shinju, the first novel in what is now a long-running series, talked some about the virtues of rigorously outlining a novel prior to starting it versus writing it as it goes, or “winging it.” She said the most difficult and tedious work she had ever had to do on a book was restructuring a failed novel, one which had not been successfully plotted out prior to its composition. All of the rework and the insertion of new scenes and the subtraction of unhelpful scenes, the deletion and/or addition of characters, and the spreading around of exposition were far more laborious and time-consuming, she said, than taking the time to carefully plot the book beforehand and then sticking mostly to the plan.

My first published novel, Fat White Vampire Blues, actually grew out of a novelette (which I later broke out into the first three chapters of the book). When I decided to expand it to novel length, I knew what my ending would be, but I pretty much filled in the middle parts as I went along. I got lucky; the book didn’t turn out overly long, and it didn’t crash and burn. Its sequel, Bride of the Fat White Vampire, has thus far been the only novel I’ve written under contract – meaning I had a firm deadline from my editor. Since I intended to structure it as a mystery novel, with lots of intricate turns of plot, I changed my methods and utilized a very detailed outline. The outline also allowed me to write the book, which turned out to be 20,000 words longer than the first one, in about half the time, eighteen months versus nearly three years. The method I used when writing my next book, The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501, was somewhere between those I had used for the first two books. I thoroughly outlined the first half of the book, then winged it with the last half, expanding my outline as new ideas occurred to me.

Then came Hurricane Katrina, which turned more than a million persons’ lives upside down, mine included. My family and I ended up far luckier than many of our Gulf Coast neighbors. We didn’t lose our home (which “only” suffered about $18,000 worth of damage), and we didn’t end up trapped in the bureaucratic hell of the Road Home program. But we were stranded away from our house for two months, only finding housing and other necessities through the extraordinary kindness of friends and some relatives, and my wife Dara ended up losing her job when her agency was forced by the collapse of the New Orleans health care network to relocate to north Alabama. Plus, we had two babies (later three) to raise in a city where the future of most basic services, including health care, education, infrastructure maintenance, and public safety, was very much up in the air.

While Dara, Levi, Asher and I were stranded in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where we’d gone to attend the Bubonicon science fiction convention the weekend Katrina roared out of the Gulf, we had little to do aside from obsessively follow the news from New Orleans on CNN and the website of The Times-Picayune. One aspect of the coverage that simply floored me was how the news from my home town got worse and worse each day I watched. Just when I thought matters had gotten as dire as they possibly could, some new catastrophe would occur – snipers would fire rifles at helicopters attempting to rescue critically ill patients from the roof of the flooded Baptist Memorial Hospital, say, driving the helicopters off (a story which later came into dispute, but which was repeated endlessly on CNN and had an enormously demoralizing effect on those of us watching). The thought occurred to me that the evolving carnival of misery, destruction, death, and pervasive ineptness was simply beyond the scope of human foul-ups – so many things were going so incredibly wrong at so many levels that there simply had to be more to it than poor planning, poor execution, and political rivalries flaring at the most importune time.

That was how things looked in late August, September, and October of 2005. It wasn’t until a good bit later that I learned that a few agencies, including the U.S. Coast Guard and the Louisiana Department of Wildlife and Fisheries, had worked a succession of miracles rescuing people trapped by the floods, keeping the death toll far lower than that which had been forecast, and the disaster relief and rebuilding efforts provided by the non-profit sector and thousands of volunteers were models of efficaciousness and compassion. These were not the stories the major media outlets chose to cover during those early months.

It took a long time for a more balanced picture of the nation’s and the city’s response to Katrina to come into focus. In the meantime, living through the disaster’s aftermath, seeking to put our lives in New Orleans back together as best we could, I remained haunted by the intimation that something “extra” had been at work during the disaster. I certainly wasn’t alone in this. Conspiracy theories were rife in New Orleans and the various communities of storm exiles during the fall and winter of 2005, stories that shadowy forces had dynamited the flood control levees in the Lower Ninth Ward to prevent other, wealthier and whiter neighborhoods from flooding (didn’t work too well, considering the fate of Lakeview, one of the whitest neighborhoods in the city), or that President Bush had purposefully kneecapped the response efforts due to an animus against black people and/or the heavily Democratic city of New Orleans.

Being a fantasy/horror/science fiction writer, it was natural that my intimations should’ve led to an idea for a novel. The notion behind The Bad Luck Spirits’ Social Aid and Pleasure Club was fairly simple – the Katrina disaster had been made magnitudes worse by a conspiracy of supernatural bad luck entities who had worked diligently over many decades to hobble the health and resiliency of New Orleans and to drive its mortal residents away. My first literary reaction to the disaster and its aftermath had been to start a nonfiction book called The Janus-Faced City, an impressionistic history of the various political, economic , social, educational, and flood protection missteps which had accumulated in the decades leading to Katrina and had helped to ensure that the hurricane’s glancing blow would be horribly amplified. My hopes for obtaining a contract for that book sank when my agent, Dan Hooker, died of cancer on Thanksgiving of 2005.

Rather than continuing to crawl down what I feared would be a rabbit hole (I had never published a nonfiction book before, and I was suddenly without active representation), I redirected the fruits of my research into what I intended to be an epic contemporary fantasy novel. I wanted to write a fantastical secret history of the Katrina disaster, dramatizing the actual events of the catastrophe and also drawing away the curtain to show the various hobgoblins and tricksters and Evil Eye spirits pulling the strings of the mortal leaders and decision-makers. In January, 2006, I began writing notes and assembling an outline for a novel bigger and more ambitious than any I’d previously attempted.

In hindsight, I made several decisions at the outset that doomed me to write a very, very long book. Secret histories, by their very nature, tend to be lengthy enterprises. This is because the author has taken it upon himself to tell two narratives at once – a procession of actual, historical events, with their cast of real-life actors, and a shadow narrative of previously “unknown” occurrences which happen off-stage or hidden behind the scenery and which determine or significantly influence the “public” events of common knowledge. Tim Powers did a magnificent job of telling the secret history of the Cold War and the fall of the Soviet Union in Declare. Declare, however, in its dual tellings of actual twentieth century European history and the secret efforts of the British and Russian secret services to acquire the services of djinns, was a very long book. Not that this was a bad thing – I had thoroughly enjoyed Declare and its amazing cleverness several years prior to starting work on Bad Luck Spirits, and the novel had been a best seller for Tim Powers.

Also, the way I structured the Miasma Club, the bad luck spirits of the book’s title, had a major impact on the manuscript’s length. I wanted all of the major ethnic communities which had populated New Orleans to have a “representative” in the Miasma Club. An organization of bad luck spirits should have thirteen members, I figured. So I did my research and found thirteen (actually fourteen, counting both Na Ba and Na Ong, who are spouses and function as a team) trickster or Evil Eye spirits from the folklores of twelve ethnic or national groups which had populated New Orleans, starting with the Houma Indians and extending to the Vietnamese immigrants who had arrived in the wake of the end of the Vietnam War; I threw in Glenn the Gremlin as well, who didn’t represent an ethnic community but rather the community of engineers and scientists who had moved to New Orleans to work on the Apollo and space shuttle programs.

My bad luck spirits needed opponents, and the Muses of Greek mythology have a long history in New Orleans, their names adorning streets and Carnival krewes, so I included the Muses in my cast of characters. There are nine Muses. So, even before including a single mortal character, I found myself with a cast of twenty-three supernatural folks. One problem of assembling such a large cast is that you find yourself wanting, if not needing, to give each one something significant to do. My ambition was to reveal the entire post-Civil War history of New Orleans as a result of the ongoing conflict between the Miasma Club and the Muses, as well as the Miasma Club’s various schemes to bedevil the mortal citizenry. I decided to have my bad luck spirits specialize, each concentrating on causing maximum havoc and disruption among members of their own ethnic communities; and since members of those ethnic communities tended to favor certain occupations (the Irish going into law enforcement, for example), I also had the bad luck spirits specializing in degrading particular sectors of the local economy or political/social system. Not a bad choice on my part, certainly defensible given my ambitions for the book. But, again, this was a driver of complexity and thus of length.

Yet another decision I made contributed to expanding my manuscripts’ length well beyond the optimal. I wanted to focus on two main protagonists: Kay Rosenblatt, the Ashkenazic Jewish bad luck spirit, and Roy Rio, the black mayor of New Orleans, whom I intended to pattern upon the real mayor, Ray Nagin. That way, I could show both sides of the story, the mortal/”real life” side and the supernatural side. I decided to choose Kay as my supernatural protagonist because the story of Katrina’s Jewish survivors was very interesting to me and hadn’t received much attention. With two protagonists, I knew I had to entwine their stories at some point. But doing so was less than straightforward, since, not being an African-American bad luck spirit, Kay could not directly influence or bedevil Mayor Rio. So I found myself needing to connect them through relationships they would have in common, which meant introducing still more characters, the Weintraub family, whose ranks included love interests for both Kay and Mayor Rio. Again, by itself, nothing wrong with that choice. But added in with the other choices I had already made, I was cooking up a very, very big narrative.

I worked on my first draft from January, 2006 to November, 2008, nearly three years. The initial length? A modest, tidy 238,000 words.

A number of external players had changed during the nearly three years I’d spent writing my first draft. The publishing industry was one of them. The industry had lost a good bit of its self-confidence in that span. When my first two books had come out, in 2003 and 2004, long novels had been in vogue. Fat White Vampire Blues had been 135,000 words. Bride of the Fat White Vampire had been 155,000 words, and my editor at Random House hadn’t batted an eye regarding length. But by the end of 2008, with the start of the recession and following several years of hard economic times for publishers, most editors were now demanding novels closer to 100,000 words, books which would be cheaper to ship to stores and which stores could fit more copies of on their shelves and end-caps and display tables. Clearly, in that environment, 238,000 words was a non-starter.

