Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 146

TT: Inheriting Power — Or At Least Names

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Page back one and take a peek at how my subconscious works.  Then come and join me and Alan as we totter through the convoluted question of inheriting power.

Bush I and Bush II

JANE: So, Alan, the U.K. has a new royal.  As time has passed, I found myself wondering a few things.  Can I ask you?

ALAN: Righto!

JANE: First, this child’s dad is a prince, but does he have a title?  Is he a duke or something?

ALAN: Ah – we’re back to the crazy world of British titles. As always, the answer is both yes and no. By birthright he is a British Prince and must therefore be referred to as his Royal Highness. He also has a territorial designation derived from one of his father’s titles and so he may also be referred to as Prince George of Cambridge (his father, Prince William, is the Duke of Cambridge).

JANE: Wait a minute!  It sounds as if the son trumps the father?  How can that be?

ALAN: No, no! His father is His Royal Highness Prince William the Duke of Cambridge. George is His Royal Highness Prince George of Cambridge. Notice the missing word “Duke.” It makes a lot of difference…

JANE: Arrrgghh!  I will never figure this out!

ALAN: If it makes you feel any better, neither will I!

JANE: I had the general impression that Prince William and his wife (what is her title, anyhow?) couldn’t follow the trend made so beloved by movie and rock stars, and name their child any odd thing they like.  So if this little boy grows up to inherit the throne, we won’t have King Zowie or King Summer Night’s Passion.

What were the restrictions on the name?  Why do you think they chose George?

ALAN: Kate is the Duchess of Cambridge, a title she obtained by marriage. As far as the names of the child are concerned, in theory he could have been called anything (and like you I think I’d have rather enjoyed an eventual King Moon Unit, or something similar). In practice however the choices were probably restricted by family pressures. George is actually named for his great, great grandfather (if I counted correctly) who was King George VI, the father of our current Queen.

Most families, I think, tend to name their children after fondly remembered relatives, so there’s nothing odd there.

JANE: Absolutely!  My own sister and brother are named for our grandparents, female and male.

Still, in the case of the royal family, it’s nice that George has such good resonances for the relatives.  I’ve read that the current queen deeply respected and admired her father.  From what I have read about George VI, I think I would have, too.  He took on a difficult job he never expected to hold and performed admirably.

Are there names of former monarchs that wouldn’t work as well?

ALAN: Indeed there are. Social pressure, rather than anything else, tends to restrict the names of the male members of the family to a rather small pool, and almost invariably the chosen names will be those of a previous generation of Kings. So we get a recurring mixture of Edward, William, Charles and, of course, George. Interestingly we haven’t had a Henry since the sixteenth century, I don’t know why.

But certain names are a little frowned upon. Richard is out of favour because Richard III brought the name into disrepute when Shakespeare turned him into a blackhearted villain. And John tends to be avoided because the only King John we ever had made a total mess of the job. He lost Wales and much of France and, because he was forced to sign Magna Carta, his reign is generally considered to mark the start of the long decline of monarchical powers which has led to the current situation where the royal family are largely figureheads. No, we definitely don’t want another King John. Who knows what horrors might result?

JANE: Indeed!  I suppose that having some restrictions on the names you can give your son is a small price to pay for the opportunity of having him grow up to be a king within such a fine tradition as that held by England in specific and the UK in general.

Still, inherited positions of power seem a bit odd to this American (United States sub-variation).

ALAN: New habits for the new world, I suppose. But, here in the old world, we just take this kind of thing for granted.  Inheriting positions of power from your parents has always been part of life for as far back as recorded history goes (and it goes back a long way). So it just seems natural to us. But even the new world is not completely immune to the practice – what about President Bush I and President Bush II?

JANE: My dear, if you weren’t a friend, I’d suspect you of being obnoxious.  Elected offices are not inherited in this country.   However, certain families definitely have chosen politics as a family business.  Following your parents’ profession is fairly typical.

Let me give an example.

Law seems to be the default profession in my family.  My maternal grandfather was a lawyer, so were both my parents.  Thus, when one of my sisters (who worked for various environmental groups) was told that she really should consider an advanced degree (she already had a B.A.) in either law or biology, she naturally went for the field she knew.  I have a brother with a law degree, too.  My other sister seriously considered law.  I think I was the only one of the four of us who didn’t!

ALAN: I wasn’t really meaning to be obnoxious at all about the Bush family, and I wasn’t seriously proposing that offices are inherited in any formal sense – I was just pointing out that America does have the concept of the inheritance of power, albeit in a much less formal manner than we do (or did). And anyway, it’s fun to put Roman numerals after people’s names, even if (or perhaps especially if) the numerals are not supposed to be there.

Weren’t there several Roosevelts as well?

JANE:  Not “several,” just two.  Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt.  Moreover, they weren’t all that closely related.  They were fifth cousins!

ALAN: That’s interesting. I’d always assumed they were much closer than that. How about the Kennedys?  They seemed well on their way to becoming a political dynasty until fate intervened in the worst possible way and cut that dream short.

JANE: They did, indeed.  However, if you look at the facts, rather than the legend, you’ll see that the seed was hardly planted.

Although many expected Bobby Kennedy to capitalize on his brother John’s success, the question is, would Bobby have actually done so?   He could be a very strong personality…  I don’t know this first hand – I was very young when both John and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated – but I have heard stories from people who knew the Kennedys.  (Remember, I grew up in D.C., my grandfather was in politics, and many of the people I grew up with were directly or indirectly connected with politics and worked on “the Hill.”)  I met John Kennedy when I was very small, though I don’t remember doing so!

ALAN: I remember both assassinations, and I vividly remember thinking “Oh, no! Not again! How can this be possible?” when Bobby was killed. It really shook me up despite the fact that it happened in a foreign country which was far, far away.

JANE: It is interesting to note that the Kennedys have never managed to have another family member elected president.  Teddy Kennedy was repeatedly elected to the Senate but, despite several runs for President, he never won. Why? Was it the scandal in his youth? Or was it precisely because he wasn’t John or Bobby?

It’s hard to follow martyrs.

Moreover, would John Kennedy be remembered with such passion if he hadn’t been assassinated?  Or would he be remembered as a young, not terribly effective president?  I think it’s important to note that many of the changes credited to John F. Kennedy were actually carried out by his successor.  Lyndon B. Johnson was an old-school politician with lots of “pull” and lots of favors to call in.

ALAN: Recent revelations about Kennedy’s conduct have exposed the personal and political flaws in Camelot. Even if he had served his full term, that information would probably have emerged sooner or later, and I suspect he’d have been remembered as young and flawed and in some ways quite politically naive. Certainly that’s how he appears to me now. And you are quite right in your comments about Johnson. He was very astute and a politician par excellence. But he seriously misjudged the situation in Vietnam and eventually that forced him out of office.

JANE: Several other Kennedys have held elected office as well, but the one who could have capitalized the most on the Kennedy mystique – John F. Kennedy, Junior – chose instead to follow his mother into publishing.  At the time of his death, he was editor and co-owner of George magazine.  Although he was repeatedly asked if he planned to follow the family “tradition,” he never gave a clear answer as to his intentions.

