Steven Lyle Jordan's Blog, page 18

Babylon 5 taught us to go DEEP with characters and stories

25 years ago today, Babylon 5 premiered on American television. Today science fiction fans still speak of it in mixed terms, both proudly and embarrassingly.  But Babylon 5 was an important SF television series, and is worth recognition today.

[image error]This new series, written by J. Michael Straczynski, gained unfortunate renown at first for being not Star Trek to audiences and critics.  And when it first appeared, there didn’t seem to be anything to rise it above the many Star Trek series or movies (Star Trek: Deep Space Nine premiered weeks before Babylon 5, leading to obvious comparisons).  Often, those comparisons left the show lacking.

For instance: Babylon 5 featured totally computer-generated space scenes, ships and effects, produced on the Amiga computer system, with the idea of saving production money by avoiding expensive spaceships and optical effects.  Although it did trim the budget, the effects weren’t up to the quality of the effects seen on Star Trek, or in innumerable SF movies.

Also, the sets had an overall cheaper, less-polished feel than Trek sets.  Although there were very unique designs that went into the show, with a lot of variety befitting a series about many races, the lack of “prettiness,” for lack of a better term, didn’t endear audiences.  (This same “dark” look, with a little more money spent on it, would turn out to be plenty popular when the Battlestar: Galactica reboot premiered.)

[image error]And there had been some very interesting choices made with the appearance of the aliens. Although some, like the Minbari and Narn were well-received (it didn’t hurt that the production found very capable actors to fill the roles of G’Kar and Delenn—Andreas Katsulas and Mira Furlan, respectively), the appearance of the old-Russia-inspired Centauri Republic (personified by veteran actor Peter Jurasic as Londo Mollari, and featuring semi-circular crowns of hair on the men—bald females—and attire that would inspire steampunk ensembles for decades) was off-putting to many viewers at first.  Ironic that SF fans had been by then skewering Star Trek for featuring alien characters as “actors with nose appliances” for so long, but one alien among the many sophisticated alien designs of B5 would bother them so much.

Finally, Babylon 5 got off to a slow and shaky start… much like like Star Trek (both the original series and The Next Generation, the series had to stop and explain so much at the start that almost the entire first season seemed like setup.  And mostly boring setup, at that… personified by the long-winded show-opening voice-over (which I won’t repeat here), which so many SF shows are convinced their series needs to be understood by the slightly-dull masses.  It wasn’t until near the end of the first season, when strange signals precede an unexpected appearance from the Babylon 4 station, stuck in time, that the first hints of a deeper story appear.

[image error]And it is this deeper story that is the hallmark of Babylon 5: After the often clumsy writing that highlighted many episodes of the first season, the second season began to build a much deeper and more extensive story, the Shadow War… and the viewer begins to see the connections that were made in season 1 that connect all of the main characters to this new story arc.  It was, in fact, the first series-long story arc in an SF series, the first attempt to build such an all-encompassing storyline in television SF.

The Shadow War series, which essentially took place over 4 seasons, reveals a building conflict between alien races as far above humans as humans are above ants… and interestingly, those higher races are fighting to be the guardians of the lower races (like us), and arguing over philosophical differences.  Over the ensuing seasons, we see the brinksmanship between the higher races and the lower, as well as the intense conflicts between the lower races vying for their own control of their corner of the galaxy.

Eventually, the conflict is ended when the lower races reject the idea of interference from the higher races, at which point the higher races agree to stop bothering us, and leave for another part of the galaxy.  This was laudable for its being so unlike the usual blow-everything-up or stalemate solutions that are so popular in SF TV and movies (even, increasingly, in Star Trek).  It was one of the better attempts to present humans as capable of creating our own future, even in a space that could be so much stranger and hostile than we could ever imagine.  Not to mention showing the audience that violence isn’t the only answer.

[image error]But perhaps because of all this… because fans and audiences don’t have an exploding death-star or the fiery destruction of nasty alien races to point to… the series is slowly fading into memory, its series-long arc remembered, but nothing else.

