Jamie Todd Rubin's Blog, page 380

So this guy walks into a door…

It sounds like the beginning of a joke, I know.  But what it is, in fact, is the pathetic tale of the damage I did to myself while in Newport News, Virginia this weekend.  This is a dangerous tale to tell, so before I proceed, I should warn you: make sure you have no food in your mouth.  Make sure you aren't drinking anything that you may spit all over your computer/iPhone/iPad/Blackberry/Droid screen. And when you laugh, be kind, this could have been you.

So I had just woken up from a short nap after a day of walking the streets of Yorktown, VA.  Kelly and Zach had gone down to the hotel swimming pool and I thought I'd join them.  I got into my swimsuit, and headed downstairs.  The pool at the Residence Inn was an indoor pool.  I followed the signs down the hallway until a saw a sign pointing left toward the pool.  Sure enough, there was an adjoining hallway that led to the pool room.  At least, it looked like an adjoining hallway.

When I am walking by myself, I don't dawdle.  I walk briskly.  I turned that corner at full speed and looked down the far end of the hallway toward the pool when all off the sudden, my entire body came to a shattering stop.  I went nose-first into a virtually invisible glass door.

Detour: this isn't the first time I've damaged my nose in some embarrassing manner.  I broke it once before.  It was just after I moved from Warwick, Rhode Island to Los Angeles, California.  I was in 6th grade, and I had yet to make a new friend.  My world had been turned upside down.  Instead of the kids going around calling everything wicked-cool and wicked-decent and wicked-awesome, everyone was saying "rad".  What the hell was "rad?"  (And I admit, I thought they were saying "rag".)  Well, there were some kids playing soccer and they were doing this wicked-awesome rad stunt whereby they leapt into the air, kicked the soccer ball over their shoulder–essentially behind them–and landed gracefully on their backs.  So I thought I'd give it a try.  I was wearing steal-toed boots at the time and I imagined that would add to the force with which I would send the ball into the net. I was right about the force.  If only my aim were true.  I sent that soccer ball right back into my face, my nose made an audible crack and I lay there stunned on the ground.  So much so that by the time my sense came back, days had passed and whatever damage had been done to my nose was now permanent and not worth reporting. The humiliation was painful enough.

When I hit that glass, my nose made an audible crack and my whole body shuddered.  I bounced off the glass and back into the intersecting hallway, grasping at my nose in pain. (The pain actually radiated into my cheekbones.)  But the very first thing I did was look around to see if anyone saw what I'd done.  I even looked to see if there was a closed circuit camera in the vicinity.  There was no one around to laugh at me except the door and I swear I heard that glass door snicker.

When I got to the pool, still stunned, Kelly could tell almost instantly that all was not well in Denmark.  (My nose is nicknamed Denmark.)  For one thing, it was bleeding.  For another, it had already swelled up.

48 hours later, it's not as bad as it first seemed.  I doubt I broke it a second time.  It hurts a little when I sneeze or rub my eyes, but I think it looks like it is healing. So perhaps it is a case of an injured pride more than anything else.  I just keep picturing myself flying around that corner and–BLAM!  If I had seen someone else do that, I would have been on the floor, helpless with laughter. Holding a gun to my head would have been no use.  I still would have laughed.

We look for excuses.  In hotels, people are always cleaning things.  That had to be some of the cleanest glass ever touched by Windex and a dust rag.  It was invisible.  One might argue that perhaps it should have been marked in some way to indicate that it was in face, a glass door.  I suppose the hotel management, if questioned on the matter, would say that the door handle was probably the giveaway.

I've never been particularly observant of what is going on around me and this just proves that, I suppose.  Still, how that glass didn't manage to shatter around me or at the very least, crack slightly in acknowledgement of my meteoric impact somehow surprises me.  I imagine if I had gently lobbed a baseball at the glass, it would have shattered instantly.  But run into it top speed with the entire weight of my body concentrated at the tip of my nose–and nothing.

I'm reminded for some reason of that old Fruit Loops commercial slogan, "Follow your nose…"

Take heed.  This could one day happen to you too.

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Science Fiction Age: Volume 2, Issue 3 (March 1994)

Each issue of Science Fiction Age presented a good mix of fiction, not just genre (fantasy, science fiction), but types too (humor, horror).  This issue is no exception, but the most remarkable thing to me containted in the March 1994 issue is the precience of Scott Edelman's editorial.  Titled, "We must leave our children the best of science fiction futures" it is, in essence, an open letter to Scott's son and one paragraph of this essay struck me as particularly prophetic:

My son will have all the information he could ever want at his fingertips, whenever he wants it.  He will carry an electronic Library of Alexandria in his pocket.  He will be able to stay in constant communication with all the world, and sift at will through all the globe's wisdom.  His world will be smaller than mine.

