Category: Literature

A Great Science Fiction Story?

photog Book Reviews, Literature, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , ,

Lately I’ve been thinking about this topic.  What makes a great science fiction story?  Can it be a great science fiction story if the story’s not great?  How about if the science isn’t great?  I think you know what I’m saying.  A great story, meaning great fiction, has characters drawn in a way that makes them compelling.  It doesn’t have to be Shakespeare but it can’t be two-dimensional cut-outs that wouldn’t make it through a toothpaste commercial.  And by the same token, what if the science is just stupid?  Sure, you can just say it’s fantasy instead and then the sky’s the limit.  But let’s stick to science fiction.

When I was a kid, I would have said that “great” science fiction needed the science but the fiction was not that important.  If there were enough star cruisers and anti-matter bombs and giant amoebas then all was right with the world.  In fact, the fewer human relations involved in the story, the better.  I was much more interested in the non-human characters acting “realistic” than any dialog between humans.  And the male/female dynamic was completely off the table.  The last thing a Lensman needed before, during or after a battle was a woman getting in the way.

Suffice it to say that time changes things.  I look at some of the “classics” of the golden age and I see a flatness to the story.  Now, this isn’t an all-encompassing criticism.  There are plenty of stories from the day that have nuanced characters and plots that reflect actual human personality types.  So, it’s not black and white.

Now, the modern literary science fiction has been described as having the opposite problem.  It’s all about human feelings and relations.  What isn’t as important is the “science.”  When that’s the case I will just declare that if a story doesn’t have any science at all then it isn’t a great science fiction story because it isn’t science fiction.  Period.

And without a doubt if a story has an exciting plot and memorable characters and also a clever science fiction premise then without a doubt it’s great science fiction.

So that leaves the other extreme.  What if a story is built on incredibly imaginative science fiction plot devices but the characters are cardboard cut-outs of human beings?  Can that be a great science fiction story?  In this category the works of Arthur C Clarke comes to mind and specifically 2001: A Space Odyssey.  Here is an epic tale stretching all the way from the dawn of Man to the first human interstellar voyage.  And yet the most human character in the book is HAL9000; a schizophrenic homicidal computer.  Now, is it an interesting story?  Well, yeah.  There are cave men and monoliths and moon bases and worm holes.  But honestly, do you find yourself rooting for anyone?  There’s just something so inhumanly stolid and wooden about everyone in the story that I feel that each one being murdered by HAL might be his happiest moment.  At least liveliest.

But anyway, I want to pose this as a question.  Can a technically engrossing sf story be considered great if the characters are ciphers?  What do you think?

Short Fiction Collected

photog Literature, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , , , ,

I have an old beat up collection of Ray Bradbury’s short fiction.  It’s called “The Stories of Ray Bradbury.”  It was published in 1980 and contains about a hundred of his stories.  These stories appeared earlier in a number of short story collections that came out over the years that Bradbury was writing.  And he also wrote after this collection came out so there’s nothing original or definitive about this collection but it contains most of the short stories that his reputation was based on.  And because it is such a large selection (almost nine hundred pages in a 9.5 X 6.5 hardcover volume), there are great stories and poor ones.  There is fantasy, horror, something like science fiction and even nondescript fiction.  And because it was written over the course of about forty years it changes.  The emphasis, the stylistic touches, the topics all change.  But the voice is always recognizably Bradbury.  For the most part he is interested in the people.  The science is not the story.  In fact, most of the time it’s just the excuse for poking and prodding the people and watching them react.  It’s a pleasure to walk through this old volume and relive old stories and find out how I’ve changed over the years.  Have my preferences changed?  Yes.  But my likes and dislikes have mostly remained the same.  Possibly I’m a little bit more sensitive to the quality of the prose rather than the surprise in the ending.

It’s interesting to consider that science fiction short stories have been declared a dead field.  No one buys the stories either in book collections or in magazines (paper or electronic).  And that strikes me as a sad situation.  So many of these short stories contain wonderful ideas and characters and images that stir the imagination.  But somehow, they no longer have any value in the present world.  Can that be the permanent state of literature?  I guess it could be.  Capitalism is ruled by the law of supply and demand.  So, there’s no demand for short stories.