My favorite element of Babylon 5 was the station itself: A massive and mostly self-sufficient space facility, revolving to create its own gravity, and partitioned with multiple environments inside to allow aliens from different planets to coexist.  The station was, as its name implied, supposed to be a place where all of these aliens could live and work together, smooth over each others’ differences, and help form a galaxy-wide alliance of races.  The series itself brought characters together that had many differing and conflicting views, backgrounds and histories… and yet, found ways to force these characters together, to find common ground (and common enemies), and eventually, to make peace with each other.

[image error]Of course, no utopia is perfect, and many fans got their greatest enjoyment from watching the ongoing battles between Londo and G’Kar, the diplomats-cum-leaders who started the series as little more than comedy relief, and ended the series literally, tragically, at each other’s throats.  Both characters became nigh-mythical figures by their end.  Other characters experienced love, hate, loss, sacrifice, jealousy, avarice, religious persecution, xenophobia… subjects such as authoritarianism, thought-crime, privacy and sexual preferences… a much longer laundry-list of experiences than fans saw on Trek productions.

My greatest personal memory is of the episode wherein Captain Sheridan is trapped on the wrong side of a door and about to be killed.  Lennier, Delenn’s assistant (and secretly in love with her) finds him, but realizes that he can choose not to save Sheridan, and have Delenn to himself… and he takes it, intentionally walking away and leaving Sheridan to die!  Sheridan is (naturally) saved anyway; and Lennier, realizing his act and his incredible shame is revealed, runs away and joins the Rangers, to be as far away from Sheridan and Delenn as possible.

To be sure, Babylon 5 reached some heady moments… but its character moments were deep—sometimes 3 octaves down deep—and we didn’t see such well-developed character moments on any other SF series until shows like Lost and Galactica.

So, it wasn’t the production that was memorable about Babylon 5; it was the series-long story arc, the well-developed characters and deeep character moments, and the well-thought-out vision of our place in the cosmos, that set this series apart.  Though other series have since taken similar cues and done a great job with them, Babylon 5 should be recognized by SF fans as the show that taught them all how it was done.

Read more about Babylon 5 on Wikipedia.

Restraint of information

The world is about to be violently shaken by a proclamation from the Trump administration that the staff of the EPA and USDA can no longer share data with the public through press releases, blogs, messages or social media postings.  The new administration is making clear its intention to hamstring, destaff or devolve many government functions and entire departments, and that includes the public sharing of scientific data.

This is more than a little worrisome: Government data, publicly funded, is generally a politically- and financially-agnostic source of data, and provides information to weigh against the data provided by corporations and politicians that may usually have their own agenda and intentional slant on their findings.

In acting to censor government data, the Trump administration is allowing corporations to tell us the sky is polka-dotted, and hiding any government data that says it’s blue.  And yes, that is a very simple example.  If you’d prefer: Corporations can now tell you that 100 parts per million of lead is okay in your drinking water… and the government report that says no more than 15 parts per billion of lead is considered safe will be hidden from you.

The accuracy of daily weather reports will also be hit below the belt.  If you thought your weather app seemed like hit-or-miss accuracy before… just wait.

As Kendra Pierre-Louis of Popular Science put it on Tuesday:

Scientific inquiry is meant to produce hard facts that the world can rely on. But the easiest way to make science lie is to keep the public from interrogating it.

Historically, the United States has been one of the best examples of a government that shared information with the public.  Perfect?  Not even close (as Kendra’s PS article points out, “to this day, the quantity of oil spewed into the ocean during the 2010 Deepwater Horizon Oil spill remains something of a mystery”).  But in most areas, government data has been either freely shared or produced in accordance of requests through the Freedom of Information Act.  I suppose steps will be taken now to abolish the act as well… or perhaps the new administration, which has already shown a clear disregard for government procedures, will simply ignore all FoI requests.

