Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 137

At a Loss…

This week I’m rather at a loss for something to wander on about. It’s not because nothing is going on. Rather it’s because too many small things are going on. This leaves me distracted and disoriented which, in turn, makes it difficult to come up with something to write about.

Writers! Don’t Overburden Your Camel!

I’ve certainly never been one of those writers who needs “a room of one’s own” to work. I’ve written in classrooms, in faculty meetings, in my office (back when I still taught), on airplanes, and at boring banquets. However, a certain amount of what might be called clear “head room” is a good thing to have, especially when, as with these wanderings, I need to come up with a new topic every week.

As anyone knows who has ever stared at the wall in desperation trying to figure out what to write for some college essay assignment, formulating the idea is half or even three-quarters of the battle. Back then, I’d spend a considerable amount of time rendering all my various thoughts down to a simple, one sentence thesis statement. After that, the rest of the paper would flow easily.

The same can be true with fiction writing. Getting the idea, whether for the overall project or for the particular section one is working on, is the biggest challenge. Once you slip into your characters’ heads, then the story toddles along quite nicely. Getting in there is the hard part.

By purest coincidence, over the last couple of months, I spoke with two professional writer friends who admitted that they were behind because they had assumed they could take on more work by scheduling themselves to write on Project One in the morning and Project Two in the afternoon. Both of these gentlemen – multiply published, quite experienced authors – discovered that this was impossible. Once they were securely into one universe, their imaginations did not want to shift into the other.

Even worse, they discovered that the Morning/ Afternoon division of labor did not work, because even prolific writers seem to have only so much writing in them. When that writing has been expended, the Muse acts like a camel that has had the proverbial “last straw” loaded into her panniers. She folds her legs under herself, sits down, and refuses to get up until the unreasonable burden is removed.

So, how does a writer cope with this? One way is to do what I’m doing right now – start writing and see what comes out. In other of these wanderings, I believe I’ve mentioned that when I can’t seem to write anything, I make myself write at least twelve sentences.

This number evolved from a time when Roger Zelazny mentioned to me that he managed to sit down three or four times a day and write three to four sentences each time and that somehow this managed to turn into a considerable amount of finished prose – especially since when he had a really good day and wrote pages and pages, he didn’t take the next day off, but went right back to that sitting down three to four times a day and writing three to four sentences.

Anyhow, I was teaching college then and was lucky if I could find time to work on fiction once a day, so I multiplied three to four times by three to four sentences and arrived at twelve. It worked. I wrote four novels and quite a number of short stories while teaching college full time, by dedicating time to getting those twelve sentences on paper. (And I was teaching English, so I was also spending a huge amount of time reading and grading essays. This is not an inspirational activity, I assure you.)

Nonetheless, even with the best will and finest discipline in the universe, it seems that the Muse is only willing to let a writer come up with so much prose in a day. How much varies from writer to writer. However, I firmly believe that with a strict exercise regime, the Muse can be convinced to give a little bit more, just as a runner or swimmer can go from doing one or two laps to three or four, on and on, until a whole mile is reached.

But the training takes patience and quite a bit of understanding of one’s own temperament. This is one reason I only write one Wandering a week. Often on the day that I write it, my creative well is dry for the day. My Muse turns camel. Even if I remind her that we weren’t writing fiction, just a nice, bouncy little essay, she says, “Hah! You can’t fool me.” Sometimes she’s kinder and will accept a division between fiction and non-fiction.

Tempting the Muse works best for me if the fiction piece is already underway, particularly if I stopped in the middle of a particularly juicy scene, so that the Muse is eager to show off how we’re going to get our characters out of whatever predicament they’re in at that moment.

Sometimes even that isn’t enough.

So, my advice if you’re stuck? Write. Even when you don’t think you have anything to write about, write. You just might (as I have myself today) surprise yourself!

TT: Simak, Spirituality, and Sound

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering? Page back one and get a glimpse at the full cover of Artemis Awakening and get some news about the forthcoming audiobook edition. Then join me and Alan as we continue our discussion of what makes the works of Clifford Simak so special.

JANE: You know, Alan, one of the things I love about Simak is that he doesn’t ignore the fact that humans – and non-humans – have a deeply spiritual side. This takes many forms, up to and including acknowledgment that there is a place for conventional religion – even in outer space.

Spirits from Otherwhere

Last week, when we talked a bit about Simak’s novel, Shakespeare’s Planet, I mentioned that one of the characters is a ship that has human brains installed in it. The three brains might be said to represent the three general ways in which humanity has tried to answer the great questions. There is the Grande Dame, who comes from a materialist point of view, the Scientist who is, well, scientific, and the Monk, who represents conventional religion.

A lesser author would have made the Monk a straw man for putting down religion as mere superstition – especially since the Monk admits he’d signed on for the mission because of his fear of death. However, Simak allows the Monk to be a voice for the part of humanity that never stops questing for something larger than wealth or knowledge.

ALAN: You’re right! This debate about, and deep appreciation of, spirituality is present to a greater or lesser extent in pretty much everything Simak wrote. I hadn’t realised that before. Thank you for the insight.

JANE: But I have run on. Last week you mentioned Project Pope. I would love to hear your thoughts about it. Did you like it?

ALAN: It’s a wonderful tale, often very funny and populated with Simak’s usual collection of raving eccentrics, some of them human, some of them not. But it has a lot more going for it than just that.

The story tells of a colony of advanced robots on a remote planet. They have set up a project called Vatican-17 which is an attempt to build an infallible, computerized pope. When the pope accumulates sufficient wisdom, it will be able to create a truly universal religion.

But first the pope needs data, lots of it. It has a team of Listeners, psychic humans, whose minds are sent out to explore the far reaches of time and space. Mary, one of the Listeners, makes an important discovery. She, quite literally, finds heaven. The robot cardinals fiercely debate the implications of Mary’s discovery.

JANE: And that’s only a small portion of the story… Psychology enters in. There are aliens. A mysterious Whisperer… And in the end, unlike many authors who would fudge when dealing with such a profound topic, a – for me at least – satisfactory conclusion.

ALAN: And for me as well.

JANE: Simak was not at all afraid of complex concepts, up to and including the nature of reality. Have you ever read Out of Their Minds?

ALAN: I know I’ve read it, but I retain no memory of it. Hang about – I’ll go and get it from my shelves…

…OK, I’m back. Here it is, published in England in 1973 by New English Library. The cover shows a picture of what looks like a brain on top of a spinal cord. It’s running down a road and is being hotly pursued by a knight in shining armour and a man on a donkey. I’m guessing that’s Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, but why would they be chasing a disembodied brain? Oh well, this is Simak so why not?

JANE: Why not indeed? What do you think about taking a break so you can read it, then get back to me? I’m already re-reading it. I think it would be cool if both of us were reading the same book on opposite sides of the planet.

