Bill DeSmedt's Blog: The Accidental Author, page 4

Review: Helprin’s Winter’s Tale

 

Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale, 1983 —

Mark Helprin once wrote a short story about a young diplomat posted to Great Britain in World War II and assigned to assuage the plight of refugees in that conflict.

After one of many long days at this thankless task, he arrives late to a formal dinner party, only to be consigned, as a gentle rebuke for his tardiness, to the children’s table. Making the best of things, the diplomat spins for the children a wondrous tale of flying horses, immortal heroes, love triumphing over death itself.

The memory of the story told in that one brief shining hour sustains him through all the dark days still ahead.

In Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin gives us that story. May it sustain you too, through our own dark days.

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Winter’s Tale Review

 

Mark Helprin, Winter’s Tale, 1983

Mark Helprin once wrote a short story about a young diplomat posted to Great Britain in World War II and assigned to assuage the plight of refugees in that conflict.

After one of many long days at this thankless task, he arrives late to a formal dinner party, only to be consigned, as a gentle rebuke for his tardiness, to the children’s table. Making the best of things, the diplomat spins for the children a wondrous tale of flying horses, immortal heroes, love triumphing over death itself.

The memory of the story told in that one brief shining hour sustains him through all the dark days still ahead.

In Winter’s Tale, Mark Helprin gives us that story. May it sustain you too, through our own dark days.

The post Winter’s Tale Review appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.

Review: Herbert’s Whipping Star

Frank Herbert, Whipping Star, 1969 —

To spell it out right up front, Frank Herbert’s sf novel Whipping Star is based on a very, very, very silly premise.

At the risk of repeating myself, did I mention that the premise is silly? Well, it is.

Here’s a partial synopsis — you be the judge:

Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinaire for the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) — a quasi-governmental organization whose mission statement is to prevent the rest of government from operating too efficiently — has been called in to solve a problem that’s come up on the planet Cordiality.The source of the problem is Madame Mliss Abnethe, the richest woman in the known universe. In McKie’s understated words, Mliss is “a bit kinky about floggings.”That in itself is not the problem, however, because Mliss has been “treated for that.” But that treatment, again per McKie, “didn’t eliminate the root of her problem. it just fixed her so she couldn’t stand the sight of a sentient suffering.”No, the problem is rather that Mliss has found a way around whatever psychic blocks have been installed in her cerebral cortex, by the simple device of hiring a Caleban — not the half-human mooncalf of Shakespeare’s Tempest (that’s a Caliban), but a mysterious alien entity that lives (or has a locus of presence) in a large beachball-like artifact that has just now washed up on the shores of Cordiality’s ocean.What makes the Caleban an ideal solution to Mliss’s problem is that the alien is ostensibly unable to feel pain — more: it’s unable even to understand the concept of pain. No pain, no suffering, hence no triggering of Mliss’s therapeutically imposed aversion to same while she’s getting her sadomasochistic kicks.But while the Caleban may not be able to experience pain from the repeated floggings to which Mliss is subjecting it, it can die from them — and thereby hangs a tale.Because the Calebans, as a species, had, long before the action of the story begins, provided the rest of the sentient beings in the galaxy with an offer they can’t refuse: a facility known as a “S’eye” (or, colloquially, a “jumpdoor”) which makes possible instantaneous travel to anywhere in the Milky Way.In anticipation of the death of their fellow on Cordiality, the rest of the Calebans have fled the plane of material existence. And, if the last remaining Caleban dies by the whip, it’ll take  everyone who’s ever used a Caleban-mediated jumpdoor along with it — a category which by now includes pretty much everyone in the galaxy, period.

Pretty ridiculous, eh? And that’s just the set-up!

So, why am I troubling you with this drivel? Ah, thereby hangs a tale of a different color: one about the linguistics of incomprehensibility.

I think it’s fair to say that Frank Herbert’s prose often teeters on the brink of unintelligibility (see, for example, his masterful descent into utter incoherence in Destination: Void (1966)). Never, however, has it done so to better effect than in Whipping Star, where Herbert deploys obscurantism in the service of depicting a truly credibly-alien alien.

