Seiun Award
April 21st, 2008“The Calorie Man” just got nominated for the Seiun Award. Nifty!
I-CON Science Fiction Convention
April 2nd, 2008I’ll be going out to I-CON this weekend at Stonybrook University and I’ve got my schedule from the organizers. Lots of stuff to do:
The Essence of Pure SF: what exactly is it?
Bacigalupi(M), Bear, Malzberg, J VanderMeer, Calvin
Fri, 7 S302
Sat 11-12 Signing
SF Kaleidoscope: SF as a Lens on the Past and Future
Bacigalupi(M), Malzberg, Collins, Kyle, Videbaek
Sat, 3 S311
Bad Stories from Good Writers: what can be learned?
Malzberg(M), Bacigalupi, McGarry, Buchanan, Williams
Sat 4, S311
(topic suggested by Barry Malzberg, based on an idea from Alice Sheldon)
Horror As Social Commentary-in many media, notably fiction and film, the horror story is used to explore and/or explain real-life horrors
Madonia(M), Gordon, Freedman, Bacigalupi
Sun, 11 S311
Where Writers Fear to Tread? Economic, Environmental and Cultural Issues left unexplored
Bacigalupi(M), Spinrad, Malzberg, Macdonald, Beagle
Sun, 12 S302
Lies and Myths About Getting Published-a surprising take on “accepted” ideas about publishing
Rosenberg(M), Crawford, Bacigalupi, Gorinsky, Bilmes
Sun, 2 S302
NY Times on Arthur C. Clark
March 23rd, 2008This must be my fifteen minutes of fame. I’m quoted along with Charles Stross, Walter Jon Williams, and Ian McDonald. Nifty.
Optimistic CO2 Sci-Fi
March 10th, 2008Here’s my take on writing optimistic SF– just don’t make it consolatory pap. That’s what advertising, TV and suburban sprawl are supposed to sell.
As an example, here’s the latest on the global warming front. (note: the link is changed to point directly to the Washington Post article as the MSNBC version expired) No big news, but here’s the money quote:
Steve Gardiner, a philosophy professor at the University of Washington who studies climate change, said the studies highlight that the argument over global warming “is a classic inter-generational debate, where the short-term benefits of emitting carbon accrue mainly to us and where the dangers of them are largely put off until future generations.”
When it comes to deciding how drastically to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, O’Neill said, “in the end, this is a value judgment, it’s not a scientific question.” The idea of shifting to a carbon-free society, he added, “appears to be technically feasible. The question is whether it’s politically feasible or economically feasible.”
A lot of sci-fi focuses on the technical aspects of a problem. And completely ignores or soft-peddles the human aspects. If you’re going to write realistic optimistic science fiction story about global warming (for example), you have to jump past the bullshit test of human greed and short-sightedness.
It’s not impossible, but first you have to explain how all the yogacizing organic carrot munching Baby Bjorn wearing liberal types who drive four blocks to the video store to get another DVD rental (real person, btw) are going to wake up and smell the coffee. I mean, if a supposedly supportive person (She buys local organic, yay!!!) is still clueless and destructive, how are you going to get the coal miner with the “Piss on Hippies” bumper sticker on his 4×4 (another neighbor of mine) to think sustainably?
Sci-fi’s urge seems to mostly go after the consumer/tech solution, ie we’ll design a better product (we love you Prius) so that we can keep doing our same old destructive things… but now, automagically, it won’t be bad. Makes me think of artificial sweeteners. Sometimes it’s not a magic bullet, no matter how much we wish it was.
So I see the central problem of realistic optimistic sci-fi as being at least two-fold:
- We’re all so self-serving.
- We seem to be biologically wired not to deal with any problem that’s not an obvious and immediate threat.
These two things seem to apply across the board, the difference between a liberal greenie in a Prius and Redneck cowboy in pickup is basically zero. If you’re driving, it’s a problem. And the last time I checked… all of America is driving, regardless of our political leanings. I’ve met a few fringe people who really do make a pretty good stab at living sustainably, but even they get on airplanes. Myself, I’ve got four cross-country flights scheduled this year. How’s that for hypocrisy?
