The Book of Greatest Impact

I started out very good at math.  Mostly because my father made me memorize my multiplication tables up to 12 and then showed me how you could break larger problems down and use the facts you knew to solve them.  But then I ran into algebra and trig and calculus and my brain looked at the numbers and symbols on the page and all I saw was static.

In the beginning it was all about apples and oranges.  I could understand a problem of division because I could act it out in my mind and it made sense.  If I had twelve apples and gave half away I would have six remaining.  But if I had a quadratic equation and I used the FOIL method to solve it… well, how does this tell me how many apples I have left?  But worse for me were the rules, like the aforementioned FOIL method.  It just seemed arbitrary. 

Then, just before I was heading overseas to begin my tour of suffering duty, a friend began raving about this very big book he was reading called Gödel, Escher, Bach.  This book, which was even thicker than a Stephen King novel, was about how the concepts of math and music and art are all entwined.  And if that didn’t make me want to read it, he informed me that the whole thing was about Gödel’s effort to prove the statement a = a and a <> a.  Oh, and the whole thing was told as a series of parables.

I can’t remember if I bought the book later or if he gave me a copy of it but somehow I ended up with this doorstop in one hand and a lot of time on the other and so I just began reading.

There is a lot to take away from Gödel, Escher, Bach – you should probably read it every year – but the thing that I took from it, the concept that changed my life, was that calculus and algebra and such things were just systems made up of rules.  These systems were like games.  If you played by the rules you would win a predictable prize, the correct answer, but if you violated the rules you would get a big mess.  It’s not how many apples you have left.  The system itself defines what the right answer is.

This simple concept that I didn’t need to see the justification for a system’s rules in order to use the system itself allowed me to get back into math and is directly responsible for a long career as a programmer.  I didn’t particularly enjoy reading it and after awhile it started to feel like a chore, especially as it got more and more into Theoretical Number Theory, but this may be the book that had biggest impact on my life.

Along with Treasure Island and Kidnapped.

Oops

Okay, so I caved.  I spent day after day walking in the greenbelt, thinking about the SciFi novel, laying out the plot, creating the characters and then one night I just pushed Pawn Takes Knight to one side and quietly started writing. 

Probably, this has to do with that lack of drama I talked about in the previous post.  Starting something new, going directly to the most pivotal scenes, beginning the character introductions, is so much more dramatic than the work of fleshing out the story. 

Technically, I am beholden to the readers out there waiting for the sequel to the Vengeance Season but I would be doing them a disservice if I were to force myself to plod along in an uninspired mood.  Besides, I’m pretty sure that this is just a minor diversion.  Once work on the SciFi novel loses its drama or I run into the intractable problems so common with a first draft, I’ll quietly slide right back to PTK and finish it.

Probably.

Bolt From The Blue

I go through long periods of workman-like productivity, weeks and weeks when I simply sit down every day at the same time and turn out good work.  There’s very little drama involved during these periods which is why they are the most productive.

The drama comes before the productivity.  Days of pulling my hair out, long angry walks in the greenbelt, my mind constantly searching for some kind of inspiration while knowing full well that inspiration cannot be searched for, it has to search for you.  During this time, I wake in the middle of the night to jot down hurried descriptions of minor revelations.  I let my mind wander on those long greenbelt strolls because that’s when inspiration finds you: when you’re thinking about something else.

I have put the great big fantasy novel aside for now (as described previously, a book has to cool on the window sill for several months before I can make a true appraisal of a draft) and turned my attention to the sequel to The Vengeance Season, still called Pawn Takes Knight.  The previous draft of PTK did not turn out well.  I learned a lot about the story and the characters and what I wanted out of them but as far as pages, it was a total loss.  I had to start this draft, number five, from a blank sheet of virtual paper.

Blank paper, virtual or otherwise, always begins a new bout of raging drama for me.  I discovered a lot from the failed drafts, but mostly what I didn’t want to do.  It took a lot of distracted driving, long hikes, and lying in bed staring at the ceiling before the first realizations began to trickle in.  After a few weeks, I had jotted down all the answers to all of the problems I had encountered in previous drafts, and more importantly than that, I was once again in love with this story.

