December 2013 – Auxiliary Memory

Why Were The Two Most Famous Science Fiction Novels of the 20th Century Not Written By Science Fiction Authors?

The two most famous science fiction novels of last century were Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. Now I didn’t write that to generate a flame war among science fiction fans, or as a slight to genre writers, but because I believe it’s true, especially if you ask people who don’t normally read science fiction. I’m actually wondering why the two biggest successes using science fiction as a writing technique weren’t penned by writers who specialized in writing science fiction? Huxley and Orwell were straight ahead literary guys – total amateurs at speculative fiction. They probably never heard of Hugo Gernsback or John W. Campbell.

And, the two most famous science fiction novels of the 19th century, The Time Machine and The War of the Worlds, were not written by a genre writer either. H. G. Wells existed before the science fiction genre was established. Nor were his books written for the genre reader of his day, which did have a lot of science fiction, even though it lacked the label. In the 21st century, when science fiction is a well established, and a well loved genre, it bizarrely seems that the people who aren’t science fiction writers have the biggest successes with the technique. Cormac McCarthy and Margaret Atwood are two good recent examples.

What are these non-SF writers doing that SF genre writers aren’t? I just got through rereading Nineteen Eighty-Four and I thought about this the whole time I was thoroughly enjoying the book. Nineteen Eighty-Four is so different from the genre science fiction books I normally read that I’m tempted to say it’s not science fiction. Many literary writers and English profs claim just that, but they would be wrong. Insanely wrong. George Orwell might not have written for Campbell’s Astounding, and probably never even read the famous pulp, but Nineteen Eighty-Four would have fit comfortably in that magazine as a serial. No Astounding reader would have made one objection as to it not being science fiction. And I’m quite sure readers would have voted it the best story of the issue, even if Heinlein had had a story in that issue too.

Not long ago I reread Beyond This Horizon by Heinlein and I felt pretty sure that Heinlein wrote it hoping it would be another Brave New World. Heinlein was savvy enough to know that Huxley’s book sold far more than pulp fiction, and at the time, very little science fiction was even being published in hardback, or that new format, the paperback. Here’s an early paperback cover for Nineteen Eighty-Four – looks just like a science fiction novel, doesn’t it?

While reading Nineteen Eighty-Four this time I was blown-away by Orwell’s world building genius. World building is an essential feature of SF/F, which books like Dune and The Lord of the Ring illustrate. J. K. Rowling is a billionaire for her world building, and deservedly so. Does that mean Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic world is just better painted than all the other genre stories working with the same idea? Does The Handmaid’s Tale just out dystopian run of the mill SF writers? Maybe so, but why?

It’s pretty obvious that more people on Earth can understand what the implications of Big Brother are over philosophical implications of Arrakis. Too many hundreds of millions of people in the 20th century encountered a totalitarian state first hand, or fought against them in wars, or spent years hearing about them in the news, not to understand the brilliant portrayal of Big Brother and the savage criticism of them with the creation of Newspeak.

The reason why Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World are so well known in the 20th century is they describe so clearly the quintessential fears of the 20th century. All stories set in the future are about the present, and I guess the better they are about exploring the present, the more copies they will sell, and the better chance they will be part of the curricula in high schools and colleges.

The entire time I spent reading Nineteen Eighty-Four off my Kindle I was amazed by how relevant this book written in 1948 was to 2013. To write that Orwell was brilliant is an undeserving understatement. We live in a society that worships freedom, yet we live with constant NSA surveillance, continuous war, Homeland Security, and the sun never sets on our drone airspace. Our paranoia knows knows no bounds. In terms of political psychology and insight into the human heart, Orwell runs away with the prize for applying science fiction techniques for writing about the future to say so much about now. Nor has any science fiction writer ever attempted to explore the linguistic territory of Newspeak, which is the real science that makes Nineteen Eighty-Four great science fiction.

I haven’t reread Brave New World recently, but I plan to. Brave New World was written in 1931 and I just finished a book, One Summer: American 1927 by Bill Bryson that is the perfect companion to the Huxley book, because it explained the world Huxley was living in when he wrote his classic. It’s a time when many U.S. governors and mayors belonged to the Ku Klux Klan, where many prominent Americans publically espoused beliefs in eugenics and extreme racism, where many states had passed eugenic laws, and racism was the law of the land. The twenties was the decade that mass production and mass communication really got massive. It was a decade where America began the Americanization of the world. That scared Huxley. Huxley was afraid of America in 1930, and Orwell was afraid of Russia in 1948.

Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are true dystopian novels – they are anti utopian, written in response to intellectuals promoting utopian solutions to world problems. Huxley and Orwell understood the world in which they lived, and wrote books that showed off that knowledge in deeply insightful ways. They both used science fiction as a literary device to philosophize about ideas if written as nonfiction would have been entertaining to few, and boring to many, but because of those techniques, wowed millions. Readers still study and reference their work. And those novels would not have had the impact they did without the science fiction.