Also, the man I’d patterned one of my two protagonists on, Mayor Ray Nagin, had changed. Mayor Nagin had come into office in 2002 as a reformer, a former businessman who promised to run city government efficiently and honestly. He became a local folk hero and somewhat of a national celebrity when, in the immediate aftermath of the levees bursting, eighty percent of the city flooding, and FEMA nowhere to be seen, he engaged in a profanity-laced meltdown on a national radio program and demanded the federal government to step up to the plate. However, in following months, perhaps worn down by the seemingly insuperable demands of the reconstruction, his political persona changed. He engaged in racially charged, divisive rhetoric, especially during the run-up to his reelection campaign, when he ran against a white candidate, Mitch Landrieu (who eventually replaced Nagin as mayor in 2010). His once sterling reputation for integrity was besmirched as one after another of his cronies and relatives were discovered to have benefitted from reconstruction projects. Civic-minded New Orleanians began yearning for the day he would leave office.

So I discovered the danger of writing a novel based on events which were still in play. My hero was based on Mayor Nagin, who was no longer acting in an admirable fashion; in fact, I found him to be increasingly contemptible as the months passed. Either I could stick with the Nagin portrayal and make my character, Roy Rio, a scoundrel, rather than a flawed but essentially admirable man, or I could sever the direct connection between Roy Rio and Ray Nagin and preserve the former as a sympathetic character.

I opted for the latter option. I also spent several months cutting 49,000 words from the manuscript, bringing it down to 189,000 words. My second agent had been attempting to market the novel as a partial (first three chapters and a synopsis). Finally I was able to give her the full manuscript to read. She balked at even the reduced length, saying we’d do much better in the marketplace if I could get the book down closer to 150,000 words. I said I was game to do another editing pass, but I was fresh out of ideas of what to cut. I asked for her advice. She began reading the manuscript, but I don’t believe she ever read it all the way through; she got hung up on one character she absolutely hated, a secondary character, Mayor Rio’s ex-wife, Councilwoman Cynthia Belvedere Hotchkiss. No matter how often I begged for her to read the entire book so she could give me educated feedback on what best to cut, I could not convince her to finish it. I never did receive any usable feedback on editing the book from her, and this ended up being a factor in my decision to seek different representation.

I mentioned my frustrations to my friend, the prolific and award-winning writer, Barry Malzberg. Barry, being both a prince and an incredibly quick reader, offered to read over my manuscript and give me his suggestions. Amazingly, he got back to me in less than a week after receiving the manuscript. He thought it needed to be shortened by at least another 40,000 words, that I should reduce a lot of the clutter and side-action, and that Mayor Rio’s character and motivations needed to be strengthened. He said I didn’t need to do anything different with Kay, as she already came through as a well-drawn, strongly motivated heroine.

I knew the only way I could cut another 40,000 words and strengthen Mayor Rio’s motivations at the same time would be to abandon in large part my ambition to make the novel a secret history of the Katrina disaster. I would need to have my disaster diverge from the disaster which had actually taken place. I had already done this to a minor extent, giving my storm a different name than Katrina and having it strike the Gulf Coast earlier in the season than Katrina did, figuring I would differentiate my plot just enough that I wouldn’t be held strictly accountable by readers to follow the exact timeline and events of the historical disaster. Now I saw myself pushing much farther away from my original intention, retaining only Katrina’s “greatest hits” in my plot.

By January of 2010, I had succeeded in cutting the book by another 38,000 words, down to 151,000 words. I had also moved on to other projects and was seeking new representation for them. When I signed with my current agent in the fall of 2010, my first order of business was to have him review and suggest improvements to Ghostlands, and later to The End of Daze. A year later, I asked if he would take a look at the most recent version of Bad Luck Spirits. I asked him for advice regarding whether I should self-publish the novel, perhaps broken into two e-books, or whether he would want to try marketing the shortened, improved version to a traditional publisher.

He told me he thought it was a good book and would be willing to put some effort into marketing it, should I be willing to implement his suggestions. He wanted me to ditch both prologues, each of dealt with the involvement of the miasmatic field with the early explorers and builders of the New Orleans region. He wanted me to squeeze as much as I could out of the first third of the book, the portion which takes place prior to the hurricane’s arrival. He told me that Kay is a stronger character than Roy Rio, and that I should refocus the book more on her story, less on his. He also wanted me to get rid of as much of the secondary viewpoints as I could, those chapters or portions of chapters told from the vantage points of bad luck spirits other than Kay.

Although I initially balked at getting rid of both prologues, I came to see the wisdom of his suggestions and followed them as best I could, without removing materials which are necessary to set up plot developments in the second half of the book and at its climax. The version I completed earlier today is 134,000 words, down an additional 17,000 words from the prior version.

So, as things now stand, The Bad Luck Spirits’ Social Aid and Pleasure Club is about the same length as Fat White Vampire Blues. I am a little stunned that I’ve been able to cut a total of 104,000 words between the initial version and this one, the fourth. Those 104,000 words exceed the lengths of my novels The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 and The End of Daze and nearly equal the length of my most recent book, No Direction Home. I must say that the effort of cutting those 104,000 words exceeded the effort of writing an equivalent number of words in either of the two latter books.

Contrary to what Laura Joh Rowland had warned against back in 1995, my error was not a failure to plan and outline my novel. I did plenty of planning and outlining before writing a single word of the manuscript. My errors were (1) adding too many characters; (2) trying to write the secret history of an event which was still unfolding at the time; (3) not properly gauging from my bloated outline how lengthy the book would initially be; and, perhaps most understandably, since few have correctly foretold the evolution of the publishing industry, (4) failing to predict that a much less welcoming market for long, complicated books would await me upon the manuscript’s completion.

Have I learned anything useful from this six-year-long experience? I certainly hope so. I spent longer working on this manuscript from beginning to end than I did on my bachelors and masters degrees combined.

And now, soon, it will be back out into the marketplace, whether I end up selling this book to a traditional publisher or going the do-it-yourself route. Please wish me luck. Just not bad luck… I’ve had enough of that with this manuscript already!

Category: Horror and Fantasy, Publishing | Tags: The Bad Luck Spirits' Social Aid and Pleasure Club

Andrew | January 11, 2012

2 comments

Heading on Down to MarsCon

This Saturday and Sunday, January 14-15, my family and I will be attending MarsCon in Williamsburg, Virginia (to be held at the Holiday Inn Patriot). I guested at MarsCon for the first time last year and thoroughly enjoyed myself. Not only was it a well-run, friendly con with lots of good food, but the surrounding area is loaded with restaurants, coffeehouses, and interesting attractions. So I really wanted to bring the whole gang this year, and the timing worked out well. Not only that, but the con has an expanded track of children’s programming this year, which will be great for Levi, Asher, and Judah (all of whom adore a good arts and crafts project or puppet show). Plus, the place we’re staying, the Comfort Inn down the road from the Holiday Inn Patriot, has an indoor pool. The boys are totally stoked about the thought of going swimming (when it isn’t summer).

Here are the panels and events I’ll be taking part in (the theme of this year’s MarsCon is The End of the World, which I think is swell):

Saturday, January 14th, noon to 1 p.m., Room 103

Undead Overload?

Are there too many zombies? Is it time for a vam-purge? How do we keep the corpse fresh? Keith DeCandido, Andrew Fox, and Adam Seats debate one of SF, fantasy, and horror’s hottest phenomena. Come help them decide if some of the films, fiction, and other zombie-rama and drac attacks would be better left undead.

Saturday, January 14th, 1 p.m. to 3 p.m. Patriot Ballroom

Autograph Armageddon

Indulge your inner fan and get signatures from MarsCon’s fantastic 2012 lineup of authors. Hear them read samples of their work while you wait in line. Join GOH S. M. Stirling and many other MarsCon authors for two hours of our featured signing event. Last line entry 2:45 p.m., limit of 3 signatures per pass through line for GOH. With Chris Berman, Danny Birt, Keith DeCandido, Andrew Fox, Pamela K. Kinney, James Mascia, Peter Prellwitz, Marina Sergeyeva, Steve White, and Leona Wisoker.

Saturday, January 14th, 3-4 p.m., Richardson Board Room

Masterworks of Apocalyptic Fiction

Writers have been destroying the world in terrible scenarios or pitting plucky survivors defiantly against the end for years now. Join our panel of writers and editors—Laura Haywood Cory, Andrew Fox, and Bud Webster—as they highlight some of their favorites and put together an apocalyptic fiction hall of fame with help from the audience.

Sunday, January 15th, 11 a.m.-noon, Patriot Ballroom

Starting at the End: MarsCon Authors Build an Apocalyptic Story Live

Join GOH S. M. Stirling and writers Danny Birt, Andrew Fox, and Leona Wisoker as they outline an original apocalyptic tale before your eyes. You’ll get insight into how they go about creating an original end for the world, build an interesting set of characters, find conflict, and construct a believable apocalyptic world.

MarsCon’s programming looks really terrific this year. A fun mix of serious and not-so-serious apocalyptic discussion panels, arts programming, independent films, concerts, and assorted goofy stuff. Plus, several of my favorite people will be attending. I always love chatting with Bud Webster, he of the encyclopedic knowledge of classic SF anthologies, and browsing through his collection of vintage paperbacks for sale. Also, my old friends S. M. (Steve) and Jan Stirling will be coming in from New Mexico. I haven’t seen Steve and Jan since the last time Dara and I attended Bubonicon in Albuquerque, the weekend of Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Steve and Jan were very accommodating to my family and me while we were in extremis following the storm, when we learned we would be unable to go home to New Orleans for an unknown period of time. For close to a month I feared I had lost all of my computers and soft copies of my novels and stories. Steve was kind enough to send me an older laptop of his that he was no longer using, an exceedingly kind gesture I’ll never forget.

So the weekend promises to be a fun one! I hope to see some of my readers and friends at the con (who will have an opportunity to see how big my boys have gotten).

Category: Conventions and Fandom |

Andrew | January 7, 2012

4 comments

What Do You Replace a Pontiac Aztek With?

Here at Fantastical Andrew Fox.com, we do not shy away from asking the hard questions.

Today’s hard question: If one were faced with the necessity (or desire) of replacing a 2005 Burnt Orange Pontiak Aztek, what vehicle should one choose, given the offerings available in the marketplace?

