Short Fiction Collected

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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.

Let Jake Barter Work on That for a While

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Now that I’ve assumed the persona of Jake Barter, my whole life has changed.  Jake Barter is no ordinary man.  At the very least he has the training of a double nought secret agent and the social connections of Bruce Wayne.  His resume is a combination of special forces operator and philosopher king.  And because of this I told Camera Girl that she needed to treat me with much greater respect and an almost religious awe.

I don’t think she “gets it” yet.  You know what they say about a prophet in his own country.  Well, that goes double for a pseudonymous author.  I think I may now begin to write the memoirs of Jake Barter in my spare time.  I think he will be a picaresque character who gets involved in serious situations like wars, revolutions and social movements and ends up causing things to go south in horribly predictable ways based on his sloth, greed and phenomenal incompetence.  His only redeeming qualities are monumental overconfidence, enormous likeability and unbelievable luck.  I’m thinking I’ll start him off as a special advisor to Trump on constitutional law and then take it from there.

But seriously, I am thinking about new characters for future stories and I think the next thing I do will have a strong humorous streak in it.  And this is because I do enjoy making fun of things I don’t like and combining that with a writing project should make it a lot of fun for me.  But what I must do is decide if it will be in the same “universe” as “The Sniper.”  So far there isn’t a lot of humor there and maybe it would be better to separate a new project from a place with so much trauma lurking around every turn.  And that’s fine.  Making up multiple fictional worlds allows the author to escape from any traps he’s gotten himself into in the old ones.  You can get tired of a scenario or you just need a break from figuring out how to keep your characters from either getting killed or solving all their problems.  After all, either of those paths ends the story.  So, you have to be constantly threading the needle to maintain the overall “problem” but still carve out a piece of plotline to make the present installment interesting.

I think I might want to do an extraterrestrial story.  I’ve played around with some short story / novella length things in the past but they just petered out.  I think this time I’ll try to storyboard a whole bunch of stuff first so I have a direction and enough plot lines and an overarching direction for the thing before I get really started.  And what is currently completely stymying me is deciding what kind of Earth this will be.  Will it be like the actual current day disaster we are living through or will it be some kind of “day after tomorrow” where we’ve gotten our act together and learned how to live like human beings.  Well, I’ll let Jake Barter work on that for a while.

Europan Trilobites

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I was watching a YouTube video about the material that a NASA probe brought back from an asteroid.  This asteroid apparently is in a near Earth orbit and so this mission was able to reach and return from this tiny world in just a few years with its cargo of sand and gravel.  By the look of the asteroid, it’s not even a solid piece of rock but a bunch of space junk that gravitated together out in the lonely stretches of interplanetary space.

But as unpromising as this locale seems to me, apparently, it was a bonanza for science.  This one kilometer flying gravel pit somehow contains an astonishing collection of organic molecules that hint shockingly about being the precursors or even the aftermath of life.  A slew of amino acids and even some precursors of the RNA molecule showed up in this sampler that NASA recovered.

Now, reading this I immediately began to question in my own mind whether these organic molecules started out on Earth and were ejected into space during one of the asteroid collisions that befall this planet every once in a great while.  After all, if rocks from Mars have ended up on Earth (as has been claimed by geologists) then surely debris from Earth could have contaminated nearby space and ended up on this neighboring rock.  But the writers of this report have information that dates this asteroid to very ancient times.  In fact, they claim it’s older than the planets and could possibly contain material from completely outside the solar system.  Well, who knows?  Despite assurances I think it’s fifty/fifty whether it’s originally terrestrial organic material they’re looking at.

But suppose it really is extraterrestrial in origin.  In that case, I think that eventually we will find that life existed on Mars in the past when it possessed abundant water.  In fact, it’s entirely possible that life exists cryptically below the surface of Mars at a depth where temperature is higher and reservoirs of water exist.  And if organic molecules are floating around the solar system, it seems likely that some of the larger Jovian and Saturnian moons with their liquid water oceans will also turn out to contain life.

Now here’s the thing.  I would make a small wager that when these life forms are found, they will be shown to have a relationship to terrestrial organisms.  I say this because I think they will be descendants of microorganisms that have managed to be ejected from Earth and drifted through the solar system until they reached environments that they could adapt to.

Of course, it’s possible that life on Earth also came from space.  Experimentation with hardy terrestrial lifeforms has shown that they can exist in the vacuum of interplanetary space for surprisingly long periods as spores.  I guess the interesting question is just how advanced is the life that we will find in the rest of the solar system.  There is a big difference between finding bacteria, algae, lichen or moss on Mars or a jellyfish swimming in the oceans of Titan as opposed to finding the xenomorph.  Well, I won’t be greedy.  I’ll split the difference.  I’ll settle for a Europan trilobite.