Touching base in September ... because

 

Spring woods at Manning Floral Reserve

Touching base in September, because it's already the middle of the month, and if I don't do it now, I'll lose contact with this blog again. And it's not so easy to pick up the threads. Not that there's anything in particular to report on a personal level. There's been no breakthrough on the writing front -- certainly no contracts or sales to report. What news there is has been so uniformly sad or lousy that I couldn't bring myself to blog about it. August 17th, the news broke that Back Caviar was dead -- and that was a heartbreaker. Just yesterday, James Earl Jones passed away, though he did live to be 93, where as "Nelly," to use her stable name, was a day short of her 18th birthday, which is young for a horse ... and her foal died a day later. I think she took him with her. Add to this, the last few months have been a blizzard of migraines, with the high point being four in eight days. I've spent a lot of recent time at the end of my rope, which doesn't make good blogging fodder! 

On the other hand, my romance with the Canon EOS continues apace, and I'll illustrate the main body of this post with photos that depict that romance, rather than just babbling about a camera and the places we've visited. In fact, we're going to all the same old places, albeit with a new camera. And even this was fraught with not-so-good luck. We were on our way back from Nangawooka just yesrerday. Bam! One hell of a bang, at highway speeds, and, just like that, we need a new windscreen. It was only this morning when we discovered (phew!) it's covered by our insurance. Praise RAA, may blessings be upon it. Now --

The main subject of this post is a ramble about books, writing, reading, publishing, and selling the dang things. Here we go.

Noisy Miner, Milang

Purple Swamphen, Strathalbyn

...It's worth reporting that I'm actually writing again. I'm at the treatment stage of a new novel that has the potential to either be huge or a trilogy, possibly both; and with about 25,000 words "on paper" at this point, it's safe to actually say that yes, I am writing again. This one is an SF piece called The Gift of Prometheus, and it's as far from anything I've written previously as could be imagined. Which might mean that it'll be the most saleable piece of writing I've produced in thirty years, lol. Sure, I had some genuine early success, circa 1990, but it wasn't sustainable -- not over the lifetime it takes for a writer to be successful unless s/he is going to sell millions of copies, which is highly unlikely. So...

Ripe brambles, Belair NP

...just lately, I've been listening properly to what people are saying about the books they love, and matching those remarks to the books themselves, and to the success of those books. Because the success of a book at market is a geometric measurement of its saleability, yes? Yes. By looking at YouTube, and reading Goodreads, and then actually buying and reading the books (!), I can say, without hesitation or fear of contradiction, that the quality of the writing -- the prose, the structure of the narrative -- has nothing to do with the success of a book these days. Perhaps in the past, it did, not now. Now, it's all about the story, plus how and why the central characters strike a chord with the reader, and how easy the book is to read. Ease of reading is more important, apparently, than good grammar. Characters with whom younger readers identify and empathize are more important than a well-written and well-structured book. O...kay.

McLaren Vale Visitors Centre

Like it or not, this is how the market shakes down in today's reading world. Publishers only exist to sell books, and they have to be able to sell them -- which means a writer has to be able to supply what readers will pay for (and this in a world where you would read forever without buying anything, because billions of words are archived online), which of course kicks back through the whole machinery, the train of reader - bookseller - publisher - agent - writer. It comes down to the inescapable bottom line: it's the reader, the end-user, who is driving the market. Publishers know this. They tell agents what they want. The agents select from a never-ending Niagara Falls of submitted material, choosing just what they think (guess; judge; hope) will woo the reader to spend $12 for this book in a year or two. So --

blossom, Strathalbyn

-- just what is it that this hypothetical end-user wants, and will spend a few bucks on? To answer that, you have to know who the end-user actually is. It might be a middle-aged man who wants a non-stop supply of Tom Clancy and Clive Cussler. It could be a septuagenarian lady who wishes there were a hundred novels on Colleen McCullough's backlist. But if you want the real money, today -- the kind of royalties that come from millions of books sold, well...

canola, near Milang and Langehorne

...any one writer can't write to all of those marketplaces. A twenty-something woman who writes romantic fantasy (a cross between Harlequin Romance and Game of Thrones) probably can't write to Tom Clancy's readership with any hope of seeing the real money we all need to pay the rent, and vice versa. The writer is pretty much compelled to pick a marketplace and write to it. There's an old saying: "A writer must write of what she knows." (Yes, I know the original saying was "he," but I'm not a guy, and in today's world, everything is trending female.) So, being a female, I started to look at what women are reading, and which women are reading, and how much they're reading. Hmm. This is where it gets interesting.

full moon, stormy sky, from the backyard

It turns out that the big-success sellers among female readers are aimed at the New Adult market, or the late-late YA range, where kids are so close to grown that it's difficult to draw a line. I chased down three recent, real successes: the Leviathan trilogy (not so much this one, actually) the Hunger Games trilogy (this was big), and the ACOTAR series. A Court of Thorns and Roses ... the one that's being banned left and right in school and college libraries in the US. Yes, that one. 

