Derek B. Miller's Blog, page 3
November 29, 2022
October 14, 2022
October 12, 2022
New website soon
Hello, everyone. In the next few weeks I'm going to launch my website (derekbmiller.com). I'll provide links to reviews, interviews with me, some readings I've done, and articles I've written. What's more fun will be all the covers that were mocked up but ultimately rejected for all my books (including Quiet Time, the Audible Original) as well as some insider discussions about how and why certain BIG EVENTS happened.
I'm also going to experiment with a section I'll call Writer's Desk, that provides images, articles, photos, maps … all sorts of things that inspired me as I was writing the books. It's sort of a visit to the messy desk of a working writer.
If you have any photos of my novels in fun places, I will be delighted to post them on the website. Write me at derekbmiller@gmail.com
All the best.
dbm
I'm also going to experiment with a section I'll call Writer's Desk, that provides images, articles, photos, maps … all sorts of things that inspired me as I was writing the books. It's sort of a visit to the messy desk of a working writer.
If you have any photos of my novels in fun places, I will be delighted to post them on the website. Write me at derekbmiller@gmail.com
All the best.
dbm
October 5, 2022
An update: October 5, 2022
A bit of personal news:
• My next novel is called THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI and will be published with Avid Reader Press at Simon & Schuster. I am delighted to be back with my brilliant editor Lauren Wein, who first acquired Norwegian by Night so long ago and helped launch my career in the U.S.
• I am writing a new novel set on the Spanish coast in the late 1950s around Cadaques. It's a darker, more gothic, Hitchcockean sort of affair that brings suspense, mystery, politics, magic and philosophy together in the death of a twin sister and the survivor's quest to learn the truth. I'm living in Spain as I write this.
• I am a Design Fellow with the Somali Public Agenda in Mogadishu. Until yesterday (4 October) I had been planning to work with them on evidence-based policy design — informed by local, cultural research — for a transitional justice program in the country intended to help reduce tensions and help communities build lasting peace. When the team started the work (I wasn't there) on Monday, two car bombs were detonated by al-Shabaab and a third went off very close to the team a half hour later. Twenty people died and 36 were injured and. Our team was OK but obviously the project is on hold. So …
• The American rights to RADIO LIFE are now available! If science fiction publishers are looking to snatch up a novel loved by the FT, The Guardian, and the Sunday Times, now is the chance.
• I am now repped by Simon Lipskar at Writers House, which is about all a novelist can ask for.
• My friend Heather is helping me design a new website that will be located at derekbmiller.com. Watch that space.
Happy reading, everyone.
• My next novel is called THE CURSE OF PIETRO HOUDINI and will be published with Avid Reader Press at Simon & Schuster. I am delighted to be back with my brilliant editor Lauren Wein, who first acquired Norwegian by Night so long ago and helped launch my career in the U.S.
• I am writing a new novel set on the Spanish coast in the late 1950s around Cadaques. It's a darker, more gothic, Hitchcockean sort of affair that brings suspense, mystery, politics, magic and philosophy together in the death of a twin sister and the survivor's quest to learn the truth. I'm living in Spain as I write this.
• I am a Design Fellow with the Somali Public Agenda in Mogadishu. Until yesterday (4 October) I had been planning to work with them on evidence-based policy design — informed by local, cultural research — for a transitional justice program in the country intended to help reduce tensions and help communities build lasting peace. When the team started the work (I wasn't there) on Monday, two car bombs were detonated by al-Shabaab and a third went off very close to the team a half hour later. Twenty people died and 36 were injured and. Our team was OK but obviously the project is on hold. So …
• The American rights to RADIO LIFE are now available! If science fiction publishers are looking to snatch up a novel loved by the FT, The Guardian, and the Sunday Times, now is the chance.
• I am now repped by Simon Lipskar at Writers House, which is about all a novelist can ask for.
• My friend Heather is helping me design a new website that will be located at derekbmiller.com. Watch that space.
Happy reading, everyone.
July 26, 2022
I need your help
Looking for the best books and movies with a dark family secret that is slowly revealed with a shocking or terrifying ending. They do not need to be recent, and bonus points from non-English sources.
July 11, 2022
The Moth
In my audio novel QUIET TIME, 15 year old Beatrice writes short stories. After an especially bad day at school she writes THE MOTH:
The Moth
By Beatrice Livingston, 14 September, 2018
There is a small gray city surrounded by a river that flows into itself. The river is the color of milk and ash. Beyond the river there is nothing.
In the city there is one light on. Dusk has fallen. The light comes from the middle of an apartment tower. It is a candle on a table. Around the candle and table sit two people whose skin is the color of the river they drink. One is a girl and the other is her father.
They are eating a meal of gray meat and water. They do not speak to each other for a long time until, to their surprise, a small moth lands in the middle of the table by the light.
“What is that?" asks the girl. “It’s a moth," says her father. “I’ve never seen anything like it," she says.
For a long time they watch the moth. It cleans its front legs and then walks a short distance and stops. It does not appear anxious or hurried. It does not fly too close to the flame.
"What does it do?" asks the girl. “It doesn’t do anything," says the father. "It flies, and eats, and looks for a mate. When it grows old or unfortunate, it dies." “Its life seems sad," says the girl to her father. “No sadder than ours," says the father. And then, with the bottom of the water glass, the man crushes the moth until it is dead. With a thin napkin the texture of plastic, he gently removes its body from the glass, walks to the window and releases it into the wind.
The body of the moth on the napkin swirls and rolls on the breeze between the towers and bridges of the city. In the last moments of the day the moth lands in the river. Floating briefly, it sinks below the surface and is gone.
The Moth
By Beatrice Livingston, 14 September, 2018
There is a small gray city surrounded by a river that flows into itself. The river is the color of milk and ash. Beyond the river there is nothing.
In the city there is one light on. Dusk has fallen. The light comes from the middle of an apartment tower. It is a candle on a table. Around the candle and table sit two people whose skin is the color of the river they drink. One is a girl and the other is her father.
They are eating a meal of gray meat and water. They do not speak to each other for a long time until, to their surprise, a small moth lands in the middle of the table by the light.
“What is that?" asks the girl. “It’s a moth," says her father. “I’ve never seen anything like it," she says.
For a long time they watch the moth. It cleans its front legs and then walks a short distance and stops. It does not appear anxious or hurried. It does not fly too close to the flame.
"What does it do?" asks the girl. “It doesn’t do anything," says the father. "It flies, and eats, and looks for a mate. When it grows old or unfortunate, it dies." “Its life seems sad," says the girl to her father. “No sadder than ours," says the father. And then, with the bottom of the water glass, the man crushes the moth until it is dead. With a thin napkin the texture of plastic, he gently removes its body from the glass, walks to the window and releases it into the wind.
The body of the moth on the napkin swirls and rolls on the breeze between the towers and bridges of the city. In the last moments of the day the moth lands in the river. Floating briefly, it sinks below the surface and is gone.
May 25, 2022
School Shootings, Lockdown Drills, and a New Idea
Texas.
I woke up this morning to news about Texas. Nineteen dead children and teachers. Again.
The conversation about these mass murders is so common that The Onion — a hilarious publication when it isn't so serious it can humble you — simply runs the same headline and story every single time it happens; in part because it's the exact same story each time and in part to create an understanding that our response is the same. The headline is: "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
[https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-pr...]
Let's go directly to my point: I have a new idea on how to prevent this.
I am well-aware that the country is awash in weapons and more are being sold by the second. I know that there are about four-and-a-half times more gun stores in America than there are McDonald's (of which there are about 14,000 and seem to be everywhere. I know about the lobbies, the NRA and the rest of it.
I still have a new idea.
Here's why I have the idea. Before being a novelist I was a social scientist (Ph.D. in international relations) and I worked at the UN for a decade specializing in innovative and evidence-based methods of design for public policy. I came to look at participation in the design of policy in new ways; ways I think could be helpful to states, counties, schools and classrooms in preventing mass shootings.
But I'm not working as a social scientist anymore and I'm a novelist now. So a few years ago I wrote a novel (published, so far, as an Audible Original) called QUIET TIME. It was the most autobiographical work I'd yet produced, and in it I imagined a family — not too unlike mine — that moved from Geneva (where I lived for over a decade) to Marblehead, Massachusetts on the Atlantic, not far from where I was born and raised.
In the story, 15 year old Beatrice experiences her first lockdown drill. She has an out of body experience, panics, and grabs the police officer's night stick — the officer who was pretending to kill everyone — and knocks him. It's caught on video and the video went viral.
Beatrice's parents — Robert and Mkiwa — are called to the principal's office for a conversation. Beatrice was invited to the office for the first part of the talk but was then kicked out so the grown ups could speak. In the scene below, Beatrice is not going to gym, like she's supposed to, and instead finds a spot outside to spy on the conversation she's not allowed to hear.
During that conversation Mkiwa (a British/Kenyan human rights lawyer) and Robert (whose background is a bit like mine) give the principal a piece of their minds (especially Mkiwa). In that scene are ideas that America is NOT discussing about how to save our children's lives.
Why share it here? I'm doing it here first and quickly because I can. Later I'll write it up elsewhere. If you find the ideas compelling, pass them along. If you work in child protection, write me. Let's deal with this:
— Derek B. Miller
25 May, 2022
______________
EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL QUIET TIME, an Audible Original:
Out in the hall, while the other students were sorting themselves into classes for the next period, Beatrice made a subtle about-face and advanced straight to the exit.
Under a hot September sun, she trotted across the lawn and around the corner with her stupid backpack that she planned to replace tomorrow, assuming she was ever allowed to go shopping again.
What she needed to do this instant was find out what the adults really had planned for her. There was no way that the full impact of smashing a guy in the legs and head with a nightstick was to be remedied by writing a short story and having a chat about it. There had to be more going on, and she needed to know what it was. It was her life, after all.
That open window was the key. Beatrice counted the open windows along the outer wall to make sure she was in the right spot near Mr. Harding’s office. Once she could hear their voices, she quickly settled down with a book, low and quietly, to eavesdrop. She opened the book to a random page and held it on her knees.
The acoustics were surprisingly good once the other students had reached their classes and the passing cars were out of range. What she had not expected was how well she could see her mother reflecting off the open window.
