Just The Caffeine Talking

Gibberish

Submitted for your approval: The Postmodernism Generator. It generates a new postmodernist critical essay. Compare with the real-life postmodernist critical writings.

This is the primary reason I have no interest in pursuing an advanced degree in either of the subjects I love -- literature or history. I can't make myself write in the accepted academic style.

Nor am I alone, apparently. The number of people getting graduate degrees in history in the United States is about a thousand a year -- up from a low of just over 500 during the early 1980s, but still below the peak of 1,200 in 1973-74 (when the big bolus of Baby Boomers was pushing its way through the gastrointestinal tract of higher education). Doubtless there are many factors involved, including pay, tenure, and so forth. But right now we're in a golden age of mass-market history. There's a cable network about it, and books about interesting but obscure historical topics are best-sellers (right now a book about Henrietta Lacks and her immortal cancer-cell culture is a hot seller on Amazon).

So why are there about a thousand people getting history doctorates while 87,000 people apply to law school each year? Sure, you can (maybe) make more money as a lawyer, but there's obviously a market for popular history. I think part of the answer is that academic writing has become so hieratic that people (like me) who can't make ourselves spout the right gibberish simply go on to other things. It's sad.

Ozblogging: Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz, Part 5

The End of the Story But Not the Book

After getting away from the Gargoyles, our heroes have a curiously un-exciting encounter with a room full of dragons. You'd think that a cave containing an unspecified number of dragons -- even baby ones -- would be a tough level for the player-characters to get through. But after some polite conversation with the dragons, whose mother has tied their tails to immobilize them while she is off hunting, the adventurers depart.

Oh, and on their way out they pass through a kind of stone revolving door, which catches the wheel of the buggy and jams shut behind them. This turns out to be a problem, as the passage they've chosen leads into a small cave with no exit. There is a crack letting in some sunlight, but no way for Our Heroes to get out onto the surface. And by a curious oversight the Wizard doesn't have any nitroglycerine in his satchel.

Faced with a slow death by starvation, Jim the cab-horse descends into postmodernism. "I was sure it would come to this, in the end," remarked the old cab-horse. "Folks don't fall into the middle of the earth and then get back again to tell of their adventures -- not in real life. And the whole thing has been unnatural because that cat and I are both able to talk your language, and to understand the words you say."

Dorothy refuses to abandon hope. She remembers that Ozma is constantly monitoring her activities by means of the Magic Picture, and Ozma possesses the Nome King's Magic Belt, which gives her effective omnipotence. In other words, Dorothy is chums with God. Of course, this does raise the rather puzzling question of why Dorothy didn't signal to Ozma that she needed her help way back in Chapter Four, or why the sweet Girl Ruler of Oz was apparently content to let her best friend remain trapped underground, beset by hostile vegetables, wooden Gargoyles, and invisible bears.

The short answer, I'm afraid, is that Mr. Baum has run out of ideas for underground adventures and is about to begin some truly merciless padding. Dorothy makes her special sign, Ozma wishes her to the Emerald City, and a moment later Dorothy's companions follow via a second wish. (Apparently Ozma would otherwise be perfectly willing to let the Wizard and Zeb starve in a cave.) The plot is over at this point, but we still have six chapters to get through.

They get to the Emerald City. Lots of introductions. The Wizard gets rehabilitated and his past crimes are declared to be the fault of Old Mombi and other enemies of the Party. We also learn his real name: "Oscar Zoroaster Phadrig Isaac Norman Henkle Emmannuel Ambroise Diggs." Because of the unfortunate acronym (O.Z.P.I.N.H.E.A.D.) he prefers to use just his first two initials, and the fact that his monogram is the same as the name of the land he arrived in by accident is pure coincidence.

Sure it is, Agent Diggs. The Roosevelt Administration now has a full-time representative at the court of Oz, "advising" the lovely Girl Ruler. The Wizard quickly comes to terms with the other major power center in Ozma's court, Glinda the Sorceress. She even agrees to begin tutoring him in magic. Evidently both Glinda and President Roosevelt are concerned about the Nome menace, not to mention the need to make sure Kaiser Wilhelm doesn't gain any influence in the continent of Nonestica.

This brings up the question of exactly where the heck Oz is located. When it was just a Pennsylvania-sized country, it might be tucked into some convenient corner of the American desert. But once you start piling on neighboring countries like Ev, Ix, Mo, Hiland, Loland, the Forest of Burzee, the lands of the Whimsies, Growleywogs and Phanphasms (and probably a bunch of others I'm forgetting), you're talking about a pretty substantial landmass. The fact that Dorothy gets washed up in Ev on the way to Australia suggests that it might be in the southern Pacific (near Bensalem, no doubt) -- except that there's no sign of any Alaska-sized island there. Even if you allow for the fact that Glinda later puts a spell on Oz to hide it from airplanes (and presumably orbital reconnaissance) that doesn't explain why the other countries of "Nonestica" aren't visible.

