Don't like elections

Elections have their value, but like all things of value, they take some effort, and sometimes there are lots of side effects.  Elections tend to bring out the best and worst, and because they bring out the worst, we see things in friends (or acquaintances) that we'd rather not, biases, prejudices, stubborn or rudeness streaks, closed minds...we all have some, but sometimes the worst can be worse than we guessed, and if there isn't a lot of basis for the relationship to start with, it becomes clear that maybe there is no basis at all.  If there's more to the relationship, the bad thing can be gotten past like all all of our weaknesses--we'd have no relationships at all without that much--but the other relationships may end.  While it seems from the outside like there might not be anything to lose, we always have hope that even a barely-there friendship might eventually go somewhere valuable, and ending it takes that imaginary future away.

I'm not aware of that sort of thing inspiring a story scene I've written for NaNoWriMo, but it follows that theme.  My character has regained someone she lost but thinks that it still is that imaginary future, a dream of what might have been, and can't accept that the loss has been reversed. 

I never planned to write about insanity and paranoia, and I'm sure I don't know enough about it to make realistic psychological thrillers (they are, in any case, futuristic space science fiction, which isn't quite the right genre for it), but I seem to land there in a lot of my stories, at least on the fringes, and in this particular series, which turns out to have a rather nutty premise and nuttier universe (never intended as I write it, but Dilbert meets Pern's dragons at Plato's Cave is as close as I come to describing the resulting flavor), insanity seems rather more likely than sanity.   I can't imagine that it will be easy to sell as a publishable novel, but trying to write it is a great way to distract myself from the election ads.

Writing to the future

I wonder sometimes if the stuff that is the most painful to write is also the stuff that's best to write. So little on the shelves (what will replace that phrase when it's e-books? We don't yet have much of an electronic vocabulary with which to work) seems to have the depth and substance of the past great novels or deep consideration in nonfiction, though true stories of drama and struggle do well enough on the surface.

Or not so much painful as merely difficult. It surprises me less by the day that science fiction struggles as a genre and needs more scientists to help it along the way. How else can we write of the future, when today is so rapidly changing? We can hardly approach a distant future ideal (save through philosophy, which has a large untapped potential) when we have 100,000 new apps in less than year? Who can even know what they all provide much less understand the trends of what people are choosing to use and why; but it is in the answer to such questions that we must find the new themes for future-based science fiction worth the writing. How can the current generations appreciate the vision of writers when their own parents still wrote school papers long hand? (We thought medieval paleography a challenge and quills a curiosity; what about a generation from now where writing with pen is an antique art form and yesterday's technology already out of date? In the beginning, science fiction was writing about a century two forward based on the technology and trends of past decades of developments. The science fiction writer today is essentially writing about tomorrow based on what they know of yesterday. Time travel stories had to go back a generation or centuries to show massive changes. Now a few years will suffice. The internet may not be into its second decade, but that long ago we still had phone booths.

Still, other areas have not kept up and leave the science fiction writer with room to work. Besides the boom in understanding of psychology that still has room to grow, and medicine, transportation is still well behind the curve. Cars are still rarely the electric or hybrid dreams of 100 miles to the gallon that we hoped for by now, and metro's are still clunky and slow to expand. Transportation has yet to make its leap into the new century, and sharing of technology and knowledge is ahead of the practical application of the same (the physical act of production work is different than the drawing board and requires a better educated workforce than many countries can yet provide, despite the claim to an information age). And emotional intelligence is still a beginner in the arc of development. Knowledge doesn't help if we aren't read to let it in and change management theories, like many advances in technology and information, are slow to make it into the work place to the degree needed to make the real difference.

Nor am I sure that the next generation, the one that has started working or those not yet there, are any more ready to take on the challenges facing managers and decision makers today. Some have been taught team work, but in my observation, too much is co-dependence, the reliance on finding team mates who are are better at the things we find hard, instead of the interdependence (shared independence) that gives the willingness to take on the hard stuff in case no one else can, to be one of the leaders in case the others are followers. Such things remain fuel for writing about the future but, unlike mere technology, is hard to tackle in a fun, exciting story form that reaches out to both heart and mind. If science fiction writers can go there, the genre will do well. Otherwise the new genre of popular consciousness will be whichever one can.

side characters

I enjoyed incorporating the character Karinne into Beyond the Wall. I still have some difficulty in cultivating related characters in science fiction and know it is an inappropriate bias: the future, spece, the world of science, more "appropriately" has strong, intelligent, not-so-feminine characters as those in fantasy, where classic ladies in silk gowns, gentle manners, and all the actionable aspects of lady-like feminin flavor are almost assumed except for the worst or wildest women.

