JOURNAL #129

                                                   January 15, 2013

 

            Occasionally, we learn something that completely changes our perspective about someone. It turns out that a movie actor whom we’d admired charges a substantial amount of money for an autograph. (Poor thing seriously needs the cash.) Or a football coach beats his wife. Or, in these times, an athlete takes performance-enhancing drugs.

            Sometimes it’s different. Sometimes we’ve known all about the individual for years, but never quite put the pieces together. Jack Kennedy cheated on his wife, but you don’t get the impact until a woman is interviewed on TV and details the experience. Mimi Alford was nineteen years old when she arrived at the Kennedy White House as an intern. If we can accept the story –and there seemed no reason not to— any claim she might have had to virginity was gone within four days.

            Okay, we’ve always known that Kennedy had a track record. But watching Alford describe what happened was painful. Like almost everyone else who was around during the Camelot years, I had more admiration and affection for this president than for any other public figure in memory. And it’s all still there. I loved the Vaughn Meader impersonations http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X0jMe-3_Dl0 and Robert Frost at the inauguration and the overall sense that we would bear any burden, share any hardship…. He promised to take us to the Moon, and he delivered. Ike had been a good president, but Kennedy was movie star material. I had just returned stateside after an Asian tour and, if my memory is correct, election day coincided with my first full day at home on the road in Arizona. Three years later, we were all scarred by the assassination.

            Afterward, gradually, news of the scandals leaked out. As Robert Dyke’s time traveler memorably phrased it in his film Timequest, it was a second assassination.      

            So okay, this is all old news, even if the appearance of Mimi Alford, more victim than willing collaborator, provided a fresh jolt. But even that became minor league stuff when I came across an Atlantic book review in its current (Jan-Feb) issue. The book is Sheldon Stern’s The Cuban Missile Crisis in American Memory: Myths versus Reality.   

            At the time, everybody followed the story. JFK went on TV and showed pictures of the Soviet missiles. It didn’t take a mathematician to see how vulnerable Miami and Atlanta were. He then warned Khrushchev to stay clear. A naval fleet blocked off Cuba. And, for fourteen days, the nation held its breath. It was the most unnerving event I can recall in my life.

            Fortunately the USSR backed off. There was pressure on Kennedy to invade Cuba, an action that almost certainly would have ignited World War III. According to Stern, leading the charge for the invasion was Bobby Kennedy. In the end, the Soviets retreated, a grateful nation began to breathe again, and life returned to normal.

We learned later that JFK had cut a deal behind the scenes offering to remove U.S. missiles in Turkey and Italy.

            We are now being told that the U.S. missiles in question would have taken an inordinate amount of time to launch, and therefore could only be useful in a first strike. That had alarmed the Soviets, who could not live with that threat hanging over their heads. (We are also being informed now that a first strike by the U.S. was no off the table, as we’d all assumed during those innocent years.) In any case, the Soviets had responded by putting their missiles into Cuba. Those missiles, by the way, according to experts, would have made no significant difference had war erupted. And they have Kennedy on tape admitting as much.

Why then all the fuss? Why were we risking Armageddon? We were unhappy that the Soviets had ignored our demand that they get out of Cuba. And that was the real reason for the stand-off.

The interesting thing about all this, that, e.g., our missiles had been the cause, was generally known, except that nobody put the pieces together. At least I didn’t. And I can’t recall seeing that the media did.

                                                          #

Another case of not looking clearly at events: George H. Nash’s book, Freedom Betrayed, is a collection of Herbert Hoover’s behind the scenes documents on WWII. It was obvious to the world that the Soviets used the war to take over eastern Europe and China. I knew we hadn’t done anything to help. But I bought the general position that we were too busy with the Germans and Japanese, and Stalin took advantage. It’s true as far as it goes.

But Hoover points out that the Soviets couldn’t have simply walked away from a war in which they stood in a central position. It feels more as if the Allies were bullied by Stalin. In any case, we didn’t lift a finger to help the nations that were being absorbed. And the two guys who let Stalin have his way were both, in my view, heroes. For a long time. FDR and Churchill.         

 

 

                                                        JOURNAL #130

                                                        January 31, 2013

 

A story showed up briefly in the media this week, but didn’t get much play. That was probably not surprising in that it dealt with an issue of world-wide significance which is politically explosive and therefore routinely doesn’t get noticed.

The State Department invited Australian Bindi Irwin, the daughter of Steve Irwin, the famed Crocodile Hunter, to write a short essay commenting on what could be done about wildlife preservation for eJournal USA. The December issue, they explained, would be headlined “Go Wild: Coming Together for Conservation,” and would put forward a State Department initiative aimed at protecting wildlife and reducing illegal trafficking.