Huxley and Orwell, and other literary writers, use science fiction to bring political, ethical and scientific ideas to the masses. Why don’t more genre writers attempt this? Heinlein tried, especially with Stranger in a Strange Land, his most ambitious novel. So, why did he fail? I think for two reasons. First, it included ESP, or PSI powers, that aren’t scientific or believable, and second, it promoted his personal ideas about freedom, especially sexual freedom, nudity, and group sex, which few people beside the hippies of the 1960s shared.

Ray Bradbury hit one out of the park with Fahrenheit 451, but it’s never achieved the popular acclaim that Brave New World or Nineteen Eighty-Four has. Maybe because it wasn’t nearly as ambitious as those two. And dare I say it, maybe the target, those people who would give up reading for mindless television, were insulted rather than inspired to canonize literacy?

John Brunner also tried several novels of this type, using science fiction to make political statements, especially Stand on Zanzibar. Zanzibar was an experimental tour de force that was hard to comprehend or read by the general reader, but dazzled the exceptional reader. It should have been a contender. It should be better remembered. Both Fahrenheit 451 and Stand on Zanzibar are shining examples of what pulp writers can do when they aim high.

I think the genre writer that comes closest in writing ambitious science fiction for the non science fiction reading masses was Orson Scott Card and his book Ender’s Game. It was obvious targeted at genre readers, but it was widely read outside of the genre. It was never as sophisticated as Huxley and Orwell’s books, and didn’t deal with broad contemporary issues, but it dealt with xenocide in a way that made it relevant to the average reader who could translate it into commentary on genocide, or commentary on science fiction. Unfortunately, the recent movie version of the story targets Ender’s Game at the lowest common denominator video game player, whose kill anything that moves instinct means they have deaf ears for the ethical insights.

The 2014 Earth is just as fucked up as the 1948 Earth, even more so, so why aren’t we reading novels that targets our political, social and ethical failures like modern science fictional smart bombs that are literary descendants of Huxley and Orwell? Is it because serious thinkers no longer believe that science fiction is the proper tool? Has decades of fun science fiction dulled the edge of sharp science fiction? Or maybe we don’t have political and social thinkers like Orwell or Huxley anymore, because those writers work for the New York Times or Fox News. Let’s hope it’s not that times aren’t bad enough yet to be muses for such writers.

JWH – 12/31/13

Do Our Souls Evolve?–A Thought Experiment

My wife’s uncle is family famous for saying in his eighties “I feel like I’m nineteen but something is horribly wrong with my body.”

If you are under 40 you probably won’t understand this essay. People over 40, as they begin to feel older, often report that although their bodies are aging, their minds feel no different than when they were teenagers. And I too, at sixty-two, feel like I’m the same person in all my memories, even the oldest. But is that really true? Are we mentally the same our whole life? Do our bodies age, but not our organ of self-awareness? Can we stay young at heart even after we start falling apart? I’m already having memory problems I never had as a kid, but I feel like I’m that same kid, just with a flaky memory.

I am intrigued by this organ of awareness that thinks it’s always young. Is that our brain? Our soul? Our identity?

We feel like we’re looking out our eyes, hearing through our ears, touching with our fingers, tasting with our tongue and smelling with our nose, but we know that if we lost our eyes, ears, fingers, tongue and nose we’d still exist inside our head as long as our body could keep our brain alive. Oliver Sacks writing in The Mind’s Eye, tells stories about blind people who continue to see by living in a virtual reality inside of their head.

For convenience’s sake, I’d like to call that organ of awareness in our head, the soul, even though I’m an atheist. It’s such a lovely word – the soul. Our sense of identity resides in our soul. We know we can shut the soul off with sleep or drugs, or distort it’s working ability with disease, drugs, stress, and injury to the brain. But for most of our lives, if we’re lucky, our soul feels unchanging.

Is our sense of identity unchanging? And what is identity? We all feel like a little being riding around in the head of a body, sitting just behind the eyes, looking out, and steering our body through life. I’m reminded of a bunch of old sayings:

Inside I feel just like I did when I was young
If I knew then what I know now
If I had to do it again I wouldn’t change a thing
If I had to do it again I’d do everything different
Youth is wasted on the young

I think we do change, and I offer one bit of evidence and a thought experiment to explore this question. Back in September 1966, The Monkees premiered on television and my sister and I absolutely loved that show. Now in 2013, The Monkees are in reruns and when I catch an episode I’m horrified that I could have ever admired that show, much less watch it for more than ten seconds. How can the Me I remember feeling just like the Me of today love a show then that I hate now? The only way to explain that would be to say neither the body or the mind are part of our soul or identity. Since I’m an atheist I don’t believe in souls that survive the death of the body, or move between bodies in reincarnation, but I’m willing to call that feature of our being that feels self-aware consciousness the soul. But are souls unchanging?