ALAN: That’s a good idea. What a shame we can’t synchronise the page turns…

… Right. I’ve read it. It’s quite a short book – only 175 pages of quite large print. Most novels from that era are short, mere novellas by today’s standards. It’s definitely Don Quixote and Sancho Panza on the cover, but there’s no disembodied brain. That’s a shame. I was looking forward to that bit.

JANE: Oh, I don’t know… I think the brain disembodied is rather the theme of the book since what comes “out of our minds” is what the story is about, that and a great speculation on reality.

ALAN: Duh! What an idiot I am. Why didn’t I spot the visual pun? I certainly spotted it in the words of the title. Sometimes the most obvious things slip by unnoticed…

As you said before, it’s definitely a speculation about the nature of reality. The premise is that human beings, have created a fantasy world in their minds through their love of storytelling and somehow that fantasy world now has an objective existence. The hero, Horton Smith, has discovered this and now the beings from the fantasy world are trying to kill him to protect their secret.

JANE: Just as an aside, Simak must have liked the name “Horton,” since it’s the surname of the protagonist of Shakespeare’s Planet. Maybe these two Hortons are related. So, what did you think of the story?

ALAN: There are a lot of quite ingenious set pieces as Horton is placed in danger and has to get himself out of trouble. Unfortunately, never once does Horton hear a Who. I think Simak missed an opportunity there.

JANE: Indeed! Heaven knows, Dr. Suess would fit right in.

I wondered how some elements of the novel worked for you, since some of the references are very American – and not only that, pop culture American that was beginning to be dated even for an American like me by the time I read it.

ALAN: I didn’t really notice anything like that. There were quite a lot of old American comic book characters in the story, characters I’d never heard of. But the context made it very clear what was going on, so that didn’t worry me at all. Is that what you meant?

JANE: Well, yes. For example, Horton gets clued into the identity of the hillbilly couple who take him in when one of them mentions “Barney.” It’s only a mild spoiler to note that originally Snuffy Smith and Barney Google were linked in one comic strip. By the time I started reading it, Barney had been pretty much phased out, so I didn’t catch the clue until Horton spells it out.

ALAN: I’d never heard of any of them. But Horton does explain who they are and, while I’m sure I missed something because of my unfamiliarity with the characters, it didn’t really hold the story up at all for me.

By the way, I also took the opportunity to re-read The Goblin Reservation after you mentioned it the other day, and I think I’m starting to see a pattern.

The thing that really appeals to me about Simak is his sense of surrealism. He constantly juxtaposes commonplace things that simply don’t go together, and yet somehow the joins don’t show. It’s exactly the same effect you get from Magritte’s train roaring out of a fireplace or Dali’s soft watches hanging off a tree. They work brilliantly even though they make no rational sense. In many respects, Magritte in particular is a thoroughly naturalistic painter. It’s just that he puts things in odd relationships to each other. After all, why shouldn’t a landscape be part of the glass of a shattered window? Who’s to say it isn’t true? You’re looking at it through glass. Who says the landscape still has to be there when the glass breaks?

Simak does with words what Magritte does with pictures and it gets to me every time. Brilliant, spine-tingling stuff!

JANE: Absolutely! You mentioned the cover of your copy of Out of Their Minds. On one of my copies the artist went for a sort of psychedelic montage. It doesn’t work for the book (in my opinion) precisely because it tries too hard to be weird. Simak’s hallmark is that the weirdest combinations make perfect sense.

ALAN: And that really does sum Simak up in a nutshell.

JANE: Tune in next time when we will discuss…. Well, just wait and see!

Artemis Awakening: Sight and Sound

Over the last week or so, there have been a couple cool new developments on the Artemis Awakening front.

I was sent the full cover and discovered that it’s a wrap-around image! The original half-face design is expanded to become a full portrait. I particularly liked this because, in a weird and twisted way, this actually makes the cover even more true to the original design image suggested by my friend, Cale Mims. (See WW 10-02-13 if you missed the really interesting fashion in which this cover evolved.)

Full Cover Image

Why? Because now instead of one half-face, we have two… This makes for a neat variation of the old saying “half a loaf is better than none.” Right?

The cover also includes blurbs from hotshot SF writers Vernor Vinge, S.M. Stirling, Jack McDevitt, and David Weber… Basically, it’s a design to warm any writer’s heart.

Late last week, I discovered who will be reading the audiobook version of Artemis Awakening when I received an e-mail from narrator Joe Barrett. Mr. Barrett has read over two hundred titles from a wide variety of authors. He was getting in touch in the hope that I’d agree to chat with him about the book.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a serious audiobook junkie – fiction and non-fiction both – so I was excited. Not only would this give me a chance to make sure that names and all were pronounced closer to the way I hear them in my head but, also I’d have a chance to slip in a few questions about a profession that has interested me for a long time.

Even before we chatted, I had one of those fascinating behind the scenes looks. I had asked Mr. Barrett if he would recommend something he’d narrated, so I could get feel for his performance style. His e-mailed reply was fascinating: “I never know quite what to recommend – mostly because I don’t listen to my own titles. Can’t stand it.”

I actually understood. I’ve been told I’m a good reader and I honestly enjoy giving readings. However, on the occasions where I’ve had an opportunity to listen to my own recorded voice – whether of a reading or an interview – I’ve shied away. My voice sounds odd to me.

So I went and searched the Audible catalog for Mr. Barrett’s work, and quickly settled on The Tomb by F. Paul Wilson. My friend, Paul Dellinger, had recommended the “Repairman Jack” novels a couple of times, but I hadn’t gotten to them because I wanted to start early in the series. The Tomb was listed in the catalog as the first Repairman Jack novel.

Anyhow, Mr. Barrett and I made a date to chat last Sunday. My phone rang promptly at the agreed upon time and a now familiar voice said, “Jane?” Talking to Joe Barrett proved to be very easy. He started out by making sure he had the pronunciation of the various character names correct. From there we moved to one of the odder aspects of the novel – the “Interludes” that close each chapter. The Interludes are written in verse – sometimes rhymed, sometimes free – and contain idiosyncrasies that would provide no problem at all to a text reader, but offer a real challenge to a narrator.

My favorite was from the Interlude that appears at the end of Chapter 10. Visually, it’s simple enough: “Seek + (you shall) = Find.” If I were doing this as part of a live reading, I’d read it as “Seek, plus, you shall, equals find.” Where the parenthesis occur, I’d sketch them in the air with a finger.

Mr. Barrett wouldn’t have that option. We agreed that having him include the punctuation verbally would interrupt the flow – as well as being jarring, since he wasn’t reading the punctuation elsewhere. We playfully considered reading the punctuation following the example of that comic – you know who I mean, the one who made sounds for all the punctuation marks – but laughed that off as just too silly.