So, going back to your earlier point, I’ll admit that, especially when looked at in cynical isolation that leaves out how many presidents of the United States have not been related to other presidents, it does look as if there is a degree of nepotism.  However, there have only been two father/son pairs out of all our forty-four presidents.  The Roosevelts were actually fairly distantly related, and the Kennedys failed to establish a presidential dynasty.

At least in our system someone new can become president, but in the U.K. no one can become the monarch except those with the proper bloodline.

ALAN: Well, as I seem to say so often, yes and no…

JANE: Fascinating!  Let’s explore that next time.

Welcome to My Subconscious

As some of you may have noticed, last week’s Wednesday Wandering was illustrated with a picture of Alan Robson’s book Trimmings from the Triffid’s Beard.   Alan is, of course, my partner in crime on the Thursday Tangents, so I guess the use of his book to illustrate a Wednesday Wandering qualifies as artistic meta-fiction or something like that. 

Quail in an Apple Tree

I am absolutely unable to take a book off the shelf, even if it is one I have already read, and not start skimming.  Alan’s book grabbed hold and ate a couple hours of my time.  (If you’re interested, you can get a free download of Trimmings and its sequel at http://tyke.net.nz//books).  In one essay, Alan gave a transcription of the talk he gave when he was Fan Guest of Honor at Windycon in 1987.  The essay is fun (and funny) in and of itself, but it also reminded me of the first time I was a Guest of Honor and realized I had to give a Talk.

This was some fifteen years ago, for Bubonicon 30.  I had no idea what to talk about.  I wasn’t a Big Name, and  the con was my hometown convention, so the attendees could talk to me just about any old year.  Nonetheless, I was really honored and wanted to do the home team proud.

Right about the time I was getting nervous, Jim and I were having dinner with Steve (S.M.) Stirling and his wife, Jan.  I asked Steve what I should talk about.  “Talk about where you get your ideas,” he said.  “That’s always fun for everyone.”

I liked Steve’s suggestion, but I was uncertain about how to go about approaching the topic.  For one, in 1998, I had a lot fewer books published.  My most recent solo was Changer.  The sequel Legends Walking (now re-released as Changer’s Daughter) was pending but wouldn’t be released for a bit.  My other more recent projects were the two novels I finished for Roger Zelazny: Donnerjack and Lord Demon.   Sure, I’d had six other novels published, so I wasn’t exactly a tyro but, as I thought over where I came up with the ideas for these novels, I realized they didn’t follow any particular pattern.

When someone asks me, “Where do you get your ideas?” I’m handicapped, because I’m a subconscious plotter.  I can talk about my lifelong love of mythology or of wolves (and have done so, see WW 3-3-10 “Why Wolves?” and 3-09-13 “Lifelong Fascination,” if you’re interested), but I can’t usually trace precisely where a book originated.

Some writers can do this and I admire them.  For example, this last Bubonicon, during the Q&A following Tim Powers’ talk, I had the chance to ask about why Tim wrote, some twenty years later, a sequel to his novel The Stress of Her Regard.  Tim had a neat, tidy, and humorous explanation for the circumstances that led to the writing of Hide Me Among the Graves.  I only wish I could be so lucid.

As the day for my talk approached, I decided that since I couldn’t seem clear, scholarly, or even particularly sane, I might as well admit to my particular form of insanity.  To illustrate the point, I came up with a great example, taken not from my life as a writer, but from my life as a gamer.

Back in the mid-nineties, Jim and I were involved in a role-playing game in which the players were all members of an FBI serial killer detection unit.  (Yeah…  Get a bunch of SF/F writers together – in addition to me, Walter Jon Williams, Pati Nagle, and Melinda Snodgrass were all involved – and the impulse arises to play cops and robbers.)  Anyhow, our team was assigned to find a suspected serial killer.  There were a lot of murders, but no one could figure out what – if any – pattern the killings followed.  Making matters worse, we couldn’t be sure which of the many unsolved case files that were handed over to us applied to our problem and which might be unrelated.

I mean, how might the murders of four prostitutes be related to the hanging in a public park of actor Danny Bonaduce (of Partridge Family fame)?  Did the murder of five people and the removal of their wedding rings have anything to do with our serial killer or was the source of those killings related to some aspect in the lives of the people involved?  That night after the game ended, Jim and I went home more puzzled than ever.  By the time we’d settled the animals and gone to bed, it was very late indeed.  Then, about four a.m., nature awoke me.

As I was pulling my weary carcass out of bed, I realized my sleeping brain had been working through the elements of the various crimes, shifting and sorting, weighing and discarding.  All these years later, I can’t remember the details of all the crimes (especially the red herrings), but I do remember most of the key ones.

Danny Partridge found dead in a park, an apparent suicide, hanging from a tree.  Three French priests.  Five wedding rings.  Gold rings.  Four prostitutes.  Call girls.  Calling Birds.  Four calling birds.

My body wanted to go to sleep.  My brain kept swirling odd bits and pieces around.  Finally, I had it!  The song “The Twelve Days of Christmas.”  The serial killer was working his way through The Twelve Days of Christmas!  What was six?  Six Geese a’laying.

We should check to see if there were any killings related to six geese a’laying.  If there hadn’t been, maybe we could figure out a likely target and set a trap of some sort for the killer!  Suddenly, I was wide awake and wildly excited.  I poked my drowsing spouse.

“Jim!  Jim!  I’ve got it!  He’s doing The Twelve Days of Christmas!”

Inarticulate mutterings into a pillow resolved into intelligent speech.  “What?  Who?  He is?  What?”

Feverishly, I explained, showing how with a little allowing for bad puns, the pattern was there.  A partridge in a pear tree.  Three French men, rather than three French hens.  Four calling girls.  Five golden rings.  Jim agreed.  He started settling back to sleep.

“I’ve got to call Melinda!”

“It’s 4:30 in the morning.  We didn’t leave her house until after midnight.”

“But I’ve got the answer.  I’ve got to call Richard.  He’s the boss.  He’ll know what we should do next.”

“No.  You are not calling Melinda at four a.m.”

“She gets up early to feed the horses…”

“Fine.  Call then.  Not at four a.m….”

So I tossed and turned, at last getting up and making the phone call rather earlier than was strictly polite.  Melinda responded with enthusiasm.  Later, the game master would ask me, “What gave it away?  I thought it would take at least to seven, even eight, before you all saw the pattern.”  I had to reply, “I don’t know.  I solved it in my sleep.”

And that’s how I write, too.  Not necessarily in my sleep, but by trusting that the story is there, buried in my subconscious mind.  Writing from the subconscious makes my characters very real to me.  I can feel when a situation is right or wrong for them.  It also means I’m not very good at workshopping because, often until a book is nearly done, I don’t have the faintest idea where it’s going.

Still…  That’s how it works for me…  I do a lot of research, a lot of thinking, but ultimately the stories come out of the borderland between the land of waking and that of dreams.

TT: Crossing the Humor Barrier

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Just page back one and help me figure out where to go for quality on-line reviews.  Then come and join me and Alan as we conclude our look at what’s funny and what’s not…

Tiptoeing Cthulu and Friends

JANE: Last time we were talking about Kuttner’s Galloway Gallagher stories.  I said that the stories were better in small doses and I still think that.