Take, for example, this exchange between the aforementioned Caleban and Alichino Furuneo, one of McKie’s BuSab colleagues (page 73):

“That which extends from one to eight,” the Caleban said, “that is a connective. Correct use of verb to be?”
“Huh?”
“Identity verb,” the Caleban said. “Strange concept.”
“No, no. What did you mean there, one to eight?”
“Unbinding stuff.” the Caleban said.
“You mean like a solvent?”
“Before solvent.”
“What the devil could before have to do with solvents?”
“Perhaps more internal than solvents,” the Caleban said.

(Now, I’ve tried my hand at creating non-human characters (see Dualism, and the forthcoming Triploidy), but this is a level of well-nigh impenetrable alienness that goes far beyond anything I could ever aspire to!)

Indeed, for the very reason that the Caleban’s utterances, and the thought(?) processes behind them, are so difficult to understand, and because in consequence any attempt at interpretation becomes such a Herculean effort, the dialogue itself — and especially the unscrambling thereof — becomes a major part of the action.

One thing’s for sure: silly premise or not, NASA should put Whipping Star on its required-reading list for everyone in its First Contact Division!

 

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Whipping Star Review

Frank Herbert, Whipping Star, Tor, 1969

To spell it out right up front, Frank Herbert’s sf novel Whipping Star is based on a very, very, very silly premise.

At the risk of repeating myself, did I mention that the premise is silly? Well, it is.

Here’s a partial synopsis — you be the judge:

Jorj X. McKie, Saboteur Extraordinaire for the Bureau of Sabotage (BuSab) — a quasi-governmental organization whose mission statement is to prevent the rest of government from operating too efficiently — has been called in to solve a problem that’s come up on the planet Cordiality.The source of the problem is Madame Mliss Abnethe, the richest woman in the known universe. In McKie’s understated words, Mliss is “a bit kinky about floggings.”That in itself is not the problem, however, because Mliss has been “treated for that.” But that treatment, again per McKie, “didn’t eliminate the root of her problem. it just fixed her so she couldn’t stand the sight of a sentient suffering.”No, the problem is rather that Mliss has found a way around whatever psychic blocks have been installed in her cerebral cortex, by the simple device of hiring a Caleban — not the half-human mooncalf of Shakespeare’s Tempest (that’s a Caliban), but a mysterious alien entity that lives (or has a locus of presence) in a large beachball-like artifact that has just now washed up on the shores of Cordiality’s ocean.What makes the Caleban an ideal solution to Mliss’s problem is that the alien is ostensibly unable to feel pain — more: it’s unable even to understand the concept of pain. No pain, no suffering, hence no triggering of Mliss’s therapeutically imposed aversion to same while she’s getting her sadomasochistic kicks.But while the Caleban may not be able to experience pain from the repeated floggings to which Mliss is subjecting it, it can die from them — and thereby hangs a tale.Because the Calebans, as a species, had, long before the action of the story begins, provided the rest of the sentient beings in the galaxy with an offer they can’t refuse: a facility known as a “S’eye” (or, colloquially, a “jumpdoor”) which makes possible instantaneous travel to anywhere in the Milky Way.In anticipation of the death of their fellow on Cordiality, the rest of the Calebans have fled the plane of material existence. And, if the last remaining Caleban dies by the whip, it’ll take  everyone who’s ever used a Caleban-mediated jumpdoor along with it — a category which by now includes pretty much everyone in the galaxy, period.

Pretty ridiculous, eh? And that’s just the set-up!

So, why am I troubling you with this drivel? Ah, thereby hangs a tale of a different color: one about the linguistics of incomprehensibility.

I think it’s fair to say that Frank Herbert’s prose often teeters on the brink of unintelligibility (see, for example, his masterful descent into utter incoherence in Destination: Void (1966)). Never, however, has it done so to better effect than in Whipping Star, where Herbert deploys obscurantism in the service of depicting a truly credibly-alien alien.

Take, for example, this exchange between the aforementioned Caleban and Alichino Furuneo, one of McKie’s BuSab colleagues (page 73):

“That which extends from one to eight,” the Caleban said, “that is a connective. Correct use of verb to be?”
“Huh?”
“Identity verb,” the Caleban said. “Strange concept.”
“No, no. What did you mean there, one to eight?”
“Unbinding stuff.” the Caleban said.
“You mean like a solvent?”
“Before solvent.”
“What the devil could before have to do with solvents?”
“Perhaps more internal than solvents,” the Caleban said.