A few caveats…

(1) This is NOT my personal vehicle I am replacing. The Pontiac in question belongs to my dad, Jerry Mellin, an 83 year-old retiree who lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

(2) I have no idea when or if Dad will ever want to give up his Aztek. He hardly puts any mileage on it, and the vehicle is almost ridiculously well maintained. The only reasons the issue even occurred to me are (a) my sister Robyn’s Chrysler PT Cruiser, formerly my dad’s daily driver, now has a humongous amount of miles on it, so Dad may be thinking of having the Aztek shipped to Tampa to replace the Chrysler; (b) I’m bored and it’s fun to think about goofy cars; and (c) I’m always looking for something to blog about.

Okay, now that those important caveats are out of the way, we may proceed. My dad has rather, ahem, “distinctive” tastes when it comes to vehicles. He spent most of his career as a salesman of folding cardboard boxes, and one of his salesman’s stratagems was to always wear a hideous tie on sales calls. He used the offensive ties as ice-breakers with his potential customers and their secretaries. Since his retirement to New Mexico, he has used his cars in sort of the same way, only with his buddies and all the new acquaintances he meets on his noodlings around town. Nothing pleases him more than to invite a new friend out for a cup of coffee, pick him up with the Aztek, and watch the horrified look of distaste appear on his friend’s face, accompanied by the inevitable question, “You bought one of THOSE…?”

Also, Dad has never relied entirely upon the manufacturer’s designers to supply the reverse of eye appeal. He is an avid customer of auto accessory shops and is the first in line whenever new models of bolt-on spoilers, fake hood scoops, and phony bullet hole decals are offered. He is very fond of utilizing enormous quantities of glue to affix various custom items to his interiors, which has made trading in his cars rather tricky at times; my dad is an artist of glue (oh, to have been a fly on the wall when his car salesman went to talk with his supervisor about the trade-in in private). He doesn’t go in for bling, mind you – it’s the opposite of bling he’s looking for. Or a kind of sideways bling. He’d probably call it “Retired Old Fart Bling.”

So, here are the stipulations with which I winnowed down the field:

(1) The vehicle must, in some way, echo the spirit of a 2005 Burnt Orange Pontiak Aztek with a glued-on fake hood scoop.

(2) Must not cost more than $25,000 out-the-door (closer to $20,000 would be preferable). This, unfortunately, rules out various Lincolns with their baleen whale snouts and that ridiculous looking Mercedes minivan/SUV thing, the R Class.

(3) Must seat at least four. Dad likes to take his buddies out for lunch and a movie. This rules out the Honda CRZ, which otherwise would be a strong contender.

(4) Must be available as a new vehicle. My dad has not bought a used car in all of his sixty years of purchasing vehicles. This rules out… well, loads of wonderful candidates, enough for me to spend days listing them.

So, without further ado, here are the candidates, listed in what, in my expert opinion, will likely be reverse order of preference.

8. Nissan Murano Cabriolet

This one is the dark-horse choice. I say that mainly because of its priceyness. Dad would have to find one of these as a heavily marked-down Demonstrator Special in order to keep the price below $25,000. Why not lease one, you ask? Dad had a bad experience with his last leased car, so I doubt he’d want to jump into that particular pool again. Plus, leasing would prohibit his customization efforts, unless he’d be willing to pay thousands to have the car reconditioned at the end of the lease.

Pluses:
–Athletic V-6 engine
–High uniqueness value (very, very few of them on the road)
–Worthy aesthetic successor to the late, lamented PT Cruiser Convertible
–The top goes down

Minuses:
–Pricey
–Would be hard to find a Demonstrator Special
–Only looks truly offensive with the convertible top up
–No room on the trunk lid for a tack-on spoiler

7. Fiat 500C

Pluses:
–Good gas mileage
–Would probably remind Dad of his old Morris Minor
–Closest thing to a Citroen CV2 on the market
–Pretty good uniqueness value (Fiat is selling in the U.S. only about a quarter of the numbers of 500s they’d projected)
–The top goes down (kinda-sorta)

Minuses:
–Kind of a chick car
–Not much room in that trunk
–Absence of any rear vision when the top is fully folded down
–With an auto transmission, might not have enough power to climb the hills between Albuquerque and Santa Fe
–Fix It Again Tony

6. Dodge Caliber

Pluses:
–About to be phased out by a new model, so dealers will be dumping them
–Spiritual descendant of the Chevy Citation hatchback and its X-car brethren (although the X-cars were arguably more attractive than the Caliber)
–Available in that becoming pea-soup-green color
–Fake hood scoop and spoiler are factory options

Minuses:
–Common as cockroaches
–The car you dread seeing waiting for you at the Budget Rent A Car lot
–Drives like a Chevy Citation hatchback (with the Iron Duke 4 cylinder motor)

5. Ford Transit Connect Wagon

Pluses:
–Has the oddest proportions this side of Sandra Bernhard’s face
–Lots of room for Dad’s tall friends, even if they wear hats
–He’ll never lose it in a crowded parking lot
–Able to transport Christmas trees home for his gentile friends

Minuses:
–Might be tempted to transport Christmas trees and throw out his back
–Could be mistaken for a taxi cab driver
–Might tip over in a strong cross wind
–Made in Turkey

4. Nissan Cube

Pluses:
–Great interior room for its size
–Looks like the box it came in; will remind Dad of his history selling cardboard boxes
–Available in a full line of garish colors
–Good gas mileage

Minuses:
–Not much in the way of get-up-and-go
–Funky styling makes for huge blind spots, likely collisions when backing up

3. Hyundai Veloster

Pluses:
–Looks like a jelly bean that’s been sucked on for a day or two
–Trick third door is a real conversation-starter
–Fun to drive
–Great warranty

Minuses:
–Limited head room for Dad’s buddies in the back seat
–May end up being a popular model
–Hyundai dealers not offering discounts on these (yet)

2. Kia Soul

Pluses:
–Especially fugly rear end
–Available with a wide variety of racing stripe packages
–Plenty of interior room for its size
–Good gas mileage
–More fun to drive than a Nissan Cube
–Cheap to buy
–Same great warranty as the Veloster

Minuses:
–May be too popular for its own good

And the winner, the worthiest successor to a 2005 Pontiac Aztek, is…

1. Nissan Juke

Pluses:
–A nose only a mother (or Jerry Mellin) could love
–So ugly it’s actually cute and interesting, sort of like a dung beetle
–More storage space than the Veloster
–Turbo comes standard, a definite conversation-starter
–Goes like a bat out of hell, even saddled with a Continuously Variable Transmission
–Most fun-to-drive vehicle on this list

Minuses:
–Nasty torque-steer if Dad floors it coming out of a turn

So, Dad, feel free to take my advice or disregard it. You may hold on to your Aztek until its plastic cladding falls off (and Robyn may refuse to accept it). But if you buy a Juke, just take it easy with that torque steer, okay?

Category: Stuff I Like |

Andrew | January 5, 2012

3 comments

Visit to the National Navy Museum (part 2)

Levi with quad 40mm anti-aircraft mount

The National Museum of the U.S. Navy is a treasure house, both inside and out. My recent post described the artifacts, some of them gargantuan, that occupy the lawn between the museum’s building and the Anacostia River, where the USS Barry is docked. Today’s post will cover some of the equally stunning (although less large) exhibits found inside the museum hall.

Any fan of the model maker’s art simply must visit the National Navy Museum. When I was a kid, my father, also a military and naval buff, put together plastic model kits for me as birthday and Hanukkah gifts. He built me a Bismarck, a HMS Rodney, and a USS Olympia, as well as a set of Hampton Roads opponents, USS Monitor and CSS Virginia. He regularly took me to hobby shops and to the Dade County Youth Fair, where we could see other model makers’ work on display, some of it very elaborate. However, nothing – absolutely nothing – I have ever seen in the way of scale models compares with the models which awaited me when the boys and I walked inside the Navy Museum.

Armored cruiser USS Pennsylvania

Both Levi and Judah have a funny little habit they engage in whenever something really, really excites them. They jump up and down and flap their arms. Well, I very nearly jumped up and down and flapped like a Canada goose when I saw the first model that awaited us, the USS Pennsylvania, an armored cruiser which served as part of the backbone of the U.S. Pacific Fleet in the first decade or so of the twentieth century, making up part of the “Big Eight” group of armored cruisers. The Pennsylvania is best known, however, as the US Navy’s first “aircraft carrier.” A little more than a hundred years ago, in 1911, she was outfitted with a temporary wooden take-off ramp on her stern and launched seaplanes, which landed in the water and were recovered by ship-mounted cranes. The model on display shows the Pennsylvania in her 1911 state with the temporary ramp installed. This is a big model, easily six feet long, built to a scale, if I remember correctly, of about 1 foot per 100 feet, a scale standard to nearly all the museum’s models.

Monitor USS Miantonomoh

One of the most unusual attractions of the Navy Museum is its outstanding collection of models and artifacts documenting the US Steel Navy, the ships which served from the period stretching from 1890 to the world cruise of the Great White Fleet in 1907-09. One ship which straddled naval epochs, bridging the gap between the US Navy’s ironclad period during the Civil War and its Steel Navy period leading into the Spanish-American War, was the monitor USS Miantonomoh. The history of the Miantonomoh‘s building, and that of her sister ships, is actually more interesting than nearly any of their operational histories. These vessels took longer to construct than any other ships built for the US Navy, reflecting the lowest period in the Navy’s long history. Their construction was begun in 1873 under a cloud of subterfuge. An incident on the high seas nearly led to war between Spain and the United States. The Secretary of the Navy was mortified to learn that the US Navy, had it been called upon to fight the Spanish fleet, had no modern, oceangoing armored ships ready to steam. Congress approved funds for five of the most recent double-turreted monitors to be repaired and modernized; these ironclads had been commissioned in the final year of the Civil War or shortly thereafter. The original Miantonomoh, one of this group, had been the first monitor to cross the Atlantic Ocean, back in 1867. However, by 1873, the five monitors, all with wooden hulls, had deteriorated so badly that they were not worth repairing.