In the end, we decided that the parenthesis would need to be ignored, as would those passages that ended with a trailing line of dots…. Pity…. But sometimes one form demands concessions that another does not.

The Interludes also originate from a variety of points of view. Mr. Barrett was on target with those we discussed but, to make life easier for him, I agreed to e-mail a list of attributions so he could match voice to point of view as appropriate.

In the course of our chat, I learned a bit about how Mr. Barrett works. He has narrated for a variety of companies – including Blackstone Audio and Audible – and has his own home studio, complete with professional quality mike, recording equipment, and sound-deadening equipment. His professional background includes acting, so he doesn’t just read, he performs.

He reads the entire book in advance, looking for possible typos. He checked these with me in advance, just to be sure that he wasn’t mistaking as typo a deliberate stylistic choice. In most cases, he had found typos (to be fair, he was working from an advance copy, not the final manuscript). However, in two cases, I was able to set him straight as to why I had chosen a particular word. (I thought everyone knew what a dhole was… but the copy editor also flagged this.)

I really appreciated his attention to detail and found myself wondering if I would listen to the finished book. I’m still not sure. I know how the characters sound in my head, how they interact. I’m not sure I want to superimpose someone else’s voice. On the other hand, I do love audiobooks and it might be interesting. I guess I’ll find out down the line…

TT: Simak — Looking Behind the Words

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering? Page back one, then amble along the stacks and let me know what libraries mean to you. Then join me and Alan as we continue our journey into the weird and wonderful worlds of Clifford Simak.

JANE: Last week we were discussing the works of Clifford D. Simak. We talked a lot, but I feel we barely scratched the surface of what makes him such a fantastic writer.

From Cities to Shakespeare: Is Nothing Sacred?

ALAN: I agree. Humour was always one of Simak’s major strengths. He was never totally serious even in his totally serious books – there was always a lightness of touch running through his deeper, more thoughtful works. But sometimes he just went for straight comedy, and of course he did it brilliantly. They Walked Like Men is an aliens-invade-the-Earth story, but it’s quite unlike any other such story you have ever read.

(WARNING: A bit of a spoiler coming up). The aliens can turn themselves into any shape they like, though in their natural form they look like bowling balls. Initially, most of them turn themselves into money which they use to buy up lots of real estate – taking over the Earth by semi-legitimate means! Unfortunately the aliens have a serious weakness, they find the smell of a squirting skunk to be absolutely the most marvellous perfume ever. So defeating the invasion is simple. Just travel through town with an angry skunk in tow, and soon all the money in the bank will turn back into eager bowling balls rolling down the road in rapture.

JANE: Oh, yes! I need to re-read that one. The resolution is silly – but the story is not.

ALAN: Indeed so, and it is a measure of Simak’s skill that he can carry such an absurd story off quite brilliantly. It still makes me chuckle even today.

JANE: Humor is a tough thing to pull off because what one person finds funny, another does not. However, Simak’s humor works for me, perhaps because it’s whimsical, even in its more overt moments.

ALAN: Simak has been called a bucolic or pastoral writer and there’s a ring of truth in that. His most successful stories have a wistful nostalgia that harks back to simpler times and simpler people. Often there is a yearning for past glories. His two most successful novels, City and Way Station, are perhaps the epitome of this attitude.

City is a fix-up novel built from a series of stories. It is set in the far future. People are long gone from the Earth. Only the dogs they loved and the robots they built are left to tell each other the old stories and to wonder whether human beings ever existed at all.

JANE: Pastoral and nostalgic are not automatically the same thing but in Simak, you’re right, the two are often linked. If I recall correctly, one of the elements in City is speculation on how big cities would no longer be necessary in a future where everyone had their own personal flying machine. This was bucking in the face of common SF fiction and artistic tropes where towering cities and flying machines seemed inevitably linked.

I think this is a good example of how Simak was both pastoral (showing a preference for a rural setting and lifestyle) and cutting edge SF, because he thought about the implications of how technology would change the manner in which people lived.

Way Station is a gem… I think it’s Jim’s favorite Simak novel. You beat me to it, so you get to tell about it first!

ALAN: Way Station is about a veteran of the American Civil War. He is the caretaker of a secret way station, a transfer point for aliens journeying to and from mysterious destinations. Inside his way station he never ages, though the time he spends outside the station does count against him. He makes many friends among the aliens who pass through. He learns a lot about the nature of the universe and they learn about the nature of the Earth. But the outside world is snooping around. His longevity is arousing suspicion and a crisis is fast approaching.

JANE: Enoch Wallace is a wonderful character, simple but possessed of a deep, sophisticated wisdom. Again, under the guise of pastoral simplicity, Simak takes on some serious questions, including what is it at the heart of human nature that must be changed before peace is possible. A lovely book and one that fully deserved the Hugo it won in 1964.

Simak has often been criticized for being “bucolic,” as if this meant he was unwilling to face the challenges of the world, but I firmly believe that this was far from the case. As Carter Horton, the protagonist of Simak’s novel Shakespeare’s Planet says, “It seems that our species at times may hold an almost fatal fascination for the past.” This “fatal fascination” is hardly passive nostalgia.

I encountered Shakespeare’s Planet in a rather odd situation. Would you like to hear about it?

ALAN: Yes please – somehow you, Simak and odd situations seem to go hand in hand. It all feels perfectly right!

JANE: I think I’ll take that as a compliment…

Shift the dials of the time machine slight forward. I’m a little older, though still in my teens, and it’s during the school term. I’m sick enough that not only am I permitted to stay home from school (a rare occasion) but I’m downstairs in my parents’ room so I can watch the television.

My mom comes home with a stack of paperbacks for me. She knows I like SF, but at that point doesn’t read any so it’s great good luck that one of her random choices was Shakespeare’s Planet by Clifford Simak. It’s possible she picked it for the vaguely literary title. If she expected me to be getting a little covert education she was right, but not the sort she might have intended.

The book was solidly weird. It featured an odd assortment of characters: a couple humans (from not only different places, but different times), a robot, an alien, and a spaceship with human brains installed in it. Oh! And a quite possibly insane human who called himself Shakespeare and is now dead, but remains a vivid character through the journal entries he left behind.

All of them are stranded on a planet where once a day some powerful force strips their minds down to the barest elements. This God Hour was so strange that the first time I read the book I credited the high fever I was running with the weirdness. I re-read it later. I was wrong. It really was that weird.

ALAN: I think it’s possibly the strangest book I’ve ever read. Simak had a genius for putting the oddest elements together and making a coherent story out of them. He proved it time after time. Shakespeare’s Planet is probably one of the more extreme examples of this technique, but it is by no means alone.