Harding was in mid-sentence when Beatrice finally caught up with their conversation. His voice was low and direct as though he was announcing a space launch:
“… a lot of parental concern about Beatrice’s actions. I appreciate what you’re doing to rectify the situation, Mrs. Livingston, but you need to know that I’ve received numerous calls from parents who are asking about what disciplinary measures the school is planning to take given that a child assaulted a man with a weapon on school grounds during a drill designed to protect students. Even the superintendent is concerned. The optics of a child rebelling against a lockdown drill—it’s very awkward. We need them to follow directions, not to mention the matter of the assault. There is some discussion,” Harding went on, “about a need to suspend Beatrice, if only for a short time and symbolically,” he emphasized, “to reassure the community that law and order is taken seriously and that the school is working in the best interests of its students. We cannot, of course, condone violence.”
No one at home had used the word “suspended” to Beatrice. This was news. She knew what it meant.
“Thank you, Mr. Harding,” Beatrice heard her mother say.
Inside, Mkiwa picked up the metal genius puzzle Mr. Harding had left on the desk for people to fidget with while being reprimanded. Her voice, too, was calm and professional and even supportive: “I suppose I can understand why you’d need to have that conversation,” Mkiwa said with a forced chuckle, “though it’s more clear why you’ve correctly rejected it, as it obviously would have sent exactly the opposite message.”
“I don’t quite see your meaning,” Mr. Harding said.
“No?” Mkiwa said, hands working the metal rings. “Let me explain. Any public reprimand of Beatrice in this case wouldn’t have told parents that you’re protecting your most vulnerable students. It would have shown the world how the school is trying to protect itself from its most vulnerable students. Suspending Beatrice would have turned a terrified fifteen-year-old child into a symbol of danger. Talk about Orwellian? A little minority girl in a big and scary new school? An honors foreign student from ever-so-peaceful Switzerland who was being threatened with death by a huge police officer with a—what kind of gun, honey?”
“A nine-millimeter Glock, dear,” said Robert.
“Right. I’m just saying, good for you for rejecting such a dangerous and politically self-destructive idea.”
“Yes,” added Robert, stone faced. “Bravo.”
Beatrice hated her mother’s forced chuckle. It was the one she used when Lindia asked for an ice cream after brushing her teeth or when Beatrice asked if she could begin training for a solo balloon license, which—as it happens—is legal in America at the age of fourteen. (She learned that she could also get a helicopter license at seventeen, but she hadn’t brought that up yet.) Always that little chuckle as a response.
She had never heard it used in her defense though. She’d never heard it weaponized.
“I’m not sure I see it quite that way, Mrs. Livingston,” said Principal Harding. “Your daughter beat a man unconscious. He’s in the hospital. This is not a minor incident. There is concern about her state of mind and what else she might be capable of doing.”
Beatrice wasn’t sure, but it sounded to her like the principal was suggesting she might become a school shooter.
“It’s fortuitous,” said Mkiwa, keeping her cool, “that you used the word ‘protect.’ Protection is one of the three Ps we talk about when discussing children’s rights. Protection, Provision, and Participation. Beatrice, like all children in the school and the country and the world—as it happens—have a right under public international law to participation in decisions affecting them. Naturally, that participation is intended to function progressively as they grow and mature and develop. It isn’t the same to be two years old as it is to be seventeen, though both are children. It seems self-evident to me, Mr. Harding, that one domain for such participation is how they might feel and act when facing the threat of being massacred in their own school. A place where they spend more time than in their own beds.”
“Mrs. Livingston …”
“Not done. Robert and I have looked through our records—the post and emails—and we’ve not seen any opportunities available to us, let alone our children, for participation in matters pertaining to their own life and death, which—in the most literal sense—is what we’re talking about. It sounds instead like participation was institutionally and legally denied from the superintendent’s level on downward in direct contravention of every level of local, state, national, and international law. In fact, it makes me think that Beatrice and the other children were less like participants in the drill and more like victims of it. You see, Mr. Harding, too often the imperative to ‘do something’ is used as a weapon against those who demand that it be done right. Try to imagine what it must have felt like for a fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-fifteen-pound little girl from another country to find herself being threatened by a policeman with a gun. A real gun that was in his hand—or one that certainly looked real, anyway—and that he was waving around like a maniac.”
“I don’t believe that was the case, Mrs. Livingston. It’s not a fair description.”
“Does your school have a formal ‘do-no-harm’ policy in the design and planning and execution of these ALICE drills?”
“I’m sure we do,” Mr. Harding said.
“I suspect you don’t, but in any case, let’s see if this enactment meets your criterion for a safety drill that does no harm,” said Mkiwa.
Mkiwa opened her iPhone and played the video she’d prepped for this moment in the conversation.
“Bang. You’re dead. Bang, bang, bang. You’re all dead.”
“Where did you get that?” Mr. Harding asked.
“Jesus,” Mkiwa said.
“Sorry?”
Robert interjected. “I believe he pronounces it Hay-Suess. Jesus Velasquez. He’s in Beatrice’s homeroom. Kids these days and those smartphones, ya know? Got to film this, film that—no wonder Quiet Time is so popular. This one’s on Twitter and has eight thousand retweets and fourteen thousand ‘likes’ so far. Oh look, it’s going up, like a little odometer. Isn’t that fun? It creates the illusion that we’re all getting somewhere.”
Mkiwa put the video on repeat and continued to talk: “That looks threatening to me,” Mkiwa said, taking over. “It looks terrifying, not educational. It looks like he enjoys killing children. In a word, it looks harmful. I think the world will see it that way too. You say it’s trending, Robert?”
“Oh yes,” said Robert.
Mkiwa paused for effect as she touched one of the phone’s colorful icons and brought up some photos of her daughter. “Beatrice, meanwhile, is quite photogenic, don’t you think?” She opened her photos file. “Here’s one of her reading to old people at a retirement home in the Alps. So pretty and youthful and yet fragile in a way. Complexion like Alicia Keys’s. The camera loves her.”
“He’s not from Marblehead,” said Mr. Harding, turning defensive. “He’s from a consulting firm. We don’t use Marblehead police for this.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that,” said Mkiwa, pretending to admit a mistake. “Why not?”
Mr. Harding hadn’t put the answer to “why not?” into actual words before. After he did, Mkiwa made him regret it. Because Mkiwa was a lawyer, she knew the answer before she asked the question; otherwise she wouldn’t have asked it.
“We want the children to have close-knit and trusting relationships with the police here, who are very nice by the way. Making them scared of the police would rather undermine that agenda. So we use consultants.”
“So … let me make sure I understand,” said Mkiwa, the trap sprung. “The drill is designed to be so traumatic that it could rupture the trust between the children and the police and so the solution has been to outsource it rather than modify it? Wow.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s exactly what you said. In this particular case, the drill was so traumatic that one especially vulnerable child—faced with a fight or flight scenario—defended herself. I am recording this conversation and your continued participation acknowledges your consent.”
Principal Harding sat back, defeated. “You’re a smart cookie, Mrs. Livingston,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“I’m not a cookie, Mr. Harding. I’m a barrister of the Middle Temple and an advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children. So let’s clear our minds of talk about suspension and turn to something productive, shall we?”
Beatrice checked to see whether she was holding her book right-side up. She might not have been. She might have been grinning like a crazy person too because never in her life had she heard her mother shoot cannonballs at anyone before. It was, as people around Boston seemed to say, wicked cool.
“Luckily,” Mkiwa said, changing her tone and sounding very thoughtful and helpful and even a bit apologetic, “I’m here to help. What I suggest we do …” Beatrice heard her mother say, “is issue a statement. I took the liberty of drafting one last night. The name of the journalist at the Marblehead Reporter who wants to cover this is Alice Bentley—I love that her name is Alice, right? Coincidence? Providence? Who knows? Alice and I spoke for half an hour last night. She’s fresh out of Bryn Mawr and is working at the newspaper en route to Georgetown next year for a master’s degree—isn’t that impressive? Robert went there before Oxford. What Alice was enthralled to learn was that you were entertaining the idea of a task force to study and improve the conduct of ALICE drills so that Marblehead might serve as a thought leader on child protection. Isn’t that wonderful? There’s a lot of talent in this town, I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr. Harding. Robert, don’t you think so?”
“Lots of talent,” said Robert. “Scholars, writers, administrators, parents, scientists. And, of course, the kids themselves.”
“The kids themselves. So right, dear. I told Alice that you have this brilliant idea of using children’s participation to better design and practice lockdown and evacuation drills. Not only because they’ll work better, which they will. And not only because students will take them more seriously, which they will because they will feel pride of ownership. But here’s the really innovative part, which Robert thought of because of his work at the UN: we think that design and enactment participation by students might actually help prevent school shootings. It turns out that ninety-one percent of school shooters went to the school they targeted. That means they are already participating in the drills. For all we know, the drills are giving them the idea of becoming shooters! Either way, making these potential shooters feel more a part of their community might go some way towards making them less likely to harm others.
“Now, I’m not naive,” Mkiwa said. “This won’t necessarily work, but think of it this way: worst-case scenario, we’re still better prepared than we are now, and the best- case scenario is we’ve turned a potential active shooter into a demonstrable active participant by community building and getting teachers to listen more closely to vulnerable students. Because the best way to make people not kill other people is to make them not want to kill other people.”
“It’s too long for a bumper sticker,” Robert said, “but we can still get it on a t-shirt.”
“Alice Bentley is waiting for your call. We’re all ready for your thought-leadership, Mr. Harding. The baton is yours.”
“Let’s knock ’em dead,” Robert said.
Mkiwa shook her head at him.
“Break a leg?”
Mkiwa placed the metal genius puzzle, solved, back on Mr. Harding’s desk.
As the two men sat silently—one dumbfounded, the other enjoying the principal’s befuddlement—Mkiwa turned her head and looked directly at Beatrice through the reflection in the window.
Beatrice—caught in the lock-eyed tractor beam of her mother and paralyzed by her Medusa-like stare—was too shocked to make any sense of Mr. Harding’s reply when it actually came, but whatever he said had been brief because soon chairs were being squeaked across the floor and good-byes uttered.
Mkiwa was the first to leave the room. Robert turned back to a silent Mr. Harding and said: “There is no shame in surrender. She’ll have you coming out of this looking great. I saw her do that with South Sudan once. It was very terrifying, but impressive.”
I woke up this morning to news about Texas. Nineteen dead children and teachers. Again.
The conversation about these mass murders is so common that The Onion — a hilarious publication when it isn't so serious it can humble you — simply runs the same headline and story every single time it happens; in part because it's the exact same story each time and in part to create an understanding that our response is the same. The headline is: "‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens.
[https://www.theonion.com/no-way-to-pr...]
Let's go directly to my point: I have a new idea on how to prevent this.
I am well-aware that the country is awash in weapons and more are being sold by the second. I know that there are about four-and-a-half times more gun stores in America than there are McDonald's (of which there are about 14,000 and seem to be everywhere. I know about the lobbies, the NRA and the rest of it.
