Just The Caffeine Talking

Wood

I grew up in an old house with a fireplace, in a city where it is a news-worthy event when the temperature gets below freezing on a winter night. My father would sometimes light a fire, but it was entirely an aesthetic experience. I never paid attention, but I'll bet the gas heater ran more when the fireplace was in use than when it wasn't. Our woodpile consisted of just a few dozen segments of tree limbs, pruned from the trees around the house or scavenged from where city workers were trimming the live oaks on St. Charles Avenue.

When I moved to my current house in Deerfield, it had a fireplace — and about four acres of trees. The woods are mostly maple, gradually being replaced by oak, with fast-growing birches at the edges and a few big old pines. Naturally, I wanted to use the fireplace, so I had to learn to cut and split wood. For several years I used a handsaw to cut fallen trees, and an axe someone gave me to split the cut segments.

We rapidly discovered that in a modern insulated house, burning wood in the fireplace is a good way to cool the place off in winter. The fire sucks in air from the outside through cracks and under doors, and shoots most of the warm air straight up the chimney. For a time we could only have fires when the temperature was above sixty degrees, which definitely ruins the appeal of a blazing fire on a snowy night.

So a few years later we got a fireplace insert. I had been advocating for a free-standing wood stove (more efficient) but my wife pointed out that 1.) it would eat up a big slice of floor space we couldn't really spare in the living room, and 2.) we had small children. So I got an insert, which is basically a wood stove that fits into the fireplace and has a little fan to circulate air around it.

That worked far better than I would have believed. With just wood burning in the fireplace I can keep my house comfortable even if the temperature outside is down to freezing. Below freezing the gas-powered baseboard radiators have to take up some of the load. I suspect that if the fireplace was located in the center of the house, rather than on an exterior wall, we might be able to manage in even colder weather.

Having a fireplace that wasn't a cooling system meant that we burned a lot more wood. Which led my wife to buy me a chainsaw for my birthday, as sawing through tree trunks by hand was just too inefficient. Around the same time I also bought myself a proper splitting maul, and then a sledgehammer and iron wedge for the really tough pieces.

I've been cutting and splitting my own wood for a decade now, and I've learned quite a bit. One of those things is a tremendous appreciation for the men of the pioneer era who did all their wood-cutting with axes.

Felling a tree and cutting it into segments with a chainsaw is sweaty work, about the same way mowing a lawn with a power mower is hard work. But cutting a tree with an axe is about a hundred times more difficult, and that's not hyperbole. Each swing of the axe cuts a little chip, the width of the blade and maybe a quarter-inch thick. Chopping through even a modest-sized tree with a foot-wide trunk takes a couple of hundred swings.

Everything in the colonial era depended on cutting wood. If you wanted to grow food, you had to cut down all the trees on the land you wanted to farm. And those weren't the piddly little third-growth trees you'll see on my land today. Those were massive old-growth elms, oaks, and chestnut trees with trunks a yard wide. Clearing a field meant days of back-breaking work to cut them down, then more work to uproot the stumps. The air must have been full of the sound of axes year-round.

And it was a good thing you had all those cut trees, because you'd need the wood to build your house. More wood to make barrels and buckets. You'd save the especially straight limbs of oak and hickory to make new handles for your axe, because all that chopping would wear out handles in just a few weeks.

All those demands were dwarfed by the need for firewood. Every house had a fire burning all the time. Wood powered cooking, wood powered clothes-drying when there wasn't sunshine (i.e. nine months of the year). And burning wood kept the house warm enough to keep the inhabitants from freezing to death. Barely.

Every bit of that wood was cut and split by someone with an axe. The sheer amount of calories needed for that work was immense. There's a reason why early Americans in portraits and old photos look so lean and rawboned. They were burning calories at a rate matched nowadays only by professional athletes in training. Until the arrival of the railroad made it possible to buy wood or coal for home use, I doubt there were any overweight people in Deerfield, simply from the work needed to keep their fireplaces and stoves burning.

(This post also appears at the Friends of Deerfield Facebook page. Check it out for more on the town of Deerfield, its history and wildlife, and the upcoming 350th Anniversary celebration!)

Excellent Analog Review

Don Sakers has a review of The Godel Operation posted in the current issue of Analog. You can see it online here (but only until the next issue comes out). 

Because of that time limit, I'm going to quote it, especially since the review really is quite favorable.

In science fiction we deal with weirdness budgets all the time, especially in stories set in the far future and dealing with technology advanced enough to be, in Arthur C. Clarke’s phrase, “indistinguishable from magic.”

Any advanced far future must include elements that today’s readers find unfamiliar, if not downright bizarre. We know that time brings change. Any world of future millennia in which everything is just like today just isn’t convincing.

At the same time, a future world with too much change borders on the incomprehensible. . . . Indeed, some cross right over the border. If we’re going to be honest, a realistic depiction of a society thousands of years in the future would be foreign in language, culture, technology, and a thousand other variables. It would be at least as hard for a present-day reader to apprehend as are Sumerian cuneiform or Egyptian hieroglyphics.

