Category: Literature

The Juvenile Novels of Robert A Heinlein – A Short Discussion

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I had so much fun with the Heinlein short stories that I’m rolling into the Heinlein juveniles.  I think many people understandably feel that the juvenile novels may be Heinlein’s best work.  I confess I’m of two minds about that.  They have different properties and leave room for adult novels to show their quality in a different way.

But let’s see where we can go with these stories.  I think I’ll rank them best to worst according to my incredibly sensitive literary faculty.

 

Have Space Suit—Will Travel (1958)

The Rolling Stones (1952)

Farmer in the Sky (1950)

Starman Jones (1953)

Citizen of the Galaxy (1957)

Tunnel in the Sky (1955)

Red Planet (1949)

The Star Beast (1954)

Space Cadet (1948)

Time for the Stars (1956)

Between Planets (1951)

Rocket Ship Galileo (1947)

 

I’ve left out Starship Troopers (1959) because although Heinlein included it in his juvenile series.  I think it’s actually one of his adult stories.

Now my order is obviously idiosyncratic and to be perfectly honest most of the stories are fairly equally good so it’s a very rough sorting.  I did put Rocket Ship Galileo last because now, space nazis do seem a bit silly to me.  But at the time the story seemed just fine to adolescent me.  Maybe depending on the day “Tunnel in the Sky” and “Citizen of the Galaxy” could switch places on the list.  And maybe a few other ones too.  But let’s go with this.

The only story that I think I can objectively hold up as accurately ranked is my first choice, “Have Space Suit—Will Travel.”  I think Heinlein did excel his usual juvenile story here.  The protagonist, characters and plot devices are especially enjoyable and I can say even now, a sequel or two in this universe might be a fun read.  Who knows, maybe one day I’ll contact the Heinlein estate to find out if they have any provisions for making that part of his intellectual property available to “respectful” collaborators.

I gave copies of all these books to my grandsons as soon as they were old enough to read.  I consider them excellent company for growing boys.  Just looking at that list of names makes me think of picking up “Starman Jones” or “The Rolling Stones” just to relive the feeling of reading them for the first time.  They are each a touchstone to a very happy time in my life when the local library had a whole shelf of these Heinlein stories just waiting for me to read them and move onto the next one.

One other word on these books.  Of all the books, I think “Between Planets” was the only one I never reread.  I remember it took place on a Venus that was tropical in climate.  There was a Venusian named Sir Isaac Newton, I believe, but I don’t remember very much else about the plot other than some kind of interplanetary political intrigue.

So, what is your order of excellence?  And what is your rationale?  And where exactly do you stand on the “Starship Troopers” question?  And what is your opinion on space nazis.  Leave your comments in the comments section below.

To Be or Not to Be a Barbarian

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Just when I think Leftists can’t get any more un-American they say, “Hold my soy latte” and show us just how miserably wretched they truly are.  Up here in New England one of the states (it doesn’t matter which one) is debating a bill to mandate 100% voting turnout for all elections.

Now I don’t know the details.  I don’t know how they’ll guarantee that the dying and the late-stage dementia patients are forced to vote.  I’m guessing if you don’t show up the ballot gets filled out for you by the Secretary of State.  I think they’re calling it the 100% Democracy Bill or something brilliant like that.

This sounds like a joke from our side; just a way to make fun of the leftist tendency to dictate behavior for “people’s own good” but this is actual legislation that’s currently under debate.  Actual politicians in this part of the country think this is consistent with the American constitution.  Well, all I can say is these people are insane.

But they’re also running the show up here.  The insanity is baked deep into everything they think and do.  They don’t realize how this looks to people on the outside.  This is so close to North Korea and Sadaam’s Iraq where “free elections” end up with the dear leaders garnishing >99% of the vote every single time.

Well, that’s enough about that.

I was thinking today about the definition of literary science fiction.  I guess it’s any science fiction that has enough character development and enough verisimilitude to the way real people act and talk and feel to convince “serious” literary critics that your story is literature and not entertainment.  I guess it has to be in some sense “real.”

