Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 12

Spring’s journal Tuesday

Last spring, I started keeping a writing journal. Every morning after I finished writing, I would jot down my thoughts in a repeating google calendar event. Thoughts I didn’t care about got deleted. What’s left is what I consistently cared about every week. Here’s Tuesday:

stop and figure out purpose
Do what scares you
One purpose per thing
building and not destroying
When creating, start with a blank page
When editing, look at old page.
Mini outline
Break open old draft and integrate
create a process for doing it again
Routine is a jumping off point for new heights
Read ahead
Trust the outline
I grabbed the image even though it’s not this project – put it away
Let speed overcome the urge to perfect
know what you like and write it
(description) is good (dialogue) needs to be swapped out
Catch what comes to you
This draft will be better than the one before it. That’s enough.
Hard to get over the hump, but I’m happy with what I got. I’ll integrate it well
Stay the course.
The resistance blows strong at the end

Spring’s journal Monday

Last spring, I started keeping a writing journal. Every morning after I finished writing, I would jot down my thoughts in a repeating google calendar event. Thoughts I didn’t care about got deleted. What’s left is what I consistently cared about every week. Here’s Monday:

Embrace the image that comes to you
Review beta draft on paper first
Don’t open the spreadsheet!
Time will come – you’re making wine
I write a lot of material before the essay comes and then it comes in an hour and that’s it!
Use the blank screen for inspiration
I want to work in watercolor, where I can see my work after it’s done
Make some insistences
Do what is scaring you
Don’t worry yet about skin
Hold onto the images
Trust the outline
No new bones only meat to pull them
Catch a phrase and write off it
I really do recharge on weekends
Feel fulfilled by grabbing something and writing it new
Work that into whatever writing you’re doing
Afternoon will integrate them.
And that’s how I’ll do 3 scenes a day and remain fulfilled
I grabbed the image that came to me

4 Star Book review: Paleocene 3

Full disclosure: the author sent me this comic, asking for an honest review. If I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t review it, but I did, so I am

I had heard about the Paleocene comic series, but I hadn’t read a full issue before this one, issue 3. Then, I went back and read 1 and 2 (as well as the short “Pleistocene”). I’d actually recommend you do the same. Read them 3, 1, 2, which seems to be more or less the chronology of the story.

That cause I was hooked by the birds. They are gorgeous jerks, as birds are. We follow the tale of one hawk-like fellow in his quest to find a new home in the aftermath of the catastrophe that obliterated his saurian kin.

Meanwhile, a troop of small primates scamper deliciously through the ruins of the Age of Dinosaurs. They have the usual primate problems, including starvation, predation, and politics.

The story is a simple one and I won’t spoil it here. It has two piercing moments, involving the sun and memories. They’re worth the price of admission.

The science is all excellent. It’s clear the Keesey paid attention to every detail, making sure we get an accurate picture of the first years after the end of the Cretaceous. The art took some getting used to, but once again the birds drew me in. Through their eyes, the world thrums with ultraviolet, as opposed to the green-gray world of the colorblind mammals. In the mammal scenes, the panels are surrounded by thick, black, rounded borders, which gives us the impression we’re peering out of a hole in a hollow tree. Their world is towering, unknown, and frightening. The bird’s world is operatic and grand. Also hungry.

 

August Newsletter: The Loud Beach

So there I was at the Loud Beach.

The speakers glared down from the top of the cliff like something out of William Hope Hodgson. The Things that Oontz.

“This Is Fun!” they seemed to bellow at the sun-burned shamblers on the sand below. “This Is Pleasure! You Enjoy Yourselves! Oontz…oontz…oontz.”

And actually, I was enjoying myself. I’d been to this particular beach before, and I had brought earplugs. And a book.

Now, I didn’t spend my whole time at the Loud Beach with my hearing blocked, buried in a book. I did swim. I took the kids out on some rocks outside of the Cone of Noise and we saw a shrimp. But, yes, what’s really important is that book.

Imagine me there under the umbrella in my highlighter-colored UV protection shirt, some kind of over-priced meatball in one hand and plugs in both my ears, staring into the depths of my kindle. I was doing something important. I was finishing a story.

Tell me if you’ve heard this one. An anglophone moves to a foreign country, where he gets married, has a kid, and gets cancer. Now he has to plan for how his family will go on after his death, but he’s crippled by the mind-your-own-business standoffishness that he’s erected between himself and his neighbors and in-laws.