However, now that I’ve had time to think, I also wonder if they might have been funnier if I belonged to a generation where extreme alcoholism (which is when a person has blackouts) was considered an acceptable source of humor. Even now, I wince at the idea of alcoholic blackouts as funny.  They just aren’t to me – too close to that “pain humor” we discussed a few weeks ago.

Now, I’m not saying Americans are immune to humor based on the lowered inhibitions accompanying drunkenness.  Take a look at any number of films intended to amuse young men and you’ll find this form of humor is alive and well.  But I’m not certain it has the same broad appeal.

In past discussions, you’ve said you as a Brit find American reactions to drunkenness puzzling, so perhaps you made the transition more easily.

ALAN: Alcoholic blackouts are not funny in themselves; I think we both agree on that. If the stories took the idea seriously then they would be tragedies rather than comedies. But we’ve already shown that tragedy and comedy are actually two aspects of exactly the same thing. It’s all a matter of emphasis. I think the cultural differences that you mention arise from the fact that Americans seem to think that some things are too serious to joke about, whereas the Brits have no such inhibitions.

A perfect example would be the British comedian Ricky Gervais who hosted the 2011 Golden Globe awards. He made an atheism joke which would not have raised a single eyebrow in England but which caused a huge controversy in America. There seems to be a streak of puritanism in American society that the Brits simply don’t share.

JANE: What other humor doesn’t cross the culture (or time period) barrier as easily?

ALAN: There was a British SF television series called Red Dwarf which was so successful that NBC decided to remake it for American audiences. Only one pilot episode was made and it was so dire that it sank without trace. For example, in the British version the character Lister is a black, short, ugly, foul-mouthed slob. In the American version Lister is white, tall, handsome, clean and wholesome. Suddenly the jokes stop working…

The American pilot show is included as an extra on one of the DVDs of Red Dwarf so I have actually seen it. It is deeply unfunny.

I’m not really sure why NBC decided to remake the show. The original was actually very popular with American audiences though I imagine the networks had to careful about broadcasting times. Many of the episodes had far too many toilet jokes for American sensibilities. Perhaps they felt a need to clean it up a bit…

JANE: Maybe they hoped it would work, even after they mutilated it to make it politically correct.  I know that Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has worked very well in the U.S. in its various incarnations, despite some aspects of the humor being very British.  Monty Python also seems to have translated well.

ALAN: Humour not translating works the other way round as well. Craig Shaw Gardner is an American writer of humorous fantasy whose works seem to sell reasonably well in America, but which made very little impact here.

JANE: I fear I’m not in a position to comment.  I’m not familiar with his works.  I wonder why his humor doesn’t translate?  Perhaps too many of the joke references are culture specific.

ALAN: I think he’s a good example of the “let’s twist the story to fit the joke” school of writing that we mentioned before. And he is overly fond of puns. Both of these tend to make the stories feel more than a little shallow.

JANE: I was reading a Darynda Jones novel the other day – she writes “Buffy Fic” with a large dose of humor – and found myself wondering how many of her jokes, especially those playing off specific television programs or other pop culture items, would make sense ten years from now.  For example, one joke played off a confusion between ESP and ESPN…

Does the ESPN reference translate?

ALAN: It does now! Once upon a time it wouldn’t have meant a thing to me, but the rise in popularity of satellite TV services has brought a lot of world-wide content to our screens and now ESPN seems to be everywhere. Darynda Jones’ joke sounds as though it has possibilities…

JANE: Connie Willis is an author who has done a very fine job of writing good humor that is funny even if you don’t know the original reference point.  I really liked her book To Say Nothing of the Dog.  I believe I would have even if I hadn’t already read – and laughed myself silly – over Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog) off which she was riffing.

Willis’ humorous novel Bellwether is much more “American” in its roots. Have you read it?  Did it work for you?

ALAN: Oh indeed – Bellwether is the one Connie Willis novel that I can honestly say works brilliantly for me from beginning to end. To Say Nothing Of The Dog is very good and I enjoyed it a lot, but it still suffers from Connie Willis’ basic assumption that people running around like headless chickens and refusing to share important information with each other is funny in and of itself. Sorry, Connie, but it isn’t.

However Bellwether, with its brilliantly satirical parody of commercial management styles and its fascinating speculations about the origins of fads is an absolute tour de force and I love it. Interestingly, I met Connie at a convention in Australia a few years ago.  (She’s a lovely person.)  I asked her to autograph two books for me. Guess which two they were? Yes – you got it right! Bellwether and To Say Nothing Of The Dog.

JANE: Yes.  Those two would be my choices as well.   In fact, if she comes to Bubonicon this year (as she often does) I should consider following your lead!

Although there are many other books and authors we could bring up, I think we’ve actually come to a close not only of this Tangent, but also of our long and winding tour through the many genres and sub-genres of SF and F.

But I wanted to ask you about…  Wait, I’ll save it for next time!

Just How Useful?

I don’t do a lot on-line, so I’ll be the first to admit, I’m behind the times.  That’s why I’m bringing my question to you folks.  Here’s what happened…

One Reviewer’s Opinions

Last week, I was considering buying a DVD of an anime series I already owned as a gift for a friend.  I went to Amazon to see if they had it and noticed there were two different packages.   Since I wanted to make sure that I had the right set and I found Amazon’s summary notes a little cryptic, I clicked on the on-line reviews as a means of seeing if there was any advantage to one package over another.  I started skimming, then found myself continuing to read in a sort of fascinated horror.

I know this particular series very well but, if I had been a newcomer, I would have had no idea what to think.  I might even have thought that two completely different series with the same title were being reviewed.  That’s how varied the comments were.

The animation was rated as artistic and creative.  It was lambasted as lousy and cut rate.  The music was singled out as boring and repetitious.  The music was praised as wonderful and dynamic.  The story line was assessed as provocative and thoughtful.  The story line was dismissed as limited and episodic.  And the characters…  I swear I wouldn’t have known them!  Even the reviewers who liked them tended to be reductive in their assessment of some very complex personalities.

So how useful are these sites that permit reviews anyhow?

Writers have a love-hate relationship with on-line reviewing sites, especially those with no limits and no moderation.  Everyone has heard tales of fans and/or writers who have taken advantage of the anonymity to use multiple accounts to pump up their favorites and downgrade works they view as rivals.  Since it only takes a single one-star review to lower a book or movie’s overall average, this is pretty creepy.

A few years ago, I heard from a reliable source that one writer deliberately set out to trash any book he viewed as competition for his own forthcoming novel.  His enthusiasm for his project drew attention to itself, creating a trail that eventually led to his unmasking and the reviews being removed.  Even so, he certainly did damage.  It’s enough to make a potential victim’s skin crawl.

At Bubonicon a couple of weeks ago, Guest of Honor Tim Powers talked about how he obsessively reads his on-line reviews.  He was very funny as he talked about ranting and raving, thinking up complex revenges upon those who didn’t understand his work.  He asked me if I read my on-line reader reviews.  I admitted that I don’t look at them.   I tend to get too upset when someone misses the point entirely or, worse, gets some crucial fact completely wrong, then chews my book apart for not doing what they think it should have done – but did in fact do!