Unfortunately, I understand that what it’s mostly become is racial and sexual grievance screeds very unconvincingly disguised as science fiction.  So outside of a specific population of people primarily dedicated to reading such stuff it’s not going to very interesting to most of the human race.

But putting this political sub-genre aside what is the difference between genre fiction like science fiction and fantasy and actual literary fiction?

Well, I think that’s still quite subjective but I get the point of some of the criticism of some genre fiction.  The story can be so stereotyped that the action feels cartoonish, the characters are one dimensional and the dialog is completely predictable.  I can think of some pulp stuff that seems that way now.  But by the same token, there are literary “masterpieces” that have long stretches of boring plot where nothing much happens.  And even the most widely hailed protagonists can have whole chapters where the story drags and the dialog is meh.

So, what’s the calculation?  Can a pulp story have 95% of the story composed of space opera and still be “literature” if the author gives the hero a scene full of heartbreaking humanity and emotional conflict?  Sure, we’re not expecting Conan the Barbarian to break into a Shakespearian soliloquy when one of his comrades is skewered by a neolithic monster.  But if you write a story that has an interesting plot surely there is no shame in trying to make, some of the characters at least, recognizably and honestly human.

Now, I’m not thinking about Hamlet showing up in any of my stories.  But Macbeth might as well be a medieval urban fantasy story.  It has witches and magic and ghosts.  Just because it’s in iambic pentameter and has “thou” and “thee” scattered around in it doesn’t make it any less a crime drama.  So, who’s to say that a genre novel can’t be legitimate literature?

Just something I was thinking about.

The Old Man and the Afternoon

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So, the tax accountant got back to me today and told me I owed Uncle Sam a couple of thousand dollars and because of that I had to pay some kind of penalty.  Well that really sucked and I had to go adjust my deductions on my paycheck and blah, blah blah … it ate up half my morning.  So, I was out of sorts today.

Because of all that, I needed to do something fun this afternoon.  Camera Girl and I decided to watch a movie we both like and haven’t seen in a long while; Ernest Hemingway’s, “The Old Man and the Sea.”  It’s the one with Spencer Tracy as an old Cuban fisherman who catches swordfish.  He’s recently become “unlucky.”  He hasn’t caught a swordfish in 85 days and the boy who used to help him has been told by his father to find a luckier boat.  So, the old man is all alone and he goes out to try his luck one more time.  And the story is a folk tale about a three-day odyssey to land and bring home a giant swordfish, bigger than his little sailboat.

In a way it’s a meditation on life and old age and fate.  It’s a simple story and mostly takes place between the old man and his mythic prey.  Most of the dialogue (or soliloquy) is the old man talking to the fish (or himself).  Occasionally he remembers (or dreams about) his past, when he was a valiant man of great strength and skill.  And often as the strain of fighting the fish becomes unbearable, he exclaims, “I wish the boy was here.”

And slowly and painfully the story unfolds and the old man finally plays the fish in and kills it with his harpoon.  But because of the size of the fish, he must lash it to the outside of his boat and eventually sharks are drawn to the smell of blood.  The old man fights them off the fish with his harpoon until it is lost, then a makeshift spear, then the gaffe hook and finally a club.  But as his weapons become cruder and less effective the sharks increasingly mutilate his prize until finally all that is left is the head, tail and a naked backbone.  When he reaches home on the morning of the fourth day, he is utterly exhausted and defeated and barely crawls back to his hut to sleep.

That morning the other fishermen are astounded at the colossal size of the carcass and remark to the boy how amazing the fish must have been.  The boy brings coffee to the old man and tells him that despite his father’s order not to fish with the old man he will defy him and bring his luck to the old man’s boat.  So, the story ends with the continuity of life as the torch is passed from the old to the young.  But in this case youth partners with the heroic efforts of the past instead of pushing it out of the way to replace it.