Now, Leviathan was written by a middle-aged male, and after reading it -- and having various misgivings about the apparent "childishness" with which the mid-teen characters were written, I followed the book to Goodreads and -- whaddaya know? Young(er) readers are saying the same thing. Scott Westerfield is writing for the kids he remembers from 25 years ago, not kids as they are today. I thought Leviathan was really good, but it's the kind of book that a parent buys for their 12 to 15-year-old, likely not the book kids would buy for themselves. This isn't to say it's not a terrific read -- it is. But it would suit readers several years younger than the age of the main character, but 11 or 12 is not the lucrative marketplace where kids have bucks for books and are actively out there, looking for them ... hunting, in fact, for the books they're all talking about at school. But Leviathan is on the right track, centring as it does on a young woman coming of age and making her mark in a man's world -- in fact, in this context, a steampunk First World War scenario. 

Hunger Games, meanwhile, is the kind of novel that gives parents nightmares while mid-teens revel in it. Dark, dismal, cruel, violent, with a thread of awkward, dawning romance, hints of sensuality, though there's nothing overt in the first one, where the central character is 16. The violence and cruelty are deliberate, often heavy-handed. Suzanne Collins was definitely writing for mid-late teens, and knew her target audience. Really, seriously knew them. She was older than this at the time when these books were written -- I believe she'd have been 45-ish, whereas her readers would have been 16-23, either the same age as the female hunter/warrior who is central to the story, or just a little older and easily able to look back and remember being that age. Hunger Games was also filmed as a major movie trilogy, so, whereas Leviathan was on the right track, safe to say, Hunger Games nailed it. For a start, the first book sold 800,000 copies, which is getting up there, although nowhere near what can be, and has been done, by other writers in a similar vein...

Take it to the next level. A Court of Thorns and Roses has several things in common with these other two projects. It's aimed at young and very young readers (Hunger Games scored; Leviathan missed the target by a whisker but hit the parents and grandparents instead, meaning it would be gifted at Christmas and birthdays ... not enough to drive a monstrous bestseller, but not too bad at all). It's dark. It's violent. It's cruel. It's written in a prose style that is so stripped and bare, it's often gauche, clumsy, amateurish (and indeed, in ACOTAR, one finds a blizzard of grammatical errors, wrong-word errors, non sequiturs, incorrect word order ... the kind of mistakes a good editor should pick up and correct. This was not done, and one speculates that the sheer clumsiness of the narrative line is some kind of "youth speak," where this is the language in which one speaks to, and with, readers aged 16 to 23 -- i.e.., the work's target marketplace).  And a young girl is the central character: in ACOTAR, the action pivots on Feyre Archeron, who is about 18 or 19, and who tells the whole saga in first person, past tense.

A pattern emerges. 

Roo, Happy Valley Reservoir

Highly successful fiction these days tends to have female heroes. Young female heroes. Very young. They're hunters and warriors, fighting against the odds. They're mostly impoverished, borderline starving, underdogs, struggling against the current in a male world. It's a dark world, brutal, cruel, dystopian. War is either looming, is happening, or has happened. These teenage girls are without exception strong, athletic, also probably stunningly beautiful into the bargain, though they themselves don't (yet) know it. They're indomitable; they also appear to be indestructible -- which is a direct holdover from generations of movies and television, a trend that began with Leia Organa, continued through Ellen Ripley, Sidney Bristow, Peggy Carter, Rose Tyler, forged ahead through Daenerys Targaryen ... and the pedigree culminates in our own decade with the aforesaid Feyre Archeron and Katniss Everdeen. Young. Stunning. Indomitable. Indestructible. 

There is one more level that this archetype can be taken to, and Sarah J. Maas was the writer with the foresight and the guts to do it. Oh, it's been tried before, but the marketplace had to be juuust right before it was going to work like magic. You take the above formula, as explored by Leviathan (characters written too young, by a Dad figure who slightly misread his readers) and Hunger Games (the narrative explores romance; the writer pulls up short of crossing the line into more adventurous territory that might get the book(s) banned in school and college libraries), and yep -- you add sex. The explicit variety, which has been what teens have always really wanted, irrespective of what parents, teachers and priests have preferred to believe. Hey, I was a teen once myself. It was many, many years ago, and even then, my peer group was smuggling porn to school, albeit books and magazines whereas nowadays it's all about phone-driven images and videos, served by websites that may not even be legally available to younger kids. Legal or not, the stuff is circulating, and over the last decade, kids have lapped it up, with the result that teens are maturing faster and faster -- fast enough, in fact, for parents and teachers to be left behind and choking on their dust. Their kneejerk, in the US, is to ban the books. No surprise there 

(I'm not here to debate the merits of growing up fast, or at what age curious, hormone-driven teens should be legally entitled to access adult entertainment. I'm too old to intuitively know where teenage heads and hearts are today. Neither am I an educator, parent or even grandparent who has contact with them to learn where those hearts and minds are, and what they might want and need. All I would do is offer up an outmoded opinion, sound like the dinosaur I probably am (chuckles), while adding nothing useful to a debate that belongs to other, better suited individuals.)