JANE: Oh! I’m so very glad it’s on your “likes” list, too!

The book wasn’t all special effects weirdness. Far from it. For a book published in 1976, it contained some neat SF speculation. The robot, Nicodemus, has multiple brains that enable him to function in a multi-purpose fashion. Today, where we’re accustomed to hardware and software, just how innovative this idea was would slip by most readers, but, in 1976, robots (and often computers as well) were single-purpose items. When software was first introduced onto the general market, I immediately thought of Nicodemus and understood what was going on.

ALAN: Simak’s robots were always highly sophisticated, utterly different from the clanking monstrosities of traditional SF and different again from Isaac Asimov’s mechanistically sophisticated but philosophically quite shallow creations. I think Simak always regarded his robots as being self-aware, an idea that writers like Asimov played with but never properly came to grips with. And it is this self-awareness that lies behind Project Pope, probably one of Simak’s most profound novels, though the story is told in his normal, pastoral and often whimsical style, which makes the medicine slip down unnoticed.

JANE: I agree… Project Pope is also a wonderful gateway into discussing an aspect of Simak’s writing that we haven’t touched on yet. I’ll leave that for next time.

Crossing the Threshold

I’m curious. Did a library, public or private, play a role in your life as a reader?

Children’s Section

Last week, in the course of discussing our first encounters with the works of Clifford Simak, Alan Robson and I tangented off into recollections of our earliest crossings between the “children’s” and “adult” sections of the library. I was pleased when several of those who chose to comment mentioned their own First Encounters of the Library Kind.

When I bopped into the library this past weekend to pick up my hold on Naruto, volume 65, a DVD of Galaxy Quest, and several magazines I’m checking over before actually subscribing, I found myself wondering what role libraries play in readers’ lives these days.

I’ve been a library junkie pretty much as long as I’ve known libraries existed. At first I went only for books. Then one summer I discovered that libraries also had record albums. (This being in those days of yore when music was magically pressed into black vinyl.) I believe that, among us, my siblings and I kept out several favored albums out for the entire summer. The library also had collections of the comics I’d previously encountered sparingly doled out in the newspaper. Now, at last, it was possible to read the evolution of various characters. Non-fiction was less attractive to me in those early days but still, occasionally, I’d take out a book about some art or craft that interested me.

Adult Section

I do much the same today. I take out novels, but I also take out armloads of research materials. I miss the old card catalogs, but computer catalogs do make inter-branch loans incredibly easy. I’ve typed my library card number in so many times that I actually have the fifteen digits memorized. With the resources offered by having the entire library system available to me for a few keystrokes and a little patience, I’ve explored works I might otherwise never have known were available.

I see lots of young parents in the library, but usually their arms are full of kids or books for the kids, not for themselves. I’ve garnered the impression that folks between their tweens and, say, early thirties, seem to have dropped out of the library scene, except when the need to pick up something related to a certification exam or suchlike drives them through the doors.

This isn’t just based observation when I’m in the library – after all, my hours are weird and erratic, as benefits my self-employed state. Instead, I’ve received the impression when I’ve mentioned something I’ve taken out of the library (ours has a pretty good manga collection), and co-hobbyists seem unaware of the option. So I’ve wondered… Has the library been replaced by the internet for a certain age group? If so, I think that’s a pity.

Using the library is nearly as easy as reading off the net. Many library catalogs are available on-line. That means it’s possible to order in advance, and only stop by the library to pick up the swag when it comes in. In some cases, as with audio books, more and more libraries are offering downloads. I take out several each week without ever leaving the comfort of home.

But I believe I’ll always enjoy trips to the library. There’s nothing like browsing through open stacks for discovering books you might not have otherwise found. When I was researching for my novel Child of a Rainless Year, I encountered Blue Cats and Chartreuse Kittens by Patricia Lynne Duffy, a non-fiction work about synesthesia. I was looking for another book on another subject entirely. Yet, this accidental find shaped some elements of my novel. Without that idle wander down the shelves, I never would have encountered it and my novel would have missed something special. It’s hard to have the same sort of impulse contact, even with the best search engine and most provocative series of links.

Some years ago, our library started shelving non-fiction for children side-by-side with adult books on the same topic. I think space considerations were part of the reason, but part was to tempt children to cross the line. This pays off for adults, too. Often the best way to learn about a new subject is to read a treatment for children. Terms are often better defined, providing a foundation from which to read further.

I know some people think there shouldn’t be a “Children’s” section at all. I can see the arguments for both sides. As with so many issues regarding what children should and should not be exposed to, I think that parental, rather than institutional, guidance is advised.

But I wander a bit far… How do you feel about libraries? Do you use them? Do you like how they are changing? Do you think the internet has made them obsolete, and that they should be replaced by rows of computer terminals?

TT: The Writer from Wisconsin

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering? Page back one and enjoy a behind the scenes look at the process of translation. Then join me and Alan as we venture into realms twisted, weird, and utterly wonderful.

JANE: When we were discussing the various genres of SF and Fantasy a few months ago, I mentioned that a writer I particularly enjoyed was Clifford D. Simak. I was delighted when you said that you liked him too.

PInkness, Ghosts, Neanderthals, and Goblins, oh, my!

ALAN: Oh yes – one of my favourite writers. He seems largely forgotten now, but in his day he was a prolific and popular author. He made the mistake of dying just a few days before Robert Heinlein died and, in the fallout from that massive event, he passed largely unnoticed. I’m not even sure if his books are still in print. If not, they certainly should be.

JANE: I wanted to talk about Simak when we first mentioned him, but I got distracted and went off on a tangent.

ALAN: Isn’t that what it’s all about?

JANE: You bet!

I encountered Simak’s work back before I paid a lot of attention to who wrote the books I was reading. Books were their own wonderful things and the authors were incidental. Simak was the author who changed that for me.

Interested in time travel?

ALAN: Yes indeed. Time travel stories are my favourite stories.

JANE: All right, climb into the cabinet and swirl back the dials. It’s summer, sometime probably in the late 1970’s. I’m in my early teens and have discovered SF and F. Every week or so, my mom takes me and my siblings to the public library. There, we are permitted to take out as many books as we can carry. Because of this weight restriction, I have abandoned what was then called the “Children’s” section with its big, bulky hardbacks and gravitated toward the wire paperback racks. It is on one of these that I first encounter the works of Clifford Simak. After a while, I find myself deliberately searching for more. I finally run out of paperbacks. Then it hits me.

This is a library! That means it works like the school library! Up until then, I think I’d considered the public library as more a holiday place, not operating by library rules, if that makes any sense. I browsed, but never systematically searched. But now, my desire to read more Simak is heating my blood. I check the card catalog. I found Simak’s name, and bravely crossed the invisible line into the Adult stacks. I half-expected someone to pull me back from Forbidden Lands.