[image error]So, what can we look forward to in this state?  How about food labels with inaccurate ingredient lists?  Crops harvested from contaminated fields? Food manufacturers that don’t have to reveal what they really put into your fast foods and energy drinks, and nutrition labels that make Doritos look heart-healthy?

And how about manufacturers that don’t have to report on the emissions their plants produce, the health problems of their workers, or how many plants and animals they allowed to become extinct when they put their plants on their habitats or strip-mine the local countryside.  How about not knowing when the lack of ozone in your sky is allowing raw sunlight to fan the flames of skin cancer on your head?  How about not being able to find out how much oil or fracking chemicals have been flushed onto your property, or how many days you’ll have until their toxicity kills you and your family?

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These are only a few of the examples of damage that will be caused by the gag orders on the EPA and USDA… and it’s only Day One of the new, pro-big-corporate, anti-everything-else administration.  These are the things that government data and oversight provides for us; information that keeps Americans safe and healthy.  Removing that source of information will leave us blindfolded, easy prey for corporations to isolate, lie to, steal from and leave us too ill to fight back.

[image error]As someone else pointed out: “We didn’t leave a fox in charge of the henhouse; we left a bulldozer in charge of the henhouse.”  And now, we won’t even be able to see the dozer coming.

 

Tiny homes: Living, simplified

I’ve lately been fascinated by the Tiny House movement regularly popularized by TV shows on the HGTV and DIY networks.  It’s basic living, taken to an extreme: Compared to the average American home, about 3,000 square, a tiny house is smaller than 300 square feet… about the size of the travel trailers you see being pulled behind pickup trucks and parked in campsites.  They encourage the occupants to simplify, shed possessions and live more outside your home than in.

That, of course, is the American viewpoint.  There are countries where many people live in 100 square foot spaces, essentially a one room home.  For them, a 300 square foot space with individual rooms would be a luxury accommodation… exactly the opposite for those used to ten times the space and plenty of possessions to fill it.  This is where the fascination sets in: How tiny houses represent such different things to different people; it all depends on your point of view.

[image error]Speaking, then, from the American point of view, I enjoy seeing these programs that not only show complete homes, as small as 150 square foot (they rarely get smaller than that), built by professionals and by amateur tool-swingers, male and female… but also provide guidance from the show’s hosts to the prospective tiny home owner in how to pare down their typically property-rich lifestyle to a much simpler, less wasteful, efficient use of space that tiny homes demand.

Most of these homes teach the homeowners the idea that their homes are essentially just a small part of the environment around them… a private den in which you can rest and rejuvenate before you venture back out into the world.  In some cases, that means a back-to-nature perspective, the confines of the small home forcing them outside to enjoy their natural environment (or opening up the tiny home to allow nature in).  But the same applies in urban areas, wherein the small home forces the homeowners out among their peers in a very pro-social environment.

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Both of these reasons—pro-social and pro-nature—seem to be two of the primary reasons why tiny homes appeal to Millennials more than any other segment of the American population.  The third: Price.  Some tiny homes have been self-built by their occupants for as little as $500 of materials.  Other tiny homes, built by professionals, can cost from $6,000 to $80,000, average $35,000.

When compared with the cost of average homes, which can run from a few hundred thousand to the millions, and it’s easy to see why millennials are willing to try downsizing and saving a few hundred thousand bucks off the cost of a home.  It also forces occupants to use less of almost everything, another possible change in American lifestyles from our credit-based, job-dependent, heavy-consumerist past.  The tiny house movement heralds an American choice to be less wasteful, less desirous of tons of stuff, more flexible, more willing to move around as needs arise.  And who knows?  This smaller, cheaper and often fully mobile home footprint may be a lot more common in our future.

Some day, my wife and I expect to leave our 25,000 square foot home in Maryland for a place better suited for retirement… our main reason for watching networks like HGTV and DIY, mentally preparing ourselves for the rigors of such a change of lifestyle.  (It could happen sooner, if the cost of living in this area shoots up too fast… but that’s another story.)