(Now, I’ve tried my hand at creating non-human characters (see Dualism, and the forthcoming Triploidy), but this is a level of well-nigh impenetrable alienness that goes far beyond anything I could ever aspire to!)

Indeed, for the very reason that the Caleban’s utterances, and the thought(?) processes behind them, are so difficult to understand, and because in consequence any attempt at interpretation becomes such a Herculean effort, the dialogue itself — and especially the unscrambling thereof — becomes a major part of the action.

One thing’s for sure: silly premise or not, NASA should put Whipping Star on its required-reading list for everyone in its First Contact Division!

 

The post Whipping Star Review appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.

The Why of Stories: Part IV

 “And by the way, you know, when you’re telling these little stories?
Here’s a good idea — have a point.
It makes it SO much more interesting for the listener!”

— Steve Martin as Neal Page to John Candy as Del Griffith, 
Planes, Trains, & Automobiles

Well, then —

What is the Point of Stories?

When we left off Part III of this blog, we’d taken an in-depth look at the way stories are used in life-and-death situations like battle command and murder trials, and we’d stopped just short of drawing some conclusions. (Important story point, incidentally: always try to end a chapter with a cliffhanger.)

So, my conclusion from the foregoing is simply this: Whatever else they may be or do, stories are explanatory and problem-solving devices par excellence. And what it is they seek to explain, what it is they’re trying to solve for, is the mystery of motivation. Stories are mechanisms by which we try to discover — or, having discovered, try to memorialize — successful theories of what drives the objective human behavior we observe.

You can trust me on this one: Over the course of three and a half years back in the early 2000s, I devoted a significant chunk of my day job to researching storytelling systems and story formalisms. And if one thing came clear in all that time, it’s that stories are all about making sense of the “intention behind the action.” (That latter being a common storytelling trope from Walt Disney all the way back to, for all we know, Sophocles.)

Think back to that Aegis cruiser commander trying to guess whether those Iranian pilots were planning to attack. Or to that Tyson jury deliberating on whether the prosecution’s star witness was lying. Attempting in both cases to find a pattern of intention that best matched the observed phenomena — and making up stories to do it!

Not to put too fine a point on it, stories have survived (and flourished) since time immemorial because they offer arguably the best cognitive structure us humans have ever come up with for performing one of the most survival-critical tasks any social animal can face. Namely, figuring out what’s going on inside the other guy’s head.

And, on an even deeper level, stories are also all about figuring out what’s going on inside our own heads, and in our own lives. Hey, Sophocles was just another Greek playwright till Sigmund Freud put Oedipus Rex on the couch, right? (By the way, If you’re interested in exploring that inward-facing aspect of story, you could do worse than to start with Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey.”[1])

In functional terms, then, stories are all about weaving a pattern of consistent human motivation for use as an explanatory and predictive device in navigating social interactions. In Marvin Cohen’s words, stories are nothing less than “a general comprehension strategy for understanding human action”[2]

But Wait!

Actually, those last remarks stand in need of some qualification: While I believe that what I said about the purpose of stories being to capture and explore human motivation is true, I also happen to think it’s too narrowly construed.

After all, the world in general bombards us non-stop with torrents of data, and not all of that bombardment originates with our fellow humans. Regardless of origin, somewhere in the resulting chaos are the key facts that will make sense of it all, that will tell us what’s going on and why – and how we ought to (re)act. But how do we identify and extract those keys?

Of the various mechanisms that humans have evolved for capturing and elucidating complex experiences and events, the mental structure called the story is unquestionably the oldest, and arguably still the most important. Over the millennia, the process of story-crafting and storytelling has emerged as humanity’s primary vehicle for managing and communicating the complexity — what William James called the “blooming, buzzing confusion” — that reality as a whole confronts us with.

So, what I maybe should have said is that the function of stories is to capture and explore causation in general. Now, it so happens that one of the perennially most interesting and survival-enhancing types of causation to try grokking is the one that explains human behavior (= motivation). But stories can be used to investigate other modes of causality as well.

Cases in point: mythologies, just-so stories, and the like. How the elephant’s child got his trunk, and how winter turns to spring when the earth goddess Demeter gets her daughter Persephone back from Hades.