ALAN: I vividly remember my first excursion into the Adult Library. I think that for people like you and me, it’s a coming of age ritual, a rite of passage. Do you recall any Simak titles from your exploration of the Forbidden Lands?

JANE: I can’t say precisely which was my first, but I can remember an early favorite: The Goblin Reservation. It had everything: time travel, space travel, inventive aliens, goblins and their fey ilk, Neanderthals, and ghosts. It was a murder mystery, a tale of political intrigue, and, for those who insist that SF teaches nothing, it was also the first place I encountered the theory that Shakespeare did not write the plays.

I still enjoy it greatly. I could go on with more titles, but maybe I should turn off my time machine and give you a turn.

ALAN: Well actually I have a time machine of my own. (Wavy lines and eerie music…)

I was about twelve or thirteen. It was summer and my parents and I were on holiday at the seaside. I found Time Is the Simplest Thing in a pile of second hand paperbacks. I’d never heard of Clifford Simak, but the blurb attracted me and so I bought the book. I think it cost me sixpence, and it turned out to be the best sixpence I ever spent. I read the story with jaw-dropping amazement.

JANE: I haven’t read that one in years. Can you remind me a bit about the plot?

ALAN: Indeed I can. Earth has turned its back on space travel. The best they’ve ever managed is to send the minds of brave people out to the stars while their bodies remain on Earth. Shepherd Blaine is one such explorer. But on his latest trip, he encounters a telepathic alien which he describes as a pinkness. “Hi, pal!” it yells in his head. “I change with you my mind.” And it does. Blaine returns to his body with a bit of the pinkness in him. He immediately goes on the run – previous explorers to whom something like this has happened have been arrested and have vanished from view. They have been contaminated and they must be dealt with.

JANE: I remember! As soon as you said “pinkness” that did it. I bet you loved it.

ALAN: I was completely absorbed in the story. So much so that I never registered that my aunt and uncle and cousin had joined us for the day. Eventually it dawned on me that my cousin was talking to me.

“What’s the book?”

“Science fiction,” I mumbled, not lifting my eyes from the page.

“Who’s your favourite author?”

There was only one possible answer. “This chap,” I said, showing him the cover.

JANE: Have you ever read Time is the Simplest Thing again?

ALAN: I read the book again as an adult and I got a lot more out of it the second time around. It was still a gripping can’t-put-the-book-down story but this time round I realised it was an allegory about racial intolerance in America. People with paranormal abilities, those with a pinkness in their mind, are feared and ostracised by society. As Blaine runs and hides in the back blocks of America, the story fills with images of rusty, decaying small towns, angry mobs and the dangling corpses of lynching victims. This is a common theme with Simak – again and again and again his novels tell us that we are all in this together and that superficial things like a pinkness in the mind really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. And so all his books have the strangest companions working together in harmony. The book you mentioned, The Goblin Reservation, is quite typical in this regard.

JANE: Absolutely! But the best thing about Simak is that he never lectures. I think one of the things I love the most about his works – and that I think has had a huge influence on what I choose to write – is how size or shape or species are not an issue in what makes for friendship or alliances.

Even when he latches onto what for other writers might become a really conventional trope, this emphasis on character connection makes the story special. In his Fantasy novel, The Fellowship of the Talisman, what could be a typical ho-hum quest story becomes special because of the extraordinary group which ends up looking for a talisman that may or may not exist. Have you read this one?

ALAN: Indeed I have, though it’s not one of my favourites. I think I’m just biased against quest stories…

JANE: Sigh… The members of the quest start out seeming rather typical: Duncan, a young knight and his childhood best friend, Conrad, who is a burly warrior. Then there’s a wardog, Tiny, and a warhorse, Daniel, and a little donkey named Beauty. Mind you, none of the animals are magical or can talk, but that doesn’t matter. They’re members of the Fellowship. Along the way Duncan’s group becomes even more diverse… But I don’t want to spoil the story by going into too much detail. Suffice to say that they become a group so varied and interesting as to make a combination of humans, hobbits, elves, and dwarves seem positively conventional.

And the resolution of the quest is not at all what anyone would expect…

ALAN: Simak had a lot of strings to his literary bow. Let’s look at some aspects of his work next week.

Translation: An Art, Not a Craft

Last week I wandered on about the delicate balancing act that an author faces when deciding how much detail to provide on a particular subject. In the course of this discussion, I mentioned that I was reading a book on horses translated from German that contained equestrian terminology that I had not encountered before.

A Few Translated Works

This spurred (yes, pun intended) an off-site Comment from a reader who is something of an expert on the subject of horses. She noted that she had never encountered – not even when she had been employed by German equestrians – some of the terms that I cited. We had a fun and lively discussion on the subject, and both concluded that translation involved a lot of decisions on the part of the translators.

Should these translators have noted that certain terms were more common in German equestrian circles than elsewhere? While this might have helped readers draw a line between areas of specialized knowledge, it also would have been a distortion of the original text – and one that could not be done with any confidence without the translators knowing precisely which English-speaking audience they were translating for, since British and American terminology can differ considerably.

My opinion — for what it’s worth – is that in this case the translators did their best. The collection they were translating was a series of short essays, meant to be read out of order, so they would have had to repeat their clarification over and over again. The book was clearly listed as a translation and even a mildly alert reader should have been able to detect that it was written from a German perspective, since the majority of the examples had a German cultural bias.

(Aside: I found this slant particularly obvious in the section on the horse in the Wild West, where the author the German author Karl May was given precedence, followed by the Franco-Belgian comic book character, “Lucky Luke.” John Wayne was mentioned in passing. Nothing wrong with this, just a strong indication of cultural bias.)

I have the good fortune to know several professional translators of literary works, and I decided to ask them for stories about the challenges they’ve encountered in the course of their work.

Rick Walter, whose recent translations of many of Jules Verne’s novels show far better than the stiff translations I encountered years ago why Verne was so popular and so influential, confirmed that even among “English” translators, different choices need to be made to reach specific audiences.

He offered me the following example:

In “20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEAS, penultimate chapter: one of the characters whips out ‘une clef anglaise’ to undo some bolts …

“– My SUNY Press translation renders the term as ‘monkey wrench.’

“ — William Butcher’s Oxford UP translation gives ‘adjustable spanner.’”

I’ve always wondered what a “spanner” was… Now I know what it means to “throw a spanner in the works.” It means to shove a monkey wrench in the gears!

But translators face far more delicate challenges than merely pulling out a dictionary, then plugging into the appropriate slot the appropriate term in a grammatically correct form. Cultures differ widely in forms of address or humor or swearing or myriad other things that, if translated literally, come across as stilted or just plain peculiar. The translator must constantly choose between being what I might call “accurate” in favor of being “right.”