When we do leave, we expect to move into a home noticeably smaller than our present place.  For myself, I could imagine living in a tiny home… but only if I was alone (which hopefully won’t be the case).  My wife and I tend to agree that, as a couple, we wouldn’t want to live in anything smaller than about 600 square feet; we’d probably prefer 1000-1,200 square feet.  This is, perhaps, our failing… a resistance to compressing and simplifying our lives too much.

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Fortunately, many manufactured and modular homes would work for our needs.  Though they still tend to carry the stigma of “double-wide trailers,” manufactured homes are of very high-quality construction, a great variety of designs (including energy efficient), assembled by professionals (often in sheltered warehouses) and shipped to your location, and can save you tens of thousands compared to building a home on-site.  If you’re considering a new home and haven’t looked into this option, you’re doing yourself a disservice.

We watch the tiny house programs mainly to get tips on more efficient storage methods, which can be applied to any size home.  And we like the idea that a smaller place, being less to take care of, may allow us a bit of recreational mobility, to wit: If our new home is small and inexpensive enough, maybe we’ll have enough to buy a trailer—the tiniest of houses—and travel around a bit in our portable home.

Whatever we do, there’s no doubt that living on a smaller scale is likely for us, for Millennials, and for a lot of Americans in the future.  And why not?  If you can live comfortably on a smaller footprint, you’re making it easier for yourself, and doing better for the planet. And for some of you, it might be good practice for your future living in spaceships and on other planets… best start prepping for the downsizing now, while you have the time.

Will your kitchen have a garden?

My wife and I watch a lot of shows about Tiny Houses, and a popular feature of many tiny houses is a tiny garden, often mounted on a wall near the kitchen, allowing the growing of spices, decorative and air-freshening plants.  It seems like a great way to keep nature close to you (not that it’s very far away when living in a tiny home), and eating naturally whenever you want.

[image error]In the movie Back to the Future II, Marty McFly’s home featured a much larger retractable garden in the kitchen ceiling, allowing family members to grab fruits and veggies to snack on at any time.  Its main draw was its size and incredible variety, making it something anyone would want.

Fast forward to today (well, not really), and the idea of the pinkhouse—a small greenhouse using pink light to grow plants—is gaining traction with those who want to grow their own vegetables.  And a company called Natufia is working on a device that would become part of your typical kitchen appliances.

[image error]Natufia’s Pinkhouse is a self-enclosed unit, about the size of a small fridge, that shines light and circulates water through a trellis of seed cups that you order.  When the veggies are grown, you just pick what you want, and order new seed cups as you use up your crop.

It’s the packaging that’s nice, if you have a modern kitchen; it looks like it belongs in there alongside your other modern appliances.  You might have trouble fitting it into an existing kitchen, but future kitchens might allocate space for a fresh vegetable appliance… in which case, you’ll want one of these.

It is being featured at CES 2017 now… see more about it.

Screen Rant’s 15 smartest SF movies

I came across a list, by Screen Rant, of the 15 most intelligent science fiction movies… and naturally, my immediate thought was: Oh, yeah?  Everyone has their opinion about things like that, and I’m no exception.  Naturally I wanted to compare and contrast it against my opinion.

Their list (in alpha order):

2001

Blade Runner

The Day the Earth Stood Still

The Fountain

Gattaca

Interstellar

Moon

PI

Predestination

Primer

The Quiet Earth

Solaris

Sunshine

Under the Skin

World on a Wire

But one of the things I noticed was that I actually haven’t seen a few of these movies (the ones that are bolded).  So, before I start my own rant about where they may have gone wrong, I realized I had to see the rest of these movies for myself.  Then, and only then, can I give them crap about their list. 

