Just The Caffeine Talking

Culinary/Literary Notes

I can usually eat something without telling the world about it, but tonight I made a grilled marinated Porterhouse steak with an heirloom tomato salad, followed by fresh-picked ripe strawberries and ice cream. All served up on the porch on a perfect evening.

But that's not what I actually intended to post about today. Lately I've been reading Dumas on Food, an English translation/abridgement of Alexander Dumas's Grand Dictionaire de Cuisine.

The entry on "Cavaillon Melon" includes the following passage, which I commend to all my fellow authors:

"One day I received a letter from the municipal council of Cavaillon which informed me that they were establishing a library and were desirous of securing for it the best books which they possibly could. They therefore begged me to send them those two or three of my novels which to my mind were the best. Now, I have a daughter and a son, whom I think I love equally; and I am the author of five or six hundred volumes and belive myself to be just about equally fond of them all. So I replied to the town of Cavaillon that it was not for an author to judge the merits of his books, that I thought all my books good, but that I found Cavaillon melons excellent; and that I consequently proposed to send to the town of Cavaillon a complete set of my works . . . if the municipal council would be willing to vote me a life annuity of twelve green melons."

"The municipal council of Cavaillon . . . replied by return of post that my request had been unanimously endorsed, and that I would certainly receive my life annuity, which in all likelihood is the only one that I will ever have."

While I don't have an oeuvre of six hundred volumes, and so probably can't parlay a set of my books into a lifetime supply of anything, I think I could manage a one-to-one swap. If you like science fiction or roleplaying games, and have a Zamponi sausage or some chanterelles, contact me.

Arkad's World Review From Locus

The new Sage of Providence, Paul Di Filippo, wrote a very kind and perceptive review of Arkad's World. Somehow I missed it when it came out back in February, but he recently put it up on Facebook. You can read the full review here.

Then you can go buy the book.

Random Encounters: The Infinite Library

"The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal librarian. One of the free sides leads to a narrow hallway which opens onto another gallery, identical to the first and to all the rest. To the left and right of the hallway there are two very small closets. In the first, one may sleep standing up; in the other, satisfy one’s fecal necessities. Also through here passes a spiral stairway, which sinks abysmally and soars upwards to remote distances."

— "The Library of Babel," by Jorge Luis Borges

The name of the Infinite Library is a lie. The books within it have a finite number of pages and a finite number of letters per page, so the possible permutations are vast (10 to the 4677th power, according to one source). The library is much bigger than our own Universe, but it's not quite infinite. You can visit it here.

Each book in the Library contains a random assortment of letters, spaces, and punctuation. Some of them (a vast number) are readable books. Even more are gibberish. All possible books exist in the Library. Finding them is next to impossible.

Travelers come to the Infinite Library via magic or super-science, usually seeking a particular book. Without some way to locate the book you're seeking, you can wander the Library's galleries until you die and find nothing but randomness.

ENCOUNTERS IN THE INFINITE LIBRARY

(Technically, this table should be nearly infinite itself, since almost anything is possible in such a vast library.)

Roll 1d10 if you're staying in a single chamber of the Library, 1d20 if you're exploring.