Note, though, that even these causal explanations are cast in terms of quasi-human motivation: the elephant’s child’s “’satiable curiosity” and Demeter’s maternal love, respectively. All part, I suppose, of the human tendency to project our motives, and hence our stories, onto the cosmos as a whole.

Too far a leap? Well, maybe. But consider how John Seely Brown, in his “Toward a New Epistemology for Learning”[3] holds that even accomplished scientists, when confronted with a novel experimental set-up, do not immediately repair to their mathematical models, but instead construct a “causal story”:

This sort of imputation of causality — constructing a causal story —involves a great deal of informal reasoning and manipulating of assumptions that standard explications inevitably overlook. Rather than simply pondering abstractions, this essential sort of reasoning involves “seeing through” abstractions, models, and paradigmatic examples to the world they represent, and then penetrating that world to explore the causality that underlies it.

Hey, if we humans weren’t forever imputing human motives to nonhuman forces, “anthropomorphize” wouldn’t even be a verb!

The Anthropomorphosis Conundrum

In a way, I faced a similar problem when it came to writing Dualism[4]: Here I had two central, um, characters, neither of which was strictly human – Nietzsche, an artificial intelligence with a dark secret, and MERGE, a hive intellect formed from the collective consciousness of thousands, eventually millions, of individual human minds.

So, how do you tell a story about those guys? How do you animate them, bring them to life, make them believable?

Essentially, the same way: try to suss out the intention behind the action. Make it believable, consistent, regardless of how outré …

Doesn’t always work, of course. Take the counter-example of Vurdalak, the submicroscopic black hole orbiting within the earth in my first book, Singularity.[5] Vurdalak (Russian for “vampire”) only figured as a (sort of) point-of-view “character” in a single scene, and even then the sole “motivation” I could come up with for it was — an all-devouring hunger.

At the end though, with any kind of luck, you’ll have a coherent character rather than a grab-bag of knee-jerk reactions.

Oh, and you’ll have a story too!

Footnotes

[1] Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949, Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.

[2] Cohen, Marvin S., Bryan B. Thompson, Leonard Adelman, Terry A. Bresnick, Martin A. Tolcott, and Jared T. Freeman, “Rapid Capturing of Battlefield Mental Models”, Technical Report 95-3, 6 October 1995, Cognitive Technologies, Inc.: Arlington, VA.

[3] Brown, John Seely (1990), Toward a New Epistemology for Learning, in Claude Frasson and Gilles Gauthier, eds., Intelligent Tutoring Systems: At the Crossroad of Artificial Intelligence and Education, Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 266-282.

[4] Bill DeSmedt, Dualism: The Archon Sequence, Book II, WordFire Press, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/Dualism-Archon-Sequence-Bill-DeSmedt/dp/1614756279/.

[5] Bill DeSmedt, Singularity: The Archon Sequence, Book I, WordFire Press, 2018, https://www.amazon.com/Singularity-Archon-Sequence-Bill-DeSmedt/dp/1614756252/.

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The Why of Stories: Part III

Last time we left off with the story of a seasoned naval officer, in command of several hundred million dollars worth of missile cruiser, and responsible for Lord knows how many lives, steaming straight into a powder-keg confrontation, and what does he do? He makes up stories!

All of which left us with the question …

What’s Going On Here?

An exception, perhaps? After all, John Wayne didn’t tell no stinkin’ stories. But no, in a similar study on “Rapid Capturing of Battlefield Mental Models,” Marvin Cohen and his associates “identified numerous examples of stories of this kind in interviews with command and G-3 staff.” US Army General Fred Franks, in his introduction to Adela Frame and James W. Lussier’s 66 Stories of Battle Command, goes so far as to say that “stories are a primary means of transmitting the tribal wisdom of the profession of arms.”