Well, that’s too bad.  Maybe the future will include a manner for artists to exhibit their works for people similar to how musicians currently perform concerts.  A live presentation where the audience listens to the story or watches a video presentation of it in a format that can’t be pirated and therefore has value as a single use experience.  All that’s left is the memory of the story.  Of course, that’s what movies were but now they’ve also lost their value.  So maybe not.  But I find a book of short stories to be a treasure trove.  A hundred stories and maybe fifty are very good and ten are wonderful.  That’s a pretty impressive collection.  I think any prolific author would be satisfied with that track record.

One thing that Bradbury liked to do was string together some of his short stories into a larger framework.  He did this with turning his Green Town stories into “Dandelion Wine” and his dark carnival stories into “Something Wicked This Way Comes.”  And what that shows me is these short stories can be the seeds for longer fiction.  But if no one reads them and rates them how will these seeds ever sprout.  Oh well.

Well, Spin the Wheel

photog Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Science Fiction / Fantasy , ,

If a brutally long and tedious day starts and ends with good news, does that make it a good day? I would have to say yes. This morning started with the book cover for “The Sniper” arriving. And after returning from a long, grueling day trapped in the bowels of a drab New England city, bored almost to desperation, I finally have a deadline for the launch of my book. It will be out sometime between the middle and end of January. Now granted, that can be as much as two months from now but just putting a stake in the ground is what I need to coordinate the whole crazy flying circus of an effort. Covers and EPUB files and pdfs and key words and discount deals and reviews and project pages and pseudonyms and email lists and Amazon ads and heaven knows what else. Yes, a day that starts and ends well is a good day.
I was pleasantly surprised at just how accurately the cover art portrayed the scenario and the mood of the story. And the quality of the drawing exceeded my expectations completely. I’m extremely glad I went in the direction I did instead of a more generic cover. If for no one else than for myself. It makes the book real.


Now I have to confess that I have no idea whether what I’m trying to do makes any sense. Can a book from an unknown author with an extremely niche audience break out and find a generously sized audience? My rational engineering side says the odds against it are long. I’ll say one in a thousand.
But at the same time, a part of me is anxious to take the plunge. And that is exactly what I’m doing. It’s a roulette wheel spin with a big pot of my money plunked down on double zero. What could be more fun than that? Well, I guess winning would be more fun. But that’s well beyond my power to ensure. I’ll have to let fate have her say.
I guess now I know how every author since Homer has felt when his creation is about to be unveiled. And I’ll say it’s a good feeling. As Kipling said:
“When ’Omer smote ’is bloomin’ lyre,
He’d ’eard men sing by land an’ sea;
An’ what he thought ’e might require,
’E went an’ took — the same as me!”
Every teller of tales is part of the long tradition. You make up something in your head and you want to see if the audience resonates to the same vibration you felt. But the worst fate would not be if a lot of people didn’t like it. The worst is if no one ever hears it.
Achilles in the Iliad wanted to die for glory, for immortal fame. Well, I’d prefer to live but I’d forego any profit if I could guarantee that a million people read my story. That would be a form of immortality. Well, spin the wheel.

Thoughts on Jack London’s Short Story, “To Build a Fire”

photog Book Reviews, Literature, photog's Corner, Reviews , , ,

When I was young, every high school English curriculum would include a review of some classic short stories and Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” was inevitably among them.  And rightly so.  Within the space of seven thousand words London casts a spell that draws you into the inhuman realm of winter in the Yukon.  We barely have a thumbnail sketch of the protagonist; “the man” and his unwilling accomplice; “the dog.”  But we learn the tragic details of what can happen when a man ignores the physics of arctic winter weather.