If you said, “Aha, you’re talking about Zendegi by Greg Egan,” you’re right. And if you said, “you’re identifying too much with that book, Dan,” you would also be right.

I first tried to read Zendegi several years ago, around Christmas. Actually I listened to it as an audiobook, which was even more dangerous. I remember setting the table for a party with Pavlina’s employees, thinking “oh this poor guy, he’s just like me.” And then suddenly I was so depressed I couldn’t function. I just sat there the whole dinner, staring into space. Pavlina says she was telling herself all sorts of bad stories about what was going on with me. When I got a chance, I told her I’d been triggered by this book.

Zendegi wasn’t the only one. There are books that made me lose sleep, or set me on a week of tooth-gnashing. Often, afterward, I couldn’t read anything else by that author, and as time went on, the number of books I could read shrank. You might notice that I’ve managed to finish very few books published after 2015. My window of tolerance seemed ever-narrower.

What better time than summer vacation to tackle that problem? What better place than the beach? I’d worked a lot on myself, and now it was time to test my new limits. At least as far as reading went.

Zendegi was the third such stress-test. I finished it! I even enjoyed it. As for the other books, they’re in the reviews below. See if you can guess which two they are

Now, it’s not all cake and champagne. The following week, I got triggered by a series of philosophy lectures (of all things). But even there, I think I’m better than I used to be. I recognized what was happening and wrote about it in my notebook. I tried to draw a line between what was just bad, and what specifically pressed my buttons. I talked with friends about it, and the result was a very deep and generous conversation. And I stopped listening to those lectures because I’d had enough mental exercise for one summer.

In other news

Tales from Alternate Earths III is out now, containing such short stories as “Gunpowder Treason” (what if Guy Fawkes succeeded?), “Not my Monkey” (what if the Empire-of-Japan scientists knew as much about brain transplants as the Nazi scientists knew about rockets?), my own “Levski’s Boots” (what if Vasil Levski had boots?) and many others.

If you want to know more, here’s the conversation a few of us had about the anthology and alternate history in general.

Interchange also…continues to be available for purchase.

And that’s probably it for publications for a few months. I’m trying to spread the word, so if know of a podcast I should be on or some other form of advertising I should be doing, tell me. A review or two wouldn’t hurt either. Publishers will look to the success of Junction and Interchange when they consider whether or not to buy my next book.

Yes, Centuries is still out with publishers. Godspeed, you little weirdo.

Wealthgiver gamma is still with beta-readers. Next week I’ll to go back to Fellow Tetrapod and make a beta draft, with speculative-evolution help from Timothy Morris. We’ll be doing a lot of speculative biology, so check back for pictures of critters.

And here’s some stuff I liked

Trese – a Netflix series based on a comic series about a supernatural detective in Manilla. It could have been a standard urban fantasy, but somebody really wrote that story! It doesn’t overexplain, it goes deep into gray areas, and bad things happen. It’s also funny and human.

Antediluvian by Wil McCarthy – An electrical engineer teams up with his biologist girlfriend to zap his hypothalamus full of the ancestral memories encoded in his Y-chromosome DNA. Turns out his personality is inherited, and his forefathers also had more bravery than sense. This book is really a collection of short stories, and some were better than others. The tone vacillated between interesting and silly, and I wish it delved deeper.

Hegira by Greg Bear – A penitent, a warlord, and a slave team up to explore their world and learn where it came from. There are some really good personal moments, and as always with Greg Bear, the worldbuilding details are many and beautiful. They don’t quite make sense, though, and the big reveal at the end doesn’t hold together. Still, I enjoyed the methane-powered steam-ship.

Tears of the Giraffe by Alexander McCall Smith – I’d been waiting to read this until I needed inspiration, but I decided I needed a little more light in my literary life. Tears of the Giraffe provided it. There’s death and marriage, missing and found children. McCall Smith’s writing is like standing under parting clouds. Even when he describes terrible things, he’s warm.

Zendegi by Greg Egan – The most mature take on brain-uploading I’ve read. Egan is never bad at writing about people, but here he ups his human game. The science behind the fiction is powerful and important, but it never gets between us and the characters. There are a few moments of real, hard insight.