Nor is it only the military that resorts to stories in life-and-death situations. In a series of experiments conducted in the 1980s and 1990s and reported in their “The Story Model for Juror Decision Making,” Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie showed that jurors in criminal cases, even those involving capital crimes, tended to rule in favor of whichever side presented the best story — the one that threaded all the evidence and eyewitness testimony into a single, credible, coherent account. The effect was noted even in controlled experiments, where nothing was changed save the manner in which the evidence was presented — on the one hand, in a chronological sequence matching that of the original events (story order), on the other, in the order which the individual witnesses were called to testify, irrespective of chronology (witness order). And that effect was nothing short of dramatic:

Mock jurors were likeliest to convict the defendant when the prosecution evidence was presented in story order and the defense evidence was presented in witness order (78% chose guilty) and they were least likely to convict when the prosecution evidence was in witness order and defense was in story order (31% chose guilty).

What’s more interesting is when and why even the best-laid story can fail — as it did to disastrous effect in the Mike Tyson rape trial (a story retold in Gary Klein’s Sources of Power). Based on some casual comments the victim made about that night’s date with Tyson being her chance to get rich (Tyson had recently paid out a multi-million dollar divorce settlement), and the fact that she had waited several days before reporting the crime to the police —

The defense lawyers felt that they had the makings of a good story, in which a woman tried to use her time with Mike Tyson to her advantage; when the relationship did not extend past the first evening, she tried to extort the money by claiming rape. … [The fact that she hadn’t immediately gone to the police] fit in with the idea that she claimed rape only when her original scheme (perhaps to marry Tyson, divorce him, and become rich) did not work out.

The only problem with this “good story” was …

The jury didn’t buy it:

The physical injuries the woman suffered were predomi-nantly those found in rape victims. Moreover, the woman’s behavior for the days after the rape, before going to the police, showed shock and depression, typical of rape, rather than anger, revenge, and plotting. Her testimony in front of the jury showed her to be well brought up, innocent, and trusting, not scheming as the story claimed. … The jury had to figure out why a nice-looking young woman would subject herself to the ordeal of a rape trial simply to punish Tyson, if her goal was riches and fame. The criminal trial would not make her rich, and she had refused to reveal her identity. … The story failed to explain too many facts and observations. The jury rejected it, and found Tyson guilty.

We’ve now reached a point where we can take a stab at what the purpose, the “real work,” of stories might be. But first, let me ask you a question:

I’ve just given you a bunch of facts — statistics and citations and experimental protocols — and I’ve also told you two stories. So, which mode of information delivery did you personally find more congenial and memorable?

You liked all that sociologist-speak and quantitative analysis, did ya? I thought not. In fact, you probably found the information presented in story form far easier to assimilate. And this, despite the fact the stories are twice to three times as long as the factual expositions: There are 301 words in the Mike Tyson story vs. 145 for the Pennington and Hastie passage, and 145 words in the last blog’s Aegis cruiser story vs. 51 for the quotes from Marvin Cohen and General Franks cited here.

Again, what’s going on here?

Next time, I’ll try to tell you.

Footnotes

  Marvin S. Cohen, Bryan B. Thompson, Leonard Adelman, Terry A. Bresnick, Martin A. Tolcott, and Jared T. Freeman, “Rapid Capturing of Battlefield Mental Models,” Technical Report 95-3, Cognitive Technologies, Inc., Arlington, VA: 1995. (http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Capturing-Battlefield-Mental-Models/dp/B00I4EMB9W.)

  General Fred Franks, Jr., “Introduction,” in Adela Frame and James Lussier (eds.), 66 Stories of Battle Command, US Army Command and General Staff College Press, Fort Leavenworth KS: 2000. (http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Battle-Command-Adela-Lussier-ebook/dp/B007M3PNT6.)

  Nancy Pennington and Reid Hastie, “The Story Model for Juror Decision Making,” in Reid Hastie (ed.), Inside the Juror: The Psychology of Juror Decision Making, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge UK: 1993, pp. 192-224. (http://www.amazon.com/Inside-Juror-Psychology-Decision-Cambridge/dp/0521477557.)

  Gary Klein, Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions, MIT Press, Cambridge MA: 1998. (http://www.amazon.com/Sources-Power-People-Make-Decisions/dp/0262611465.)

