R4SFF: October 2015

Saturday, October 31, 2015

The Worst (Fake) Opening Lines

After having written about the best opening lines in literature and in SFF, the mind naturally turns to thinking about the worst opening lines. I have no list of these to share, and instead have the following.

The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest was conceived "to encourage unpublished authors who do not have the time to actually write books, the contest challenges entrants to compose bad opening sentences to imaginary novels" and was named for Bulwer because he opened his novel "Paul Clifford" (1830) with the immortal words, "It was a dark and stormy night."

The 2015 winners of the award have been posted on the Contest website.

The overall winner was Joel Phillips of West Trenton, New Jersey, for this gem:

Seeing how the victim's body, or what remained of it, was wedged between the grill of the Peterbilt 389 and the bumper of the 2008 Cadillac Escalade EXT, officer "Dirk" Dirksen wondered why reporters always used the phrase "sandwiched" to describe such a scene since there was nothing appetizing about it, but still, he thought, they might have a point because some of this would probably end up on the front of his shirt.

The winner in the fantasy category was David S Nelson of Falls Church, VA for

The three Black Forest Elves, Twinklemann, Sparklemann, and Von Dazzleberg, were sitting at their merry campfire, frying their wursts and hamhocks, slathering their rich black bread with the grease, drinking the icy magical Rhine-water, and one of them at least puffing away on a pudgy little elven-pipe, when who should show up but the OTHER famous elves Oberon, Titania, Galadriel, Elrond, Tinkerbell, the Munchkin lollipop dude, and that thing on the airplane wing in “Twilight Zone.”

The winner in the science fiction category was John Holmes of St. Petersburg, FL for:

The gravitational pull up here on Mars is much less than it is back at home base, of course, so your tongue sticks to the roof of our mouth and everyone sounds like Eleanor Roosevelt.

They are all pretty good, but my personal favorites were the runner up in the Science Fiction category:

Entering the Forbidden Zone on Planet Q38 Minor meant death, either quickly by mushroom poisoning or terribly by The Shiny Golden Hook; but Captain Zirek didn't care, he was in love with three-legged Zora, and that's where she was stabled. — David S Nelson, Falls Church VA

and the winner of the purple prose category:

Carlos stared in lust and amazement as she walked away, her spandex-covered body giving the impression of two well-oiled sumo wrestlers on stilts furiously going for the win. — Marlin Back, Columbus, IN

There is plenty more at the contest website.

Friday, October 30, 2015

The Art of Editing According to Robert Gottlieb

Robert Gottlieb was editor in chief at Simon & Schuster, publisher and editor in chief of Knopf, and was editor of The New Yorker from 1987 to 1992. Throughout his career he has worked with a huge number of authors writing both non-fiction and fiction of various types. Among his best selling fiction authors are Nora Ephron, Barbara Goldsmith, Salman Rushdie, Elia Kazan, V. S. Naipaul, Toni Morrison and Robert Caro; spy fiction writers Len Deighton and John le Carré; and science fiction writers Ray Bradbury, Doris Lessing, and Michael Crichton.

Back in 1994, The Paris Review published a wonderful piece entitled Robert Gottlieb, The Art of Editing No. 1. In it, they talked to both Gottlieb and many of his authors about their experience with the editing process. It is all worth reading. Below I post some excerpts that either apply to SFF authors, or that I found particularly amusing or instructive.

Lessing:
Bob has been advising me and editing my work for thirty or more years. It is hard to remember details now. I have just been reading my diary for 1978, where it records that I spent some days making alterations he suggested. I remember cutting quite a bit out of The Sirian Experiments. I cut a bit out of The Four-Gated City at his suggestion, which perhaps was a mistake. Bob has made mistakes. But, nearly always, he is right. I don’t think Bob would be surprised to hear that I would describe him as an authoritarian personality. Why should he? I’ve told him so. We are good enough friends for us both to put up with this kind of mutual criticism.
Says Gottlieb:
Well, I describe her as authoritarian. So there you are. But this is actually more complicated than that, because my neurotic vision of myself is of a fly on the wall. I see myself as an observer, as someone who could not possibly affect any other human being, not even my children. Now, I’m an acute observer and an analyzed person, so I know perfectly well from the evidence of my eyes and ears that I have a strong personality and have no problem running large organizations, and I know that I’ve had a considerable effect on many people. I know I have a great deal of personal authority. But there’s a disparity between what I know and what I feel. I’ve never quite understood why people do what I say. But then, I’ve never taken myself very seriously.
On working with Doris Lessing, Gottlieb says:
Doris Lessing also has a very removed attitude to her writing. You can say to Doris exactly what you think without fear either of wounding her or overly influencing her. The day after she gave me the manuscript for The Summer Before the Dark we were walking in Queen Mary’s rose garden in London; she asked me what I thought about the manuscript. I said I liked it very much and told her I was sure it was going to be her most successful book. She said, Now that’s interesting, because it’s by no means my best book. There are not many writers whose clarity and disinterestedness are such that they could say that about a book they had just finished.
On Lessing's The Sentimental Agents:
I don’t remember any serious disagreements, but this does not mean Bob has liked everything I have written. He doesn’t like The Sentimental Agents, for instance, which I do like.
Says Gottlieb:
I did think The Sentimental Agents was rather schematic. It was an idea rather than fiction. It’s part of Doris’s space fiction series, and like all space fiction, or science fiction, it is underlain by a highly moralistic, utopian impulse. When that kind of thing works it’s because the idea becomes clothed in specifics that are interesting, exciting, moving, whatever, and in most of the books in that series I think that did happen, but in this particular book I felt the ideas were bare.
On the relationship of Michael Crichton and Robert Gottlieb. Says Crichton:
There is absolutely no question that I see Bob paternally. Absolutely no question. There is a lot of jealousy involved in your relationship with your editor. You don’t want to walk into the office and see another writer chatting with Bob—you’d want to kill them. So you learn to schedule your appointments so you can see Daddy all by yourself. I remember at one point I wanted a larger advance and Bob didn’t want to give it to me. He asked Lynn Nesbit, my agent, Why does Michael want such a big advance? And she said, Well, Bob, I think he wants to buy a house. Bob said, Well what does he need such a big house for, and she said, Bob, he’s married now and has a child. There was a way in which, as with a parent, I was always this young kid to him, and it never really changed. So maybe there was some countertransference too.
On the editorial process for Crichton's The Andromeda Strain. Crichton:
Bob became my editor just after he had moved to Knopf from Simon & Schuster in 1968. Lynn Nesbit was my agent. She recommended Bob partly because she thought I’d like him and partly because he was an overnight person. I was being driven mad by the usual publishing business of waiting a month for manuscripts to be read, because in those days I was in medical school and medicine is so fast. To send a manuscript to New York and wait a month—well, you might as well wait for your next reincarnation.

When I sent Bob a draft of The Andromeda Strain—the first book I did for him—in 1968 he said he would publish it if I would agree to completely rewrite it. I gulped and said OK. He gave me his feelings about what had to happen on the phone, in about twenty minutes. He was very quick. Anyway, I rewrote it completely. He called me up and said, Well, this is good, now you only have to rewrite half of it. Again, he told me what needed to happen—for the book to begin in what was then the middle, and fill in the material from the beginning sometime later on.