First of all, my own list includes movies like Arrival (mentioned in the article, but not actually included among the smartest list), The 13th Floor, Soylent Green, Ghost in the Shell, Akira, Paprika (last three are anime, but still movies), Her, Bicentennial Man, 2010 and Contact.  How do these compare to Screen Rant’s list?  I could probably bounce Moon and Sunshine in favor of almost anything on my list (both movies deal with strong concepts, issues of individuality and environmental manipulation, but are a bit clumsy about it).

Secondly, I was surprised to discover that none of the movies I needed to catch up on were actually on Netflix.  Some were on Amazon video, and I found one on Verizon On-Demand.

This left me kind of appalled.  The very idea that these intelligent SF movies cannot be easily found and watched on major movie outlets left me with a hole in my chest.  It’s like going to a quality Jewish market, and finding out they don’t have bagels.

Okay, fine, I get it: “intelligent science fiction” isn’t the same as “popular sci-fi.”  In the profit game, Star Wars will win out over Predestination every time.  But there are plenty of intelligent non-science fiction movies in Netflix, for example.  Why not these?  It’s just one more indication that SF is the Rodney Dangerfield of genres in the US, considered of less value than a season of Phineas and Ferb.

So, whatever.  Apparently, it’s going to take me some time to see and judge all of these movies.  Or, by the time I do, may have forgotten about this list.  So, stay tuned… but don’t hold your breath.

NY goood… self-pub baaaaaad?

Kristen Lamb has a blog post that does a great job of refuting all those articles that trash self-publishers and try to convince readers (and self-publishing writers) that traditional publishing is the only way to go.

“Author Animal Farm—New York GOOOOD, Self-Pub BAAAAAAD” uses as its springboard a Huffington Post article by Laurie Gough… which Lamb highlights as particularly ironic, as HuffPo has made a rather lucrative business of printing articles that it doesn’t actually pay for.

One doesn’t need credentials or to submit queries to editors and hope one day this “news” agency will publish said article for actual money. Nope. If a writer has demonstrated an ability to cultivate readers, then Huff has slots available. They truck in wagons of cash and the contributor is paid in clicks and feel-goods.

[image error]Then Lamb does a great job of—ahem—skewering the Gough argument, and explaining to self-publishers why toeing the line set by the NY publishing machine is all bullshit in the 21st century.

Lamb makes the very significant point that publishing’s history has had a lot more to do with economy and profit margins than it’s ever had with writing talent or quality of content.  And that’s where self-publishers have an opening: If they can provide a product people want, at a price they’ll pay, the traditional industry can’t do a thing to stop them.

What’s unfortunate is that the traditional industry, knowing this well, already has the ear of the major media outlets, and is using it liberally to present all self-publishers as talentless hacks with no understanding of storytelling or the English language.  Okay, that’s not exactly true; what’s more accurate is that they’re whoring their own writers loudly enough to block any sight or sound of lesser writers in the public eye, and denying self-publishers access to major promotional venues.  Then they try to claim that the reason self-publishers aren’t getting noticed is that they’re not yet good enough to be brought into the traditional publishing venues… something only the traditional publishers can determine for the readers’ convenience, thank you very much.

[image error]But however you slice it, it’s clear the traditional industry is using its power, influence and ready cash to cock-block any new kids trying to make bank on their block.  And the readers are obediently going through the traditional publishers’ gates, apparently oblivious of the fact that there’s nothing preventing them from going around the gates to get what they want.

This makes it hard for writers like me to make inroads with my audience, specifically, fans of serious science fiction.  Most of them have already chugged the kool-aid and swallowed the notion that only traditionally-published SF writers can be worth a damn… to the extent that they won’t even entertain the notion of checking out my books (if they even manage to find out about them).

