A bunch of stuff that happens

The older you get, the more life looks like "just a bunch of stuff that happens." When you were younger, you looked for meanings in things ... not omens or karma as such, but something to put sense to the drivel life dishes up every day. One day you realize, if any such thing as karma actually exists, it's got to be an almost genetic process, where guff that happened (and the good things, too) forty years ago is acting like the building blocks and glue of what's happening today. A dumb decision you made at age 15 is currently screwing up your life, for example; but eons ago it looked like a terrific idea.

One tends, traditionally, to think about good and bad karma -- something angelic you do might win you a reward to cancel out something demonic you did. Well, maybe. But Fate, or Destiny, is just as likely to be simply the aggregate of the sensible and the silly, the lucky and the unlucky, plus a bunch of blind chance ... all of which accumulates over half a century and eventually dumps you right in it, without a spade.

So much for philosophy. But you gotta wonder, when you find yourself "right in it, without a spade."

Actually, we have a couple of spades. But no one is looking forward much to doing the digging.

So --

What am I reading?

The Exile Waiting, by Vonda N. McIntyre, originally published in 1975, and the copy I have is the 1985 reprint. This has been on the shelf for about thirty years (!) but only in the last few of those years have I owned the chance to read. (I'm currently reading up to a hundred thousand words a week ... and since I've actually started to think seriously about writing professionally, I'm not only looking more critically at my own work, I'm looking more critically at the work of others.)

What a marvelous storyline The Exile Waiting promised. It was filled with potential and started out very well. What happened next is a puzzler. After having read several of McIntyre's books in the past (admittedly, her Star Trek titles) I guess I expected more, either from this writer or this novel. Spider Robinson said of it (quoted from the cover matter), "A cracking good yarn with a very real cast..." And Joanna Russ called it "...one of the most vivid and real science fiction words I've seen..."

All of which gave me high expectations which, in turn, left me scratching my head; because the inescapable fact is -- great plotline and fantastic potential or not, the novel is so underwritten and abbreviated, the story barely survives and the characters don't. It's a quick read, at about 100k words in 248pp, and many of the characters are little more than a name and a cursory physical description. This will work for background filler characters, but when some of your main characters are still close to mysteries when the story ends, the reader is left unfulfilled. The action unfolds in fits and starts, sometimes lovingly detailed (in gorgeous prose), other times "dashed off" with critical sequences told in retrospect, and in shorthand. The overall effect is ... lumpy.

If I were awarding stars, I'd give The Exile Waiting three, because the world it builds is refreshingly strange, a couple of the characters are oddly compelling, and from time to time the prose is luminous. I wanted to love this book, because I know McIntyre's other work quite well; but this one is uncomfortably like a third draft awaiting revision and polishing. It was her first published novel, so I guess it's safe to say everyone has to start somewhere!

Having said that, I come around in a big circle and begin thinking as a writer...