Michael Swanwick's Blog, page 167
June 10, 2013
Iain Banks Has Left the Wasp Factory
.
The best way to remember Iain Banks, who died yesterday morning at the far-too-young age of 59, is by reading one of his books. If you've never read it, I recommend the novel that first brought him to the astounded attention of the world -- The Wasp Factory . By some readings it's a horror novel, by others mainstream. And it's just a flat-out astonishing piece of writing. I say this as someone who is not a big fan of horror or of horror-related mainstream fiction.
Aside from the fact that it's relatively short and you can read it quickly, that's all I'm going to say about the book. You'll be happiest going into this one blind.
And while I'm at it . . .
In 1994 I wrote an essay titled "In the Tradition..." which praised many of the fantasists then working whom I deemed most worthy of praise. Here's an excerpt from it, in which I lauded Banks's The Bridge . The word never appeared in the essay, but it occurs to me now that this was his Steampunk novel:
I'll confess that I don't know which hat Banks was wearing when he wrote The Bridge. It hardly matters. What matters is the remarkable setting he has chosen for the bulk of the book--an enormous and seemingly endless bridge stretching from horizon to horizon across a nameless ocean. An entire society lives upon the bridge, employing bicycles, rickshaws, and motorcycles for short-term transportation and steam trains for longer voyages. Here is the scene from a platform above the main train deck:
The first-person narrator is being treated for amnesia. He finds himself in a mannered society rather like that of Freud's Vienna but riddled with small absurdities, not the least of which is the total lack of curiosity its citizens display toward the bridge itself. What lands does it connect? Who built it? How old is it? Only the protagonist cares, and he cannot find out.
His sporadic search for answers is the chief of three alternating narratives. The second follows the life and difficult romance of a (young, at first) man in contemporary Scotland, and the third . . . well, it can only be characterized as the adventures of Conan the Glaswegian.
At first the farcical adventures of a nearly brainless swordsman with an overintellectualized familiar and a truly hideous accent ("I luv the ded, this old basturt sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fuckin old pervert I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, and slit his throate; ah askd you whare the fukin Sleepin Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you like. No, no he sez, splutterin sumthin awfy and gettin blud all ovir ma new curiearse, no he sez I sed Isle of the Dead" and so on) seem jarring and even intrusive. There are moments in the main narration when the fabric of reality wears thin and opens a window into the second plot-line. But this barbarian stuff is straight out of left field.
These segments are so engaging, however, so funny in an awful way, that the reader comes to accept them while doubting they'll ever quite make sense.
The Bridge is, underneath all, a novel of psychological revelation. So I am forced to be a little coy about the plot. In broad terms, it is about the protagonist's reluctance to deal with the mystery of his situation. He is a man in serious peril and it is his task to discover the nature of that peril. However, life on the bridge is pleasant, and he has met an engaging woman, an engineer's daughter named Abberlaine Arrol.
The sections on the bridge are more vivid and engaging than those set in Scotland. The same could be said of the swaggering, cigar-smoking Abberlaine compared to her real-world counterpart. Small wonder that the protagonist is uneager to rock the boat. But little things start going wrong. Telephones cease to work for him. He loses his social position. Mad events proliferate. He must finally find the resolve to ask tough questions and face their consequences.
Morals are out of fashion these days, even in the retrogressive universes of fantasy. But if there is one message to be taken away from the book, it is this: That sometimes the reason life seems difficult is that we are engaged in difficult and important work.
And our foul-mouthed, sexually deplorable, and bloody-handed barbarian? One of the many delights of The Bridge is the marvelously orchestrated revelation by story's end that he is integral to the plot. Central, even.
*
The best way to remember Iain Banks, who died yesterday morning at the far-too-young age of 59, is by reading one of his books. If you've never read it, I recommend the novel that first brought him to the astounded attention of the world -- The Wasp Factory . By some readings it's a horror novel, by others mainstream. And it's just a flat-out astonishing piece of writing. I say this as someone who is not a big fan of horror or of horror-related mainstream fiction.
Aside from the fact that it's relatively short and you can read it quickly, that's all I'm going to say about the book. You'll be happiest going into this one blind.