Finally we had the manuscript in some kind of shape. I was just completely exhausted. He said to me, Dear boy, you’ve got this ending backwards. (He’s married to an actress, and he has a very theatrical manner. He calls me “dear boy,” like an English actor might do.) I don’t remember exactly the way it was, but I had it so that one of the characters was supposed to turn on a nuclear device, and there was suspense about whether or not that would happen. Bob said, No, no, the switch has to turn itself on automatically, and the character has to turn it off. He was absolutely right. That was the first time I understood that when there is something wrong in writing, the chances are that there is either too much of it, too little of it, or that it is in some way backwards.
Says Gottlieb:
When Michael wrote The Andromeda Strain he assumed he had to fill out the characters of all those scientists and make them real people, as in a conventional novel. But that wasn’t where his interest lay, and so he had only done it at the surface level. Somehow it occurred to me that instead of trying to flesh the characters out further and make the novel more conventional, we ought to strip that stuff out completely and make it a documentary, only a fictional one.
Says Crichton:
What Bob actually said to me was that he thought the manuscript should be factually persuasive, like a New Yorker piece. I thought that was a very interesting idea, but I couldn’t see how to do it. I couldn’t take his suggestion literally, because in those days the signature of New Yorker writers like Lillian Ross was that they were using fictional storytelling techniques in their nonfiction, and my problem was that I had to get away from fictional techniques. Finally, I began to think about what I would do if the story were real. Suppose this had actually happened and I were a reporter, what would my book look like? There was a book on my shelf at the time by Walter Sullivan called We Are Not Alone. I started thumbing through it, noticing the vocabulary, the cadences of nonfiction and how the structure of the sentences conveys a sense of reality that is not found in fiction.

As soon as I began to do that, it became clear to me that the author of a nonfiction account would not have the access to the characters’ innermost thoughts in the way that you assume for fiction. So I began to take all that stuff out and make the book colder and more impersonal—but I didn’t do it completely. Bob read it and said, Look, this book can either go this way or that way, and you’ll have to decide what you want to do. Ultimately he thought I should just take all the novelistic passages out. He thought the characters shouldn’t have any relationships with each other, and that all the dialogue should advance the plot.

He took a much more radical step than I would have dared. It was never again as it was with The Andromeda Strain, mostly because I think in the process of working on it Bob taught me a tremendous amount about editing. I never again sent him a manuscript in such a mess. A part of me became Bob, or acted like Bob, and as I was writing I would sit there and think, This is what he’s going to say, and I’d go fix it. Before The Andromeda Strain I didn’t really know the extent to which you could write a draft and not accept it but rather tear it all apart, move things around, rework them, and then put it all back together. I had never gone through that process in my previous writing, and Bob put me through it. Occasionally Bob has said to me, The new book doesn’t work. Forget it. Which I have done. That has happened a few times. But it was in part a result of my method of working, which is to go off and tell nobody what I’m doing and write something; sometimes it would work and sometimes it wouldn’t. I guess because of my youth it didn’t seem so devastating. I just thought, Oh well, that didn’t work, I’ll go do something else. I don’t work that way anymore—I’m too old.

Even now, when Bob first calls me back about a manuscript, I panic. But I’ll tell you, I think every writer should have tattooed backwards on his forehead, like ambulance on ambulances, the words everybody needs an editor.
On the importance of responding promptly to authors. Says Gottlieb:
The first thing writers want—and this sounds so basic, but you’d be surprised how unbasic it is in the publishing world—is a quick response. Once they’ve finished a new manuscript and put it in the mail, they exist in a state of suspended emotional and psychic animation until they hear from their editor, and it’s cruelty to animals to keep them waiting. I’m lucky, because I happen to be a very quick reader, so I can almost always read a new manuscript overnight. Besides, when I receive a manuscript from a writer I’ve been working with I’m consumed by curiosity to know what he or she has written. But easy or not, one’s first job is a swift and honest response—tempered, of course, by tact.
On the anonymity of an editor. Joseph Heller:
When I finally completed my second novel, Something Happened, The New York Times interviewed me about having finished the book, and I talked to them about Bob’s value to me as an editor. The day the interview ran, Bob called me and said he didn’t think it was a good idea to talk about editing and the contributions of editors, since the public likes to think everything in the book comes right from the author. That’s true, and so from that time on, I haven’t.
Says Gottlieb:
Of course, if anybody says nice things about me in print it’s pleasant. But the fact is, this glorification of editors, of which I have been an extreme example, is not a wholesome thing. The editor’s relationship to a book should be an invisible one. The last thing anyone reading Jane Eyre would want to know, for example, is that I had convinced Charlotte Brontë that the first Mrs. Rochester should go up in flames. The most famous case of editorial intervention in English literature has always bothered me—you know, that Dickens’s friend Bulwer-Lytton advised him to change the end of Great Expectations: I don’t want to know that! As a critic, of course, as a literary historian, I’m interested, but as a reader, I find it very disconcerting. Nobody should know what I told Joe Heller and how grateful he is, if he is. It’s unkind to the reader and just out of place.
There were ubiquitous fights about punctuation. Bob Caro:
Bob and I would have big fights over colons and semicolons. Semicolons are not quite as forceful as colons. And dashes are very important to me—I establish my rhythm with them. We could spend a long time fighting over an adjective. We had such fights that sometimes he would bring in another editor as a buffer. When Bob is editing something he’s very careful that the rhythm stays the same, which is very hard to do. I had huge fights with William Shawn when he excerpted The Power Broker for The New Yorker. One time my editor there, William Whitworth, who’s now at The Atlantic, put Shawn on the line, and Shawn said, But we’ve hardly changed it at all, we haven’t changed any of the words. I said, But you ran three paragraphs together—paragraphs matter to me, they’re part of my rhythm. You’re combining sentences, making periods into semicolons, semicolons into commas—that is changing my writing. Those fights were not nice fights; they were bitter, angry fights.
And from Charles McGrath, deputy editor at The New Yorker:
He is a Tartar, too, about participial clauses. He will often take a relative clause—a that clause or a which clause—and make it into a participial phrase or a gerund phrase. And he has a great nose for cant and pretension and highfalutin crap of any sort. He goes at it like a terrier. It’s as if he can smell it.
And from Gottlieb himself:
I have idiosyncrasies in punctuation, like everybody else. Because one of the formative writers of my life was Henry James, it’s all too easy for me to pepper a text with dashes. Many people don’t like dashes. With Le Carré, I’m always putting commas in, and he’s always taking them out, but we know that about each other. He’ll say, Look, if you absolutely need this one, have it. And I’ll say, Well, I would have liked it, but I guess I can live without it. We accommodate each other. When I was a young firebrand it never occurred to me that I might be wrong, or that I wasn’t going to have my way, or that it wasn’t my job to impose my views. I could get into twenty-minute shouting matches over semicolons, because every semicolon was a matter of life or death. As you grow older you realize that there are bad lines in King Lear and it has survived.

There is a lot more worth reading at The Paris Review.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

An Old Tolkien Interview, Reprinted

I just came across an article from last years Telegraph which is, in turn a reprint of an interview with Tolkien first published in 1968. The reprinted title is JRR Tolkien: 'Film my books? It's easier to film The Odyssey'. It is a fascinating insight into the masters thought process.

Among the highlights for me:

Tolkien never expected to make money from TLOTR or The Hobbit:
“I never expected a money success,” said Tolkien, pacing the room, as he does constantly when he speaks. “In fact, I never even thought of commercial publication when I wrote The Hobbit back in the Thirties.