You take Harlequin romance (the Mills & Boon style of frills and swoons love story). You hang it on an indomitable, indestructible, impoverished, starved, barely educated, stunningly beautiful 18 year old girl with a bow and arrow. Now, you set the story in a dark, dystopian, cold, muddy, male dominated future under the shadow of war. Last step: add sex. Did Sarah J. Maas invent this? No. People have forgotten than Daenerys Targaryen was about 14 when her brother sold her to Kahl Drogo. Sure, she went on to be the Mother of Dragons who burned down empires, but she began right where the others began, with such preplanning that it would be fair to say George R.R. Martin was the first who took fantasy to the next level ... except that A Song of Ice and Fire is not "frills and swoons romance." 

What Ms Maas did was to read her marketplace with genuinely awe-inspiring precision. Your readers are female, 16 and hormonal; they love Game of Thrones, Witcher, Carnival Row, Lord of the Rings; they're steeped in fanfiction, reading millions of words of largely-unedited amateur writing; this is their main source of sexy romance; unpolished prose speaks their language ... either that, or they honestly can't see the grammatical gaffes, the errors in the writer's craft. ZTF Zero Tolerance for Punctuation, yes? Your reader is looking for something that speaks their language, tells a vast, windmilling, fastasy saga about an 18 year old girl who's (!) indomitable, indestructible, impoverished, starved, barely educated, and whose feet are on the path that leads to tearing down empires. 

A pattern emerges. And it sells -- ooooh, a lot of copies. ACOTAR is five books long, and each volume has sold about two million, in 38 languages. Okay, so that's the formula. It's the formula devised from actually listening to readers, respecting what they say, and reading the books with an open mind. Sure, I can see every single grammatical and writing gaffe, and I'm not going to criticize, because Ms Maas is the one who has sold 38,000,000 copies while I'm still wondering if I can score an agent! I have no taste for sour grapes.

But I do wonder how The Gift of Prometheus should be crafted. Oh, yes, I do wonder.

And that's where I am at this point in time! Just finishing the treatment version of a novel, and beginning to wonder -- with a somewhat mercenary train of thought -- how it should be crafted to appeal to a readership that's looking for something "new but the same." One only writes for the sheer fun of it up to a certain point. Past that point, one has bills to pay. One would like to buy a house in the country! This particular one would like a facelift, lol, and there's forty grand before we launch ourselves off the starting blocks! So --

Vale Black Caviar. May you run forever where the stars meet the greenest grass ... thank you for the memories. It was ... glorious. Nothing short of glorious. 

Root and Branch in print!

This was a thrill! The postman just delivered, and here I am ... "Root and Branch" by Jen Downes. Very cool indeed. This is the first time I've had a physical contributor's copy in my hands, and I have to say, it's an extremely nice experience. Gives one a little incentive to be busy, and write.

Speaking of which, with The Hesperides done, I turned my attention of urban fantasy, and Dark is The Valley is very close to done now. Two novels down, and the only fly in the ointment is that the pandemic is going ballistic in the UK and US, which of course is the marketplace for such books. It would be a waste of time and material to try for agency representation at this moment, so all we can do is cruise along. Finish the books, put them away, always go on with the next project ... wait for 2021 at the earliest, to seek an agent. By then, I might have three or four novels ready to shop around.

But for today ... contributor's copy! So very nice!

And in case anyone is so inclined, let me paste in the link for the page where it can be purchased: https://dimshores.bigcartel.com/product/dim-shores-presents-volume-1-anthology-2nd-edition

Situation hopeless, but not serious (and a ditty for today)

What is the meaning?

Where lies the point --?

Life is merely a game...

Ain't it amazing: you roll the dice,

Play your cards right, it can be very nice!

But,

What is the reason? 

What's it all for?

Nothing's ever the same --

All your great schemes explode into dreams:

It's chaos! But -- no one's to blame!
...Jen Downes

...I've just been having a bit of a rant on facebook. An associate posted that we need to be turning to biodegradables rather than filling the world with plastics, petrochemical derivatives ... very wise, very laudable indeed, and I shall stand up and applaud; though I also have to note that this one is so far off the "duh scale," unless you're preaching to the choir, you're highly likely to score a lot of giggle-face icons. And the next two stories I read, consecutively, effectively cut the foundations out from under any such laudable goals.