It would not be good form to fight back, but I am a fighter, so it’s best not to put myself in the position of fuming quietly (or not so quietly, at least as far as Jim is concerned).

Even with this anime series I was looking at, I found myself pushing down an impulse to write a volume of commentary, pointing out the deep, philosophical underpinnings of the recursive story.  However, looking at the site’s chronological organization, I knew what I wrote would soon be lost.  For a short time, my piece might be the first someone would see, but eventually it would be buried.

So, just how useful are these on-line reviews?  If you were looking for a good quality assessment of a book or movie, where would you go?  Having had this bad experience, I’m curious as to what a tyro like myself may be missing.

TT: Humor Surreal

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Just page back one and hear both about a new short story and what went on at this year’s Bubonicon.  Then join me and Alan as we enter the world on the surreal.

Solidly Surreal

JANE: Last time, we were just getting into the surreal element in SF/F humor.  Pray, continue.

ALAN: I think it’s the edge of surreality that comedy can bring to SF which makes some of the odder stories work so well. Fredric Brown’s remarkable short story Placet is a Crazy Place takes place on a planet which meets itself coming back in its orbit, causes hallucinations and is inhabited by widgie birds which are made of matter so dense that the planet itself appears to them as thin as air appears to us. They have a habit of flying through the foundations of buildings, thereby making the buildings unstable.

JANE: Sound like a variation on the Higgs Boson particle to me.  I was just reading an article in Smithsonian magazine which used the analogy that a fish physicist would have a great deal of trouble analyzing the watery world in which they dwell because they are completely surrounded by water and its influences.  Seems as if the super density of widgie birds is playing off a similar idea.

ALAN: Quite so. And I imagine when the fish went exploring on land, it would be utterly astonished and bewildered by the first fire it found. Stories like Frederic Brown’s put us in the position of that fish. You have to admire the cleverness of that, even while you are laughing at all the fun he’s having with the odd ideas.

JANE: Yes!  The best of SF in its speculative mode as well as something funny.  Who could ask for more?

ALAN: Henry Kuttner was another brilliant practitioner of surreal humour as well. I have a very soft spot for his Hogben stories. The Hogbens are hillbillies who are so inbred and mutated that that they have magical powers. For example Uncle Lem is so lazy that he spends most of his time fast asleep. When he gets hungry he wakes up just enough to send his mind out into the forest where he hypnotises a raccoon which gathers up a pile of firewood and carries it back to Uncle Lem. Then it builds a fire and cooks itself so that Uncle Lem can eat it. Only one thing worries the narrator of this story. He’s never been able to figure out how Uncle Lem gets the ‘coon to skin itself first…

JANE: Uh, oh…  Tangent warning…  I think of “hillbilly” as a very American term.  Is there a British equivalent?

ALAN: Not directly – I think it’s because the population density is such that there simply isn’t room for an isolated community like the hillbillies to survive. Though having said that, we do have gypsies (and their modern equivalent, the travellers) who are isolated mobile communities and who do share many of the characteristics of America’s hillbillies.

JANE: Thanks!  I’d never compare hillbillies and gypsies, though…  Still, I can see what you mean.  Both are cultures that evolve within larger cultures.

Kuttner was also responsible for the humorous Galloway Gallagher stories.  I was too young to encounter them in their original format as short stories published in Planet Stories, but a few years ago we were given a collection of the stories (Robots Have No Tails) by a friend.  Since I’d liked some of Kuttner’s  fantasy, I sat down to read them with great enthusiasm.

The basic gimmick is that when Gallagher is drunk he is a genius and clueless when sober.  He invents a machine when drunk then, when sober, has to deal with the consequences.  The problem is, he suffers alcoholic blackouts, so he usually doesn’t remember what he has done.

ALAN: I always liked the odd images that the stories evoke. One of the machines that drunken  Gallagher builds is a narcissistic robot with a transparent body. The robot spends most of its time standing in front of a mirror admiring its cogwheels as they spin. The sober Gallagher has no idea why he constructed such a complex and seemingly useless machine and he embarks on a quest to solve the mystery. And the ultimate purpose of that robot is, at one and the same time, both very practical and very silly. I’m actually smiling as I write these words – the story is that funny and that memorable.

JANE: I’ve actually wondered if that robot – Joe is his name – influenced Marvin, the depressed robot in Douglas Adam’s Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

ALAN: I hadn’t thought of that until you mentioned it, but I would not be at all surprised to find that Joe and Marvin were siblings.

JANE: I think, for me at least, the Gallagher stories would have worked better in their original format.  Despite some very clever tales and peculiar characters, the similar element tended to drown the fun after a while.  If I was ever to give someone the collection, I’d say, “Read no more than two at a time.  You’ll like them better.”

I did love the Lybblas – cute little bunnies from Mars with a vicious intent to conquer.

ALAN: I think I’d agree with that. The stories’ impact is much greater if you read them at widely spaced intervals.

JANE: There’s more to humor even than this, but – funny as it may seem – I really should go write.  Let’s pick up with this next time.

“Hamlet Revisited” and Bubonicon

It’s been an exciting week and not just because I went to Bubonicon.  I also had a short story published, met my new editor from Tor, got to hold a reviewer’s copy of Artemis Awakening in my hot little hands, and finally had a chance to get the answer to a long-held question about Tim Power’s novel, The Anubis Gates.

Let me start with the short story…  It’s called “Hamlet Revisited” and you can find it at http://www.snackreads.com/products-page/product-category/hamlet-revisited/.

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“Hamlet Revisited”

Many years ago, when I taught Shakespeare’s play Hamlet a couple times a year, I must have gotten a bit punchy.  I realized that if the events of the play were looked at from the ghost’s point of view, the story became a comedy.  I promptly sat down, wrote the story, liked it very much, and started sending it out.

I collected the most amazing sheaf of rejections.  I wish I still had them.  Basically, time and again I heard 1) the story was very funny 2) everyone in the office read it and laughed their heads off  3) but they weren’t taking the story because (some variation of the following) a) it didn’t suit their magazine’s needs b) the editors were concerned their readership wouldn’t remember enough of the original Hamlet to follow the plot c) it was neither fantasy or SF (despite having a ghost).

So, when I was contacted by Josh Gentry, the editor of a new venture called Snack Reads, I immediately thought of this story.  I was honest with Josh about its history of rejection, but he decided that it suited his needs perfectly.  His wife Jennifer Gentry supplied the amazing cover art.

Not only am I delighted to have the story coming out for itself, I can’t help but think that, side by side with Shakespeare’s original play, “Hamlet Revisited” is a great illustration of the concept that the difference between comedy and tragedy is in how you tell the tale.  Needless to say, it belongs in every classroom! 

Just a few words about the publisher.  Snack Reads’ focus is offering new and reprinted short stories in inexpensive ebook format.  For now, they are drawing from the local New Mexico pool (which is vast and varied indeed), but I have no doubt they will expand.  They also do interviews with their authors, which appear on the web both on YouTube and as podcasts.  Josh Gentry and I had a conference at Bubonicon to lay the groundwork for my forthcoming interview.  I think it’s going to be fun.  I’ll let you know when it’s available!