I asked a couple of professional translators for examples of the challenges they have faced over the years. Tiina Nunnally, who became a Knight of the Norwegian Order of Merit for her work as a translator, said: “Translation always involves endless decisions, both big and small, and it takes years of experience to figure out how far to veer from the original without altering the intent and tone of the book.”

She continued: “So one of the biggest challenges — especially when dealing with fiction — is translating swear words. A few years ago I translated a Danish novel that was filled with profanities, and I had to make sure that all the curse words would have the same force in English as they did in Danish. In the Scandinavian languages, the strongest and most searing swear words all have to do with the devil — but the devil has almost no impact in English. Instead, all of our swear words have to do with God or sex or various body parts. So I had to come up with words that would have the same vulgar equivalence in English. The publisher sent the author (who had only a perfunctory knowledge of English) a copy of the translated manuscript, and he immediately sent me an irate email saying “What are all these ‘God’s doing in my book!” He had no idea that a ‘literal’ translation of all those epithets would have ruined his book in English… ”

(Aside: Look for Tiina’s work in Only the Dead by Norwegian author Vidar Sunstol, to be released this October.)

In translating Jules Verne, Rick Walter faced a different challenge.

“For me, the trickiest challenge is translating jokes. You wouldn’t know it from most of their English versions, but humor is a major element in Jules Verne’s novels-not only was Verne a chronic punster, his yarns are full of running gags, black comedy, slapstick, and social satire. Needless to say, these are the scourge of translators everywhere, and many duck the challenge altogether.

“One such mindbender is the witty tagline of Chapter 2 in Around the World in 80 Days. The French valet Passepartout has just met his new boss, a sedentary, robotic, anal-retentive Englishman named Phileas Fogg . . . and he marvels at the fellow:

“Un homme casanier et régulier ! Une véritable mécanique ! Eh bien, je ne suis pas fâché de servir une mécanique !

“A literal translation of the above would be: ‘A home-loving and regular man! A veritable piece of machinery! Well, I don’t mind serving a machine!’

“Well, I didn’t want to chicken out and skip the it; so, after hours of cudgeling my brain, I finally came up with: ‘He’s a homebody, an orderly man! A real piece of machinery! Well, it won’t pain me to have a domestic appliance for a master!’”

As these small examples show, the process of translating is rather fascinating… I wish I read another language well enough to read one of my stories in translation. It would be interesting to find out what I said!

TT: Hidey Holes

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering? Just page back one for a great review of Artemis Awakening and a discussion of the German Spotted Tiger. Then join me and Alan as we answer a riddle and tangent all over the place!

ALAN: Our discussion of landfills seems to have crossbred inside my skull with our discussion of British history to remind me of something. The idea actually popped into my mind back when we were discussing the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants under Henry VIII, Bloody Mary, and Elizabeth, but it popped out again as the discussion took a different path…

The Riddler!

JANE: Is this a riddle of some sort? What do you get when you cross landfills and religious controversy? If so, I can’t guess. Tell me!

ALAN: Priest holes!

JANE: Oh, of course. Priest holes! Why didn’t I think of that? I always wondered if they were for real or simply made up for mystery novels.

ALAN: They’re real all right. I’ve been in one.

Religious persecution in England didn’t end with the death of Bloody Mary. When Elizabeth came to the throne, she reversed her sister’s policies and actively persecuted the Catholics. The religion was driven underground and many Catholic houses in England began to construct priest holes where itinerant priests could hide from Elizabeth’s forces. Clandestine services would be held in the houses when the coast was clear…

A school friend of mine lived in a house that dated from this time. It had a priest hole, which was a small enclosure carved into the sandstone that the house was built from. It was behind the fireplace and presumably, when a priest was hiding in it, the fire would be lit to camouflage it and to discourage the troopers from searching too closely…

JANE: That sounds seriously uncomfortable!

ALAN: Very much so. I was quite surprised at how small and cramped the priest hole was. There was barely enough room to stand upright in it and, when the fire was lit, it must have been very hot and uncomfortable. Also the priest would have had to be careful not to cough from the effects of the smoke. Coughing coming from behind the fire would have been a dead giveaway!

JANE: It certainly would have been. Although I don’t believe we have priest holes, as such, here in the United States, many houses in the eastern part of the country boast similar hiding places. Can you guess why?

ALAN: I presume that there’s some historical reason, but I truly don’t know what it might be.

JANE: The slave trade. Have you ever heard of the Underground Railroad?

ALAN: Oh, of course. Yes – I’ve come across references to it in various novels, but I never really understood exactly what it was.

JANE: Well, this railroad was neither a railroad (although sometimes it used it) nor did it run underground. Instead, it was a network of people devoted to getting black slaves out of those southern states where slavery was legal into the “free north” and often into Canada. In north and south alike there are still buildings with secret rooms, or rooms with false walls, or hidden basements in which the escapees could be kept protected from searchers.

When I bought my house in Virginia, the cellar was just a hole dug into the red clay soil. There’s no indication it ever was a hiding place (in my day it held the hot water heater and furnace), but if the entry had been hidden behind a wall, rather than made obvious by a door, it would have been a dandy “stop” on the underground railroad.

ALAN: That sounds exactly like the kind of scheme that was used in Europe during WWII. The various European resistance groups passed escaped prisoners of war and the survivors from downed Allied aeroplanes from one safe house to another, eventually smuggling them out to (usually) Spain and from there back to England. There was a wonderful BBC series called Secret Army which dramatised the story, and later there was an absolutely hilarious parody of the series called ‘Allo ‘Allo which took the story to such utterly ridiculous extremes that I find I can no longer watch the original series – my memories of the parody are so strong that the drama no longer works for me.

JANE: Oh! That’s a nice comparison. There’s an inherent drama in such situations. Since I grew up in Washington, D.C. – which was “free” but bordered by slave states – stories of the Underground Railroad had a real resonance. One of my childhood heroes was Harriet Tubman. She was slave born, escaped to free Philadelphia, but returned repeatedly to help others to freedom. She began with members of her own family, but expanded to help others.

She did this so often that she was known as “Moses.” She was also at far greater risk than most would be because she was subject to seizures and narcoleptic fits as a result of having been hit on the head with a weight. Nonetheless, despite not being able to trust her own body, Tubman kept rescuing others and was famous for having “never lost a passenger.”

ALAN: Isn’t it interesting how often women play such decisive roles in these kinds of things? Secret Army made much of this, in fictional terms of course. In real life, one of the heroes of the resistance was Nancy Wake, known as the White Mouse. I’m particularly fond of her because she was born in New Zealand. She wasn’t directly involved in the people-smuggling networks – she was far too busy fighting hard at the sharp end. Interestingly though, she herself was passed through the network to England in 1943 when the Gestapo were getting too close to her for comfort.