So I wrote this, in the comment field:

My brother and I were just having a discussion about how to recycle fiberglass windmill blades ... Might fiberglass fragments be bonded with tarmac, for enduring road surfaces?? Then the first things I see on Facebook ... Our government is going to clearcut more native habitat (after the fires???) and some absolute lunatic just handed out a permit for 200 wombats to be culled to convenience a farmer, who can't figure out how to drive AROUND them! Then, they're going to make the slaughter socially acceptable (!!??!!) by handing it off to the Aboriginal community ... who will STONE the animals to death, which is vile. On one hand, people like us are trying to recycle consumables; on the other hand, droves of other people can't see beyond clearcutting and slaughter! It makes you wonder if humans, en masse, will ever change. Because, if they don't, and soon...

...and therein lies the problem. Nothing people are doing or saying on an individual basis seems to move government; and unless government moves --

Well, it's all just business as usual, isn't it? The world will spin on for decades yet before the time arrives for the Big Crunch. The aged will have departed. Those like myself, who today are not quite young, not quite old, will by then be suspended in the gray "limbo" zone where old(er) folks exist while they become functionally invisible, like the older woman patronizing (or trying to) the stores and cafes of NYC. So at this moment?

No matter what happens, or who says what idiocy (and especially if he or she happens to be in politics!) it's "situation normal," because whacked-out-crazy has become our normality. To put it another way ...

"Situation hopeless, not serious."

That's a brilliant line -- and no, I didn't think of it first! The movie was made in 1965; and for those who're film or lit buffs, I can tell you that Robert Shaw developed early drafts of the screenplay from his novel, The Hiding Place.  Yes, Robert Shaw was an award-wining novelist before he was an award-winning actor --

And yes, this is the Robert Shaw I'm talking about. Quint, in Jaws. Henry VIII in A Man For All Seasons. That Russian who gave 007 a real run for his money. He was also a playwright (in fact, if you're interested, there's a terrific blog post from many years ago, still on line at this time of posting). Novels like The Flag, The Man in the Glass Booth, The Sun Doctor, A Card From Morocco ... they're forgotten now; I wish they weren't! It's hard enough to find his movies these days, much less his books! And yes, in case you still don't believe me, here he is on Goodreads!

I don't know if he came up with the line, but it certainly has his quirky Irish sense of humor, and it's more relevant today than ever. Our global predicament? Yep. Situation hopeless, but not serious. Well not yet. Not for maybe another twenty years. Then ... dang.

My fourth story going into print!

Am very pleased indeed to announce that my fourth story is going into print at this time, with Dim Shores Presents.

The story is Root and Branch, which also won an Honorable Mention in the Writers of the Future competition last year.

I don't yet have a "buy now" link for this issue, but when I receive one, I'll return to this post to include it.

The anthology looks like being a really good read -- am looking forward to it greatly. Have been an ocean of spec-fic lately, and genuinely enjoying it. We're lucky enough to have entire shelves filled with Andromeda Spaceways, Eidolon, F&SF, and a huge assortment of other magazines, from Story Hack to Aliterate, via Lovecraftiana, Interzone, Analog and so on. And on. The indie magazines tend to have a much fresher taste and feel than the old, long-established mags, and I've been enjoying them greatly.

Also, this would be an appropriate time to mention that I've finished the novel, "The Hesperides." This piece isn't spec-fic, but an Aussie story, full of angst and humor with an ending which, I hope, will be not merely "feel good," but also surprising. For my next trick (ha!), find a publisher -- which means finding a literary agent first. The quest (roll drums, sound trumpets and set loose the dragon sentinels) has begun.

The Eternal Tourist

Sailing to Byzantium by Robert Silverberg

Some novellas deserve to be full novels, and Sailing to Byzantium is one of them. Robert Silverberg wrote this cross-genre jewel -- a mix of SF, fantasy, time travel, romance and mystery -- in 1984 and, deservedly, it won the Nebula Award. The real mystery is why it hasn’t been filmed, because it has the makings of a gloriously visual movie, especially in this age of CG effects.  

The other mystery is why Silverberg took an immense story which touches on so many subjects, and invested only a novella’s length in it. The plot is simple enough, but the world he explores in a scant 40k words remains arresting over 30 years since the Nebula was awarded.