USS Monadnock in heavy Pacific swells

So the Secretary of the Navy used the funds appropriated for repairs to begin building five entirely new monitors, each of which would be given the same name of one of the old monitors, so as to maintain the fiction that those old ironclads were being repaired and refitted. Running out of funds, the Secretary of the Navy gave the private shipyards dozens of Civil War-era monitors and sloops to scrap for additional building money. The scheme eventually came to light, and Congress directed that work on the five monitors be halted. Several years later, however, during another diplomatic crisis, Congress changed its mind and directed that the vessels be completed in various Navy Yards. The incomplete Miantonomoh was transferred to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. However, laggard appropriations and frequent changes in design dragged out construction times for another decade. The Miantonomoh did not enter service until 1891, seventeen years after her construction had been initiated. Her sisters and partial sister, the Puritan, did not enter Navy service until 1895-96, more than twenty years after their construction had begun. Contemporaries and rough equivalents of the British ironclad HMS Devastation, which had been commissioned in the early 1870s, the Miantonomoh and her sisters were thoroughly obsolete as frontline warships by the time they entered service. The major problem with the class can be seen in this photograph of the Miantonomoh‘s sister, USS Monadnock, crossing the Pacific to join Commodore Dewey’s squadron during the Spanish-American War. She made it, but the crossing was so treacherous that she spent the rest of her career on the western side of the Pacific with the US Asiatic Fleet, never daring to cross an ocean again.

Protected cruiser USS Baltimore

The protected cruiser USS Baltimore played a role in every major US conflict from the Spanish-American War to WWII. Commissioned in 1890 as Cruiser #3 of the New Navy, her first major duty was to transport the body of famous engineer John Ericsson, inventor of the US Monitor, to be buried in his native Sweden. She was one of Commodore Dewey’s ships at the Battle of Manila Bay during the Spanish-American War and participated in the Philippines operations which followed that war. Prior to the US involvement in WWI, she was converted to a minelayer, and in 1918 she helped lay anti-submarine minefields between Scotland and Ireland and in the North Sea, an effective deterrent against German U-boats. Between 1922 and 1942 she was laid up as a storage hulk at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and was present during the Japanese air raid on December 7, 1941.

Broadside 8" gun turret, armored cruiser USS Brooklyn

The USS Brooklyn was the most powerful of the first group of New Navy cruisers, mounting eight 8” guns, four of them mounted in French-style en echelon broadside turrets (one of which can be seen in my photograph of the model of the Brooklyn). Commissioned in 1896, she played a key role in the Battle of Santiago de Cuba in July of 1898, where the main Spanish battle fleet was destroyed. The Brooklyn was hit twenty times by Spanish shells but suffered only one sailor killed. In 1905, she retrieved the remains of naval hero John Paul Jones from Cherbourg, France and delivered them to the US Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, where the body was reinterred. During WWI she served as the flagship of the US Asiatic Fleet and finished her lengthy career with the Pacific Fleet in 1921. The Brooklyn was the only US armored cruiser named for a city, rather than a state.

Battleship USS Kearsarge

Similarly, the USS Kearsarge was the only US battleship not named for a state; rather, she was named after the famous steam sloop of the Civil War, the vanquisher of the Confederate raider CSS Alabama (the museum also features models of the original Kearsarge and the Alabama). Commissioned in 1900, too late for service in the Spanish-American War, the Kearsarge nevertheless enjoyed a very lengthy and varied career in the US Navy. Never firing any of her guns in anger, she participated in the cruise of the Great White Fleet in 1907-09 and served as a training vessel during WW1. In 1920, she was converted to a heavy-lift crane ship. During WWII, she lifted and enabled the installation of guns, turrets, and armor plating for the battleships Pennsylvania, Indiana, and Alabama, as well as the cruisers Savanna and Chicago. She continued to serve as a heavy-lift vessel until decommissioned in 1955, five and a half decades after her first commissioning. The most notable feature of the Kearsarge’s design was her double-decker main turrets, with the turrets for her four 13” guns serving as the bases for turrets for her secondary armament of 8” guns. This arrangement caused blast interference between the 13” and 8” guns, however, and the arrangement was repeated in only one other class of US battleships (the Virginia class).

Ironclad CSS Virginia

Other outstanding models at the museum include a diorama of the CSS Virginia in drydock, completing her fitting out after her conversion from the steam frigate USS Merrimac; the USS South Carolina, the US Navy’s first all-big-gun battleship (designed before the famous HMS Dreadnought but completed several years after that history-making warship); and a tremendous model of one of the navy’s last dreadnought battleships, the USS Missouri. The model of the Missouri was built by the same technicians and craftsmen who built the actual ship; they spent an incredible 70,000 man hours working on the model, which is likely one of the finest ship models existent, anywhere.

Battle flag of USS Balao

The museum contains more than just scale models. There are numerous preserved cannons on display, the largest inside the museum being a twin 5″ gun mount from a WWII anti-aircraft cruiser. My boys enormously enjoyed sitting in the gunners’ seats of a quad 40mm anti-aircraft mount, which they were able to swivel and elevate. A display on American submarines contained fascinating models of some of the earliest US Navy submersibles, as well as two working periscopes, both of which poked out the museum’s roof and looked out onto the USS Barry. Another wonderfully appealing artifact is the battle flag of the submarine USS Balao, credited with sinking seven Japanese vessels in WWII. This memorable flag, with its cartoon mascot of a pistol-packing bumblebee riding a torpedo, was designed by a Walt Disney Studios artist in 1945 at the request of Motor Machinist’s Mate 3rd class William G. Hartley.

We’ll most definitely go back. Many times!

Category: Stuff I Like | Tags: Civil War, the kids

Andrew | January 3, 2012

2 comments

Visit to the National Navy Museum (part 1)

1850s experimental 15" gun

This past week, while my boys were on their winter break from school, I finally found the time to visit one of the Washington, DC-area museums I’ve been anxious to see since moving up here – the National Museum of the U.S. Navy. Located next to the Anacostia River, inside the Washington Navy Yard, the Navy Museum is a good bit smaller than its sister facility, the National Museum of the U.S. Marine Corps, located in Quantico, Virginia. However, it is densely packed with artifacts and displays, many of them one-of-a-kind, and a naval buff can easily spend an entire afternoon strolling among the outside artifacts and exploring the various exhibits inside the museum hall. Additionally, the 1950s-era destroyer USS Barry is docked adjacent to the hall as a museum ship (the boys and I ran out of time and energy before setting foot aboard the Barry, so we’ll have to save that exploration for another visit to the Navy Yard).

We visited on a cold, blustery day, but the outside artifacts were so fascinating that we spent nearly an hour braving the winds off the river. Some of the most fascinating things we saw included:

Cannons from ironclad CSS Tennessee

Four cannons removed from the ironclad USS Tennessee (formerly CSS Tennessee) prior to that ship’s scrapping in 1867: two 7” Brook rifles and two 6.4” Brook rifles (the latter seen in the photograph of the Navy Museum’s entrance); as the CSS Tennessee, the ironclad had fought valiantly against Union Admiral David Farrugut’s entire fleet, which included four ironclad monitors, before being overwhelmed by the combined gunfire of the monitors USS Manhattan, USS Chickasaw, and USS Winnebago;

6" gun from USS Maine

A 6” gun salvaged from the wreckage of the second class battleship USS Maine after she was sunk by a magazine explosion in Havana Harbor in 1898, the incident that precipitated the Spanish American War;

Post WWI 16" gun

Several very large cannons which were never used in combat, including an experimental model of a 15” muzzle-loading cannon built in the 1850s, and a 16” gun built prior to the Washington Naval Conference arms limitations talks of 1921-22, which resulted in the scrapping, cancellation, or (in the cases of the USS Lexington and USS Saratoga) conversion of big gun capital ships into aircraft carriers; battleship size was limited by the treaty to 35,000 tons, which ruled out two classes of U.S. battleships and battlecruisers than being built, most of which would have been armed with the model of 16” gun on display here;

26" thick Japanese battleship armor

Sections of battleship armor plating, including large strakes of 16″ thick waterline armor and 9″ thick upper side armor from the USS South Dakota, plus a massive 26″ thick plate intended for the battleship Yamato, recovered by the American Navy at the Japanese naval base of Kure after the war and later tested against 16″ gun armor-piercing shells (as you can see, the American battleship gunfire pierced the Japanese plate clear through, so perhaps the American Iowa class battleships would not have been so terribly outgunned by the Yamato and Musashi had the ships ever met in a gun duel, particularly given the former ships’ five knots greater speed).

Judah between two 16" shells

The most mesmerizing artifact we saw outside the museum was also the largest — a 14″ battleship gun mounted on a railcar carriage. This particular gun (identical to those being mounted on battle wagons of the Pennsylvania class) was shipped to France in the spring of 1918 in time to fire several hundred giant shells at German positions up to twenty-four miles distant. The gun was manned by U.S. Navy sailors who fired it in over a dozen campaigns on the Western Front.

14" railway gun sent to France

14" railway gun (background); Civil War cannons (foreground)

Next in Part 2: the scale model treasures found inside the museum hall

Category: Stuff I Like | Tags: Civil War, the kids

Andrew | December 31, 2011

4 comments

Wishing My Friends and Readers a Wonderful 2012

Consider this my “bloggy” version of the end-of-the-year summing-it-all-up letter (known most commonly, I think, as “the Christmas letter”) that lots of families write, then make dozens of copies of to send off to their relatives and friends along with a Christmas card and/or a family snapshot.

Topping my “to do” list is wishing all of you a coming year of good health, profitable ventures, enjoyable times with family and friends, a deepening sense of community, and many hours of wonderful, entertaining, and enlightening reading. May 2012 be a year in which many longstanding bright aspirations are fulfilled, and one in which all of life’s surprises are positive ones.

2011 has been an odd year, a rather bifurcated year for me. Whereas many events in the wider world have prompted ill ease and a sense of waiting for the next shoe to drop, my immediate family’s life has been one of blessings over the past twelve months (your host spits between his fingers and mutters in Yiddish, “Kein ayin hora.”) The economy has remained on wobbly legs, with the official unemployment rate declining only because more and more people are opting to give up and leave the workforce entirely. Events overseas, from unrest in Arab lands to Iranian belligerence to the European sovereign debt crisis, combine to keep one on edge. In this time of uncertainty, I feel incredibly fortunate that I continue to be gainfully employed, that my family and I live comfortably and cozily in our small house in the woods, that we have enjoyed mostly good health this past year, that I’ve been able to start and finish a book I am very proud of, and that my sons have continued their growth and development into admirable young men.