To answer this question I’ll offer a thought experiment. Imagine you could send your soul back in time to replace the soul of your younger self, would your older soul follow the same path as the younger soul first took? Pick a month in your past and use the Internet and your memories to recreate everything you can about that month, all the personal encounters, all the activities, all the pop culture pleasures, and imagine whether or not you would have followed the same path or diverged.

September, 1966

Life and Family and Friends

I was fourteen and my sister twelve, when my mother took us to live in Charleston, Mississippi at the end of summer 1966, just before school started. Aunt Let and Uncle Russell lived outside of Charleston, in the country. I don’t know why my mother moved us there. I remember my parents fighting all the time, but I don’t remember them talking divorce, but that might have been the case. We had been moving around so much all my life that it was just another move. By the end of March, 1967, we moved back to Miami, reuniting with my Dad. He died in May of 1970, and those last years were miserable for all us when it came to family relations.

In September of 1966 I was a fourteen year old kid who survived by hiding out in science fiction books, AM Top 40 rock music, and watching television. I quickly made two friends, Ben White and Mack Peters. I had crushes on several girls I was afraid to talk to but who lived constantly in my fantasies. I remember those eight months – August through March – very fondly, but I had a well honed coping mechanism. If my 62 year old self had to live those same eight months he (it?) would have reacted much differently.

The 2013-me would have loved and sympathized with my parents far more than the 1966-me, but wouldn’t have put up with their bullshit. I hid from their emotional hurricane when I was young. If my current soul could have seen their suffering I’m positive I would have reacted completely different. I’m pretty sure I would have been far more empathetic to their lives, but I also would have told them everything they never wanted to hear from a fourteen year old son. It wouldn’t have been nice. I would have told them to get their shit together, or get a divorce, and either way, I wanted the bus fare back to Miami so I could go live with my grandmother. Over the years I realized that if I knew then what I know now I would have divorced my parents at age twelve. Even now, I’m not sure what would have been best for Becky, my sister.

Do our souls change with experience and knowledge? Are our souls the knowledge and experience we collect? Then why don’t we feel like we’re aging on the inside? Or are our souls the organ of awareness that just surveys knowledge and experience and that’s why we don’t feel it aging?

When it comes to friends, I’m pretty sure my present self could not have been friends with any of the people I remembered. At fourteen I was already an atheist and liberal, and the racism of the small town Mississippi life revolted me, but I was too chicken back then to be confrontational. I was already reading about LSD and was looking forward to when I could try it. I remember a January, 1967 issue of Popular Science magazine that had an article about a guy trying LSD in a clinical situation that changed my attitude about drugs. My time in Mississippi was just before the Summer of Love, and I was already reading everything I could in Time, Newsweek and Life about the counter-culture. My 14 year-old self kept quiet then, but my 62 year-old self wouldn’t.

If for some Peggy Sue Got Married reason I found myself back in the past I would have done everything different. But then, does doing things different, and thinking different, really mean my soul was different? If our soul is only a mechanism of perception that feels the body, and listens to what the brain thinks, it still might change – and even evolve over time. Hinduism teaches we are here lifetime after lifetime to educate our immortal soul. Lovely concept, but I don’t believe it – but can we educate our mortal soul? Or is it merely a viewing mechanism?

There are things that shuts the soul off. It happens every time we fall asleep, or pass out drunk, or go unconscious because of sickness or drugs – or death. Our souls can break down because of stress and torture, or come apart because of disease or drugs. So why shouldn’t they change because of new learning experiences?

Television

September 1966, the month The Monkees premiered, many other famous television shows premiered too: The Smother’s Brothers Show, The Girl From U.N.C.L.E., The Invaders, ABC Stage 67, The Dating Game, That Girl, Star Trek, The Time Tunnel, Tarzan, The Newlywed Game, and Mission: Impossible. I also watched, sometimes with my family, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color, Bonanza, The Ed Sullivan Show, Candid Camera, What’s My Line, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, The Lucy Show, The Andy Griffith Show, Combat, The Fugitive, The Red Skelton Hour, Petticoat Junction, Lost in Space, The Beverly Hillbillies, Green Acres, Gomer Pyle, The Virginian, I Spy, F Troop, My Three Sons, Daniel Boone, Hogan’s Heroes, Twelve O’clock High, The Avengers, The Jackie Gleason, Flipper, Please Don’t Eat the Daisies, Get Smart, Gunsmoke and Saturday Night at the Movies.

I’ve always considered the 1966/1967 television season one of the best ever, if not the best. Many of my cherish memories of growing up come from watching those shows. Yet, I find them all painful to watch today. If somehow I could go back in time I wouldn’t watch 1966 TV at all. That would have disconnected me from family and friends. My whole timeline, life and personality would have changed.