And while I'm at it . . .
In 1994 I wrote an essay titled "In the Tradition..." which praised many of the fantasists then working whom I deemed most worthy of praise. Here's an excerpt from it, in which I lauded Banks's The Bridge . The word never appeared in the essay, but it occurs to me now that this was his Steampunk novel:
I'll confess that I don't know which hat Banks was wearing when he wrote The Bridge. It hardly matters. What matters is the remarkable setting he has chosen for the bulk of the book--an enormous and seemingly endless bridge stretching from horizon to horizon across a nameless ocean. An entire society lives upon the bridge, employing bicycles, rickshaws, and motorcycles for short-term transportation and steam trains for longer voyages. Here is the scene from a platform above the main train deck:
Over the noise of the milling people, the continual hisses and clanks, grindings and gratings, klaxons and whistles of the trains on the deck beneath sound like shrieks from some mechanistic underworld, while every now and again a deep rumble and a still more profound quaking and rattling announces a heavy train passing somewhere below; great pulsing clouds of white steam roll around the street and upwards.
Above, where the sky ought to be, are the distant, hazily seen girders of the high bridge; obscured by the rising fumes and vapors, dimmed by the light intercepted outside them by their carapace of people-infected rooms and offices, they rise above and look down upon the rude profanity of these afterthought constructions with all the majesty and splendor of a great cathedral roof.
The first-person narrator is being treated for amnesia. He finds himself in a mannered society rather like that of Freud's Vienna but riddled with small absurdities, not the least of which is the total lack of curiosity its citizens display toward the bridge itself. What lands does it connect? Who built it? How old is it? Only the protagonist cares, and he cannot find out.
His sporadic search for answers is the chief of three alternating narratives. The second follows the life and difficult romance of a (young, at first) man in contemporary Scotland, and the third . . . well, it can only be characterized as the adventures of Conan the Glaswegian.
At first the farcical adventures of a nearly brainless swordsman with an overintellectualized familiar and a truly hideous accent ("I luv the ded, this old basturt sez to me when I wiz tryin to get some innfurmashin out ov him. You fuckin old pervert I sez, gettin a bit fed up by this time enyway, and slit his throate; ah askd you whare the fukin Sleepin Byootie woz, no whit kind of humpin you like. No, no he sez, splutterin sumthin awfy and gettin blud all ovir ma new curiearse, no he sez I sed Isle of the Dead" and so on) seem jarring and even intrusive. There are moments in the main narration when the fabric of reality wears thin and opens a window into the second plot-line. But this barbarian stuff is straight out of left field.
These segments are so engaging, however, so funny in an awful way, that the reader comes to accept them while doubting they'll ever quite make sense.
The Bridge is, underneath all, a novel of psychological revelation. So I am forced to be a little coy about the plot. In broad terms, it is about the protagonist's reluctance to deal with the mystery of his situation. He is a man in serious peril and it is his task to discover the nature of that peril. However, life on the bridge is pleasant, and he has met an engaging woman, an engineer's daughter named Abberlaine Arrol.
The sections on the bridge are more vivid and engaging than those set in Scotland. The same could be said of the swaggering, cigar-smoking Abberlaine compared to her real-world counterpart. Small wonder that the protagonist is uneager to rock the boat. But little things start going wrong. Telephones cease to work for him. He loses his social position. Mad events proliferate. He must finally find the resolve to ask tough questions and face their consequences.
Morals are out of fashion these days, even in the retrogressive universes of fantasy. But if there is one message to be taken away from the book, it is this: That sometimes the reason life seems difficult is that we are engaged in difficult and important work.
And our foul-mouthed, sexually deplorable, and bloody-handed barbarian? One of the many delights of The Bridge is the marvelously orchestrated revelation by story's end that he is integral to the plot. Central, even.
*
June 7, 2013
Telling Tales
.