That’s how I know the period of solid work has begun: I am anxious to write every night.  During the difficult times, when I’m casting about for stray strands of brilliance, the approach of the hour for writing comes with a certain feeling of doom.  Not because I feel I’m being forced to write (that will always be a choice for me) but because I know that I will not accomplish much and what I do accomplish will be destined for digital dustbin.

But, like most people with at least a mild mental disorder, I have to admit that I miss the drama.  You can tell how little I have been thinking outside the lines by the sheer amount of time between posts on this blog.  I spend most of my time quietly writing away hoping for some missile of disruption to strike from the outside world.  Maybe in the form of an email (you know who you are) or a new movie or novel.  Something that gets the heart rate up and returns a little bit of that electricity that distinguishes craft from work.

That’s not to say that the work I’m doing now isn’t inspired.  It’s just that it’s filled with the minor surprises that are so important to keep prose lively rather than the thunderbolts of realization that knock you out of your chair.  It’s good.  It’s fine.  To keep myself from getting to antsy, I’m spending my walks thinking about the scifi novel that I will be working on after I finish this draft of PTK.

Wow, that’s a lot of work stretched out in front of me and it will be at least a year before I will have anything to send to agents.

Great.  Now I’m depressed.

Boom. Done.

Once again I find myself on the verge of a state of nearing done.  The first four drafts of the big fantasy novel were somewhat there, near there, almost there, and just about there but they were never there.  That’s why they became previous drafts.  Draft number five is the final page-one rewrite.  From here on out, it’s all about tweaking and punching and polishing.  That is to say that this draft has all the major elements, plot and character and narrative, in place.  All that remains is getting the language right and plugging any holes that crop up.

So what now?  Well, we’ve talked about this before. Now I put it in a metaphorical drawer and ignore it for some months.  Then, when it is new to me again, I’ll take it out and make a more objective decision on whether this is really the final draft.

In the meantime, I can bask in the glow of finishing.  The prospect of writing a draft of a novel is so stupidly harrowing (especially the way I do it) that the mere fact of finishing, apart from any questions of quality, becomes a matter for celebration. 

Since I don’t know how the novel is going to end when I start, I have no idea if I’m going to make to the end.  I have a ton of unfinished novels sitting in my metaphorical drawers (wait, not in my pants, in file folders.  You know what I mean) that will probably never reach completion, forever destined to claim they enjoy cuddling just as much.

But some of them have second and even third lives.  Right now I’m going to work on the sequel to The Vengeance Season and I’m more than happy to do that because it’s shaping up to be an excellent follow up, but when I inevitably have to put that draft into a drawer, I know the next story I’m going to tell.

From previous posts, I’ve made it clear that one of my favorite writers is John Scalzi.  This is because he writes the kind of unfettered science fiction that reminds me of the golden age.  Back in the day (I really hate that I’m old enough to say that with conviction) SF fell into two categories: Asimov and Heinlein.  It was easy to tell the difference.  Asimovians spent pages and pages explaining the exact science behind their warp drives.  A Heinleinian’s warp drive was a black box that powered adventure stories more concerned with giant bugs and anatomically correct cyborgs than how you got to a bug infested planet or who built the girl named Friday. 

Scalzi is of the Heinlein school.  Not that he’s a fascist or weirdly perverted, I don’t know him well enough to make that call, more that he uses interplanetary travel as a way to tell a story rather than a reason to lay out a nerdgasm’s worth of theoretical physics while describing how a spaceship travels the unthinkable distances between planets. 

So, the thing is, one of those orphans moldering in a drawer is that kind of science fiction story.  Very little science, lots of fiction, no fantasy.  I put this story aside because I didn’t feel like there was a readership out there waiting for such tales.  Then I stumbled onto Fuzzy Nation by John Scalzi and it changed my mind.

The interesting aspect of this journey is that it came through audible books.  As my eyesight and attention span fail, I find myself reading less and listening more.  I’m lucky.  My grandfather was forced into a life of endlessly flipping cassettes of Louis L’amour westerns. I get to go to Audible.com and download a professional, high quality production of practically any book I can imagine.  The interesting aspect of this is that it adds a new element of choice to book buying.  What if you don’t like the narrator?  This turns out to be a big deal for me because two of the most popular science fiction narrators happen to be the ones I can’t stand to listen to.  So I’m always on the hunt for good readers.