Does this mean that my soul has changed over the years, or have I just gotten used to more sophisticated TV? I still love TV. I love binge TV watching, so I’ve not become an intellectual snob. In 1966 I loved those television shows. They were highly addictive, but when I catch reruns of them today their stories seem way too slow, simple and obvious. I sometimes feel a twinge of nostalgia, but I’m way to impatient to watch them. And many of them, like The Monkees, F Troop, Gilligan’s Island, etc. horrify me. I can’t believe I ever had a mind that could like them, much less love them. Star Trek stands out as being among the most intellectually ambitious of the bunch, but it’s absolutely painful to watch today.

I really don’t think I’m the same soul. Maybe I have an old body, an older mind, and an older soul?

We like to think of ourselves as being the same person our whole life, but this thought experiment makes me doubt that. I once read that it takes about seven years for all the cells in our body to change out. If everything physical is new every few years how can we be mentally or spiritual the same? Could our soul be like a computer program that can be replicated, but also patched and rewritten?

Books

It’s much harder to pinpoint the books I read in September of 1966. I was limited to my school library, and a tiny, two room Charleston, Mississippi town library. I didn’t get to buy books. I’d join the Science Fiction Book Club in early 1967, but at this time, I was limited to libraries. I loved Robert A. Heinlein, and would read whatever I could find. I brought a few paperbacks with me from Miami, Florida. I can remember one author I discovered at the Charleston Library, George Adamski, and I’m terribly embarrassed to admit it. I was reading books about flying saucers. I also was reading about cryogenics, but remember no specific books. I joined the science club at school and I proposed two experiments. One was to get a weather balloon and launch it with lights and see how many people reported it as a flying saucer, and two, get some liquid nitrogen to freeze frogs and see if we could revive them. The big lumbering husky 4H boys in their bib overalls probably thought I was one whacked out puny four-eyed city kid.

Of the writers that existed back then that I’ve come to love since, like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, George Elliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald – if I had tried to read any of them I would have failed to enjoy them. But is that really true? Two years later, in the 12th grade, I read and loved Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce, The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger, The Stranger by Camus and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. And a year after that I was reading The Autobiography of Malcolm X and On the Road by Jack Kerouac.

Could it be our minds, our souls, reflect the pop culture we consume? To be the soul that loves 1966 television meant I couldn’t be a soul that loved classic American and English literature!

If I could have given my 12 year old self novels to prepare him for girls, I wished I had discovered Pride and Prejudice, Great Expectations, Middlemarch and The Way We Live Now. They would have been far more useful than the science fiction I was reading to prepare me for the future.

Music

Music is the monkey wrench in my theory. I routinely play the music I listened to in 1966 today. It still resonates with me at a very deep level. I have learned to love many other kinds of music since, and I do believe if I could send my 1966 soul Miles Davis or Mahler he too would have loved their music. Music is where the past me and the current me overlap the most. That’s hard to explain.

Movies

Living in Charleston, Mississippi in 1966, a small town with no theater, took me out of the movie world for nine months. In fact, the television was so exciting that season that I don’t remember watching many old movies, or even newer movies on NBC Saturday Night at the Movies. I remember my cousin Robert and his wife Charlotte let me stay with them in Memphis for my 15th birthday that November and they took me to see Fantastic Voyage at the drive-in in their 1962 Chevy Corvair. I had seen Our Man Flint in Miami at the beginning of 1966, and it was one of my favorites for the year. Most of the other movies for 1966 I saw years later on TV. If my present day self was stuck in 1966 I would have wanted to see Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, The Sand Pebbles, A Man for All Seasons and Blow Up – all flicks my younger self wouldn’t have liked.

Results of the Experiment

The next time I feel the urge to tell a young person I feel the exact way I did in my head at 16 that I do now, I’m going to pause, and try to stop myself. Yes, I do feel that way, but only if I don’t analyze the details. I think if I could be magically thrown back into the head of my younger self it would feel like an intense drug trip. The restless energy, emotions, hormones, fears, pleasures, would overwhelm me. Getting an erection countless times a day at the slightest thought or sight of anything female would drive 2013-me insane. I’m not sure about this, but I get the feeling I must have had more thoughts per minute than I do now – so switching bodies would feel like doing speed. I think the combination of a racing mind and constant horniness would short our my present soul if it was plugged into my younger body.

I don’t like that my body is getting old and failing, but on the other hand, I quite enjoy where my soul is at. Having my soul travel back in time would be uncomfortable, like time traveling to a time before air conditioning, the Internet, indoor plumbing and antibiotics.

No, I don’t feel like I did when I was young. I do, but it’s an illusion. So why do we fool ourselves? I don’t know, but I might explore the idea in the future.