When I was an undergrad at the College of William and Mary, roughly a century ago, Dr. Jenkins (who knew how I felt about science fiction) gave me a flyer that had popped up in the English Department and been routed to him because he taught the Creative Writing class. It was for a relatively six-week course in writing science fiction called Clarion. I glanced at it and threw it away because not only could I not afford to money for it, I couldn't afford the six weeks either. Back then, I held down a 48-hour a week summer job at the Johnson-Carper Furniture Factory, and saved almost every penny of it to pay for my schooling.
The exception was books. I bought lots of SF paperbacks at used book stores, because I rightly considered them to be an important part of my education.
One Saturday -- I remember this vividly -- I found an anthology of stories from Clarion students. They were, on the whole, pretty crude. But I could see that these were the products of raw, talented writers who had just been through an experience that had cut years off of their learning time.
You can imagine how jealous I was of people who could afford such an experience.
Nowadays, I suspect that I ducked the bullet. Because the Clarion experience -- whether it be Clarion West, Clarion South, or the original Clarion Classic -- is not for everybody. It best rewards those who can write fast and aspire to a conventional prose style, and least serves those who write slowly or have distinct prose styles. A timely scholarship to one of the workshops quite possibly could have prevented the young Howard Waldrop from ever writing another word.
However, for many writers, the experience is a very positive one indeed, an early booster engine for their literary careers. So I'm passing along the following info about an upcoming anthology that doesn't contain a single word written by Yours Truly:
You can pre-order from Hydra House here.
Above: The upcoming book. The original series was going to be yearly, I believe, but only lasted I think two anthologies. I have them around here somewhere.
*
When I was an undergrad at the College of William and Mary, roughly a century ago, Dr. Jenkins (who knew how I felt about science fiction) gave me a flyer that had popped up in the English Department and been routed to him because he taught the Creative Writing class. It was for a relatively six-week course in writing science fiction called Clarion. I glanced at it and threw it away because not only could I not afford to money for it, I couldn't afford the six weeks either. Back then, I held down a 48-hour a week summer job at the Johnson-Carper Furniture Factory, and saved almost every penny of it to pay for my schooling.
The exception was books. I bought lots of SF paperbacks at used book stores, because I rightly considered them to be an important part of my education.
One Saturday -- I remember this vividly -- I found an anthology of stories from Clarion students. They were, on the whole, pretty crude. But I could see that these were the products of raw, talented writers who had just been through an experience that had cut years off of their learning time.
You can imagine how jealous I was of people who could afford such an experience.
Nowadays, I suspect that I ducked the bullet. Because the Clarion experience -- whether it be Clarion West, Clarion South, or the original Clarion Classic -- is not for everybody. It best rewards those who can write fast and aspire to a conventional prose style, and least serves those who write slowly or have distinct prose styles. A timely scholarship to one of the workshops quite possibly could have prevented the young Howard Waldrop from ever writing another word.
However, for many writers, the experience is a very positive one indeed, an early booster engine for their literary careers. So I'm passing along the following info about an upcoming anthology that doesn't contain a single word written by Yours Truly:
An afterword accompanies each story, written by an instructor from that graduate’s year: Greg Bear, Terry Bisson, Pat Cadigan, Gardner Dozois, Andy Duncan, Elizabeth Hand, Nancy Kress, Ursula K. Le Guin, Maureen McHugh, Pat Murphy, Samuel R. Delany, Paul Park, Geoff Ryman, Lucy Sussex, Howard Waldrop, and Connie Willis.
The book will be available for pre- orders in April in hardcover, paperback, and eBook formats from Hydra House, the University Book Store in Seattle, and other online retailers.
You can pre-order from Hydra House here.
Above: The upcoming book. The original series was going to be yearly, I believe, but only lasted I think two anthologies. I have them around here somewhere.
*
June 5, 2013
The Barrel Test
.
My son Sean has friends who think they might want to become writers. He tells them that if they want, he can arrange for me to go over one of their stories with them. "It feels like being put in a barrel of gravel and rolled downhill," he says, "but you'll be a better writer afterward."
So far, nobody has taken him up on the offer.