Levi’s love of reading grows stronger and stronger, and he is taking to playing the piano, if not quite like a duck to water, then like a golden retriever to water (slowly and steadily, he’ll get to the far side). He and his younger brother Asher have both received glowing reports from their teachers at school. Both of them have made me proud by hanging in there with their Tae Kwan Do lessons, despite Master Nam’s exacting standards and Marine-like insistence on discipline, which places far greater demands on them than those they encountered at their former Tae Kwan Do academy (at the old school, the boys advanced to a new belt every other month, whereas under Master Nam, Levi has remained a white belt for more than six months, and Asher only recently received his first promotion). Judah has discovered an enthusiasm for monster movies, especially Japanese kaiju monster movies, which has prompted me to make him handmade monster toys and brought us even closer.

Dara and I have been able to do some traveling, reuniting with old friends in New York and in New Orleans; I had the honor of being a writer guest at CONtraflow, the first fan-run science fiction convention to be held in the New Orleans area since before Hurricane Katrina in 2005. We welcomed a new companion into our family this year, a kitten, rescued from the streets, named Priscilla. She has quickly made herself the queen of the household, demanding only the best (and most expensive) cat food, continuously pouncing on our four older cats, putting her small nose everywhere it does not belong, but happy to purr on Dara’s chest all night and offer affection to the rest of the members of the family (with the possible exception of Judah, who plays as roughly with her as she does with the other cats).

Growing independence on the boys’ part (mainly their being able to fall asleep without having me in their room with them) has returned to me a part of my life I had greatly missed – the opportunity to read for pleasure before going to bed. I’ve read some wonderful books this past year. The best of the bunch were Barney’s Version by Mordechai Richler and Mr. Sammler’s Planet by Saul Bellow. Not quite as pleasurable and enriching but still very rewarding were A Thread of Grace by Mary Doria Russell, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Kampus by James Gunn, and The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow. Borders’ going-out-of-business sale tempted me into adding a lot of recently published books to my library, so I have a very full shelf of to-be-read books waiting for me in 2012.

The Borders bankruptcy was just one symptom of the massive churn and “creative destruction” that seemed to accelerate in 2011 in the publishing and bookselling industries. All the uncertainty is enough to give any writer heartburn. Uncertainty has been the hallmark of my writing career since 2004. I presently have five unsold novel manuscripts sitting on my hard drive. But my attendance at the 2011 Nebula Awards Weekend helped me decide to take a more proactive stance toward my career, rather than simply churning out the books and hoping/praying that something good happens in the brain of some editor somewhere. Although the connection I made with Robin Sullivan of Ridan Publications didn’t end up working out the way I’d originally hoped, that experience did lead me to setting up this website after having been absent from the web for six years. I convinced my most recent publishers, Tachyon Publications, to make my third book, The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501, available in all the popular ebook formats. Also, Dara and I have been laying the groundwork for our own small e-press, so that when I judge that any of those five unpublished manuscripts have sat on enough editors’ desks for enough time, the books won’t be trapped in limbo. I will make them available myself, and Dara and I will combine our efforts to market them directly to readers.

Blogging has been a source of fun and pleasure so far. Since July 1 of this year, I’ve been fortunate enough to attract about 60,000 page views; not a rocket ship take-off, but not too shabby. Of the approximately 120 posts and articles I’ve placed on the website in its first six months, the following twelve are the ones I’m happiest with, the posts I think of as my creme de la creme to date. If you’ve missed any of them, you may want to take a look:

“The Death of Science Fiction, 1960 and Today”
“Lust for a Laptop, or the Madness of the Obsessive Collector” (series begins here)
“Thoughts Prompted by the English Riots”
“It’s J. G. Ballard’s World, We Just Live in It”
“The Absence of 9-11 from Science Fiction”
“Science Fiction Movements and Manifestos”
“The Thrill of the New”
“A Tale of Two Bildungsromans”
“An Unpredictable (But Golden) Reward of Publishing”
“In Praise of Anne McCaffrey”
“Training the Next Generation of SF Geeks: an Intergenerational Study”
“Farewell to Joe Simon, American”

To close out the year, here is my favorite quote I’ve stumbled across in 2011 (thanks to Mona Charen for bringing it to my attention), from the lips of Teddy Roosevelt:

“It is exceedingly interesting and attractive to be a successful businessman . . . or farmer, or a successful lawyer, or doctor, or a writer, or a president, or a ranchman . . . or to kill grizzly bears and lions. But for unflagging interest and enjoyment, a household of children, if things go reasonably well, certainly makes all other forms of success and achievement lose their importance by comparison.”

I couldn’t agree more, Teddy. Have a wonderful and successful 2012, everybody!

Category: Miscellaneous Musings | Tags: the kids

Andrew | December 27, 2011

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Academia As Seen Through the Lens of Science Fiction

Drunkard’s Walk
Frederik Pohl
Original Edition: Ballantine Books, 1960 (following serialization in Galaxy Science Fiction)
Most Recent Edition: Ballantine Books, 1973

Kampus
James Gunn
Original Edition: Bantam Books, 1977
Most Recent Edition: Kindle, 2010

Over the past thirty years, the level of interest in science fiction shown by academia has grown at least tenfold, with hundreds of campuses now offering courses on science fiction as literature or science fiction as a prominent branch of popular culture, and a handful of universities offering full degree programs in science fiction. However, the level of interest running in the opposite direction – the interest of science fiction authors in extrapolating the future of academia—has been rather lower. Few major works of science fiction have taken up potential future developments in higher education as their primary subject. I find this to be a bit surprising, given the not insubstantial contingent of science fiction writers who currently earn the majority or a sizable portion of their income serving as university faculty.

Examining potential futures for academia and the university system is a timely endeavor. America’s university system, long considered one of the crown jewels of the nation’s economic and social infrastructure, now finds itself at the confluence of powerful societal trends, technological, economic, and political in nature, which will almost certainly reshape much of that system within a decade or two into forms which may be drastically different from the norms we as a society have become accustomed to since the Second World War and the granting of the G.I. Bill educational benefits to veterans.

Much has been written in recent years about the suspected inflation of a higher education bubble which mimics in many of its aspects the housing bubble whose bursting brought on the 2008 recession. Since 1985, the cost of college tuition and fees has increased nearly 500%, versus a 115% increase in overall consumer prices. Student loans, a majority of which are backed by the federal government, are non-dischargeable in bankruptcy, and many students find themselves graduating from a four-year program of liberal arts study with the equivalent of a home mortgage (debt loads for many graduates of private universities approach a quarter of a million dollars, with the graduates of public universities not far behind). Even worse off than the graduates are the more numerous drop-outs; they are saddled with sizable debt burdens but have no credential in hand to assist them in finding work which will allow them to repay their loans. Many observers feel that current trends in higher education are unsustainable and that a crisis, or a combination of crises, will force the system into radical change.

What might those changes look like? Two prominent science fiction authors, Frederik Pohl and James Gunn, have painted portraits of potential futures for the higher education system. Their novels were published seventeen years apart – Pohl’s Drunkard’s Walk in 1960 and Gunn’s Kampus in 1977. Giving credence to the truism that science fiction is more about the present than it is about the future, each book strongly reflects the academic milieu which was prevalent during the period of its writing: for Pohl’s, the Sputnik Era, fear-driven lionization of the hard sciences and the concurrent dedication of significant government funding to basic research efforts at the universities; and for Gunn’s, the student radicalism and participatory democracy and identity group power movements of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, which, by 1977, had mostly retreated from large-scale public protests to their bases on university campuses.

Drunkard’s Walk was originally serialized in a shorter form in Galaxy Science Fiction in 1960. Pohl’s novel has the feel of a typical late-1950s Galaxy story: a surface urbanity and wit, many clever turns of plot, and characterization about as deep as that found in a Twilight Zone episode of the same era. The novel-length Drunkard’s Walk, although not a long book, suffers some from excess padding glued to its flanks during the effort to expand it from a novella to a novel; many of the chapters told from the vantage point of a supporting character, Master Carl, feel tacked on and unnecessary. The primary problem faced by the protagonist, Master Cornut, a mathematics professor at an unnamed University, is both original and compelling—during periods of partial consciousness, such as when he is on the verge of falling asleep, has just woken up, or is distracted by the progress of one of his own lectures, Cornut is plagued by an autonomous compulsion to commit suicide, despite being a happy, privileged, and well-adjusted individual. He is forced to rely upon the watchfulness of those who live adjacent to his on-campus living quarters, initially students and later his student wife, to keep himself from slitting his own throat or hurling himself over the railing of his apartment’s balcony. Where the plot ultimately heads is less fresh, at least from the present vantage point of an additional half-century of science fiction stories and films, involving as it does the trope of a conspiracy of secret immortals who seek to wipe out potential rivals before those rivals can realize their own power.

For today’s reader, the primary draw of Drunkard’s Walk may be its setting, the University where Master Cornut teaches. Pohl paints the University as a refuge from the overcrowded, tumultuous outside world, where a sizable portion of the American lower middle class is forced to live on “texases,” off-shore platforms originally constructed as early-warning radar installations, which are now used for dirty jobs such as manufacturing and raw materials processing (each texas produces its own power from the wave energy that crashes continuously against its support legs). The book’s most accurate extrapolation is Pohl’s envisioning of distance learning; each professor’s lectures are taped and broadcast, reaching audiences of millions, those who either aspire to degrees of higher learning or who desire access to knowledge:

“Cornut had more than a hundred live watchers—the cream; the chosen ones who were allowed to attend University in person—but his viewers altogether numbered three million. …

“For education was something very precious indeed.

“The thirty thousand at the University were the lucky ones; they had passed the tests, stiffer every year. Not one out of a thousand passed those tests; it wasn’t only a matter of intelligence, it was a matter of having the talents that could make a University education fruitful—in terms of society. For the world had to work. The world was too big to be idle. The land that had fed three billion people now had to feed twelve billion.

“Cornut’s television audience could, if it wished, take tests and accumulate credits. … Almost always the credits led nowhere. But to those trapped in dreary production or drearier caretaker jobs for society, the hope was important. There was a young man named Max Steck, for example, who had already made a small contribution to the theory of normed rings. It was not enough. Sticky Dick said he would not justify a career in mathematics. He was trapped as a sexwriter, for Sticky Dick’s analyzers had found him prurient-minded and creative. There were thousands of Max Stecks.