In the fiftieth century, the world as we know it is gone (no surprise there), and the homogenized descendents of humanity are a comparative handful of functional immortals: physically perfect, they are masters of a magical technology which enables them to live as what one can only term ‘eternal tourists,‘ forever traveling from one fantastic city to another. The rub is this: every city is a recreation of one of history’s great metropolises, raised from dust by legions of machines, permitted to exist for a short time then demolished, no doubt to be cannibalized for the materials to build another. All the great cities of history are being recreated, five at a time (the limit is firmly imposed, no reason given), and the immortal citizens of the fiftieth century simply travel, party, enjoy, socialize, and generally have a great time among the grandeur and the teeming populations of ‘temporaries,’ who appear to be androids whisked into existence to complete the illusion of Alexandria, or Chang-An, or Constantinople itself.

Only a tiny percentage of the human population don’t enjoy the eternal lifestyle. One in a thousand, or perhaps ten thousand, still grow old. After an extended youth, when the aging comes on them, they age rapidly. Such is Gioia, the lovely young thing with whom Charles Phillips falls in love. And Charles himself is the other, and even rarer, anomaly. He’s a ‘visitor’ in the future: synthetic body and mind, machine-designed and built to bring the past to vibrant life for the entertainment (and perhaps the education) of the citizens, who -- by our standards -- often seem callow, and occasionally even moronic.

Charles isn’t the only visitor, but there’s barely a handful like him, constructs drawn from whatever century. Being synthetic, he’s a misfit, greater than the ‘temporaries’ but lesser than the citizens. Gioia is drawn to him as like is drawn to like: she also is a misfit, doomed to age with an incurable genetic condition. When the rapid aging begins she flees, and as Charles literally pursues her around the world, city to city, he discovers what he is. Not a twentieth century man at all; not even a naturally-born human … something more, he decides, not less. Being synthetic, he is as timeless as the physically perfect (and intellectually somewhat dense) citizens; but what of Gioia, who is aging alarmingly. What can be done for her, amid this kaleidoscope of incredible technology?

The prose is stylish and rich and the world building tantalizing. If Sailing to Byzantium were double or triple the length, properly fleshed out and with the panoply of amazing concepts fully explored, it would make a novel today’s reader would deem awesome. At 40k words, it seems oddly abbreviated, in places thin to the point of anorexia. Silverberg has remarked on how the novella is a format he likes a great deal, and he clearly had a fine time here. But the material demanded, and deserved more.

Nebula Award notwithstanding, and as much as I adore Robert Silverberg, I want to give Sailing four stars rather than five, because it surely needed more growth, more investment, just more, to work truly brilliantly. It might have read better in 1984. Current readers -- in this age of hundred-episode sagas on tv and book series running many thousands of pages -- are seldom satisfied when thematic material is underdone. Sailing has a ‘rare’ quality, perfect on the outside but a tad too pink in the middle to suit all tastes. Which isn’t to say I don’t love this story -- I do! But my imagination runs away on flights of creative fantasy, filling in the blanks and building the sumptuous, thick novel I wish Robert Silverberg has written.

A dust-bunny in paperback's clothing

One thing about creative writing: it makes you read with your eyes wide open. The shortcomings and follies of other writers tend to become far more obvious when your “internal editor” is active. Lately I've been toying with short fiction while I work up a major novel in the form of reams of notes ... and in the same time frame (six or twelve months), I find myself growling much more over what I read.

We own a lot of books. Some are read repeatedly, others are shelf-sitters, dust-gatherers ... “dust-bunnies,” if you will ... and some deserve to have been on the shelf for decades, without the cover being lifted! Brace yourself for a book review. Here we go:

In every way, Pindharee by Joel Richards (Tor, 1986) is an example of how not to write a novel. The only area in which it succeeds is in the basic story idea, or “plot driver.” The project begins with a marvelous idea; its failure is in the execution of the idea.

In the most basic terms, Pindharee is a massive concept, not deserving but requiring at least a normal-length, full novel to develop it properly. An absolute minimum of ~100k words would have been appropriate, and if the author were predisposed, he could have generated a “thick” and quite possibly come up with a novel long remembered as that rarest of beasts, an utterly original idea in a genre where concepts have been re-re-recycled for close to a century.

Instead, Joel Richards hammered his vast (potential) plot into what I’ll term “the world’s longest short story;” and one can only wonder why this was packaged as a paperback novel ... or published at all, since it’s such a monumentally unsatisfying read, suffering from so many maladies, it was doomed to one- or two-star reviews as the crated copies exited the warehouse on trucks bound for the bricks-and-mortal bookstores. No ebook here: trees gave their lives for this.

The only way to shoehorn an epic story into a narrative around 50k words is to abbreviate everything from sentence structure on up. Between Pindharee’s covers, critical scenes are raced through in lightning shorthand; character development is little or absent; world building is under-cooked; enormous new concepts are routinely tossed into the mix with inadequate introduction and insufficient development. At the level of sentence construction, the paring-down of the language sometimes impairs the actual meaning: readers can interpret a statement two or three ways, which constitutes bad writing. The finale is merely a jumble of tossed-together ideas, jotted down the way a writer makes notes for scenes he intends to build; Richards never wrote those scenes. 