That's only natural, of course. New writers are as greedy for praise as a child for candy. But, like candy, praise contributes very little to their growth. They need criticism and correction -- not to build character or anything like that, but because criticism and correction contain information that will make their fiction better. On those rare occasions when I teach at Clarion or Clarion West or Clarion South, I always tell my students that their job while there is not write good stories but to make interesting mistakes and as many of them as they possibly can, in order to elicit information from me that they will find useful. With the possible exception of the first week, when they're being eased into the experience, workshoppers should get as little public praise (the private conferences are a different matter) as possible, because it wastes their time and makes the other students envious.
Still, I think Sean has come up with a good way of gauging whether there's any hope for your becoming a writer: If you could improve your writing by being placed in a barrel of gravel and rolled downhill, would you do it? If not, then you're probably not going to make it.
*
My son Sean has friends who think they might want to become writers. He tells them that if they want, he can arrange for me to go over one of their stories with them. "It feels like being put in a barrel of gravel and rolled downhill," he says, "but you'll be a better writer afterward."
So far, nobody has taken him up on the offer.
That's only natural, of course. New writers are as greedy for praise as a child for candy. But, like candy, praise contributes very little to their growth. They need criticism and correction -- not to build character or anything like that, but because criticism and correction contain information that will make their fiction better. On those rare occasions when I teach at Clarion or Clarion West or Clarion South, I always tell my students that their job while there is not write good stories but to make interesting mistakes and as many of them as they possibly can, in order to elicit information from me that they will find useful. With the possible exception of the first week, when they're being eased into the experience, workshoppers should get as little public praise (the private conferences are a different matter) as possible, because it wastes their time and makes the other students envious.
Still, I think Sean has come up with a good way of gauging whether there's any hope for your becoming a writer: If you could improve your writing by being placed in a barrel of gravel and rolled downhill, would you do it? If not, then you're probably not going to make it.
*
June 3, 2013
Gannets!
.
I had quite a nice weekend, topped off yesterday by a daylong backyard party with a lot of the people I like most in attendance. So today I am happy but weary.
Which is why I'm posting the above footage of gannets diving. Watching them is almost terrifying, they're so swift and efficient.
Beautiful, if amateurish, footage. I'm not a big fan of the music, though.
And here's some footage of gannets in super slo mo.
Finally, if you like a little intellectual context with your eye candy, Darren Naish's blog post, which turned me on to the original video, can be seen here. Good stuff.
And in the Guardian . . .
The very fine writer Christopher Priest eulogizes the late Jack Vance. Unexpectedly, it's quite a nice piece.
Click here to read it.
*
I had quite a nice weekend, topped off yesterday by a daylong backyard party with a lot of the people I like most in attendance. So today I am happy but weary.
Which is why I'm posting the above footage of gannets diving. Watching them is almost terrifying, they're so swift and efficient.
Beautiful, if amateurish, footage. I'm not a big fan of the music, though.
And here's some footage of gannets in super slo mo.
Finally, if you like a little intellectual context with your eye candy, Darren Naish's blog post, which turned me on to the original video, can be seen here. Good stuff.
And in the Guardian . . .
The very fine writer Christopher Priest eulogizes the late Jack Vance. Unexpectedly, it's quite a nice piece.
Click here to read it.
*
May 31, 2013
Jack Vance, Wandering the Stars
.
Jack Vance died the other day at age 96. He was the most influential science fiction writer that only those within the field knew about.
Vance wrote a great many books but no "great" books. With the exception of The Dying Earth and its successors, which took Clark Ashton Smith's vision of Zothique, the last continent on a far-future and dying Earth, and infused it with wit and energy and zest, and then passed that vision on to Gene Wolfe and his Book of the New Sun sequence, it's Vance's oeuvre, rather than its individual components, that is important.
Typically, Vance's heroes were little men caught up in big events. His sympathies were always with the hoi polloi, and his novels always had the time to pause to take in the opinions of an innkeeper or the crackpot theories of a small businessman. This is a lot harder to make work than it sounds, and it's one of the reasons why, almost secretly, Vance was so influential. His fiction taught lessons to aspirant writers that other novels could not.
Jack Vance loved boats, avoided fans, and lived a good long life. Though physical problems kept him housebound in his last years, a mutual friend told me a year ago that his mind was still clear. He kept writing later into his old age than all but a very few can manage.