‘At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolfdog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother, the wild wolf. The animal was depressed by the tremendous cold. It knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than was told to the man by the man’s judgment. In reality, it was not merely colder than fifty below zero; it was colder than sixty below, than seventy below. It was seventy-five below zero. Since the freezing point is thirty-two above zero, it meant that one hundred and seven degrees of frost obtained. The dog did not know anything about thermometers. Possibly in its brain there was no sharp consciousness of a condition of very cold such as was in the man’s brain. But the brute had its instinct. It experienced a vague but menacing apprehension that subdued it and made it slink along at the man’s heels, and that made it question eagerly every unwonted movement of the man as if expecting him to go into camp or to seek shelter somewhere and build a fire. The dog had learned fire, and it wanted fire, or else to burrow under the snow and cuddle its warmth away from the air.’

…

‘Already all sensation had gone out of his feet. To build the fire he had been forced to remove his mittens, and the fingers had quickly gone numb. His pace of four miles an hour had kept his heart pumping blood to the surface of his body and to all the extremities. But the instant he stopped, the action of the pump eased down. The cold of space smote the unprotected tip of the planet, and he, being on that unprotected tip, received the full force of the blow. The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its absence. His wet feet froze the faster, and his exposed fingers numbed the faster, though they had not yet begun to freeze. Nose and cheeks were already freezing, while the skin of all his body chilled as it lost its blood.’

…

‘A good idea, he thought, to sleep off to death. It was like taking an anaesthetic. Freezing was not so bad as people thought. There were lots worse ways to die.

…

He drifted on from this to a vision of the old-timer on Sulphur Creek. He could see him quite clearly, warm and comfortable, and smoking a pipe.

“You were right, old hoss; you were right,” the man mumbled to the old-timer of Sulphur Creek.

…

Then the man drowsed off into what seemed to him the most comfortable and satisfying sleep he had ever known. The dog sat facing him and waiting. The brief day drew to a close in a long, slow twilight. There were no signs of a fire to be made, and, besides, never in the dog’s experience had it known a man to sit like that in the snow and make no fire. As the twilight drew on, its eager yearning for the fire mastered it, and with a great lifting and shifting of forefeet, it whined softly, then flattened its ears down in anticipation of being chidden by the man. But the man remained silent. Later, the dog whined loudly. And still later it crept close to the man and caught the scent of death. This made the animal bristle and back away. A little longer it delayed, howling under the stars that leaped and danced and shone brightly in the cold sky. Then it turned and trotted up the trail in the direction of the camp it knew, where were the other food-providers and fire-providers.’

London reveals the emotions and thoughts that race through the mind of the man as he tries to escape the consequences of his terrible mistake.  But at every turn he’s thwarted by the limitations that cold have imposed on his failing body.  And we listen to his thoughts as his time runs out and he accepts his fate.

Jack London created a remarkable story.  There is no filler.  The story only includes what is needed to paint the picture of a tragic human tale.  And I will say that if I ever write anything half as good as, “To Build a Fire,” I will consider myself an accomplished writer.  Well done Mr. London.

Life over Art

photog Book Reviews, Literature, photog's Corner, Reviews , , , , ,

Thomas Mann was a famous German author whose heyday was the first half of the twentieth century.  He had a Nobel Prize in literature for one of his novels and a reputation for writing psychological stories that were full of melancholy and longing for lost happiness.

In addition to his novels which were too long for my liking he wrote a handful of novellas that were collected in an English translation under the title “Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories.”  One of these stories is named “Tristan” and is the story of a sanitarium up in the Alps that especially treated people suffering from tuberculosis which is never actually named in the story but only hinted at when a patient would cough and then check a handkerchief for blood.  But in addition to the actual patients at this sanitarium called Einfried there was one resident who stayed there for the atmosphere; a “novelist” named Detlev Spinell.  And novelist would be an exaggeration.  No one has ever read his book and even letter-writing is an enormously slow and painful exercise when performed by him.  In the story, this writer is the cause of the death of a woman who is attempting to recover from a mild case of tuberculosis which is several times emphatically stated to be only affecting “the trachea, and not the lungs, thank God.”  He is a malevolent force that insinuates into the young woman’s mind that she is the victim of a crass, plebian existence that sacrificed her health and artistic spirit at the altar of mundane human activities, specifically; marriage and childbirth which was the event that sapped her strength and weakened her body sufficiently to allow the wasting disease to get the upper hand with her.