The Architect of Aeons by John C. Wright – Two men with opposed views on life and freedom butt heads as Earth’s deep future evolves around them. This is the fourth book in the Count to the Eschaton Sequence, and you really do have to read books one and two to get what’s going on. Unfortunately, you also have to read book three, which caused me to drop this series for years. Wright must have been very angry when he wrote it. Book Four, however, is better. The ideas are big and interesting, and we dig satisfyingly into a couple of characters. To paraphrase one of them: “your reaction to the universe can either be despair, anger, or faith.” Wright seems to be trying to move from anger to faith. I appreciate that. Me too.

Against Peace and Freedom by Mark Rosenfelder – You are a fairly competent, very self-absorbed spy for an Ekumen-like interstellar union, sent to dismantle one dictatorship and prevent the formation of another. Think George Orwell and Ursula LeGuin, but funnier (and in the 2nd person). I thought it was hilarious, although the choose-your-own-gender romance subplot did not work at all for me. The story also dragged after a while, but some of the set-pieces were absolutely perfect. Especially the ones with aliens: “Please increase your intelligence!” continues to echo in my head. It’s good advice.

Soldier of Arete by Gene Wolfe – In the sequel to Soldier of the Mist, a Roman mercenary with no long-term memory stumbles through the Second Persian Invasion of Greece, beset by friends and enemies (mortal and immortal), just trying to do the right thing. I especially like Latro’s attempts to repair his memory, which sort of work, and of course I’m a sucker for Thracians. As with the previous book, it’s not always clear what actually happened, but that just means I can enjoy rereading this book later.

Meditations by Marcus Aurelius – A nice little index of wise insights. There’s something a lot like mindfulness here, and I’ll need to go back and read the Meditations again to incorporate them into my mental life. I especially like the bit about the lion’s wrinkled brows. Now there’s an image.

David’s Sling by Marc Stiegler – An IT entrepreneur tries to save the world (back before everyone was doing it). The good part of the book (and it’s really good) is the account of this guy putting together a team of engineers to design, build, and project-manage the first military drones. There are passages in there that ring very true. The World-War-III stuff doesn’t fit, and the book would have been better without it. The biggest tragedy is a glorious bad-guy who vanishes halfway through. Still worth reading.

The Hobbit: Illustrated Edition by J.R.R Tolkien – A middle-aged couch-potato sees more of the world than he would have preferred. I read this book to my 8-year-old daughter and was surprised how much she got into it. My Gollum voice is rather good, and she loves the idea of elevenses. For my part I enjoyed this, my third re-read, for the calm pace and focus on experience. Tolkien was a master of description, partly because he had made something worth describing.

See you next month,

Dan

Alternate History Anthology

“Levski’s boots hit the ground and he kept running…” That’s the beginning of my alternate history short story, included with many others in the Tales From Alternate Earths III anthology, out this Friday the 3rd. Find it here

The Grass of a Park

The grass of a park

Green stems against dark shadows

Chicory and trees

July Newsletter: The Karst River

I’m trying something new this year, which is a vacation.

Last summer you might recall I struggled to find my peace with not writing. And the summers before that, too. The beginning of July would find me in the middle of a project, and I’d spend the summer scrabbling for the time I needed to keep it alive. Or I’d try to start a new, light, summer project, and scrabble to keep that alive.

This year, I made sure not to do that. I pushed to finish draft three of Wealthgiver by the end of June. I sent it out to beta readers. It was safely out of my hands, and now I wasn’t going to do any writing at all.

I stopped doing my morning rituals. No more exercise, no more meditations. No more vitamin supplements. There’s no need for all that support since I’m not doing anything in particular in the morning. At first, it worked.

We had a week of vacation where Pavlina and I were at home, but our kids weren’t. Oh, the glorious work that we got done! I played with Thracian all day. I had gotten a-hold of Vladimir Orel’s A Concise Historical Grammar of the Albanian Language and I was just going to town on case endings*! But then we got the kids back, we had a birthday party to go to and a week to spend at Pavlina’s dad’s house on the north face of the Balkan Range.

It should have been a nice change, but it wasn’t. Immersed in my vocabulary and sound-change spreadsheet, I could ignore how bad I felt. But when I was away from my laptop, the kids were misbehaving, my brioche buns didn’t rise, Pavlina’s family was annoying, and nobody would talk to me.

The feeling got progressively worse until we went for a walk. We took a picnic to the Zlatna Panega river, which cuts through a canyon full of caves and willow trees. Long-tailed tits flitted above chalky water, jeweled with damselflies. The kids loved it and I really did hold up my end of the conversations in Bulgarian. We came home and swam in the pool. I finished up with Thracian plural endings and helped Pavlina’s dad plant trees. Swallows gathered as clouds swelled and popped on the peaks of the mountains right over us. It should have been idyllic, but all I could remember from the river was a cave that someone had used as a toilet.