Will it always be like this?  Who knows… maybe I’ll find a magic price-point that readers will like, or some added content to my books that really pulls at them, and my books will start selling.  Maybe traditional publishers will slip up and, I dunno, make clear to its audience how little it really thinks of them beyond their wallets, and lose favor.  Maybe the public will see the traditional publishers as the pigs they are, and actively seek out new sources for entertainment from better and more honest sources.  Maybe someone with an ear to the public will start talking about my books and give me some promotional influence.  Maybe a major shift in the US economy will give self-pubs new, strong in-roads to the market.  Maybe a meteor will wipe New York City off the map.  A lot of maybes.

All I know is, none of those maybes are helping me… yet.  But I’ll keep watching.

Lamb’s article is here.

SF movies for 2016: Two YAY, the rest, Meh.

Well, it took me a few days into 2017… but I can now say that I’ve seen the two science fiction movies of 2016 that I would consider to be great SF.  The movies that make me feel good about science fiction movies, and their future… the ones that (should) end up on lists of superior SF movies.

To be sure, there have been plenty of movies in 2016… you might even call some of them science fiction.  I would call most of them sci-fi—that is, movies that barely understand the meaning of science, and absolutely won’t let science get in the way of crazy aliens and a nice, juicy explosion.  Sorry, but I’m too old to be impressed by crazy aliens and explosions any more.  Simply put, these kind of movies don’t move me anymore… and they certainly don’t move me to theaters.

That list includes Star Trek: Beyond and Star Wars: Rogue One, so we understand each other.  Regarding the former, I consider it a shame that Star Trek, a franchise that stands for a serious treatment of science fiction concepts, has fallen parsecs away from that in its movies.  It’s like watching Star Trek’s mirror universe, where Kirk is an @$$hole, his crew are all screwups and the best you can expect out of them is to say something stupid and fire all phasers at something.  They might as well be giving each other Nazi salutes.  Pass.

[image error]Christ. Not these guys again.

Yeah, blah blah, millennials, blah blah, FPS and the CW, blah blah, sell tickets.  I expect that out of Star Wars (and that’s exactly what you get).  But Paramount’s turning Star Trek into a Star Wars clone (where the empire is the good guys!) is a lot like putting spinning rims and LED lights on a 1965 Rolls Royce Silver Shadow: You should be ashamed of yourselves.

I have nothing to say about the latter, other than the fact that I was done with Star Wars long before The Phantom Menace came out, and nothing will turn me back on to that essentially vacuous franchise.  For the record, I’ve seen neither of these films, and have read enough to know that I don’t care to.  Maybe I’ll catch them when they show up on FXX for free.

Aaaand maybe not.

A lot of 2016’s films I would call outright fantasy, not science fiction.  And the only fantasy movies I watch are superhero movies.  I was a big fan of Deadpool and Captain America: Civil War, and I enjoyed Suicide Squad; but Batman v. Superman was sad, and I haven’t seen Doctor Strange yet.  (Been busy.)  But again… fantasy, not science fiction.

The rest, I’d just call: Bad.  Fortunately, that’s a short list, since so few movies of 2016 actually tried to be serious science fiction.  The only one I’ll single out, Approaching the Unknown, did its best to look like serious science fiction, while at the same time demonstrating that it knew less about science than the average sixth grader.  If this is what our command of science in the US has wrought, it may be time to move to the EU and hope they’ll lead us into the next century.

[image error]So what were this year’s two exceptions in an otherwise low point in science fiction cinema? First of all: Arrival.  Hands-friggin’-down.  The movie about aliens with their own sense of time, and the scientists trying to learn enough of their language to decipher their messages to us, was beautifully constructed, brilliantly written and wonderfully acted.  Though it did end up using the tired old “military guys screw up all alien contact scenarios” trope, I ended up soaking in Arrival‘s every second the way a connoisseur inhales a particularly fine brandy.  There was not only a great, intriguing message, worthy of the best in science fiction movies, but they delivered it in an exciting-yet-not-pyrotechnic way.

(And I’m not just saying that because it coincidentally had some common elements from a spec TV script I wrote a year back.  Yeah.  Completely coincidental.  Seriously.)