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The Why of Stories: Part II

Stories about Stories

This first story harks back to the era of the Iran-Iraq war. As recounted by sociologist Gary Klein in his Decision Making in Complex Military Environments, it goes like this:

In an incident in which Iranian F-4s had taken off and were circling near an AEGIS cruiser, the CO [commanding officer] of the cruiser used their flight paths, radar activities, and so forth to build a plausible story of how they were just harassing him. The different observations fit this story well. Another possible story was that they were preparing to attack him, which was also plausible since they had turned on their fire control radar to lock on to his ship. However, the CO did not believe this second story, since the behavior of the F-4s was so brazen, so attention-gathering, that he could not imagine a serious pilot preparing an attack in this way. The CO needed to prepare for an attack, and did so, but he held his fire, despite provocation, since he did not believe that the attack story was plausible.

So, here we’ve got a seasoned naval officer, in command of several hundred million dollars worth of missile cruiser, and responsible for Lord knows how many lives, steaming straight into a powder-keg confrontation, and what does he do? He makes up stories!

So … What’s going on here?

 

  https://www.nifc.gov/PUBLICATIONS/acc...

The post The Why of Stories: Part II appeared first on Official website of Bill DeSmedt.

The Why of Stories: Part II

Stories about Stories

This first story harks back to the era of the Iran-Iraq war. As recounted by sociologist Gary Klein in his Decision Making in Complex Military Environments, it goes like this:

In an incident in which Iranian F-4s had taken off and were circling near an AEGIS cruiser, the CO [commanding officer] of the cruiser used their flight paths, radar activities, and so forth to build a plausible story of how they were just harassing him. The different observations fit this story well. Another possible story was that they were preparing to attack him, which was also plausible since they had turned on their fire control radar to lock on to his ship. However, the CO did not believe this second story, since the behavior of the F-4s was so brazen, so attention-gathering, that he could not imagine a serious pilot preparing an attack in this way. The CO needed to prepare for an attack, and did so, but he held his fire, despite provocation, since he did not believe that the attack story was plausible.

So, here we’ve got a seasoned naval officer, in command of several hundred million dollars worth of missile cruiser, and responsible for Lord knows how many lives, steaming straight into a powder-keg confrontation, and what does he do? He makes up stories!

So … What’s going on here?

 

  https://www.nifc.gov/PUBLICATIONS/acc...

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The Why of Stories: Part I

Introduction

Pick up any how-to book for the aspiring author, and somewhere around page three it’ll tell you what stories are all about: They’re all about conflict. They’re all about character. They’re all about characters in conflict or conflict in characters. Whatever.

Point is: depending on who’s doing the talking, stories can be all about a lot of things.

On the other hand, if you ask what it is that stories do, exactly — what purpose they serve — well, that’s a different, uh, story.

Yet even posing that question, even hinting at the possibility that stories might conceivably be drafted into performing some menial, quotidian service, that literature itself might bare an unseemly utilitarian underbelly, is sure to raise the hackles of the art-for-art’s-sake crowd.

So let me put it a bit differently: If you were to observe that there is a certain kind of behavior, a particular form of activity, which humans in every culture, all over the world, have engaged in since time immemorial, wouldn’t you begin to suspect that said activity had some inherent survival value? If not survival in an ultimate, of-the-fittest Darwinian sense (though maybe that, too), then at least in the sense of carving out one’s own ecological niche in an environment whose principal dangers and principal opportunities, are — other human beings?

Well, making up stories is such an activity. It’s been practiced in every corner of the globe, by every culture on earth, for as far back as The Epic of Gilgamesh[1] and doubtless beyond. So I don’t think it’s totally out of line to ask what function the art of story-making might fulfil from an evolutionary perspective.

As to what I think the answer might be, rather than attacking the subject head on, let me try sneaking up on it, by telling you some stories about stories …

[1]    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epic_of_...

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Reminiscences of Roger

I once had the privilege of spending the better part of a weekend with Roger Zelazny

It was in the early ’nineties, and the Computer-Assisted Language Instruction Consortium (CALICO) of which I was an almost-founding member, was holding its annual convocation in Monterey CA with Roger as the Guest of Honor. (Roger wasn’t actually the CALICOfest organizers’ first choice — they had tried to get Isaac Asimov, unaware that the Good Doctor’s fear of flying ruled out a transcontinental trek).

in any case, it’s safe to say that Roger was not nearly as well known as Isaac would have been to the crew of college professors and other assorted language teachers who frequent CALICOfests. In fact, I was probably one of the few in attendance who even knew who he was, much less had read him. As to that, I had been a fan ever since reading The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth and Lord of Light — a fan-fetish that kicked into hyperdrive with the first Chronicles of Amber pentalogy.