“It all began when I was reading exam papers to earn a bit of extra money. That was agony. One of the tragedies of the underpaid professor is that he has to do menial jobs. He is expected to maintain a certain position and to send his children to good schools. Well, one day I came to a blank page in an exam book and I scribbled on it. ‘In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.
He has only a vague idea of where the name hobbit came from:
“I don’t know where the word came from. You can’t catch your mind out. It might have been associated with Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt. Certainly not rabbit, as some people think. Babbitt has the same bourgeois smugness that hobbits do. His world is the same limited place.”
The road to publication of The Hobbit was more than a bit fortuitous:
Tolkien let a few of his Oxford friends read The Hobbit. One, a tutor, lent it to a student, Susan Dagnell. When, some time later, Miss Dagnell joined Allen & Unwin, the publishers, she suggested it as a children’s book. Sir Stanley Unwin assigned his son, Rayner, then ten, to read it. ("I gave him a shilling,” Sir Stanley recalls.)
Allen and Unwin believed from the beginning that TLOTR was a work of genius:
Sir Stanley Unwin, whose competitors called him mad when he published the first two volumes in 1954, told us, “I was in Japan when the manuscript arrived. Rayner wrote to say it seemed a big risk. It would have to be published in three volumes, at a guinea each – this at a time when 18 shillings was top for a bestseller. But Rayner added, ‘Of course, it’s a work of genius’. So I cabled him to take it.

“Of all the books I’ve brought out in 63 years, there are few that I can say with absolute confidence will sell long after my departure. Of this one I had no doubts.”
C.S. Lewis was closely involved with the writing of TLOTR:
Tolkien’s friend and fellow author, the late C. S. Lewis, “was immensely immersed” in the development of the Ring, but not always mutely admiring. “He used to insist on my reading, passages aloud as I finished them, and then he made suggestions. He was furious when I didn’t accept them. Once he said, ‘It’s no use trying to influence you, you’re uninfluenceable!’ But that wasn’t quite true. Whenever he said ‘You can do better than that. Better Tolkien, please!’ I used to try.”
Tolkien had strong opinions on what constituted a fairy tale and on what, if any, meaning could be deduced from TLOTR:
parallel to scholarship has always run his strong preoccupation with the mystic land of Faerie.

This, to him, is a rich and wondrous realm filled with beauty, peril, joy and sadness – to be relished for its own sake, and not dissected.

So, naturally, he resists the earnest student who tries to read “meanings” into the Ring. “The book,” he said, “is not about anything but itself. It has no allegorical intentions, topical, moral, religious or political. It is not about modern wars or H-bombs, and my villain is not Hitler.”

Must fairytales be confined to legendary times and places, or could they be staged in modern settings? “They cannot,” he said, “not if you mean in a modern technological idiom. The reader must approach Faerie with a willing suspension of disbelief. If a thing can be technologically controlled, it ceases to be magical.”
He also had strong opinions on what constituted good writing for children:
Tolkien regrets that, over the centuries, fairytales have been downgraded until they are considered fit only for very young children. Most of all, he dislikes the story that moralises: “As a child I couldn’t stand Hans Andersen, and I can’t now.”

He has written: “The age of childhood-sentiment has produced a dreadful undergrowth of stories adapted to what is conceived to be the measure of children’s minds and needs. The old stories are bowdlerised. The imitations are often merely silly or patronising or covertly sniggering with an eye on the other grown-ups present. ...”

He said to us: “Believable fairy-stories must be intensely practical. You must have a map, no matter how rough. Otherwise you wander all over the place. In The Lord of the Rings I never made anyone go farther than he could on a given day.”
Tolkien did not want TLOTR to be filmed, although perhaps this reflected the possibility of the plot being crammed into a 90 minute film:
“You can’t cramp narrative into dramatic form. It would be easier to film The Odyssey. Much less happens in it. Only a few storms.”
Tolkien did not like being compared to other epic writers:
C. S. Lewis once declared that Ariosto could not rival Tolkien. To us Tolkien said, “I don’t know Ariosto and I’d loathe him if I did.” He has also been likened to Malory, Spencer, Cervantes, Dante. He rejects them all. “Cervantes?” he exploded. “He was a weedkiller to romance.” As for Dante: “He doesn’t attract me. He’s full of spite and malice. I don’t care for his petty relations with petty people in petty cities.”

Although I have excerpted liberally from the article, there is plenty I left out and I encourage you to read the full thing.

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Kurt Vonnegut's Story Diagrams

Kurt Vonnegut was a graduate student in anthropology at the University of Chicago. He did not graduate initially because the University rejected two proposed master's theses, leaving in 1947 to work for General Electric. The second proposed thesis was entitled "on the necessity of accounting for the similarities between Cubist painting and late-19th Century Native American uprisings", while the first was "Shapes of Stories".

In Shapes of Stories, Vonnegut proposed diagramming stories in terms of the ups and downs faced by the main character:

The fundamental idea is that stories have shapes which can be drawn on graph paper, and that the shape of a given society’s stories is at least as interesting as the shape of its pots or spearheads

Each story diagram is plotted with time (beginning to end) on the horizontal axis, and fortune (from bad to good) on the vertical axis. One of the most popular story types is what Vonnegut called “Man in Hole,” in which the protagonist gets in trouble, gets out of it again, and ends up better off than where they started. Vonnegut is reported to have said that “You see this story again and again. People love it, and it is not copyrighted.” A very similar story structure is what Vonnegut termed "Boy Meets Girl." They are both illustrated in the next graphic due to Maya Eilam.

Vonnegut applied these ideas to both the Old and New Testaments. In Creation stories, a deity progressively delivers gifts and the world is built. In the Old Testament, this is followed by the Fall in which these gifts are taken away.

By contrast, the New Testament adopts a form better to known to modern readers in which the fall is followed by redemption. This is very similar to the story of Cindarella which Vonnegut deascribed as “The most popular story in our civilization. Every time it’s retold, someone makes a million dollars.”

Other stories are more negative or amibiguous, such as Kafka's The Metamorphosis which starts off bad and only gets worse

Now there’s a Franz Kafka story. A young man is rather unattractive and not very personable. He has disagreeable relatives and has had a lot of jobs with no chance of promotion. He doesn’t get paid enough to take his girl dancing or to go to the beer hall to have a beer with a friend. One morning he wakes up, it’s time to go to work again, and he has turned into a cockroach. It’s a pessimistic story.

Or Hamlet in which the entire story is ambiguous. Says Vonnegut:

The question is, does this system I’ve devised help us in the evaluation of literature? Perhaps a real masterpiece cannot be crucified on a cross of this design. How about Hamlet? It’s a pretty good piece of work I’d say. Is anybody going to argue that it isn’t? I don’t have to draw a new line, because Hamlet’s situation is the same as Cinderella’s, except that the sexes are reversed.

His father has just died. He’s despondent. And right away his mother went and married his uncle, who’s a bastard. So Hamlet is going along on the same level as Cinderella when his friend Horatio comes up to him and says, ‘Hamlet, listen, there’s this thing up in the parapet, I think maybe you’d better talk to it. It’s your dad.’ So Hamlet goes up and talks to this, you know, fairly substantial apparition there. And this thing says, ‘I’m your father, I was murdered, you gotta avenge me, it was your uncle did it, here’s how.’

Well, was this good news or bad news? To this day we don’t know if that ghost was really Hamlet’s father. If you have messed around with Ouija boards, you know there are malicious spirits floating around, liable to tell you anything, and you shouldn’t believe them. Madame Blavatsky, who knew more about the spirit world than anybody else, said you are a fool to take any apparition seriously, because they are often malicious and they are frequently the souls of people who were murdered, were suicides, or were terribly cheated in life in one way or another, and they are out for revenge.

So we don’t know whether this thing was really Hamlet’s father or if it was good news or bad news. And neither does Hamlet. But he says okay, I got a way to check this out. I’ll hire actors to act out the way the ghost said my father was murdered by my uncle, and I’ll put on this show and see what my uncle makes of it. So he puts on this show. And it’s not like Perry Mason. His uncle doesn’t go crazy and say, ‘I-I-you got me, you got me, I did it, I did it.’ It flops. Neither good news nor bad news. After this flop Hamlet ends up talking with his mother when the drapes move, so he thinks his uncle is back there and he says, ‘All right, I am so sick of being so damn indecisive,’ and he sticks his rapier through the drapery. Well, who falls out? This windbag, Polonius. This Rush Limbaugh. And Shakespeare regards him as a fool and quite disposable.