It’s a very strange story and plays out as something of a fairy tale.  Mercifully, the fish never speaks but the old man treats it as if he wouldn’t be surprised if it did.  The old man taught the boy to fish and so they have a mentor/pupil relationship but it appears more like a grandfather/grandson bond between them.  And that is the only major character dynamic going on in the story.

There really isn’t that much to this story.  Most of it takes place in a boat on the water with only one person present.  I really don’t think I could justify why I like this movie that much.  Maybe because I like watching it with Camera Girl.  Her father was an avid salt water fisherman.  And I think the movie is evocative of that connection.  Well, anyway it brightened up our day.

It Grows on You

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I think I want to talk about science fiction some more.  I don’t remember the first time I heard the expression “literary science fiction?  But I think it was being used to compare to space opera.  Now I’m not well versed in the history and evolution of science fiction past the 1970s.  Halfway through that decade I became deeply interested in making a living so I didn’t have the leisure to read all of the books coming out.  But what I could tell was some of it didn’t seem to be science fiction.  I can remember reading a couple of Samuel R Delaney books and thinking, “This guy has problems that I’m not interested in.”  And so, I decided that literary science fiction was not for me.

It seemed to me that there should be a middle ground between space opera and Samuel R Delaney.  Without a doubt some of the writers from the olden times like Asimov completely eschewed producing characters that sounded and acted like real live human beings.  Now granted, we don’t expect to get James Joyce when we pick up a book with a cover illustrated with a half-naked woman in the clutches of a giant lobster.  But by the same token once you’ve grown up and have some understanding of what people say and do in real life it would seem to me that an author who wants to make his story interesting would make his people act and speak like … people!

So, if you go back and read, for instance, Jack Williamson’s “The Legion of Space” as an adult you may be amazed at how threadbare the writing seems.  The characters are for the most part caricatures of the chivalrous hero battling monsters (literally) to save the damsel in distress.  And this is too far in the other direction from literary s-f.  Space ships, evil giant intelligent amoebas and space-time tearing secret weapons are great stuff but unless the characters have at least some similarities to actual human beings it’s kind of hard to get the readers to want to finish the story.

And there is a pretty wide bandwidth between these extremes.  Writers like Asimov and Clarke didn’t spend much time on characterization.  Hari Seldon and Dave Bowman were thumbnail sketches that barely provided enough description to convince the reader they existed.  But these were plot driven stories and as long as their authors would give us anything at all to allow us to pretend that they were people, we could suspend disbelief.

And Heinlein was able to write dozens of stories that were populated with various flavors and ages of his “competent man” whom I guess we were supposed to imagine were stand-ins for Heinlein himself.  And there was some humanity on display there.  Definitely not James Joyce but voices that were reminiscent of real people (at least somewhat).

And over the decades, characterization, especially in the hands of female authors (authoresses?) has become the dominant ingredient in literary science fiction.  And now it has reached the point where leaving out the science is completely acceptable.  Wonder has been replaced by social justice and grievance reckoning.  That’s how you end up with something like “The Handmaid’s Tale” as the exemplar of successful science fiction.

Well, all of this is very interesting.  But there’s nothing like actually trying to write a full-length novel to show someone just how much work it is to balance along that tightrope between too much and too little characterization.  And the hardest trick (for me) is getting dialog between a man and a woman to work.  I really only have my discussions with Camera Girl as my template.  But we’ve known each other for fifty years so it’s almost a pantomime at this point.  One- or two-word sentence fragments, facial expressions and gestures gets a lot done at this point.  This doesn’t translate into character dialog.  Nor would I want my protagonist to sound like me.  I’m anti-heroic.  I’m more like comic relief.

But it has given me greater respect for good writing, even in other genres.  And I think I’m getting a taste for it.  It grows on you.

That’s Entertainment

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Over the course of three thousand years of western civilization, storytelling has transformed from an oral tradition of poet/rhapsodes reciting mythological epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey at religious festivals to information age books read on an electronic page or listened to from an audio-file.  I find it interesting that the Greek epic poems are approximately the same length as a typical modern novel, something between one and two hundred thousand words.  Reciting the whole poem at a festival would take up week’s-worth of listening.  That’s comparable to the time it takes to read a book.