So I stick to my theory: Oz and environs are not on Earth. They exist in some parallel world. People from our world can get there, either by means of natural gateways or some innate ability. It's not unreasonable for Theodore Roosevelt to be curious about this mysterious place. And if Dorothy and the Wizard can get there, it's quite reasonable to worry about agents of hostile powers doing the same. Linguistic evidence strongly supports this: the tribes of Oz are Winkies, Quadlings, Gillikins, and Munchkins -- all very suggestive of a Germanic origin.

I expect there's a rattling-good unpublished Oz saga concerning the Wizard's slow chess-game battle against the Kaiser's agents in Oz during the years leading up to World War I.

The rest of the book is taken up with a very pointless non-crisis about Eureka the kitten being accused of devouring one of the Nine Tiny Piglets. She's put on trial for murder, with the Tin Woodman as her defense attorney and the Woggle-Bug as prosecutor. The Wizard attempts to subvert justice to save Eureka, but in the end the kitten is innocent and can prove it -- but let the affair go to trial because otherwise Mr. Baum would have had to come up with something else to fill out the book.

Jim, Eureka, and the Wizard remain in Oz. Ozma uses the good old Magic Belt to send Zeb back to California and Dorothy to Kansas. Uncle Henry's getting pretty jaded about Dorothy's constant disappearances. He doesn't even wait around in California to see if she'll turn up after the earthquake.

Dorothy Gale will return in The Road to Oz.

How I Did It #6: The Ocean of the Blind

"The Ocean of the Blind" is a long story about a group of scientists in a station on the bottom of the ice-covered sea of a moon called Ilmatar, in a distant star system. They mean well but get into trouble.

The main character is Rob Freeman, a young technician who gets recruited by the boorish celebrity scientist Henri Kerlerec to help with a secret project. Henri has a Russian Navy stealth diving suit, and wants to use it to get a close look at the lobster-like intelligent inhabitants of Ilmatar. Contact with the natives is forbidden, but since they sense the world by sonar, Henri thinks he can get close in the stealth suit and record videos without being detected.

Meanwhile, an Ilmataran scientist named Broadtail is nervously presenting his discoveries about ancient stone carvings to a learned society run by the wealthy aristocrat Longpincer. His work is well received, and Broadtail is accepted into the group. Longpincer invites all of them to investigate a nearby vent, where they may find some interesting specimens.

They do: they find Henri. His stealth suit makes him sonar-absorbent, but the Ilmatarans can perceive him because there's a big blank silent spot in the middle of their echo-filled world. Feeling invulnerable, he boldly swims right into the middle of the group and they capture him. Rob tries to distract them with noisemakers but it doesn't work. The Ilmatarans are more curious than frightened.

The Ilmatarans haul their new specimen back to Longpincer's home and are amazed at how odd it is when they dissect it. Rob returns to the station alone, horrified and tormented by guilt at leaving Henri behind.

The story had an odd genesis. Back when I was living in Ithaca during the late 1990s I got an idea for a novel which I called A Darkling Sea. It was about a three-way conflict among humans, Ilmatarans, and another spacefaring species called the Sholen. The Sholen follow a kind of Star Trek style "Prime Directive" which forbids contact with non-starfaring species, but the humans argue that since the Ilmatarans live at the bottom of an ocean under a couple of miles of ice they're never going to venture into space on their own. Eventually the Sholen invade Ilmatar to shut down the human research station, and some of the humans take refuge with the Ilmatarans and wage a guerilla campaign against the Sholen.

(Anyone who has ever spent a year in Ithaca may understand where I got the idea of people deep in an icy abyss, dealing with strange alien creatures motivated by fanatical ideology.)

When I took my synopsis and sample chapters of A Darkling Sea to the acerbic and perceptive Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop, I got a lot of comments and suggestions. One idea for improvement was to add a chapter at the beginning, showing more of the life of the scientists on the station and depicting a "triggering incident" to set the plot in motion.

I did, and because I wanted to get some money for my work, I wrote the chapter as a stand-alone story . . . called "The Ocean of the Blind." So this story is also the first chapter of a novel.

So far I haven't been able to sell Darkling Sea, but the completed manuscript is sitting on my hard drive in case any publishers are reading this.