You know, dumb parents think that the advice that Polonius gave to his kids when they were going away was what parents should always tell their kids, and it’s the dumbest possible advice, and Shakespeare even thought it was hilarious.

‘Neither a borrower nor a lender be.’ But what else is life but endless lending and borrowing, give and take?

‘This above all, to thine own self be true.’ Be an egomaniac!

Neither good news nor bad news. Hamlet didn’t get arrested. He’s prince. He can kill anybody he wants. So he goes along, and finally he gets in a duel, and he’s killed. Well, did he go to heaven or did he go to hell? Quite a difference. Cinderella or Kafka’s cockroach? I don’t think Shakespeare believed in a heaven or hell any more than I do. And so we don’t know whether it’s good news or bad news.

I have just demonstrated to you that Shakespeare was as poor a storyteller as any Arapaho.

But there’s a reason we recognize Hamlet as a masterpiece: it’s that Shakespeare told us the truth, and people so rarely tell us the truth in this rise and fall here. The truth is, we know so little about life, we don’t really know what the good news is and what the bad news is.

And if I die — God forbid — I would like to go to heaven to ask somebody in charge up there, ‘Hey, what was the good news and what was the bad news?’

There are further good discussions of these diagrams by Ana Swanson at The Washington Post and Maria Popova at Brain Pickings.

In 1961, the University of Chicago accepted Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle as his thesis, and awarded him the M.A. degree based on "the anthropological basis of his novels." (see this tribute in the Chicago Maroon).

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Predicting the Year 2000 in 1900

Following up form my posts on H.G. Wells predictive abilities (here and here), the Washington Post has an interesting article on a series of artworks from 1900 depicting what the artists thought life might be like in the year 2000, entitled rather unimaginatively What people in 1900 thought the year 2000 would look like.

The pictures are, of course, interesting not only for what they got correct, but also for what they got wrong and why.

Many of the pictures show increased mechanization, reflecting the rise and rise of mechanization at the time. Many were applied to the service industries, such as what the Washington Post describes as "a precursor to the new robot vacuum, the iRobot Roomba vacuum" in the diagram to the left.

To an economist, the main thing that is surprising about this picture is that the mechanized vacuum operates alongside a maid, as opposed to having replaced the maid. The development of labor saving machines for use in home production is probably one of the most transformative set of innovations of the 20th Century and would appear to have played a large role in the rise of women working outside of the home.

Not all of the envisaged mechanized service sector inventions have come to pass. The next picture shows a mechanized barbershop. The fact that this has not occurred in practice may reflect the fact that certain services need to be more precisely individually tailored than others.

We might be getting closer to the day when we have, as shown in the next picture, almost fully automated and almost instantaneous production of tailored clothing. Certainly, taking advantage of improved telecommunications, people today can take advantage of tailoring that is offshored to low labor cost countries.

The mechanization of the agricultural sector is also commonly depicted. This was a very accurate prediction, although the specific details were a little off.

We certainly see today the mechanized harvesting of crops, depicted in the next picture. The incubation of chickens is also, I think, now regularly mechanized, although it does not seem to work as instantaneously as depicted in the following picture.

The second last picture is of something that might reasonably regarded as an early conception of a mobile home. Whether this was viewed as a permanent home for the very rich, or a summer fancy for the middle classes is not clear. But it clearly tapped into the increased interest and affordability of travel at the time.

Lastly, a surprising number of the images contain rather fanciful depictions of recreational activities underwater, as shown in the last picture of an underwater croquet game. At first glance this may seem surprising. But it makes a lot of sense once it is noted that France played a central role in the development of diving as both a professional activity and as a hobby. For example, the French engineers Auguste Denayrouze and Benoît Rouquayrol invented the under water regulator in 1864.

In the picture, the people seem to be using self contained underwater breathing apparatus. As there are no bubbles depicted, it looks like a closed circuit system, perhaps along the lines of that built by the Englishman Henry Fleuss in 1878. The first open-circuit scuba system was not devised until 1925 (by the Frenchman Yves Le Prieur).

Monday, October 26, 2015

Recommended Viewing

Instead of lists of recommended reading, this time io9.com has come out with a list of recommended viewing. Written by Charlie Jane Anders, 50 Brilliant Science Fiction Movies That Everyone Should See At Least Once is exactly what the name says.

Unlike most of the recommended reading lists I have been posting, I have actually seen most of these movies.

The list, and Anders's comments on the ones I haven't seen:

Metropolis (1927, dir. Fritz Lang)
Frankenstein (1931, dir. James Whale)
The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951, dir. Robert Wise)
The Man in the White Suit (1951, dir. Alexander Mackendrick)

One of the classic “Ealing Comedies” starring Alec Guinness, this is a very different sort of “mad scientist” film than Frankenstein. Guinness plays a man who’s determined to invent a fabric that can never rip or get dirty, so he can free millions of people from drudgery. But his invention will also put a lot of people out of work, because eliminating drudgery means eliminating jobs. This is science fiction at its most thought-provoking—and it’s funny as hell, too.
Godzilla (1954, dir. Ishiro Honda)
Forbidden Planet (1956, dir. Fred M. Wilcox)
Doctor Strangelove (1964, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Planet Of The Apes (1968, dir. Franklin J. Schaffner)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, dir. Stanley Kubrick)
Solaris (1972, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977, dir. Steven Spielberg)
Alien (1979, dir. Ridley Scott)
Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980, dir. Irvin Kerschner).
The Lathe of Heaven (1980, dir. David Loxton and Fred Barzyk)

Based on the novel by Ursula K. Le Guin, this made-for-TV movie is a rock solid piece of science fiction as well as an unsettling psychological drama. Despite the PBS production values, this story of a man whose dreams start coming true in the real world manages to pack in a lot of strangeness and wild visions. Plus it asks the kinds of huge questions about the nature of reality, and how our perceptions shape the world, that science fiction often asks at its best.
Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981, dir. George Miller)
Star Trek II: The Wrath Of Khan (1982, dir. Nicholas Meyer)
Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott)
E.T. (1982, dir. Steven Spielberg)
Tron (1982, dir. Steven Lisberger)
Back To The Future (1985, dir. Robert Zemeckis)
Brazil (1985, dir. Terry Gilliam)
Enemy Mine (1985, dir. Wolfgang Petersen)
RoboCop (1987, dir. Paul Verhoeven)
Predator (1987, dir. John McTiernan)
They Live (1988, dir. John Carpenter)
Akira (1988, dir. Katsuhiro Otomo)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, dir. James Cameron)
Jurassic Park (1993, dir. Steven Spielberg)
Ghost In The Shell (1995, dir. Mamoru Oshii)

Like Akira, this is one of the first anime films to hit the U.S. and make a big impact, and impress on U.S. fans how powerful anime film-making was becoming. It’s spawned a huge franchise, which for the most part hasn’t diluted the awesomeness of the concept at all — Stand Alone Complex is considered one of the greatest science fiction anime shows, and it wouldn’t exist without this film. With its theme of possibly false memories and cyber-weirdness, it had a huge influence on both cyberpunks and memory-altering works like Dark City and Dollhouse, but it turns into an amazing examination of the theme of sentience and the definition of life.
Twelve Monkeys (1995, dir. Terry Gilliam)
Gattaca (1997, dir. Andrew Niccol)
The Fifth Element (1997, dir. Luc Besson)
The Matrix (1999, dir. the Wachowskis)
Galaxy Quest (1999, dir. Dean Parisot)
Primer (2004, dir. Shane Carruth)
The Incredibles (2004, dir. Brad Bird)
Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind (2004, dir. Michel Gondry).
Serenity (2006, dir. Joss Whedon)
Children Of Men (2006, dir. Alfonso Cuarón)
The Host (2006, dir. Bong Joon-ho)
Wall-E (2008, dir. Andrew Stanton)
Moon (2009, dir. Duncan Jones)
District 9 (2009, dir. Neill Blomkamp).
Inception (2010, dir. Christopher Nolan).
Looper (2012, dir. Rian Johnson)
Her (2013, Spike Jonze)
Predestination (2014, dir. Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig)