JWH – 12/27/13

2013 Year in Reading

The older I get, the more I feel my reading life is fading away. I was born to read. Reading has shaped and defined my existence. So it’s scary to think that I’m running out of reading time. Even if I live another 20 years, that’s only 1,040 books at this year’s pace. That seems like a lot, but it’s a finite number. Picture an hour-glass, but instead of grains of sand, imagine tiny little books falling through the narrow waist of the time.

I retired this year on October 22nd, and assumed I’d start reading books like crazy. When I worked, I read about one book a week. I hoped after retiring, to read two books a week – instead it’s one book every two weeks. Damn. That’s not what I planned at all! I’ve only been able to catch up to my yearly average by quickly finishing off several half-read books.

As 2013 closes out, I contemplate the power of less, both having less time, but also wanting and owning less, so I can focus clearly on my goals, and I realize I need to change my attitude toward reading. More than ever, I want to make every book count. This might sound contradictory, but I’m thinking I need to read less too. Instead of consuming books in great numbers, I should savor and study them. But what if that means I have 300 books left?

In 2012 I read 49 books and I wrote in my 2012 Year in Reading that I wanted to read 12 novels, 12 science books, 12 history/other non-fiction books in 2013, and hopefully 12 of those would be published during 2013. Well, I didn’t do so good, especially with science books – I didn’t read any science books at all! I did read one math book. Plus, I only read just seven 2013 books (I did read eleven 2012 books, so I’m close). I read 24 fiction books, twice what I wanted.

When I look at the list below I realize that some books were definitely worth my reading time, but others, even ones I really enjoyed, weren’t. I’ll rate the books I felt added much to my life with up to 5 pluses (+), but any book I didn’t rate means I could have skipped without impact. Some of these were lots of fun, but I need more than just fun.

Books Read in 2013

Favorite Fiction

Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
The Short Stories Volume 1 by Ernest Hemingway
Confessions of a Crap Artist by Philip K. Dick
The Fault in Our Stars by John Green
The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett

Favorite Nonfiction

Half-the-Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide by Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn
The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond
The Unwinding by George Packer
The Voice is All by Joyce Johnson
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull by Barbara Goldsmith

Order of Reading

Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959) – Philip K. Dick (+++++)
Half-the-Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide (2009) – Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn (+++++)
Beautiful Ruins (2012) – Jess Walters (+++)
The World Until Yesterday (2012) – Jared Diamond (+++++)
At Home (2010) – Bill Bryson (+++)
Redshirts (2012) – John Scalzi
The Wrecking Crew (2012) – Kent Hartman (+++)
The Sheltering Sky (1949) – Paul Bowles (+++)
Hull Zero Three (2010) – Greg Bear
Wishin’ and Hopin’(2009) – Wally Lamb
Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking (2012) – Susan Cain (++++)
Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull (1999) – Barbara Goldsmith (++++)
The Searchers (2013) – Glenn Frankel (+++)
Heaven is for Real (2010) – Todd Burpo
Darwinia (1999) – Robert Charles Wilson
Society’s Child (2008) – Janis Ian
We Can Build You (1972) – Philip K. Dick
Oz Reimagined (2013) – edited by John Joseph Adams
Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us (2009) – Daniel Pink (+)
Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triump, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitive SCRABBLE Players (2001) – Stefan Fatsis (++)
The End of the Affair (1951) – Graham Greene (++)
Mrs. Dalloway (1925) – Virginia Woolf (+)
The Fault in Our Stars (2012) – John Green (++++)
The Sense of an Ending (2011) – Julian Barnes (++)
Why Are You Atheists So Angry: 99 Things That Piss Off the Godless (2012) – Greta Christina
The Next 100 Years: A Forecast for the 21st Century (2009) – George Friedman
The Heart of Darkness (1899) – Joseph Conrad (+)
Life As We Knew It (2006) – Susan Beth Pfeffer (+)
The Ballad of Bob Dylan (2011) – Daniel Mark Epstein (+++)
2312 (2012) – Kim Stanley Robinson
The Cuckoo’s Calling (2013) – Robert Galbraith (J. K. Rowling)
Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls (2013) – David Sedaris
Door Wide Open (2001) – Joyce Johnson
The Unwinding – (2013) George Packer (+++++)
The Year’s Top-Ten Tales of Science Fiction 5 (2013) – edited by Allan Kaster
Euclid’s Window (2001) – Leonard Mlodinow (++)
The World Jones Made (1956) – Philip K. Dick
The Long Tomorrow (1955) – Leigh Brackett (++)
Lightspeed Year One (2011) – edited by John Joseph Adams
One and Only (2011) – Gerald Nicosia and Anne Marie Santos
Po-boy Contraband (2012) – Patrice Melnick
The Voice is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac (2012) – by Joyce Johnson (++++)
The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) – Joan Didion (++++)
Boys Adrift (2005) – Dr. Leonard Sax (++++)
One Summer: America 1927 (2013) – Bill Bryson (++++)
The Power of Less (2008) – Leo Babauta (+)
Wheat Belly (2011) – William Davis MD (+++)
The Short Stories Volume 1 (2002) – Ernest Hemingway (+++++)
Distrust That Particular Flavor (2012) – William Gibson (++)
Pulphead (2011) – John Jeremiah Sullivan (+++)
Leviathan Wakes (2011) – James S. A. Corey
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) – George Orwell (+++++)

Reading Plans for 2014

Once again I want to read less science fiction and more science, fewer fiction titles and more nonfiction. Of course I’d like to read all +++++ books, even if I only read half as many books total. I find it tragic that I forget what I read so quickly. What a crying shame it is to take in so many fascinating facts that flee my mind in just minutes and hours. Shouldn’t I be doing more rereading than reading, studying, rather than rushing by all those scenic words?