Now for shorter subjects, the Greeks had the drama.  A play by Aeschylus, Sophocles or Euripides was just an hour or two of the viewer’s time.  Pretty similar to a Shakespearean play and interestingly enough, the amount of time that a motion picture usually takes to watch.

Does this mean that human beings inherently absorb story telling in these lengths of time?  I can’t prove that assertion but you know, a three-hour movie starts to get to be a bit much for one viewing.  And a four-hundred-page book better be damn interesting or it also begins to wear out its welcome.

So maybe our entertainment has been standardized to suit our mental, emotional and physiological parameters.  Humans have a limited attention span.  We also tire after a certain amount of time sitting or standing watching something.  Also, hunger, thirst and the realities of hydraulic pressure eventually force us to interrupt even the most fascinating entertainment.  To ameliorate these considerations, movie theaters are equipped with a snack bar and restrooms.  But dramatic interest will begin to flag by the third hour.

So, I’d say we’re programmed for these lengths of entertainment products.  Whether it’s Oedipus Rex, Hamlet, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly or The Lord of the Rings at some point you either come up for air or you fall asleep.  And similarly with a book.  There have to be chapters or groups of chapters that allow for the reader to put the book down and come back to it later.  It needs a punctuated progression.  The action must go through a series of starts and stops.  It needs a rhythm to the action, a flow.  And if the rhythm isn’t right, the story doesn’t work because the reader is jarred out of the spell of the story.

You may be wondering what this post is about.  It’s a transcription of an internal dialog I’m having with myself.  I’ve been rereading my story and some sections seem choppy to me.  Some of the transitions from one chapter to another just don’t flow.  So, to make myself feel better I’m imagining Homer sitting in his office in downtown Mycenae and wrestling with the transition between the story of the cyclops Polyphemus and the Island of Aiolos.  He’s plucking the strings of his lyre and thinking, “This Aiolos story is really boring compared to all the excitement of the cyclops.  It needs something to punch it up a little.  Maybe I can include some more man-eating giants again.  No, wait, that’s stupid.  There can’t be man-eating giants on every island.  That’s just lazy.”  I totally feel for him.  The epic poetry-listening public is easily jaded.  They demand good writing (or singing).  Ah, the vicissitudes of the epic Muse Calliope.  Like all females, she is fickle.  Well back to the grindstone.

Plotter and Pantsers

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Here on the other side of the bright line of demarcation that is the post-2024 election decision I selected outlining the plot of my poor neglected novel “Sniper” as this morning’s project.  Last night was a long planned and greatly enjoyed family party celebrating Princess Sack of Potatoes’ sixth birthday.  It was a good-sized gathering of about thirty people and featured the Princess’s food of choice; multiple versions of pizza.  Now I personally do not believe that something called “mac and cheese” pizza could actually be considered pizza.  It is an abomination in the same league as anything called pizza that contains pineapple.  But I am a tolerant man.  If the children demand mac and cheese pizza then so be it.  I found a giant box that contained something that was garnished with sausage and pepperoni on it and so I was content.  And I even managed to introduce the grandchildren to a small snippet of the classic W.C. Fields movie “It’s a Gift” before it was drowned out by the torrent of talking that erupted when their parents followed us upstairs after the majority of the guests left.  Well, I’ll just have to wait for an opportunity during the Thanksgiving or Christmas holidays to screen that cinematic gem for their viewing pleasure.

And because that gathering ended late, I had no time to look around for a theme for last night’s post.  And honestly, I was exhausted.  And if I had tried to post something in that state it would have been stale and derivative and a waste of everybody’s time.  And in this new regimen of mine that is anathema.  I’ll write when I have something I want to say.  And when I don’t, I’ll work on my projects.