Bubonicon this year was really busy for me.  Josh Gentry wasn’t the only editor I met with.  I also met my new editor at Tor, Claire Eddy.  We’d met once before, about 19 years ago, at a World Fantasy in New Orleans.  However, that had been at a crowded and moderately insane dinner party.  This time we went out for a very genteel tea at the St. James Tea Room.

Claire Eddy and me at Bubonicon’s Afternoon Tea

Claire had arranged to have a copy of the advance bound manuscript of Artemis Awakening sent to me.  No cover art yet – that’s still being finished up – but just seeing the story in something like book format made the entire project more real.  It also made giving my reading at Bubonicon a whole lot easier.  I had a good audience and they seemed to enjoy themselves.

One of the things that made Bubonicon insanely busy for me this year was that one of the two writer Guests of Honor was Tim Powers. (The other was Brent Weeks.)  If you’ve been following the Wednesday Wanderings and Thursday Tangents, you already know I’m a huge fan of Tim Powers’ work.  Except for one interview at a World Fantasy years and years ago,  I hadn’t had an opportunity to hear him speak.  Therefore, I resolved to try to make as many of his program items as I could, often bouncing from the panel I was on to one of Tim’s.

It was worth the effort…  Although I enjoyed the rambling discussion on what happened to dark fantasy between Tim Powers and George R.R. Martin, I enjoyed even more Tim’s solo presentation.  He can vary between serious and side-splittingly funny in a breath, and is a talented physical comedian as well.  Later, when both Guests of Honor were interviewed by the Toastmaster, Diana Rowland, she raised the question of having one’s work adapted by Hollywood…  Well, Tim’s account of his attitude toward the process is impossible to redo in print, but it involved hamsters and high walls.

Also, in a fan girl’s best dream, I managed to have a few chats with Tim in small groups.  During one of these, I got to ask a question that had been lurking in my mind for years.  In the novel The Anubis Gates, there is a passing reference to a husband and wife who have written a “massive, multi-volume History of Mankind.”  For years I had wondered if these were meant to be Will and Ariel Durant, whose massive, multi-volume Story of Civilization is one of the most amazing works in any genre ever written.  Tim confirmed my guess.  Australian author, Joel Shepherd, had been chatting with us.  When Joel admitted he wasn’t familiar with the Durants’ work, Tim and I both started raving about the series with the enthusiasm of religious fanatics talking about their holy book.

It was a lot of fun.

As usual, I came away from the weekend with a list of books to read.  After hearing all the labor Brent Weeks put into becoming an “overnight success,” I certainly will try one of his works.  I also will be reading Ian Tregillis’s latest “Milkweed” book and the next in James S.A. Corey’s wonderful space opera series and…

But now, off to do the grocery shopping that didn’t get done this weekend!

TT: Very British Humour

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Page back one.  You certainly don’t want to miss how vegetable curry can lead to dystopias (or something like that).  Then come back and join me and Alan for a look at the unique twists the British bring to their humo[u]r.

Remember!  Bubonicon, New Mexico’s SF/F convention starts tomorrow…    Hope to see some of you there!

JANE: I rather talked my head off last time, so this time you get to start.

Russell and Holt

ALAN: I’ve always had a soft spot for the British writer Eric Frank Russell. He’s probably best known these days for his 1955 Hugo Award winning short story Allamagoosa but he wrote a lot of stories and novels which still read well today. I’m particularly fond of The Space Willies (aka Next Of Kin). Leeming is flying a space ship behind the alien lines. He’s on a spying mission. The alien language sounds exactly like English, though the words make no sense. Leeming amuses himself by listening to their dialogue:

First voice: “Mayor Snorkum will lay the cake.”

Second voice: “What for the cake be laid by Snorkum?”

First voice: “He will starch his moustache.”

Second voice: “That is night-gab. How can he starch a tepid mouse?”

They spent the next ten minutes in what sounded like an acrimonious argument about what one repeatedly called a tepid mouse while the other insisted that it was a torpid moose…

When Leeming is eventually captured by the aliens he is informed:

“We shall bend Murgatroyd’s socks.”

Leeming then goes on to wage a rather twisted one man campaign of psychological warfare against the aliens. He is, of course, triumphant!

JANE: Very amusing!  Reminds me of some of the by-play Pratchett uses for his secret societies.  Is this back and forth nonsense a British tradition?  Just wondering.

ALAN: It’s very much in the tradition of The Goon Show, a very popular radio comedy show in the 1950s. It was written by Spike Milligan and performed by Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe. It was hugely influential (without the Goons there would have been no Monty Python, as the Pythons themselves freely admit) and The Goon Show remains popular to this day. So, yes, the back and forth nonsense is very British. The first time I read The Space Willies I remember thinking, “Milligan would love this…”

JANE: Thanks!  I’m not familiar with The Goon Show, but I love a lot of the Monty Python troupe’s work.   The first time I saw Monty Python and the Holy Grail, I didn’t register that most of the male roles (and many of the female) were played by the same six people.  Later, when I started watching the television show and it clicked, I was even more impressed.  I’d enjoyed the movie as a very funny riff off of Arthurian legend without even needing the gimmick of most of a very large “cast” actually being only six people.

Have you read British author Tom Holt?  His novel Expecting Someone Taller is screamingly funny and very smart at the same time.

ALAN: Oh indeed! Expecting Someone Taller knocked my socks off. It’s a kind of a sequel to Wagner’s Ring cycle. I’d never realised before that Wagner was funny…

JANE: That was my reaction, too.  The scene where Malcolm Fisher, heir to the Ring of the Niebelungs, goes to the library to find out exactly what it is he’s been carrying around and reads the summary of Wagner’s “Ring Cycle” is laugh out loud funny, especially in its analysis of the various personalities involved and the logical incongruities necessary to make the plot work.

Roger sent me the novel, noting the page numbers, just to make sure I didn’t miss that part.  I particularly loved the description of Wotan as “evidently the sort of person who, if asked to rescue a cat from a roof, would solve the problem by burning the house down.”  Or the plot element that involved “Fafner kills Fasolt, and transforms himself into a dragon before retiring to a cave in the middle of the forest in the middle of nowhere, this apparently being preferable in his eyes to retiring to a cave in a forest with the Goddess Freia.  It takes all sorts.”  I’ll never be able to see Wagner in the same way again…

ALAN: I also loved Who’s Afraid Of Beowulf? An archeologist is excavating an ancient Viking burial ship. The ship is occupied by a horde of Viking heroes and a couple of rather odd spirits who while away the time playing a game called “Goblin’s Teeth” which appears to be a combination of chess, Monopoly, Scrabble and Snakes and Ladders. It’s very, very funny.

His first several novels, which re-examined classical mythologies in a curiously British way, were all great fun. But then he seemed to fall into a bit of a rut and the novels became quite repetitive. I wasn’t very impressed with those. However he’s recently been writing a series of novels set in the modern day offices of J. W. Wells and Co., purveyors of magic (J. W. Wells, of course, is a Gilbert and Sullivan reference). I suppose you could describe the novels as office politics with magic and spells. They are a true return to form and they are very funny.

JANE: Thanks for the tip.  I’d had a similar reaction to later Holt, so it’s good to know he found a new playground.