Going through my bulging bookcases, here’s what I’m pulling down to pile beside my reading chair, hoping to read in 2014.

On Looking: Eleven Walks with Expert Eyes (2013) – Alexandra Horowitz
Grain Brain (2013) – David Perlmutter, MD
Time Reborn (2013) – Lee Smolin
The Goldfinch (2013) – Donna Tartt
Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011) – Daniel Kahneman
The Beginning of Infinity (2011) – David Deutsch
Darwin’s Armada (2009) – Iain McCalman
The Best Writing on Mathematics (2013) – Mircea Pitici, Editor
The Fallacy of Fine-Tuning: Why the Universe is Not Designed for Us (2011) – Victor J. Stenger
Waging Heavy Peace (2012) – Neil Young
Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin
Mathematics: The Loss of Certainty by Morris Kline
Touching the Rock: An Experience of Blindness by John M. Hull
The Social Conquest of Earth by Edward O. Wilson
Darwin’s Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meaning of Life by Daniel C. Dennett
Euclid in the Rainforest: Discovering Universal Truth in Logic and Mathematics by Joseph Mazur

JWH – 12/27/13

Learning to Write Science Fiction By Studying Temporal POV

My goal is to write a science fiction novel, but I don’t have the skill or discipline to finish one now. I write scenes and chapters, and then rewrite them. I spend much of my time thinking about fiction and how it’s created. I also spend a lot of time thinking and reading about the past and how we learn about it in fiction and nonfiction, films and documentaries, television shows, and even poems and songs.

When we read science fiction we read it imagining the scenes are happening in the future.

All art is communication from the past. Even when artists are creating their artwork in the present, they are inspired by the past in creating their communiqué to the future. Yet, when we experience art, we experience it in the present. Writing science fiction is hard because I’m writing a message to the future, about the future, but it’s really about their past, and my past, but perceived in some future present.

Once you start thinking about artistic temporal POV it gets as twisted as a time travel paradox.

Most readers will be thinking I’m overthinking this and say, “Quit procrastinating and go write a story about spaceships and robots.” I can crank out bad fiction all day long. Fiction is like a stage magic – full of illusions and sleight of hand. It’s easy enough to fool readers with crude make believe, but it’s damn hard to create a slick piece of storytelling magic.

My retired life is divided into three modes. The first, I spend living in the present, cooking, cleaning, having friends over for dinner, getting the hot water heater replaced, shopping for books, paying bills, etc. The second, and what I spend most of my time doing, is decoding messages from the past. The second mode happens in the present, so reading a book – the act of sitting in a chair and looking at pages – I’m still living in the first mode. In my head though, I’m decoding messages from the past. Most people never think about this, and reading a book or watching a movie is the present. It’s only when you examine how art is created that you start decoding the message from the past. My third mode of existence, which I’m working to expand, is spent coding messages to the future.

This morning I woke up at 4:09 am. I sat in the dark (I sleep in a chair) thinking about all this.

I put on Crosby, Stills & Nash, CSN’s first album. Listening to an album on headphones in the dark before dawn is a great time to focus on music and stimulate thinking. I remember buying this album the week it was released in 1969 and how excited I was to discover it. The Byrds were my favorite group in the 1960s, and Buffalo Springfield was another favorite band, so the names David Crosby and Stephen Stills jumped out. The album blew me away back then. And as I listened to it now, I admire it greatly for its artistic construction, and find it beautiful to hear. However, the songs are fascinating. They are histories themselves, many about famous girlfriends. Or the songs have a history themselves, like “Wooden Ships” which months later appeared on the Jefferson Airplane’s Volunteers album.

Why am I talking about music when I promised to talk about science fiction? I’m working on a story that I want to be about legendary people. When you read it, these people will be from the future, but the narrative will make you feel they are from the past, but the scene will be set in their present. What details from fifty years ago about ordinary people living their present survive to make legends?

Like I said, all artwork is a communication from the past. But even my urge to hear this album this morning comes from an earlier communication.