When Ready Player One came out, I leapt on it – I mean, let’s face it, this is the book I was born and raised to read – blindly jumping in without pausing to make sure I could stand to listen to the narrator.  Lucky me, that narrator turned out to be Wil Wheaton.  He was so good at reading this book that I did a search to find other books he had recorded.  That led me to John Scalzi’s Fuzzy Nation.  And that led me to every other thing Scalzi has written except for his most famous work, the Old Man’s War series, because the guy who reads that one is one of the readers I can’t stand to listen to.

But, audible books aside, the real point here is that reading Scalzi reminded me how much I loved science fiction during the second golden age.  And that reminded me that I don’t need a degree in theoretical physics* to tell a story about interstellar travel and human colonization of other planets.  And that led me back to a story I had once concocted about the technical difficulties of taming a wild planet.  And that is the story I will work on next.  I can’t wait.

* One of my favorite bits from the show Community is that Greendale offers a course in Theoretical Phys-Ed. 

 

Happy Endings

About five years ago, I had a run of incredibly ambivalent luck when, over the course of a single summer I read the novels The Time Traveler’s Wife, Never Let Me Go, Children of Men, and Oryx & Crake.  This was a profoundly disturbing experience for me as I am a shallow person who doesn’t just tend toward happy endings but rather seeks them out with the unerring, indefatigable single-mindedness of a Sidewinder missile hot on the exhaust of an enemy jet.

For those of you who haven’t had a chance to read these four excellent works, I urge you to go do that now because this post is going to be full of inadvertent SPOILERS.

I started that summer with Time Traveler’s Wife having no idea what lay before me.  I had read some glowing book review somewhere, needed something read, and eagerly dove in.  The first two thirds of this book are so much fun and the quirky, out-of-sequence love story is so clever and beguiling that you really have no idea that the light at the end of the tunnel is actually a gamma ray burst that will hollow out your happiness for the next four months. 

Seeking to shake myself from the well of despair that book left me in, I immediately jumped into Children of Men.  At least this one didn’t pretend to be a happy shiny love story before it grew fangs and went for my giblets.  Children starts off in a weary, gray version of Earth where the population has become steadily more infertile over time until the people of Earth are just wiling away the hours until oblivion comes to collect them.  Front to back, this is a tour of the despair of knowing one’s demise is imminent, but instead of being about a single person dying of cancer, it’s about a whole race simply dying out.  If you’ve seen the move, by the way, you haven’t read the book.  They took some serious departures there, as usual.

Once again stunned and disoriented, I turned to Oryx & Crake.  I had never read the book of The Handmaid’s Tale but I’d seen the movie so I should have been at least partially warned.  My problem is that when I decide to read a book or watch a movie, I refuse to read any reviews beforehand.  I want the experience, good or bad, to be all mine.  Oryx & Crake, it turns out, is another book about the human race eking out its last desperate puffs of breath.

At this point, I asked MLA to hide all the sharp things in the house. 

If I remember correctly, it took me two months to read those three books.  While I tore through Time Traveler in a hurry, my pace was slowed appreciably for the others by work & family demands and a general lack of momentum caused by the contents of the books.

Finally, I set to reading Never Let Me Go.  This book was so disquieting that I didn’t even start to read anything else for a month after I finished.  This is rare for me.  I always have to have a book in progress or I go crazy.  Just to give you an idea of what a chipper and upbeat story this is, let me just say that it’s about a group of children growing up in a special boarding school.  What’s special about this school is that the children are clones being set aside so that they can make “donations” later in life when their originals need an organ.  What makes it worse is that all of that happens mostly in the background while in the foreground it’s just a story about kids growing up together and all the drama entailed therein.  I think the fact that the story never really deals head on with their situation makes it all the more horrific.

Let me pause for a moment to save you from a potential bout of suicidal depression by detailing the correct order in which to read these books:

1) Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro

2) Ready Player One, Ernest Cline

3) Children of Men, P. D. James

4) Agent to the Stars, John Scalzi

5) Oryx & Crake, Margaret Atwood

6) Android’s Dream, John Scalzi

7) The Time Traveler’s Wife, Audrey Niffenegger

8) Red Shirts, John Scalzi

Notice that I lean pretty heavily on John Scalzi for the interstitial reads.  That’s because, as I’ll discuss in a future post, he is a master plotter who knows how to bring home the happy ending.  There is little that is more satisfying than reading the last page of a Scalzi story.