ALAN: Holt also has a sideline in historical novels which are also extremely funny. Olypmiad tells the story of how the Olympic Games might have started, way back in ancient Greece. And Song for Nero is the story of what happened to the Emperor Nero after he was deposed (no, he didn’t die…) I highly recommend these as well.

JANE: I missed those, too.  I’m hard to lure back to an author once I’ve been burnt. Thanks for letting me know about them.

We seem to be on a British theme here. Are there any other British authors of humorous SF/F you enjoy?

ALAN: I have a very soft spot for Robert Rankin, though his novels are so odd that I find myself at a bit of a loss as to how to describe them. He has a fixation with brussel sprouts and they play a large part in many of his novels. In one novel, a brussel sprout called Barry travels back in time and lodges himself in the brain of Elvis Presley. There are days when I think that this is perhaps the most logical explanation behind the bizarre events of Elvis’s life…

Most of Rankin’s novels are set in the London suburb of Brentford. Over the years Brentford has been invaded by aliens, infested with ancient evils, and rescued by God.

JANE: I’m spotting a theme here – the books you seem to like sound very bizarre, and often surreal as well.

ALAN: Again, I think you can blame this on the Goons. When you have just listened to a radio programme in which the players steal Dartmoor prison (leaving a cardboard replica behind so that nobody will notice), then sail the prison across the channel and fight a battle on the high seas against the Chateau D’if (“Curse these French prisons, they’re so much faster than ours!”), it becomes remarkably easy to accept the idea of a time travelling brussel sprout.

JANE: I bet!  I’d like to explore this further, but duty – in the form of my other life as a writer of fiction – calls.  How about we continue this next time?

Dystopias and Anti-Heroes

This weekend, as Jim and I were cutting up vegetables for curry, we ended up talking about dystopias and anti-heroes.

We Can Be Heroes

Seriously…  We really did.  This is NOT just an excuse for a topic.

Anyhow, Jim was saying how he didn’t much like fiction set in dystopias.  Knowing something of his reading and viewing preferences, I told him I didn’t think this was actually the case.  I pointed out that lots of very good stories take place in dystopian settings.  A dystopia is simply a fictional setting which is diseased or corrupt either (or sometimes both) politically or environmentally.  Such settings are often very good for fiction because the protagonists have a lot of challenges to work against.

During the Cold War, these dystopias were often under the control of totalitarian governments who pretended to be promoting some ostensibly positive philosophy (usually a variation on socialism or communism), but were really creating a tiered society in which those on top lived a lot better than the bulk of the population.

These days, environmental catastrophes (rather than an abstract political philosophy) have become the reason for the dominating regime to become established.  The world is in trouble.  Extreme control is needed.  The mass of the population is subjected to severe, even harsh, restrictions.  As with the earlier incarnations, there is usually a segment of the population who is living very well – in direct contrast to the policies they enforce.

In both these earlier and later trends of fictional dystopias, the government may be a theocracy of some sort. (Although sometimes the “god” is a leader, since Marxist philosophy speaks out against organized religion.) After all, what better way to maintain control than to have the divine on your side?

Jim and I started discussing books and movies we’d both enjoyed that used dystopian settings.  I mentioned Heinlein’s various “Crazy Years” stories.  Jim brought up the movies Rollerball and Blade Runner.  I mentioned Pratchett’s Small Gods.  Jim mentioned Zelazny’s Lord of Light. From there we went on to a lot of the cyberpunk material.  In the end, we both agreed that it wasn’t the dystopian settings we disliked, but the frequent cases where dystopias seemed to become an excuse for authors to create whining, unattractive, and simply just plain annoying and/or ineffectual characters whom we’re supposed to accept (or at least pity) because they are against (or oppressed by) the dystopian regime.

For this reason, neither of us much cared for Orwell’s classics 1984 or Animal Farm.  Or Huxley‘s Brave New World.

This led us to anti-heroes.  Anti-heroes are a more difficult concept to define than dystopia because the question of what is heroic and what is not heroic shifts with both the time period and the culture.  Even the definitions of the term vary from source to source.   (Take a look on-line if you’re curious).  Some definitions say that the anti-hero has “no” heroic qualities.  Others say that anti-heroes are lacking in some heroic qualities, while possessing others.

If I were to take a stab at a definition, I would say that an anti-hero behaves in a recognizably heroic fashion in some sense, but does not embrace the idealized concept of how a hero should behave.

What do I mean by behaving in a “recognizably heroic fashion in some sense”?  Usually, the anti-hero is on the side of what would be recognized as “good.”  He might be a bit of a bully, but he’s our bully, fighting worse bullies.  She might be a vigilante (therefore, outside of the law), but the people she’s taking down are operating in a fashion so that the law cannot  or (as is often the case in a dystopia) will not touch them.

As for the idealized concept of how a hero might behave…  Its evolution is so complex that I can’t possibly cover it all here.  However, one of the major influences on the modern concept of the hero in “Western” civilization were the medieval courtly and chivalric romances.  These included the concepts of a fair fight, treating a lady with courtesy, and honoring your ruler (and often his legal code).

While serving as a fine, civilizing influence, these chivalric romances were not in the least practical, nor were their ideals followed in “real life.”  Nevertheless, the concept is so attractive that it keeps cropping up.  You find an updated version in many Westerns (novels, television shows, and movies), where the “white hat” hero won’t shoot to kill, is more likely to kiss his horse than the girl, and does his good deed, then rides off into the sunset without asking for reward – or even thanks.

Early Science Fiction, especially space operas – which were often Westerns translated into outer space, rather than being set on a more or less historical frontier – also adopted these ideas.

As I said above, the concept of heroic behavior changes with time periods and cultures.  The Greek hero Theseus was considered a great hero at the time his stories originated, but I doubt that someone who builds his reputation by brawling, murdering, and stealing, and even abandons the girl who gave up everything to help him, would be considered a hero today.   John Gardner’s novel Grendel retold the Beowulf saga from the monster’s point of view – and showed the burly hero in a much more unattractive light than he would have been seen by the culture which created him.

Robin Hood is a great example of how the reasons behind actions, rather than the actions themselves, make the difference between an anti-hero and a villain.  If Robin Hood had robbed from the rich to line his pockets, he would have been a villain.  However, because he robs from the rich to give to the poor and flouts the law to correct its abuses, he is an anti-hero.  The classic film with Errol Flynn shows this perfectly.   Maid Marian’s view of the dashing rogue doesn’t change because he is charming and has a brilliant smile, but because she sees what he does for others.

I think one reason we like anti-heroes is that they are more believable than idealized heroes.  As much as we love the Lone Ranger (classic version), it’s hard to believe that we’d be able to shoot to wound when being rushed by a dozen furious outlaws, all armed to the teeth.  Arthurian legend shows how vulnerable a hero becomes when an impersonal code replaces personal justice.

Yet, as appealing as anti-heroes can be, writing them well is a dangerous balancing act.  It’s far too easy for an anti-hero to slip over the line into villainy.  Carrie Vaughn dealt with this challenge beautifully in her “Kitty” books.  The vampire hunter Cormac steps over the line and goes to jail for it – this despite the fact that he is an appealing character, one who had helped Kitty a great deal in her adjustment to the supernatural world.  I’m sure I’m not the only reader who expected to pick up the book following Cormac’s arrest to find that he’d escaped or gotten off or a technicality.  It was refreshing to find a story where, when the anti-hero steps over the line into villainy, he pays the price.