Bindi is only fourteen. But she’s obviously a lot more than a kid. She’s had her own TV show, has starred in a film, has been a guest on Ellen DeGeneris, Oprah, David Letterman, and Larry King. She feels passionate about the issue, and consequently went directly to the heart of the problem. Unfortunately, the heart is another of those third rails that nobody wants to touch. I’ve never heard it mentioned by a politician. Yet it is critical, and we are in trouble.

Global population recently hit 7 billion. During the late Middle Ages, there were about 350 million people on the planet. There are now almost that many in the United States. World population is now increasing at approximately 80 million per year. By the time President Obama delivers his 2017 farewell address, we will have added the equivalent of another U.S. population onto this already-crowded planet. Not sure where we’re going to put everybody.

This reality places stress on fresh water resources, the environment, food production, and energy. We are also driving other life forms out of existence.

We’re in the middle of a major extinction event. And we are the cause.

Polar bears are near the end. So are several species of whales, gorillas, turtles, parrots, tigers, rhinos, and ferrets. Pandas are in trouble, as are jaguars, bald eagles, leopards, elephants. And the list goes on.

Bindi submitted, as requested, a 1000-word essay to the State Department and described the problem. The Earth's population was expanding, she wrote, and the planet was reaching a point where it could no longer be supported. She used the simple analogy of a child's birthday party in which 15 people are invited, a caterer is brought in, but 70 show up. The editors at State apparently responded by cutting all references to the party, and overpopulation in general, added some comments of their own, and returned the essay for her approval. They apparently assumed that a 14-year-old girl would be delighted at their willingness to accept her work and would go along with it. They might have underestimated Bindi.

She was outraged and declined publication. "I hadn't said anything they had put in,” she said. “My words were twisted and altered and changed. I was a little bit shocked to tell you the truth."

The source of the story was Sydney's Daily Telegraph.

Overpopulation figures to be another of those issues that we won’t talk about until a series of disasters leaves us no choice. Climate change, anybody? Making guns available to lunatics?

Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/bindi-irwin/2013/01/25/crocodile-hunter-s-daughter-bindi-irwin-upset-hillary-s-office#ixzz2JYWy3BdF

                                                    #

Futuredaze, a YA anthology edited by Hannah Strom-Martin and Erin Underwood, has been released. It’s gotten good early reviews. One story, “A Voice in the Night,” features a teenage Alex Benedict, his uncle Gabe, and a pilot named Kolpath. But don’t assume you know her.                                 

                                                      JOURNAL #131

                                                      February 15, 2013

​

            If all goes according to schedule, Alex will be back in a 2014 novel. I don’t have a title for it yet, but it involves an archeological mystery that brings him and Chase to Earth. That’s become something of a challenge in that I have no clue what the home world will look like in his time, which is 9000 years in the future. Alex visited Earth at the beginning of The Devil’s Eye, but I didn’t have to work out much in the way of details because he and Chase were on their way back to Rimway before the prologue ended. Things will be different this time around.

            If you’re wondering about the issues: What will the political realities be? What are the odds there will still be a United States? How much of a population will the planet have? (That is, will it still be crowded, but even more so? And consequently will Earth be one of the more backward worlds in the Confederacy? Or will it be the heart of the system?)

            How much will be left of what we can see today? Will there be a New York or a London? Will anything of ours still be standing other than, maybe, the pyramids, Boulder Dam, and the Great Wall of China?

            Will there be a single world government? If there is a USA, will Florida still be one of the states?

            What kind of shape will the environment be in? What will the people living in that time remember about us? If anything?

            What artifacts will survive?

                                                                  #

            Book clubs can be a lot of fun. Mine met this morning on St Simons Island. We were discussing The Gnostic Gospels, by Elaine Pagels. The Gnostics seem to have been the religious rebels of the first two centuries of Christianity. They weren’t big on dogma, they didn’t care much for people telling them what was sinful and what was virtuous, and they thought ultimate truth came from examining oneself, and not from religious authorities.

            One of points that came up for discussion was the change in religious life that occurred when belief switched over to a monotheistic deity. It reminded me of a story I’d read years ago in The Atlantic, whose title and author I can’t recall. A reporter wonders what really happened at Lourdes, and why the only survivor of the three children seemed to be hidden away in a convent. The solution: It wasn’t Mary who showed up as the apparition; it was Pallas Athena!

                                                                          #

            There’s good news from the United Kingdom. Headline Publishing will be releasing paperback editions of the Alex & Chase novels, and the Academy novels, two at a time beginning in May, and leading up to Starhawk in November. The first two will be A Talent for War and Polaris.

