Just The Caffeine Talking

Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 2)

As I mentioned previously, Corsair had its origin in a short story for a pirate-themed anthology. So when I began to expand it into a novel, one of my guiding principles was that it had to remain a pirate story -- even though it's about a nerdish spacecraft hijacker 17 years in the future.

This in turn made me think about pirate stories, and what I realized is that most pirate stories aren't about piracy. Even the greatest classic of the genre, Treasure Island, isn't so much about pirating as about the aftermath. Even in pirate movies, the piracy mostly happens off-screen, as in Errol Flynn's Captain Blood, where the eponymous Captain's career as a pirate is crammed into a brief montage.

The most famous pirate film of recent years, Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, subverts the whole thing even more: it's about a band of pirates who are obsessively recovering stolen gold in order to put it back where they found it.

How did this happen? How can one have a genre in which the ostensible subject matter hardly ever comes up? It would be as if all Westerns wound up being set in New England or something. 

I think the tension in pirate fiction derives from two facts: 1) People think pirates were cool and romantic, and 2) Pirates were a horrible bunch of amoral sociopaths. The modern pirates of Somalia are following exactly in the tradition of their Jolly Roger predecessors, except that they use motorboats and AK-47s instead of fast sloops and cutlasses. So unless one wants to create a work of fiction which realistically depicts a bunch of amoral sociopaths in action (and now I wish someone would hire Quentin Tarantino to make a pirate movie), you kind of have to soft-pedal the looting, raping, and murdering in favor of rope-swinging stunts and buried chests of gold.

For Corsair I have tried to have my cake and eat it, too. David Schwartz really is an amoral sociopath -- and his eventual redemption is ultimately driven by the stripping away of all his romantic fantasies and self-justification.

But I also wanted to work in as many pirate movie cliches as possible. So there's the pirate haven of Tortuga (now a Disneyesque theme resort), a sea battle, a secret island, a rescue, a buried treasure, a duel (waged with keyboards instead of cutlasses), and an eyepatched villain. If I could figure out how to have someone swing on a rope at a key moment, I'd do it.

    

City Life

In my after-action report on the Arisia convention I mentioned that the "Future of Cities" panel had crystallized some ideas that had been floating around inside my head. The panelists spent a lot of time discussing problems that afflict modern cities, particularly the metropoli of the northeastern United States. Congestion, sprawl, and the need for affordable housing were the main topics.

Important note: I love cities. I grew up in one, and for most of my life one of my favorite ways to spend an afternoon has been to just walk around in a big city. 

The first thing that struck me was how many of the problems the panelists were trying to solve were the result of earlier attempts to solve other problems.

Consider the bugaboo of all big cities: traffic congestion. We call the morning and evening pulse of commuters "rush hour" even though one panelist pointed out that actual travel speed slows to a crawl. It's inextricably tied to the issue of urban sprawl, since as more people live outside the city, more people are trying to come and go at the same time. And this in turn is related to the issue of density: if more people could live affordably in the city, they wouldn't be traveling so far.

But go back in time a century or so and density was the problem. Slums like New York's Lower East Side had fantastic, Hong Kong-level population densities, with entire families crammed into one-room apartments. Nobody commuted because the parents typically worked right there, doing piecework, or "commuted" a block or so to the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory or a pushcart on the sidewalk.

And social reformers of the era were dead set on getting people out of those grimy firetraps, out to "garden suburbs" where the kids could maybe see a tree now and then, and sleep only two or three to a room in a bungalow rather than a tenement. 

Fast forward half a century or so and visionaries like Robert Moses were carving up whole neighborhoods to put in highways, to speed up the flow of traffic -- and to reduce everyone's dependence on railroads, which up till then had a virtual monopoly on long-distance transport. Midcentury architects and planners envisioned cities of huge towers, linked by absurdly wide avenues and highways, sweeping away all the street-level clutter of inefficient little shops and marginal businesses.

The second thing that struck me was how the solutions to the new problems were the same solutions that had caused them. Zoning rules, massive construction projects, and city planning destroyed the funky diverse neighborhoods of old, and now in order to encourage new funky diverse neighborhoods the answer is . . . more zoning rules, more massive construction projects, and more city planning. Ban the big-box stores to make people shop in their own neighborhoods! (Never mind that poor people will have to spend more to live, and someone's going to have to walk six blocks carrying a load of groceries.) Build more rail transit! (Never mind that rail transit in cities is incredibly bad at shifting to meet changes in demand and land use.) Et cetera.