I still have a new idea.
Here's why I have the idea. Before being a novelist I was a social scientist (Ph.D. in international relations) and I worked at the UN for a decade specializing in innovative and evidence-based methods of design for public policy. I came to look at participation in the design of policy in new ways; ways I think could be helpful to states, counties, schools and classrooms in preventing mass shootings.
But I'm not working as a social scientist anymore and I'm a novelist now. So a few years ago I wrote a novel (published, so far, as an Audible Original) called QUIET TIME. It was the most autobiographical work I'd yet produced, and in it I imagined a family — not too unlike mine — that moved from Geneva (where I lived for over a decade) to Marblehead, Massachusetts on the Atlantic, not far from where I was born and raised.
In the story, 15 year old Beatrice experiences her first lockdown drill. She has an out of body experience, panics, and grabs the police officer's night stick — the officer who was pretending to kill everyone — and knocks him. It's caught on video and the video went viral.
Beatrice's parents — Robert and Mkiwa — are called to the principal's office for a conversation. Beatrice was invited to the office for the first part of the talk but was then kicked out so the grown ups could speak. In the scene below, Beatrice is not going to gym, like she's supposed to, and instead finds a spot outside to spy on the conversation she's not allowed to hear.
During that conversation Mkiwa (a British/Kenyan human rights lawyer) and Robert (whose background is a bit like mine) give the principal a piece of their minds (especially Mkiwa). In that scene are ideas that America is NOT discussing about how to save our children's lives.
Why share it here? I'm doing it here first and quickly because I can. Later I'll write it up elsewhere. If you find the ideas compelling, pass them along. If you work in child protection, write me. Let's deal with this:
— Derek B. Miller
25 May, 2022
______________
EXCERPT FROM THE NOVEL QUIET TIME, an Audible Original:
Out in the hall, while the other students were sorting themselves into classes for the next period, Beatrice made a subtle about-face and advanced straight to the exit.
Under a hot September sun, she trotted across the lawn and around the corner with her stupid backpack that she planned to replace tomorrow, assuming she was ever allowed to go shopping again.
What she needed to do this instant was find out what the adults really had planned for her. There was no way that the full impact of smashing a guy in the legs and head with a nightstick was to be remedied by writing a short story and having a chat about it. There had to be more going on, and she needed to know what it was. It was her life, after all.
That open window was the key. Beatrice counted the open windows along the outer wall to make sure she was in the right spot near Mr. Harding’s office. Once she could hear their voices, she quickly settled down with a book, low and quietly, to eavesdrop. She opened the book to a random page and held it on her knees.
The acoustics were surprisingly good once the other students had reached their classes and the passing cars were out of range. What she had not expected was how well she could see her mother reflecting off the open window.
Harding was in mid-sentence when Beatrice finally caught up with their conversation. His voice was low and direct as though he was announcing a space launch:
“… a lot of parental concern about Beatrice’s actions. I appreciate what you’re doing to rectify the situation, Mrs. Livingston, but you need to know that I’ve received numerous calls from parents who are asking about what disciplinary measures the school is planning to take given that a child assaulted a man with a weapon on school grounds during a drill designed to protect students. Even the superintendent is concerned. The optics of a child rebelling against a lockdown drill—it’s very awkward. We need them to follow directions, not to mention the matter of the assault. There is some discussion,” Harding went on, “about a need to suspend Beatrice, if only for a short time and symbolically,” he emphasized, “to reassure the community that law and order is taken seriously and that the school is working in the best interests of its students. We cannot, of course, condone violence.”
No one at home had used the word “suspended” to Beatrice. This was news. She knew what it meant.
“Thank you, Mr. Harding,” Beatrice heard her mother say.
Inside, Mkiwa picked up the metal genius puzzle Mr. Harding had left on the desk for people to fidget with while being reprimanded. Her voice, too, was calm and professional and even supportive: “I suppose I can understand why you’d need to have that conversation,” Mkiwa said with a forced chuckle, “though it’s more clear why you’ve correctly rejected it, as it obviously would have sent exactly the opposite message.”
“I don’t quite see your meaning,” Mr. Harding said.
“No?” Mkiwa said, hands working the metal rings. “Let me explain. Any public reprimand of Beatrice in this case wouldn’t have told parents that you’re protecting your most vulnerable students. It would have shown the world how the school is trying to protect itself from its most vulnerable students. Suspending Beatrice would have turned a terrified fifteen-year-old child into a symbol of danger. Talk about Orwellian? A little minority girl in a big and scary new school? An honors foreign student from ever-so-peaceful Switzerland who was being threatened with death by a huge police officer with a—what kind of gun, honey?”
“A nine-millimeter Glock, dear,” said Robert.
“Right. I’m just saying, good for you for rejecting such a dangerous and politically self-destructive idea.”
“Yes,” added Robert, stone faced. “Bravo.”
Beatrice hated her mother’s forced chuckle. It was the one she used when Lindia asked for an ice cream after brushing her teeth or when Beatrice asked if she could begin training for a solo balloon license, which—as it happens—is legal in America at the age of fourteen. (She learned that she could also get a helicopter license at seventeen, but she hadn’t brought that up yet.) Always that little chuckle as a response.
She had never heard it used in her defense though. She’d never heard it weaponized.
“I’m not sure I see it quite that way, Mrs. Livingston,” said Principal Harding. “Your daughter beat a man unconscious. He’s in the hospital. This is not a minor incident. There is concern about her state of mind and what else she might be capable of doing.”
Beatrice wasn’t sure, but it sounded to her like the principal was suggesting she might become a school shooter.
“It’s fortuitous,” said Mkiwa, keeping her cool, “that you used the word ‘protect.’ Protection is one of the three Ps we talk about when discussing children’s rights. Protection, Provision, and Participation. Beatrice, like all children in the school and the country and the world—as it happens—have a right under public international law to participation in decisions affecting them. Naturally, that participation is intended to function progressively as they grow and mature and develop. It isn’t the same to be two years old as it is to be seventeen, though both are children. It seems self-evident to me, Mr. Harding, that one domain for such participation is how they might feel and act when facing the threat of being massacred in their own school. A place where they spend more time than in their own beds.”
“Mrs. Livingston …”
“Not done. Robert and I have looked through our records—the post and emails—and we’ve not seen any opportunities available to us, let alone our children, for participation in matters pertaining to their own life and death, which—in the most literal sense—is what we’re talking about. It sounds instead like participation was institutionally and legally denied from the superintendent’s level on downward in direct contravention of every level of local, state, national, and international law. In fact, it makes me think that Beatrice and the other children were less like participants in the drill and more like victims of it. You see, Mr. Harding, too often the imperative to ‘do something’ is used as a weapon against those who demand that it be done right. Try to imagine what it must have felt like for a fifteen-year-old, hundred-and-fifteen-pound little girl from another country to find herself being threatened by a policeman with a gun. A real gun that was in his hand—or one that certainly looked real, anyway—and that he was waving around like a maniac.”
“I don’t believe that was the case, Mrs. Livingston. It’s not a fair description.”
“Does your school have a formal ‘do-no-harm’ policy in the design and planning and execution of these ALICE drills?”
“I’m sure we do,” Mr. Harding said.
“I suspect you don’t, but in any case, let’s see if this enactment meets your criterion for a safety drill that does no harm,” said Mkiwa.
Mkiwa opened her iPhone and played the video she’d prepped for this moment in the conversation.
“Bang. You’re dead. Bang, bang, bang. You’re all dead.”
“Where did you get that?” Mr. Harding asked.
“Jesus,” Mkiwa said.
“Sorry?”
Robert interjected. “I believe he pronounces it Hay-Suess. Jesus Velasquez. He’s in Beatrice’s homeroom. Kids these days and those smartphones, ya know? Got to film this, film that—no wonder Quiet Time is so popular. This one’s on Twitter and has eight thousand retweets and fourteen thousand ‘likes’ so far. Oh look, it’s going up, like a little odometer. Isn’t that fun? It creates the illusion that we’re all getting somewhere.”
Mkiwa put the video on repeat and continued to talk: “That looks threatening to me,” Mkiwa said, taking over. “It looks terrifying, not educational. It looks like he enjoys killing children. In a word, it looks harmful. I think the world will see it that way too. You say it’s trending, Robert?”
“Oh yes,” said Robert.
Mkiwa paused for effect as she touched one of the phone’s colorful icons and brought up some photos of her daughter. “Beatrice, meanwhile, is quite photogenic, don’t you think?” She opened her photos file. “Here’s one of her reading to old people at a retirement home in the Alps. So pretty and youthful and yet fragile in a way. Complexion like Alicia Keys’s. The camera loves her.”
“He’s not from Marblehead,” said Mr. Harding, turning defensive. “He’s from a consulting firm. We don’t use Marblehead police for this.”
“Oh. I didn’t realize that,” said Mkiwa, pretending to admit a mistake. “Why not?”
Mr. Harding hadn’t put the answer to “why not?” into actual words before. After he did, Mkiwa made him regret it. Because Mkiwa was a lawyer, she knew the answer before she asked the question; otherwise she wouldn’t have asked it.
“We want the children to have close-knit and trusting relationships with the police here, who are very nice by the way. Making them scared of the police would rather undermine that agenda. So we use consultants.”
“So … let me make sure I understand,” said Mkiwa, the trap sprung. “The drill is designed to be so traumatic that it could rupture the trust between the children and the police and so the solution has been to outsource it rather than modify it? Wow.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“That’s exactly what you said. In this particular case, the drill was so traumatic that one especially vulnerable child—faced with a fight or flight scenario—defended herself. I am recording this conversation and your continued participation acknowledges your consent.”
Principal Harding sat back, defeated. “You’re a smart cookie, Mrs. Livingston,” he said. “I’ll grant you that.”
“I’m not a cookie, Mr. Harding. I’m a barrister of the Middle Temple and an advisor to the UN Special Rapporteur on trafficking in persons, especially women and children. So let’s clear our minds of talk about suspension and turn to something productive, shall we?”
Beatrice checked to see whether she was holding her book right-side up. She might not have been. She might have been grinning like a crazy person too because never in her life had she heard her mother shoot cannonballs at anyone before. It was, as people around Boston seemed to say, wicked cool.