Short story narrative must often be brief to the point of brusqueness: when a manuscript is cut to meet editors’ requirements, the first thing consigned to the wall is the artistry of language. Mr. Richards began the abbreviational process on page one. By p216, writing that was choppy throughout became almost unreadable, sometimes unintelligible, with paragraphs reduced to bundles of sketchy ideas and sentence fragments. To worsen matters, the writing is often sloppy: repeated words, lazy sentence structure with far too many "thats" and, as the real kicker, pages devoted to judo, which makes little sense to anyone outside the sport.

The astonishment is, Tor actually published Pindharee in this form. At the same time as jacketing such poor material, they rejected newcomers with better-done books. Joel Richards is a pen name of Joel Richard Fruchtman (http://www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/richards_joel), who is credited with several short stories. Pindharee is his sole novel, and I wonder if it was published as a favor to a “pal in the business” … which publishers frequently do, though they’ll categorically deny it. 

Though the idea is massive, the plotting is skimpy in the extreme. Key concepts are sometimes scant hints, even remarks dropped in dialog, from which one puzzles together a meager backstory: 

In an era of galactic expansionism, humans are hell-bent on colonizing any appropriate world. Advancement in Earth’s political arena hinges on individual success in a military dedicated to exploration -- officers murder to win credit for discoveries and alien contact operations. The Fairbairn charts Lydia, where a perfect, dreamlike city seems abandoned, its people vanished, rendering this garden world prime real estate. In fact, the human-doppleganger population has evolved through science, to psi tech. They dance rings around the intruders in their determination not to be colonized, and their powers will reach back to Earth to ensure their liberty. 

But yes, the ideas driving the story are immense. I’ll give Pindharee two stars (out of five) because I remain impressed by the concepts though I finished the novel growling. Also, I actually finished it, whereas I could mention A Quiet of Stone by Stephen Leigh. I've never been able to get more than 25pp through, in 30 years, because (at least to me) it's so bloody boring. 

Pindharee would benefit from speed reading, where ideas leap out but no one stops to enjoy the language and denouement. If you want a good read, leave this on the shelf -- it’s one of a very few novels I’ve actually disliked, in five decades of serious reading. However, if you teach a creative writing course and want to demonstrate how not to craft a novel ... grab Pindharee. Believe it or not, you can actually still get a copy on Amazon.

To boldly read. Because I'm bored.

To boldly read. Because I'm bored.

I wish I could tell you I was reading Proust. Shaw. Hemingway … Azimov, Clark, Anderson. But the fact is, I've plowed my way through just about everything from Robert Graves to Greg Bear, Islands in the Stream to The Caves of Steel. And I'm still so bored, I'm ready to read “My Trip to Mars by Flash Gordon (age 5)”, which was written in crayons of various colors.

I've read every single page of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. And the entire Inkheart trilogy (and most of you probably didn't even know it was a trilogy, right? Just a movie with Brandan Fraser and Paul Bettany. Well, you're not wrong there, either). I read Ken Follett's World Without End. And Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. And Poul Anderson's entire Technic Civilization series, The Van Rijn Method – David Falkayn: Star Trader – Rise of the Terran Empire.

And it was reading The Van Rijn Method, and remembering how Harry Mudd was based on the utterly inimitable Nicholas van Rijn, made me turn to the shelves of Star Trek paperbacks I haven't opened in more years than I care to even think about. The last time the cover was lifted on one of those books, I think Bill Clinton was still unpacking his bags on the way into the White House. Ouch.

Well now … spoiled for choice … where would one begin? I decided to zero-in on books I'd never even read, and wound up bouncing from classic Trek to Next Gen, reading one here, one there. They're mostly quick reads and, reading with perhaps a more critical eye since I've drifted apart from my rosy-spectacled youth, I'm … more than a little surprised. I honestly don't remember some of these novels being quite poorly written -- being careful not to tar them all with the same brush, because others of these novels are beautifully done.

But if you bounce all over the shelf, reading with a blissful paucity of discrimination, you eventually have to scratch your head in perplexity, because these books range from one end of the spectrum to the other, without warning.

Prime Directive was the best classic Trek I read, and I'd readily recommend it, with 4.5 stars. It has an intriguing plot, the authors got the characters pretty close to “true,” and aside from some reservations I have about the story, and a few nits to pick regarding narrative line, the book flies. 

It's quite the page-turner, and if your house was burning down and you could only save 10 of your favorite Trek books on your dive out the door, you'd very likely grab this one. Gotta love the way the book begins: Jim and crew have “Kirked” another planet, and this time Starfleet has busted them for it -- right back to civilian. Hell of a neat gambit.