1. Roll Twice and Combine
2. Alien Wizard: It's an ancient supergenius with five eyes, wings, and tentacles, and it knows secrets of magic you've never encountered. It's here looking for a particular book and won't leave without it.
3. Ghost: The phantom of an author searching for her books in the endless library. It's possible that all authors wind up here when they die . . .
4. Giant Book Worm: A worm twenty feet long, with a mouth a yard wide. It consumes books — but it won't say no to some fresh protein, either.
5. Giant Wasps: 1d6 wasps the size of dogs. They feed on books to make paper for their mammoth nests.
6. Gust of Wind: A blast of wind roars through this part of the library, stirring up a blinding cloud of dust and blowing out all lamps and candles.
7. Librarian: A tall robed figure, its face hidden by a hood, with inhuman proportions and extremely long fingers. The Librarian knows the location of all books and can give directions — but note that some books may be thousands of light-years away.
8. Madman: A visitor to the Library driven mad by the scale and the randomness of the books. There's a 50 percent chance that at first he seems rational and may give advice which is plausible-sounding but utterly delusional.
9. Origami Assassin: A small, stealthy killer made of folded pages, magically animated and sent after one of the party. It hides between books and waits to give its target a poisonous paper-cut.
10. Thieves: A band of 2d6 book thieves, sent to steal a particular book. In short, it's a rival band of adventurers. Roll 1d6 to see what they're armed with. (1: Clubs, 2: Knives, 3: Swords and Crossbows, 4: Revolvers, 5: Lasers, 6: Disintegrator Guns.)
11. Barricade: Someone has used the books in this room to wall off the entrance. There's a 50 percent chance that they're still inside; reroll to see who has built the book fort.
12. Dangerous Book: Instead of the book you're seeking, you've found a dangerous book. Roll on the Dangerous Books table below for its harmful effect.
13. Doctor: A blind physician who offers shelter and assistance to anyone who enters the room he uses. He is well-known in this part of the Library and anyone who harms him makes enemies of everyone else.
14. Empty Rooms: The shelves of the next 1d20 rooms have been emptied of books. Don't worry, near-duplicates of all of them exist somewhere.
15. Giant Silverfish: 1d6 roaches as big as cats. They scuttle among the books, eating the bindings and sometimes scavenging the bodies of the dead. There is a 10 percent chance that one of the silverfish has attained human-level intelligence and remembers all the books it has eaten.
16. Inquisitor: An official searching the Library for prohibited books. The odds of finding any book at random are basically zero, but they search anyway. There's a 50 percent chance that any Inquisitor is really a fraud, using bogus credentials to get stuff from people they encounter.
17. Purifiers: 2d6 members of a cult who believe the random nature of the books proves that this library is a Hellish creation. They destroy all books they encounter, casting them down the cosmologically-long shafts or building huge fires. Purifiers are unarmed but do not fear death.
18. THE Book: The one you came here to find is on the shelves of this room.
19. Wasp Nest: Giant wasps have filled this room with a paper hive made of pages of text. There are 2d6 Giant Wasps in the room, plus the remains of 1d6 unfortunate visitors stung to death.
20. Tracks: Roll again to see what the room has traces of.

DANGEROUS BOOKS

Roll 1d6 to see how harmful a Dangerous Book is.

1. Blindness: The words of the book damage the human visual cortex. The reader goes blind for the next 1d6 days.
2. Curse: Anyone who reads the book will be unlucky in all things for a year and a day.
3. Dreadful Knowledge: The book includes a description of something terrible which will happen to the character or a loved one. (Note that the prophecy can be false, but it is convincing.)
4. Haunted: A ghost begins stalking whoever read the book. It's both clever and sadistic, so will try to maximize the suffering it inflicts before killing its victim.
5. Madness: Reading the book drives a person mad. There's a 75 percent chance the insanity will fade in 1d6 days, a 20 percent chance it will last 1d6 weeks, and a 5 percent chance it's permanent. The exact form of the insanity is up to the gamemaster.
6. Poisoned: Literally. The pages of the book are toxic. Unless the reader wears gloves, he or she gets a dose of something.

SITUATIONS IN THE INFINITE LIBRARY

(Roll 1d6, then consult the table above to determine who A and B are.)

1. A desires B
2. A wants to capture B
3. A wants B dead
4. A wants to go somewhere
5. A wants to solve a mystery
6. A wants X

Disaster Excuses

One common thread running through science fiction, almost since the beginning, is a concept I call "Disaster Excuses." A Disaster Excuse is some awful event used to justify what would otherwise be an unlikely technological project, journey, or social change.

For a long time the standard Disaster Excuse was nuclear war. From 1945 up to the 1980s, nuclear war could justify almost anything. The most obvious was a return to medieval or even stone-age society — too many examples to count. It was also used to explain oppressive future religions, paranoid underground civilizations, secret time travel, and fertility cults. As with most Disaster Excuses, it was a prime mover for the colonization of space.

But it wasn't the only one. Beginning in the 1960s, pollution and overpopulation became equally prominent Disaster Excuses. Again, an overcrowded Earth was often the justification for colonizing other worlds or voyaging to the stars. Draconian population-control regimes served as the rationale for any number of dystopian futures.