A typical Vancean detail in I forget which novel was that on summer evenings on one particular world, it was the custom to picnic on the grassy hills outside of town and then, lying back on blankets, point to specific stars one had visited and talk about what the people on the planets orbiting them were like. Tonight, I will go out and do the same: "See that star? Jack Vance wrote about the people there. They never go out in public without a mask and those masks reflect their public prestige. One day, he said, there came a stranger to that world..."
There will be formal obituaries and the weeping and rending of garments soon. In the meantime, you can read the Locus Online item here.
Above: The Maestro. The story about the people with masks is called "The Moon Moth," and if you haven't read it, you are encouraged to do so. It's a classic.
*
Jack Vance died the other day at age 96. He was the most influential science fiction writer that only those within the field knew about.
Vance wrote a great many books but no "great" books. With the exception of The Dying Earth and its successors, which took Clark Ashton Smith's vision of Zothique, the last continent on a far-future and dying Earth, and infused it with wit and energy and zest, and then passed that vision on to Gene Wolfe and his Book of the New Sun sequence, it's Vance's oeuvre, rather than its individual components, that is important.
Typically, Vance's heroes were little men caught up in big events. His sympathies were always with the hoi polloi, and his novels always had the time to pause to take in the opinions of an innkeeper or the crackpot theories of a small businessman. This is a lot harder to make work than it sounds, and it's one of the reasons why, almost secretly, Vance was so influential. His fiction taught lessons to aspirant writers that other novels could not.
Jack Vance loved boats, avoided fans, and lived a good long life. Though physical problems kept him housebound in his last years, a mutual friend told me a year ago that his mind was still clear. He kept writing later into his old age than all but a very few can manage.
A typical Vancean detail in I forget which novel was that on summer evenings on one particular world, it was the custom to picnic on the grassy hills outside of town and then, lying back on blankets, point to specific stars one had visited and talk about what the people on the planets orbiting them were like. Tonight, I will go out and do the same: "See that star? Jack Vance wrote about the people there. They never go out in public without a mask and those masks reflect their public prestige. One day, he said, there came a stranger to that world..."
There will be formal obituaries and the weeping and rending of garments soon. In the meantime, you can read the Locus Online item here.
Above: The Maestro. The story about the people with masks is called "The Moon Moth," and if you haven't read it, you are encouraged to do so. It's a classic.
*
May 29, 2013
My Undead Story Lives! It Lives!
.
I vividly remember getting a royalty check for my story in The Living Dead -- which in itself was notable because most anthologies do not sell enough to earn anything above and beyond the advance -- and being astonished at how large it was.
It turned out that editor John Joseph Adams had found the sweet spot for a theme anthology by a) carefully assembling pretty much all the very best zombie stories written to date and then b) publishing it at exactly the right moment -- just after zombie fiction went mainstream and just before every other editor in the world decided to put together exactly such an anthology and discovered that Adams had beat them to the punch.
Here's the stock blurb:
And many, many others. This is one big book, with an excellent list of authors. How excellent? Excellent enough that I wasn't offended by not making the short list on the cover. Much.
My own story, "The Dead," was inspired by a series of paintings by an American leftist and came out so well that, figuring that James Joyce wouldn't mind, I gave it the title of what may be the single most famous short story in the English language.
Now the UK publisher Orbit has acquired rights to the anthology and will be issuing a digital edition in the United Kingdom and their export markets (including Australia & New Zealand) one June 13th.
So for e-readers in those countries, the decision whether or not to buy is an easy one: If you like zombie fiction, you want this book. But if you don't, I fail to see how you made it this deep into today's blogpost.
Amazon's pre-order page can be found here.
Above: That's the American cover. The Brit cover can be found over at Amazon. And wherever fine UK ebooks are sold.
*
I vividly remember getting a royalty check for my story in The Living Dead -- which in itself was notable because most anthologies do not sell enough to earn anything above and beyond the advance -- and being astonished at how large it was.