That night I stumbled around the garden with Pavlina, claws upraised as I choked on my complaints. Thracian was a parasite on my time. Pavlina’s dad planted trees wrong. Everything was bad.

And Pavlina was like, “have you been taking your magnesium?”

No, and I hadn’t been meditating or exercising either. Why bother? Now I knew why bother. And an interesting experiment had presented itself to me.

How important were my various rituals? I now knew what the effect was if I didn’t do any of them: everything was bad. So, what would change if I reintroduced something? Magnesium, but not meditation. Exercise, but not diet. What makes a difference, and what doesn’t? That’s my project for this summer. I put away my book, and I’ve put away Thracian. Now, I’m just going to read and experiment on myself.

Also, maybe I’ll draw.

 

In other news…

Interchange is out. You can buy it. 

We had our launch party, which you can watch here.

I also have three interviews about Interchange and my process (in text), how I did the speculative biology(in voice), and what my life was like when I wrote it(in voice).

I serialized a Centuries Unlimited short story here. It’s about family, life-plans, and time-travel.

Wealthgiver is still resting and collecting beta-reader comments. If you want to be a beta-reader, say so in the comments, and I’ll send you the manuscript.

 

And I read some stuff:

Mythos by Stephen Fry – was entertaining and occasionally inspiring. Fry did a good job of cutting enough to present a coherent story, while keeping enough _in_ to demonstrate the sprawling _in_coherence of the folklore and religion of a wide-spread, long-lived culture. Romanticism isn’t my thing, but Fry was upfront about it. I think it’s cool that “cyclops” originally meant “cow-thief,” but Fry doesn’t, and that’s okay. His retellings were a bit pre-digested, but there were moments when the insights of Stephen Fry and a million departed storytellers came together in a twinkle of wisdom. And I appreciate that Fry did his part to keep the tradition of the storytellers alive.

This book (that is, Greek mythology) also finally encapsulated the sort of thing I love in f-sf. You have the Teumessian Fox, which CANNOT BE CAUGHT, and the dog Laelaps, who ALWAYS CATHCES HIS PREY. What happens when you set Laelaps on the Teumessian fox? What do you do about that? And what happens next? That, for me, is the core of speculative fiction: chaining out the consequences of your conceit. What if A? Well then, B would surely follow. But then, oh dear, you’d have C.

From now on, I’ll be able to think to myself “I like this story because it has a good Teumessian fox hunt.”

Code of the Lifemaker by James P. Hogan. Now here’s a story. When I was in high school, my dad told me about a scifi book he vaguely remembered, in which self-replicating alien robots found their way to Titan and evolved there into a robot ecosystem, complete with kingdoms of metal humanoids. I was fascinated by the idea. I designed robot animals with friends, built up a menagerie, and finally wrote a novella about the pros and cons of environmental protection in an eco-system that thinks your spaceships and environment suits are delicious. Hogan wrote a very different, and much better story.

Hogan didn’t get as creative with the native life of Titan as I did, but he did give some very sweet descriptions of the families of concrete-pourers wallowing in the methane stream under softly humming generators. And then of course there is the actual story, where a stage psychic, symbol of everything that’s gone wrong with America’s relationship with science, becomes the hero. There are deep and poignant meditations on truth and lies, right and wrong, and how they don’t always match up. Also there are such delightful passages as “a hermit in a wheel-skin tunic has wandered into town on a steam-donkey with some new heretical claptrap about pacifism. Shall we boil him in acid until he confesses?” Fingers to lips. Mwah!

The Barsoom Project by Larry Niven and Steve Barnes – It’s great to be re-reading the Dream Park books. They’re always a delight, richly layered under a deceptively simple adventure story. In this one, the authors (mostly Barnes according to the authors’ note) had some things to say about mental and physical health. What’s really keeping you from losing weight, and what can a story do to dig up those reasons and suggest solutions? Also, the story has Inuit gods and the sunken city of R’lyeh, powered by a radioactive Soviet satellite. The book talked about some heavy things, occasionally heavier than the authors could lift, but they got there.