“Luckily,” Mkiwa said, changing her tone and sounding very thoughtful and helpful and even a bit apologetic, “I’m here to help. What I suggest we do …” Beatrice heard her mother say, “is issue a statement. I took the liberty of drafting one last night. The name of the journalist at the Marblehead Reporter who wants to cover this is Alice Bentley—I love that her name is Alice, right? Coincidence? Providence? Who knows? Alice and I spoke for half an hour last night. She’s fresh out of Bryn Mawr and is working at the newspaper en route to Georgetown next year for a master’s degree—isn’t that impressive? Robert went there before Oxford. What Alice was enthralled to learn was that you were entertaining the idea of a task force to study and improve the conduct of ALICE drills so that Marblehead might serve as a thought leader on child protection. Isn’t that wonderful? There’s a lot of talent in this town, I’m sure you’ll agree, Mr. Harding. Robert, don’t you think so?”
“Lots of talent,” said Robert. “Scholars, writers, administrators, parents, scientists. And, of course, the kids themselves.”
“The kids themselves. So right, dear. I told Alice that you have this brilliant idea of using children’s participation to better design and practice lockdown and evacuation drills. Not only because they’ll work better, which they will. And not only because students will take them more seriously, which they will because they will feel pride of ownership. But here’s the really innovative part, which Robert thought of because of his work at the UN: we think that design and enactment participation by students might actually help prevent school shootings. It turns out that ninety-one percent of school shooters went to the school they targeted. That means they are already participating in the drills. For all we know, the drills are giving them the idea of becoming shooters! Either way, making these potential shooters feel more a part of their community might go some way towards making them less likely to harm others.
“Now, I’m not naive,” Mkiwa said. “This won’t necessarily work, but think of it this way: worst-case scenario, we’re still better prepared than we are now, and the best- case scenario is we’ve turned a potential active shooter into a demonstrable active participant by community building and getting teachers to listen more closely to vulnerable students. Because the best way to make people not kill other people is to make them not want to kill other people.”
“It’s too long for a bumper sticker,” Robert said, “but we can still get it on a t-shirt.”
“Alice Bentley is waiting for your call. We’re all ready for your thought-leadership, Mr. Harding. The baton is yours.”
“Let’s knock ’em dead,” Robert said.
Mkiwa shook her head at him.
“Break a leg?”
Mkiwa placed the metal genius puzzle, solved, back on Mr. Harding’s desk.
As the two men sat silently—one dumbfounded, the other enjoying the principal’s befuddlement—Mkiwa turned her head and looked directly at Beatrice through the reflection in the window.
Beatrice—caught in the lock-eyed tractor beam of her mother and paralyzed by her Medusa-like stare—was too shocked to make any sense of Mr. Harding’s reply when it actually came, but whatever he said had been brief because soon chairs were being squeaked across the floor and good-byes uttered.
Mkiwa was the first to leave the room. Robert turned back to a silent Mr. Harding and said: “There is no shame in surrender. She’ll have you coming out of this looking great. I saw her do that with South Sudan once. It was very terrifying, but impressive.”
April 26, 2022
Radio Life and A Canticle for Leibowitz
Radio Life and A Canticle for Leibowitz
Derek B. Miller, 13 August, 2020
I was a Freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in 1988 meeting a friend for lunch. We were at the Pub. It must have been October or so because I remember the stone cottage in Westchester County, New York, being surrounded by the changing leaves. The sense of the school year was starting and the excitement was uplifting. Autumn was never melancholy or wistfulness on campus. It provided a kind of spiritual settling. Here comes the winter with the promise of books, ideas, and just maybe the cuddling of a new lover.
I can't remember the friend but I remember the conversation. We were talking about books — as people do at Sarah Lawrence — and in this case science fiction. "Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?" he asked me.
No. Never heard of it.
‘It's a classic,’ he said.
Sounded Jewish. And Catholic. And mystical, as though it was inspired by something real and was only masquerading as fiction.
All good stuff.
‘You've got to read it,’ he said.
OK.
He described it and I still remember the description: there was a Flame Deluge (a nuclear war) and the population was wiped out. The survivors blamed the scientists and burned all the books. But there was a tiny abbey of monks run by an order of people who protected every scrap of paper and knowledge they could find even though they had no idea what any of it meant. They came across a box that contained the seeds of new technology.
I can't remember the rest, but I was intrigued.
I didn't read it.
(I was a Freshman. There were changing leaves, and classes, and girls, and other books, and girls, and classes, and leaves).
Twenty years went by and I'd long-since forgotten all about it. Then I saw a movie called The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington (and Jennifer Beals, who was excellent and unappreciated in that role). I didn't love the movie but I was reminded of the premise of Canticle — as it was told to me — by the scene at the end where the survivors try and build a new library and Eli (i.e. Washington) recites the Bible so they can add it to the collection. This was a linear ‘homage’ to that 1959 story whether the screenwriter knew it or not.
I still didn't read it.
But I did start thinking about it partly because I had a premise for a new science fiction story that I was kicking around. I was noticing that all around me were dystopian stories (Planet of the Apes, Dredd, Looper, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Oblivion …) but nothing about the renaissance of civilization after the end. Nothing about the rise.
Now it's 2012 and I'm watching a documentary with Keanu Reeves called Side by Side. It's about film-making and captures a moment when the industry is switching over from film to digital. The conversations ranged from artistic possibilities to what's gained and lost to what it means for the democratization of storytelling and whether we might lose something vital. It was all fascinating. But one issue jumped out: At the end of the documentary, a cinematographer named Geoff Boyle reflected (along with George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and others) on the lax state of our archiving and whether these films/movies would even still exist a few hundred years from now — let alone after an apocalyptic event.
Geoff's view? (I'm quoting from the film here), ‘We're f**cked.’
I was intrigued. It wasn’t about the rise of civilization but it suggested a kind of blank canvas from which a new civilization might rise. All movies, gone? Because the technology failed? If the failure was the internet and cloud storage, wouldn’t that also eradicate pictures and books and music and everything else that was being moved to the cloud?
If we projected into the future a few decades or a hundred years … what wouldn’t be in the cloud?
Eager (read: too eager), I wrote a whopping six pages of a screenplay based on this notion in 2012.
Then I abandoned it and moved on. I had books to write.
In 2015 I turned back to it. By that time I'd already written a feature-length screenplay to my first novel, Norwegian by Night, and was enjoying the new form of writing (not that it could replace novels, but it was fun). I had seen Mad Max: Fury Road (a masterpiece of visualizing the same-old same-old dystopian vision) and also read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, (which I quite liked), but even that thoughtful story too ended long before my idea for a story would begin. The only story I’d ever heard of that addressed the rise was that Canticle book I never read.
By the time of the 2016 election I was becoming convinced that there was a space in our conversation about the future for a new kind of post-apocalyptic story. One that wasn’t dystopian, per se, but about creation and the challenges we’d face if we all had to try again.
That year I wrote twenty-one new pages of a new screenplay. Something about a meteor landing in Antarctica. It wasn't good, and it didn't resemble Radio Life in any way except in three regards: I had the title and loved it. Henry and Graham were already named. And their repartee and relationship as a couple jumped off the page.
Still: it was terrible. I went back to novels.
After finishing my third novel, America by Day in 2017, I needed to do something else and I wanted to have another go at Radio Life, this time as a feature-length screenplay. I got in touch with Geoff Boyle from the Side by Side movie to get the homework started and to develop new ideas. Geoff’s very tapped into the technical community and so he started asking around on my behalf.
He talked to the media storage companies that all the movie studios use to archive their material. Though it wasn't a scientific poll, he wrote me and said (I'm quoting our correspondence), ‘at least 80% use Amazon Web Services. None of them know where their material is stored. They'd never thought about it. One, who was willing to talk if they were not named, was really concerned by the question once they thought about it. They are one of the largest companies specialising in data-handling from camera to archive. It appears that nobody knows where or how their material is stored, even the companies that said they had their own storage would mostly admit that that was just front end immediate rushes and that everything else was “in the cloud”. There really isn't anything else to say, publicly it's all fine, privately they are scared.’
That was when the idea of Radio Life really came together. It was not only possible for the world to forget everything; it seems like we actually will if we put everything in ‘the cloud’ and the cloud fails. The first part is happening now. Libraries are closing. Books are being digitised. All of our photographs and music are online now. It’s only a matter of time before we have nothing on paper.
Could the cloud fail?
Does any technology not fail?
At this point I also knew that I had to read A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was now a full thirty years since I first heard of the book and its premise. It was hovering over me. There was no writing Radio Life without engaging with this book written by Miller; a man who only published one novel in his tragic life and then one posthumously.
In 1959 there was no internet. There was no ‘cloud.’ There was no digitisation of knowledge and there was no way for it all to vanish at once. To achieve that condition in his imagined world, Miller (I later learned) created a period called the Age of Simplification where survivors set out to destroy all the knowledge, having blamed it for the destruction of the world. Mechanics aside, there was no denying that I was utilising a premise that he established some sixty years earlier.
To my mind, it would have been both dishonourable and counter-productive to proceed as if I didn’t know it; the former for obvious reasons, but the latter because Radio Life’s potential value to our cultural conversation would be — if there would be any at all — in revitalising a conversation about remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, knowledge and wisdom, competition and cooperation all within the domain of science fiction.
After all, two things were colliding all around us by 2017: the rise of world-changing technology on the one hand, and the decline of trust in reason, logic, facts, truth, and scientific method on the other. A strange combination, it would seem, but a real one. In an age of strong(er) AI, nanotechnology, CRISPR and gene manipulation, killer robots, and STEM cell research we were also experiencing a full-on assault on our core democratic processes and institutions, multilateralism, international cooperation, and the post-WWII liberal order. We were once again moving in the direction of all-engine, no steering wheel. That was Miller’s world in the 1950s.
I was now certain that Ignorance needed to be the new Bad Boy of science fiction. After all, haven't we had our fill of asteroids, comets, aliens, waves, tornados, earthquakes, supervillains and monsters?
Now I had to read Canticle.
I still didn’t read it.
But this time was different. I wasn’t distracted or hesitant or busy. I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew that I needed to attend to the core themes and problematics of the story on my own without being swayed by Miller’s own answers.
I’m a mature writer and I’m not anxious about being influenced, as Harold Bloom might have suspected. I’ve written a doctorate, four books, and much more. So I don’t have a young writer’s fear about being lead on matters of style or tone or voice. But ideas – solutions to problems and mysteries – are more furtive. More insidious, in a way. It is easy to accidentally adopt philosophies and concepts them as one’s own and then move forward without a second thought to attribution. Art, after all, thrives not only on inspiration but theft.