It turned out that editor John Joseph Adams had found the sweet spot for a theme anthology by a) carefully assembling pretty much all the very best zombie stories written to date and then b) publishing it at exactly the right moment -- just after zombie fiction went mainstream and just before every other editor in the world decided to put together exactly such an anthology and discovered that Adams had beat them to the punch.
Here's the stock blurb:
When there's no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth!
From White Zombie to Dawn of the Dead, Resident Evil to World War Z, zombies have invaded popular culture, becoming the monsters that best express the fears and anxieties of the modern west.
Gathering together the best zombie literature of the last three decades from many of today's most renowned authors of fantasy, speculative fiction, and horror, including Stephen King, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, George R. R. Martin, Clive Barker, Poppy Z. Brite, Neil Gaiman, Joe Hill, Laurell K. Hamilton, and Joe R. Lansdale, The Living Dead covers the broad spectrum of zombie short fiction.
And many, many others. This is one big book, with an excellent list of authors. How excellent? Excellent enough that I wasn't offended by not making the short list on the cover. Much.
My own story, "The Dead," was inspired by a series of paintings by an American leftist and came out so well that, figuring that James Joyce wouldn't mind, I gave it the title of what may be the single most famous short story in the English language.
Now the UK publisher Orbit has acquired rights to the anthology and will be issuing a digital edition in the United Kingdom and their export markets (including Australia & New Zealand) one June 13th.
So for e-readers in those countries, the decision whether or not to buy is an easy one: If you like zombie fiction, you want this book. But if you don't, I fail to see how you made it this deep into today's blogpost.
Amazon's pre-order page can be found here.
Above: That's the American cover. The Brit cover can be found over at Amazon. And wherever fine UK ebooks are sold.
*
May 27, 2013
Last Chance to Write SF About Self-Driving Cars
.
There's one of them up above -- a self-driving car. Looks deadly normal, doesn't it? Oh, it has that goofy camera on top, but that's just Google collecting street views for its Earth app. Still, we can confidently expect it to change the world in surprising ways.
I've been thinking about self-driving cars off and on for the past decade, ever since it became obvious that they were about to arrive. Some things are pretty obvious: They'll be a godsend for people with a drinking problem. There'll be an upsurge in fuel consumption and a real traffic problem in places like New York City as, rather than spend forty bucks for a parking garage, people just tell their cars to drive around the block for a couple of hours while they go to see a movie. And every medium-sized city in America is going to hope to revitalize their downtown shopping districts by building convenient pull-offs in front of the shops where you can get in and out of your car before it's sent to free parking lots in the cheap part of town.
But there are going to be problems, too. I think that a lot of parents are going to send their children to school in driverless cars. The default situation in the U. S. is that most parents have to leave for work before their kid leaves for school, and come home after their child does. Once your car can drive itself, the obvious is to put in a nanny-cam and let your Prius do the driving.
I can't see the police or politicians liking this much -- it feels too much like reckless endangerment. And I'm pretty sure there are going to be some very creepy people looking to game the situation by luring a child into what only looks like the family car.
To my embarrassment, though, the whole thing hasn't set my imagination aflame. Once the driverless car becomes common -- and since they're going to be much safer than human-driven cars, I expect that will happen fast -- there are going to be huge social consequences. Changes as profound as those brought on by personal computers, cell phones, and the Internet. Some good hard thought and some good crisp writing, and Somebody can get credit for the rest of their life for having predicted them. Which is a useful thing for a science fiction writer.
I'm not going to do it because my hindbrain apparently just doesn't find the chore interesting. So it might as well be you.
You'd better move fast, though. Driverless cars are already on the road and they're going to be an everyday sight soon. A few years back, a friend told me that he'd test-ridden a driverless car on a closed track with paid drivers in regular cars who would occasionally cut if off or slam on the brake right in front of it. "How did it feel?" I asked him.
"You'd be amazed," he said, "how little time it took for it to feel perfectly ordinary."
*
There's one of them up above -- a self-driving car. Looks deadly normal, doesn't it? Oh, it has that goofy camera on top, but that's just Google collecting street views for its Earth app. Still, we can confidently expect it to change the world in surprising ways.