And getting back to the theme of this post, my project for today is to review “The Sniper” holistically and identify plot line and character development and quality issues that need to be worked on.  And come up with an outline for the whole story and an outline for the series of stories in this “universe” and then a plan for completing this novel this winter. And then scheduling this work to be finished by some reasonable date.

And this is exciting for me.  It’s an intellectually interesting process that I’ve never tried before.  Up until now I’ve been what’s called a discovery writer or more colloquially a “seat of the pantser” or just a pantser.   This is the opposite of an “outliner” or a plotter.  A discovery writer just sits down and starts writing based on some idea or even just a gestalt of a story and keeps writing and let’s the story write itself without any direction from the author’s conscious mind.  I’ve always done this.  The positive side of this process is that the author’s natural creative instincts are in control and many exciting characters and plot events bubble up.  It is the natural method for producing realistic dialog and emotional insight into the characters.  The negative side is that the story direction is kind of random and you very easily can paint your story into a corner that can only be fixed by a massive re-write which is lethal for story-telling and for the morale of the writer.

And as someone who has run up against this dead-end scenario several times, I have decided to make the effort to do a formal outline and learn the skills it takes to plan my story in a disciplined way so that it won’t fly off the rails at the end and cause me massive mental anguish and confusion.  If I find that working on this outline is interesting, I’ll probably write more about and might even consult some of the sci-fi fans in the audience for their opinions on some of my story choices.

So here I go.

More Than Meets the Eye – Part 3

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The bank branch of the Farmer’s Credit Union and Loan nearest “Grid 19” was open for business on a Tuesday morning when a convoy of black SUV’s rolled up in front of the building and a phalanx of men in dark suits and sunglasses marched into the building and converged on the manager’s office.  A security guard intercepted them and was shown some very high-powered federal credentials that backed him right down.  The manager was handed paperwork that required him to begin providing access to all of his files, account data and any other damn thing the feds decided they wanted.

At approximately the same time a similar invasion was occurring at the headquarters of that bank.  And the man heading up that raiding party was from the Justice Department and he wasn’t interested in uncovering some scam that the IRS would be adjudicating.  He was interested in a conspiracy.  He demanded and received access to all transactional data for accounts that were deemed to be colluding in a price fixing conspiracy to control commodity prices throughout the United States.

The president of the bank was a mild-mannered fellow who was basically scared out of his wits and agreed to cooperate as thoroughly as humanly possible but he assured the official that he had no idea what they were talking about.  His bank wasn’t a high-powered financial behemoth.  They were strictly small potatoes.  And after a few weeks of digging through the bank’s accounts, transactions and files they found precisely nothing.  All of the payments were between the private individuals that bought and sold the farm products.  The bank had no control over prices or quantities.  There was no commonality between these transactions and the bank other than the money passed in and out of their accounts.

The Deputy Assistant Attorney General who was overseeing the investigation read the report he had received from his flunkies and shook his head.  This was not going to be well-received by his boss.  He now regretted having allowed himself to be convinced that his old Harvard Law School buddy Dex Hastings was onto something big with this price fixing conspiracy.  He called up Hastings, “Hey listen, Dexter, make sure the next time you have a tip on a conspiracy theory just call up Morning Joe instead.  You can’t have price fixing when the individual prices are up and down all over the map.   I can’t waste a million dollars auditing some penny-ante flyover-country bank looking for super-villains.  Some of us have to work for a living.”  After that he felt better.  But then he wondered if Hastings would still invite him to his summer party on Martha’s Vineyard.  After that he felt worse.

Dexter Hastings got off the call from Washington and he was incensed.  His friend in Washington had insulted him, his dashboard had that red flashing light which the CEO would slam him for and he still hadn’t gotten to fire Barry Carver for his insolence.  This was turning into a hell of a week.

