Maybe Next Year

I cringed when I saw the cover of the new issue of Scientific American. Trying to predict what technology will be like 50, 100, 0r 150 years in the future is a parlor game, not a serious intellectual exercise.

To understand why, you need only read a little 1950s-era science fiction. The predictions made by the authors about what the 21st century would be like were not just wrong — they were wildly, spectacularly wrong, by turns far too bold and not nearly bold enough.

My favorite example is Isaac Asimov’s early stories about robots. He built his robots’ brains using vacuum tubes, because the transistor hadn’t yet been invented, much less the IC chip. And yet, sixty or seventy years down the line, we still don’t have autonomous thinking machines of the kind Asimov envisioned. He had not the shadow of a clue about the real technological difficulties over which he was leapfrogging.

The migration of humans to colonies in space has been a staple of science fiction for close to a century, yet none of the authors who have written about it has come close to grappling with the real issues, which are probably more economic than technological, though the technological challenges are beyond imagining. And yet, here is Scientific American blathering about “starship humanity.”

Dissecting the rosy vision of space exploration in this article would be an amusing exercise, but it would take days. There’s a howler in almost every paragraph. Author Cameron Smith imagines

Fantasy Unchained

I’ve written seven novels. The first two were published; the other five haven’t been. Three of those five my agent (who I guess is now my former agent, more or less) declined even to try to market. He didn’t feel they were commercially viable, and he may have been right. It’s very possible that my stories aren’t gripping enough to provoke excitement among hard-to-impress publisher types.

Even so, every few years I get the itch to try it again. Right now I’m sketching some ideas for a fantasy novel. The idea of writing another less-than-publishable book, however, fails to stir me. If I’m going to put all that work into developing a story, I’d like to believe, or hope, that other people might enjoy reading it too.

To that end, I thought I’d do a little survey of what’s going on in the fantasy field. I have my own favorite authors, but they’re not necessarily representative. Terry Pratchett sells like gangbusters, but I have no interest in writing like Terry Pratchett. Tim Powers I happen to like a lot, but I don’t think he’s a hot seller.

Poking around on the Web, I made a list of about 20 authors of epic fantasy series, folks who seem to be selling decent quantities of books. Hard sales figures are not readily available, but given that there are 14 books in Robert Jordan’s series, it’s a reasonable bet that the publisher was happy with the sales of volumes 3, 4, 5, and so on.

I approve of writers’ habit of putting the first chapter of a book up on their website. It gives me a reasonable glimpse both of what the book may be like and — more important — what elements these writers feel will draw in fantasy readers.

One strategy, in books that aren’t the first volume in a series, seems to be

Eye Candy

Last night I watched the first half of Avatar on DVD. I’m not sure I’ll watch the second half.

It’s visually stunning, of course. Breathtaking. But the story … feh.

For starters, there’s the unobtainium. Terrible name for a mineral — straight out of DC Comics. Either unobtainium is an element (which it can’t very well be), or it’s a molecule. If it’s a molecule, synthesizing it from its atomic constituents is simply bound to be a thousand times cheaper than sending out starships and maintaining a base on another planet.

We need also to ask, how can a gigantic economic demand ever develop for a substance that is so rare as to make this mining operation profitable? Consider the case of aluminum: It’s extremely useful stuff, but it was also extremely rare — more precious than gold — until a way was found, in the 19th century, to extract pure aluminum from bauxite. Until aluminum became cheap, there was no demand for it!

Considering the scope of an interstellar mining operation, unobtainium would have to be worth at least

Trapped in Amber

In a couple of weeks I’ll be moving, so I’ve been putting my books in boxes. 45 boxes. I got down to the Z’s in the science fiction section, and box 44 was full, and the Roger Zelazny novels were still on the shelf. So I sat down and started reading the Amber series.

I think I have the original edition paperbacks. All five volumes, published in the ’70s. Black covers. The paper is yellowing by now. I must have read them at the time … or maybe not. I tended in those days to start things and then get distracted. I remember only a few bits and pieces from the first three books.

The story kept me turning the pages, I’ll say that for it. This time, I read all five books straight through. And yet, at the end, I find myself very dissatisfied. The Amber saga is flimsy. For the benefit of any writer who might stumble onto this blog while contemplating (or actually developing) a fantasy series, here are a few

Bibliophilia

I wish I had a lot more time to read. I own hundreds and hundreds of books, some of which I’ve been carting around for 30 or 40 years. Don’t remember a thing about some of them except that I enjoyed them. It would be nice to sit down for a few years and just read.

And not just the old books, either. I’d love to buy lots of new ones.

I generally read the Resnick/Malzberg column in the SFWA Bulletin, and this month they were talking about specialty publishers — small houses that are supporting the history of science fiction by keeping classics in print. So today I have an itch to rush out and buy all the science fiction I can find. It’s a mild form of mania — a raw desire to buy thousands of books simply because it would be so cool to own them! Complete collections of Heinlein, Sturgeon, Poul Anderson, and a host of other visionaries. I’ve got most of the Philip Dick paperbacks … but maybe I’m missing a few!