Overpopulation waned a bit as a Disaster Excuse, for a couple of reasons. First, the trend lines have gotten less worrisome as the birth rates in country after country drop to replacement level or below. Second, once writers realized that most of the population growth was coming from outside North America and Europe, it was hard to ignore the kinda racist aspect of that particular apocalypse.

Pollution morphed into Climate Change, and is still going strong. It also seems to have spawned an odd backlash against space colonization. Because various writers over the years used environmental destruction on Earth as the pretext for terraforming Mars or settling planets of other stars, somehow the idea got around that this was a serious proposal. Consequently I've seen a number of critiques of space colonization centered around the idea that "we can't run away from Earth's problems!"

Astronomical disasters occasionally crop up as Disaster Excuses — most notably in When Worlds Collide. They do lack the social relevance of other excuses, since you can't really show off your political bona fides by taking a stand against colliding planets or interloping black holes.

All this does raise a question, though: why do we need a Disaster Excuse at all? Surely colonizing Mars or sending spacecraft to other stars are things worth doing even if Earth is a perfectly swell place to live. I'd even argue that a peaceful and prosperous society is actually more likely to tackle large projects like those. A starving or war-torn world is too busy struggling for survival. The Apollo program was launched in the booming 1960s; the leaner 1970s saw massive cutbacks in space budgets. Right now we're in another boom era, so that eccentric billionaires can afford their own space programs. I think I prefer that to fighting over my next Soylent ration.

Changes in Fandom: A Different Perspective

Judith Dial (editor of the delightfully un-redacted Conspiracy! anthology) published some remarks on the Amazing Stories blog about the shifts in fandom which provide an interesting "parallax view" on my own musings about status and social class in SF. You can read her post here.

Boskone 2019

This Friday and Saturday I'll be appearing at the venerable Boskone science fiction convention, at the swanky Westin Waterfront hotel in Boston. Here's my schedule if you want to join in.

Friday, February 15, 4:00 p.m.: The Most Alien Aliens

A panel discussion about creating aliens and what our depictions of them say about ourselves. With me, Stephen Kelner, Jeffrey Carver, Laurence Brothers, and Karl Schroeder.

Friday, February 15, 7:00 p.m.: Game Editing

A discussion of how editing works in different kinds of games, and why it's important. Featuring me, Carlos Hernandez, Melanie Meadors, and M.C. DeMarco.

Saturday, February 16, 10:00 a.m.: Classic Dungeons & Dragons

Join me for a very old-school Basic D&D game. Characters will be provided. This session is only one hour, so be prepared to think fast!

Saturday, February 16, noon: Reading

I'll be reading from Arkad's World and taking any questions my listeners might have.

Saturday, February 16, 4:00 p.m.: Signing

I'll be at the signing table with Dan Kimmel, Bracken MacLeod, and Karl Schroeder. I'll sign whatever you bring me.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pandemonium Event February 6!

". . . with awful ceremony and trumpet's sound, throughout the host proclaim a solemn council forthwith to be held at Pandemonium . . . " 

— Paradise Lost

This Wednesday at 7:00 p.m. I'll be at Pandemonium Books & Games in Cambridge for a reading, signing, and discussion of my new novel Arkad's World. Everybody come!

Class, Status, and SF Continued

The movie science fiction boom of the 1980s pumped a lot of money into the field. SF and fantasy authors began to get six-figure advances for novels, and sometimes cracked the New York Times bestseller list. Money and status usually go together (but not always, as we shall see in a moment), so you didn't hear the genre condemned as "trash" any more.

Science fiction had arrived, we thought in the 1980s. Academics were giving SF novels and short stories serious attention, bookstores were displaying them up by the front door, and moviemakers were paying big bucks for film rights.

Little did we know . . .

A lot of the SF fans of the 1970s and 1980s went into the hot new fields of computer engineering and programming. Some of them started companies making computers, or operating systems, or games. And by the 1990s some of those companies became global giants. Science fiction books didn't make it onto the bestseller lists as often in that decade, but science fiction fans were making it onto the "Forbes 400" list of the world's richest people.

As I write, the #1 person on the Forbes list is Jeff Bezos, described by Wiredmagazine as a "lifelong science fiction fan." Elon Musk cites the Foundation series by Asimov and The Hitchiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams as major influences on him. The late Paul Allen, one of the founders of Microsoft, even used part of his fortune to endow the Science Fiction Museum and Hall of Fame in Seattle.