All of which worked out splendidly as far as I was concerned, because it meant I basically had Roger all to myself for the weekend. It was like a WorldCon for one!

Although he wouldn’t have realized it at the time he got the GoH invitation, I was in all likelihood the link that connected Roger to CALICO. It happened like this:

Some years prior to the event in question, I had been casting about for an appropriately evocative name for a small company I was forming, in hopes of commercializing a foreign-language instructional game I’d coded (more about that here: http://www.academia.edu/4331182/Herr_...). At the time I was also re-reading The Hand of Oberon , the fourth book in the first of two Amber Chronicles pentalogies, when I came upon page 52 and the all-too-brief scene where Corwin, the hero of the tale, meets its author — his maker, so to speak — who’s standing guard down in Castle Amber’s dungeon, as follows:

“Good evening, Lord Corwin,” said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.
“Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?”
“A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.”
“You enjoy this duty?”
He nodded.
“I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”

Until I (re)read that line, it had never occurred to me that The Amber Chronicles was a work of philosophy. Thereafter, I could never forget it. Because the work as a whole is shot through not only with “elements of horror and morbidity,” but moreover with Roger’s personal outlook on life, the universe, everything, which I’d been unconsciously absorbing all along — and which, unless I miss my guess, enabled him to contemplate his subsequent too-early death with some measure of equanimity.

More, that line illuminated how Roger had managed to enlighten while seeming merely to entertain — the very model of what I was, in my own small way, trying to accomplish with my computer game for teaching intermediate German conversation. Was it any wonder, then, if I went and named my company “Amber Productions”?

Or if I came prepared for the meeting with Roger bearing a rare hardcover copy of The Hand of Oberon , which he obligingly signed on page 52, right next to the above-quoted passage.

Suffice it to say, we talked a good deal over that weekend in between the language-learning presentations and panel discussions. And I even got an answer to the question that had been bugging me ever since Amber Book II, The Guns of Avalon — namely: Did you always know the truth about Ganelon?

Saturday night, I got to introduce Roger at the CALICO Banquet. Ironic in a way, because to the CALICO audience, I was the celebrity — they all knew Amber Productions far better than the Amber Chronicles that gave the company its name.

For his banquet speech, Roger related the story of a discussion he’d had with a fellow sf&f writer (Roger mentioned his name, but I’ve forgotten it) about human genetics, and what traits to breed for, assuming you even could (this was in the early nineties, remember — around the time Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna was being awarded her PhD from Harvard Medical School). Anyway, Roger and his friend quickly rejected physical beauty and money-making ability as desirable attributes, because, in either case, how could you be sure if people really liked you for you? Intelligence was on the table, but then lots of intelligent people seem to be pretty miserable pretty much of the time. Finally, perhaps harking back to how Larry Niven’s two-headed Puppeteers messed with Earth’s Birth Lottery, they settled on luck as the best genetic legacy one could bestow on one’s progeny. Which left them, however, with the problem of how to do the bestowing?

Simple, said Roger’s friend: put a bunch of fertilized chicken eggs on a platter and throw them up in the air. Let the unbroken eggs hatch and grow to maturity. Rinse, repeat. After not too many generations, you’d have bred a strain of the luckiest chickens alive.

“And so,” Roger summed up, “As I look out at the CALICO audience here tonight, I see a bunch of people doing what they most want to do, engaged in the work they love the best. As am I. And so I think we are, all of us, lucky chickens.”

That was the last time I saw him — had to leave early Sunday morning for the drive down to San Diego. We corresponded a little over the next couple of years. I recall him being very excited about his collaboration with Gahan Wilson on A Night in the Lonesome October — a project he’d been thinking about since the 1970s.

Oh, and somehow along the way, he inspired me to try my own hand at writing.

Well, Roger’s been gone over a quarter century now, and is still much missed.

He was indeed a lucky chicken!

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A postscript, ICYMI, WIRED just published a retrospective on Roger’s work and its critical reception (here: https://www.wired.com/2021/05/geeks-g...), which I coincidentally happened upon just as I was putting the final touches on this brief reminiscence. Lucky indeed!