In order to surmount this, fictionally, it seems that one would either have to pretend that the majority of people are not in fact lazy, self-serving, and most importantly short-sighted (which seems difficult given that these aspects are precisely what has driven us to the edge of the cliff), or you have to come up with a plausible set of reasons for people to change. Kim Stanley Robinson does this by making global warming a crisis. But what if it’s actually a death of a thousand cuts?
I’d love to see good meaty sf that goes after the big questions about where we’re headed and how we’re going to sort it all out, but I have a hard time believing that it’s going to be done by techno-fix alone. And I have a very hard time believing that we’ll do anything before the damage is already enormous. After all, I’m writing this on a coal-burning computer, which will then be posted to a coal-burning web server, and there’s a pretty good chance that you’re reading it on a coal burning computer at your end, too.
At this point, writing realistic optimistic sf feels like another genre entirely– it feels like fantasy.
Podcast of “The People of Sand and Slag”
March 10th, 2008When I was out at SF in SF, Rick Kleffel of the Agony Column recorded my reading of “The People of Sand and Slag.” If you’re one of those people who likes audio, I don’t stumble too much as I read. :-)
Rick also recorded our after-reading panel discussion where Terry Bisson, Carter Scholz and I all wax thoughtful about sf. It was an interesting conversation and the audience had great questions (though they aren’t mic’ed well so you have to crank up the volume and listen carefully to hear them).
And finally, I want to link to Carter Scholz’s reading as well. We only met at the event, and I was sadly ignorant of him going in, but he did an astonishing reading from his book Radiance. I liked it so much I bought the book.
Fantastic Reviews Interview and Review
March 10th, 2008Aaron Hughes over at Fantastic Reviews has a very long interview with me, which ranges over everything from my writing process, to free markets and externalities, to the idea of “boy” stories. It was a fun conversation.
They also have a review of PUMP SIX which opens with, “There is no shortage of talented writers in the science fiction genre today, but there are all too few who matter.” And they give it a 9/10. Shiny.
Crystal Meth House: Coda
March 7th, 2008The wonderful folks from Crystal Meth House have moved away. Rumor has it that they were foreclosed on, that that they left the house in shambles (broken windows, destroyed lawn, etc)…. and that they also apparently stripped it bare, to the extent of removing the furnace and the kitchen, cabinets and all. I’m still waiting for confirmation on whether or not they also took the toilet.
I sort of admire that level of crazy. I’m damn glad they’re gone. But I’m impressed, nonetheless.
American Dream
March 6th, 2008My wife and I have the option of moving into bigger, more spacious, more sunny, more land, and more pretty much of everything, house.
The downside is that it’s also more mortgage, more responsibility, and it exists two miles out of town… basically in that no-man’s land called ex-urban sprawl. I hate this kind of sprawl. The 1-acre and 2-acre and 5-acre subdivisions that eat up farmland and cut up a landscape. And frankly, I hate the feel of 1980’s subdivisions- even though the house we’re looking at has fairly groovy passive solar and decent insulation, it’s still very much a product of the eighties. Right now, we live right down in town in a cute little 1940’s bungalow. It’s two blocks from my writing office. It’s a small house so our utility footprint is pretty modest, for Americans, anyway, and we’re within walking distance of post office, grocery store, bank, and friends. And when I say walking distance, I mean it’s all about four blocks away. Then again, pretty much the whole town is four blocks away.
But I think the thing that bothers me the most is that it’s definitely a case where if we move, it will mean that we have to be more disciplined financially. Right now, we live on a $300/month mortgage in our tiny house, so we have a fair amount of breathing room to do stupid things like write novels and short stories. If we move, it means I’ll need to start writing epic fantasy or start shaking my military-sf money maker or something.