Reading this one early in the proceedings probably spoiled me... 

The next I picked up was Mudd in Your Eye, a Harry Mudd-centric comedy thriller which I'd expected to be fluff, and which turned out to be very fluffy indeed. Flyaway entertainment. The plot is okay; the writing is okay; the characterizations are okay. 

What can you say? A solid 3 stars, I guess; not quite “meh”, but not the kind of rolling on the floor, breaking ribs laughing one might have hoped for. The plot was certainly bulked out here and there to squeeze more mileage out of it, and at times it did seem the joke had either worn thin -- or I was missing it. It's not often a miss a joke, but it has happened. Anyway, it's always enjoyable to return to Harry Mudd, so -- what the hell? 3 stars it is.

Next came Sanctuary. And here, I really did scratch my head. It's the oddest mismatch of material: an adult plot (the storyline isn't at fault -- it's a good “driver” for a novel) paired with a sometimes painfully juvenile narrative line. As if the book were crafted for very young readers, though its thematic material is mature. The characterizations are frequently also miles off-beam, with a thoroughly wishy-washy Kirk, who far too frequently asks other people what they think his group ought to be doing. He spends most of the book just going with the flow. 

Hmm. For me -- two stars on this one; though to be conscientious as a reviewer I did go look at the reviews it scores on Goodreads and was extremely surprised to see four and five stars and glowing referrals. Other readers either don't see the problems I perceive, or don't care. Go figure: live and let live.

Here, I switched gears to Next Gen, and returned to a book I'd liked a great deal many years ago: 

Immortal Coil. Phew. It's not me, losing what little remains of my mind. This one is a very good book indeed. It doesn't hurt that it focuses on Data, who was always my favorite character; and you have to love the way it reaches into every nook and cranny of Trek lore, weaving together a story spanning centuries and a technology spanning the whole arm of the galaxy.  If it has one fault, it's that there's so much plot it must race along, at times barely touching down on story elements that might have been explored in much greater depth. 

However, the author would certainly have working to length constraints, and I can imagine the job involved in covering “this” much story in “that” many pages. A writer can't always write what she or he wants and needs to; he writes to the publisher's specifications. Highly recommended: five stars.

Many years after Immortal Coil was written, another writer picked up the ideas it had touched on, and ran with them to produce The Persistence of Memory, and this one … is gobsmacking. It really is something very special indeed, not merely well written but also intricately plotted and with a rather courageous twist: decentralizing the series characters to frame the story through, and around, others for much of the book's running length. 

The experiment could have killed the book at market, and in fact if you look at the reviews on Goodreads, not everyone likes it: many of those who don't cite this departure as their main reason for being dissatisfied. There are as many opinions as there are readers, and for me it worked, so -- five stars here, and a strong recommendation.

The Persistence of Memory kicked off a threesome of books which were marketed as a trilogy and shouldn't have been. In fact, they're three loosely connected stories that have little in common and certainly don't tell a contiguous story. These tales are wildly different; you'll either like them or you won't. All are uniformly well written, but Silent Weapons and The Body Electric...

...took off in directions which were, alas, directions I hadn't actually wanted to go. I went along for the ride, and it was never boring; but I do wish these novels hadn't been marketed as a trilogy: they're not. It would be mean spirited to mark them down to three stars for this reason: not fair to the writer or to the books, because each one, in and of itself, is fine … save that (to my mind) author David Mack missed some utterly platinum opportunities. A direction existed in which this story could have gone, that (for me) would have been as gobsmacking as the first book. He didn't go there -- and that's fair enough too. I'm just the reader, sighing over where I'd have gone instead.

Possibly inspired by The Persistence of Memory, the original author of Immortal Coil came back many years later to continue the story along his own lines, with The Light Fantastic. Hmm. Well, it was interesting; well written; the plot is airtight; but … 

The truth is, bratty teenagers are not my favorite reading, and this story could have been (one cringes to fall back on the threadbare cliché but here we go) "so much more" if it hadn't focused on the bratty teen aspect of Lal. It's … okay; but it's like Part Two of a trilogy, and there's no next bit that I know of. Like most books, you'll either like it ... or you won't. 

It would be true to say, perhaps because I liked Immortal Coil so much, The Light Fantastic didn't go in the directions I'd wanted it to go … like buying a ticket for Melbourne and being taken to Canberra instead. Both interesting places, but if you wanted to go to Melbourne you'd be made keenly aware of the gentle art of compromise.

So, what am I reading next? After a rather odd book, The Songlines, which I'll talk about later, I went right back to classic SF with Halcyon Drift. Might even go back further and read A Princess of Mars again. I'm fascinated by Mars. 

