Mark W. Tiedemann's Blog

Going Forward: An Observation and a Wish

Something that I think must be understood by as many Americans as possible going forward, is that the lost possibilities we are presently lamenting are all based on a relatively short period of time in…

Post 5th Blues

I waited nearly a month before commenting because… One of the things difficult to do is think competently in the afterwash of disappointment and dismay. Had I commented within a couple of days of the…

November

With a couple of weeks left till election, this will likely be my last political post till after it’s over. I have never been so anxious about an election. Annoyed, irritated, amused, baffled, angered…but not anxious. I thought the election of George W. Bush was a tragic misstep. I thought he was ill-equipped for the job and as it turned out he was. It was too much for him, even with perhaps the best of intentions. His first major mistake was the tax cut. He inherited a surplus. Say what you will about Clinton, he left us in better fiscal shape that any president since Eisenhower.…

Attention! Um….attention?

This weekend past I attended our local science fiction convention, Archon. I was on a number of panels and something of a theme started to emerge. More than one, actually. A couple of times the discussion came around to our lack of attention. And I coined a phrase.

We live in a Fractured Attention Ecology.

I’m keeping that. It was off-the-cuff, but the more I think about it, I think it’s something worth exploring. I’m not equipped to do that, not clinically. I’m a writer. But I realized that we keep trying to label the chronic short attention span that seems to plague contemporary life, to fit it into a manageable file to be dealt with by the appropriate expert.…

Status Whatever

In a little over a week, I will be 70. The mind, as they say, boggles. How did this happen?

All in all, though, I have little to complain about. Physically, I seem to be in fairly good condition, I just got my COVID and flu shots, the minor inconveniences that dance around me like gnats are largely insignificant and can be ignored.

I have a lot on my plate, though, and I have noticed a marked decrease in…

I don’t know if it’s energy or just give-a-damns. There are things I think it would be a good idea to do and then I just sort of fade when it comes time.…

Dolls

Something non-political. Or maybe just less political. (Or possibly political in an abstracted way, or stealth political.) Whatever. We’ll see what evolves.

Way back in my youth, in a galaxy far far away.

Gender roles supposedly used to be rigid. Boys were boys, girls were girls, and the only time that got mixed up was in ways we weren’t supposed to know about until we were married (or at least of marriageable age, but that’s another matter). I grew up knowing nothing about Drag or gays or any of that, despite what we may have been exposed to in movies (Some Like It Hot, Flip Wilson, what have you).…

Granger's Crossing

/Users/marktiedemann/Desktop/Grangers_Crossing_Book_TRLR_v4.mp4

How Did I Get To Here

I've been thinking lately about the influences that brought me here, to the point of writing an historical novel. Yes, my preference for many years has been for science fiction, so a bit of head-scratching may seem reasonable. But in a few fundamental ways, they are very much related fields.

But instead of talking about those factors, I thought I'd talk a bit of about early influences. Around age 10 to 14, my life as a reader was established. I grew up in a house where books were always present. And given my childhood proclivities, I always found it preferable to curl up with a book instead of try to play ball with other kids.

What I stumbled on were my mother's book club titles, stashed in a trunk in the basement. Mom was an avid reader and her taste ran to the historical. My earliest introduction to fiction was by way of the novels of Thomas Costain, Eddison Marshall, Frank Yerby, and Kathleen Winsor. Opening those books---all hardbound from the Doubleday Book Club---was like opening a forgotten temple. Even the smell was fascinating.

As far as I know, none of these people are widely read anymore, and yet when I read newer works by people like Hilary Mantel, Ken Follett, Allison Petaki, or Tracy Chevalier the resonance is inescapable. We make and remake stories that matter from the stuff of our collective past.

It's not a stretch to see the same goals and impulses informing works by R. F. Kuang, Tristan Palmgren, Mary Gentle, or Tim Powers. Even some literary giants, like Thomas Pynchon or Richard Powers or Emily St. John Mandel or Margaret Atwood straddle the forms and create blended realities that do much more than the suym of their components.

I remember reading Yankee Pasha by Eddison Marshall---an adventure novel set at the time of the Barbary Pirates---and feeling completely immersed and carried away. The sensation was very similar (though different in key respects) to the thrill of stepping aboard a starship and visiting an alien world. History became my other favorite pasttime. Eventually I found my writing moving more in that direction, until finally---Granger's Crossing. Tracing the path from writing about traveling the stars to 1783 St. Louis would be a bit more tangled than I have time for here, but it has been very satisfying. Something for that 12-year-old who was reading Asimov and Michener at the same time.

Tomorrow Denied

In retrospect, the situation we face in the country today is born of factors that have been present all along, but were buried under a common optimism about the future which used to define us, at least in our public discourse. Looking to the future has defined this country in one way or another since its inception, but very aggressively since the mid-20th Century. Once we had the technological capacity to build a common infrastructure, the Future became a destination for more people than ever before.

So what happened?

Because that is what we find ourselves on the verge of losing.…

Policy Points

My previous post was an emotional tirade in behalf of Kamala Harris and in opposition to the Other One. It is fair to say that too often we see and hear jeremiads against politicians that are little more than pure spleen, with almost no substance to back them up. We’ve grown used to people on the Right slamming liberals with claims that we will destroy the country, and then, when pressed for details, crickets.

So allow me a little space here for a few details.

What do I have against DJT?

Aside from his demeanor, which is that of an aging frat boy who never learned that No means No, he comes from a career of shysterism quite common in American culture.…