Anyway, the reason I bring this up (apart from being a warning to others) is that these four authors did something I would never do.  I wasn’t kidding when I said I like happy endings.  I would never in a million years set out to write a book that ends like Oryx & Crake or Time Traveler’s Wife and I would never set a novel in a world as bleak as Children of Men or Never Let me Go.  I would not seek to do it and I would not allow myself to accidentally do it because I do not have that much self confidence.

I mean, honestly, you have to have a ton of faith in your prose style and you storytelling skills to place a story in a gray, uninteresting landscape because you don’t have fantastical adventures as a break from the relentlessly downbeat surroundings.  And as far as the ending is concerned?  No way would I try to pull off the ones from Time Traveler’s Wife or Oryx & Crake because I would have trouble believing I had left the reader feeling fulfilled.  That’s something I’m very touchy about.

Now, just to be clear, I’m not bagging on these books – they were each an excellent experience in their own way – I’m just saying that the emotional impact of reading them was profound and long lasting.  It’s sort of like a meal you had once that you loved but would never order again because it was just too rich.

Maybe someday I will have the courage to move into that gray area but for now I will continue to seek out (and to write) upbeat, if not outright happy, endings for my own peace of mind.

Back Into The Cage: Chernobyl Diaries vs. The Awakening

The Awakening and Chernobyl Diaries happened to come in from Netflix on the same day so I watched them back to back in order to form a comparison even though, apart from the fact that they are both horror movies, they don’t have much in common.  One is a classy ghost story in the vein of The Others and the other is a lowbrow zombie picture with radioactive mutants standing in for the zombies.  So why compare them?  Because, much like Total Recall and Dredd, one of these movies succeeds and the other fails on the basis of what is and isn’t in their stories.

On the face of it, one would expect The Chernobyl Diaries to be the favorite here.  It’s got a great hook, tourists trapped in the Chernobyl support village of Pripyat run into a tribe of cannibalistic mutants with hideously deformed faces (either that or they’re wearing old gas masks.  They’re shown so fleetingly that I never got a good look at one).  One of my favorite horror movies ever was the Dawn of the Dead remake and this looked to be in the same vein.  Unfortunately, Diaries has none of the story or character depth of that film and ends up languishing in manufactured drama and overused tropes. 

Anyone can tell a story about a group of people running away from monsters.  The hard part is making viewers or readers care about the people running away from the monsters.  You see how we’re into the Total Recall territory again?  The writers lay in some artificial conflict between two brothers and a pair of newlyweds who are never really properly introduced but it’s just exterior noise. 

Watching this group of really unsympathetic young people get picked off in an increasingly ridiculous series of set pieces, I was reminded of a truly awful book and film that swept the nation a few years ago, The Ruins.  An unreadable book and a truly unwatchable movie, they both fail for the same reason Diaries does: the characters’ relatability ranges from “don’t care” to “wish she would just die already”.  Throw in a completely ridiculous monster in the form of sentient vines (or mutants who have somehow managed to survive intense radiation for several decades) and you’ve got something that is really hard to care about.

Notice I didn’t warn you about spoilers?  That’s because there is absolutely nothing to spoil. If you’ve seen the trailer for this movie, you’ve seen this movie. 

The Awakening, on the other hand, was the one I was looking least forward to seeing.  It looked like another twee British ghost story that spends most of its time going on about “The War” and “Mustard Gas” and wot-wot with a ghost thrown in every now and then for good measure.  Like the Haunting of Downton Abbey – a concept I find so horrible it would just be unimaginable.

That’s not what this is.  Much like the beautiful and powerful and sad and triumphant Pan’s Labyrinth (highly recommended, obviously) The Awakening uses the war as a backdrop for the real story.  But in this case, the war is over and the people who have survived it (and the Spanish Flu epidemic) are living with the ghosts of a million dead from a single generation. 

I’m struggling to find a way to explain how wonderful this movie is without ruining it for you.  Suffice to say that the definition of “haunted” gets a workout and the lead character is on a journey of intense discovery.  And it’s that character and that journey that give the story so much depth.