So anyway, I’m torn. As Arjun gets bigger, we’re more and more on top of each other here. But the thing about having bigger more expensive things like houses is that they pretty much enslave you to that whole money jobby-job thing I’ve alluded to above. I hate that treadmill. It’s why I keep quitting jobs to write.
But then, on the flip side, another appealing aspect of the house is that it has more space for gardening, and as spring approaches, I’m dying to get out and plant things. And it’s got interior sun rooms so I could plant things all year round. And even though it’s out of town, it’s still close enough that I can ride my bike so it won’t necessitate another car — but still, the thing about living away from the town center is that the car just naturally gets more of a workout; you drive for groceries instead of walking for them. I can go back and forth about this stuff all day. Actually, I’ve already been doing it for a month.
Basically this boils down the cost/benefit analysis of the American Dream. With the hunger for the fun and the toys and the rosy lifestyle on one side, and the more practical but somewhat less fun version where we accept a life with limits.
Bitterness Abated
March 6th, 2008The work on the book continues. I have not scrapped it.
One of the things that has always troubled me with writing is the need to both be creative and also to differentiate between good and bad paths to follow. The eternal editor/creator conundrum. It’s easy to say that when you’re creating, you should put the editor in a box and ship the bastard around the world, and only let him come visit for copyediting… But I don’t think that works.
Even when you’re in creative mode, you still need to be making choices, aiming toward something, plotting and gunning for something… and that editorial hat, or at least that hat of crafty scheming is necessary to get you there– To say, “umm, you’re deep in cliche here”, “let’s not do something boring here,” “kick it up a notch, eh?” etc.
When the editor gets completely exiled, you end up with a lot of words and not much gleam, either in ideas or prose, so you need… if not an editorial voice, at least a striving and demanding voice to be around. But the trick is to leash it and make it work for you. And I think the way you do that is not to use the editor to tell you what sucks, but to help guide you to what is cool, and to wave a flag for you when you need to go hunting for something better/cooler/more exciting. If you’re in a scene, and you’re thinking, “Christ, what a load of cliches,” the first thing to do is set aside the self-denigration, and the second thing to do is to focus on the much more pleasurable and interesting question of “what’s the coolest thing I can do with this? Let’s play here to make it better.”
It puts an optimistic spin on the realization that something’s not working, and by extension that keeps me working instead of throwing up my hands in despair.
Dogged
March 4th, 2008In moments when my overweening ego is feeling buffed, I imagine that I’m a good writer.
After today, what I really think is that I’m a dogged writer. If I polish the turd long enough, eventually something shines. It’s really my specialty. Going after a story again and again until finally I figure out how to spin crap into gold. I often don’t know where I’m going with a story, or why a section of it (or the whole thing) doesn’t work. I just keep working at it, and eventually it gets better. Mostly by magic, it seems.
The problem with this technique is that it works pretty well for short stories, and works terribly for novels. I think I’ve been working on my current novel for almost two years, and mostly, I keep having the urge to throw it all away and give up. But no. Because I’m such a dogged sonofabitch, I keep working on it, trying to force it into a form that works. And that’s a problem, I think, because really, whenever I’ve really successfully reworked a short story, its because I threw everything away and started fresh from some angle that had been revealed in all of my earlier crummy attempts– that’s how I did “The Fluted Girl,” “The Calorie Man,” and my latest, “The Gambler.” I went after the coolest part that wasn’t really shining the way it should, the heart of it if you will, and I ripped that heart out and set it into a whole new body. And then the story worked.
With 150,000 words written, its painful to think that almost everything needs to be trashed, so that something more interesting can be created, but I’m starting to have that creeping feeling. Crash and burn. That’s how this whole project is feeling right now. I woke up in the middle of the night with this feeling of panic about the book– all its problems, all the facts that aren’t checked, all the cultural details that are fudged, all the world-building scaffolding that looks like it could collapse at any moment. All the words. Christ there are a lot of words. And I couldn’t go back to sleep for three hours. It’s not like there aren’t decent sections of the book, but its like the whole is less than sum of its parts.
