Steven R. Boyett's Blog, page 9

Threefer

Last year I performed at Litcrawl, the city-wide event that closes San Francisco's massive, week-long Litquake festival of readings, panels, and book-related events. It was one of the best readings I've ever given, in front of one of the best crowds I've ever had.

Naturally I'm stoked that this year Ive been asked to do my little tap dance during Litquake's opening weekend. I'll be performing as part of The Fantastic Surrounds Us, a fantasy & science fiction-oriented segment of the "Off the Richter Scale" series that opens Litquake.

Litquake/Off the Richter Scale

Sunday, Oct. 7 - 2:00 - 3:00 PM

Variety Children's Hospital Preview Room Theater

582 Market Street, San Francisco (map)

On Thursday, October 10, I'll be reading in the East San Francisco Bay city of Benicia as part of Straitquake, a Litquake-affiliated event. This will be a longer performance than at Litquake.

Straitquake (Benicia Litquake Reading)

Thursday, Oct. 10, 7:00 - 9:00 PM

Bookshop Benicia

636 First Street, Benicia, CA (map)

And finally, I am totally stoked to announce that I"m DJing the Litquake closing party after Litcrawl on Sunday, October 14.  The party is private from 10 to midnight, but wide open after that. Much funk will be served.

Litquake Closing Party (DJ gig)

Sunday, Oct. 14, 2012

10:00 PM - 12:00 AM (private)

12:00 AM - Closing (open)

The Blue Macaw

2565 Mission St., San Francisco (map)

I will probably record all the performances. Video of the readings will be posted here, and audio of the DJ gig might end up on Groovelectric, depending on how much new material I use (and whether or not I suck).

Watch the Revolution Without Me

I'm getting a ton of email about the new tv show Revolution, asking if it is based on my 1983 novel Ariel, and if I had any involvement with the show. I haven't watched the show and I'm not likely to.

The answer to the latter question is, no, I had nothing to do with the show. The answer to the former question is that I think it is a ripoff of a different novel that seems to be largely a ripoff of Ariel. I'll leave the issue of whether you can ripoff by proxy for others to debate.

Further details would require a very lengthy post that I would probably regret writing, so this is all I'm gonna say about this for now.

Mortality Bridge: Now More Hell Per Dollar!

Thanks in part to the influence of Cory Doctorow's reach on BoingBoing, and to the responsiveness of the good folks at e-Reads, the price of the trade paperback (large-format softcover, if you will) of Mortality Bridge is now $19.95.

As someone who winced whenever he saw the original $23.95 price, I can tell you that I am relieved and happy about this. Sure, I make less money per sale. But given this more reasonable price, I will probably sell more copies.

Would I rather sell more books for less money? You bet. If I had great business acumen, I doubt I'd have picked writing as a profession. The truth is, writers want to be read, sometimes unpragmatically so. Otherwise I'd just have one copy available and I'd price it at $100,000, and then wait and hope I score that sale. Sure, the odds aren't good -- but I just need one!

Fortunately for both of us, that ain't the case, and you can get the very handsome trade paperback here for the New! Low! Price! of $19.95! operators are standing by call by midnight tonight get your free ginsu knives never needs winding lasts all month on a single charge minty fresh ZOMG whAt r U wtNg 4!

Drafty in Here

About 75% of what got tossed.

Nothing makes me feel like one of those reality-show rat-warren hoarders more than confronting the things I've hauled from garage to garage for years with some notion that Someday I Will Need These. I've been moving the same set of paper-marbling combs for 15 years, ferchrissake, entirely because they're such a pain in the ass to make.

Among the things that have been taking a Garage Tour of America are manuscript drafts. I tend to keep the significant drafts & marked revisions of novel manuscripts. I tell myself they're an important map of My Process. But now that I'm playing Apartment Tetris with all this stuff, I'm thinking, you know, I don't really see any universities begging for my papers so that PhD theses can be mined for posterity.

Mortality Bridge, for example. I probably revised it 40 or 50 times. I kept the major revisions, and I had at least 12 incarnations of the thing here. We're talking 6600 sheets of paper. Carry enough of those up and down stairs and you'll get to where you don't care if it's a signed first edition of the Old Testament -- it's outta here. And I'm not exactly First Folio Shakespeare; no one's gonna bid on V3.1 of The Gnole on eBay.

So I decided to throw out my intermediate-draft manuscripts and keep only firsts and finals. Early versions of the continuation of The Architect of Sleep? Gone. The second draft of Ariel? History.