In "Ocean" I killed off Henri in a fairly horrible way (the Ilmatarans vivisect him), so I did as much as possible to make him a thoroughly unlikeable character before that. At his first introduction he barges into a conversation the other researchers are having, in which they're trading methods of murdering Henri. He doesn't know who they're talking about and butts in, suggesting a murder method lifted whole and entire from Roald Dahl's story "Lamb to the Slaughter."

That was actually based on a real incident at college. Some people I knew in another dormitory had a much-disliked fellow resident who absolutely would not shut up and insisted on forcing his way into every conversation he encountered. Their dislike of him reached the point that they were happily discussing ways to murder him, when of course the jerk happened by and insisted on joining in.

Because I intended for the humans and Ilmatarans to wind up allied against the invading Sholen meant that this story could have no villains. Everyone -- even that ass Henri -- is well-intentioned. Indeed, their goals are exactly the same, since they're all motivated by a desire to learn. It's the off-stage Sholen and their draconian rules against contact who are ultimately responsible for what happens.

Did I mention I think the Star Trek "Prime Directive" is a stupid idea? I do. I know Gene Roddenberry wanted to get away from the raygun-toting empire-builders of the pulp science fiction era, but the idea of a rigid ban on any contact with "less advanced" civilizations is still foolish. It assumes that cultures without advanced technology are somehow naive or innocent, and that the process of leaving that low-tech life is a step down somehow -- a Fall from Eden. That's simply not true. When Commodore Perry sailed into Tokyo Bay, he brought change to Japan; incredible, neck-snappingly rapid change. But Japan remained Japan. Its people were no better or worse morally than before.

"The Ocean of the Blind" ran in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction in the April 2004 issue. People must have liked it because it was collected in Year's Best Science Fiction in 2005, and the story made it as far as the preliminary Nebula award ballot. I still like it a lot, and if I don't manage to sell A Darkling Sea I may see if I can carve any more short stories out of the carcass.

Random Thoughts on Horror

Recently I was casting about for something to write next, and it struck me that I've never written a horror story. Some of my work has elements of horror -- I wrote a Hellboy story about a vampire -- but usually my goal is something other than scaring the reader. (The Hellboy story was a comedy.)

So I applied my usual over-thinking approach to the topic. What is a horror story? Well, it's one in which scary things happen. What are scary things? Depictions or threats of death, painful injury, loss of freedom, mutilation, madness, and bodily violation.

Stephen King, who knows a few things about horror stories, once pointed out that horror can be internal or external -- in other words, it can either be brought about (knowingly or unknowingly) by the characters, or it can be an external menace. Internal horror tends to be a literalization of whatever character flaw brought it about. This is the familiar Twilight Zone/EC Comics trope of the kid who shoots birds with a BB gun getting carried off by a giant bird, or some such. If you think about it, and squint, internal horror is a sprig off the main trunk of tragedy. A hero is destroyed by his tragic flaw, only in the horror story the flaw is often made literal and the focus is on the process of the destruction.

External horror is less tied to character. People are inexplicably afflicted by evil, even if all they did was move into the wrong house or stop at the wrong motel. In H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, the heroes are just looking for fossils in Antarctica. It's never even suggested that their pursuit of knowledge is a flaw; they're decent fellows in a praiseworthy, constructive endeavor who wind up running afoul of ancient monsters. 

King suggests (and I agree) that external horror is actually scarier. With internal horror, the reader can always console herself with the thought "I would never do that!" If the heroes' downfall comes from their own flaws, then we can congratulate ourselves on not having those flaws (or at least on controlling them better). With external horror there's no such refuge. You might be the one whose car breaks down at the remote gas station run by cannibals. You might be the real-estate agent hired by Count Dracula.

Well and good. BUT: there's a stinger, which caught me rather painfully when I began trying to plot out a horror story. External horror doesn't allow for much realistic character development. Think about it: if the evil doesn't come about from a personal flaw of the hero, then there's no reason for the hero to change or gain self-knowledge. All he has to do is get away from the scary monster.

One can make various noises about "finding your inner strength" in such a situation, but when you look at how people in the real world react to terrifying experiences, there's a name for how they change: it's called Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. That's right, a realistic horror story would leave the heroes severely messed up. But if they don't show those effects, then it stops being a horror story and instead becomes an adventure story -- which is a fine thing, but not what we're after.

There: I've proved logically that horror stories are impossible. Stephen King, Bram Stoker, and H.P. Lovecraft may now vanish in a puff of brimstone. Actually, it occurs to me that Lovecraft himself may have followed a similar course of reasoning, because several of his stories ("The Haunter of the Dark," and "The Color Out of Space" come to mind) are presented as cases where the horror wins, and the narrative is either a fragment left behind as the hero succumbs to his doom, or is pieced together by investigators after the fact.

So how can things realistically go bump in the night?