I've been thinking about self-driving cars off and on for the past decade, ever since it became obvious that they were about to arrive. Some things are pretty obvious: They'll be a godsend for people with a drinking problem. There'll be an upsurge in fuel consumption and a real traffic problem in places like New York City as, rather than spend forty bucks for a parking garage, people just tell their cars to drive around the block for a couple of hours while they go to see a movie. And every medium-sized city in America is going to hope to revitalize their downtown shopping districts by building convenient pull-offs in front of the shops where you can get in and out of your car before it's sent to free parking lots in the cheap part of town.
But there are going to be problems, too. I think that a lot of parents are going to send their children to school in driverless cars. The default situation in the U. S. is that most parents have to leave for work before their kid leaves for school, and come home after their child does. Once your car can drive itself, the obvious is to put in a nanny-cam and let your Prius do the driving.
I can't see the police or politicians liking this much -- it feels too much like reckless endangerment. And I'm pretty sure there are going to be some very creepy people looking to game the situation by luring a child into what only looks like the family car.
To my embarrassment, though, the whole thing hasn't set my imagination aflame. Once the driverless car becomes common -- and since they're going to be much safer than human-driven cars, I expect that will happen fast -- there are going to be huge social consequences. Changes as profound as those brought on by personal computers, cell phones, and the Internet. Some good hard thought and some good crisp writing, and Somebody can get credit for the rest of their life for having predicted them. Which is a useful thing for a science fiction writer.
I'm not going to do it because my hindbrain apparently just doesn't find the chore interesting. So it might as well be you.
You'd better move fast, though. Driverless cars are already on the road and they're going to be an everyday sight soon. A few years back, a friend told me that he'd test-ridden a driverless car on a closed track with paid drivers in regular cars who would occasionally cut if off or slam on the brake right in front of it. "How did it feel?" I asked him.
"You'd be amazed," he said, "how little time it took for it to feel perfectly ordinary."
*
May 24, 2013
If We Can't Make Education Better, Shouldn't We Stop Making It Worse?
.
There it is, up above, St. Francis Xavier School in Winooski, Vermont. Yes, I went to Catholic school. Yes, I have conflicted feelings about that. Yes, I have stories to tell. But never did I doubt that everybody involved was doing their best to educate me.
Skip forward fifty years.
Today after half a century's efforts to improve education, we have school accountability. Which means that every public school is obsessively tested to find out if they're doing better this year than they were a year ago. If they are, no problem.
And if they aren't?
Well, the good news is that their funding remains the same. The bad news is that the money which otherwise would have gone to library, sports, music, and books is required to go to motivational speakers to tell the teachers how to bring their students' grades up.
This is bad. Because it does not work. In fact, it actively degrades the education children are receiving.
This is not a red thing or a blue thing. It's not a left thing or a right thing. And it's certainly not a conspiracy on anybody's part. It's simply an idea that sounded good once upon a time but which didn't work out in practice.
Let's get rid of it. We can replace it with a better idea when we come up with one. But in the meantime, let's just let our teachers teach.
Here endeth the sermon. Go and sin no more.
*
There it is, up above, St. Francis Xavier School in Winooski, Vermont. Yes, I went to Catholic school. Yes, I have conflicted feelings about that. Yes, I have stories to tell. But never did I doubt that everybody involved was doing their best to educate me.
Skip forward fifty years.
Today after half a century's efforts to improve education, we have school accountability. Which means that every public school is obsessively tested to find out if they're doing better this year than they were a year ago. If they are, no problem.
And if they aren't?
Well, the good news is that their funding remains the same. The bad news is that the money which otherwise would have gone to library, sports, music, and books is required to go to motivational speakers to tell the teachers how to bring their students' grades up.
This is bad. Because it does not work. In fact, it actively degrades the education children are receiving.
This is not a red thing or a blue thing. It's not a left thing or a right thing. And it's certainly not a conspiracy on anybody's part. It's simply an idea that sounded good once upon a time but which didn't work out in practice.
Let's get rid of it. We can replace it with a better idea when we come up with one. But in the meantime, let's just let our teachers teach.
Here endeth the sermon. Go and sin no more.