The survivors

I looked at those about-to-be-tossed drafts on my couch (there were even more than in the picture) and thought about the time and effort they embodied. Four of those novels were never published.

I also thought about how many reviews I'd read, how many emails I'd gotten, that mentioned how I don't write very much, or had stopped entirely for 25 years, or whatever bullshit makes the rounds until it becomes irrevertible. It's enough to make you eat a bottle of tequila.

At the end of the day, though, what really matters is where those drafts led to.  All the blind alleys, deleted scenes, rephrasings, tightening, clarity, rhythm, proofreading -- they're the dirt left behind as you dig your way to that final draft. Understanding that made it easier to throw it all away.

And now it truly may be said that Boyett recycles his stories.

Corybantic

Cory & Stewart Brand, moments before returning to the mothership

Last night I went to hear Cory Doctorow lecture on "The Coming Civil War Over General-Purpose Computing,"  for Stewart Brand's The Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. I met Cory in 2010 at World Science Fiction Convention in Montreal, and I just wanted to box him up and take him home. We were on a panel together, and I found Cory intimidatingly knowledgeable and articulate.

I was familiar with Cory's work on issues of intellectual property, privacy, and individual rights in the 21st Century. I'd been thinking along similar lines for a few years, and when I ran across Cory and Lawrence Lessig I saw that here were people who had not only cogently articulated ideas I'd been messing with, they had become movers & shakers in those areas.

I hadn't read any of Cory's fiction, and after meeting him I read a bunch.  I've found it as engaging as Cory himself. His wonderfully subversive YA novel Little Brother is an Anarchist Cookbook for young teens.

The big surprise for me was Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves TownSomeone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town. It's a flat-out, unapologetic magical-realist techno-activist science-fiction fantasy. (Whew.) It's dark, and it's loaded with exactly the kind of urban grit detail a book like this needs to stay grounded. It's also the most lyrically written thing I've read by Cory, with a sustained mood and poetic tone that make it one of my favorite novels I've read in the last few years.

I'm pretty sure it's also Cory's least commercially successful novel. It doesn't explain itself, it demands that you accept some baldly stated impossibilities, and it can't possibly be catering to the nuts & bolts technophile audience who usually gobble Cory's work like crack-filled bonbons. But for me it has the urgent immediacy of a book its author simply had to write, a "damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" insistence.

I tend to like artists' "B" sides. Chances they take, things they knock out with no notion where they're going or if they'll even sell, much less make money. You can just feel the artist not playing it safe. (Gene Wolfe's Latro books are like that for me -- I'd bet they are among his least-selling novels, but they're by far is most evocative and interesting. For me, anyhow.)

I was surprised to learn that last year was Cory's first time at Burning Man. I was not surprised to learn that he is going again this year. And I'm delighted to learn that by doing so, he will be blowing off WorldCon for the first time in 18 years. The Playa will do that to you. And while I think Cory has a lot to offer WorldCon, I think Burning Man has a lot to offer Cory.

I would never say this to Cory directly, for fear of looking like a squeeing fanboy, but he is one of my heroes. His stances on the sham that is current intellectual property law, the fundamental humanism that makes him a revolutionary at heart, and his unwavering dedication to telling the world when the emperor has no digital clothes -- they're all traits of someone fighting the Good Fight.

Great Strides

Yesterday marked the 43rd anniversary of the first human step upon another world. I remember it vividly. It's hard to convey now the extent to which much of the world was caught up in the Apollo program at the time. (And it would be hard to go back to that time and make people believe how little has been accomplished in manned space exploration since.)

Though the Apollo program was conceived as an American propaganda machine, the vision gradually became reshaped in the public consciousness, so that Apollo 11's historic firsts were celebrated as a unique and inspiring human accomplishment.

Some years back I made up this image in an attempt to express the breadth of that accomplishment. The left side is a picture of the earliest known hominid footprint, from Laetoli in Tanzania. (At least, it was the oldest known at the time I made the image. It may have been superseded since.) It's 3.7 million years old.

On the right, of course, is Neil Armstrong's iconic footprint on the moon from July 1969 -- a footprint that's still there, and that might still be there 3.7 million years from now.

Taken together, they represent a stride that encompasses all of human development. (I know it can be argued that the Laetoli footprint is from a line that died out, but we're talking symbols here, okay?)