Brain Wave by Poul Anderson – yeah! Scifi! Turns out that since the end of the Mesozoic, the Earth has been in a region of the galaxy where the speed of light is just a wee bit slow. It doesn’t make a difference to inanimate objects, and not much difference to bugs and plants, but when you have a central nervous system, emergent effects (such as intelligence) are depressed. So when the Earth passes out of the slow zone, we all get smarter. Pigs included. What happens next? Damn good stuff!

The Confessions of Augustine of Hippo. Whuh. I started this book a year ago on the advice of my friend and mentor Paul Venet. It was the summer and I was struggling with finding meaning in what I was doing, and faith in the future. How could things ever be all right?

He assigned Augustine, and suggested we have weekly conversations where we talked about the book and the cultivation of faith. We missed that target and created an international business communication class instead. But anyway.

I got a lot out of the first half of the book, which is Augustine’s autobiography. The food he ate came out of someone else’s mouth. His job was just a way to get money to spend on things that weren’t good for him. His friends and family died one by one. He abandoned the mother of his child, who also died. His pleasures became suffering, and his suffering was already suffering. So where did that leave him?

Augustine’s solution was to change his perspective. What if it was good that he lost his job, because that let him devote himself to a spiritual life? What if it was good that his mother died, because that crisis forced him to listen to what she had to tell him? Roman society wouldn’t let him marry the woman he loved, and their son died young. But even from that, he could extract meaning. He had to.

At least that’s what I got out of the book.

Legends from the End of Time by Michael Moorcock – eh. There is something there. What happens when “Art triumphs over Nature” and there’s nothing left that’s outside of our control? What does decadence look like when it’s turned up to eleven, and how does that look from different perspectives? The characters were pretty good, and I liked the conceit that time travelers all end up tumbling all the way to the end of time. But I like science in my science fiction. I like characters that take things apart to see how they work. Moorcock wasn’t interested in talking about how things work. Alright, but there’s also the question of mortality. Time will end, dude. What do you do about that? Give us an answer, author, come on.

The Courage to be Disliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga – I’ve been recommending this book to people at rate of about one every two days. It’s good. It’s useful. It’s written in a very irritating style, but once you get past that, it really has something to say.

The Courage to be Disliked is about the work of Alfred Adler, a psychologist who I’d never heard of, who espoused “teleology” for those suffering from mental illness, rather than “etiology.” That is, rather than focus on the reasons why you came to this impasse, you figure out what to do about it.

You want to around, over, under, or through the wall in your way, so you don’t need to dwell on the composition of its bricks. If you’re camped out in the shadow of the wall, it’s because, on some level, it’s a strategy. Does it work for you? What’s your next step?

Thud by Terry Pratchett – Thud is my favorite Discworld book, and that’s saying a lot. This is Pratchett at the height of his craft, telling an entertaining “scaffolding story” about a police investigation that gets caught up in an imported war. Then there are the greater depths: bigotry, hatred, the drive for revenge, and the forces that oppose them. Which are not always nice. The battle is not of dark against light, but of different kinds of darkness. My paper version is marked with my thumbnail from when I read it in the ICU recovering from my second life-saving surgery in two weeks. I didn’t have a pen in the ICU. Anyway, the book helped. Uh, go read it.

Next up is August. I’m not planning to write then either, but let’s see what sort of mischief I get up to.

*They turned out gorgeous.

Family Pre-Union (4)

William is standing behind Mother, who is still arguing with the Kishas, and he isn’t just looking at me, he’s staring like I’m a ghost. So are two Kishas and a Cheryl. And I’ve had the same horrified fascination from almost everyone at this gathering of my future family. It’s as if they’re watching the beginning of a train wreck.

My earlier suspicions grow cold and solid. Something happens to me in the spring of 1930. Or somebody wants me to think so. My hand goes to my jacket pocket. “What the hell this is layout?” I mutter.

“Just what I’m wondering.” Rudolf’s eyebrows meet in the middle of his forehead. So that’s what worry looks like on him. “Everyone is awfully touchy, but nobody will tell me why.”

“Someone’ll tell me,” I say, and put down my champagne flute. “So long, Rudolf. See you at the airport.”

I meet William in the same place Billy and I used to go to get away from Mother’s parties. The closet under the stairs is empty of furniture now and tall enough for us both to stand comfortably.

“Quickly.” William is sweating, face red, eyes shifty. “They’ll miss me soon.”