And this unhealthy influence by Spinell eventually causes her health to completely break down.  And so, the doctors call for her husband to return to the sanitarium before her incipient death.  And while this catastrophe is occurring Spinell takes it upon himself to write a letter to this husband who at this point is occupying a room in the same building.  He painstakingly writes the letter, mails it, smiles at the husband in the hallways when they meet and gives no thought to what will happen when the letter returns from the post office to the building that they both reside in.  The letter is an insulting and disparaging polemic attacking the husband for his “plebian” tastes and lack of artistic feeling.  And he announces that he has awakened the wife to her true spiritual stature and thereby causes her to renounce her allegiance to ordinary life (and by that choice, life itself).

Now all of this is quite bizarre but Mann paints the personalities of husband, wife and Spinell very skillfully.  And this allows the personalities and their relationships to each other to make sense.  The husband is a very plain and “normal” individual.  A businessman who embraces the life of a husband and father along with his hard charging life as a capitalist.  He loves his wife and child but he isn’t above pinching a maid in a hallway when the opportunity arises.  The wife loves her husband and child but she has the artistic side to her personality and she can be influenced into believing that the prosaic life of a housewife and mother is a demeaning occupation for someone as sensitive and with such an elevated soul as herself.  And then there is Spinell.  He is an abnormal spirit of the “artistic” type who sees life through a prism that only values the spiritual and pure emotions and sensibilities of the artist.  All ordinary things like the normal male/female relations are fraught with unacceptable amounts of inartistic reality.  Thus, his hatred of the husband in the story and his beatification of the wife.

The climax of the story, to my mind is the collision when the husband reads the letter and confronts Spinell down the hall from him.  He reads parts of the letter to the author and then rains verbal abuse on the head of his frightened and contrite adversary.  But just as his screaming abuse reaches its crescendo, from out in the hall, comes news that his wife’s lungs have collapsed under the ravages of her ailment, causing her to cough up an enormous quantity of blood and that she is on the edge of death.  The husband shifts his focus onto the bearer of bad news:

‘“Is she dead?” yelled Herr Klaterjahn.  As he spoke he clutched the Rätin by the arm and pulled her to and fro on the sill.  “Not quite?  Not dead; she can see me, can’t she?  Brought up a little blood again, from the lung eh?  Yes, I give in, it may be from the lung.  Gabriele!”  he suddenly cried out, and his eyes filled with tears; you could see what a burst of good, warm, honest human feeling came over him.  “Yes, I’m coming.”  He said and dragged the Rätin after him…’

Mann shows us the reality of life and compares it to the shadow of life that Spinell hides in.  He uses art to hide from life.  As for the husband, who really was a crass, plebian individual full of crass plebian faults, he is also a living, breathing human being.  Spinell is a wraith.  His artistic sensibilities and motives are pathetic and infantile.  Now this is coming from Thomas Mann who embraced art as the central motive of his life.  What I find interesting is that he so clearly shows us the primacy of life over art.  I find that powerful.

Exaggerations of the Simple Stuff of Human Life

photog Book Reviews, Literature, photog's Corner, Poetry, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , ,

Act 4, Scene 1 of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth, when the second witch says:

“By the pricking of my thumbs,

Something wicked this way comes.”

And Macbeth enters.  What a marvelous scene.  Witches, bloody ghosts and a demigod truly drained of his humanity.  A horror story in a stage play.  And then Ray Bradbury takes that line, “Something wicked this way comes” and makes it the title of his own American ghost story; the story of a haunted carnival.  Now what does Macbeth have to do with Bradbury?  Well, in both cases we have basically good people seduced by the devil.  Whether it’s Shakespeare’s witches or Bradbury’s Mr. Dark it is the story of men succumbing to the devil’s promise for their heart’s desire in exchange for their souls.