                                                                         #

            We’ll be surviving another near miss this evening when an asteroid half the length of a football field passes at a range of about 17,000 miles. Sounds like a lot, but by planetary scales, it’s downright scary. If something like that hits, the damage will not be limited to the local area.

            We’ve been here a long time without getting hammered, but these rocks seem to be showing up with increasing frequency. Maybe our telescopes are getting better. In any case, I can’t help wondering if we’re looking at a story line here?

                                                                          #

            I’ve been trying for about forty years without any success to get to some of Scott Fitzgerald’s novels. A few weeks ago we watched “Midnight in Paris,” with a Woody Allen script in which a screenwriter on vacation with an obnoxious girlfriend climbs into a time-traveling taxi in the French capital, and encounters Hemingway and Fitzgerald, among other celebrities of the 1920’s. It’s a beautiful film. And I’m happy to report that I’ve finally started Tender Is the Night.                                                                                                        

                                                   JOURNAL #132

                                                     March 3, 2013

 

            I’ve always been impressed by people who jump into a book and stay with it until they’ve finished. My own habitual method is to keep a stack on my bedroom side table and the coffee table and more or less rotate them as the mood hits. In case anyone’s interested, here’s a list of current reading and books recently finished:

                                       The Gnostic Gospels, Elaine Pagels  

                                       The Spoon River Anthology, Edgar Lee Masters

                                       Before the Big Bang, Brian Clegg

                                       Anomalies, Gregory Benford

                                       Tender Is the Night, F. Scott  Fitzgerald

                                       The Twelve Caesars, Michael Grant

                                       The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom

                                       Queen of Iron Years, Lyn McConchie

                                       Futuredaze, edited by Hannah Strom-Martin and Erin Underwood                                                  The Whole Shebang, Timothy Ferris

                                       Knocking on Heaven’s Door, Lisa Randall

 

            I should also include the book that is on my stationary bike:

                    Where God Lives in the Human Brain, Carol Rausch Albright & James B. Ashbrook

            Some, like Ferris’s book, I’ve been reading for years, going back to and rereading sections. Others, like Bloom’s exposition on the American perspective, I more or less stayed with until I’d finished. (That one was for my book club.) I’ve also recently launched on Joseph Wallace’s SF novel Invasive Species. That’s for blurb purposes. I’m only about a hundred pages in, but it works fine. Anyone who picks it up should have trouble putting it down.

            This might be a place to admit that, after H. G. Wells’s Martians, I more or less lost my taste for scary aliens. But after all these years, Wallace has me locked in again. His aliens, if that’s indeed what they are, are the scariest I can remember. Ever.

                                                                     #

            We discovered Downton Abbey this year. And got sucked in like apparently everybody else in the country. Great series.

            Also, I don’t see many films anymore that strike me as being memorable. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies over the better part of a lifetime. Even when the film is effectivelt done, there’s usually, at least, a repetitiveness, a sense of having seen all this before. Or maybe they’re just too similar in too many ways. But there were two over the last few days that,, I’m sure, will stay with me. “Lost Valentine” with Betty White and Jennifer Love Hewitt, scored with a story line in which a young woman says goodbye on February 14, 1943, in a train station, to her navy pilot husband as he heads off to the Pacific. But he does not return. We see White as the widow sixty years later, not so much still mourning the loss as celebrating the couple of years she had with her husband. The aftermath comes when a cynical young reporter tries to turn it into a TV clip.

            The other film was “Big Miracle,” with Drew Barrymore and John Krasinski. Everybody gets together at Point Barrow, Alaska, in an effort to rescue three whales trapped as the ice closes in. This one is based on the 1988 incident.

            The film did not do well at the box office. Probably not enough shootings.

                                                                           #

            We try to post the journal entries at the beginning and middle of each month. This one is a bit late because I became embroiled in my current novel and simply lost track of the calendar. A man with a history of heart problems, who has been a longtime critic of Alex Benedict, is found dead on a mountain slope. It would have been a long climb from ground level. And there’s no apparent reason for him to go. What was he doing up there?

            It took the better part of three days trying to figure out a rationale.

            There aren’t many things in this world as much fun to play around with as a good mystery.                                

                                                                                                      

                                                    JOURNAL ENTRY #133

                                                              March 15, 2013

             

            These days are completely caught up in the Alex & Chase novel that’s scheduled for a November 2014 release. It doesn’t have a title yet, and at the moment I’m only about a quarter of the way through. Over the last few days I’ve been violating one of the principles I always push in workshops: Complete the first draft before you do anything else. That’s the brute work. Don’t worry about fixing stuff until you can see a complete run-through of the novel.