“Then there was Charles Bingham. He was a reactor hand at the 14th Street generating plant. Mathematics might help him, in time, become a supervising engineer. It also might not—the candidates for that job were lined up fifty deep. But there were half a million Charles Binghams. …

“These, the millions of them, were the invisible audience who watched Master Cornut’s image on a cathode screen.”

Pohl places the University’s professors, or Masters, at the top of his social pecking order. Masters may take advantage of a sort of droit de seigneur regarding the University’s students. Conjugal relations between professors and students are encouraged, being viewed as beneficial to each, and what are called “term marriages” are common, which may last (presumably on the Master’s prerogative) as briefly as a few weeks. There is a strict separation between Town and Gown, with the latter acting in many ways as a sort of hereditary landed aristocracy, but one which sometimes opts to absorb very talented members of the former into its ranks (as scholarship students).

That strict separation between Town and Gown is mirrored in James Gunn’s Kampus, but the relative status of the two is nearly inverted. Gunn, born in 1923 (four years after Frederik Pohl), is a professor emeritus at the University of Kansas and the director of its Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Following an estimable career as a science fiction author and anthologist, he became one of the pioneering academicians to teach science fiction. He was a personal witness (from the faculty side) to the campus upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s, and the first third of Kampus takes place on the University of Kansas campus at some point early in the twenty-first century. A series of social upheavals has caused state governments to essentially surrender their university campuses to student control. Walled off from the surrounding communities, the campuses act as holding pens for the revolutionary young adult offspring of the middle and upper middle classes, who are free to act out their anarchistic, communitarian, or socialist fantasies within the walls. Symbols of authority are still present, in the form of Kampuskops, but these are more actors in revolutionary theater than agents of bureaucratic control, present mainly to give the student activists and revolutionaries someone to act against.

In contrast to the University portrayed in Drunkard’s Walk, within the universities of Kampus the professors have virtually no social status at all. In the absence of state financial support, they are reduced to competing with one another for paying students, each trying to outdo the others with promises of lurid classroom content, skills to be gained in manipulating peers, and drug experimentation. Professors must be transported to and from their classrooms in armored cars, since campuses are rife with plots to kidnap them and demand various forms of ransom. Students live in self-righteous squalor, mostly unaware that small cadres of student leaders pull their strings and benefit from unlimited sexual partners and access to endless supplies of psychoactive drugs. These cadres keep the student populations entertained and distracted with violent demonstrations on campus and destructive raids into the surrounding communities, which hate and fear the students.

Very little in the way of active learning takes place. Students are supplied with their degree parchments on the first day of their matriculation; they are also issued learning pills that encode the peptides of popular professors and allow some forms of knowledge to be effortlessly passed on. The novel’s protagonist, Tom Gavin, enrolls in a philosophy course offered by one of the few traditional professors remaining on campus. He becomes so enthralled with the Socratic experience that he plots to kidnap the Professor in order to extract peptides from his blood and create new learning pills that will allow Tom to internalize all of his knowledge. The kidnapping leads to a regrettable denouement, but before it does, the Professor has an opportunity to deliver a potted history of the devolution of higher education:

“‘Here I stand,’ the Professor said, ‘tearing my breast to bleeding shreds like the fabled pelican to feed you ungrateful chicks, in a place where learning has fled, where man has retreated from intellectual activity to ritual. I have lived through it all. I have seen the University retreat from educational standards and academic freedom through autonomous black-studies curricula, general studies, and student participation in University governance to total lack of concern for objective educational criteria and to the abandonment of the campus by serious scholars and scientists. Where has learning fled?

“‘How many of you know that when you matriculate in this University you are automatically awarded a degree? Of course, most of you stay around to play in the sandbox you call a university, and a few of you, to seek out an education. Where has learning fled?

“‘The practice of students hiring and paying their own teachers goes back to the first university, at Bologna, founded in the eleventh century, but it soon was recognized as the pure bologna it was. Students do not know what they need to know; if they knew, they would not need teachers. Well, the Dark Ages returned as public support for higher education gradually was withdrawn from campuses, enrollments began declining, and faculty became increasingly dependent upon student fees; the ancient pattern of student control and student hiring, firing, and payment of faculty reestablished itself. The result, you see around you–not teachers but charlatans, pimps pandering to student lusts in the name of relevance. Relevance–that’s what we call it when our prejudices are reinforced. A basic principle of education is that you cannot learn anything from someone with whom you agree.'”

Student rivalries and the machinations of StudEx, the student leadership executive board, force Tom to leave the University of Kansas once he has become a threat to StudEx’s power. He sets out across the country, Candide-like, confident in his revolutionary-socialist-egalitarian ideals, to see for himself the semi-legendary University of California at Berkeley, the font of the student revolutionary movement. He falls in with a young female companion of a much more practical bent, an orphan who graduated from the school of hard knocks and who has no patience for Tom’s high-flown ideals, but who loves him and tries (not always successfully) to protect him from the consequences of his own naiveté. On the course of their travels, we readers discover “where the learning has gone:” practical, technical instruction has migrated to a system of highly automated community colleges, matriculating a mostly lower class and working class student body who are motivated to achieve wealth, not social equality, and theoretical and applied research have left the universities for secluded mountain havens funded by philanthropic billionaires.

Kampus is a more ambitious novel than Drunkard’s Walk. Its characters, at least the protagonists, are drawn with greater psychological depth than those of the earlier book. Pohl’s prose is sturdy and workmanlike, never flashy or evocative, whereas Gunn’s frequently achieves real beauty. If Kampus can be said to have a significant flaw, it is that too many of its well delineated and highly entertaining episodes teach the same lesson to Tom Gavin, who, until the book’s end, seems stubbornly resistant to learning what is endlessly rubbed in his face – that beautiful ideals may often hide venal motivations, and that violence, rape, and theft committed in the stated pursuit of a more egalitarian society are still violence, rape, and theft. Many readers will be tempted to give up on Tom halfway through the novel, but the charm and vividness of Gunn’s prose, plus his deft hand at keeping his plot moving, will keep them on board through the end. Some reviewers have remarked that the scenarios extrapolated in Kampus are dated and were dated even when the book was written in 1977. However, the recent saga of Occupy Wall Street and the other Occupy movements around the country makes many of the events and actors of Kampus feel very current.

Which of the novels is more relevant to the situation faced by higher education today? Pohl was certainly on to something with his description of the ubiquity of distance learning, and Gunn made prescient points concerning the growing divide between teaching and research and the likelihood that, should colleges and universities abandon the teaching of the practical arts, other institutions (such as the Internet) will rise to fill the gap. Interestingly, whereas the earlier book portrayed the professors as the top of the heap and the latter book did the same for the students, in actuality a third group, hardly mentioned by either novel, appears to have been the biggest beneficiary of the enormous growths in university budgets over the past thirty years – the administrators. As the numbers of tenured faculty have plummeted at most colleges and universities, replaced by adjunct or part-time instructors, the numbers of administrators and managers, in new areas like environmental compliance and diversity observance, have skyrocketed, and many of those administrators enjoy salaries and power well beyond those extended to professors.

My own recent novel No Direction Home posits a third possible future for higher education. In the mid-twenty-first century, much of the middle class has abandoned the old American Dream of homeownership and college education. A large portion of the population has taken up a nomadic existence, living as gypsies in their electric cars and moving between short-term jobs, flowing wherever the demand for labor arises. Most states, strapped for cash, have closed their public universities. College education has reverted to what it was prior to the Second World War – a status good, a privilege available primarily to the wealthy. Most gypsies obtain what training and education they need for their short-term jobs from the Internet setups built into their vehicles, and they are guided in their courses of learning by one-time professors, laid off from public universities, who now accompany the gypsy crews on their travels. Those gypsies who wish to pursue non-vocational learning attend roadside seminars and salons offered by the professors, after-work perks provided by the organizers of the crews.

So the future I’ve envisioned for higher education combines elements of Frederik Pohl’s extrapolations (universities limited to the wealthy and/or privileged; widespread distance learning) with those of James Gunn’s (teachers as migrant free agents offering their services to students; practical training provided in electronic form). For what it is worth, I wrote my novel prior to reading either Drunkard’s Walk or Kampus. The confluence between my book and theirs proves to me yet again that science fiction is a conversation carried out over decades, with effective exchanges taking place even in the absence of direct influence or knowledge; a form of telepathy between writers, perhaps, or at least of the convergent modes of thinking that arise from the practice of science fiction.

In a recursive hall of mirrors, professors who are science fiction writers may teach science fiction books about the future of academia… wherein science fiction writers teach books extrapolating the future of academia…

Category: Book Love, Reviews and Such, Science Fiction |

Andrew | December 21, 2011

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Happy Hanukkah from The Good Humor Man

In honor of the first day of Hanukkah, the Jewish Festival of Lights, I present to you, my festive readers, the Hanukkah party scene from The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 (excerpted from chapters 5 and 6).

Just to bring you up to speed: we’re in the year 2041, when the government has outlawed all high-calorie, “unhealthy” foods, and officially sanctioned vigilantes called the Good Humor Men enforce those dictates. Dr. Louis Shmalzberg, who very recently resigned from the Good Humor Men after a bout of guilt stemming from his participation in a botched raid, is attending his cousin Cindy’s Hanukkah party, where illegal potato pancakes, or latkes, fried in high-fat oil, will be secretly served.

If you like what you read here, please remember, books make great Hanukkah or Christmas gifts! The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501 is available as either a trade paperback or in any of the popular ebook formats: a Kindle book, a Nook book, an Apple iBook, and a Sony Reader ebook. So now buying the novel Booklist selected as one of their 10 Best SF and Fantasy Novels of 2010 is more convenient than ever, amigos!

