Just The Caffeine Talking

Story Alert!

My story "Object Three" is in the November/December issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. Alexander Jablokov described this story as a bonsai space opera. It's got romance, shootouts, aliens, a big mysterious object, and people jumping out of spaceships. I just got my sample copy of the issue and it looks great. (The other stories are pretty good, too. Check it out.)

How I Did It #8: "The Vampire Brief"

Since Halloween is only a couple of weeks away, it's appropriate to tackle my first horror story, "The Vampire Brief." It's another anthology story, written for the collection Odder Jobs, published by Dark Horse Comics. As the publisher name might suggest, the stories in Odder Jobs were all based on a comic book: Mike Mignola's wonderful Hellboy comic.

I somehow managed to pass by Hellboy during its first few years of publication. I saw some promotional posters at my local comics shop, but somehow the image of a red guy with goggles pushed up on his head didn't stir my interest. In 2001 the inimitable Dr. Kromm, editor at Steve Jackson Games, asked if I'd like to work on a Hellboy roleplaying game they were bringing out. I passed on it -- at the time I was doing some other game writing and, as I explained to Kromm, I didn't know much about Hellboy so I didn't think I could do a very good job.

Then I picked up one of the Hellboy collections -- I think it was Conquerer Worm -- and was hooked. I spent quite a bit of time kicking myself for having passed on the game project, but Phil Masters and Jonathan Woodward managed to create a very well-written and entertaining book without me.

Then in 2004 I heard from Kelly Link that Dark Horse was putting together a second collection of Hellboy short stories. I contacted Christopher Golden, the editor, and asked if he was still taking submissions. He sent me an evasively polite reply -- if I had something, send it in, but he had a lot of submissions and couldn't make any promises. Translation: "Sure, person-I've-never-heard-of, send me your godawful Hellboy fan fiction and I'll try to be polite when I reject it."

I wrote the story in about three days and sent it in. He bought it a couple of days later. Ha!

So what's it about? It's another New Orleans story, but this time I didn't flatten the place. Hellboy tracks down a vampire who counters by taking out a restraining order, forbidding Hellboy to approach him. The vampire is making a fortune giving vampire tours and (literally) preying on Anne Rice fans. On the advice of an old woman who runs a magical junk shop, the big red guy hires a local lawyer, "Little Augie," and sues the vampire, hoping to lure him out during the day for a court appearance.

Unfortunately the vampire can summon storms, so the court date is dark and rainy. Hellboy and his lawyer desperately come up with a case to present: they insist that the vampire is guilty of false advertising because he's not really a vampire. After a little back and forth, the villain finally demonstrates he really is what he claims by turning into a bat. Which Hellboy promptly catches and crushes -- because there's no law against killing a bat.

When I sat down to write the story I knew it had to involve lawyers and vampires, because at the time John Grisham and Anne Rice were both cranking out best-sellers set in New Orleans. I had a lot of fun mocking the "vampire tourism" industry which is all over the French Quarter like a weed.

Before Anne Rice, New Orleans wasn't a vampire town. Authentic local folklore is heavy on ghosts and voodoo, and Cajun horror stories are mostly werewolf-based. I found it a little irritating that all these bloodsucking pretty boys were colonizing my hometown in fiction. So I used the story as a bit of a symbolic exorcism: Hellboy cleans the vampire menace out of town.

I don't have as much of a beef with John Grisham, and the character of "Little Augie" the lawyer let me work in a tip of the hat to the legendary New Orleans ambulance chaser Morris Bart, whose ads were a mainstay of late-night television on WGNO in the 1980s. In my early teens I'd sit up till all hours on Friday and Saturday nights watching old movies and reruns of Star Trek and Wild Wild West, all punctuated by ads for Morris Bart, Seafood City, Alterman Audio, and Waterbed Warehouse. Each of them had only two or three ads, which means that they all repeated every commercial break.

I'm still a fan of the Hellboy comics, and if Dark Horse ever wants to put together another fiction anthology I'd contribute like a shot.

When Metaphors Attack!

Science Fiction has a problem. The problem is that it is (among other things) a literature of prediction. Writers extrapolate future worlds and new technologies. A huge part of the genre's appeal is simply seeing what the future might be like.

The trouble with predictions is that either they come true, or they don't, and it's a problem either way.

Failed predictions become laughable. How could writers in the 1950s have worried that robots would take over by the year 2000? How could writers in the 1970s have worried that clones would take over by the year 2000? How could writers in the 1990s have worried that Japanese megacorporations would take over by the year 2000? At best, failed predictions turn into retro camp nostalgia-fodder. ("Where's my flying car?")
   
But predictions that do come true are equally problematic. See, the thing most people don't notice about science fiction is that it's fiction. Stories, made up by storytellers. Which means that when storytellers extrapolate a future world or technology, they're doing it in the service of telling a story.

Technologies, in particular, get used as metaphors. In another place I've mentioned how cybernetics has long been a metaphor for dehumanization. We've also seen robots used as a metaphor for both Marxist class warfare and racism (and probably other things as well). Cloning: metaphor for loss of individuality, exploitation, slavery again. Being able to "literalize your metaphors" is one of the big strengths of the fantastic in literature.

The problem is that when a technology becomes real, it stops being a metaphor. And therefore it loses a lot of its thematic power. Consider space travel: right up to about 1969 space travel was a huge metaphor for transcendance and escape. Travel to other worlds could be used to tell stories about culture clash, the desire for independence, imperialism, and isolation.

But once it became a real technology, space travel lost all that metaphorical heft. In fiction it becomes simply a background element, the way that we get our characters from planet to planet. No modern writer wastes more than a paragraph describing how the characters travel in space, unless some part of the voyage is important to the plot.

As many "next decade" technologies finally make their way to the shelves at Best Buy, this is becoming a bigger problem for SF writers. I complained recently about how irritating I found it when people relied upon "unexamined assumptions" about science fictional events. Later I realized that the problem was people applying metaphorical thinking to things which are becoming real. When people worry about clones being an oppressed class of slaves, that's metaphor-thinking. When I bitch about how unrealistic that is, that's real-technology thinking.

Is it possible to write science fiction without literalizing metaphors? Just write about future worlds as future worlds? But if the world is just window-dressing to a story about character, why put it in a future world at all?

Perhaps we just have to get used to the idea that science fiction is a genre with built-in obsolescence.