            It sounds good. But rules are designed for exceptions. Like when you’re on the wrong track and will only have to toss everything out anyhow. It happened to me when I was writing A Talent for War, which introduced Chase and Alex. But neither one was in the original plan. The novel was based on “Dutchman,” a short story I’d done for Asimov’s. In the story, a starship blunders onto the aftermath of the 200-year-old war between humans and Mutes, and discovers that the official history was wrong. With Talent, I decided to do the actual blow-by-blow of the war. Neither Alex nor Chase appeared in the first draft, of course, which read like a straight military SF novel, depicting the struggle of an unlikely hero who leads human forces against invading Mutes. But it didn’t feel right. I didn’t know why, so I stayed with my plan.

            There was nothing really wrong with the base narrative, but it was just another military SF shoot-out, and I gradually realized that the approach in “Dutchman” had much better possibilities. If long after the war, that starship shows up and uncovers the inconsistencies in the standard account, it would be possible to send an historian out after the truth.   

The historian morphed into an antiquarian who becomes accidentally involved, and the antiquarian needs a pilot, so Alex and Chase arrive on the scene.

            The painful aspect was that I had to toss the bulk of what I’d written. Somewhere around 70,000 words. About 20,000 words still survives in the novel. (The alert reader would have no trouble spotting it.)

Talent was only my second novel. It was five years before I attempted another one. But I’d learned that sometimes the subconscious takes over. And it’s a good idea to listen when it does.

                                                                          #

            I had a similar feeling yesterday about a chapter in the new book. I’m about a quarter of the way in. Alex and Chase have arrived at Earth’s space station. They pass through customs and, shortly thereafter, are in a shuttle on the way to the ground. And the alarm went off.

            The pacing was wrong. Things were happening too fast.

            Chase, the narrator, had been to Earth once before, in the prologue to The Devil’s Eye. But she’d been preoccupied playing escort to a pair of Mutes. So this second flight could be parlayed as the first time she’d really been alone, say, in a restaurant on the space station, looking down on the home world. That meant she should experience the emotional impact of being back where it all began. Of being home. All that’s necessary is to give Alex something else to do for an hour. Maybe sleep.

            I wondered how I could have missed it. Anyhow, it’ll happen today. And I’ll confess I’m looking forward to Chase’s reaction. I’m not sure how it will go. That’s up to her. And I know how that sounds. But one of the very odd things about this business is that frequently the characters simply take over the action. Especially someone like Chase.

 

 

                                                      JOURNAL #134

                                                         April 1, 2013

 

            Kay Holt and Athena Andreadis have just launched The Other Side of the Sky, an anthology built around female heroes. I haven’t had time to read it yet, but Athena was enthusiastic about it, so I’d be surprised if it’s not a pretty good ride. It includes my own story, “Cathedral.”

            I’ve been writing more short fiction than usual lately. The current issue of Analog has “Glitch.” For those who are graduates of LaSalle University in Philadelphia, the upcoming edition of the school’s magazine LaSalle will have “The Play’s the Thing.” I’ll admit to having been excited when they invited me to contribute a story. Back in 1954, when I was in my first year at LaSalle, they were running an annual freshman short story contest. I submitted “A Pound of Cure,” which won. It was one of the happiest moments of my young life. And there was even more cause for celebration when they published it in LaSalle’s literary magazine, Four Quarters.

            There is nothing so encouraging to an aspiring writer as the first time you see your by-line on a piece of fiction. I should mention that I eventually became a sports columnist for the LaSalle newspaper.

            One of my earliest ambitions was to become a journalist. During my senior year at LaSalle, I applied to the Philadelphia Inquirer, but they smiled politely at me and suggested I get my military obligation taken care of first. It was the era of the draft.

            Eventually, after four and a half years in the Navy, I picked up a job as a reporter for a small South Jersey weekly. It was as close as I ever got to fulfilling that dream.

                                                                         #

            These are nervous times, which in one way also remind me of my college years. At that time, nuclear war was a distinct possibility. My high school years had included preparation drills in case the Soviets showed up. I don’t know how many of us actually thought we could survive an all-out nuclear attack. And in any case some people didn’t seem to have any idea about the extent of the threat. I recall one adult expressing concern that an atomic bomb might land in a nearby oil refinery. ‘Those oil tanks go up, heaven help us.’

            Fortunately, the Russians were not dummies, and they had no more interest in a nuclear exchange than we did. So we got through it. But Kim Jong Un doesn’t seem aware of the realities. If I could locate his email address, I’d take the Dennis Rodman approach and try sending him a note. Let’s get the president to call the guy, say hello, and invite him over to watch a couple of basketball games.