So, dystopias and anti-heroes…  Like them?  Hate them?  Tired of them?  I’d love to know.  And I hope to see some of you this weekend at Bubonicon, right here in sunny New Mexico.

TT: The Humor Boom

Looking for the Wednesday Wandering?  Just page back one and learn what “butt-heads” had to do with my lasting fondness for a certain popular TV SF show.  Then join me and Alan as we take a look at a couple of writers who contributed hugely to the boom in humorous SF/F that made the 1980’s such a funny time to live.

Some Very Funny Books

JANE: Although humorous Science Fiction and Fantasy was certainly around long before, there seemed to be a boom in the 1980’s.  Oddly enough, there was also a boom in Horror around the same time.  Probably something in the psychological landscape of the time.

ALAN: Ah yes. All those hilarious novels by Stephen King. I remember them well.

JANE: Smart aleck!

Anyhow, when I think back, two authors immediately spring to mind: Piers Anthony and Robert Lynn Asprin.  The first works in their most popular series –Anthony’s “Xanth”  and Asprin’s “Myth Adventures” –  appeared in the late 1970’s, but by the 1980’s both series were going strong.

ALAN: I quite enjoyed the early Xanth novels but I felt the series deteriorated in quality as it progressed. Anthony also wrote a very funny fix-up novel called Prostho Plus which was all about the adventures of an intergalactic dentist. As someone with a dentist phobia, I found it both amusing and squirmy!

JANE: I agree with you about Xanth.  I thought A Spell for Chameleon was a very thoughtful look at the different and contradictory roles a woman is expected to play in the course of her life.  I very much enjoyed The Source of Magic and Castle Roogna.  However, by Centaur Isle, I felt the puns were coming to dominate the story – the forcing the story to serve the joke, an element you mentioned last week as bothering you as a weakening trait in so much humorous fiction.

I did find that the Xanth stories that focused on non-human characters held my attention longer.  I recall liking Ogre, Ogre and I thought Night Mare was very interesting.

ALAN: I also enjoyed Asprin’s early “Myth Adventure” novels, but I felt that he blotted his copy book with Little Myth Marker which was simply a re-telling of Damon Runyon’s Little Miss Marker. I stopped reading Asprin’s books after that.

JANE:  I loved the early “Myth Adventure” books.  One element that kept me reading was that beneath the puns was a very solid coming of age story that continued into a story about coming to terms with changing relationships and changing roles in life.  However, I agree that eventually Asprin lost his sense of where the heart of the stories rested.

Did I ever tell you I interviewed Bob Asprin back in 1992?

ALAN: No – I didn’t know that. Tell me more!

JANE: I’d met Bob at Magnum Opus Con in South Carolina.  (That’s where I met David Weber, too. That convention has a lot to answer for.  That meeting directly led to Roger asking Bob to be one of the contributors to Forever After, a humorous novel in four parts, to which I also contributed a section.)

The first time we met, we ended up going to the airport at the same time.  Bob came into my concourse with me and, while he signed books for my sister –  (I never got him to sign one for me, something I regret), – I asked him some questions about writing.  His answers were so interesting that I queried one of the academic SF publications to see if they wanted an article.  They said “yes,” and the next year I taped an interview.  (The article came out in Extrapolation, November 1993.)

ALAN: Is it available on-line anywhere? I wouldn’t mind reading that.

JANE: I don’t know…  Maybe one of our readers would.

Anyhow, Bob talked a lot about how the interplay of business and writing had influenced his approach to what he did.  He started as an editor of the seminal “Thieves World” anthology series – the one that pretty much gave birth to the entire “shared world” anthology concept.  On the strength of that, he was able to sell his  original fiction.  He saw himself as an entertainer first and writing as only one of the ways he entertained.

Bob also indicated that  there was a lot of insecurity behind his “funny” – not an uncommon trait in comedians.

ALAN: Indeed. Witness Stephen Fry’s battles with depression that have brought him more than once to the brink of suicide. And yet Stephen Fry is one of the funniest men on television…

JANE: I had no idea about Stephen Fry, but I agree with you about his talent.  I am especially fond of his portrayal of Jeeves.

Anyhow, I remember Bob Asprin telling Roger how he’d just gotten a huge advance for a novel.  I forget the amount, but it was pretty impressive.  He said, “But I don’t know how to write a $X00,000 novel.”  Roger responded with typical gentle wisdom.  “They don’t want you to do something other than what you’re already doing.  They simply have realized what your work is worth in the market.”

But I have wondered if success is what ultimately undid him.

ALAN: It must have been very stressful for him, so I imagine there’s more than a grain of truth in your speculation.

JANE: I listened to those tapes again when I saw what direction we were going in our chat.  I’d just read your comment about “hilarious novels by Stephen King” so you can imagine my shock when Bob suddenly started talking about how close horror and humor really were, paraphrasing Stephen King saying that handled wrong horror could become humorous and humor a source of horror.

ALAN: Oh indeed. They are often two sides of the same coin. The Frankenstein story can be quite shuddersome when taken seriously and yet Mel Brooks managed to turn it into one of the funniest films I’ve ever seen when he made Young Frankenstein. It’s really only a matter of emphasis.

JANE: Yes…  I’ve always thought Hamlet has great room for humor.  I’ve even written a story…

Going back to Piers Anthony, again I wonder if success weakened Xanth.  When I read the entry on him in Supernatural Fiction Writers: Contemporary Fantasy and Horror, the article mentioned that Anthony actively solicited reader feedback for the series, up to and including plot ideas and puns, then incorporated the material into the series.  The writer of the article seemed to think this gave the series a certain “freshness,” but I think it could lead to twisting of the plot to make a joke work.

ALAN: Absolutely! I found no freshness in these books. I did attempt to read some of the later Xanth novels and Piers Anthony would often have an introduction or afterword commenting about the reader input. But somehow the stories always seemed stale and forced to me. It was almost as if he was going through a semi-mechanical process to generate the book, with only half his mind on what he was doing. Too many silly jokes and not nearly enough story.

JANE: This brings me back to what I said last week at the end of our discussion of Terry Pratchett.  To me, Pratchett never seems to write from anything but the heart – even when that means his book isn’t going to be as “funny” as his readers might expect.  Some of my favorites – Small Gods, Nightwatch and Hogfather – are often not funny at all…  But they are very wise and the wisdom blossoms forth from the humor.

ALAN: That’s why he’s so successful at what he does. And, of course, now that we’ve exposed his secret to the world, anyone can just follow the formula and be as successful as Pterry! Oh, if only it really was that easy…

JANE: Easy… Yeah.  Right.  The man is an amazing writer.

Now, mostly thanks to me, this has gotten a bit long.  Perhaps next time we could spin through some other aspects of SF/F humor.

The Other Great Doorway

Last week we chatted a bit about the books that showed us that SF/F had something to offer that other genres did not.  This past weekend, when Jim and my friends Sue and Hilary Estell came over, we found ourselves extending the discussion to include television programs.