Just then he received a text to report to the C-Suite.  Arriving, he saw that the executive board was assembled and Dexter nervously entered the board room and took a seat at the far end of the table.  Eventually the matter under discussion was resolved and the CEO, Jim Hatcher turned to him smiling and said, “Dex, we’ve been discussing your project.  It seems that wheat just isn’t going to recover soon enough for us to put your plan into action.  We’ve decided to reallocate the capital to another venture.  We’ve had an offer from Typhon Industries to buy up your entire portfolio in the Midwest.  We’re going to have to take a bit of a haircut to get him to take the whole lot but we’re just champing at the bit to pick up that Korean Biotech firm with the hair restoration patent.  I’ve heard it’ll be worth a trillion dollars over the life of the patent so how can we resist.  I’m sorry we won’t be able use you anymore but you know how these things go; here today gone tomorrow.  But we’ve got an excellent package set up for you, I hope.  So, buck up.  You’ll surely bounce back from this.  In fact, if you’d like I’ll put in a good word for you with Typhon Industries.  Who’s that fellow, Paul Connors?  I hear he’s a strange duck, but any port in a storm, as they say.  Well, that’s all Dexter.  See you around the Vineyard next summer, maybe.”

Paul Connors was sitting at his desk, looking at what liquidations he could expedite in order to make the land purchase from Bay Holdings.  He would be forced to sell an embarrassing amount of gold and platinum group metals on the international markets.  It would necessarily depress the prices but more problematically it would draw too much attention to commodity holdings that would be difficult to explain.  For these metals hadn’t been purchased they’d been mined.  And having to account for his mineral holdings would raise too many questions that he could not afford to answer.

Just then a deeply encrypted link appeared on his desktop.  Opening it he saw the face of his most valuable operative, Cutter.  The bearded face looked only slightly worried which Connors took as good news.  “What’s the word Cutter?  Will the gestapo be busting down my door this week?”  Cutter shook his chin, “No, not this week.  You lucked out.  That nitwit Hastings sicced his equally stupid friend in the Justice Department on the poor guys in the bank.  And since they know exactly nothing about our operation, that’s exactly what the feds learned.  We dodged another bullet.”

Connors smiled weakly, “How many more will we dodge?”  Cutter looked down, “Better assume that was your last break.  We’ve got to have a plan to deal with the day after tomorrow when some bright young man kicks over your Potemkin scenery and exposes your operation.”

Connor stopped smiling, “Do I declare war on the United States?”  Cutter looked at him with a glazed expression and said, “Yeah, more or less.”

More Than Meets the Eye – Part 2

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Barrymore Carver descended like a storm on the research department.  Within an hour he had half of the department digging through the details of the financial records for all fifty of the farms he had failed to take.  By 8 pm he had a systematic database of all the financial and commercial records for each farm for the last ten years.  By midnight he had a pounding headache but he also had a eureka moment that might save his career.  And at 6am he collapsed across his desk with a look of relief on his face.

When Dexter Hastings reached his office at 10am Carver was in his office.  “So, Barry, I hope you have something worth my time.  I have a 10:30 with the HR director to browbeat her for hiring you and I know that should put her in the mood to craft your separation package properly.  What have you found?”

On the office display, Carver queued up a slide deck that he had assembled sometime after 3am.  In his best corporate jargon, he detailed the data he had unearthed.  He demonstrated that each of these farms managed to pay all their bills with an absolutely precise balance sheet.  Each of the accounts managed to match debits and credits down to the penny.  And this occurred regardless of how many separate sales the farmers collected or what random setbacks or emergencies befell them.  And in fact, these farmers didn’t seem to sell their products to wholesalers or even retailers.  They sold their products to private individuals.  And even the prices they charged were constantly changing without any rhyme or reason.

Dexter listened to this exposition for about ten minutes then shut off the display from his desktop and disgustedly said, “That’s enough Barry.  This gibberish is meaningless.  All you’ve shown is that these dirt-poor farmers are dirt-poor farmers barely scraping by.  It means you were defeated by the most pathetic individuals imaginable; penniless yokels.  You might as well go now before I really get mad.”

Carver did something very strange, he smiled condescendingly at his boss and said, “Sure Dexter I’ll go, but if you had a little more attention span you would have learned why you haven’t been able to increase the price of wheat in three years.”