                                                                             #

            We live in Brunswick, GA. If the name rings a bell, it’s probably because we’ve been in the national news lately. A lady with an infant in a stroller was headed home from the post office a few days ago when she was approached by two teens with a gun. ‘Give us your money or we’ll shoot your baby.”  Unfortunately, she had no money.

            So Brunswick, which most of us had always thought of as a safe community, turns out to be just as potentially lethal as any other place. Every time I reach a point where I come to oppose the death penalty, another horrific act takes me back. Two juveniles have been charged. As well as the mother of the accused shooter, who, police believe, tossed  the murder weapon into a pond.                    

 

 

                                             JOURNAL ENTRY #135

                                                     April 15, 2013

 

            We take a lot of things for granted, and tend not to notice them until they go away. I was reminded of that twice this week. Last night the Golden Isles chapter of the Military Officers’ Association of America gave scholarships to seven local high school students. The kids literally glowed as they accepted the awards, said a few words of thanks to the organization, and to the parents and teachers who’d helped them get where they are. And of course, they couldn’t resist a moderate display of pride.

            It occurred to me that those of us born into western civilization all collect scholarships. We may not make it through college, but teachers and facilities are provided for twelve years. Reports of school closings for lack of funds in some areas underlined the very generous provision the USA makes for all of us. It doesn’t happen everywhere. Some places are simply too backward. Many don’t have the resources. Others have cultural roadblocks. In some Islamic areas, girls who seek to learn basic math risk their lives. (Although there is progress toward equal rights. A Saudi prince this week got some unwelcome attention from conservatives when he suggested that maybe women should be allowed to drive.)

            The second event occurred when the Water Commission informed us that a large tree on the street behind ours had to be taken down, and, as a precaution, they were going to shut the water off for a few hours.

            We live with water and electricity in our homes, and never really think about the significance of either. They are a part of life. Like cars. Like dentists. It’s hard to imagine life without them. In the nineteenth century, the guy who cut your hair also probably took care of the dental work.

            And doctors. Civil War doctors couldn’t do much except patch wounds and remove limbs. Pain-killers are relatively recent. And medical services have advanced enormously. While many of us don’t think much about, say, ambulances, they’re nice to have around if we fall off the roof.

            What else? I came of age in a pre-TV era. I can remember my mom describing life before radio. The Battle of Belleau Wood was raging, and the Russian Revolution erupted, but Americans could only read about it in newspapers. It’s hard to imagine those kinds of events without CBS, or whoever, on the scene sending images back. And assorted experts explaining why it all mattered and what would happen next.

            And comic books. Thay became an important part of my life from the very beginning. They got me and a lot of the kids of that era reading two years before we showed up for first grade. I was there within a year after Superman got his start. The radio show had an impact as well. Not on our reading, of course, but on our enthusiasm for the character. We all admired Superman and Batman, Wonder Woman and Captain Marvel. They had to warn kids to stop putting on capes and jumping out of second-story windows. I’d be interested in seeing a study of the people who grew up with those characters: Were we less inclined to engage in criminal activity than the kids who never formed an acquaintance with the heroes of that age? I’d be amazed if they didn’t affect our behavior. Not that we didn’t engage in mischievous stuff from time to time, or get in trouble, but I can’t imagine any of the kids I knew then deliberately harming anyone. It wasn’t the way Bruce Wayne behaved.

            There were other things also that I took for granted as simply part of the cultural architecture. Baseball. Movies. Science fiction. (I can remember clearly sitting on the porch at my dentist’s office, completely caught up in Robert Heinlein’s “Gentlemen, Be Seated.”)

            Music.

            Youth.

Books.

            And most of all, people. My dad, who took me to ball games. My mom, who was an avid reader, although the culture in which she grew up limited her to an eighth grade education. Aunts and uncles. They’re all gone now. And again the rule applies: I’d love to be able to sit and talk with one of them again. To relive a few of those lost hours that I took so much for granted.

            And friends.

            When I was teaching, I told my students that the day would come when they’d drive by the school after it had become a parking lot or a shelter for senior citizens. “When it happens,” I said, “you’d give almost anything to be able to come back to that particular school day and live through it again. To spend time with old friends who were young again.”

            What I don’t think I realized was that I’d want to be there too when they showed up.   

                   

                                                     JOURNAL #136

                                                         May 2, 2013

 

            Eeriecon was at full throttle this past weekend on Grand Island, NY, midway between Niagara Falls and Buffalo. I should say thanks to Joe Fillinger and his staff for another rousing journey offworld. Joe, incidentally, is retiring after many years as the con’s chief organizer. We’ll be sorry to lose him. Though I suspect he’ll stay within hailing distance.