The weak-minded and the weak-willed are too fast to mistake an analytical product, or a hard-won insight, or a conceptualisation of a problematic, as their own. Watching the world rise again in the distant future, where knowledge and the act of remembering were central tensions in a drama where other people wanted us to forget, were ideas explored by Walter Miller Jr. in A Canticle for Leibowitz. They were also ideas largely untouched since then, and the book itself all but forgotten (which I’ll come to in a moment).
I didn’t need the will to read Canticle now. I needed a strategy.
My solution was to write about three quarters of Radio Life. Alessandra, by that time (in the screenplay), had escaped and Elimisha had not. The ending, more or less, was clear to me. I knew what I believed and the ideas were on paper. Canticle wasn't going to direct me now. It could only give me a basis for reflection and comparison against what I had already written. This was safe ground.
I read it.
I also read about it.
On March 6, 1960, Edmund Fuller (no less), wrote a full-page review of the book in Magazine of Books for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. ‘It is projected into the future – it has elements in common with science fiction, yet it would be quite impossible to classify it narrowly as such. It is fanciful, yet as deeply true as any book I’ve read. It brilliantly combines several qualities: It is prodigiously imaginative and original, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all, is simply a memorable story as to stay with a reader for years.’
At the end of that same month, the comparatively tiny Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle would write, ‘The conjunction of day-to-day life with the sweep of centuries, of individual characters and masses of men – all viewed under the aspect of eternity – makes A Canticle for Leibowitz a unique experience in faith and adventure, in raw humanity and in the exploration of the spirit.’ The review continues with a brief biography of Miller, noting that he ‘enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor and spent most of World War II as a radio operator and gunner. He participated in 55 combat sorties, among these was the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western World.’
Those who know the book and its author also know that it was Miller’s participation in this raid that led him, in part, to write Canticle. As the Jewish Chronicle put it, ‘the story of another abbey with a somewhat parallel history.’
The part left unsaid in the reviews was that the abbey at Montecassino, Italy was erected in AD 529 outside of Rome. The Allies bombed it thinking the Germans had occupied it. After destroying it, the Germans did occupy it. The Battle of Montecassino was comprised of four assaults between January and May of 1944. Some 55,000 allied casualties resulted, and 22,000 German.
The monks of the abbey had copied and accumulated forty thousand manuscripts, including the majority of the writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. All were destroyed.
The abbey had been filled with hundreds of civilians who had fled there as a sanctuary.
Miller was one of the people who killed them.
Whatever the size of the publication, and wherever the book went, the reviews were all positive. In The Gazette, in Montreal, Canada, Phyllis Reeve wrote that Canticle ‘transcends the bounds of any fiction, impudently invading those of poetry and philosophy’, and in The Guardian out of London, Roy Perrott wrote in April of 1960, ‘… by AD 3700 the world is ready for another atomic war. The people and politicians have learned nothing; the scientists have passed the buck again; religion is nowhere. Platitudes of our time, perhaps, but Mr. Miller gives them room to breathe in a forceful and ingenious way. A deeply interesting book.’
Despite the universal acclaim and favourable comparisons to A Brave New World and 1984 among major fictional works of political philosophy, Miller disappeared almost entirely from the literary stage. By 1966 – a mere seven years after publication – Edward Ducharme at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a piece for English Journal (an academic periodical) and notes that, ‘[i]t went through several printings and was finally published as a paperback by Bantam in 1961. Since then it has died the death of most best-sellers.’
Ducharme, though, was only partly correct. For one thing, Canticle won the Hugo Award in 1961. For another – and with the benefit of decades of data and hindsight – we can now see that Miller’s book did not actually die; not by a long shot. Despite his being a recluse and not publishing another novel in his lifetime, Canticle would go on to sell two million copies over thirty-seven years until his death in 1996 and would also inspire — seemingly at random — staged theatrical productions in small towns and even a fifteen-part NPR radio production in 1981 adapted by John Reeves (which we can still listen to on Old Time Radio, https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/A...)
Now, in 2020 – though I don’t have sales figures – it is still in print and selling well on Amazon, which is at least indicative. Those with access to Bookscan data can add the needed footnote here.
What is notable, however, is that talk of the book seems to have fallen into near silence, despite the themes it elevated being now central to science fiction (aside from one excellent piece in The New Yorker in 2014 by Jon Michaud that drew on many of the scant sources I too have found). How many of our stories today — from The Terminator to The Matrix to West World — are centrally concerned with whether we will ever have the wisdom to control the technological demons our minds create?
Looking through thousands of newspapers and archives on Newspapers.com as well as JSTOR and of course Google, I was struck by the utter lack of institutional engagement with this novel, whereas Huxley and Orwell are household names. Where is it being used in high school or college curricula? Where are the references to it as a benchmark in science fiction? Where are the novelists and screenwriters who credit that book with their inspiration or ideas? Surely there are instances, but there is no trend. In 1997, when David Streitfeld wrote his piece on the death of Miller, he entitled it, 'Canticle' author unsung even in death. Between then and now, I would posit that little has changed.
To be sure, the Huxley and Orwell comparisons can be over-stated. Their output as writers was incomparably greater, as was their public engagement. But Orwell was dead in 1950 and Huxley famously died the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. So – not to be cheeky about it, but – they didn't do much publishing after 1961 either.
So why is Miller still unsung?
Much of the blame, if that’s the word, seems to lie with Miller himself. ‘“Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,” said writer Joe Haldeman, the closest thing Miller had to a friend in the science fiction world,’ according to Streitfeld of the Washington Post in October, 1997. ‘I don't know how many people he felt responsible for killing [during World War II], but it was a lot.’
The PTSD and depression isolated Miller from the world. ‘Miller's long-time agent, Don Congdon, said Miller was “the only client I never met, although we talked a lot,”’ Streitfeld explained.
Miller’s wife died two years earlier. By 1996, Miller had had enough.
With 90% of his second and final novel completed (which would be published posthumously), Miller called the police in Dayton Beach on January 9, 1996 at 8:29 a.m. and said there was a dead man on his front lawn. They arrived three minutes later at 8:32. ‘They found the 72-year old writer sitting in a chair on his lawn, dead from a bullet to the brain.’
Miller’s problems and reclusiveness, however, can’t shoulder all the blame for our amnesia about this book.
Streitfeld noted that ‘the first surprising thing about Miller’s suicide is that even now, 20 months after the fact [in 1997], it hasn't been widely reported. No obituary ever appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press. His children apparently wanted the information kept secret, and they largely succeeded.’
If there is a final conspirator in our amnesia it is the rest of us. It might be natural to take for granted the ideas that shape us, but there’s virtue in remembering and going back to core documents and concepts to better ensure that the conversations that define us remain anchored, rich, enlightened, and progressive.
I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was imaginative and playful and bold. It seemed to be uninhibited by any fear of censure or criticism like all great novels and works of art. It wasn’t only the ideas. I liked the characters, I liked the settings, I was swept away by the story. My criticisms, and I have some, are best discussed in person rather than in print; I’m not a critic.
What I did find was that my reading of Canticle was different from many others. Miller may have been compared to Huxley and Orwell, but when I read it I thought of The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947), The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948), From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951), and of course, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which was written between 1953 and 1961.
The other book I thought of (which I also consider a war novel) is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, published a decade later in 1969.
These were books about war. And not only war in general, but World War II specifically. Canticle was not. Not by any reading. So why did it strike me this way?
I think the answer lies with Emily Dickinson who once wrote ‘tell the truth but tell it slant —‘ and ended her poem (1263) with, ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—’
Canticle, like Slaughter-house Five in my opinion, was a war novel told slant.
Interestingly, even Miller himself didn’t notice it at the time. Jon Michaud wrote, “By his own admission, the Miller [sic] did not become fully aware of the driving force behind his novel until he was working on its third part. ‘I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble,’ Miller recalled. ‘Then a light bulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? . . . What have I been writing?’”
While Vonnegut integrated his experiences from the firebombing of Dresden into his science fiction(esque) story, Miller didn’t — not explicitly. Instead, he injected his fears, his theology, his philosophy, his terror, and his sense of dread. He wrote about it using the only medium he could: Science fiction.
I’m speculating, but I think this happened for a number of reasons, some personal and some social.
We already know that Miller wasn't able to deal with his depression and pain from the war. So his need to come at the truth from any direction other than head-on might be obvious. And while I don’t want to psychologize his philosophy, because I think that would be an injustice to the depth of this reflection, I can't help but imagine Miller on 55 bombing sorties during World War II — a time when the likelihood of surviving 25 missions was extremely low — and wondering what that did to his view of the world. You take off. You fly a straight line to the bomb target where flak tries to kill you and often does. You kill people you never knew and will never see and will never atone for, and then you fly straight back. And then you repeat this another 54 times. Is it a wonder that his views of humanity represents a linear path from knowledge to destruction, only to be repeated over and over again if the destruction was not complete?
Even with this, I think there’s more to the story.
At some point, the canonical literature on any historical event begins to tie-off and the attention — of the agents, the editors, the publishers, the booksellers, the critics, the reading public — moves on. This happened with WWII literature. It happened with Vietnam literature. It happened with The Gulf War. Many will remember the key September 11 novels like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), The Zero by Jess Walter (2006) and Falling Man by Don DeLillo (2007). It happened there too. Today, no one can write a ‘September 11’ novel anymore. It's too late. One can mention the events, but the literature is closed.
And yet, even after a literature has been tied off, the compulsion to write among writers lives on. It is little wonder to me that after the most explicit and realistic fiction about World War II, great writers like Miller or Vonnegut started turning to science fiction as the domain in which to explore the themes, philosophies, counter-factuals, emotions, and pain that was left behind in a world that no longer wanted novelistic expression of that war. In fact, I think that one of science fiction's greatest attributes is to be the last domain where all great ideas are welcomed and where neither time nor space will inhibit the exploration of what still matters.
I had a fresh reading of Miller’s book and I knew his fate. I wanted to say to him, ‘You didn't just write a book. You started a conversation about hope and possibility as we contend with knowledge and ignorance, reason and morality, conflict and cooperation. I thank you for that and for placing those things at the center of science fiction. You then abandoned all of that and eventually yourself but I'm not letting you off that easy because the conversation is bigger than you. It's current. It's pressing. And as best I can tell, it is also unattended. So forgive me, but Radio Life is going to pick up the baton you discarded."
Hubris? Arrogance? I didn't much care and still don’t. Sometimes the person who moves an agenda forward is simply the one who cares enough to try.
I finished writing the screenplay with some modest influences from Miller. I loved the story but the screenplay was weak. I soon decided that the only way to really attend to what was on my mind was to write a proper novel. I am, after all, a novelist. So I got started.