But really, we have some pretty feminine women these days with gentle, good manners, even if they can rarely lay the perfect table, and nervous as well as bold women. Why shouldn't the distant future? The question becomes, where do they fit? Mxyra in E-ships offers something of the question, but she is about as far as it goes in her world as I've built it, at least outside the mountains. In flashbacks, I could offer something of her fellow village women, and there's the Chancellor's daughter... easily sliding into the negative connotations rather than the positive, bright personality of Karinne. Karinne is one of those characters that fits her world well, I think: at least I can't quite picture her handling Mxyra's world very well. I wonder, though, is that a weakness for Karinne, or a problem with my expectations for the future?

fixing the arc or arch or wave or something

I've been playing with the ending sections because they had a bit of mashe together feel, rather than the kind of flow I wanted. I don't think it's quite there yet, but I think it is improving overall. the tricky bit with these kinds of big changes is that I've probably left quite a few references to action in other scenes that maynot be out of alignment. If you notice something that seems out of sequence or just wrong, it probably is. Please let me know.

I still probably need to do something with the middle too, the story arc as they call it, though I think it a misnomer. An arc implies a fairly straightforward buildup to a climax, but most stories, especially novel length ones aren't that straightforward, and if they are, they shouldn't be. One description I was given was that it should be more like a W or an M, ups and downs, things seeming to go right as well as going wrong, even if they get undone in the next breath. I think my arc is too smooth an arch and needs some more ups and downs, contradictory forces, or misleads (mystery like). The trick of course it to have those ups and downs, and also changing between action, intensity, and other qualities while overall still building toward a climax. I've been working on one of my other books that does it rather better and noticed the nature of the problem, but haven't yet figured out how to fix it. How to you get a feeling of success as a prisoner on an enemy ship without it seeming a total illusion or a solace?

Where are we going?

Agent hunting, I came across one listed in the past for Science Fiction and they still are, sort of, but they provided a fairly specifica discussion of what they were looking for, and it was, in my old fashioned view, about as science fiction as Flubber, Shaggy Dog, and that movie more recently where the guy could suddenly read the minds of women--contemporary Earth, near future, with some element a little further along than now or taking a bigger place in someone’s life, all about the people.. I suppose, technically, they could be labeled SF, just like most of the James Bond movies, but such stuff has always been in the main stream, on the general fiction shelves. Do they really need to be on the Science Fiction shelves? Do they belong there? and perhaps more important, is that what science fiction genre fans really want, the future that is no further away than next week or next year? If that’s really all they want, my own science fiction is doomed, but in reality, I haven’t noticed that much of a decline in Star Trek books on the shelves, either.

According to one recent discussion, it would be a sign of a decline in curiosity about the world and science, and leave the science fiction to the Chinese consumers, where curiosity is still growing. To me, the lack of curiosity dooms us to stagnation for years to come, for it is a sign of a generation lacking hope, faith, dreams of better to come, an interest only in the struggles of the day, and in addressing those struggles only in the most short-sighted way, if they can address them at all. Today, ethics, the environment, the sense of right and good, and long term value and meaning all too often seem to lose the argument. Even the books that address them seem too often to sermonize instead of letting the reader or student learn, and that is the approach of the defense, not outreach.

If I wanted to write about the contemporary world, I wouldn’t choose to take the course of science fiction and fantasy (though a few fantasies, like Harry Potter, have done it well and left the genre not in question). Popular fiction inevitably does better than genre fiction, and anything that can take that route should probably do so.

Intellectual vs technical in science fiction

I guess he didn’t want any advertising for his book because the paragraphs about them wouldn’t copy, but you can read those bits at http://www.concatenation.org/articles/hocking~science~sf.html. They weren’t the bits that interested me, anyway, as much as his clear misunderstanding of the quotes he included in his write up.