One thing to add, though, is that I’m in the minority with my fondness for this film.  Rotten Tomatoes gives it a 62% from the critics (Roger Ebert, usually one of the more reliable critics, gave it a one word review: “Whatever”) and 52% from audiences.  I attribute that to its slow pacing and gradual ratcheting up of the horror, two things that I believe add to the film rather than detract from it.  So if you’re in the mood for a quick, cheap scare, definitely go for Chernobyl Diaries.  If you’ve got the time and the patience for a really good ghost story, I recommend The Awakening.

 

Dredd Vs. Total Recall Cage Match

I watched the 2012 Dredd remake last night.  Following on the heels of the just so-so Total Recall remake, I thought this would be an interesting experiment considering the similarity of the source matter; both were remakes of cheesy 1990s Science Fiction extravaganzas staring actors known more for their physiques than their acting chops.

The original Judge Dredd is a stark reminder that once upon a time, Hollywood couldn’t make a comic book movie to save its greasy life.  In the wake of Spiderman, The Dark Knight, Thor, Captain America, Iron Man and The Avengers, that’s a little hard to believe, but it’s true.  Once the best Hollywood had to offer in the form of a comic book movie was The Fantastic Four.  I don’t know how they figured it out but the current crop of DC & Marvel movies benefits from more than just better special effects.  They benefit from excellent story structure and storytelling, as well.

The differences between the two remakes are stark.  The look of Total Recall was good but derivative.  The storytelling was rife with action tropes and, as noted before, there was a singular lack of emotional investment in the characters even though there was a romance at the heart of the story.

Everything that Total Recall gets wrong, Dredd gets right.  The oversaturated chromatics give the colors a weird metallic vibe that sets the look apart from anything else I’ve seen in a while.  I didn’t get to see this one in 3D because I was streaming it at home, but I wish I would have.  The super slow motion, overexposed scenes showing the effects of the SloMo drug must have been nearly overwhelming to the senses.  The megablocks, with their vaguely Soviet “good enough for government work” appearance, are also a better visual indicator of overpopulation than crowds of people standing in the rain.

But this blog is really about story, not about visuals, and that’s where Dredd scores well ahead of Total Recall.  Whereas Total Recall wasted a perfectly good chance to humanize their story with the romance between Quaid and Melina, the Dredd writers realized straight off that their protagonist was a nonstarter for emotional involvement.  Judge Dredd as a character is an Eastwood.  He’s not capable of dramatic change or emotional connection.  He’s more a force of nature than a person.  So they rightly focused the emotional side of the story on Dredd’s rookie partner, Cassandra. 

In the end, this is really Cassandra’s story, not Dredd’s.  Not only does she have to go through the mouth and belly of Hell, a megablock run from top to bottom by a vicious gang led by a sociopathically disinterested Ma-Ma (played perfectly by Lena Heady), she has to do it as a psychic given to taking in the thoughts of those around her.  This tower of despair is not filled with the sort of people whose thoughts would be comforting to read.

This is another good point the movie makes about overpopulation: the megablock is filled with equal parts good people and atrocious villains.  When they run out of room, people live in despair cheek to jowl regardless of their proclivities.  With no police force to protect them (Judge Dredd says early on that they can only respond to 6% of 911 calls) people are forced either into a life of crime or one of cowardice without recourse.  This is highlighted when Ma-Ma shuts the building down and traps the two Judges inside so she can kill them.  The ordinary citizens are ordered not to help or risk being killed themselves.  There follow many scenes of terrified citizens closing their doors to the Judges.

The hail of bullets destroying property and innocent bystanders alike used to be Paul Verhoeven’s signature but now pretty much every science fiction movie spends more rounds than were used in all of World War II.  This is probably because the simple act of shooting someone doesn’t have the impact it did when Dirty Harry did it.  We are too inured to gun violence for a single bullet to impress us.  Dredd uses this trope to good effect, however, to show the absolute worthlessness of human life inside the megablocks.  Ma-Ma puts the exclamation point on this statement when she uses three Gatling guns to erase a whole floor, including all its civilians, by shooting right through the concrete walls.

Cassandra’s journey from idealistic rookie to full on Judge is a good one and Dredd’s character acts as a nice signpost indicating where she’s headed should she choose to go there.  And that’s the difference between this plus-good movie and the just good Total Recall.  There’s a journey to go with the chase.