And here’s a sort of companion piece to Looper and Twelve Monkeys—the Spierig Brothers took Robert A. Heinlein’s classic, defining story of time travel and transformation, and actually managed to turn it into a powerful, satisfying movie. What makes this film more than just the clever closed-loop time travel scenario its title implies is the intense performance from Sarah Snook as the “Unwed Mother.”
Guardians of the Galaxy (2014, dir. James Gunn)
Ex Machina (2015, dir. Alex Garland)
The Martian (2015, dir. Ridley Scott)

This isn't a terrible list; it has many of my favorites, including the much underrated Enemy Mine. I am also glad it included Robocop, which I like as an economist for the portrayal of the problems of private provision of public goods. As Anders says, it is: "A surreal blend of cyberpunk, Frankenstein and action movie, this film remains Verhoeven’s greatest statement." Well, maybe I would disagree with the last statement as some great Verhoeven films were left off the list.

It is a strange list in some ways, too. Most notably for me, it includes a lot of space opera while excluding a bunch of great works of speculative fiction, such as some of the many movies based on the work of Philip K. Dick. There are also no horror or live action super hero films (although The Incredibles does make it, deservedly) on the list, probably by design.

Here are some others I would have included:

The Truman Show (1998, dir. Peter Weir). Written by Andrew Niccol, I think this is an excellent example of near future speculative fiction.
Stalker (1979, dir. Andrei Tarkovsky). Based on the Strugatsky brothers novel, Roadside Picnic, this is what the best of all speculative fiction can be.
Edge of Tomorrow (2014, dir. Doug Liman). Maybe the best time travel movie ever made, I cannot understand why this wasn't both a bigger hit and more critically acclaimed. I also cannot imagine anyone other than Tom Cruise in the main role.
Terminator (1984, dir. James Cameron). The sequel was awesome too, but the original blew my mind.
Aliens (1986, dir. James Cameron). The directors cut improves over the already excellent theatrical release.
Starship Troopers (1997, dir. Paul Verhoeven). Although not at all faithful to Heinlein's brilliant novel, this is a sly subversive masterpiece in its own right.
Minority Report (2002, dir. Steven Spielberg). More thought provoking speculative fiction based on a Philip K. Dick novel. Spielberg adds some wonderful speculative elements about our near future society.
Impostor (2002, dir. Gary Fleder). Another film based on a Philip K. Dick novel.
Total Recall (1990, dir. Paul Verhoeven). Stay away from the stylishly filmed but ultimately terrible 2012 remake directed by Len Wiseman. This might be my favorite SF film of all time. Also based on a Philip K. Dick idea.
Gravity (2013, dir. Alfonso Cuarón). Much better than the snoozer Children of Men that did make the list above.
Avatar (2009, dir. James Cameron). I know many people have problems with this movie, but the breathtaking visuals and the transformative effects of the new 3D technology it used requires that it be listed here.

Sunday, October 25, 2015

David Mitchell on Le Guin's Earthsea

I've written briefly several times about my love for Ursula Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea books (see here and here). They were my Harry Potter and played a prominent role in developing my interest in SFF.

Recently, David Mitchell, the author of Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks wrote a lovely tribute to these books for The Guardian: David Mitchell on Earthsea – a rival to Tolkien and George RR Martin.

For Mitchell, Earthsea was instrumental in making him want to become a writer:

Growing up, I adored A Wizard of Earthsea, Le Guin’s slim but muscular 1968 novel, which I read and reread until my ratty old paperback copy required emergency surgery, and I still have a precious memory of getting to the last page for the umpteenth time, staring at the final line – “and Yarrow ran to meet them, crying with joy” – and realising with a giddy clarity that being a goalkeeper or inventor or forester was yesterday’s news, and that I had to be a writer and nothing else would do. I yearned to do to other people what A Wizard of Earthsea had just done to me – even if I couldn’t articulate exactly what that was.

Mitchell does a great job articulating what it was about Earthsea that resonated for so many of us. Unlike many earlier magical fantasies, where the wizard was some version of Merlin, "a Caucasian scholarly aristocrat amongst sorcerers, who appears fully formed and with little room for character development," the protagonist of Earthsea is Ged, who starts as a young lad from a tiny island, transforms into a brash student, and grows to become a powerful wizard. This makes him understandable to anyone who has gone through adolescence.

The world of Earthsea is also rich and, thankfully, free of many of the worst Tolkien clichés:

Earthsea is a fantasy world, and proud of it, mapped by its creator in 1966–7 on a large sheet of butcher’s paper with crayons in a house full of young children. Earthsea has magic, dragons, its own myths and prehistory; but its magic is weighted with metaphysics, its dragons are psychodragons of air and mind, more akin to dangerous Chinese sages than Tolkien’s Smaug; and Earthsea is so human a world – with trade-routes, local politics, class hierarchies, infant mortality, abuse, addiction and slavery – that its fantastical elements feel almost quotidian. Even Earthsea’s islands, with names such as Atnini, Komokome, Selidor and the Isle of the Ear, have a habit of morphing into islands in each reader’s memory: the Hebrides, the Cyclades, the islands of the Seto Inland Sea, or Hawaii.

It is also free of the worst of Tolkien's racial styereotypes:

In contrast to Tolkien’s Middle-earth, where what is western and white is good, Earthsea’s Arians, the Kargad raiders, are “a savage people, white-skinned, yellow-haired, and fierce, liking the sight of blood and the smell of burning towns”. Ged’s skin is copper-brown, “like most Gontishmen”; his friend Vetch would pass as a sub-Saharan African; and in the third book of Earthsea, The Farthest Shore, Ged will owe his life to a “floating tribe” of raft people in the Southern Reach whose Polynesian-inflected folkways match their complexions.

The books are also more cerebral than many epic fantasies.

Chief among its concerns are morality, identity and power. In The Farthest Shore the Master Patterner on Roke will ask Ged, “What is evil?” and be answered, “A web we men weave,” but the seed of this theme is germinating in A Wizard of Earthsea. From Beowulf to Tolkien, to countless formulaic fantasy movies at a multiplex near you, the genre generates two-dimensional Manichaean struggles between Good and Evil, in which morality’s shades of grey are reduced to one black and one white. The real world, as most of us know (if not all presidents and prime ministers), is rarely so monochromatic, and neither is Earthsea. Ged’s quest is not to take down a Lord of Darkness but to learn the nature of the shadow that his vanity, anger and hatred set loose – to master it, by learning its nature and its name. “All my acts have their echo in it,” says Ged of his shadow; “it is my creature.” The climax of A Wizard of Earthsea is not the magical shootout that lesser novels would have ended with, but the high-risk enactment of a process Jung called “individuation”, in which the warring parts of the psyche integrate into a wiser, stronger whole. To quote Le Guin again: “In serious fantasy, the real battle is moral or internal … To do good, heroes must know or learn that the ‘axis of evil’ is within them.”