[image error]The second of the exceptional movies: Passengers.  Though the movie presents itself (in the trailers) as lighthearted romantic-adventurous science fiction, Passengers turned out to be much more.  The story of two awakened passengers on the interstellar ship Avalon, en route to a new planet for humans to colonize, was fun and exciting.  The design of the ship was beautifully done, the effects were flawless and the technology looked believable and workable.  Although I often kid Jennifer Lawrence about her trademark ability to display stricken terror in almost all of her movies, she and Chris Pratt (and Michael Sheen and Lawrence Fishburne) all delivered great performances.

Passengers wasn’t as serious as Arrival, but it was a good SF flick, nonetheless.  It was overly science-showy, just as you’d expect from a big-budget SF film with Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence in it, but it rarely felt contrived or science-dumb.  The over-used trope here was the good old “non-expert humans need to fix the one problem the sophisticated ship can’t fix automatically” bit.  But they did a good job navigating around that trope and making the movie feel as if two ordinary people could find themselves in this situation, and not just primal-scream themselves into oblivion.

A lot a lot A LOT of discussion has been centered around the controversial act of Jim prematurely waking up Aurora, essentially dooming Aurora to die before they reach their destination, just so Jim wouldn’t be alone on his own doomed journey.  But this is just the kind of question that marks great stories, and great SF: Characters in dire straights and under personal stress, making hard and controversial decisions, and showing their very human strengths and weaknesses.  For that reason alone, I consider Passengers great science fiction: I applaud their willingness to explore that controversial idea, and look forward to the conversations and opinions that will be expressed.

So, that was 2016, and the two movies that I think will be remembered, for good reason, for years to come.  (They’ll also be going into my DVD collection when they are available.)  I’d like to hope 2017 will do science fiction a bit better, but early signs seem to indicate there won’t be a lot of serious scientific discourse in the public arena for about the next 4-8 years.  In fact, I pretty much expect much of the popular discussion to be about the virtues of VR porn.  Here’s hoping for better… but I’m not holding my breath.

Anachronism… or nebbish?

I’ve had (more than) a few people suggest that my novels never made it because they are about an old style of science fiction; specifically, the Science Nerd era of Clarke, Asimov and Pohl.  The audience for smart science fiction, where people find intelligent ways around complex problems based on our knowledge of science and the challenges it poses, is now old hat.

If I want to be successful, they say, I need to write SF based around dystopias, cyberpunk and Star Wars-type space battling.  I need to write stories with FTL drives, time travel, and humans shooting at goofy aliens and mega-dinosaurs.  I need stories with rebellious kids skateboarding or parkouring through Blade-Runner-style urban wastelands.  I have to write stories that can be translated into video games (and sell the video games, since nobody reads anymore).

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Oh, but there’s one kind of person who still reads: The ones who want stories about women having sex with animals, vampires, werewolves, mermaids, aliens, cyborgs or alien-clone-cyborg-creatures.  If I write those, they will cum (ahem).

Is it true that I’m a writing anachronism, then?  That I was born to the wrong era… that no one will want the kind of books I write, ever again?

Maybe not.  As the saying goes, “What goes around comes around.”  Story types go out of style for awhile, replaced by the latest trends, and then come back into style as those new trends go stale.  Maybe, if I leave my existing books on the digital shelves long enough, they’ll be discovered by a new breed of fan who believes that the greatest adventures lie inside the human mind.

But should I wait for those future nerds to come along and make me famous?  Sucker bet.  Not an option.

A better option would be to consider writing for this generation (the four or five of ’em that actually read, at any rate).  But not only do I not know if I can write those kind of stories… the likelihood that I’ll figure out how to promote and sell them isn’t any stronger with new and different books than it’s been with my earlier books.

[image error]But hold on… I wrote a story about a woman who has sex with a robot.  Couldn’t sell it to save my own life.  I wrote a book about virtual realities and superheroes.  I wrote three books that included FTL drives and aliens.  I haven’t been able to sell any of my books, regardless of content, reviews or ratings.  Because they are unknown: They haven’t been seen or heard of by enough people, and not enough people (or enough of the right people) are recommending them to others.