“Oh they will, will they?” I sneer. What sort of dumb cluck does he think I am that I haven’t caught on to his game yet? “Because Mother doesn’t want you talking to me? Isn’t that right, William?”

“She forbade me explicitly.”

“As if I should believe you. You think you can play me for a sucker? I know what goes on.”

“I very much doubt you do.” William wipes his brow. “Saints alive, I wasn’t this nervous when I was plotting to overthrow the United States government.”

That throws me. “You overthrew the government?”

“I did, yes.” He tugs on the lapels of his uniform. “But that’s not important.” He leans closer. “Ruth, I have to tell you – ”

I hold up my hands. “Right. You’ve some dire horse feathers to sell me about how my future self ruined her life.”

“Horse feathers?” repeats William as if he doesn’t know the meaning of the phrase.

“Admit it,” I say. “You and Mother want me to believe all my plans will end in tears. So you arranged for this whole parade of descendants to come here and show me so.”

William shakes his head, blinking. “We haven’t arranged – ”

“And even if it weren’t a load of hooey, things will be different this time,” I assure him. “I’ve got a…well. Let’s just say I can protect myself now.”

“No, Ruth – ”

“Let me finish,” I say. “I’ve made my own plans and unless you give me an awful good reason – ”

“Ruth!” William’s voice is choked. “Don’t get on that plane with Rudolf.”

“Rudolf?” I repeat dumbly. I thought he was about to forbid me to run away.

“Break off your engagement,” says William.

“Take it easy,” I tell him. “I’m not engaged. I’m not even thinking about marriage.”

William glances over his shoulder at the door to the closet. “Mother will be here any moment. Listen. What’s your relationship with Rudolf?”

“Relationship? That’s an odd way to put it.”

“Did he invite you to go on a plane ride to Denver?”

I move my shoulders. “Yeah?”

“Jesus.” He’s shaking. “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, don’t go with him, Ruth. You’ll marry him, Ruth, and then you’ll – ” He breaks off, shakes his head, runs his hands across his face. “No. Not you. She. She committed suicide.”

I feel as if I’ve been kicked in the gut. “She who? Your sister, you mean? My counterpart?” That might explain her kids’ reaction when they saw me. Suicide. Jesus. “Why?”

William shakes his head again. “I don’t know why she killed herself.” Then, as if he knows all too well, “It was after the War, when Rudolf came back from the Pacific.”

“That’s that war with Japan, you mean,” I say. “But now there won’t be a war.”

“I don’t give a damn about any old war!” says William. “Rudolf is still going to…” He closes his eyes and shakes his head, the back of his trembling hand pressed to his mouth.

I’m out of patience. “You think Rudolf drove me – my counterpart, I mean – to suicide. Swell. Did she tell you how? Because that’s what I’d like to know.”

“She never told me,” admits William. “My sister and I drifted apart during the war and I saw her only once between 1945 and her death. That was for Betty’s christening in ’47.”

“Betty. My daughter,” I say. “I mean her daughter.” The one who wouldn’t come to this house and wouldn’t tell Rudolf why. Mother of Ginevra, who couldn’t bring herself to look at me, grandmother of Kisha, whose three counterparts descended like furies on Mother.

“Betty was her second daughter.” William levels a look at me like a melancholy cannon. “Ruth, your counterpart’s eldest daughter was born in 1930.”

That’s not a kick to the gut; it’s a pie in the face. “Go on with you. I’m not pregnant, for Christ’s sake.”

“Not yet,” William says.

“Not yet, he says. Hooey.” I’m starting to heat up again. Someone is playing me, even if the game isn’t what I thought it was. “It’s already 1930 and I don’t intend becoming pregnant before, what, the end of the month?”

William’s expression makes me double-check my math. I think about that romantic plane ride. Could butter-sandwich Rudolf actually seduce me?

Could he do worse?

I take a sharp breath. “What are you telling me, William?” But I know what he’s telling me. The skin on my neck prickles and all of a sudden the closet seems awfully dark and close. The air is clogged with old horror.

“I suspect,” says William, voice as heavy as a tax audit, “that young Rudolf has gotten tired of waiting.”

He’ll to force me to marry him. That’s what William is saying. Nine months later, my first daughter will be born, and I’ll stay with Rudolf for her sake. Then, when Rudolf comes back from the war 18 years later, he’ll rape me again, I’ll have another daughter, and that’s when I’ll decide to take my own life.