Authors of far future SF must tread a thin line: Exceed the weirdness budget and lose readers, or use too little weirdness and bore them.

In The Godel Operation James L. Cambias hits the balance just right.

This was an issue I really worried about while writing Godel Operation. I wanted to have relatable characters at least similar to modern humans, but I wanted to convey the fantastic reality of the Billion Worlds. Glad to hear I managed to thread that needle.

Movie Review: Luca

Capsule review: it's The Shadow Over Innsmouth re-imagined as a kids' buddy comedy about bicycle racing in 1950s Italy. How can that not be wonderful?

Return to the Event Horizon!

The second half of my interview with John Michael Godier is now available on his excellent Event Horizon YouTube channel. You can listen to it here. Hear me pontificate about star-mining, slow-motion interstellar colonization, nuclear war, and how planetary scientists have fallen in love with giant impacts.

Pulp Covers!

Here's an article on LitHub about pulp-style covers for some very not-pulp novels. I even remember seeing some of these back in the 1970s. Some are silly, but a few are hilariously wrong.

Still, I kind of wish publishers still did covers like these. I think my own novels could really benefit.

A Darkling Sea: scantily clad Alicia menaced by giant lobster, beefy Rob Freeman wrestling it, knife in hand. Tagline: "An Ocean of Danger — and Passion!"

Corsair: bare-chested beefy David Schwartz, bikini-clad Elizabeth Santiago trading pistol shots with bad guys as a rocket lifts off in the background. Tagline: "A Fortune From Space — Big Enough to Kill For!"

Arkad's World: Arkad, sans shirt, punches tentacled pirates while Baichi in just the shreds of her torn cloak fights off a clawed flying monster. Tagline: "Across a World of Danger Lies the Ultimate Treasure!"

The Initiate: Pretty much the cover and tagline of the actual book, really. Maybe replace creepy horror-novel Isabella with Taika Feng in a femme-fatale pose.

The Godel Operation: Shirtless Zee and Adya in torn skintight spacesuit battling a big boxy robot with eye-beams. Tagline: "Save the Fabric of Existence Itself!"

Why Caesar?

In European civilization, I think it's a true statement to say that the most famous historical figure, second only to Jesus, is Julius Caesar. He's been hero-worshipped more or less continuously since he led his army into Gaul — except for one unfortunate incident involving sixty or so of his political rivals and a lot of knives.

If you think about it, this is really weird. Other historical figures go in and out of fashion. Today's hero is tomorrow's villain. But Caesar has been reinterpreted in every era.

In Imperial Rome, he was literally deified, and all the subsequent emperors used his name as their title. They all claimed his power, his popularity, and his legitimacy. A few even deserved it.

With the decline of Roman paganism and the triumph of Christianity in Europe during the Middle Ages, you'd expect a guy who was a pagan god to fall out of favor. But nope. He was honored as one of the Nine Worthies, the greatest heroes of antiquity, the Bible, and Christendom. A virtuous pagan and a paragon of chivalry. Emperors in Germany and Constantinople still claimed his authority.

When Dante wrote his Divine Comedy and described a journey through Hell, at the bottom layer was the three-headed figure of Satan, frozen in ice up to his waist and eternally gnawing on history's three greatest traitors. Who were those three villains? One was Judas Iscariot, who betrayed Christ. The other two were Brutus and Cassius — two of Caesar's assassins. For Dante, stabbing that one particular Roman politician is as awful as betraying God.  

Another literary genius took up Caesar three centuries later. Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is perhaps the most "nuanced" view of Caesar in literature. The man himself gets the usual hero-worship, but Shakespeare doesn't shy away from depicting the gangsterism of his political followers, and shows Brutus as having honorable and patriotic motives. Still, the play is named after Caesar and that's who the audience shows up to see.

The intellectual and political movement known as the Enlightenment was enamored of all things Roman, so Caesar remained as popular as ever. Especially in Italy, where a rather self-interested Roman politician was reinvented as a symbol of national unity and liberation from foreign rule. It must have gnawed at Italian leaders and thinkers of that era to see some Habsburg German sitting in Vienna, calling himself "Kaiser" and lording it over most of northern Italy.

In the Twentieth Century, Caesar's most avid admirer was another Italian politician, whose career was less glorious but did follow much the same trajectory. One would think that association with Italian Fascism would lower Caesar's stock, but that didn't happen. In America he got reinvented as a populist reformer, a proto-FDR brutally killed by "reactionary" Senators.

There are any number of explanations for his invincible popularity. The fact that a hundred generations of educated men in Europe grew up reading about Caesar in Plutarch didn't hurt. Nor did the fact that most of those men also read Caesar's own account of the Gallic Wars.

One must conclude that in addition to being a military genius, Caesar was also the greatest self-promoter in history. His reputation outlived him, his family, and his civilization, and shows no sign of abating. I guess he earned it.

My Canon

In modern geek culture we've begun to use the term "Universe" to refer to a background setting, particularly one which is shared by multiple creative works. The most famous, right now, is probably the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," which encompasses all the Marvel/Disney superhero films and TV series since Iron Man in 2008. There are some odd borderline cases, mostly the result of rights ownership issues, but right now pretty much all live-action films about Marvel characters can be assumed to take place in the same world.