I won’t do it, of course. I wouldn’t have time to read them all, and I’m not rich enough to indulge such whims purely for the sake of having a well-stocked private library. Besides, a lot of the old science fiction wasn’t actually very good. Reading it would be in the nature of a research project – to find out what ideas were amazing or trendy in 1950, and what cultural blind spots the writers wallowed in without knowing it.

Some of the cultural blind spots are interesting. In the late ’60s and early ’70s, there was a lot of SF in which everybody was having happy sex with everybody else (or at least, with everybody else of the opposite sex). STDs weren’t even a blip on the radar, and nor was the importance of long-term pair-bonding to emotional health.

But I’d still like to own all those books!

Reading: Connie Willis

Many years ago I was knocked out by Doomsday Book, Connie Willis’s novel of time travel to the dark days of the Black Plague. But then I tried another of her books, found it disappointingly shallow, and gave up on her.

This month I decided to give her another shot. I borrowed To Say Nothing of the Dog from the library, rolled up my metaphorical pant legs, and waded in.

Imagine a Victorian sitcom. Imagine Lucy and Ethel wandering around in Victorian England, trying to fix up a mixup that just gets worse and worse.

The history department at Oxford is using a time machine to travel back from 2057 to 1940 in order to do a blazingly trivial bit of research (the whereabouts of a spectacularly ugly vase that vanished during the Nazi bombing of Coventry Cathedral). But there are complications, so the narrator takes a detour

Reading: The Dragons of Babel

Elves, centaurs, dragons, trolls, witches, hippogriffs, and other creatures even more fantastical throng through Michael Swanwick’s The Dragons of Babel. But it isn’t what you’re thinking. Swanwick has taken classic fantasy and mythology and done a cheerfully brutal mash-up with the seamier elements of our own modern world. There’s plenty of technology (from cigarette lighters to subway trains with electrical third rails), explicit sex, and casual profanity, not to mention overt references to actual historical figures like Mozart and Flaubert.

The first 2/3 of the novel seems almost picaresque — young Will is wandering through the world without much direction, falling in with whoever he meets, getting into trouble, falling in love, and so on. But Swanwick has a deeper design. Eventually the story is revealed as a modern expression of one of the timeless fantasy themes.

I’m not even going to tell you which theme, because that would spoil it. This book is a winner. If you’re looking for something fresh in the fantasy genre, you won’t want to miss it.

Video: Battlestar

I never saw the original BattleStar Galactica series. The new series looks pretty good, though it’s far from flawless. Last night I watched the pilot miniseries, which is essentially a 3-hour movie. I’ll try a few more episodes before making up my mind.

Script: Pretty good. Plenty of human elements, and it’s always nice to have Truly Evil Bad Guys that you can love to hate. I love seeing a woman fighter pilot who (though apparently heterosexual) smokes cigars with evident enjoyment.

What the Cylon sexpot is doing inside Gaius’s brain is a bit hard to decipher. Why the Cylons would build a new Cylon race that was all but biologically identical to the humans — mystifying. What the Cylon was doing lurking in the weapons depot — even more mystifying.

Effects/animation: Very good. Marred mainly by a few concessions to what TV viewers will expect to see. The fighter spacecraft look way too much like conventional jet fighters — and when we see a profile of a pilot in the cockpit, the stars in the background are whipping past! This is just wrong. The stars would appear stationary unless the craft were spinning rapidly, in which case it would be out of control.

Casting: As Commander Adama, Edward James Olmos looks the way Captain Kirk should have looked, but didn’t. Too bad Olmos can’t act. He seems to have only one facial expression: craggy.

And speaking of Star Trek, when Galactica is hit by enemy fire in the final battle … you guessed it, everybody on the bridge staggers sideways and falls down, and sparks fly from the control panels. We have so been here before.

But overall, it’s not too bad.

World-Building

Writing science fiction is enormously difficult. If you cut corners, it gets easier. Cutting corners is always a temptation, because (a) if you don’t, your whole story may collapse, and (b) your readers or viewers probably won’t notice or care.

Quick example: Last week I watched an episode of Dr. Who called “Daleks in New York.” It’s the 1930s, and the Daleks are doing something to the spire atop the Empire State Building in order to capture the energy of what is clearly described in the dialog as an impending “solar flare.” Solar flares can’t be predicted, and not much of their energy reaches the surface of the Earth (for which we can all be thankful), but never mind that. As the climax of the story nears, the “solar flare” has transmuted into a simple bolt of lightning emanating from a thunderstorm.

I’ll bet not one viewer in ten even noticed the switch.

A reader named Conrad Cook has been grilling me about my unflattering view of Riverworld, by Philip Jose Farmer. I was critical, among other things, of

Time After Time

I am so bummed. The third season of Primeval has only just started airing on BBC America, which means it won’t be out on DVD for at least a year. And I don’t have a TV!

Is it a good enough series for me to rush out and buy a nice new TV and subscribe to cable? Basically, no, it’s not that good. Besides, the first few episodes have already aired. Who knows when they’ll go into reruns? It’s the kind of series that you sort of want to watch in order, because there’s a long story arc involving Nick Cutter’s ex-wife, who is quite clearly Up To No Good.

I wonder why the good science fiction is on TV these days. Not all of it, I’m sure. Lately most of the novels I’ve been reading have been fantasy. I think I need to stray over into the other aisle.

I do hope the SF novels being written today are less juvenile than Riverworld.