The other night I watched Legends of the Canyon about many famous musicians, songwriters and groups that lived in Laurel Canyon in the 1960s, including The Mamas and the Papas, The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, Joni Mitchell, and Crosby, Stills & Nash. Because David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Graham Nash and Dallas Taylor were prominently interviewed, the film almost seemed to be about the birth of CSN. Now I want to find time to listen to Joni Mitchell and The Mamas and Papas albums. I don’t think I’m an old guy that dwells on the past, at least not my personal past, but much of my retired time is spent listening to music, reading books, watching television and going to the movies. These people who lived in Laurel Canyon lived lives that are still being written about again and again. Imagine writing about such people who live in the future. How do you capture their essence in the fewest words?

One thing that struck me was the memories of Crosby, Stills and Nash had of the first time they played together. Crosby and Nash insist it was at Joni Mitchell’s house, Stills adamantly insists it wasn’t. Reading science fiction often feels like science fiction writers are predicting the future, but they are not. They never try to predict the future. We remember the past imperfectly, but we constantly mine it for value. Don’t we also mine speculation about the future for value even though we know those stories are completely untrue? Doesn’t fiction create truth out of lies?

I’m consuming the past. Part of that is being in the present moment just enjoying the art, but more and more, I’m thinking about where and how the art was produced. I have read many books and articles about these bands, albums and songs. As interpreters of art we do not have to know the history connected to them. You can listen to “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” without ever knowing that Stephen Stills was writing about Judy Collins. However, if you do study it’s history, the nature of how you appreciate the song changes. The more you know how the song was recorded, and how the band was formed to record it, the more you realize the song is history, part of the past, and not part of the present. Won’t the same be true about science fiction? The more you know about science and the present will enhance the art of painting imaginary futures?

Am I studying art, or studying history? Yesterday I cooked lentil soup while listening to The Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway Volume One. The stories are exquisite. They are wonderful read by Stacy Keach (who Judy Collins left Stephen Stills for) on the Audible edition, making them dramatic, and the intent of Hemingway’s writing clear and obvious.

For my retirement years my goal is to write a novel, and I’m working on it sporadically. I’m not a very good writer, so I’m spending part of my days studying fiction and writing styles. When I listen to Hemingway I realize two very important things. One, Hemingway wrote as if he witness these events first hand. Some of his stories, like the Nick Adams tales, are autobiographical, but others like “The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber” are obviously fiction, but the details are so vivid, that I believe many of them are autobiographical too. Second, Hemingway wrote in a style that describes much with few words. His scenes are vivid and dramatic, with dialog so pitch perfect that they feel ultra realistic, like everything he writes is a documentary film. It has tremendous impact.

For example, just a few lines of dialog paints a vivid picture of the mother in “Soldier’s Home.” How did Hemingway create her? Was she like his mother, or did one of his friends tell him a story about their mother, or did Hemingway make it up whole? Like a poet, Hemingway uses very few words to capture this woman. The scene reminded me of conflicts with my mother when I was young. No matter where Hemingway got his idea, it feels like it had actually happened.

Most fiction is made up in the head of the writer. It’s not based or inspired by anything that really happened. Great fiction either captures real events, or fakes them so well they feel real. Good writing is about pulling off this trick.

I spend my days experimenting with writing science fiction, but I want to use the Hemingway style. How do I write about a future that will never exist as if I’m chronicling something I experienced for real? It’s only possible if I can visualize it completely, as if each scene really happened. I’m working on a scene where a man and women meet for the first time – how can I convey it to readers who can’t see what I’m seeing in my mind, and for me to make them feel they are experiencing something that really happened?

After I cooked the soup, I went to see Philomena with my friends Janis and Anne. It’s a movie based on real life events, which was also published as a book, The Lost Child of Philomena Lee by Martin Sixsmith. We all loved this quiet little movie because it was so real. I spend a lot of time thinking about how real life is turned into fiction, or how completely fictional characters are made to seem real. It often seems to me that the fiction with the most impact is either based on real events, or at least written by people who have been to the times and places where the stories took place.

That means science fiction and fantasy have a very real handicap. If everything comes out of the author’s mind then the story is limited by the author’s imagination. That’s why the Harry Potter books are so impressive. J. K. Rowling spent years imagining her characters and scenes. She even drew detailed pictures of them. And that might be why movie science fiction and fantasy is so much more popular than book SF&F. Movies have to create all the visuals and that makes the stories more real.

Science fiction and fantasy stories must spend a lot of time painting the scenery and explaining the cultural background, but don’t you think the Harry Potter books feel like the events actually happened? Isn’t that why they succeeded and other books about schools for wizards don’t?

Sometimes history is so distant that we must recreate it from imagined details. After the movie last night, Janis and I watched Alpha House, and then I watched an episode of Lark Rise To Candleford. Flora Thompson wrote a trilogy of books that were autobiographical sketches of growing up in rural England in the late Victorian times. As much as I love the TV series, it’s full of anachronistic thinking. I’ve read a little bit of the original book and it’s absolutely wonderful in providing period details.