A related concept is "canonicity" — which stories "really happened" in the fictional universe versus which ones are either "imaginary stories" (a term pioneered by DC Comics in the Silver Age) or alternate timelines. The Star Trek universe illustrates this: for a long time the rule was that the live-action TV shows and movies were "real" and thus canon while animated shows, comic books, tie-in novels, and games were not.

There was some permeability, as when the depiction of Klingon society and culture invented by John M. Ford for his novel The Final Reflection and the FASA Star Trek roleplaying game were adopted wholesale by the makers of Star Trek: The Next Generation and thereby became canonical. The 2009 film snarled everything up by introducing a canonical timeline split induced by time travel, so that it's no longer clear which universe is which.

All that throat-clearing accomplished, now I have to grapple with the fact that I seem to be creating a couple of Universes of my own.

Most of my novels and short fiction have been stand-alone works. The world of my first short story "A Diagram of Rapture" has nothing to do with my second story "The Alien Abduction," or my first novel A Darkling Sea. And none of them are connected with The Initiate or "Object Three" or Arkad's World.

However, because I was writing "Abduction" and Darkling Sea around the same time, some concepts and jargon did seep into both. Those two stories can be considered to share the same Universe. Its defining features are:

• Very near-future interstellar travel (basically some smart people discover a convenient way to go faster than light next week, and this sparks a boom in space exploration),
• Star travel primarily a scientific endeavor, under the auspices of the UN Interstellar Cooperation Agency (UNICA),
• Multiple intelligent species, but
• Few technological civilizations.

I may return to this Universe again, especially if I want to do another first-contact story. There are some complications about publishing, but nothing insuperable. Possible names for this setting are "the Darklingverse" or "the UNICA/UNIDA universe." At present it includes only the novel and the short story already mentioned.

My second, and more extensive Universe is of course the Billion Worlds. So far it encompasses one published novel, one published short story, a novel in progress and two forthcoming short stories. In addition, some concepts and ideas from some of my earlier works show up again in the Billion Worlds, so I'm inclined to retroactively put those stories into the same history.

So, the official list of Canonical Billion Worlds Universe fiction, straight from the creator, is:

"Balancing Accounts" (2008) — the dawn of autonomous sarcastic artificial intelligence;

"Periapsis" (2014) — first mention of Deimos as an important power center;

Corsair (2015) — the dawn of private space development and colonization;

"Contractual Obligation" (2014) — collective AI runs a military squad, Deimos shows its ruthless side;

"Calando" (2020) — specifically mentions the Billion Worlds, side reference shows up in Godel Operation;

The Godel Operation (2021) — primary introduction of the Billion Worlds;

"Out of the Dark" (forthcoming) — Billion Worlds short story, references Juren habitat;

"The Paoshi Puzzle" (forthcoming) — involves Adya and Pelagia from Godel Operation;

The Scarab Mission (in progress) — takes place a few years before Godel Operation and involves one character from that book.

By including Corsair I can even create a thrilling canon/non-canon debate about its short story progenitor "The Barbary Shore" of 2007. Let the flamewars begin!

Event Horizon Interview on YouTube

I have been a fan of John Michael Godier's "Event Horizon" channel on YouTube for more than a year now, so I was particularly pleased when Mr. Godier and his team decided to interview me about my new book The Godel Operation. The interview itself was great fun. Our conversation rambled widely, discussing the book, artificial intelligence, apocalypses, the Fermi Paradox, and some topics I'm probably forgetting.

While it's technically a "video" because it's on YouTube, the graphics are mostly just for show. You can listen to it here. Enjoy!

Political-Literary Observation

In the news one constantly hears journalists and government officials referring to "bad actors" when talking about matters of crime and national security. I think that movie reviewers and theater critics are the ones to guard us against bad actors. Soldiers, spies, and policemen should confine themselves to stopping wrongdoers instead.

How's It Doing?

 

The Godel Operation has been out for three weeks now. I've done interviews and promotion — there's an interview on the "Event Horizon" YouTube channel due to drop Friday the 27th. I'm sending out signed bookplates in lieu of autographings. Reviews have been good: Publishers' Weekly liked it, and Paul DiFilippo wrote a glowing piece for Locus. Responses on GoodReads and Amazon customer reviews are also very complimentary.

Naturally, this prompts people to ask how the book is selling. I can track that a little — the Amazon ranking is currently #1430 in "Hard SF," #4645 in "Space Operas," and #6272 in "Science Fiction Adventures." That's pretty good. Store sales, however, are a mystery.

Publishing in 2021 is an odd mix of current cutting-edge tech and practices dating back to the age of Dickens. I write on a laptop, and submit my manuscript in electronic form via email. The book doesn't actually exist in physical form until it's sent to the printer. It's all just-in-time and postindustrial.

But sales information and royalty payments hearken back to the era of stagecoaches and post horns. I won't see my first official sales reports until six months after publication. 

So for now we are enveloped in fog. I hope a lot of people find this book. I think they'll like it. Pass the word.