These days it's pretty easy to look at news headlines and despair. For all of our ability, we can be a pretty wretched species sometimes. But I like to look at this image and realize what we can accomplish when we put our (so far) unique minds to it, and take pride in our achievements while being grateful for our unbelievable luck. (One example of our great good fortune, out of thousands: We've had time to evolve and develop a civilization between major catastrophic collision events. Better luck is if we have time for that civilization to get to a point where it can get us off the planet, avert such a catastrophe, or both. Assuming, of course, that it doesn't get too smart for its own good and wipe itself out in any number of ingenious ways.)

Great strides.

Reading @ The Rellik

The Benicia Literary Arts Organization very kindly asked if I would read at their second public reading at The Rellik Tavern in Benicia. They've only done poetry so far and wanted to see how it would work if they incorporated fiction into the program.

It's weird, but I was nervous because it was a home-town crowd. For some reason I can go into San Francisco, or to a convention, and do my dog & pony show in front of a bunch of strangers just fine. (Well, not completely fine -- I always get a kind of racehorse-at-the-gate nervousness before any performance.) But where I live? Whole nother ball game, for some reason.

Luckily, I've bombed at The Rellik before, as a DJ, so if I sucked, I wouldn't be on unfamiliar ground.

I read two short pieces. I videotaped (I always pause before I type that -- there's no tape anymore, but what else do you call it?) both, but there was so much background noise on the first that I don't want to put it up.

I'm really happy with how the second one, "I'm Sorry to Have to Tell You This," turned out. There's audio of it on my media page, but I much prefer the video. It was the best performance of the story I've done, and the audience was great.

Big thanks to the BLA, and to Lois Requist, Benicia's new Poet Laureat, for asking me to read.

Channel Changer (pt. 2)

(Continuing my look at the half-dozen or so tv shows I watch, and why I watch them.)

Mad Men

Like Breaking Bad, I'd heard about Mad Men for a while before I watched it. It's a great show about a Madison Avenue advertising company, people said.

I worked in advertising for about six years, as a temp and then full-time, mostly at a boutique agency in Pasadena. I was a proofreader and a copywriter. I grew to hate that job possibly more than any job I ever had, which is why I avoided Mad Men at first. The very thought made my stomach grumble.

But like any work of art of any depth, Mad Men isn't really about its subject matter. It's about advertising, all right, and the writers & researchers have definitely done their homework. I clearly remember some of the campaigns they reference (Heinz baked beans, Volkswagen, Right Guard, the Kodak Carousel). And the maneuvering to get and keep accounts (adjusted for dramatic inflation) feels pretty authentic.

The show's production values also are terrific. Set dressing is practically a character all by itself. Again, the research here seems thorough, accurate, and authentic. The show conjures 1960 through the mid-60s almost eerily. I've gotten uncomfortable watching sometimes because the show's often awkward and tense office parties so closely match my memories of my parents' similar parties (my father was a VP at Eastern Air Lines & my mom was an executive secretary at EAL).

Period dramas often get the accessories right but the fundamentals wrong. Actors wear authentic clothes but just don't act or talk the way people did; they're still contemporary. Mad Men gets it right across the board.

And this gets me to what Mad Men is really about. I think it wants to show us how different the world was 50 years ago. How people treated themselves, women's near-subjugation, men's role-confinement, the way they looked at the future -- these aren't subtle differences, they're profound. It's a depiction of a generation. I'm looking at my parents here, but I'm not seeing them from outside. They aren't old people with dated notions and unrelatable values. With Mad Men I've been moving along with them, feeling what they feel in all its glorious unexamined contradiction. In Mad Men, I am my parents. I'm shown who they were as people, in the context of their time, as a part of the expanding and ultimately diminishing wave front that is a generation. I'm seeing how the world got away from them, how my generation usurped them, how the next will usurp me.

I think that's a brilliant accomplishment.

Mad Men accomplishes this through some amazing character development. The writing is great, but what makes it stand out is that it's often opaque. Sometimes you aren't sure why a character has done something. You get the feeling the character doesn't know, either. Yet it fits. In a show about people who create images intended to manipulate, meaningful symbols abound. Yet, like advertising, they often exist iconically, without explanation and sometimes without context, yet never without meaning -- even if the meaning isn't readily apparent. I think that takes courage, and confidence, and trust.

Channel Changer

I used to be one of those people who took obnoxious snobby pride in the fact that he didn't watch television. For the longest time I didn't even own one.