Anger and confusion battled with curiosity on Dexter’s face, “What are you talking about?  What could these fifty farms possibly have to do with the price of a commodity like wheat?”  Carver walked over to Dexter’s desk, turned the display back on and started an animation that showed the fifty farms colored in red geographically on the GRID 19 map and then expanded out to the Midwest and showed hundreds of thousands of additional parcels in the same color, “How about half a million farms?”  Our fifty farms have all their financial accounts in the same bank.  This bank has an additional eight hundred thousand accounts.  Not all of them are farms.  Some are small businesses and some not so small businesses but the great majority of these accounts have the same kind of screwy bookkeeping.  Apparently, none of them make any money worth talking about and yet none of them go out of business.  And I’ve looked at the owners of these businesses.  All of their homes and businesses are financed through this same bank and on paper none of them seem to have enough money to be able to buy a toaster without a loan and yet based on a random selection of social media accounts they all seem to have large families and are active members in all the community groups around them and none of them look like they’re starving.  And when I built up the customer list for our fifty farms every customer is an account holder at that same bank.

This isn’t a coincidence.  This is a highly developed and carefully orchestrated hidden network.  This is a secret society.”

More Than Meets the Eye – Part 1

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Dexter Hastings looked out of his office window of the corporate offices of Bay Holdings, the largest corporate real estate owner in the United States.  He smiled as he looked into the sun glinting off of the mostly empty skyscrapers of Manhattan Island.  Far below he could see the tent cities of homeless immigrants squatting on the once frenetic streets of this former bastion of American prosperity.  He shrugged his shoulders knowing that his escort and armored sedan could get him through any street provocation without the need for him to get involved.  He could reach a heliport or major highway to leave this troubled metropolis if it was necessary for another “demonstration” for the bourgeoise of who was in charge of this country.  At this thought he smiled again and went back to his enormous mahogany desk.

Looking at the quarterly acreage goal he nodded to see that all the quotas were met and the reductions in private ownership of wheat, corn and cattle farms had been reduced to the levels specified in the quarterly dashboard.  Everywhere he looked he saw green lights.  Except one.  Up in the northern quadrant of the Great Plains there was one red light on his board.  What the hell is that!  He clicked the red icon and a file; Grid 19, opened up.  It listed the farms that had been targeted for foreclosure by their local bank.  There were fifty farms all clustered within a radius of twenty miles that had looked like easy pickings last year.  All pressure points for their owners had been applied.  They even got the IRS to audit half of them to see if any fines could be levied against them.  And all the buyers they typically worked with had been instructed to lower the commodity prices they would pay.  Most if not all of those farms should already be in bankruptcy.  But not a single one had folded.  That was impossible.  Sure maybe a few might have found a private source of funds to allow them to limp along.  But all of them?

Dexter muttered to himself, “Something is fishy here.”  He rushed out of his office and barged into a conference room where some of his direct reports were having a meeting about the company team-building trip to Auckland.  He rapped the door behind him and said sternly, “I’m gonna need you in my office now, Barry.  Grid 19!”  And he rushed back to his office with a black look on his patrician face.

Barrymore Carver hustled into Hastings office with a worried expression and stood nervously in front of the huge desk.  He looked surprisingly like a frightened boy standing in the principal’s office.  He knew Grid 19 would be a big problem.  If there was a red light on the dashboard, whoever owned it had to have a story to tell Dexter that included a speedy resolution and a penalty prize to pay for the outrage.  Otherwise, the penalty was a walk of shame to HR and an armed escort out of the building.

“What the hell is going on Barry?  Oh for fifty?  Are you just tired of working here?  Have I brutalized you so thoroughly that you sabotage my dashboard like this?  Talk to me Barry.  Quick!

“Dexter, I worked on this Grid for months I put pressure on these people you wouldn’t believe.  I managed to cut off their power in the middle of a deep freeze.  I even had the government inspectors declare half of their beef cattle substandard.  I did everything but light their fields on fire.  But they made all their mortgage payments they cleared all their supply bills and paid all their taxes.  There was nothing I could do.”