Though in conversation with Canticle, Radio Life was no homage, no sequel, no parallel, no competitor. However, it was a conversation between two books that I wanted to make explicit. Now I had a chance to give both Miller (and poor, hapless brother Francis) a better end.
In Part IV I elevated Miller's Brother Francis (who was eaten by cannibals, "eat! eat!") to the Abbott in Radio Life (it isn't Francis himself, of course, as they are very different men but I adopted the name), and I created an abbey in the forest (not the desert) defined by joy and humanity and hope, not devotion or work. That abbey was made possible by Miller's as his — in its way — was forced into being by Montecassino. And so destruction begets creation, and creation inspires new possibilities. The lives and loss at Montecassinno (or anywhere) can never be recovered. But what we do with the memories and remains define us. Which, of course, is what Radio Life is all about.
As I wrote the ending I had the privilege of comparing my own philosophies and education with Miller's in order to sharpen the philosophical underpinnings of the dramatic enactments — the scenes, the dialogues, the debates. The reason I could do this without fear of re-writing Miller’s book (so to speak) is because I see things differently than Miller did.
I never dropped bombs on people but I was under missile attack for over a month in Israel during the Gulf War in ‘91. I never served in the military, but I studied alongside mid-career military officers when I earned an MA in national security studies at Georgetown. Unlike Miller, I didn’t lament the absence of peace in our world and bury my head on apocalyptica (let’s call that a word) but worked for a decade at the United Nations on disarmament, peace, and security after earning a doctorate in international relations. And along the way I learned a few things relevant to my implicit debates with Canticle.
To wit: I know, that the development of new technologies is not linear but contingent. The directions we take are a function of the values we hold and sustain through time as a culture, as well the resources we choose to allocate at specific moments in time as a polity. We could develop better chemical and biological warfare weapons, or blinding laser weapons, or exploding bullets, but they are banned by international convention and law and we do not. Even if they are developed in secret, that development is hampered by international norms and also by the values we teach our children who will later choose a career path of their own and hopefully will not want to develop such weapons because they are bad.
We could have developed new technologies for perfecting genocide and the eradication of swaths of humanity so that we might be more efficient than the Nazis were. We have not done this — not because we can't improve on the speed of murder as it was performed until 1945 — but because we are outraged by the Holocaust and will resist this rather than perfect it.
And then there are our failures. We might have cured cancer by now if we'd been as dedicated to that goal as increasing GDP. We might have eradicated malaria if wealthy and northern nations had considered the suffering of others as though they were our family and not distant strangers, but we haven't made those investments or directed our attention to those ostensibly-achievable goals either.
Inevitability, linearity, and determinism are easiest to believe when you are hindered from seeing the range of other possibilities. Many things hinder us. Our characters and personalities. Our cultures and conversations. Our imperatives and problems. Sometimes, simply our imaginations. But this is why we have to rely on each other; to break through the walls that contain us to reach the betterment on the other side. Stories can do that because we need the greatest imaginations to show us what is possible, what is desirable, and what is not.
Miller was a pessimist. I am no optimist but instead embrace the reality of uncertainty to find possibility. Faced with the truth of our own limitations, I encourage us to both imagine more and get our hands on the wheel of our fate.
I would have liked to tell Miller that what is possible is made possible by who we are and what we value; by what we will do to have a certain life. Technology itself will not doom us. Abandoning our values and humanity as the mechanisms to direct it, however, absolutely will. So in this way, I believe Miller was wrong about the linear relationship between thought and destruction. And I wish he'd known that and believed it. Though it didn’t set out to be and is not limited to this, I nevertheless see Radio Life as a response to the suicide letter Miller never wrote and the book that he did.
— Derek B. Miller
Derek B. Miller, 13 August, 2020
I was a Freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in 1988 meeting a friend for lunch. We were at the Pub. It must have been October or so because I remember the stone cottage in Westchester County, New York, being surrounded by the changing leaves. The sense of the school year was starting and the excitement was uplifting. Autumn was never melancholy or wistfulness on campus. It provided a kind of spiritual settling. Here comes the winter with the promise of books, ideas, and just maybe the cuddling of a new lover.
I can't remember the friend but I remember the conversation. We were talking about books — as people do at Sarah Lawrence — and in this case science fiction. "Have you ever read A Canticle for Leibowitz?" he asked me.
No. Never heard of it.
‘It's a classic,’ he said.
Sounded Jewish. And Catholic. And mystical, as though it was inspired by something real and was only masquerading as fiction.
All good stuff.
‘You've got to read it,’ he said.
OK.
He described it and I still remember the description: there was a Flame Deluge (a nuclear war) and the population was wiped out. The survivors blamed the scientists and burned all the books. But there was a tiny abbey of monks run by an order of people who protected every scrap of paper and knowledge they could find even though they had no idea what any of it meant. They came across a box that contained the seeds of new technology.
I can't remember the rest, but I was intrigued.
I didn't read it.
(I was a Freshman. There were changing leaves, and classes, and girls, and other books, and girls, and classes, and leaves).
Twenty years went by and I'd long-since forgotten all about it. Then I saw a movie called The Book of Eli with Denzel Washington (and Jennifer Beals, who was excellent and unappreciated in that role). I didn't love the movie but I was reminded of the premise of Canticle — as it was told to me — by the scene at the end where the survivors try and build a new library and Eli (i.e. Washington) recites the Bible so they can add it to the collection. This was a linear ‘homage’ to that 1959 story whether the screenwriter knew it or not.
I still didn't read it.
But I did start thinking about it partly because I had a premise for a new science fiction story that I was kicking around. I was noticing that all around me were dystopian stories (Planet of the Apes, Dredd, Looper, The Hunger Games, The Walking Dead, Oblivion …) but nothing about the renaissance of civilization after the end. Nothing about the rise.
Now it's 2012 and I'm watching a documentary with Keanu Reeves called Side by Side. It's about film-making and captures a moment when the industry is switching over from film to digital. The conversations ranged from artistic possibilities to what's gained and lost to what it means for the democratization of storytelling and whether we might lose something vital. It was all fascinating. But one issue jumped out: At the end of the documentary, a cinematographer named Geoff Boyle reflected (along with George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and others) on the lax state of our archiving and whether these films/movies would even still exist a few hundred years from now — let alone after an apocalyptic event.
Geoff's view? (I'm quoting from the film here), ‘We're f**cked.’
I was intrigued. It wasn’t about the rise of civilization but it suggested a kind of blank canvas from which a new civilization might rise. All movies, gone? Because the technology failed? If the failure was the internet and cloud storage, wouldn’t that also eradicate pictures and books and music and everything else that was being moved to the cloud?
If we projected into the future a few decades or a hundred years … what wouldn’t be in the cloud?
Eager (read: too eager), I wrote a whopping six pages of a screenplay based on this notion in 2012.
Then I abandoned it and moved on. I had books to write.
In 2015 I turned back to it. By that time I'd already written a feature-length screenplay to my first novel, Norwegian by Night, and was enjoying the new form of writing (not that it could replace novels, but it was fun). I had seen Mad Max: Fury Road (a masterpiece of visualizing the same-old same-old dystopian vision) and also read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, (which I quite liked), but even that thoughtful story too ended long before my idea for a story would begin. The only story I’d ever heard of that addressed the rise was that Canticle book I never read.
By the time of the 2016 election I was becoming convinced that there was a space in our conversation about the future for a new kind of post-apocalyptic story. One that wasn’t dystopian, per se, but about creation and the challenges we’d face if we all had to try again.
That year I wrote twenty-one new pages of a new screenplay. Something about a meteor landing in Antarctica. It wasn't good, and it didn't resemble Radio Life in any way except in three regards: I had the title and loved it. Henry and Graham were already named. And their repartee and relationship as a couple jumped off the page.
Still: it was terrible. I went back to novels.
After finishing my third novel, America by Day in 2017, I needed to do something else and I wanted to have another go at Radio Life, this time as a feature-length screenplay. I got in touch with Geoff Boyle from the Side by Side movie to get the homework started and to develop new ideas. Geoff’s very tapped into the technical community and so he started asking around on my behalf.
He talked to the media storage companies that all the movie studios use to archive their material. Though it wasn't a scientific poll, he wrote me and said (I'm quoting our correspondence), ‘at least 80% use Amazon Web Services. None of them know where their material is stored. They'd never thought about it. One, who was willing to talk if they were not named, was really concerned by the question once they thought about it. They are one of the largest companies specialising in data-handling from camera to archive. It appears that nobody knows where or how their material is stored, even the companies that said they had their own storage would mostly admit that that was just front end immediate rushes and that everything else was “in the cloud”. There really isn't anything else to say, publicly it's all fine, privately they are scared.’
That was when the idea of Radio Life really came together. It was not only possible for the world to forget everything; it seems like we actually will if we put everything in ‘the cloud’ and the cloud fails. The first part is happening now. Libraries are closing. Books are being digitised. All of our photographs and music are online now. It’s only a matter of time before we have nothing on paper.
Could the cloud fail?
Does any technology not fail?
At this point I also knew that I had to read A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was now a full thirty years since I first heard of the book and its premise. It was hovering over me. There was no writing Radio Life without engaging with this book written by Miller; a man who only published one novel in his tragic life and then one posthumously.
In 1959 there was no internet. There was no ‘cloud.’ There was no digitisation of knowledge and there was no way for it all to vanish at once. To achieve that condition in his imagined world, Miller (I later learned) created a period called the Age of Simplification where survivors set out to destroy all the knowledge, having blamed it for the destruction of the world. Mechanics aside, there was no denying that I was utilising a premise that he established some sixty years earlier.
To my mind, it would have been both dishonourable and counter-productive to proceed as if I didn’t know it; the former for obvious reasons, but the latter because Radio Life’s potential value to our cultural conversation would be — if there would be any at all — in revitalising a conversation about remembering and forgetting, truth and lies, knowledge and wisdom, competition and cooperation all within the domain of science fiction.
After all, two things were colliding all around us by 2017: the rise of world-changing technology on the one hand, and the decline of trust in reason, logic, facts, truth, and scientific method on the other. A strange combination, it would seem, but a real one. In an age of strong(er) AI, nanotechnology, CRISPR and gene manipulation, killer robots, and STEM cell research we were also experiencing a full-on assault on our core democratic processes and institutions, multilateralism, international cooperation, and the post-WWII liberal order. We were once again moving in the direction of all-engine, no steering wheel. That was Miller’s world in the 1950s.
I was now certain that Ignorance needed to be the new Bad Boy of science fiction. After all, haven't we had our fill of asteroids, comets, aliens, waves, tornados, earthquakes, supervillains and monsters?