            SF conventions first appeared on my horizon in the fall of 1962. I was just out of the Navy, and driving a taxicab in Philadelphia while I thought about what I was going to do with the rest of my life. I picked up several people at the airport one evening and took them downtown to one of the hotels. On the way, I couldn’t help overhearing them talking about Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. When I asked what was going on they told me about Philcon, and I seem to recall that Isaac was scheduled to be there. I dropped them off at their destination, wondering why I wasn’t attending as well, and drove off into the darkness.

            I’ve always loved SF conventions. One aspect of them that’s particularly remarkable is that it seems as if the same people are always in attendance. And I’m not talking about the writers and artists. Whether the con is in Los Angeles or Boston or Grand Forks, I always feel at home. The conversation is inevitably about the future, about what-if scenarios, about serious cultural issues. Nobody ever wants to talk about his favorite restaurant, or the quality of the screens she just bought at Home Depot.

I get occasional invitations to speak at non-SF events, where the atmosphere is different. I remember a staff assistant one time, after I’d arrived, leaning into the next office and telling her boss “the Buck Rogers guy is here.” And then there’s the inevitable 40-year-old man who approaches as the proceedings end and comments that “I don’t read the stuff myself, but my nephew does.” This is usually delivered in a tone that suggests the nephew has other odd qualities as well.

            I feel sorry for people who’ve been wandering around for a substantial part of their lives, and have never discovered SF. I used to think that, in their case, it was too late. The train had left the station. But occasionally someone does show up who claims to have become a fan fairly late. So maybe there’s always hope.

            I can’t imagine life without SF. It was the old Flash Gordon movie serial that got me looking past the South Philadelphia rooftops. I became interested in astronomy and began wondering about really strange stuff, like why I’d fall into the street if I walked off a rooftop? Why wouldn’t I just keep going? Crazy? Sure. But it was a question I was never able to answer.

                                                                 #

            One of the panels we did at Eeriecon was called “Books That Moved You.” Moved us so much that we remember the moment. My co-panelists were Lynna Merrill, James Alan Gardner, and Carl Frederick. We noticed that the majority of the memorable moments seemed to have occurred in short fiction rather than novels. We could arrive at no conclusive explanation why that might be.

            Some of my own unforgettable moments: The kids in Ray Bradbury’s “The Million-Year Picnic” look into a Martian canal, see only their reflections, and complain to their father that he’d promised to show them Martians. And of course we all know the reply.

            And when the Jesuit navigator in Arthur Clarke’s “The Star” discovers the truth about the long-dead supernova they are investigating. Or when Rhysling sings in Heinlein’s “The Green Hills of Earth.”

            Among novels, the single moment that I remember most vividly occurs in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein when the creature –who is nothing at all like Boris Karloff—is rejected by his creator, and subsides into reading John Milton….

                      

                                                      JOURNAL #137

 

                                                        May 16, 2013   

 

            Maureen and I spent the weekend at Leprecon, at the Marriott Mesa Hotel, in Mesa, AZ. The co-chairs, Patti Hultstrand and Don Jacques had concluded that the con needed something more than simply people discussing whether FTL will ever be possible, or how writing and editing have changed in the Internet Age. So, with the help of Mike Willmoth, they added a couple of distinctive elements.

            One was the Leprecon 39 Film Festival. These were not films in the standard tradition of Hollywood movies from an earlier era, but were rather indies in a program run by Brick Cave Films and Apocalypse Later. I’d had only one previous exposure to SF independent films, and it had provided a jolt when John Broughton, Dan Scanlan and their crew brought Star Trek back to life with a dazzling level of execution. Script, acting, special effects, everything was there.

            So when I showed up at the Leprecon event, I was expecting good stuff. And I got it. Host Hal C. F. Astell provided a series of short films. And these also would have been hard to separate from a professional effort. In “Red Sand,” we’ve discovered an alien research station buried in the Martian soil. A bank robbery goes seriously wrong in “Black Gulch.” A stranger takes over a game of trivia in a bar, raising the stakes and displaying unlimited knowledge in “The Guy Knows Everything.”

            Four other short films kept us all in our chairs. Then came a full-length feature, “The Constant Epiphanies of Billy the Blood Donor.” A dark comedy produced by Squishy Studios, it features a newly-graduated college student who is working for a company called American Blood, which, not surprisingly, doesn’t have the best ethics in the world.

            The other surprise sprung by the con organizers was the Mystery Dinner Theater. A large group of us gathered in one of the hotel’s Canyon Room, a section which could be kept private. We had a beautiful view of the evening sky. A tall, bearded man introduced himself as the Captain and told us he hoped we were enjoying our flight. If any of us needed anything, he added, we should not hesitate to ask.