That hasn't been true for a while now. And not only will I not offer up my former excuse ("The worst book is better than the best television show"), I'll flatly contradict it. There's stuff on tv now that is friggin amazing. The last few years have seen some of the best tv shows ever.

I'm not going to make a case for living on your ass and devouring shows. I like to think that no one on his deathbed looks back on his life as the lights are dimming and thinks, "I sure watched me some great tee vee!" But, y'know, I talk about books & writing a lot here, and sometimes about movies, and it's just stupid to disregard a medium in which really good things are happening. Being a DJ has taught me that no medium is by its nature good or bad, and being a DJ and being published in science fiction & fantasy have taught me that there are no bad genres, just bad practitioners.

So I'm gonna spend a couple of entries not admitting to which shows I watch, but boasting about them.  So nyah nyah.

Did *your* chemistry teacher look like this?

Breaking Bad

I heard about how good this show was for years, but I had no desire to watch it. A chemistry teacher who becomes a meth cooker -- oh, look, Weeds on speed! No, no, people said: The writing is great, the show is really dark & gritty & interesting, and everyone's a bad guy. Oh, look, I said, The Sopranos on speed! (I was funny about The Sopranos. Beautifully produced, written, & acted, and I didn't care, because I wanted everyone on the show dead. I only watched a few of them.)

Then Netflix streamed all the Breaking Bad episodes and I watched the first one. I was hooked in five minutes. (That's right, kid, the first one's free.) The opening was one of the strongest hooks I've ever seen on TV. And it's not about bad guys doing bad things. It's about how you become a bad guy. About losing your perspective. About the incremental path to evil.

And what makes it devastatingly effective is that it isn't moustache-twirling, vein-popping, sociopathic TV Loon evil. It's suburban two-car-garage evil, evil across the street from you, evil that belongs to your rideshare program and cheers the little league team. Not pure evil, because that's a fiction concocted by lazy storytellers and simplistic moralists. This is evil alloyed with good, evil where the worst traits are actually caricatures of your own ambitions and desires, commingling with your best intentions. Fuck Sauron, folks. I'm never gonna meet him and neither are you. But I've met Walter White a hundred times, at least -- and that's scary.

To follow Walter White's arc is to become acquainted with a perfectly understandable evil. You're taken along so effectively that I imagine it's startling to watch the first episodes again to see how naive Walter seems, how relatable, compared to the alpha-male Machiavellian bastard he is now.

The writing is spot-on, the characters are laminated and contradictory and their evolution is (mostly) believable (I have some issues with the rapid ballistics of Walter's wife, Skyler). Its worldview is sparse, Spartan, bleak, dark darker darkest.

I can't wait for the season premiere Sunday night.

Big Media Fail (Again)

So I rented Safe House the other day. Absolutely generic film done in shaky-cam (which I loathe). It had surprisingly good hand-to-hand fight scenes, and it looked as if the DVD's bonus material had a featurette on their choreography. Cool!

So I go to the bonus section and play the featurette, and I get this screen:

WTF? To watch this movie, I endured six movie previews, two tv show previews, an ad for a video game, a self-congratulatory ad for all of Universal's Blu-Ray collection, and an ad for a theme park ride. And then they tell me that the version they've sold to Redbox is crippled in an effort to upsell me. Seriously?

This, after blocking video controls that would allow the owners of DVD players to skip advertisements; legislating that you are not allowed to duplicate an item you bought; locking it with Digital Rights Management encoding; seeing their former executives appointed to Cabinet posts related to intellectual property; furiously lobbying Congress to pass Draconian legislation; being caught red-handed gaming takedown-notice systems to eliminate competition and create de facto exclusives on artists they represent or are considering representing; having no fear of reprisal for malicious or incorrect accusations -- the list goes on for miles.

Can these people still wonder why the world at large not only refuses to conform to their antiquated business model and archaic and increasingly irrelevant notions of copyright? Do they have any idea that people are refusing to adhere to their paranoid litigation and legislative efforts not because people are cheap, industry-destroying scofflaws, but because there is such joy to be taken in making the bully lose? Do they have any idea what's in store for them now that they have gotten ISPs to collude with them on narcing on their customers?

The funny thing is, in the long run I don't think we really have to do all that much to stop Big Media. They shoot themselves in the foot with astonishing regularity and precision. The ill will created by these drawbridge-raising, self-protective, out-of-touch, screw-you-jack-just-give-us-your-money measures is them bringing their own rope to their slow-motion hanging.