Now I had to read Canticle.
I still didn’t read it.
But this time was different. I wasn’t distracted or hesitant or busy. I deliberately didn’t read it because I knew that I needed to attend to the core themes and problematics of the story on my own without being swayed by Miller’s own answers.
I’m a mature writer and I’m not anxious about being influenced, as Harold Bloom might have suspected. I’ve written a doctorate, four books, and much more. So I don’t have a young writer’s fear about being lead on matters of style or tone or voice. But ideas – solutions to problems and mysteries – are more furtive. More insidious, in a way. It is easy to accidentally adopt philosophies and concepts them as one’s own and then move forward without a second thought to attribution. Art, after all, thrives not only on inspiration but theft.
The weak-minded and the weak-willed are too fast to mistake an analytical product, or a hard-won insight, or a conceptualisation of a problematic, as their own. Watching the world rise again in the distant future, where knowledge and the act of remembering were central tensions in a drama where other people wanted us to forget, were ideas explored by Walter Miller Jr. in A Canticle for Leibowitz. They were also ideas largely untouched since then, and the book itself all but forgotten (which I’ll come to in a moment).
I didn’t need the will to read Canticle now. I needed a strategy.
My solution was to write about three quarters of Radio Life. Alessandra, by that time (in the screenplay), had escaped and Elimisha had not. The ending, more or less, was clear to me. I knew what I believed and the ideas were on paper. Canticle wasn't going to direct me now. It could only give me a basis for reflection and comparison against what I had already written. This was safe ground.
I read it.
I also read about it.
On March 6, 1960, Edmund Fuller (no less), wrote a full-page review of the book in Magazine of Books for the Chicago Sunday Tribune. ‘It is projected into the future – it has elements in common with science fiction, yet it would be quite impossible to classify it narrowly as such. It is fanciful, yet as deeply true as any book I’ve read. It brilliantly combines several qualities: It is prodigiously imaginative and original, richly comic, terrifyingly grim, profound both intellectually and morally, and, above all, is simply a memorable story as to stay with a reader for years.’
At the end of that same month, the comparatively tiny Wisconsin Jewish Chronicle would write, ‘The conjunction of day-to-day life with the sweep of centuries, of individual characters and masses of men – all viewed under the aspect of eternity – makes A Canticle for Leibowitz a unique experience in faith and adventure, in raw humanity and in the exploration of the spirit.’ The review continues with a brief biography of Miller, noting that he ‘enlisted in the Army Air Corps a month after Pearl Harbor and spent most of World War II as a radio operator and gunner. He participated in 55 combat sorties, among these was the Benedictine abbey at Monte Cassino, the oldest monastery in the Western World.’
Those who know the book and its author also know that it was Miller’s participation in this raid that led him, in part, to write Canticle. As the Jewish Chronicle put it, ‘the story of another abbey with a somewhat parallel history.’
The part left unsaid in the reviews was that the abbey at Montecassino, Italy was erected in AD 529 outside of Rome. The Allies bombed it thinking the Germans had occupied it. After destroying it, the Germans did occupy it. The Battle of Montecassino was comprised of four assaults between January and May of 1944. Some 55,000 allied casualties resulted, and 22,000 German.
The monks of the abbey had copied and accumulated forty thousand manuscripts, including the majority of the writings of Tacitus, Cicero, Horace, Virgil, and Ovid. All were destroyed.
The abbey had been filled with hundreds of civilians who had fled there as a sanctuary.
Miller was one of the people who killed them.
Whatever the size of the publication, and wherever the book went, the reviews were all positive. In The Gazette, in Montreal, Canada, Phyllis Reeve wrote that Canticle ‘transcends the bounds of any fiction, impudently invading those of poetry and philosophy’, and in The Guardian out of London, Roy Perrott wrote in April of 1960, ‘… by AD 3700 the world is ready for another atomic war. The people and politicians have learned nothing; the scientists have passed the buck again; religion is nowhere. Platitudes of our time, perhaps, but Mr. Miller gives them room to breathe in a forceful and ingenious way. A deeply interesting book.’
Despite the universal acclaim and favourable comparisons to A Brave New World and 1984 among major fictional works of political philosophy, Miller disappeared almost entirely from the literary stage. By 1966 – a mere seven years after publication – Edward Ducharme at Teachers College, Columbia University, wrote a piece for English Journal (an academic periodical) and notes that, ‘[i]t went through several printings and was finally published as a paperback by Bantam in 1961. Since then it has died the death of most best-sellers.’
Ducharme, though, was only partly correct. For one thing, Canticle won the Hugo Award in 1961. For another – and with the benefit of decades of data and hindsight – we can now see that Miller’s book did not actually die; not by a long shot. Despite his being a recluse and not publishing another novel in his lifetime, Canticle would go on to sell two million copies over thirty-seven years until his death in 1996 and would also inspire — seemingly at random — staged theatrical productions in small towns and even a fifteen-part NPR radio production in 1981 adapted by John Reeves (which we can still listen to on Old Time Radio, https://www.oldradioworld.com/shows/A...)
Now, in 2020 – though I don’t have sales figures – it is still in print and selling well on Amazon, which is at least indicative. Those with access to Bookscan data can add the needed footnote here.
What is notable, however, is that talk of the book seems to have fallen into near silence, despite the themes it elevated being now central to science fiction (aside from one excellent piece in The New Yorker in 2014 by Jon Michaud that drew on many of the scant sources I too have found). How many of our stories today — from The Terminator to The Matrix to West World — are centrally concerned with whether we will ever have the wisdom to control the technological demons our minds create?
Looking through thousands of newspapers and archives on Newspapers.com as well as JSTOR and of course Google, I was struck by the utter lack of institutional engagement with this novel, whereas Huxley and Orwell are household names. Where is it being used in high school or college curricula? Where are the references to it as a benchmark in science fiction? Where are the novelists and screenwriters who credit that book with their inspiration or ideas? Surely there are instances, but there is no trend. In 1997, when David Streitfeld wrote his piece on the death of Miller, he entitled it, 'Canticle' author unsung even in death. Between then and now, I would posit that little has changed.
To be sure, the Huxley and Orwell comparisons can be over-stated. Their output as writers was incomparably greater, as was their public engagement. But Orwell was dead in 1950 and Huxley famously died the day Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. So – not to be cheeky about it, but – they didn't do much publishing after 1961 either.
So why is Miller still unsung?
Much of the blame, if that’s the word, seems to lie with Miller himself. ‘“Walt was deeply depressed by post-traumatic stress disorder and had been for half a century,” said writer Joe Haldeman, the closest thing Miller had to a friend in the science fiction world,’ according to Streitfeld of the Washington Post in October, 1997. ‘I don't know how many people he felt responsible for killing [during World War II], but it was a lot.’
The PTSD and depression isolated Miller from the world. ‘Miller's long-time agent, Don Congdon, said Miller was “the only client I never met, although we talked a lot,”’ Streitfeld explained.
Miller’s wife died two years earlier. By 1996, Miller had had enough.
With 90% of his second and final novel completed (which would be published posthumously), Miller called the police in Dayton Beach on January 9, 1996 at 8:29 a.m. and said there was a dead man on his front lawn. They arrived three minutes later at 8:32. ‘They found the 72-year old writer sitting in a chair on his lawn, dead from a bullet to the brain.’
Miller’s problems and reclusiveness, however, can’t shoulder all the blame for our amnesia about this book.
Streitfeld noted that ‘the first surprising thing about Miller’s suicide is that even now, 20 months after the fact [in 1997], it hasn't been widely reported. No obituary ever appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, or the Associated Press. His children apparently wanted the information kept secret, and they largely succeeded.’
If there is a final conspirator in our amnesia it is the rest of us. It might be natural to take for granted the ideas that shape us, but there’s virtue in remembering and going back to core documents and concepts to better ensure that the conversations that define us remain anchored, rich, enlightened, and progressive.
I loved A Canticle for Leibowitz. It was imaginative and playful and bold. It seemed to be uninhibited by any fear of censure or criticism like all great novels and works of art. It wasn’t only the ideas. I liked the characters, I liked the settings, I was swept away by the story. My criticisms, and I have some, are best discussed in person rather than in print; I’m not a critic.
What I did find was that my reading of Canticle was different from many others. Miller may have been compared to Huxley and Orwell, but when I read it I thought of The Gallery by John Horne Burns (1947), The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer (1948), From Here to Eternity by James Jones (1951), and of course, Catch-22 by Joseph Heller, which was written between 1953 and 1961.
The other book I thought of (which I also consider a war novel) is Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut, published a decade later in 1969.
These were books about war. And not only war in general, but World War II specifically. Canticle was not. Not by any reading. So why did it strike me this way?
I think the answer lies with Emily Dickinson who once wrote ‘tell the truth but tell it slant —‘ and ended her poem (1263) with, ‘The Truth must dazzle gradually, or every man be blind—’
Canticle, like Slaughter-house Five in my opinion, was a war novel told slant.
Interestingly, even Miller himself didn’t notice it at the time. Jon Michaud wrote, “By his own admission, the Miller [sic] did not become fully aware of the driving force behind his novel until he was working on its third part. ‘I was writing the first version of the scene where Zerchi lies half buried in the rubble,’ Miller recalled. ‘Then a light bulb came on over my head: ‘Good God, is this the abbey at Monte Cassino? . . . What have I been writing?’”
While Vonnegut integrated his experiences from the firebombing of Dresden into his science fiction(esque) story, Miller didn’t — not explicitly. Instead, he injected his fears, his theology, his philosophy, his terror, and his sense of dread. He wrote about it using the only medium he could: Science fiction.
I’m speculating, but I think this happened for a number of reasons, some personal and some social.
We already know that Miller wasn't able to deal with his depression and pain from the war. So his need to come at the truth from any direction other than head-on might be obvious. And while I don’t want to psychologize his philosophy, because I think that would be an injustice to the depth of this reflection, I can't help but imagine Miller on 55 bombing sorties during World War II — a time when the likelihood of surviving 25 missions was extremely low — and wondering what that did to his view of the world. You take off. You fly a straight line to the bomb target where flak tries to kill you and often does. You kill people you never knew and will never see and will never atone for, and then you fly straight back. And then you repeat this another 54 times. Is it a wonder that his views of humanity represents a linear path from knowledge to destruction, only to be repeated over and over again if the destruction was not complete?
Even with this, I think there’s more to the story.