They’re not recommending me, either, but not because I’m an anachronism.  In science fiction terms, I am what is known as a nebbish… a nobody, as unknown as my books.

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All this tells me, yet again, that promotion is the problem.  Not content.  Not the size of my catalog.  I need notoriety; I have to have people known in science and science fiction who talk about me and my books, and recommend my work to their fans, until I become a known person.  I need help from others in the biz, or who have access to those in the biz.  (I wish I could do the job myself, but to do that would require a lot of money, and frankly, if I had the kind of money it would require to pay for my own promotion… I wouldn’t need to write for extra money.)

Why am I thinking about all this?  Because I’m not actively writing… but I haven’t given up on cracking the promotion nut yet.  If I can figure out how to sell my books—or find someone who can help me to sell them—I could start writing once again.

For now, I’m concentrating on finding a full-time job, and have no intention of starting any full-on writing projects until that is accomplished.  But who knows what 2017 could bring?

2016: More than celebrity losses

Yeah, 2016 sucked.  But let’s be clear: It didn’t suck because (insert your favorite celebrity here) died in it.

2016 sucked for me because I lost family.  I lost friends.  People I knew personally.  Nothing against celebrities, but… I didn’t know any of them.

I lost my job of 8 years.  I was told the only way for me to get a new job was to become something I’m not and will never be: A social networker with scads of connections to the best people. (Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to 2017.)

I watched my country turn against non-white races, against the poor and the sick and the wretched refuse that the statue in NYC tells us to bring here.  I watched people being killed by my tax-supported police because they were born Black.  I watched a man rape and kill a stranger, in her own car, for spending money… and tell the cops she asked for it.  I watched my fellow Americans advocate the same atrocities against immigrants that were committed on their own great-grandparents when they came here.

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I watched America turn against the environment.  I watched America attack Native Americans for trying to protect their land from rupturing oil pipes.  (Which—quite tellingly but not ironically—ruptured.)  I watched America turn against truth, logic and science.  I watched America turn against democracy.  I watched a quarter of Americans elect a reality show host to the presidency, over a woman with a few decades of political experience and a former President for a husband; while another half of Americans whined in their microbrew pubs and their parents’ basements and didn’t vote at all.

So, if you want to commiserate 2016 with me, don’t talk to me about Bowie, Prince or Carrie.  My head’s really not there.

2016

Yeah, 2016 sucked.  But let’s be clear: It didn’t suck because (insert your favorite celebrity here) died in it.

2016 sucked for me because I lost family.  I lost friends.  People I knew personally.  Nothing against celebrities, but… I didn’t know any of them.

I lost my job of 8 years.  I was told the only way for me to get a new job was to become something I’m not and will never be: A social networker with scads of connections to the best people. (Needless to say, I’m not looking forward to 2017.)

I watched my country turn against non-white races, against the poor and the sick and the wretched refuse that the statue in NYC tells us to bring here.  I watched people being killed by my tax-supported police because they were born Black.  I watched a man rape and kill a stranger, in her own car, for spending money… and tell the cops she asked for it.  I watched my fellow Americans advocate the same atrocities against immigrants that were committed on their own great-grandparents when they came here.

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I watched America turn against the environment.  I watched America attack Native Americans for trying to protect their land from rupturing oil pipes.  (Which—quite tellingly but not ironically—ruptured.)  I watched America turn against truth, logic and science.  I watched America turn against democracy.  I watched a quarter of Americans elect a reality show host to the presidency, over a woman with a few decades of political experience and a former President for a husband; while another half of Americans whined in their microbrew pubs and their parents’ basements and didn’t vote at all.

So, if you want to commiserate 2016 with me, don’t talk to me about Bowie, Prince or Carrie.  My head’s really not there.