In the meantime, treasure your freedom to eat those potato pancakes and Christmas cookies and slurp down that eggnog without Big Brother (or the Good Humor Men) looking over your shoulder…

__________________________________________________________________________

**** THE LATKE RAID ****

Shit. I’m late for Cindy’s dinner party in La Jolla. Apart from my father, she’s the only family I have left. Worse, I forgot to get out to the store to buy a gift. I search the kitchen for something to bring. The best I can find is a bottle of California table wine. I wrap it in tin foil and hope Cindy won’t notice that the top fifth of the bottle is empty. …

Buddy answers the door. I’ve never much cared for him. According to Cindy, he’s been an emotionally removed husband and father, burying himself in his engineering business. It’s probably the resemblance to my own father that irks me. But he’s certainly provided my cousin and their son with a comfortable home.

“Hello, Lou. Cindy was just wondering whether you’d make it.”

“Hi, Buddy. How are you?” We awkwardly shake hands. I catch him looking curiously at my black eye. “You haven’t fed the last crumbs of the latkes to the dogs yet?”

“Not yet. Cindy’s just taking them out of the oil now.”

“The latkes or the dogs?”

No smile. “The latkes.”

“Good. I understand Will is scheming to make you a grandfather?”

“Yeah. Isn’t that a kick in the head?” He almost smiles. “He and Blair are out in the solarium, if you want to go congratulate them.”

“I’ll do that. Here’s a little something for the party.”

He takes my wine and mumbles his thanks. The rich aroma of frying latkes greets me. I exchange nods of familiarity with several of the other guests. Many of them must have heard I’m a Good Humor Man. I wonder how they feel about that, sipping their fat-laden matzoh ball soup at Passover and eating their latkes at Hanukkah next to a man with the power to revoke their health care privileges. …

I find Cindy in the kitchen, wrapping her latkes in paper towels to absorb the excess oil. I sneak up behind her and put my hands on her shoulders. “Miss, tell me the name of the black marketeer you bought that oil from,” I say, “and it’ll go easier on you.”

She turns around. “Lou! You made it!” Her bright-eyed smile immediately turns to shock, however. “Jesus Christ! What happened to your face, honey?”

Cindy’s nine years younger than me. Despite the age difference, we were close growing up. She was a lifeline for me after Emily died. I’ve never been able to lie to her. “A bad day in the food confiscation business,” I admit.

“Shit,” she scowls, pulling off her cooking mitts and lightly touching the bruises around my eyes. “They beat you up? Where were those macho pals of yours? Aren’t they supposed to protect you? You’re too old for all that crap, Lou. How long have I been begging you to give it up? It’s not as if you believe in it anymore.”

She’ll certainly be happy to hear my next bit of news. “I resigned. Just last night.”

Her eyes go wide. “Really?”

“Really. I’ve confiscated my last chocolate bar.”

She hugs me tightly. “That’s great, Lou. That’s really great. That’s the best news I’ve heard since — well, the second-best news, after Will and Blair deciding to have a kid.”

“I told them I’d pitch in for the embryologist’s fees.”

“That’s awfully sweet of you. But can you afford that?”

“I’ll do whatever I can. I figure it’s my patriotic duty to help grow the population. Although it sure would be wonderful, not to mention enormously cheaper, if they were willing and able to get pregnant the old-fashioned way.”

“Heh. Yeah.” She smiles ruefully, multiplying the tiny age lines around her eyes. “But you can’t expect kids today to put up with what our generation did, Lou. Blair’s seen the pictures of me pregnant with Will. I was El Blimpo, remember? She’s heard how long it took me to drop all that excess blubber. Asking her to get pregnant au naturel would be like asking her to cut off her arm.” She doffs her apron and puts her arm around my waist. “C’mon into the dining room. The kids are about to light the candles. Then we’ll eat.”

The guests are all gathered around the ornate brass menorah, the ceremonial candelabra with its branches for each of the eight days of Hanukkah. Although I’ve never been particularly religious, I have warm feelings for this holiday, with its symbolism of ever-increasing light. Tonight six candles will be lit.

Blair, the youngest person present, sings the ancient prayers of praise in Hebrew and then in English, while touching the wick of each candle with the flame of the shamas, the lead candle. The sixth candle, the one for tonight, isn’t seated firmly enough. Blair jostles it with the shamas while trying to light it. The burning candle falls onto the tablecloth.

Blair’s face goes white. “Damn — so clumsy —”

Not wanting Cindy’s heirloom tablecloth to get burned, I reach for the wick. “It’s all right —” My fingers burn as I snuff out the fire.

“Lou, your fingers — let me get some first aid cream,” Cindy says.

“Not necessary. I’m fine.” I take a knife and dig the excess wax from the candle holder, then reset the candle in the menorah. “Go ahead, Blair. Finish the prayers.”

Cindy makes an ice pack for me nevertheless. The guests and I sit ourselves around the dining table. The long table is covered with platters of fruits, vegetables, and prime cuts of Leanie-Lean meats. Cindy emerges from the kitchen with the pièce de résistance — a heaping tray of steaming, crispy latkes. We all applaud. Especially this ex-Good Humor Man.

The oldest among us look the happiest. I watch guests in their sixties or seventies eagerly place three or four latkes on their plates at a time. Blair, however, quivers with distaste as she reluctantly spears one small potato pancake, then cuts it in half and quickly shoves the other half onto her husband’s plate.

I take three, plus a generous helping of the sour cream Cindy has managed to conjure up. If there are any latkes left over, I may ask Cindy if she’d wrap some up for my father. The aroma… it’s as if I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen again. I dip a latke in the sour cream and take a bite. It’s just as delicious as I remember. Maybe more so this year, because this is the taste of hope, of fresh beginnings.

The room is quiet. The only sounds are the crunching of latkes and faint music outside, coming from somewhere down the road. It gets gradually louder, as if it’s coming closer.

That first latke goes sour in my stomach.

The approaching music is the false cheer of a calliope.

I glance around the table. The pit of my stomach begins to churn. Some of the others hear the music, too. I see the anticipatory dread in their faces. And worse, accusation, aimed at me like a blowtorch blast.

Maybe the truck is going to another house? The calliope gets louder. Cindy catches my eye. I feel sick. I desperately shake my head, struggle to wordlessly convey I don’t know a thing — this has nothing to do with me…

I hear the truck come to a halt, then the clatter of doors being shoved open, men grunting beneath the weight of equipment, disposal pots banging as they’re unloaded. It’s all so familiar. Only I’ve never heard it from this side of the equation before.

Blair spits out the piece of latke and hides it in her napkin. Her act unfreezes everyone else at the table. Plates clatter and water glasses spill. Guests rush to the kitchen garbage disposal or bathrooms. Many will force themselves to vomit; I’ve seen all this before.

But it’s too late. Already the Good Humor Men are smashing in the door. I stay at the deserted table, eating my last two latkes. I know better than to try to hide the evidence of my “crime.” I have my credentials on me. Perhaps by confronting these men calmly, as a colleague, I can convince them that nothing illegal has occurred, that Cindy obtained a special religious exemption for using the oil… even though no such exemptions exist.

An axe blade bursts through the front door. The first Good Humor Man enters my cousin’s house. And my world is plunged into queasy, inexplicable nightmare again.

It’s Mitch.

“Aww, fucking hell,” he says when he sees me. “I didn’t want to believe you’d really be here.”

He can’t be here. This is thirty miles south of the edge of our district.

“You — you have no enforcement powers here,” I say. “You don’t have… what is your authority to make a raid outside our district?”

“My district, you mean. Didn’t you just quit us?”

“Yes. I did.” The anger and hurt in his voice hit me like burning arrows. But again I ask, “What is your authority?”

“Special dispensation,” he says slowly, his eyes tracing the trail of latkes crushed into the carpet. Brad and Alex, Jr. enter, Brad carrying the dragon, Alex bowed beneath the weight of the clumsy disposal tubs. Brad sprints into the other rooms to round up the guests. His eyes don’t meet mine. But Alex’s eyes do. He stares at me with the shocked, stung look of a little boy who has caught his father making love to a mistress.

“The local crew gave us permission to operate on their turf,” Mitch says. “When I explained it might involve a case of corruption inside our unit, they didn’t have any choice but to say yes.”

Brad ushers the guests back into the dining room. Several of them stare fearfully at his flamethrower. Grown men playing soldier. Why didn’t I ever let myself see it before? Because I was one of the toy soldiers.

Someone is hanging back in the hallway. Brad grabs her arm and pulls her roughly into the room. It’s Blair. The poor thing wipes flecks of vomit from the corners of her mouth.

“Brad!” I shout, standing. “Don’t be rough with her. With any of them. It’s not necessary.”

“Lou?” Cindy stands at the edge of the crowd, an oven mitt still dangling from one hand. “Lou, these are… friends of yours? Can’t you make them go away?”

“Cindy, please believe me, I don’t have anything to do with this —”

Her voice is plaintive, quivery, almost childlike. “Can’t you make them go away?”

I turn to Mitch, my oldest friend, hoping I’ll find some pity in his weathered face. I don’t see what I’m hoping to see. He jerks his head toward the door. “Lou. Let’s you and me step outside a minute.”

Out on the porch, Mitch whirls on me, his face distorted with fury. “Lou, how could you do this to me?”

I’m momentarily wordless, stunned that he can view himself as the injured party. He sticks his contorted face close, too close, to mine. “Do you realize the position you’ve put me in? What the fuck do twenty-five years of friendship mean to you? Don’t you have a single goddamn thing to say for yourself?”

“Who was the informant, Mitch?”

“What?”

“Who told you I’d be here, and that latkes would be on the menu?”

My unexpected question deflates his anger. Fury gone, he looks like a graying sixty-six-year-old man again. “Hell, I can’t tell you that. You know better than to ask that, Lou.”

I nod. He chews his bottom lip, twists the axe handle in his hands. “Lou… I don’t understand any of this.” He stares at the ground. “Why you quit. Why I found you in the middle of this crime scene. Maybe you’re hacked off at what happened the other day in Mex-Town. About me and the boys not being there to back you up when you needed us. Maybe this is your way of gettin’ even. I don’t know.” He looks up, and his voice gets stronger. “But what I do know is that we’ve been friends for an awful long time, Lou. I don’t like throwin’ friendships away.”

“I don’t either.”

“Good. I’ll make you a deal. Come back inside with me and help finish up the raid. Let’s pretend this quitting business of yours never happened. Agree to come back to the unit, and I’ll explain to the other guys that this was a sting operation, that you were on the side of the angels the whole time. How about it, Lou? Can we make these last three days just disappear?”