Lastly, Mitchell also points out the difficulty of writing fantasy fiction well:

Style and voice are the Scylla and Charybdis of fantasy novels, where many authors of duller literary gifts than Le Guin’s come undone. Quality writing within genre is harder, not easier, because the ground is so mined with cliche. A cod-historic narratorial voice in a fantasy novel feels like being locked inside a medieval theme park; neologisms will jar – one use of “totally awesome” will puncture a fantasy world; but a studied neutrality of style tastes like clingfilm. What is needed is a high-wire balancing act, which Le Guin pulls off with deceptive effortlessness. Ged’s story is told with the calm authority of an age-old Icelandic saga, yet stitched here and there with passages of pure beauty for its own sake.

I think Mitchell does a masterful job explaining what it is that we love about these books; far better than I could have done myself. All in all, this is a fitting tribute to Le Guin just days after her 86th birthday.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Tolkien's Map of Middle Earth

The Guardian reports that a copy of a map of Middle Earth, annotated by Tolkien himself, has turned up and is on sale for 60,000 pounds: Tolkien's annotated map of Middle-earth discovered inside copy of Lord of the Rings. The map was found loose inside a copy of The Lord of the Rings owned by illustrator Pauline Baynes who had produced a color map of Middle Earth for a 1970 Allen & Unwin reprint.

The annotations by Tolkien, in black and green ink, show that he was obsessed with the details of the map. It includes extra place names, corrections of others, suggestions about flora and fauna, and details of the latitude of various places.

Hobbiton ... “ is assumed to be approx at latitude of Oxford”

The map also makes reference to Belgrade, Cyprus, and Jerusalem, and indicates that

the city of Ravenna is the inspiration behind Minas Tirith.

Friday, October 23, 2015

Thursday, October 22, 2015

The Canadian Publishing Market

In the past, I've written a little bit about the problems with understanding the publishing industry resulting from the paucity of good data. Much of the data we have comes from the US market and is based on an unrepresentative sample of US book sellers (see the discussion here, here and here).

In Canada, data on book sales can be also drawn from a survey of consumers run by BookNet, whose 2015 report was recently released: The Canadian Book Buyer 2015.

The survey of 4,277 individuals in early 2015 first asked people if they had bought a book in the previous month. Only 19% (784) responded that they had and all results are drawn from this subsample, which is modest in size but not insignificant.

The key findings:

Book buyers bough an average of 2.8 books each;
e-books account for 17% of sales, the same as in 2013. This is attributed to the shrinking price difference between e-books and print books.
Paperbacks account for 55% of the market, hardcovers for 25%, and audiobooks (and other) for 3%.
The typical book buyer is a college educated woman aged 45 or older working full time and living in an urban area.

These findings pretty much confirm what we have learned from the US data. First, the decision of publishers to raise e-book prices has led to a stalling of demand for this format. Second, book buyers are increasingly women which may explain why some men prefer to write under female or gender neutral pronouns.

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

More H.G. Wells Predicting the Future

In 2009, Google celebrated what would have been H.G. Wells 134th birthday with a series of doodles. This prompted a number of magazines to run articles about the predictions he had made that had come true, as well as those that had not. I came across a number of these as I writing yesterday's post, of which the following are a sample:

HG Wells on Google: which of his predictions came true? The Telegraph, 22nd September, 2009.
H.G. Wells Predictions Ring True, 143 Years Later by Richard A. Lovett, National Geographic, 21st September, 2009.
H.G. WELLS: 9 Predictions That Have, And Haven't, Come True. by Richard A. Lovett, National Geographic, 21st September, 2009.

Here is a list of his predictions which arguably have come true:

Nuclear weapons: The World Set Free (1914) Wells envisioned "atomic bombs" that could explode continuously using the power of radioactivity. He also foresaw the problem of proliferation, warning that a global government was the only way of preventing nation states from destroying themselves with nuclear weapons.
Moon landing: The First Men in the Moon (1901). Although the moon turned out not to be populated by a subterranean civilisation of Selenites.
Genetic engineering: The Island Of Dr Moreau (1896). Dr Moreau's monstrous experiments with vivisection, creating human-animal hybrids, are reminiscent of the hybrid interspecies embryos known as "chimeras" routinely conceived for medical research. Modern scientists have created glowing animals.
Lasers: The War of the Worlds (1898). Wells's Martian had a Heat-Ray, which fired streams of energy powerful enough to set fire to flesh and incinerate buildings. Laser weaponry was a central element of Ronald Reagan's "Star Wars" plan to shoot down nuclear missiles in space, and the U.S. military developed (in 2007) a so-called heat-ray gun that uses an invisible beam of microwave radiation to cause a burning sensation meant to help disperse crowds. The so-called Active Denial System stands at the ready at Moody Air Force Base in Georgia.
Second World War: The Shape of Things to Come (1933) Wells correctly predicted that a global conflict would break out within a decade, erupting in Eastern Europe before sucking in all the world powers. He was not alone in forecasting conflict during the volatile 1930s, but his descriptions of carpet bombing raids and fear of gas attacks proved prescient.
Automatic doors. Wells door slid upward, into the ceiling, which is impractical as it requires room for the door to move into.
Cell phones. In The Shape of Things to Come, Wells depicted a wireless wrist intercom that had many cell phone-like features. His 1923 book Men Like Gods, imagined a future in which people communicated almost entirely by wireless telephones and voice mail.

While here is a list of others that have not come true (yet!):

Invisibility: The Invisible Man (1897). Scientist are developing the technology to build invisibility cloaks.
Super-highways/sidewalks. In When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) Wells described 300-foot-wide highways that moved like giant conveyor belts, complete with seats and refreshment kiosks. Such an invention is a far cry from today's moving walkways, often found in airports.

Wells was also an astute social commentator, even if his fears for future society have not proven true. However, as science fiction writer Jerry Oltion points out

One of the jobs of science fiction writers is not so much to predict the future as to prevent the future. In that regard, Wells did a very good job.

Monday, October 19, 2015

H.G. Wells Predicting the Future

In 1932, H.G. Wells published a short story "The Queer Story of Brownlow's Newspaper" in which a man obtains a copy of the London Evening Standard from November 10th, 1971. You can read the story courtesy of Project Gutenberg.

The story describes the response of Brownlow, who

found himself surveying a real evening newspaper, which was dealing, so far as he could see at the first onset, with the affairs of another world.

What was this world like? How did H.G. Wells imagine the future? Some details he got exactly correct, even if he was off on the timing of when they would arrive. The newspaper was in color with color photographs. The fashions displayed people with wearable gadgets. Birth rates have declined. Animal extinctions continue (although thankfully not gorilla's as of yet).

In other respects he was quite wrong. Although geothermal energy is making progress, it is not true even today that "The Age of Combustion has Ended!" Body clothing has not been reduced. Although the Soviet Union has fallen, The U.K. and U.S.A. remain. Wells was wrong to think of a world with a supranational government in which

the great game of sovereign states will be over.

Perhaps most laughably to my mind, although perhaps I should be more depressed than amused by this, Wells was wrong to think that newspapers and public discourse would have become much more sophisticated:

There was much more space given to scientific work and to inventions than is given in any contemporary paper. There were diagrams and mathematical symbols, he says, but he did not look into them very closely because he could not get the hang of them. "Frightfully highbrow, some of it," he said.

A more intelligent world for our grandchildren evidently, and also, as the pictures testified, a healthier and happier world.

That Wells was unable to do better predicting the future is not at all surprising. In fact, I am quite impressed with how well he did. As he points out himself, some inventions are so sudden and so transforming it is almost impossible to predict their occurrence or their implications:

After all, in 1831 very few people thought of railway or steamship travel, and in 1871 you could already go round the world in eighty days by steam, and send a telegram in a few minutes to nearly every part of the earth. Who would have thought of that in 1831? Revolutions in human life, when they begin to come, can come very fast. Our ideas and methods change faster than we know.