What's particularly odd is that the model, the ideal that everyone (including myself, as I mentioned) aspired to was the cityscape of old European cities: walk-up buildings, narrow pedestrian-friendly streets, small blocks, lively street-level businesses, and an "organic" and visually diverse architectural landscape. It's odd because for the most part that landscape wasn't the result of zoning, massive construction projects, or city planning. People just built stuff. A few ambitious princes might put up a palace or two, or set Baron Haussmann to work carving out new avenues, but by and large the most charming towns in Europe just growed.

I wonder if the simple fact that a cityscape is obviously a built environment is what turns people into megalomaniacs when they think about cities. Just shake up the Etch-a-Sketch and draw a city that looks like what I want to live in. Use laws and policies to make people live the way I think they should.

Here's a simple question: has any city government tried simply responding to what the citizens do? Let people live and work where they want to? I know it's a pretty radical idea, but has it ever been tried?

Post-Arisia Report

I arrived at the Westin Hotel in Boston on Friday the 18th just as the convention was getting underway, and spent some time checking out the dealer room and saying hello to new arrivals. I did manage to attend one panel: "The Man Who Sold The Moon," featuring Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop stalwart Steven Popkes and Ian Randal Strock among others. The panelists veered back and forth between talking about private space development and talking about Heinlein.

The rest of Friday was taken up by a long dinner with the rest of the CSFW, then a tour through some of the bid parties and room parties before retiring.

On Saturday the 19th I managed to see one other panel, "The Future of the City" featuring the convention's Artist Guest of Honor Roger Dean. It was very interesting, and I plan to do an entire blog post inspired by it soon.

Then the mighty CSFW group reading, at which seven (count 'em! seven!) writers read short works or excerpts. I note without false modesty that mine was the only work written specifically for the occasion.

When that ended I hustled over to serve on another panel about going "Beyond Dice and Hit Points" at which we discussed the roots of roleplaying game mechanics in wargames, the reason cards never really made it as a game element, and the intriguing possibilities of diceless and "sheetless" games. Nearly all the panelists agreed that in the end, it's the caliber of the players and gamemasters that really matters.

I had a little time off after that, and then joined Dan Kimmel and Walter Hunt at the autographing table for the most pointless autograph session ever. Given that the signing area was literally as far away from the dealer area as it was possible to get without actually leaving the hotel, there wasn't much traffic. Still, I had an enjoyable time chatting with my two fellow guests, without any pesky fans bothering us about signing books.

After another break for dinner, I moderated the "Innovation Starvation" panel, riffing off Neal Stephenson's essay of the same name. All four panelists more or less agreed that we aren't in the middle of an innovation drought -- despite a cover story in last week's Economist asking the same question. We did talk about why people might believe that situation exists, and what (if anything) science fiction can do about it.

Wrapping up the day's serious literary events was the panel on Parasites and Zombies. As the designer of Parasites Unleashed! I was able to furnish lots of Fun Parasite Facts. There was a fair amount of discussion over the precise definition of a zombie, the issue of Slow vs. Fast Zombies, and whether any kind of zombie makes sense as anything but supernatural fiction.

The rest of the night was devoted to Building My Brand as an author by going to parties and bragging.

On Sunday I woke up early (certainly earlier than most of the people who were still partying hard when I went to bed). My only panel of the day was "Home-Based Business and Children," about balancing family life with working from one's home. The panelists enjoyed numerical superiority to the audience, but we soldiered on for the full time slot.

And that marked the end of Arisia 2013 for me, even though the convention had another 24 hours to run. I was concerned about getting home before the Patriots playoff game traffic immobilized all roads around Boston. 

Overall: high marks. With the exception of the autographing fiasco the convention was very well-organized and enjoyable. I'll be back next year if they'll have me, and then maybe I'll even have a novel to sign.

Game of Thrones

Some members of the Crack Team have become devoted fans of the HBO series Game of Thrones, based on George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series of fantasy novels. Consequently I've seen my share of episodes. It's a good show, with great actors. 

It also reveals something very interesting about a change in how people understand fiction. 

First some data. Sales figures for the books are about 15 million copies sold for the whole series, which works out to roughly 3 million copies of each book. So we can assume that A Song of Ice and Fire has around 3 million readers (maybe as many as 4 million if lots of people are borrowing copies from friends or the library).

The television series has about 10 million viewers per episode -- plus people like the Crack Team who watch it on DVD, and apparently a record-breaking number of people watching pirated downloads.

So roughly three times more people have watched Game of Thrones than have read A Song of Ice and Fire. Most people watching are not fans of the books.

Why is this important?

It's important because of something I noticed about the television show. It doesn't do any handholding. There's no narrative prologue or text crawl explaining what's going on. The viewers have to pick up on the setting's complex history (and geography, and biology, and theology, and all the rest) on the fly.