Becoming a Good Humor Man again… that rates dead even with necrophilia and cannibalism on my “to-do” list. But I’d eat my own arm if it would save my family from humiliation and financial hardship. “I’ll rejoin the unit, Mitch, on one condition. You let the others know this was all a mistake. The three of you leave those people in there alone. My family and all their guests.”

His eyes fall to the ground again. He shakes his head slowly. “You’re asking too much.”

“Why? Why too much?”

“That should be goddamned self-evident, Lou.” His fury reawakens. “Brad and Alex saw what those people dumped in the toilets. They watched those girls in there make themselves throw up. What do you expect me to tell them, huh? How am I supposed to keep their respect, their allegiance, if I tell them some bald-faced lie? It’d mean the end of the unit!”

“You’d be lying to them anyway,” I say as calmly as I can manage. “You want things between us to go back to how they were? I’ve told you what I need.”

His half-hissed obscenity barely reaches my ears before he swings his axe in a violent arc, embedding its blade in one of the porch’s wooden posts. “It’s impossible!” he shouts. “Why are you being such a suicidal asshole? Those people in there — they’re going down no matter what you do. You can save yourself, save your reputation, and they’re going down. Or you can sacrifice yourself, like some fuckin’ idiot, and they’re still going down. So what’s the goddamn difference, Lou?”

He doesn’t see it. He doesn’t see the difference, and that is terribly sad. “ ‘Those people’ are my family, Mitch. If you can’t see a difference between my betraying them and my standing with them… then our friendship is done.”

I see something break behind his eyes. I’ve done it. I’ve stepped into the abyss.

I follow Mitch back into the house. Cindy’s guests are doctors, engineers, and architects. Most of them have probably never even been issued a traffic citation, and now each of them will have this century’s scarlet letter permanently affixed to their record and reputation: “G” for Glutton. Their eyes beseech me for mercy, as though I control their fates. But I’m plummeting through the abyss right alongside them.

“Collect their health system cards,” Mitch says to Brad. He indicates me with a twitch of his thumb. “His, too.”

I open up my wallet and remove the laminated card. Sixty-eight years old. I’d better pray for good health.…

Category: Science Fiction | Tags: The Good Humor Man or Calorie 3501

Andrew | December 19, 2011

6 comments

No Direction Home Completed… For Now

One reason I started this blog was to keep track of my milestones. Milestones in a writer’s life include starting a project, finishing a project, finding a market for a project, seeing that project offered for public consumption, and receiving some form of public acclaim (or damnation). Milestones are of great importance to the writer who reaches them, of course. They may be of major or middling interest to that writer’s readers.

I just hit a milestone earlier today. I finished my initial draft on the completed manuscript of my eighth novel (ninth, if I count my learner’s book, Draining the Everglades, which I generally don’t), No Direction Home. Much like The Good Humor Man, or, Calorie 3501, No Direction Home is a near-future, mid-century extrapolation of current societal, political, economic, and technological trends and events. My just completed book extrapolates these humdingers thirty-five years out: the decline in homeownership in America; the astronomical growth in the cost of higher education; globalization’s pressure on Americans’ wages and benefits; the unsustainability of the retirement and elder health care systems now in place; and major advances in battery technology, akin to what has occurred with microprocessors in the last thirty years.

Thirty-five years from now, most middle class Americans have abandoned the dream of home ownership. They live, gypsy-like, in their electric vehicles, traveling from temporary job to temporary job around the country. Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid are fading memories of a lost golden age. Major advances in battery technology have come with a side product: the illegal, life-shortening drug called vent, which the terminally ill and elderly take, both to ease their pain and to support themselves by selling their drug-induced hallucinatory visions and memories to millions of online subscribers.

My protagonists are two young people from different worlds, one forced out onto the roads by upbringing and economic necessity, the other sampling life on the road by choice. Fate gives them a child, but they are both highly immature, not ready for a shared life or shared parenthood. Eighteen year old Bud Shinsky, son of a Long Island factory owner, tries to win back the love of gypsy Tula Ann Decca, the young mother of his infant son. But Tula Ann has decidedly different ideas. And so does her uncle, Robert Decca, the ailing drifter who, thirty years before, founded the movement and lifestyle that changed America from the land of the rooted to the land of the rootless. Robert has terminal cancer. He wants to find Tula Ann, whom he hasn’t seen since she was a child, before he becomes an invalid and has to go on vent. He wants to bond with her and pass on to her his legacy: acting as secret venture capitalist of the gypsy world, funding gypsy entrepreneurs’ dream businesses.

Bud’s initial attempt to reunite with Tula Ann, who has become a member of the ChanningHammer crew of gypsies, goes terribly awry in the tomato fields of South Florida. After Tula Ann flees the ChanningHammers, Bud finds himself forced to take her place in the crew so that she will not be socially “kaputted,” denied a role in gypsy society for breaking her contract. Bud soon finds himself handed responsibility for the ChanningHammers’ resident vent head, David Zodi. Tula Ann bounces from job to job on the road, doing lighting and sound board work for an itinerant theater company, then working as a living history re-enactor at a Twentieth Century Christmas Village. Her jobs force her to find a nanny for infant Dean Moriarty, but the nanny, Margaret Spangler, carries a terrible secret. Will the rough life lessons that residence on the road provides to Bud and Tula Ann bring them closer, or drive them even farther apart?

The novel asks these timely questions: what is the future of American capitalism? What will replace the American Middle Class Dream of college education and homeownership should that dream become obsolete, or stray out of reach for the majority of the population? Does globalization mean an endless economic “race to the bottom,” or will a new equilibrium be reached, different from what we Americans are used to now, but livable? How will society in future decades care for its increasing population of the very old and the chronically ill? How will it raise its children? Are we as a society becoming dangerously dependent upon electronic interfaces which can be obliterated by a solar flare at any second?

I aimed for the fences with this book. I wanted to write a book with big emotions and a huge payoff at the end, a book that readers would not soon let slip from their memories. With its completion, I now have five novels currently unplaced, all searching for homes. I’ll very soon go to go back to The Bad Luck Spirits’ Social Aid and Pleasure Club at my agent’s request and give it one more round of editing before he sends the book out (and earlier version was unsuccessfully marketed by my former agent). After that, I’m going to begin work on a new type of project for me, a middle grades YA science fiction book called Lizardland. My oldest son, Levi, has been begging me for the last couple of years to write a book that he can read; that’s one motivation. My other motivation is to set out in a different direction from what I’ve been doing and trying something else. A common definition of insanity is continuing to do the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result, and I now have five unsold adult science fiction and fantasy novels sitting on my hard drive, the fruits of eight years of labor. I may be edging into insane territory (not as insane as Mack Reynolds, who apparently died with the manuscripts of more than thirty unsold novels sitting in his closet, but heading in that direction).

All of my novels (with the exception of Draining the Everglades) will eventually be made available to any readers who are interested. In this age of SmashWords and CreateSpace, why the heck not? But, depending on the fate of No Direction Home, that novel may end up being the last adult novel I write with traditional publication (dead-tree book put out by a major New York or second-tier independent publisher, sold primarily in bookstores) as a goal.

What sort of a difference will that make, if any? That depends on whether one considers ebooks to be merely a migration of an existing media (printed books) to a new platform, the way recorded symphonies migrated from vinyl long-play records to CDs, or a brand-new medium.

Early, very anecdotal evidence suggests that readers may prefer for their ebooks to be shorter than their printed books. Some research has indicated that a reader retains less information, or retains information less thoroughly, when reading on a screen, as opposed to reading from a printed page. If valid, this could indicate that readers, or at least some readers, might experience difficulties keeping characters, settings, and plot developments straight in very long manuscripts read on an e-reader.

The length of popular novels has varied over time as the delivery platform and sales environment have changed. During the pulp magazine era of the 1920s through the 1950s, popular novels tended to be short, so as to lend themselves to serialization in a limited number of monthly magazine issues; most novels published in the pulps weren’t much longer than 50,000 to 60,000 words. During the 1960s and 1970s, when most popular novels were published as paperback originals, the bulk of those paperbacks were sold on spinner racks in locations such as drug stores, cigar stores, supermarkets, and department stores. Spinner racks would not hold very thick paperbacks, and in order to sell more copies in the physically limited amount of space provided, publishers put out a lot of fairly slender books; average popular novel length for these decades was about 60,000 to 70,000 words.

From the late 1970s throughout the 1980s and 1990s, however, big, fat books were in fashion, led by reprints of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Stephen King’s novels, and various historical epics and multigenerational family sagas. For the first time, beginning with Anne McCaffrey’s The White Dragon in 1978, major science fiction novels began to be published by large New York houses in hardcover. This format allowed for physically longer books, as did the trade paperbacks which followed. By the time I began marketing Fat White Vampire Blues in 2001, editors didn’t blink an eye at manuscripts which clocked in at 135,000 to 150,000 words. But within a few years, the publishing industry took a major downward turn, and considerations of economy led editors to look for shorter manuscripts once again, not much longer than 100,000 words. Book sellers like Barnes and Noble and Borders could fit more copies of a thinner book on their shelves, and publishers could squeeze more copies of thinner books into each shipping carton.

Ebooks, of course, are not limited by considerations of shelf space or the size of shipping cartons. But they may end up limited by the attention spans and comfort levels of readers who do their reading on e-readers. If I had to guess, I would suspect that many novels written specifically for the e-reader market will top out around the size of the paperback originals of the 1960s – 60,000 to 70,000 words at the outside, with many ebooks being shorter. Series novels which once would have been published as 200,000 word leviathans in hardback will be e-published as three much shorter segments, if they are intended to be ebook originals.

This will require some rethinking on my part, and a conscious redirection of many of my longstanding writing habits. I’ve never written a novel shorter than 95,000 words. Perhaps working for a couple of years on YA novels, which tend to be a good bit shorter than adult novels, will give me good practice. We will see; we will see… I can’t quite make out the direction home yet, but I know I will eventually get there, even if “home” is a place I wouldn’t recognize from the here and now.

Category: Book Love, Publishing, Science Fiction | Tags: No Direction Home

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