Writing science fiction is like producing a television show over a century after the events – only a strange stylized view comes through. I wished I had the skill to write about the future with the details of Flora Thompson’s written observations. Since that’s impossible, I’d have to make up the details with that level of realism. I don’t know if that’s possible.

I’m currently listening to Distrust That Particular Flavor, a nonfiction book by William Gibson, where he talks about learning to write science fiction, but also deals with understanding the past, present and future. Gibson also admits to not knowing how to write when he started writing but taught himself. Listening to his essays I get the feeling he’s also obsessed with time and science fiction too, but maybe in a different way. He talks about writing about the net before the net caught on, and writing about future technology that we have no words to describe, especially verbs that explain its impact.

I’ve also reading Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. It is a book written in the late 1940s about 1984 but about a future that has never happened but is all too real, that is now part of our past. Nineteen Eighty-Four is a brilliant piece of science fiction, absolutely stunning, among the best examples of the literary technique ever produced.

So, what makes Orwell’s great novel great? To me it’s the temporal POV. It reads like the events have already taken place, like the details given were facts of memory, like the characters actually lived through these events. It feels like Orwell lived through this time like Hemingway lived through the events in his stories. That’s a neat trick for a science fiction book. It’s a trick of literature. It’s a writing trick that distinguishes literature from genre. And it’s one very hard act to pull off.

In struggling to write my scenes, which I do over and over again, at best I can produce pulp fiction. I’m not being critical. There’s nothing wrong with pulp fiction. Hell, my writing isn’t even good pulp fiction.

But what all of this exploration of time and science fiction has taught me is I want to write as if I’ve already experienced what I’m writing. In other words, I want to write about the future as if I’ve already lived it, instead of imagining a future I might could live in.

JWH – 12/18/13

Christmas for Atheists

I’m not one of those Grinch atheists that want to remove Christmas celebrations from governmental locations. I’m sure my faithful friends would be horrified, but I no longer believe Christmas is just about Christ, and seeing baby Jesus in a manager is no different than seeing Santa in a sleigh. Christmas supplanted a pagan holiday, so is it all that strange that a secular Christmas has supplanted a religious Christmas? Our society is about diversity and inclusion, so why not let the religious Christmas coexist with a secular Christmas? I don’t believe in angels, but I like them, and I especially like movies with angels. I value the concept of the separation of Church and State, but is a nativity scene really a religious endorsement in our modern commercial Christmas times? Isn’t it closer to a holiday brand?

I love that we have a holiday based on giving and sharing, that promotes goodwill to all mankind. That’s very positive and not particularly endorsing any religion when you think about it. It is sad that Christmas has become a commercial holiday, but the underlying concept is still about giving, and that’s good. Plus, helping businesses stay afloat and keep people employed is a positive concept too. We’re a capitalistic society, so a commercial Christmas is the perfect holiday for our economic philosophy. And isn’t giving a nice way to expand the GDP?

Wasn’t Christmas redesigned by Charles Dickens in the 19th century anyway? Isn’t A Christmas Carol the real model for modern Christmas philosophy? It’s sad to say, I think even the wonderful sentiment of Dickens is now being supplanted by Comedy Christmas – which makes me wonder what the holiday will be like in one hundred years. I guess it’s sort of funny, but serious Christians want to restore the ancient traditions about the celebration of Jesus, and I want to maintain a mid-20th century traditional view of Christmas. My concept of Christmas comes from these movies:

A Christmas Carol (1938) – with Reginald Owen
The Shop Around the Corner (1940)
The Man Who Came to Dinner (1942)
Holiday Inn (1942)
Christmas in Connecticut (1945)
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
It Happened on Fifth Avenue (1947)
Miracle on 34th Street (1947)
The Bishop’s Wife (1947)
Scrooge (1951) – A Christmas Carol with Alastair Sim
White Christmas (1954)
A Christmas Story (1983) – a modern movie about a mid-20th century Christmas

Younger people today when they list their favorite Christmas movies pick films that are about the Christmas holiday such as Home Alone and National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation, but they seem to lack the sentiment of what I think Christmas is about. Even the Christian Science Monitor lists Die Hard as one of their top Christmas films. Really?!!!

Thus, we have to accept that Christmas is constantly changing, mutating, and must I say it, evolving. I think it’s interesting that many low-tech animated Christmas television shows from the 1960s have a retro popularity now. I guess Christmas itself is always about looking backwards, and promoting a sentimental view of the past. Sometimes a modern movie conveys this almost as well as my old favorites, such as the films Love Actually, and The Family Stone. Even the comedy Christmas movies add moments of touching generosity between their crude gags.

Christmas is about reminding people they shouldn’t be Ebenezer Scrooge. Does it matter how the message is delivered? I can accept that some people like it with metaphysical trappings. That’s cool.

JWH – 12/16/13