Fortunately, we own a lot of books...

The Paperback Time Machine

The book itself is a piece of history; a glimpse into the mindset of a bygone age which was flexing its muscles through the exercise of looking forward into the starship era. The novel is as much a time machine, or time capsule, as any film about 1940 made in 1940 (rather than a film set in that era made by people from a different world. Us).

I first read Starman Jones in the early 1970s. It was a good read then, and it's a good read now. Robert Heinlein wrote it in 1953 for a largely YA readership, but the narrative is rich enough to be rewarding to adult readers at the same time as not being too heavy for younger chilluns. A well-written story often stands the test of time, even if not quite in the way the author might have imagined...

Heinlein might possibly have written the ultimate Steampunk without ever knowing it.

Think about this: in a world where electro-mechanical “computers” were the cutting edge of technology, he had to figure a way to navigate a starship. 

Not to power the ship, mind you, because there was nothing to be done, way back when, other than call the engines “the so-and-so drive,” and then get on with the story. Faster than light travel is still a mystery 60 years later; it'll probably remain a mystery in another 60 years. But –

How to navigate a starship from planet to planet via a series of natural space-warps caused by the gravity fields of nearby stars … and how to do this without recourse to computers as we understand them. Now, that's the question. And a very pretty pickle it is. Arthur C. Clark managed to get a spacecraft home from the Saturn (or was it Jupiter??) system with abacus calculation, but piloting a ship between stars, at optic velocity is a whole 'nother beast. 

Ten years after Heinlein devised a system of calculus performed by a team of mathematicians using telescopic sightings of doppler-shifted stars, from the astrodome of a ship moving almost at the speed of light, the best computer in the world was the size of a house and had to be “programmed” by a team of people who literally set innumerable dipswitches before the “Go!” button was pushed. The “computer” made the calculation all of a piece, in an instant; the answer to the calculation flashed up in binary (light on, light off) which was translated back into numbers.

So Heinlein devised a system of calculus using the living brains of a team of humans who are fed data by technicians manning telescopes and stereo cameras. It's actually brilliant. The fact it's utterly redundant now, in the age of computers, is irrelevant. By 1965, just 12 years after Heinlein nutted out a computerless solution, Star Trek had already left behind the whole problem and driven on. Today, many phones have the processor power to handle the math for these calculations; but that's not the point.

The point is, Heinlein devised a way to navigate a starship in 1953 … and it would probably have worked just fine.

Here's how Wikipedia defines Steampunk:

“Steampunk is a subgenre of science fiction or science fantasy that incorporates technology and aesthetic designs inspired by 19th-century industrial steam-powered machinery.”

The tech, such as it is, in Starman Jones was almost certainly inspired by the electro-mechanical genius behind battleship gun sighting “computers” in the 1940s. It's very, very close to the spirit of Steampunk, though the starship Asgard surely isn't powered by steam!

As for the story itself: young boy runs away from home to see if he can follow his uncle into the Astrogators Guild, winds up having to join the service under false pretenses and, after disaster strikes the ship, quite literally saves the day due to his eidetic memory. It's a good, tight plot and once I'd have said it was ideally suited to younger readers and especially boys around ten … so long as today's lads can set aside their pooh-poohing of computerless astrogation, when they know for a fact how the Enterprise is navigated. Or the Nostromo. Can ten-year-olds do that? Well … probably not.

Pop over to Goodreads and you'll see many readers/reviewers giving the novel three stars; not for being a poor book, but for using outdated tech. This is actually a weak reason to mark down a book so old, it's a piece of history itself. A better reason would be to point up the seeming sexism with which the female characters are written … but then you must remind yourself that in a 1953 YA book aimed at boys, it's a wonder there were any female characters at all, much less a properly developed one who's a social rebel and turns out to have (!) a brain --

And one point made me, in 2016, curiously uncomfortable: the utter revulsion with which the central characters view alien species. Today, post-Avatar and so on, we relish the difference between species. The Ood leap to mind: so ugly and so heart-wrenchingly beautiful, at one time. It was quite astonishing to read of characters being revolted by alien forms, as recently as 1954; but … it's sixty years. People change; the zeitgeist changes; it should; it must.

So who'll get the most from Starman Jones today? Kids, for whom it was written? Unlikely. Try fans of Steampunk who're fascinated by the meld of outdated, outmoded tech and the age of starships.

For myself, I enjoyed it a lot, at the same time remembering to make the allowances one must, and wouldn't hesitate to recommend it; unless you think your kid will line the budgie cage with it in disgust when he reaches the Steampunk navigation part. Or perhaps you worry he'll get hopelessly confused and wonder if it's somehow impossible to use computers on starships. But just a second, Mister Spock said …!  

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...