We were, we realized, in the depths of the solar system. We enjoyed our meal and talked about how fortunate we were to be living in an era when space travel was available, and how we were looking forward to seeing Saturn later that evening. Eventually, we finished our meals and many of us got up to go say hello to friends at other tables. Then suddenly there was commotion somewhere. Screams and cries for help broke the sedate atmosphere of the dining room.

Crew members charged between the tables as the shrieks continued. They plunged past us and disappeared. Weapons were fired. Someone screamed there was a dragon in the galley. Then the firing stopped and the screams died away. The captain arrived and smiled. “It’s okay,” he said. “Just a misunderstanding. Nothing to be worried about.”

A few minutes later, we heard more shouts. Then pirates appeared, squabbling among themselves. The quarrel exploded into a swordfight. A knight appeared, but somehow he only made matters worse. 

The passengers were trying to make sense of the situation. A tall thin man seated beside me asked if I had any idea what was going on? Someone else wondered if we’d passed through a time warp? Dancers in curious costumes appeared and performed. Had we perhaps entered an area where the laws of physics didn’t apply anymore? No one had a reasonable explanation. But while we gabbled on, security forces moved in on us and seized the tall thin guy sitting beside me. It turned out that he had lethal intentions toward the ship and the captain had organized the distractions. “We were doing everything we could to prevent his harming anyone,” he explained.

Fortunately everything ended happily, and we were able to enjoy our dessert, gazing peacefully out at the rings.

                                                    #

Off to the Nebulas this weekend. The event is being held in San Jose. I get to present the award for the winning novel.               

                                                    #

Hans Christian von Baeyer, in the June Scientific American, reports that a new version of quantum theory has been under development for more than a decade. The new perspective, called Quantum Bayesianism, or QBism for short, promises to get around the absurdities of the theory, which clearly works but makes no sense. (You can have a particle in two places at once. Or, famously, a cat simultaneously dead and alive. Et cetera.)

I’m reminded of Richard Feynman’s comment that anyone who thinks he understands quantum reality doesn’t have a clue. I’ll try the article tonight, with the hope that von Baeyer  really can clarify things.

 

 

                                                         JOURNAL #138

                                                           June 1, 2013

 

            Most of us, when we fly, take along something to read. I took Paul Boller’s Presidential Anecdotes to Leprecon in Phoenix two weeks ago. Published in 1981, it covers everybody up to Reagan. The stories provide insights into the character of the various presidents, and into the world they inhabited, that are quite different from what we pick up in routine history books. Sometimes funny, like John Quincy Adams going down to the Potomac before dawn, taking off his clothes and jumping in. (Can you imagine cable news getting that live?) And sometimes compelling: Lincoln, announcing Lee’s surrender to a large crowd, directs the band to play “Dixie” and then “Yankee Doodle.”

            Sometimes it’s the stories told about a president by his contemporaries that open windows. Woodrow Wilson, for example, runs into Moses in heaven. Moses points out that his Fourteen Points are being ignored. Wilson responds by asking Moses whether he’s checked recently to see how the Commandments are making out?

                                                                      #

            On the way home from Phoenix I picked up a book that’s taken over my life, or at least the half-hour or so that isn’t devoted to writing and hanging out: Jeremy Scahill’s Dirty Wars.  It’s an account of how we got into the Middle East turmoil, how we’ve been responding to it, especially, how much stuff has been going on under cover.

            I guess the aspect of the last twenty years that is particularly disturbing is how little seems to get picked up by the news outlets. They go on endlessly about a murder trial somewhere, or about a politician who says something silly, while the details and impact of the war on terror are ignored. And I understand that that information is hard to come by. But that’s what journalism is really about, isn’t it? Not simply relaying official congressional and White House handouts to the public. But I guess they’ve been doing at least some of that, or the Department of Justice wouldn’t be seizing their e-mails.

                                                                         #

            I attended the Nebula Awards banquet in San Jose two weeks ago and was given the privilege of presenting the prize for best novel to Kim Stanley Robinson for 2312, which examines where we might be headed over the next few centuries with planetary exploration, climate change, and prolonged lifespans. Also my editor, Ginjer Buchanan, won the Solstice Award for contributions to the field.

            After struggling for months to find a title for the next Alex & Chase novel, it finally showed up. It seems so obvious now that I cannot imagine how I missed it: Coming Home. Alex pursues a mystery that takes him to Earth, and the Capella finally returns.

            Oh, and I should mention the book I took along: Mark Twain’s Autobiography. For anyone who thinks that Mark Twain is all about Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, do not miss his essays. They are his most entertaining work.