Compare this with the famous opening of Star Wars, which had to spell out that this is all taking place "a long time ago in a Galaxy far, far away" and helpfully lets you know that the heroic rebels are fighting the evil Galactic Empire. Or with the more recent films of The Lord of the Ringsand The Hobbit, by Peter Jackson -- both of which began with long backstory narration sequences.

Being able to figure out a fictional setting which isn't our own world (present or past) is a skill set which was once the jealous preserve of SF and fantasy fans. The late John M. Ford wrote a wonderful essay called "The Rules of Engagement" about how a great many readers simplycannot read science fiction or fantasy because they're unfamiliar with the implicit contract between reader and writer in those genres -- that if a writer makes a passing reference to, say, Queen Victoria II being crowned in 1952, it's not a typo but a useful clue to the nature of the setting. 

But apparently that skill set has now "escaped" into the general population, or at least is widely shared enough to support a television series, because that's exactly how the Game of Thronesseries depicts its fantasy setting. 

This is both good news and bad. It's good news because it gives one reason to hope for more high-quality fantasy and science fiction on TV and film. The old argument that "viewers won't understand" doesn't hold. (Assuming the viewers are stupid is a perennial failure by movie and television producers -- has any show actually failed because it was "too smart"? I know that moviemakers sometimes console themselves with that thought, but is it true?) 

It's bad news for the greater nerd community because it kicks away one of the props under our collective ego. Apparently we're not any smarter than anybody else. Mass audiences can learn to understand and enjoy the same works us geeks do. 

Viddy the Squiddy

Here's a neat news story: the first video footage of a giant squid in its natural habitat. Since I don't get the Discovery Channel, I'll have to be satisfied with looking at bootleg snippets on Youtube until the documentary finally makes it to Netflix.

However, one line in the news story caught my attention: that the giant squid was the origin of the legend of the Kraken and other tales of giant squiddy things in the sea. I found myself wondering if that's really true.

It seems commonsensical: there are stories about giant squids, now we've found a giant squid, obviously the squid inspired the stories. But is that necessarily true? After all, it took deep-diving submersibles, high-tech lures, and special cameras to actually get this footage. The giant squid lives deep down and is shy and cunning. Though Aristotle and Pliny mentioned giant squid, there's no evidence either actually saw a specimen. The first genuine scientific description of the species didn't come until the 19th century.

More to the point, I think assuming ancient stories of giant squids had to be inspired by real specimens seriously underestimates the creativity and imagination of people who lived long ago. They could make up stuff as well as we can (maybe better). It doesn't take seeing a giant squid to inspire stories of the Kraken -- all it takes is seeing a regular squid and a good imagination. 

We understand this about our contemporaries; nobody would claim that the makers of the cinematic landmark Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus were inspired by seeing actual sharks attacking airplanes. They made it up. And I'm willing to bet that some Greek fisherman sitting on the quay at Piraeus in Homer's time could make up a squid big enough to drag a ship beneath the waves, especially after a couple of bowls of wine.

So I strongly suspect that scientists haven't found the creature which inspired the stories. They've found a real creature which happens to match something someone imagined. 

Arisia 2013, Featuring ME

Next week I'm going to be a program participant at the always interesting Arisia convention in Boston, held at the Westin Waterfront hotel. My schedule, in case you want to follow me around and bask in my brilliance:

Saturday (January 19) at 11:30 a.m.: Cambridge SF Workshop Flash Fiction Reading. The members of the coolest writing workshop on Earth read short works. My own story has never before been heard by mortal ears.

Saturday at 1:00 p.m.: Beyond Dice and Hit Points. A panel on roleplaying game design. Do we really need all the stuff that has become part of the standard kit for RPGs?

Saturday at 4:00 p.m.: Autographing. I'll sign anything you put in front of me, along with Walter Hunt and Dan Kimmel. 

Saturday at 7:00 p.m.: Innovation Starvation? A panel inspired by Neal Stephenson's essay "Innovation Starvation" about the role SF can play in bringing about ambitious technology projects.

Saturday at 8:30 p.m.: Zombies: Victims of Parasites? In which the panelists talk about horrifying real-life mind-controlling parasites, and how to use them in zombie fiction. 

Sunday (January 20) at 10:00 a.m.: Home-Based Business and Children. How can one balance working from home with raising kids? 

I hope to see you all at Arisia!

Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 1)

A few months ago I wrote a How I Did It post about my short story "The Barbary Shore." In it I mentioned that I was expanding that story into a novel. In point of fact, I had nearly finished expanding it when I wrote that post -- or so I thought.