“Science fiction comes in so many flavours that defining 'science fiction' is problematic. One aspect of our understanding of SF is that it should be technically accurate.
But is this more important than the story? Should it be compromised to tell a story? asks author and psychologist Ian Hocking” is the blurb at the start of the story.

Ian Hocking makes some good points about the value of some degree of accuracy, and the often misleading results when journalists misrepresent medical findings and translate it into incorrect or misleading advice to their readers (A relationship may not be cause and effect). (Scientists would like to see some of the same correctness in science fiction, knowing that science fiction readers often become science students and ultimately scientists, and benefit from realistic portrayals of current science knowledge.)

“But should science fiction be held to such standards?” he counters, “I would argue not. Because, first and foremost, the responsibility of a storyteller is to tell a story. If the storyteller is primarily concerned with edification -- rather than letting this grow organically from the story -- then an alternative form of dissemination, such as the essay or the documentary, might be more appropriate.”

Hocking further explains: “Perhaps SF is seen as too challenging. My own view, however, is that science fiction is commonly conceived as tedious unless one is interested in gadgets, time paradoxes, poor characterization and the willfully obscure. As an SF writer, I would not agree that this conception is an accurate one, but it does appear to describe the common reaction.”

His further arguments, however, take on a rather sideways perspective. Hocking uses a quote by Ben Bova from an essay on the Cassandra Effect in SF, where Bova assesses that few people read SF because “Perhaps the problem lies with the visual entertainment media: movies and TV. Let's face it, most of Hollywood's "sci-fi" has its origins in comic strips, not actual published science fiction. Many people don't realize that the "sci-fi flicks" on both big and small screens are a far cry from the intellectual and emotional depth of real science fiction.”

Hocking says of this: “I find this problematic in the context of creating fiction. A story is a series of moments that, through the interactions of their meaning, create emotions in the reader. Intellectual depth, it would appear, works at a level incommensurate with the story. Sure, we can be entertained by a bit of techno-jargon, we can go 'Ahhh,' when the author explains how a nifty camouflage suit can lower the wearer's refractive index to zero, rendering them invisible. But this not the story. It is, yes, part of the support structure of the story, but it represents a reduction of forward motion while what the reader should really care about - the characters and what happens to them - is put on hold.”

In my view, Ian Hocking has missed Bova’s point entirely. Hocking equates “intellectual” with technobabble, just because sometimes the technobabble is technically correct and well-researched. I accept that technostuff, accurate or totally made-up, can be problematic, that the story should take priority, and that technobabble) can just slow the story down and discourages readers who have no interest in gadgetry. it’s a problem not exclusive to science fiction, either: look at the spy tales of Clancy). He argues reasonably that “You shouldn't have to be interested in the space stuff to an enjoy an SF story any more than you need to have an intrinsic interest in African territorial jurisdiction to enjoy Casablanca.”

But Hocking misses the point that intellectual and technobabble have nothing to do with each other and may even be contradictory, if the technology stuff is handled badly. A little bit of technology and a lot of ethics, social, or emotional questions surrounding the use of the specified technology and its impact on individual lives--all the makings of “intellectual depth”-- can be the meat of a genuinely good story. No technobabble is needed beyond character’s understandable and realistic dialog. Tolkien put a lot of work into researching the Lord of the Rings and the story is enriched by the language and legends portrayed, truly an intellectual work in many respects, but LoR isn’t an academic study in the those languages and legends, the inclusion as part of the lives of the characters doesn’t make the tale harder to read, and yet the reader still wants “Frodo to reach Mount Doom and you worry for the tragic figure of Gollum.”

Hocking does offer some good advice, even if he got there through a sideways logic: “I guess I've come to this conclusion through the editing process. I've learned that what makes a scene good isn't the tech; it's the meaning conjured by the characters, their struggles, the conflict, and the wider narrative. When working to improve a piece of fiction, you can fiddle with the meaning (I'm using this word in a broad sense that encompasses 'emotion', 'affect', 'interest' and so on) or you can fiddle with the technical stuff. At the end of the day, it's the sharpening of meaning that improves the work by any real margin.”