JANE: I wonder if women were particularly suited for such roles because of the tendency to underestimate them?

One of my favorite anecdotes about Harriet Tubman went as follows. Harriet Tubman was travelling on a train and saw two white men looking at her suspiciously. She realized they were comparing her to a “Wanted” poster. She picked up a newspaper and pretended to be reading it – terrified that she might have it upside down, because she couldn’t read. She heard one man say to the other “Oh, that can’t be her. She’s illiterate.”

ALAN: Thank goodness the 50/50 chance of getting it the right way round worked out for her!

JANE: Yes! I’ve told that story to many people and the reaction is always the same. In those days, newspapers weren’t as likely to be illustrated, of course. Today, the pictures would be great clues.

Well, this has been a classic Tangent in that we started with a queen and ended with escaping slaves… I wonder where we’ll go next?

How Much Is Too Much?

First thing… Artemis Awakening has its first major review. I hope you won’t mind if I share both it and my excitement. The review is from Publisher’s Weekly:

Spotted Tiger… Really

“Centuries after a war shattered the star-spanning Empire, the planet Artemis is a fable—an artificial paradise lost to mainstream civilization. Archaeologist Griffin Dane is the first to rediscover Artemis, but his attempt to explore it in person leaves him stranded on the forgotten planet. With Artemis local Adara to assist him, Dane searches for remnants of high technology, treasures that might allow him to return home. Dane is not the only person interested in Artemis’s secrets, and, as he soon learns, his rival is unbounded by decency or law. Seeking only knowledge, Dane and Adara are propelled into the role of the planet’s protectors. Lindskold (Five Odd Honors)—paying homage to golden-age SF by authors like Andre Norton, Leigh Brackett, and C.L. Moore—offers familiar set pieces like fallen civilizations, mad scientists, telepathic animals, and enigmatic mechanisms bordering on the mystical, all filtered through a modern sensibility and polished prose. Embracing and building on tradition, the work is a promising series launch.”

A question I’ve been asked several times since I turned in “The Hermit and the Jackalopes” to Steve Stirling for his Change anthology is “What are you doing now?” The answer is, I’ve been recharging my creative juices.

One of the things I do to recharge my writerly batteries is read non-fiction. One of the books I’ve been reading is the lushly gorgeous Horses: Myth and Fascination by Susanne Sgrazzutti. The book has several sections, one of which is devoted entirely to the complicated and sometimes confusing terminology associated with horse coloration and markings.

I first encountered many of these terms in Marguerite Henry’s All About Horses, a book that was given to me when I was ten or twelve and which still has an honored place on my bookshelf. At the start of Chapter 13 the author says:

“If we are riding across country and meet an old friend on a new horse, how nice to be able to say, ‘What a beautiful buckskin (or sorrel, or flea-bitten gray)!’

“Or if we’re at the races, watching the entries parade to the post, how nice to be able to say, ‘I like the chestnut first, then the sandy bay.’”

Well, of course, I agreed with Ms. Henry. I wanted to know what made one horse a “chestnut” and another merely “brown.” Why was that horse a buckskin but this other one – so close in coloration – a dun? Why was one face marking a “blaze” and another a “stripe”? At what point did a stocking become a sock? Ms. Henry elucidated these mysteries and many others.

Later, I learned that terms for coloration varied according to region and culture as well. Terms commonly used in American horse circles such as “pinto” and “palomino” come to us through the Spanish who contributed so much to the language of the American West and later to American English in general. I remember being vaguely puzzled when in one of Susan Cooper’s novels someone is described as riding a “lion-colored” horse. When I sorted through the description, I realized that what she meant was a palomino.

Ms. Sgrazzutti’s provides yet another angle on this mystery. Her book was originally written in German and traces of the German terminology creep over. One example is that she refers to what an American would call an “Arabian” as an “Arabian Thoroughbred.” To most American horse fanciers, a “Thoroughbred” is a specific type of race horse. As Ms. Henry says: “to a horseman a Thoroughbred is always a horse whose ancestry can be traced directly to the Byerly Turk, Darley’s Arabian, or the Godolphin Arabian.”

Even more fun was discovering that the German color system was designed by one man – Eduard Meyer – in the 1930’s. For this reason, a grey horse is mold colored, while one with a wildly spotted coat is referred to as a “Tigerschecke” or “spotted tiger.”

Now, when I say this is “fun,” I suppose I should clarify. I find this a tremendous amount of fun because I find horses beautiful and interesting. Therefore, I find the language associated with them interesting. I must admit, I would not feel at all the same about, say, guns. I quite enjoy mysteries and thrillers, but when the writers pauses to lovingly describe a certain model of gun for no other reason than they want to, I get frustrated. (I feel differently if the distinctions have some value to the plot.)

I am fond of Steve (S.M.) Stirling’s “Change” books, but sometimes I feel as if I should have my dictionary of armor by my side when he starts describing what his characters are wearing. All those technical terms for types of helmets and breastplates and the like mean less than nothing to me. They actually make what his characters are wearing less clear than if he stuck to less accurate, more general terms.

Too technical a definition becomes worse than no description at all. Why? Because a description that relies on too specific a vocabulary may be the equivalent of saying “gobble-wibble wibble-wobble.” Don’t believe me? Let’s try an example.

I bet most of you would have no problem following me if I described a horse as having a “star.” You’d even position it correctly on the horse in question. However, would you understand what the difference was if I said the horse had a “flower”? Without context, would you even know where the flower was, or that it was a marking, not an ornament? Possibly not. Why? Because the term “star” as a marking on a horse has entered common usage. It’s dramatic to describe the hero riding into town on his black horse with the star on its brow. Less so if he rides in on a black horse with a flower…

But both are legitimate terms for equine horse markings that mean subtly different things to a horse fancier. (A star is more angular, a flower more a rounded blotch. A flake, by the by, is a very small blotch. All are located on the face. If elsewhere, other terms are used.)

How about “overo piebald” or “tobiano skewbald”?

A careful writer can combine accurate use of any sort of terminology by melding it with description, but this needs to be carefully handled. Take a look at the subtle differences between these descriptions.

“Marshall Kane rode out to confront the bandits on his chestnut gelding with the white stripe.”

“Marshall Kane rode out to confront the bandits on his ruddy chestnut gelding with the white stripe down its nose.”

“Marshall Kane rode out to confront the bandits on Flame, his chestnut gelding with the white stripe down its nose.”

The first is perfectly accurate and would tell someone who knew horses that the horse was reddish brown and had a thin white stripe on its nose. However, someone who didn’t know horses might envision a horse with zebra markings or a lightning bolt on its flank. “Chestnut” is descriptive – if you know what a chestnut is. If you don’t, it doesn’t immediate conjure “reddish brown.”