Heading Toward the Final Frontier

Although most of these – at least for me – did not have the idea-jolting impact I found in books, they did offer a visual and auditory addition to the story experience that made them compelling in their own unique ways.

Sue, Jim, and I are all of an age that “classic” Star Trek captured our imaginations.  Jim watched it during its original release when he was in high school.  Sue caught it in re-runs when she was in college.  I didn’t catch Star Trek until re-runs and those very sporadically – especially at first.  In fact, for the longest time, I thought there was one episode only, “The Menagerie,” because that was the one I’d see in passing, usually when being chased outside to play on some summer afternoon.

My parents weren’t into having kids watch TV.  Except for the Sunday evening ritual of Wild Kingdom and The Wonderful World of Disney, I don’t remember watching much TV until was about twelve and started babysitting for other people.  Then, whether with the kids I was babysitting (many of whom seemed glued to televisions) or after the kids had gone to bed, I caught up on my TV viewing.

That’s when I discovered that the show with the “butt-heads,” as we had dubbed the aliens in “The Menagerie,” actually had a whole lot of episodes. I also learned that the “butt-head” story, which had always confused me, had done so because it was a two-part story.  Catching it in fragments, out of order, had created a very surreal viewing experience.

After that, although I never became a “Trekkie,” I was certainly hooked.  I watched every episode more than once or twice or three times.  I read  the James Blish short stories based on the episodes.  Later, at the Smithsonian of all places, I bought a boxed set of the first four “Star Log” stories by Alan Dean Foster.  These were based on the animated Star Trek, which I’d never seen, so they were very exciting – all new Star Trek.  Later, I picked up others in the series.

These were the days before media tie-in novels cluttered bookstore shelves.  Even when tie-ins started appearing, there were only a few that caught my imagination.  The New Voyages collection had some good stories, as I recall, but most of the original novels were missing some intangible quality I found on the screen.  (Later I’d find a couple really good ones, but going into that topic could be its own Wandering!)

I owned two non-fiction Star Trek books –  The World of Star Trek and The Making of Star Trek – but, although I read these through repeatedly, they mostly served to confirm me in a preference that continues to this day.  Even if I love a show, I don’t care about the actors or how special effects were designed.  Although I enjoyed a few anecdotes, especially those about how the set design people created a starship on a shoestring budget, mostly I didn’t want the fourth wall broken – and I still don’t.  Let me keep my illusions and believe that , on some deep level, it’s all real.

I guess because of my willingness to believe the Star Trek universe was “real,” I puzzled over little unexplained details.  Initially, I watched Star Trek on a black and white television.  (For that reason, the joke about “red shirts” meant nothing to me the first time I heard it.)  When I saw the show in color, I tried to work out what each different color of uniform shirt indicated.  (And wondered why engineering and security apparently wore the same color.)  I also wondered what the different lengths of the braid on the cuffs meant.  Remember, these were the days before VCRs or the ability to “pause” and study a screen.  I had to gather my information on the fly!

Stardates were a particular puzzle.  I kept a notepad with the dates mentioned in a given episode, then tried to figure out the order in which the different stories happened.  You can imagine my disappointment when I realized these dates were tossed out at random and were not an indication of continuity.

All of this was great fun and, I think, contributed to my appreciation of the little details that can make or break a story world.

Star Trek was certainly my favorite SF TV show, but those late night babysitting gigs exposed me to a lot I hadn’t caught the first time around.  Mission: Impossible was a favorite (although I was a bit startled to see Spock without his ears and characteristic haircut).  I liked The Six Million Dollar Man, but never got into The Bionic Woman – especially after they introduced the stupid dog.  I could stretch my credulity to believe that a school teacher might get the bionic add-ons, — especially with the threat her very expensive boyfriend might go AWOL if she wasn’t saved –  but a dog?  A kid?

I watched other shows occasionally, but usually those with continuing casts, rather than anthology series like The Twilight Zone.

Sue Estell was a much more voracious viewer.  I asked her what stories grabbed hold of her imagination.  After noting that she couldn’t leave out the impact of the Star Wars movies, she went on to say that she had continued to follow the various Star Trek incarnations, liking Next Generation quite a bit, and finding something to value in most of the others. She then noted a range of programs, stretching to the present day: “The Outer Limits and Twilight Zone, Lost in Space, Time Tunnel, Land of the Giants, Battlestar Galactica (both the laughable old one and the edgier new one), V, SeaQuest, Babylon 5, Quantum Leap, StarGate SG1 and Atlantis (I did NOT like StarGate: Universe), Farscape, and more.  I watched just about anything on the SciFi channel in past years (before their programming managers went mad and classified wrestling as SciFi), except for The X-Files, which never drew me in.”

Sue’s “twenty-something” daughter, Hilary, has a viewing history that overlaps her mom’s, then takes off in new directions: “I think Star Trek all around was a starter in sci fi for me too, simply because Mom watched it a lot when I was little and it’s the kind of show I grew up knowing about. I especially remember the original Trek and Next Generation. I didn’t sit down to watch shows with Mom though until later, when I saw Farscape and Stargate SG-1, both of which I really, really enjoyed. Although Stargate started before Farscape, I know I only started watching it in season 3, so I’m pretty sure Farscape was The One that really started everything. (Show-wise at least. I’m in agreement with Mom about the impact Star Wars had on me for watching sci-fi/fantasy). I also watched about two seasons of Stargate Atlantis before losing interest, and then got into Firefly late to the game after I saw reruns on the Sci Fi channel. My most recent choice isn’t actually on the tv really; it’s a web-series called The Guild, which is about 6 gamers trying to cope with real life.”

As for me, when I went to college, my TV viewing pretty much ended for four years, as neither I nor my roommates had televisions.  The one exception was The Muppet Show, which my then boyfriend’s roommates watched with great fidelity.  Even after my undergrad years, when I moved out of the dorms and had a little TV, I didn’t get back into watching in a big way.  However, I did watch some “after school” animated programs.

These were the days when SF/Fantasy was becoming more prevalent, even in the afternoon TV shows.  I really liked Thundercats, at least for the first season.  After it became a hit, characters and stories were altered to provide more merchandizing opportunities.  Sigh…  He Man and the Masters of the Universe and Jayce and the Wheeled Warriors were fun, too, although not up to the standard of Thundercats

When I finished grad school and moved to Lynchburg, Virginia, to teach at Lynchburg College, I had cable for the first time in my adult life.  However, even cable was not enough to draw me back into regular television watching.  I remember liking some of Quantum Leap, but I was too busy (this was when I was both teaching college for the first time and trying to break into selling fiction) to spend time watching much television.  Gaming was my chosen break and stress reliever, followed by – thanks to Steve Hogge,  a young man with whom I gamed, and southern fan Diana Bringardner – my first opportunity to watch more than the occasional bit of anime.  (That is another topic, one I touched on in the WW for 3-10-10, “Animated Enthusiasm.”)  These days, anime remains my main viewing choice.

Clearly, visual media is the other great doorway into SF/F.  Nor is there a dividing line between media fans and reading fans.  Both the Estells are voracious readers.  (That’s how I met them.)

What television programs were your favorites?  Which ones can you forgive for their flaws because they showed you places that made you dream richer dreams?  I haven’t really gone into movies here (so many stories, so little time), but feel free to include them!