More notes on editing and revising

In trimming the section I've just posted for Cerelian Gold, and for editing and revising in general, I often look for series of prepositional phrases that I've added to clarify a sentence. Prepositional phrases (on the planet, in the hatchway, etc.) can be very useful constructs, but they are easy to overuse and having even two in a row can be a problem. sometimes they can be replaces with a difference sentence construction, a description in another form, but often I simply delete them as not really necessary. They serve primarily to help the reader see the scene as I, the writer do, but unless it impacts the plot, some later action, it's usually alright if the reader visualizes some details in their own way. The more they can imagine it for themselves, and the less the author contradicts a vision of the scene that the reader has already created in their own imagination, the easier the reader can get into the scene.

I think that is one of the reasons that science fiction can be particularly challenging for some readers to get into, and why it remains less popular than fantasy as a general rule: the writer has to describe scenes that the reader cannot readily fill in from their own experience and including concepts that the reader may be hard-pressed to visualize even when thoroughly described. It's probably also why many SF fans are either scientists or young or both: the scientists can get the concepts from knowledge of current science, and the young always have more vivid imaginations. A specific detail or two can be enough to give such readers a picture, without it being the exact same image the writer had in mind, and that's often enough.

what next and more on definitions in novels

Cerelian Gold is heading toward climax and ending rapidly but I haven't yet decided what tale to post next, whether science fiction or fantasy and whether to try to keep to the more adult themes rather than the young adult that I post to my other blog. Part of the hesitation is that I might not actually have a choice on the latter as I don't know that I have another grown-up science fiction or fantasy ready for public viewing. I tend toward young adult quite unintentionally and didn't even know that that was what I was writing for many years, many novels. I suppose because the bulk of the science fiction and fantasy novels I was finding and reading when i got started were billed as just that, not specifically as young adult at all, but in retrospect, that's what they really were. Adding substantial romance and the psycho-drama are what really made them different in my view. I wonder what other themes make a book general or adult instead of young adult? Perhaps I will let the readers see how I explore a new idea, long before it becomes a novel... I'll take suggestions for themes.

What Defines the Science Fiction Classic?

Came across a blog awhile back about whether there were any modern science fiction classics, that is, science fiction books (rather than movies) that if you mentioned it to an SF reader, they would be almost guaranteed to know the book and probably to have read it. Lots of old ones, but what about in the last half of the 20th C or since? if I say "Pip and Flinx", how many SF readers would recognize the characters and the books they are from? What about Helva, the Ship Who Sang, or the Dragonriders of Pern (though they slide toward fantasy most of the time), but there are plenty of memorable Fantasies.

The question came up again in a discussion at home, and it came up that we'd have a hard time testing even if we thought of a few candidates: how would you know, unless you were involved in discussion outside your local reading group or book club? classices are not always 'favorites" either, as the NY Times best seller lists show. Classics, in the sense I refer to here is more about recognizable quality and long-term memorability and value, that ensures the next generation reads it, too.

With no answers, my thoughts turned to what exactly would define a classic in a genre fiction? What kind of features would make it modestly popular, over more than a single generation, memorable and recognizeably good quality such that a teacher would bring it to the attention of their students? Here are some of my thoughts:

* Well written with a distinctive style, voice
* Helps define the genre or a subgenre, perhaps the first to effectively capture a subgenre and leads the way to many of the same sort, poor imitations of the first.
* A story that a wide audience can relate to (typically relatively basic, even obvious in essence with classic themes of life, family, friends, good and evil, challenges to basic values, but portrayed in such an interesting manner that adults and teens can read and re-read it and find something new to learn and understand, complex enough in content along the course to retain interest.
* Strong emotional content (fear and hate, love and hate, obsession, jealousy, and fierce loyalty
* A new twist, setting, or focus
* Larger than life characters that none the less represent the human condition, with flaws and weaknesses in the same proportion as strength and nobility and purpose.
* In particular for a given genre, it should be an archtype of the genre. For science fiction, a fictitious, pseudo, or future predictive science that is not just present but a key story element.

The last may be an answer to why no science fictions obviously fall into this category: So many kinds of science and science fiction are available for exploration, that finding a representative one may be hard for subgenre's whose true models were written more that a century before: time travel, vampires, monsters, space fiction, and others. A book that tries to address several of the options at once becomes unbelievalbe, a farce or parody, although that can be a kind of classic of its own. Who hadn't heard of the Hitchhikers Guide, even before the movie?

Even if no book achieves it all, I figure any book that aims in the right direction will at least have a great chance at publication success.