JOURNAL ENTRY #71August 15, 2010
ReConstruction, in Raleigh, NC, provided a picturesque stage for NASFiC last weekend. NASFiC, of course, substitutes for Worldcon when it is being held outside the US. There were lots of parties, and the dealers’ room provided a wide selection.
I helped conduct a workshop with Matt Rotundo. Matt is just getting his own career underway. Judging by what I saw, he’ll do fine. The overall organizer was Oz Drummond.
Our section of the workshop included three writers: Kim Zimring, who’d been a 2007 finalist with Writers of the Future; Gwendolyn Williams, who has a story coming up in Asimov‘s; and Dan Campbell, with a background in writing from college. Kim and Gwendolyn provided stories, while Dan had a novel excerpt.
I came away from the experience, as I have with other workshops, wondering whether the primary beneficiary at these things isn’t inevitably the people conducting the program.
Panels on which I served included a discussion of what the relationship between writer and editor should look like. That one’s easy: It should be similar to your relation to your eye doctor. Don’t do anything to upset the person who can cause you some serious damage.
We also talked about how to create believable aliens. I’ll confess I haven’t yet figured that one out. A lifelong experience with SF has taught me that as soon as an alien appears onstage, he becomes somebody in a bad makeup and funny clothes. I know, with modern technology, the movies are changing that. But it’s still difficult --and maybe impossible-- to bring off in a piece of fiction. Maybe it’s because we have no real experience with aliens. Because some of our own kind are so far out there that the twisted logic of an alien culture is no different from what we see daily in news reports.
And finally, there was a panel on the effect that TV and film SF has had on our lives. That one’s easy for me: Some of my earliest memories are of the old Buck Rogers serial. That lit the fire. Radio shows like Lights Out and Dimension X kept it going. And films like Howard Hawks’s The Thing and The Day the Earth Stood Still locked me in. I remember watching Rocketship X-M when I was in high school. That gave me a fascination with countdowns, which I got in the habit of doing during the last ten minutes of my last class each day.
Zero minus nine.
There are five or six radio episodes from the 1940's which I've never been able to forget.
One was the Lone Ranger being ill with a choked voice, and hauled around in the back of a covered wagon. (That was actually several broadcasts, and they were covering because the actor who played the part had died in a car accident.) And I recall Mandrake the Magician trapped in a cell on a sinking ship. And James Gunn's "The Cave of Night" on Dimension X. There was also a Lights Out episode.
I took some Lights Out shows with me to Raleigh. (The ride is about six hours one way.) Most, despite my early recollections, are not particularly noteworthy. Though to be fair, even the Stooges don't seem that funny anymore. But I was surprised to find the episode I remembered among the disks.
A young married couple, on vacation, go to the top of the Empire State Building. The listener is reminded that war has once again broken out in Europe. (The broadcast was in 1943.) On the roof, they look out across New York while ominous clouds gather and roll across the sky. When it’s time to leave, they discover that no one is manning the elevators. The offices on the top floors, occupied when they came in, are now empty. When they get downstairs, the lobby is deserted. There is no one on the sidewalks. Cars are left in the streets with their doors open. The radio stations are silent.
What has happened? Maybe, says the woman, God has finally gotten tired of it all.
On a related subject, I’d love to have known when I was listening to “The Cave of Night,“ that the day would come when I’d actually get a chance to sit down with James Gunn, share a pizza, and talk about science fiction.
I had dinner at the con with Joyce and Stan Schmidt and John Hemry. If you’re not familiar with his work, John has written the Lost Fleet novels, among others. He often writes under the pseudonym Jack Campbell, and he’s worth getting to know.
#
I just finished Rob Sawyer’s Watch. Rob has been doing extraordinary work for a long time now. Even for him, this one is exceptional.
#
Why are we so dumb? History is littered with wreckage, wars and wrecked civilizations and crazy ideologies. The August 16 Newsweek has a story by Sharon Begley, arguing that people who are persuasive are more likely to survive than those who think clearly. A good way to survive is to get people on board with our ideas. That, if I’m reading the article correctly, means appealing to emotions, being consistent, and overlooking evidence that might count against the position we have taken. Clear thinking is good, but not when it gets in the way of being persuasive.
#
In the pipeline: two Alex Benedict novels: Echo, scheduled for a November release; and Firebird, which will appear in November 2011. I’m probably getting ahead of myself here, but for 2012, I’ll be collaborating with Mike Resnick to do a novel based on “The Cassandra Project,” which appeared in the June issue of Lightspeed.