The second description bridges the gap between accurate terminology and description. The third uses the horse’s name “Flame” to hint at the coloration.

Which would I use? Honestly, I’d probably skip the term “stripe” (which describes a narrow white line; a marking, just to confuse matters further, that is also called a “race”) entirely and go for the more familiar “blaze.” I’d hazard “chestnut,” but find a way to slip in “reddish brown” when possible. “Dismounting, he placed a hand on the horse’s reddish brown shoulder.”

Let’s dance back to those German terms for a moment. What if I had a German character? Shouldn’t I use German terminology? Well, it could be colorful. (I have a mad desire to have some character ride a spotted tiger in some future book.) However, would it add interesting world-building or merely confuse my reader? How much is great fun and how much is too much? Whether describing horses or guns or types of food or whatever fascinates you, that’s something writers need to consider.

TT: Cycling, Again

Tah-dah! (Trumpet Flourish). Today Alan and I are happy to announce the 150th entry to the Sir Julius Vogel Award nominated Thursday Tangents. In hono[u]r of this occasion, we’re hoping you can solve a mystery for us.

Oh… Looking for the Wednesday Wanderings? Just page back one. I’ve an exciting announcement as to where you can sneak a look at the forthcoming Artemis Awakening. Then there’s a word that I have questions about…

Recycling

JANE: Alan, in the “hols” column that started us off on this discussion of cupboards, cabinets, tips, dumps, and other rubbish, you mention that although you still use the term “tip,” the facility you were visiting had, until recently, been called a “landfill” and was now called a “Reclamation Center.”

ALAN: Everyone calls the facility a tip, but I think the city councils must have objected to the colloquialism because all the road signs pointing to the tip say “Landfill.” And once upon a time, that’s exactly what they were: just a great big hole you threw stuff into. Eventually, it filled up and got smoothed over and the landfill closed and re-opened somewhere else. But these days the tips are much more sophisticated operations than once they were, and now there is a genuine attempt to separate out the various items and reclaim or recycle whatever can be reclaimed and recycled. I find that very laudable.

JANE: I agree. One of the first Wednesday Wanderings I wrote was about a trip we took to the dump with a friend and my reaction to finding that it was now possible to drop electronics, for example, off where they would be recycled. This was in late January of 2010. I haven’t been back since, so I don’t know how the process changed. However, as in your part of the world, the name has been changed to reflect a new mission.

When I checked the phone book for listings, I started with the one for the Solid Waste Management department of city government. There I found a very amusing entry: “Residential Convenience Centers: See Landfills for List of Locations.” This seemed very silly to me. Why rename something by a term no one would think to look up? I prefer your term “Reclamation Center.”

ALAN: Ah, pomposity. Don’t you love it?

JANE: Anyhow, I went over to the “Landfills” entry and discovered that we have four places to dump or tip garbage or trash. Three are now termed Residential Convenience Centers but one persists in being a landfill, making me think it must be inconvenient.

I was a little surprised that you mentioned various things – jigsaw puzzles come to mind – that you tipped into the tip that seemed as if they might have some use left in them. If it were me, I would have taken those to a thrift shop. Do you have anything like that there?

ALAN: Yes indeed. Two large charities run them, the Salvation Army (“the Sallies”) and the Society of St. Vincent de Paul (“Vinnies”). The outlets that you call thrift shops we’d call op-shops. I assume that’s short for opportunity shops on the grounds that the bargains they contain represent a great opportunity! A friend of mine who loves clothes has a lot of stunning outfits that she’s rescued from op-shops.

JANE: I love the term op-shops! It sounds like a place where spies would shop. Q would have a room in the back where scratched and dented espionage tools could be bought for a bargain. Acid pens that fire jam or smoke tablets that transform your car’s exhaust into a bright pink cloud.

ALAN: Shades of Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op – maybe that’s how he outfitted himself. Or maybe we’ve both got far too vivid imaginations!

JANE: Too vivid? Us? Never!

We have a much wider variety of thrift stores here. The name “Goodwill” is practically synonymous with “thrift shop,” but other charities operate them as well. It’s quite possible to recycle gently used items this way and hope you’re helping some organization raise money.

I was curious. How is your recycling collected? You mentioned a while back that containers are supposed to be rinsed out. That’s true here, too. However, do you sort items or do they go into one big bin?

ALAN: The cardboard, paper, tins and plastic all jumble together in a big bin with a yellow lid (the council seems to be inordinately fond of yellow). The glass has a separate bin all to itself which is, unfortunately, turquoise. Each bin is collected on alternate weekly cycles.

When it’s the turn of the glass, a massive truck rumbles slowly up the street hotly pursued by very athletic men who pick up the bin and throw the glass into the truck, generating very satisfying crashing, smashing noises.

When it’s the turn of the other stuff, a different truck with a mechanical arm picks up the bin and empties the contents into itself quite quietly. I have no idea how they separate the elements out at the other end, but they must have some sort of system. There’s a threatening label attached to the bin which lists things that are allowed in the bin and things that are not. Dire penalties await those who disobey the instructions.

JANE: Interesting. Our system is similar in that cardboard, paper, cans, and plastic are all put into one large, bright blue bin. I’ve also wondered how – or, sadly, even if – these items ever get sorted and used or if we’re just going through the motions.

Glass is not collected at all. I heard this is because a sanitation worker (formerly known as “garbage man” or “trash man”) was cut very badly on glass. Glass can be dropped off at various places, which is a good thing, because glass is one item that recycles very well. A friend of mine briefly worked for a company that took used glass and transformed it via heat into a perlite-like substance that had various uses, including (if I recall correctly) being used in potting soil in place of peat.

ALAN: “Sanitation Worker”? Don’t you mean “Environmental Reclamation Technician”? Or possibly “Specialist Disposal Engineer”?

JANE: I like that! Almost Orwellian… But, go on.

ALAN: Here, the rule is that broken glass won’t be collected. We are supposed to wrap that carefully and dispose of it with the normal stuff that goes in the yellow council rubbish bag. The truck that they throw the recyclable glass into is covered over so that there is no possibility of “splash-back” causing injuries when the glass is collected and tossed in. They are really as safety conscious as they can be.

JANE: Many years ago, when I still lived in Lynchburg, Virginia, the city had a voluntary recycling program that worked very well. Neatly labeled dumpsters were placed in the parking lots of various grocery stores. It only took a moment to go by and pop recyclable items into the appropriate place. Then the city collected the already sorted items and distributed them to businesses that would turn them into something useful.

As I said before, I do wonder if somewhere there are conveyer belts where someone sits sorting all the things we dump into our recycling bin. If not, it’s just a scam.

ALAN: I wonder if one of our readers knows where we could find the answer.