Science fiction isn't just respectable. It's actually cool now. The world's richest men read it when they're not actually building rocketships to colonize Mars. There are TV shows which center on groups of SF fans — the people who would have been the goofy sidekicks of the cooler lead characters a generation ago. We've won!

Ah, but history shows that victors often begin quarrelling among themselves. Science fiction's new respectability has sown the seeds of conflict in the field and in fandom. In particular, its new literary respectability has created a split between the writers and fans in the literary/academic world, and the ones who stick to the older model of writing popular fiction for a mass market.

I think this is one reason why so much conflict centers on the awards and award nominations. For people trying to write for money, an award is a nice cherry on top of the sundae — a prize demonstrating that one has earned the esteem of fellow professionals and devoted fans. But for academics, prizes and awards are serious business. They go on your curriculum vitae and help you get teaching jobs, fellowships, and grants. Winning SF awards is a way to gain status that the academic writer needs. They'll lobby and network and fight to get them. 

The need for status bleeds over into the publishing world, too. If you are, for example, a twenty-five-year-old assistant editor working for a publisher in New York, you're not making much money. You're probably sharing a Manhattan apartment with three other people, or commuting from Queens or New Jersey and wishing you could afford to live in Brooklyn.

Meanwhile your classmates from Sarah Lawrence or Smith are Congressional staffers, or investment bankers, or maybe have a gig at a nonprofit. They have wealth, or power, or both. But at the class reunion, you aren't intimidated, because you're a book editor. That has status, too. But like all status, it has to be maintained. It's fragile. If your classmate the Deputy Assistant Undersecretary of Miscellaneous Affairs asks what you've published lately, it's a little embarassing (still!) to admit it's a book about giant alien lobsters, or space pirates, or treasure-hunters on another planet.

There's more status if you can describe the book as intersectional, or "transgressive" (though not really transgressive), or talk about the author's exotic background. It's much less fun if the writer's just some ordinary science fiction guy writing ordinary science fiction. If that's the case the conversation will shift away from your work and the investment banker will start talking about the condo she's buying on the Upper West Side, and you get to stand there feeling like a failure.   

(I'm not even going to talk about the role of social media, partly because I am not much of a Twitter or Instagram user, and mostly because I think Twitter is the greatest threat to human civilization since the Black Death.)

Meanwhile, the vast expansion of "nerd culture" over the past half-century has created sub-fandoms which increasingly have little to do with one another. A few years back I went to a science fiction convention in Austin, and my wife and I found ourselves sitting across the aisle from a younger couple with a "fannish" look about them. We asked if they were also going to the convention. They said yes — but it turned out they were heading for a different convention in Austin that weekend, one centered on animation fandom, and hadn't even heard of the "literary" con we were attending. There are new status pyramids arising.

I'm afraid this atomization will only continue. As more authors take to self-publishing, I expect to see more and more little unconnected pockets of fandom, possibly unaware of each other. Instead of science fiction conventions, or even specialized written SF conventions, we'll see hyper-specialized single-author or even single-universe meetups. (Anyone who wants to put together a CambiasCon should email me privately.)

On the plus side, I have hope for a revival of local fan communities. It's much easier nowadays for fans outside the big cities to get in touch, and there are so many of us now that even a small or medium town get-together could bring together as many fans as the first Worldcon did. Maybe that's what SF needs — more drunken pool parties and movie nights, less fighting over status. It's something to hope for.

Open the Pod Bay!

You can hear my voice on the latest episode of the Baen Free Radio Hour podcast, talking about Arkad's World and various digressions. Listen here.

Class, Status, and SF

I spent last weekend at the Arisia science fiction convention in the heart of Boston. My chief amusement at conventions is the panels. I don't like "filk" singing much, I can rent my own videos, and I don't wear costumes (other than my "professional SF writer" outfit). I keep intending to spend more time in the game room but I never remember to do it. So it's panels, both as a participant and as part of the audience.

At SF cons you'll see lots of panels about the history of science fiction and fantasy, panels on how to write good, panels about the businesses of writing and publishing, panels about specific authors — and, lately, panels about race and gender in science fiction.

