18
Jan
2010
Three Things For Today.
18
Jan
2010
No great announcements, just a few writerly things I saw today:
#1: Regarding my recent reviews of Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods, Jo Waltonnails my opinion to the floor:
The techniques of writing and reading [science fiction] have developed in that time. Old things sometimes look very clunky, as if they’re inventing the wheel—because they are. Modern SF assumes. It doesn’t say “The red sun is high, the blue low because it was a binary system.” So there’s a double problem. People who read SF sometimes write SF that doesn’t have enough surface to skitter over. Someone who doesn’t have the skillset can’t learn the skillset by reading it. And conversely, people who don’t read SF and write it write horribly old fashioned clunky re-inventing the wheel stuff, because they don’t know what needs explanation. They explain both too much and not enough, and end up with something that’s just teeth-grindingly annoying for an SF reader to read.
Exactly right, and that’s what’s wrong with everything fromWinterson’s The Stone Gods to the atrocious “science fiction” of e-book only romance writers like Jet Mykles and Reese Gabriel.
#2: The Five Stages of Publishing. See, I skipped down to acceptance right from the beginning. And it’s always worked for me.
#3: I’ve been writing again, and it’s been an iffy thing. The skill comes and goes like a guilty whoremonger. But I received an invitation for an anthology of “Queerpunk,” and have been thinking about how to work cyberpunk, homosexuality, near-future transhumanism, and I think I have an opening:
I met him in the one place where we could possibly have met: on a de-orbiting shuttle. I was coming back from another freelance job in orbit, all wracked out and drained but carrying so much new knowledge it had weight. He had a suit, and a tie, and all the signs of a lunar career. We’d have never met if it hadn’t been for the blackout, that fifteen minutes of silence when you’re cut off from the net. We were forced to talk to each other. Hell, we were forced to notice each other. Which wouldn’t have happened without the blackout.
Our seats were side by side. But he had all the newest stuff, corporate double-signed and encrypted with Diffie Hellman Six, every one of them with a publicly visible EULA and the checkmark box visible should the Pirate Corps come looking. And me? Diffie Hellman nine but GPL’d, man… all the way.
I’m not sure where to go from there. I know I have to get them into bed and emotionally involved, but what’s the plot? Hmm…
10
Jan
2010
Review: Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods
10
Jan
2010
So, I’ve finished reading The Stone Gods by Jeanette Winterson, and my reactions are mixed, to say the least. My primary reaction was one of intense sadness: she really does believe that she’s braving new territory. She is completely unaware that she’s hacking through a jungle right next to a long, well-trodden road and the crew that’s building it is far, far ahead of her, and her course takes her away from the best conclusions. She’s off in a strange, dualistic universe in which robots come to feel “just because.” There are dialogues about how humans have emotions and yet this obviously emotional robots does not, and yet not a single word toward the general consensus that emotions are what give us the capacity to come to a conclusion, to shut rationalization down and make a decision, to break ties between competing choices, and without emotions we would be helpless. When a video game acts as if it wants to defeat you, it has been given that want by its developer; at some stage, we turn off the abstraction and act as if the game wants to defeat us. Winterson picks up the glittering tools of modern science fiction and engages in bronze-age reflections with them.
The Stone Gods is science fiction written as an excuse to do whatever the hell she wants, without regard for the reader’s sense of continuity or rationale. The sense of used furniture is stronger than ever.
Winterson is trying to do too much: she’s trying to tell a love story. She’s trying to tell a story of ecological disaster. She’s trying to tell a story about fatalism, and about how fatalism is the only logical attitude to take given Mankind’s tendency to destroy himself. Individual death is a metaphor for the world’s end– not in an entropic sense, but in a personal one, and an immediate one.
Toward the end of the book her lyricism returns, coupled with some really stupid scenes stolen from the worst post-apocalyptic fiction you could possibly imagine. Think Shirow’s Appleseed, watched without translation or subtitles, and the author then tries to re-write what she saw as farce. That’s where it’s going.