Hastings shook his head, “And it never occurred to you that this wasn’t normal?  When have you ever seen fifty targets fail to succumb?  Never!  Now you are going down to the finance boys and you are going to find out where the money came from and if you don’t have an answer by tomorrow then just go find another job.”

Carver flushed, spun on his heel and took off for the elevators at high speed.  A smile broke out on Dexter’s face.  He loved pulling the wings off of flies.  It was what he was born to do.  He looked down at that red light blinking on his board and the smile left his face.  “Where the hell did that money come from?”

Gardening

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One day the Master was working in the garden and the Servant approached, “Father, your son wants to see you.”  The Master put aside what he was doing and asked, “What did he say to you?”  The Servant frowned and hesitated, “He says he won’t leave.  He says it’s not fair and he won’t leave.  I think the woman put him up to this insolence.”  The Master smiled ruefully, “She is spirited, isn’t she.  Well, look, leave this to me.  They’ll only blame you and become even more incensed.  I’ll have to have that talk with him now.  Just leave them alone for the time being.”  The Servant looked relieved, “Thank you Father.  I never know how to deal with them when they disobey.  It’s very confusing.”

The Servant left and the Master sat in thought for a while and then walked through the Garden to find his troubled son.  The young man was standing on a high hill and looking out at the beautiful forest and the valley below with its orchards and streams and grazing herds.  The Master approached him and called to him, “Hello my son, what would you like to tell me?”

The young man upon seeing the Master looked troubled and his shoulders slumped, “Father why must we leave our home.  This place is beautiful and full of all the good things that make our lives happy.  Why would you make us leave?”  The woman is afraid.  She thinks the Servant has told stories about her that made you angry at her.  He is always suspicious of her.”

The Master patted his son on the shoulder and laughed, “They don’t understand each other.  He doesn’t have any point of reference to decipher what she means.  And she can’t figure him out at all.  But all that’s beside the point.  You haven’t done anything wrong.  You two are not being punished.  And this is not your home.  It’s like the nest that a baby bird hatches into.  It is the place where you grew and developed.  But now you must leave the nest and face the world on your own.”

The young man looked angry, “But I’m not a bird.  I’m your son.  Why can’t I stay with you?  Don’t I share in your possessions?  The servant said we will be sent into the wilderness where wild animals and wild men are all around.  Why would you leave me at the mercy of the cruel places outside this garden?”

The Master looked sad, “The reason you can’t stay with me is because you are not like me.  Only the smallest spark of your being possesses the property I possess as my nature.  You will die.  You and the woman will grow old and die.  You must have children and raise them as I raised you.  You must learn how to survive in the world so that they can survive after you’re gone.  And that chain from parent to child must go on until time ends.  And when this world is finally at an end you will be like me.  And you will be able to remake the world in your own image and then you will find me again.  And your work will be done and we can enjoy what you’ve built.  In the meantime, I’ll leave the Servant within this world to keep it from falling apart.  But his strength is not as mine and eventually you will have to learn to control all the forces of the world; the stars and the voids and the waters of the deep.”

The young man was stricken, “But, I will die.  I will never see you again!”  The Master smiled, “Do not believe that.  There is a spark in you that can never die.  You were made to conquer death and you shall.  But now you must face death.  There is no other way.

But there is much you need to know.  The Servant will answer as many of your questions as you can think of in the next month.  And you and the woman will dine with me for the month you have left here.  And I will tell you some things you must know.  And some of them will be about her.  She will be a great help to you but remember that her nature is different from yours.  Learn what that means and take that into account.  And most importantly try to remember what a father and son are to each other for when you have children.  This will be your most important role.”

The young man was dazed from the impact of everything he had heard, “Dad, I’m scared.”  The Master hugged him to his chest and said, “Of course you are, so was I when I was your age.  But you’re lucky you didn’t have your grandfather to deal with.  He was much tougher than I am.”