The blog Futility Closet points out that on the actual November 10th, 1971, the Evening Standard ran the headline “The Prophecy H.G. Wells Made About Tonight’s Standard”. They even tried to track down the supposed intended recipient of the newspaper from the story: a Mr. Evan O’Hara. Unfortunately, they found no trace of him.

Sunday, October 18, 2015

On Extremism

Will Shetterly has attracted more than his share of opprobrium within the SFF community. I have no intention of going into that right now.

Recently he posted an interesting quote explaining the attractions of extremism that he attributes to John Cleese:

The biggest advantage of extremism is that it makes you feel GOOD because it provides you with enemies.

Let me explain. The great thing about having enemies is that you can pretend that all the badness in the whole world is in your enemies, and all the goodness in the whole world is in YOU. Attractive, isn't it?

So, if you have a lot of anger and resentment in you anyway and you therefore enjoy abusing people, then you can pretend that you're only doing it because these enemies of yours are such very bad persons! And if it wasn't for them, you'd actually be good natured, and courteous, and rational all the time. So, if you want to FEEL GOOD, become an extremist.

You can strut around, abusing people, and telling them you could eat them for breakfast and still think of yourself as a champion of the truth. A fighter for the greater good. And not the rather sad paranoid schizoid that you really are.

—John Cleese

Shetterly argues, I think convincingly, that this helps us understand some of the acrimony experienced within SFF fandom over the past year.

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Friday, October 16, 2015

What book got you to become a fan of SFF?

In a recent Mind Meld column at SF Signal entitled The Books That Made Us Love Science Fiction and Fantasy, Paul Weimer has posted the responses he received when he posed a bunch of authors, editors and fans:

Tell me what book got you to become a fan of SFF, and why?

The resulting list is fascinating, as are the reasons advanced for why the books had such an impact. I recommend you go read it all, but here are the authors and the books they cited as influential:

Gail Carriger: Tamora Pierce Song of the Lioness.
Tansy Rayner Roberts: David Eddings The Belgariad.
Yoon Ha Lee: Anne McCaffrey Dragonflight.
Rachel Swirsky: cites work generally by Sheila Williams, Anne McCaffrey, Bradbury and Eleanor Cameron.
Beth Cato: Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman's Dragonlance series.
Tehani Wessely: lists a range of work but places Anne McCaffrey's The White Dragon at the top.
Alan Baxter: also lists a number of books but focuses on C J Cherryh’s The Chronicles of Morgaine.
Sarah Hendrix: Madeleine L’Engle Wrinkle in Time.
Olivia Waite: Anne McCaffrey “The Smallest Dragonboy.”
Anthony Cardno: Robert Silverberg To Open the Sky.
Ann Vandermeer: The Oz books by L. Frank Baum.
Sarah Williams: Douglas Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Pamela Sargent: Alfred Bester The Stars My Destination.
Jaye Wells: C.S. Lewis The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Mike Glyer: lists a lot of books, from which I will emphasize the Lensman series by E. E. “Doc” Smith about which he says
there I found the line that hooked me on science fiction forever — “Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other….”
Sabrina Vourvolias: C.S. Lewis The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe.
Kerry Schafer: Tolkien The Fellowship of the Ring.
Jim Henley: Science Fiction Hall of Fame, edited by Silverberg and Bova.
Melanie Meadors: Robin McKinley The Hero and the Crown.
M.L. Brennan: lists The Dragonriders of Pern by Anne McCaffrey, Dune by Frank Herbert, The Belgariad by David Eddings, Ender’s Game by Orson Scott Card, The Darkangel Trilogy by Meredith Ann Pierce.
Meghan B.: Tamora Pierce Lioness and the Woman Who Rides Like A Man.
Jon Courtenay Grimwood: Alexei Panshin Rite of Passage.

Usually, when I find lists of recommended or favorite readings online, I am a little embarassed by how few of them I have read. Not this list, where I must have read 80%. Perhaps it reflects the ages of the people responding?

I was also a little surprised to find how similar peoples lists were. In addition to overlap mentioned above, many people responded with other books they loved that often drawn from the same small list: The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, Ender's Game, Dune, as well as various books by David Eddings, Raymond Feist, Terry Brooks, C S Lewis and Anne McCaffrey.

The one book (or set of books) that was surprising in its omission was Ursula Le Guin's Wizard of Earthsea which was extremely influential to me and to many of my friends. I think of it as our generations Harry Potter, and recommend it to anyone (along with Dune, McCaffrey, and Ender's Game, it topped my list of recommendations for younger readers).

Thursday, October 15, 2015

Wednesday, October 14, 2015

Sociology in SFF

As an economist, I am often perplexed by the way economics is portrayed in SFF. Although it is sometimes done well---here is one list of SFF books in which economics makes an appearance in a way that passes muster with some economists---it is often done badly.

I suspect professionals in other fields must feel similarly. For example, historians must be driven crazy by what they perceive to be misrepresentations of various historical episodes, while political scientists no doubt think that the political intrigues described in some books are hopelessly naive, or else overly elaborate.

With regard to the discipline of sociology, Hannah Emery, who has a PhD in sociology from Berkeley, has written an interesting short article On Dothraki and House Elves: Developing Fantasy Cultures over on Dan Koboldt's blog. Although written as a set of tips on world building, reading between the lines I think we can see some things in SFF novels that must drive sociologists mad.

Emery's main point is that, when it comes to believable world building, it is not enough to simply develop a culture (or cultures) for that world.

if you want your story to portray a realistic society, building “the culture” won’t be enough, for three reasons: cultural drift, cultural exchange, and deviance.

What Emery mean by these terms?

Cultural Drift

Cultures will evolve over time, and vary across space. If a culture is old, and if it covers a large territory, we can expect a greater degree of cultural drift. This can lead to the coexistence of diametrically opposed cultural mores:

There’s a lot of talk both inside and outside the United States about “American culture,” You know, the culture of Big Macs and organic local farmers’ markets, of abstinence pledges and the reality show Sixteen and Pregnant, of – you get the idea. Even in “the information age,” the US still has regional cultures. If you’re familiar with those cultures, you might make assumptions about someone from the Bay Area, or the Bible Belt, or Brooklyn, but you’d likely realize there’s not much you can assume about someone from “America.” The country’s just too big.

...

Over time and distance, the Vulgar Latin spoken in the Roman Empire fragmented into the very-different Romance languages. Culture fragments, too, and it also changes in response to local conditions.

...

Failing to take cultural drift into account seems to be particularly common when you’re developing non-human cultures (centaurs are noble, dwarves are gruff, elves are arrogant, you know the drill). One exercise to help you get around this is to think about which of the cultural traits you’ve developed are actually rooted in biology: those are the ones most likely to be universal across cultures. For instance, almost all human children are raised in family groups; almost all humans subsist on some combination of plant matter and animal protein; almost all humans will have sexual partners at some point in their adult life. But think how many variations exist on those themes if you widen the scope to all human cultures.

Cultural Exchange

When cultures meet, they interact and exchange ideas. Sometimes, an idea that originated in one culture can become inextricably linked to another.

For example, tomatoes are a main feature of Italian cooking. But

there were no tomatoes in Europe until the sixteenth century. They originated in southern Mexico, and came to Europe with returning Spanish explorers. Same thing with chili peppers, brought first to Europe and then to Asia from the “New World.” People traveled, they saw new things, and they adopted those things as their own.

Intelligent creatures are curious. If people from your primary culture have contact with other cultures, whether through war, alliance, or just casual encounters, some parts of those other cultures will trickle home with them. Some American GIs who served in Vietnam came home with a new taste for Southeast Asian cuisine; some sub-Saharan Africans who heard the preaching of European missionaries decided this Jesus stuff might be worth exploring.