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May 22, 2013
Diving Giraffes
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I'm sure there's an explanation for this.
But I believe we're better off not knowing it.
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I'm sure there's an explanation for this.
But I believe we're better off not knowing it.
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May 20, 2013
Real Dinosaur Art Real Cheap
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I spent a long and pleasant weekend in Virginia for a family wedding. Now I'm back at the keyboard, weary but typing away. Since, mirabile dictu, I have no news to pass along today, I thought I'd throw in a second plug for the Walters & Kissinger Etsy sale.
Robert Walters and Tess Kissinger are both paleoartists of renown. Which is to say that they don't just paint and draw dinosaurs and related subjects, but they do so in close consultation with paleontologists. To paint, let's say, an Sinraptor, Bob will begin by drawing its skeleton. This drawing goes back to the paleontologist working with the fossils for comment and correction. This can take several passes. Then Bob draws an écorché -- the skeleton covered with muscles, but without the skin. Back and forth it goes for corrections. Then he draws the animal covered with skin. After a last round of consultations, he paints the final version of the dinosaur.
This is why you were never able to afford to buy a museum-grade scientific illustration to hang on your wall. Those things are labor-intensive, and the people who can create them are not numerous. Also, more and more the illustrations are being created on the computer. So the hand-made originals are getting progressively rarer.
All that's background to the fact that Bob and Tess have put up a number of original illustrations -- the final, finished product, not an intermediary step -- for sale at what I consider to be bargain prices. I owned several major Robert Walters pieces already, but I took advantage of the sale to buy two skulls by Tess Kissinger -- one for Marianne's Dragonstairs Press office, and one as a birthday present for our son Sean.
I'm not sure how long these things are going to be for sale or whether any more items will be added to the shop. But I do know that the supply is finite. Right now, there are a dozen of Bob's illos available for prices ranging from $125 to $200, unframed. There's also a Tess Kissinger Sinraptor skull left unsold. There were rather a lot of skulls available when the sale began, but people like me leapt upon them with small, glad cries.
You can find the Etsy shop here.
Above: There resides the Giganotosaurus skull, just beneath the Moebius serigraph. You'll note that I very carefully bought it before letting you know such things were on sale.
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I spent a long and pleasant weekend in Virginia for a family wedding. Now I'm back at the keyboard, weary but typing away. Since, mirabile dictu, I have no news to pass along today, I thought I'd throw in a second plug for the Walters & Kissinger Etsy sale.
Robert Walters and Tess Kissinger are both paleoartists of renown. Which is to say that they don't just paint and draw dinosaurs and related subjects, but they do so in close consultation with paleontologists. To paint, let's say, an Sinraptor, Bob will begin by drawing its skeleton. This drawing goes back to the paleontologist working with the fossils for comment and correction. This can take several passes. Then Bob draws an écorché -- the skeleton covered with muscles, but without the skin. Back and forth it goes for corrections. Then he draws the animal covered with skin. After a last round of consultations, he paints the final version of the dinosaur.
This is why you were never able to afford to buy a museum-grade scientific illustration to hang on your wall. Those things are labor-intensive, and the people who can create them are not numerous. Also, more and more the illustrations are being created on the computer. So the hand-made originals are getting progressively rarer.
All that's background to the fact that Bob and Tess have put up a number of original illustrations -- the final, finished product, not an intermediary step -- for sale at what I consider to be bargain prices. I owned several major Robert Walters pieces already, but I took advantage of the sale to buy two skulls by Tess Kissinger -- one for Marianne's Dragonstairs Press office, and one as a birthday present for our son Sean.
I'm not sure how long these things are going to be for sale or whether any more items will be added to the shop. But I do know that the supply is finite. Right now, there are a dozen of Bob's illos available for prices ranging from $125 to $200, unframed. There's also a Tess Kissinger Sinraptor skull left unsold. There were rather a lot of skulls available when the sale began, but people like me leapt upon them with small, glad cries.
You can find the Etsy shop here.
Above: There resides the Giganotosaurus skull, just beneath the Moebius serigraph. You'll note that I very carefully bought it before letting you know such things were on sale.
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