When I turned "Barbary Shore" into the novel Corsair, I had to change some stuff. The battle between Captain Black the Space Pirate and his nemesis Captain Santiago of Space Command became just the first chapter, and the rest of the book tried to answer the question "And then what happened?"

I also changed the outcome of that first battle. Captain Black wins it, hands down. He's the supreme badass of space, and his bank accounts are full of pirate loot. He retires to a pirate-themed Caribbean resort island with his latest girlfriend. Life is good -- except that it isn't. David Schwartz isn't the sort of person who can enjoy doing nothing. He winds up getting recruited by a shadowy character calling himself "Colonel Ghavami" to run another helium-piracy job. David heads off to Asia to build a new pirate satellite.

Meanwhile Captain Santiago gets punished for losing her battle with Captain Black. She is pulled off the antipiracy operation and assigned to an experimental propulsion project run by a small startup company in Florida. One of the partners in the firm is Jack Bonnet, an astronaut. Jack and Elizabeth tentatively move towards a romance -- but Elizabeth is also secretly re-purposing the company's experimental solar-thermal test spacecraft to use as a pirate-hunter.

 He gets double-crossed by his criminal partners and goes on the run, her scheme gets exposed and she's bounced out of the Air Force entirely . . . and then it turns out that David's criminal partners aren't really planning to steal the helium cargo at all. Their plans are much more sinister. The space pirate and the rogue pirate-hunter have to join forces as the clock of orbital mechanics ticks inexorably down. 

I wrote the expanded version . . . and discovered that in my quest to keep the narrative lean and fast-paced, I must have gone a little overboard because it was simply too short! So now I'm doing some large-scale revising, with an eye toward bulking the book up by about 50 percent. This means minor characters get more "screen time," and I'm considering adding another subplot if I can braid it into the narrative without the seams showing.

A Book About Venice

I love Venice, and I have enjoyed Peter Ackroyd's work in the past, so I was very pleased and excited when I got his book Venice: Pure City. But as I read it I became more and more frustrated and disappointed. 

Mr. Ackroyd attempts to paint a portrait of Venice, incorporating its history, its art, its mix of fantastic romance and hard-nosed commerce, its architecture, its people, and its effect on visitors over the years. It's a laudable goal, but I'm afraid the book falls short.

The problem is one of organization: because this was written in parallel with a British television documentary series Ackroyd worked on, the book's chapters cover different aspects of the city, like television episodes. But what works in episodic television doesn't work in print. The book is terribly unfocused, and lacks any kind of narrative or thematic spine.

Without a straightforward historical narrative, the reader drowns in interesting but disconnected historical trivia. There is no battles-and-dates history, few historical characters (other than the abstract collective "Venetians"), not even any of the economic minutiae beloved of modern historians. What we get is Ackroyd constantly gushing about shimmering surfaces, masks, and the color of the water. 

Nor would the book be of much use to anyone visiting Venice. It describes the modern city only as the commodified ghost of past glories. James/Jan Morris's Venice is far more useful as a practical guide even though it's fifty years old -- and manages to give one a better sense of the city's history and development, to boot.

I grew up in New Orleans, another water-girt city that trades on its romantic history and cultural importance, and I've always been struck by the tendency of outsiders to describe it as a single consistent object at all points in its history -- as if the city where Jean Lafitte sold smuggled goods is the same city that Walker Percy wrote about, and as if either of them is the place you can fly to this afternoon. 

Descriptions of Venice (also Florence and Rome) all focus on the past, ignoring the place that currently exists and the people who currently live there. Even as authors decry the "Disneyfication" of places like Venice and New Orleans, they participate in that process by focusing entirely on the glorious past. 

If I were a footloose youngster just out of college, looking for adventure with a laptop and a backpack, I'd head for a city like Venice or Florence -- but I'd stay in the modern city, the suburbs tourists avoid. Spend time in Mestre or Marghera, on the mainland end of the causeway to Venice; or the west side of Florence out by the airport and the University. I know that one finds some of the best "real New Orleans cooking" in suburbs like Marrero and Kenner, and I suspect one can find a lot of "real" Venice or Florence in the overlooked postwar housing tracts.

And what is "authenticity," anyway? A Venetian of the city's medieval days of imperial glory wouldn't recognize polenta (made from New World maize) -- does that mean that the signature dish of Venetian cuisine isn't "really" Venetian? 

I certainly understand the desire to preserve the past; I feel it very strongly myself. Old things and old ways get to be old because they work. But there's a narrow line between preserving the past and mummifying it. Instead of regretting that Venice no longer sends out galleys to shoot the hell out of the Turks, we should appreciate it for what it is: a modern city with a thriving tourism industry, inhabited by people who are world-class experts at getting people to pay for the experience of being there.