Food and religion are particularly good examples of cultural exchange, because they’re pretty portable and fairly resistant to extinction. When people travel to a new country, they bring their cuisine and their faith along, and even when immigrants assimilate, food and faith tend to persist longer than other things. But the longer an export is immersed in a new culture, the further it’s likely to drift from its original source material. Christianity in Africa looks quite different from Christianity in Europe; “Chinese food” in the United States is very different from Cantonese or Szechuan cuisine. Blame cultural drift again, along with syncretism (a term most commonly applied to religion): combining new cultural elements with ones that are already working well. East and Southeast Asia are notorious for this, with many people’s religious practices incorporating elements of Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism and local indigenous traditions without the practitioners seeing any contradiction.

Cultural exchange is particularly common where two cultures bump up against each other often. This is why “ethnic” food is most prevalent in big cities that are common immigrant destinations, and why there are more Mexican restaurants in the southwestern US (i.e., close to Mexico) than in New England. If your story’s set in a border town, it will almost by definition not be monocultural.

When Two Cultures Meet

Finally, of course, there’s cultural exchange in the most direct sense of the word. When two human cultures first meet, there are two things you can almost always count on: they’ll try to kill each other, and they’ll make babies. Even if there are taboos against intercultural sexual relations – even if it’s punishable by death – it’ll still happen. And the children who come from those unions will have to be categorized within the societies who could potentially claim them, and decide for themselves what cultural space they’re going to occupy.

Which brings me to my final bullet point. I suspect that right now, someone reading this is preparing to protest that your fantasy culture is the exception, that your cultural authorities (king, warlord, high priests, whoever) maintain a policy of strict isolationism, so there’s no opportunities for cultural exchange, and they’re immortal, so there’s limited opportunity for cultural drift because the story coming from the top never changes. To you, I say that even in the most authoritarian societies, there will always be the crazy ones.

Deviance

Whatever a cultures dominant social norms may be, there will always be those members of society that deviate from it.

Whatever norms, beliefs and values your society has, there will be people who stray from them. People who don’t believe God created the universe, or don’t believe that the Big Bang did. People who sever ties with their family of origin, or who live with their parents until they’re forty. Straying from the mainstream – whatever that mainstream might be – is what sociologists call deviance.

Characters Breaking the Norm

There are many forms of deviation and most are neither illegal nor regarded as immoral. Some might be viewed as eccentricities, and many may make members of the dominant culture uncomfortable.

Your society will have all these forms of deviance. There will be people who commit crimes (actions that a government deems undesirable for one reason or another); there will be people who do immoral things (often actions that a religious authority deems undesirable); and there will be people who do weird things, and think outside the box. The motivations for these actions could be anything you can imagine. What if there was a Dothraki in George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire who was allergic to horses? What if there was a Hogwarts house elf who had a vision from the gods and started preaching that the house elves needed to go join Voldemort’s cause, or that they needed to use their magic destroy the humans?

The people in your world will be born into a culture, and that culture will shape their thoughts and beliefs and actions. But no thinking person can conform completely to every aspect of their culture, no matter how constrictive that culture is. You’ll always have variability, and that’s something to consider when developing fantasy cultures.

This might all sound like a lot of work, and I’m certainly not suggesting you come up with a hundred incarnations of every culture that could potentially appear in your story. But for the main cultures, I’d suggest it’s worth thinking about these things. Because the more nuance you can put in your cultures, the more realistic they’ll feel to your readers – and who knows, you may even find opportunities for new stories! The messianic house elf seems like it has potential to me.

I'd be interested to know if Emery has any examples of books and/or worlds that she feels were especially well done from the point of view of a sociologist.

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

Book Review: Scott Hawkins The Library at Mount Char

Scott Hawkins's The Library at Mount Char is a disturbing and strange little book. It begins with a great opening sequence and a pretty good opening line (see here for some other great opening lines):

Carolyn, blood-drenched and barefoot, walked alone down the two-lane stretch of blacktop that the Americans called Highway 78.

This effectively sucked me in, and I was kept reading along by the far-better-than-average writing quality. But at the end I was left dissatisfied. And it took me a while to adequately explain to myself why.

The novel primarily follows Carolyn, orphaned in some kind of disaster, and adopted along with 11 other orphans by Father, a godlike being who has lived for many tens of thousands of years. Over these years, he has accumulated his wisdom into a library and each of the children is assigned the task of learning a catalog comprising roughly one-twelfth of the library. Carolyn learns languages, Jennifer learns medicine, David learns warcraft and murder, Michael learns of animals, and so on. Each is forbidden to learn another's catalog.

When we join the action, Father has gone missing and the orphans find themselves barred from approaching the library. Separately and together the authors set out to find out what happened. As we go along we learn of the astounding cruelty with which Father educated them and the terrible consequences that this has wrought on their psyche's. Indeed, one of my problems with the book was the very detailed depiction of murder, torture and rape. These acts appear to have had a purpose; Father had a plan in mind. But it emerges slowly that the orphans have their own plans, too, and that one of them may be behind Father's disappearance.

I usually try to keep my reviews as spoiler free as possible, but in order to understand my problems with the book I need to delve a little bit deeper into the plot. And so, beware this warning: SPOILERS BELOW.

One of the things that makes it difficult to like Carolyn, the book's protagonist, is that she takes a number of actions that are both staggering in their cruelty and appalling as regards the indifference she shows to both human and animal suffering; people and animals are disposable to her. The fact that the actions are all in support of her plan---it emerges that she is behind Father's disappearance---is somewhat lessened by the knowledge that Father is a despicable creature, but only somewhat because Carolyn's motive is purely and simply revenge for one of Father's acts of cruelty. This is, of course, part of Hawkins's point; the assumption of godlike powers combined with Father's training has made Carolyn lose her humanity.

About two-thirds of the way through the book, Carolyn's plans succeed and are finally revealed. There is a bit of a god from the machine thing going on here; we never get to see understand Carolyn's implementation of her plan as it goes along so that when it works it all comes as a bit of a surprise. This is explained by the fact that, because her opponents have some power to read minds, she was not able to think about her plans. But it left this reader unsatisfied, as though having watched a heist movie in which the preparations for the heist all occurred off screen, and suddenly the protagonist ends up in possession of the stolen goods.

The remainder of the book, then, sees Carolyn grappling with the loss of her humanity with the help of Steve, a childhood friend from before the incident that killed her parents. During this process, she brings Father back to life and it is revealed that this was all his plan, too. Carolyn seems to accept that the cruelty was necessary as a way of grooming her to take his place and they are reconciled. Again, I found this ending unsatisfying. I think Hawkins wants us to see Carolyn's forgiveness of Father as necessary for her to recapture her humanity. And it certainly does not come easy to her. But I nonetheless found Carolyn's transition from little-ball-of-revenge-fueled-hate to wise-and-magnanimous-future-god-of-our-world a little too abrupt. There is not enough questioning of Father's methods, and whether alternative teaching methods would have worked; whether the callous disregard of people's lives and suffering was worth it. It is simply accepted that these things needed to happen.

Is this intended as some form of religious allegory? Should we accept the suffering in the world as just a part of god's plan? I have heard that message before, and do not need to hear it again. In fact, the greatest disappointment of all was that in the end I just did not care about the answers to these questions at all.

Let me stress that the book does have some redeeming features. The premise is intriguing, the writing is very good (I zipped through the book in a couple of days), and the characters are unforgettable. But to fully enjoy that you have to look past the torture porn, the deus ex machina, and the religious allegory. I wasn't fully able to do so, which is why this receives a rating of "decent" ...

R⁴ Rating: 6 out of 10.

R⁴SFF