But the ending makes me cry because the writing is so good, even if the writer is telling you the character is hallucinating as she dies. But Winterson makes me cry reliably. I wouldn’t waste my time reading her “science fiction” ever again. If you love breathtakingly beautiful writing, check out The World, And Other Places, her collection of short stories. Each is small, worth your time, and not an insult to your intelligence.
5
Jan
2010
New Story! And bonus stories by others!
5
Jan
2010
In case you missed it, I’ve posted a new story in the Bastet series: Bath Night, which brings us to the most recent decade and a riff on something I read during the Iraq war.
If you’re a fan of the Singularity, here are two stories told from opposite sides of the fence: Gentle Seduction by Marc Stiegler is an early, and hopeful, depiction of the Singularity. It starts as a riff on the seminal trans-Singularity movie Brainstorm, and moves on from there, reflecting on the character of a woman who we normally wouldn’t have thought of one of us– and it is her quality as someone not interested in the rapture of the nerds that makes her so pivotal to our success. The other is by Peter Watts, so expect nastiness, and Watts delivers: The Things is John Carpenter’s The Thing as told from the point of view of the monster. Watts manages to make us sympathetic to the creature, even when leading to an even more horrific conclusion than what Carpenter delivered.
26
Dec
2009
The Lead, And How to Swing It
26
Dec
2009
Insanely prolific blogger and book reviewer James Nicoll has a contest entitled Because My Tears Are Delicious To You. James has a lack of patience for exceptionally bad SF, along with a notoriously long idiosyncratic list of things in SF that especially set him off, and is challenging people to write the ultimate “make James cry” opening sentence. (Really, don’t participate unless you know what makes James cry.)
I wanted to participate– some of them are real groaners. Much to my frustration, I found that I couldn’t.
Here’s the real truth: I haven’t written anything new since April. Mostly, that’s because, as I wrote in my previous post, people pay me more to write code these days. But there seems to be something else going on. I’m not sure entirely what it is, but it bugs me. I sit down to write and nothing comes to the fingers. I do what I’m supposed to do when that happens: I write anyway. I write crap. And I mean, real crap. (Okay, some of you might actually want to read a scene involving Wish, a Sterling Y, and a bit of llerkin nobility, but the dialogue there sucks, people)
And many of the novel ideas I had to work with just seem to be equally dead. A retelling of the Superman story as STL warfare between back-to-the-soil types and posthumans? Completely hung up on the “just another Anglo writer” complex. Moon Sun Dragons? Not enough ideas for a book, not enough eyeball kick for a movie. Caprice Starr? Boring. Automatic Sweetheart? “Steampunk is so last year.” The Last Year of the Cat? “Nobody will ever take catgirls seriously, no matter how much Sarah Waters, Camille Paglia, and Bram Dysktra you throw in there.” Janae? “Too obvious.”
Bleah. Someone find me my mojo, ne?
The other day, I was reading one of my own Journal Entries, trying to remind myself of why I wrote them and get back into the groove of writing them again. Now that I’m doing freelance work, though, I don’t have as much time to write as I used to. I have to produce value, and people pay me more to write code than stories so, well, there you go.
But as I was reading, the love scene started and the characters got into positions and suddenly it turns out, completely unremarked-upon before this, that the woman in the story is black. I was at first annoyed by this revelation: how did the idiot author let the story get this far along before dropping this little bombshell? And then I recalled, annoying myself further, that that had been part of the point of the damn series. Bombshells like that were the fun stuff of the Journal Entries. I had enjoyed tweaking the audience by doing exactly that: dropping in details that the characters themselves wouldn’t have cared about until it mattered, not bothering to announce the color of another character’s skin as an identifier but rather as a source of pleasure, an aesthetic quality independent of personality, or culture, or expectation. I was pleased to note that the trick had worked.
Then I became further annoyed with myself for feeling tweaked by my previous self. I wonder what other annoyances I’ll have to grind away at in the future, to get back to my former egalitarian gorgeous self?
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