In this brief paragraph probably written in late 1993, Scott captures the world nearly twenty years later.  His "electronic Library of Alexandria" might be wikipedia.  Sifting at will through all the globe's wisdom is a fairly good description of a Google search (if you factor out all of the world's idocy from the search results). With minimal alteration, this paragraph could be an ad for an iPhone or iPad.  What I find most ironic is that while Scott wished this for his son, he got to see it happen, too.  Today, if Scott is at a convention, you will find him tweeting about what people are saying on a panel (sometimes while he is on that very panel).  He is in constant communication with the world, spreading his dreams out across the global network.  You'd almost think he had a time machine, back when he wrote that paragraph.

It's always amusing to go through science fiction book reviews from 17 years ago.  In this issue Connie Hirsch reviews a book by first time novelist Jonathan Lethem called Gun, With Occasional Music.  More disturbing was the science discussion on "a permanent manned U.S. space station is an idea whose time has finally come" between Joe Haldeman, Doug Beason and Geoffrey A. Landis.  While such a space station in now nearly complete (17  years after this discussion), there was this prophetic exchange between Beason and Haldeman:

BEASON: [referring to the space shuttle] One of these days we're going to have another explosion.

HALDEMAN: Doug, the shuttle is dangerous and obsolete and is going to be out of the equation soon.   One more disaster and American's are going to lose heart.

Of course, nearly 8 years later, the shuttle Columbia was destroyed on reentry and while flights eventually continued, the space program hasn't had the same energy since.

It was a pleasure to read Jack Williamson's essay on the birth of science fiction.  It was also sad.  Jack is no longer around and the essay serves as a reminder of not only all that science fiction has gained, but all that it has lost.

There were 6 pieces of fiction in this issue, of quite varying lengths.  The issue opened with Richard Parks "Simple Souls", a story not unlike Daniel Keyes "Flowers for Algernon" about a mentally challenged boy and the experimental procedure he has to enhance his mental abilities.  The story is a good example of writing from a challenging view point, and I came away from it wondering who it was that was really "challenged", the boy, or his doctors.  His sympathetic doctor, Susan Curruther's was not only reminscent of Asimov's Susan Calvin (coincidence?) but also of another Asimov character, the nurse Edith Fellowes in "The Ugly Little Boy".

If there was a theme in the stories for this issue, it seemed to center around time.  Three of the stories touched on this theme, beginning with "The River's Time" by Mark. W. Tiedemann.  The story centers around a world on which nine rivers dominate the lives of the people.  A group of siblings travel these rivers on a barge to make their living.  To replace crew (a brother who left for the stars, for instance) they pick up "Returnist" woman–the Returnists being a group of people who shunn technology and machinery and want to go back to simpler ways.  The story is a moving one, remincent of both Twain's "Life on the Mississippi" and Phillip Jose Farmer's, To Your Scattered Bodies Go.  The time element in this story centers around absences.  People get the "wanderlust" and head for the stars and are not heard from again, or return only after long periods of time.  It is these absences that influence the lives of the characters throughout the course of the narrative.

In "Survivors" by Steven Popkes, a 20,000 year old simulacrum presents itself to a "surivor" warning him that there are still parts of the planet that are poisonous, even all these millenia later.

The last of the time-themed stories, "Taken For a Ride" by Brian Stableford, is a time-travel story dealing with the potential of future information and the paradoxes that arise out of it.  Most notible about the story was the twist at the end, reminiscent of the ending of Robert Silverberg's end-all-be-all of time travel novels, Up the Line.

"Obituary" by Jeffrey G. Liss was an interesting story, the ending of which I simply didn't get.  I didn't connect it back to the title of the story and the opening paragraphs, and this is certainly my failure as a reader and not Liss's as a writer.

Finally, there was the humour fantasy piece, "Sherlock the Barbarian" by David Garnett.  I like that Science Fiction Age includes humour stories from time-to-time and I think this one worked well on many levels.  It was clearly poking fun, not only at the Sherlock Holmes genre, but at logic, reason and inference itself.  This is brought to bear in a rather remarkable  way toward the very end of the story (no spoilers here, you'll have to read it) when you find that your own assumptions about the narrator of the story brought into question.