Macbeth wants the Scottish crown.  Bradbury’s Green Town denizens want various things.  Tom Fury and Mr. Crosetti succumb to lust.  Mr. Tetley wants money.  Miss Foley and Charles Halloway want their youth back.  Jim Nightshade wants to be older so he can indulge his various negative desires.  And for these things they risk becoming permanent prisoners of Mr. Dark and Mr. Cooger’s haunted carnival travelling the American continent in search of more souls to consume.

What a marvelous conceit.  An ancient locomotive from the Civil War era, arrives in small towns in the middle of the night and sniffs out the spiritually wounded inhabitants and lures them into the haunted attractions of the show.  If they wander into the house of mirrors, they will see their heart’s desire or their greatest fear.  Or they can follow the barker’s lure and enter the tent where the belly dancers expose their bodies for a silver dime.  And those that disappear are no longer recognizable as themselves and so cannot be rescued by any police force.

And redemption can only be had in Bradbury’s story if the devil is laughed out of town.  Laughter and happiness are the only cures for this evil.  The secret is to realize that life is not a tragedy.  Even at its worst, it is better than the alternative which is nothingness.  Pain and sadness and even death are a human story and in fact the only certainty in this world.  But it’s also still better than never existing.  Because no matter how sad and awful our existence, it’s still ours.  We get to feel it and react to it and maybe win a few rounds before we’re finally cornered and beaten by death.

So, the ride’s the thing.  That’s the lesson that Charles Halloway learns by the end of the story.  Even though he’s old and overwhelmed with trying to be the father of a young boy, that overwhelming challenge is his greatest opportunity to squeeze every bit of meaning and gusto out of what remains of his life.  And the boys get to see that fears and desires are exaggerations of the simple stuff of human life.  Lust and greed and fear are just the ingredients of life taken out of balance from their normal proportions and occasions.

I wonder who will take this theme up next?  Maybe I will, someday.

Does Fiction Publishing Still Exist?

photog Book Reviews, Literature, My Fiction, photog's Corner, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews ,

Selling intellectual property has changed radically in the last thirty years.  We used to buy books at a book store.  We bought music at a record shop.  And we rented or bought movies at a video store.  And then we bought all these at a Walmart or an electronics store (well, maybe not the books).

Now we stream movies and pay by the minute or the month and listen to music more or less for free and books are just this thing that exists on Amazon as a free service or a minor expense.  And the marketing and advertising of these works is some inexplicable algorithm that somehow links up people to the things that would appeal to them.

Now, the only way a musician can make any money is by live concerts that people pay to attend.  But no one would pay to attend a reading of a chapter of a book.  So maybe very soon books will cease to exist as a commodity.

And I guess that’s just the way it will be.  Now I’ve been trying to finish up a novel (and fixing the last ten percent of the book has been much harder than writing the first ninety percent).  And when I attempt to market it, I’ll try it on some traditional publishers and if that doesn’t work, I’ll probably self-publish it on Amazon.  I have noticed that lately some authors try to start a “go fund me” campaign to drum up the support for the book before it’s released.  But I’m not sure how that would work for a new author.

I guess pretty soon I’ll know as much about it as anyone else.  But isn’t it interesting that now that technology allows for avoiding all the obstacles that the “gatekeepers” of traditional publishing provided, that the real problem would be the “needle in a haystack” reality of many millions of self-published books thrown together in an endless slush pile with no way to stand out to a jaded reading public.

Well, they say that Americans have always made the best salesmen.  It wouldn’t surprise me to find out that self-promotion is the real talent behind entertainment.  Hollywood was successful because they could get millions of eyes on their product.  I’m sure the same applies to selling books, movies and music.  It’s just that it’s a field I never got involved in.  Engineering is product that has to be sold but I was always just the product.  I was never one of the sellers except when I would be sent out with the marketing team to convince the buyers that we knew what we were doing and could provide them with the services and hardware that they wanted.  Books on the other hand need fancy covers with somewhat-undressed women and weapons of war and starships to attract the buyer’s attention and get him to plunk down his electronic money.

I’ve seen some marketing going on by some of the people I follow on X and YouTube and it all feels very tiring but maybe that’s because at heart I’m a very lazy guy and hawking product is hard work (at least for me).