At some point, the canonical literature on any historical event begins to tie-off and the attention — of the agents, the editors, the publishers, the booksellers, the critics, the reading public — moves on. This happened with WWII literature. It happened with Vietnam literature. It happened with The Gulf War. Many will remember the key September 11 novels like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer (2005), The Zero by Jess Walter (2006) and Falling Man by Don DeLillo (2007). It happened there too. Today, no one can write a ‘September 11’ novel anymore. It's too late. One can mention the events, but the literature is closed.
And yet, even after a literature has been tied off, the compulsion to write among writers lives on. It is little wonder to me that after the most explicit and realistic fiction about World War II, great writers like Miller or Vonnegut started turning to science fiction as the domain in which to explore the themes, philosophies, counter-factuals, emotions, and pain that was left behind in a world that no longer wanted novelistic expression of that war. In fact, I think that one of science fiction's greatest attributes is to be the last domain where all great ideas are welcomed and where neither time nor space will inhibit the exploration of what still matters.
I had a fresh reading of Miller’s book and I knew his fate. I wanted to say to him, ‘You didn't just write a book. You started a conversation about hope and possibility as we contend with knowledge and ignorance, reason and morality, conflict and cooperation. I thank you for that and for placing those things at the center of science fiction. You then abandoned all of that and eventually yourself but I'm not letting you off that easy because the conversation is bigger than you. It's current. It's pressing. And as best I can tell, it is also unattended. So forgive me, but Radio Life is going to pick up the baton you discarded."
Hubris? Arrogance? I didn't much care and still don’t. Sometimes the person who moves an agenda forward is simply the one who cares enough to try.
I finished writing the screenplay with some modest influences from Miller. I loved the story but the screenplay was weak. I soon decided that the only way to really attend to what was on my mind was to write a proper novel. I am, after all, a novelist. So I got started.
Though in conversation with Canticle, Radio Life was no homage, no sequel, no parallel, no competitor. However, it was a conversation between two books that I wanted to make explicit. Now I had a chance to give both Miller (and poor, hapless brother Francis) a better end.
In Part IV I elevated Miller's Brother Francis (who was eaten by cannibals, "eat! eat!") to the Abbott in Radio Life (it isn't Francis himself, of course, as they are very different men but I adopted the name), and I created an abbey in the forest (not the desert) defined by joy and humanity and hope, not devotion or work. That abbey was made possible by Miller's as his — in its way — was forced into being by Montecassino. And so destruction begets creation, and creation inspires new possibilities. The lives and loss at Montecassinno (or anywhere) can never be recovered. But what we do with the memories and remains define us. Which, of course, is what Radio Life is all about.
As I wrote the ending I had the privilege of comparing my own philosophies and education with Miller's in order to sharpen the philosophical underpinnings of the dramatic enactments — the scenes, the dialogues, the debates. The reason I could do this without fear of re-writing Miller’s book (so to speak) is because I see things differently than Miller did.
I never dropped bombs on people but I was under missile attack for over a month in Israel during the Gulf War in ‘91. I never served in the military, but I studied alongside mid-career military officers when I earned an MA in national security studies at Georgetown. Unlike Miller, I didn’t lament the absence of peace in our world and bury my head on apocalyptica (let’s call that a word) but worked for a decade at the United Nations on disarmament, peace, and security after earning a doctorate in international relations. And along the way I learned a few things relevant to my implicit debates with Canticle.
To wit: I know, that the development of new technologies is not linear but contingent. The directions we take are a function of the values we hold and sustain through time as a culture, as well the resources we choose to allocate at specific moments in time as a polity. We could develop better chemical and biological warfare weapons, or blinding laser weapons, or exploding bullets, but they are banned by international convention and law and we do not. Even if they are developed in secret, that development is hampered by international norms and also by the values we teach our children who will later choose a career path of their own and hopefully will not want to develop such weapons because they are bad.
We could have developed new technologies for perfecting genocide and the eradication of swaths of humanity so that we might be more efficient than the Nazis were. We have not done this — not because we can't improve on the speed of murder as it was performed until 1945 — but because we are outraged by the Holocaust and will resist this rather than perfect it.
And then there are our failures. We might have cured cancer by now if we'd been as dedicated to that goal as increasing GDP. We might have eradicated malaria if wealthy and northern nations had considered the suffering of others as though they were our family and not distant strangers, but we haven't made those investments or directed our attention to those ostensibly-achievable goals either.
Inevitability, linearity, and determinism are easiest to believe when you are hindered from seeing the range of other possibilities. Many things hinder us. Our characters and personalities. Our cultures and conversations. Our imperatives and problems. Sometimes, simply our imaginations. But this is why we have to rely on each other; to break through the walls that contain us to reach the betterment on the other side. Stories can do that because we need the greatest imaginations to show us what is possible, what is desirable, and what is not.
Miller was a pessimist. I am no optimist but instead embrace the reality of uncertainty to find possibility. Faced with the truth of our own limitations, I encourage us to both imagine more and get our hands on the wheel of our fate.
I would have liked to tell Miller that what is possible is made possible by who we are and what we value; by what we will do to have a certain life. Technology itself will not doom us. Abandoning our values and humanity as the mechanisms to direct it, however, absolutely will. So in this way, I believe Miller was wrong about the linear relationship between thought and destruction. And I wish he'd known that and believed it. Though it didn’t set out to be and is not limited to this, I nevertheless see Radio Life as a response to the suicide letter Miller never wrote and the book that he did.
— Derek B. Miller
March 10, 2022
Catch any errors in HOW TO FIND?
Hi, readers. If you caught any errors in HOW TO FIND YOUR WAY IN THE DARK, please write and let me know (Derekbmiller@gmail.com). We're about to go to press with the paperback and now's the time to correct anything that may — somehow — have missed our eagle-eyes.
Thank you!
Thank you!
March 8, 2022
A SPEECH FOR PRESIDENT ZELENSKY
A SPEECH FOR PRESIDENT ZELENSKY
Derek B. Miller
8 March, 2022
All leaders have speechwriters. If I were President Zelensky’s speechwriter, this is the speech I would suggest he deliver today:
This morning. I would like to take this opportunity to speak directly to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. President Putin, I will now share some news with you that I think you will find remarkable.
I share this because I know you are not listening to your intelligence agencies. You are not listening to your military. You are not listening to the brave and proud Russian citizens protesting on your streets — streets you are learning really belong to them — and you are not listening to the nations of the world individually or when they come together at the United Nations. But you will listen to me. And so will the rest of the world, if only for a moment. But a moment is all I ask.
I want to tell you the best case scenario for Russia. It is not what you think it is.
The best case is that your military is preposterously downgraded on the ground, in the air, and at sea and Russia’s weakness in the world grows by the minute.
At best, the Western nations now see your ineptitude in planning, execution, logistics, strategy, public diplomacy, and mental agility.
At best the ruble is devalued to the point it cannot be traded on the world markets anymore and every gain of Russia since the collapse of the USSR is reduced to dust.
At best you have emboldened nations to stand against Russia who, in the past, would not have done so like peaceful Switzerland or Sweden, while encouraging others to join the EU and NATO; institutions you wanted to destroy but are now beloved and growing stronger.
At best thousands of Russia’s young soldiers will be slaughtered by our forces and the eternal resistance we are now building, training, positioning, and empowering. I remind you that Ukraine remembers the Communist era extremely well and though it was a hated era, we remember the power and planning and operations of a people’s war. No nation has ever won against a people’s war. Ukraine will be a permanent hellscape for Russia’s youth that choose to die here.
At best Russia’s citizens — from the oligarchs who are losing millions and billions from your actions to the mothers who are losing their sons and daughters — will turn on you and decide whether you will die in a cave like Saddam or whether your body will be hung upside down like Mussolini’s. Perhaps, if you manage to weasel out of this, you will end up talking yourself to death in The Hague as a war criminal. Dead or alive is of no interest to me.
At best the people of Russia will soon have to pay war reparations to Ukraine for the country it has destroyed despite having almost nothing of their own to eat. And why? For what? No reason. For nothing.
At best Russia has now added a new reason for shame, for self-hatred, and for self-pity in a world in which it cannot join so tries to destroy instead.
And at worst, Vladimir? My mind will not bother with the worst. Because the best is good enough for us.
Stop this war now, Mr. Putin. Or the worst is yet to come.
Long live Ukraine.
Derek B. Miller
8 March, 2022
All leaders have speechwriters. If I were President Zelensky’s speechwriter, this is the speech I would suggest he deliver today:
This morning. I would like to take this opportunity to speak directly to the Russian President, Vladimir Putin. President Putin, I will now share some news with you that I think you will find remarkable.
I share this because I know you are not listening to your intelligence agencies. You are not listening to your military. You are not listening to the brave and proud Russian citizens protesting on your streets — streets you are learning really belong to them — and you are not listening to the nations of the world individually or when they come together at the United Nations. But you will listen to me. And so will the rest of the world, if only for a moment. But a moment is all I ask.
I want to tell you the best case scenario for Russia. It is not what you think it is.
The best case is that your military is preposterously downgraded on the ground, in the air, and at sea and Russia’s weakness in the world grows by the minute.
At best, the Western nations now see your ineptitude in planning, execution, logistics, strategy, public diplomacy, and mental agility.
At best the ruble is devalued to the point it cannot be traded on the world markets anymore and every gain of Russia since the collapse of the USSR is reduced to dust.
At best you have emboldened nations to stand against Russia who, in the past, would not have done so like peaceful Switzerland or Sweden, while encouraging others to join the EU and NATO; institutions you wanted to destroy but are now beloved and growing stronger.
At best thousands of Russia’s young soldiers will be slaughtered by our forces and the eternal resistance we are now building, training, positioning, and empowering. I remind you that Ukraine remembers the Communist era extremely well and though it was a hated era, we remember the power and planning and operations of a people’s war. No nation has ever won against a people’s war. Ukraine will be a permanent hellscape for Russia’s youth that choose to die here.
At best Russia’s citizens — from the oligarchs who are losing millions and billions from your actions to the mothers who are losing their sons and daughters — will turn on you and decide whether you will die in a cave like Saddam or whether your body will be hung upside down like Mussolini’s. Perhaps, if you manage to weasel out of this, you will end up talking yourself to death in The Hague as a war criminal. Dead or alive is of no interest to me.
At best the people of Russia will soon have to pay war reparations to Ukraine for the country it has destroyed despite having almost nothing of their own to eat. And why? For what? No reason. For nothing.
At best Russia has now added a new reason for shame, for self-hatred, and for self-pity in a world in which it cannot join so tries to destroy instead.
And at worst, Vladimir? My mind will not bother with the worst. Because the best is good enough for us.
Stop this war now, Mr. Putin. Or the worst is yet to come.
Long live Ukraine.