The issue included an essay by Ben Bova on science fiction illustrator Vincent Di Fate, which provided some interesting insight into the illustration process for a magazine like ANALOG, to say nothing of some of the gorgeous illustrations that Di Fate has produced.

It's always a pleasure to read these magazines.  I hope to keep better to schedule for the next one, which should appear about November 1.  In the meantime, all of the re-reads I have done so far have been compiled together here for anyone interested.

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Story Sale: "Take One for the Road" to ANALOG

I found out earlier today that I sold my story "Take One for the Road" to ANALOG.  This is my 3rd professional sale, and my first to one of the "big three" and it has made this an incredibly exciting day.  I feel ill-equipped to describe just how thrilled I am to have a story of mine appear in ANALOG.  I always imagined it in the way that a person dreams of winning the lottery, but I'd take this story sale over the lottery any day.

For those following along on Twitter and/or Facebook, "Take One for the Road" is the 4th story that I wrote this year.

At this point, I don't know when the story will be appearing, but it will likely be sometime in 2011.  Once I find out, I will, of course, post it here.

I'm still in a kind of hazy, endorphine-rich state of ecstasy over all of this.  MY STORY IS GOING TO BE IN ANALOG!  You know whose stories appear in ANALOG?  Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke, and more recently folks like Michael A. Burstein, Allen Steele, Joe Haldeman and Robert J. Sawyer.  This is just a little too unreal at this point, and I keep thinking I am going to wake up and this is all going to be a dream.

After the story appears, I'll post a little about its genesis.  Until then, man oh man, has this refueled my tanks.  I'm working on story #6 and now hope to have that completed in the next couple of weeks.  Story #7 is already partially written and I hope to have that done before the end of October.

I love being a science fiction writer!

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Kindle "samples" save money!

I've recently discovered another bonus of the Kindle–which I have been using now for well over a year: samples!  Prior to having a Kindle, my book-buying behavior followed 2 possible pathways:

Rush off to bookstore, browse for something that piqued my interest, and purchase on the hopes that I would like it.  I rarely had the time to read the first few pages, let alone the first chapter in the bookstore.
Order it online (usually via Amazon) and read it when it arrived.

In both cases, I...

NaNo Novel

Last night, I decided which story I would tell in my second attempt at writing a novel.  I was debating between two ideas: the first is a kind of period piece set in the early 1970s; the second is a time travel story.  I'm super-excited about the second idea, but the amount of research it will take is enormous and I don't feel like I have the time for that.  I need to learn how to write a novel and so I'm sticking with the first idea–which is the idea I had come up with when finishing...

Colonel Roosevelt

I just found out today that on November 23, the third book in Edmund Morris' biographical trilogy on Theodore Roosevelt, Colonel Roosevelt,  is being released. I read the first book, The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt in December 2001, and read the second book, Theodore Rex in February 2002. Both books were extraordinarily well-written and I have been awaiting the third ever since finishing the second. I have pre-ordered the Kindle edition of the book. I guess my wait will soon be over.

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The upcoming novel

I have been thinking a lot about this in preparation for my second attempt at writing my first novel:

which is supposed to illustrate the story arc for a novel.  Fantasy novelist David B. Coe has a lot to say on this subject here.  When I write short stories, I generally don't worry about the arc so much because it seems to come more natural.  After all, you're dealing with a much smaller and generally more specific scope so that the arc is easier to define.  Not so with novels, at least for m...

Review: Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (5-stars)

This is one of the most remarkable novels of any kind that I have ever read, and a truly stunning piece of time-travel/historical/science fiction.

I started reading Doomsday Book because I'd read Connie Willis's Blackout earlier in this year and was anxiously awaiting All Clear. I knew that DOOMSDAY BOOK was a Hugo and Nebula winning and I knew that Connie Willis was an outstanding writer, so I figured the book was going to be a good one.

It was a remarkably good one. I've come across very few ...

Writers live for the mail

Kelly finds it amusing that the first thing I do upon arriving home from work is rush off to the mailbox to check for any mail.  I've tried to explain to her that writers live for the mail, but I'm not quite sure she gets it.

Granted, there aren't a whole lot of science fiction and fantasy markets these days that don't take electronic submissions.  But so what?  We live for mail regardless of its delivery mechanism.  At this very moment, I have 3 stories out for submission.  One of those...

My desk, annotated

Procrastinating just slightly before I wrote tonight, I cleaned my desk.  Here is the annotated results (click on the image for a larger view).  And despite the procrastination, I managed to get in 550 words on the current work-in-progress, my 6th story of the year.