And maybe this is all a transitory situation and eventually some more efficient way to link readers with new books that match their tastes will appear among the AI gods.

Well, just some musings.

Tom’s World – 12JUL2025 – The Joy of Reading

photog Guest Contributors, Literature, TomD , ,

Tom | Flickr

TomD

The gift of the ability to enjoy fiction, or nonfiction for that matter, has a requirement: an attention span exceeding a minute or two. And that seems to be becoming increasingly rare. Both my parents were readers, likewise myself and two siblings.

I don’t remember exactly when I started reading Sci-Fi but it was as a teenager somewhere along the line. But I suspect that I’m one of the few people on earth who, while in grammar school, read every single volume of Encyclopedia Britannica cover to cover.

I really wish that Nook and Kindle were available back then. I started with Nook probably around 2010 and now use both. Point being that every book I’ve read in the last 15 or so years is still available to me. When, in 2009, I moved from my last residence in metro Atlanta where I had lived for 20 years, I “donated” a long bed and a half pickup truck loads filled to the brim with mostly paperbacks. What a loss! And that wasn’t the only donation made from that house.

I could have that entire mass of books on around several gigs on a thumb drive with lots of room left.

But at least I have the last 15 years and I find myself rereading. +The device keeps perfect order, organizing by order of purchase, title or author.

The Wise of Heart: A Modern-Day Re-Imagining of the Scopes Monkey Trial by Hans G. Schantz – A Book Review

photog Book Reviews, Current Events, Fake Science, Literature, Reviews, Science Fiction / Fantasy, SF&F Book Reviews , , , ,

“Inherit the Wind” was a famous fictionalized account of the Scope’s Monkey Trial of the early twentieth century.  It centered on a young school teacher who was arrested and put on trial for teaching the theory of evolution in the Bible Belt where laws had been passed to forbid it.

Dr. Schantz has managed to swap out transgender orthodoxy for fundamentalist creationism in his story and crafted a courtroom drama that captures all of the nuances of our present-day retreat from reality that calls sexually mutilating adolescents, “gender-affirming therapy” and allows grade school teachers to conspire with social workers to perform these procedures on minors despite parents’ horrified resistance.  A high school biology teacher is accused of teaching the biological facts of human sexuality and this throws him in conflict with a state law that forbids a teacher from challenging a student’s “selected gender identity.”

For those familiar with the movie version of “Inherit the Wind,” some of the plot twists will reappear in a new analog.  But this isn’t a rehash of the old story.  This is a very in-depth look at the illogic and fallacies of the transgender narrative and the way different parts of the government, the medical profession, media and academia pander to the delusions of confused children and frighten their parents into allowing terrible things to be done to their children.

The story is inhabited by a cast of characters that interlock at multiple points.  Small town politics and society mesh with national political figures who have their own agendas but seize upon the trial as the perfect battlefield to win a victory for their side.  Both sides are portrayed believably.  The woke activists aren’t just straw men but sound quite close to what their real counterparts sound like in news clips.  The details of the trial sound extremely close to what the transcript of a trial would consist of.

So, what did I think of the story?  I think the story takes a while to get going.  There is a set-up needed to get all the pieces in position for the trial.  During this period the reader will have to be patient.  Once the trial gets going the story finds its stride and becomes a courtroom drama.  And I found the ending satisfying without being overdone.  As with its predecessor it doesn’t attempt to write a conclusion to the clash going on in the story but rather capture the flavor of the two opposing sides and show how each side attempts to paint itself and its opponents using the weapons that each prefers.  The Left fixates on emotions and idealism while the Right points to logic and reality.

Who is this book for?  Well, first off, people of the woke persuasion will not be amused.  Despite being reasonably accurate in his portrayal of the woke side they don’t come off as sympathetic characters.  So, this leaves moderates and people on the Right.  Also, this book is a courtroom drama and folks who read these are its intended audience.  Personally, I liked the book.  I liked the defense attorney and I despised the prosecutor.  This made the courtroom battle satisfying for me.  But you’ll have to make up your mind based on what I’ve described whether this is your kind of story.