But you won't see much about social status. A few "worldbuilding" discussions may touch on how to use the social class structure of the Middle Ages in your fantasy settings, but that's about it. Nobody talks about the role of social status in science fiction and fantasy, nor about their place in our society's status pyramid.

Science fiction emerged as a recognizable genre (and gave birth to the original "fandom") in the pulp magazine era. Amazing Stories began in 1926, and Astounding in 1930, so let's pick 1930 as our start date. What status did science fiction have?

It was trash. Read any memoir by SF authors or fans who grew up before 1960 or so: every one of them includes at least one confrontation with a parent or a teacher or even an employer about "Why are you wasting your time reading that garbage?"

Now, some of that was due to the often clunky writing, but a lot of other awful writing was published in the early 20th century which didn't get condemned as garbage out of hand. I think the "lowbrow" reputation of SF came from who read it rather than how it was written.

Science fiction in the pulp era wasn't aimed at the educated segments of society. It took thirty years and the arrival of nuclear weapons and space travel for SF to make it into the "highbrow" markets, and it's still scarce there. No, the target market for the original SF magazines was blue-collar or lower-middle-class young men. The same young men who mailed off for Charles Atlas's "dynamic tension" system for building muscles, or correspondence courses in radio repair.

I get the impression that the early SF writers were a step up, socially, from their readers. Most of them had at least a couple of years of college, though they tended to have engineering, scientific, or business degrees rather than studying the liberal arts. None of them went to Harvard or Yale. America's elites didn't do science fiction in those days.

(Digression: even today, Harvard is startlingly under-represented in the science fiction field, with only Michael Crichton and William Burroughs to its credit. Interestingly, Radcliffe College — before its final merger into Harvard — had a considerably better track record than its sibling school, boasting Margaret Atwood, Ursula LeGuin, and Anne McCaffrey, though all of them graduated after World War Two. End digression.)

Science Fiction moved a couple of steps up the social scale as a result of the Second World War. When those Harvard and Yale grads running the government are suddenly interested in rocketships and atomic bombs, it's harder to look down on the non-Harvard people writing about them. Not impossible, but harder. This new respectability included the ultimate "middlebrow" accolade: a science fiction anthology in the Random House "Library of America" series. (See my review beginning here.) Science fiction stories began appearing in the mass-market "slick" magazines like Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post.

There was still a whiff of the gutter about the field, though. For every respectable-looking hardcover from Gnome Press or Doubleday, there were a dozen SF paperbacks with lurid covers and easily-mocked titles. The fact that SF fans of that era could easily go haring off after weirdness like the "Shaver Mystery" or Dianetics didn't help.

The postwar era also saw a rapid growth in SF fandom. Tom Wolfe devoted much of his journalistic career to studying a phenomenon he noticed in the 1960s: the post-World War Two prosperity in America was so huge, and so widespread across the social spectrum, that every social class could indulge in hobbies and subcultures on a scale which only the wealthy had been able to manage a generation earlier. Custom car fans and teenage surfers and Appalachian amateur car racers could turn their obscure hobbies into major cultural phenomena.

Science fiction fandom followed suit. The lower-middle-class SF fans could now afford to travel halfway across the country for conventions, as a regular event rather than a once-in-a-lifetime indulgence. Fans could publish monthly zines, and construct costumes which would outdo anything at one of Louis XIV's masquerade balls.

The academy began to discover SF in the 1960s, as more SF readers went to college. Academic scholars had to fight for elbow room with SF's own internal apparatus of critics and historians, but academia could offer something that the fanzine and Locus reviewers couldn't: status. In such an affluent society, mere wealth was no longer the sole marker for social status. Academic prestige began to have equal, or even greater value.

And then . . . Boom! Beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s science fiction began it slow takeover of visual media. The first big SF movie hit wasn't Star Wars — it was Planet of the Apes (1968). That SF movie spawned four sequels and a short-lived TV series, and made more money during its initial run than the other famous science fiction film of 1968, Kubrick's 2001 (though 2001 surpassed it later on). Star Wars merely cemented space adventure as the big money movie genre for a generation.

Meanwhile, a bunch of nerds in the Bay Area and Washington State were about to change everything. We'll pick up there next time.