            Something else that came out of the Nebulas: The next novel after Coming Home will probably be a time travel sequel. The title should be easy. Something like Time Travelers Never Wait in Line. Or Time Travelers Always Score First. In any case, one of the characters they meet will be Mark Twain. “Listen, Sam, what you need is to write a book about a kid and the river. Maybe call him Buck Something….”

                                                                   #

            More than a half-century ago, I was a freshman at LaSalle College in Philadelphia. They were kind enough to publish my story, “A Pound of Cure,” in the school’s literary magazine, Four Quarters. It was my first published work, and I wouldn’t see another for more than a quarter of a century. Consequently, when my alma mater invited me in March to contribute a story to the alumni magazine, LaSalle, I was delighted. I’m not sure this wasn’t the incident that prompted the “Coming Home” title. In any case, I delivered “The Play’s the Thing.” The story will also be published in Ben Bova’s upcoming anthology Carbid e-Tipped Pens.            

 

 

                                                     JOURNAL #139

                                                       June 16, 2013

 

            We’re just back from the Georgia Writers Association’s 49th annual banquet. They provided recognition in various categories of fiction and nonfiction and presented me with a lifetime achievement award. I’d planned to talk for a couple of minutes on why I have a passion for science fiction, but watching the various writers coming forward to accept their awards sent me off in a different direction.

            I wanted to be an SF writer as far back as I can remember. I started a Batman novel at about seven, and a Martian novel a year or so later. But during my college years I decided I lacked the talent to make a career for myself, and made no serious effort to write anything. I finally broke down twenty-five years after my graduation from LaSalle and wrote a story at the urging of my wife Maureen.  It got rejected a couple of times, and I said how I told her that would happen. I wanted to give it up. But we called in a friend, who made some suggestions. I did a fix, and it got rejected a third time. That was enough for me. But Maureen brought home a copy of Twilight Zone Magazine. I sighed, told her okay, once more but that would be it, and we shipped it off.   

            We were on a TDY at the time. When we returned home to North Dakota two weeks later, we found a postcard from T.E.D. Klein, the editor. They were buying the story, we went into orbit, and I never looked back.

This is old stuff, and if you’ve been hanging around these journal entries for a while, you’ve seen it before. But there’s a critical lesson to be learned here.

            Over the years, researchers have run an interesting experiment. They’ve gone into schools, picked out four or five students at random, and informed their teachers that they were highly talented kids. Superbly talented. They said nothing to the students, and asked the instructors not to treat them any differently than the other students, and in fact they should say nothing. Invariably, the selected kids proceeded to outperform the group, usually by a substantial margin. Why? Because the teachers could not entirely hide their respect for the capabilities of these kids, who then sensed a positive approach. They acquired confidence from it. If Ms. Jenkins thinks I can do this stuff, I probably can. And they acted on it. They performed. The lesson: We’re all more talented than we realize. We have a tendency to underrate what we are able to do. This is probably a result of authority figures, teachers, parents, bosses, whoever, pointing out our shortcomings. Keep your hands off it, you’ll break it. After a while, we come to believe it.

            I eventually figured out when I was an English teacher that I should not spend my time showing students where they made mistakes, say, in writing. Forget that part of the exercise. Instead, I learned to look for solid work. Find the compact sentence, the line or two that might have been written by Hemingway. Show it to them. Circle it, and tell them Yes!, give me more like this.

            In later years, I did management training for the Customs Service. We emphasized how important it was for supervisors and bosses of all kinds to encourage their subordinates, to recognize good performance, to make it a point to share credit with the people who were out there doing the work. Don’t just show everybody where they need to improve.

                                                                  #

            I come into contact with a lot of aspiring writers. The biggest thing holding them back isn’t usually a lack of talent, but a lack of confidence. It’s possible they may be right to doubt themselves. Their capabilities might run more in the direction of pharmaceutical development or engineering or who knows what. But the point is that they don’t know.

            At the beginning, no one does. And consequently we hold ourselves back. Once I’d sold that first story, I was on my way. Somehow I became more able to develop ideas, and I was willing to take chances. Everything tends to come together when you learn to believe in yourself.

            It’s easy to say, but unfortunately not easy to do. But at least we should all be aware of it. Some of the people gathered at that ceremony last night are already professional writers. I suspect at least three-quarters of the rest want to be. That’s why they were in attendance. And I’d be surprised if very many lack anything other than self-confidence. That’s probably true also of the considerable numbers who show up at cons and sit in on writing seminars. Or who participate in workshops. In most cases, the talent is very likely there. The issue is how one gets it up on the front line and plugs it in.