“The Kishas were right, damn them,” mutters William, rubbing his chin as if he feels dirty. “You deserve to know this even if Mother – ”

“Mother doesn’t want me to know any of this.” I point a shaking finger at him. “You spilled this whole story to her just now. That’s what you came here to do in the first place. And that job you offered me in the Nuclear Commons – ”

“I was wrong to do so.”

“– it was to get me out of this house.”

William sighs miserably. “Your mother refused, in any case. But, Ruth, you can still – ” William touches my shoulder and I twist away.

“Get your hand off me.”

“I’m sorry. I felt I had to tell you.” He looks out the closet again. “But you can see I also had to tell Mother.”

My fingertips are tingling. I see for the first time that William is between me and the closet door.

“Mother,” he swallows. “Your mother, that is, she says the future safety and, and prosperity of the family are worth your marrying Rudolf.”

“Oh she does, does she?” I raise my voice. “Her safety is worth the sacrifice of my whole damn future?”

William wrings his hands and snivels, but it isn’t he who answers.

“What are you sacrificing, Ruth? Much less than I ever had to.”

Mother is at the closet door.

“Go to hell, you dirty, rotten harpy,” I tell her, since nothing better comes to mind.

She brushes off the insults like silverfish crawling in the lace at her breast. “Weren’t you listening, Ruth? We shall prevent your suicide.”

“Not the rape, though,” I say. “That, you’re attempting to ensure.”

“Don’t make her marry that man,” pleads William.

Mother rolls her eyes. “Of course she must marry him. The Bleirer family brings us through the Great Depression. You told me so yourself, William.”

“There won’t be a Great Depression now,” he says. “Not in your timeline.”

“That misses the point a good ways,” I say. “How about I find someone better to marry, my own damn self?”

“And whom would you choose?” Mother shakes her head. “It has become clear to me that women in our family are afflicted with the urge to marry the strangest men they can find.”

I think of my father. He lives on the other side of town and opposes everything mother does, but I wouldn’t call him “strange.”

William also looks perplexed. “Beg pardon?”

“Nothing,” says Mother. “Ruth, I have been too lenient – ”

I shout over whatever lecture she has prepared. “You’re about to sell my virtue for a share of the Chicago meat packing business, you hag.”

Mother’s lip curls. I’m reminded of Ginevra. “Keep your voice down, Ruth.”

“Selling my virtue,” I shout louder, “for the possibility of – ”

“For our family’s safety,” she hisses. “Yes. And you, Ruth, would make the same decision if you were in my position.”

“Oh I would, would I?”

Mother puts her hands together and presses her fingertips to her lips, eyes closed as if praying. “Once I was foolish like you,” she says in a calmer voice, “and two persons were killed.”

I’m back up in the air. Mother’s killed people?

“Mother?” asks William.

“No,” Mother opens her eyes and drops her hands. “There is no reason for you to repeat my mistakes in order to learn my lessons, Ruth. You can simply listen to me now. And as for Rudolf, I shall ensure his good behavior.”

Her voice makes William and me shiver. I almost feel sorry for that vile, lizard-eyed rapist. Although not sorry enough to spend another minute in his company.

“He will treat you as a gentleman should,” says Mother. “In all other ways, however, you two are to carry on as canonical history dictates.”

“As you dictate, you mean.” Why am I arguing with her? I could never change Mother’s mind about anything. Now I can’t bear even to stay in the same house as her. She can go to hell. This whole city go to hell. This whole damn era of history!

I reach into my pocket. “I won’t let Rudolf rape me, Mother.”

She winces. “Language, Ruth. Why did you tell her, William? For God’s sake, don’t let her past you.”

William makes helpless little circles with his hands, and I see that Mother doesn’t need a time machine to turn an old bird into a little kid. “But you don’t need the Bleiers,” he says. “You can all come live with me. Be reasonable!”

Mother barks out a laugh. “Live? In your half-baked pseudo-Marxist utopia? No. As always, I must stay behind and create safety while others dive into danger. I must stay the course.” She points at me, finger like the barrel of a manicured rifle. “And your course, young lady, is set.”

I pull the taser out of my coat. “I’m fixing to un-set it.”

Mother’s eyes focus on the weapon and her powdered forehead wrinkles. “What is that? Some sort of gun? Put it away, Ruth, before someone sees you with it.”

William slaps his forehead. “Gun? The gun! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! This is the spring of 1930! Ruth was planning to run away!”

“Run?” Mother’s glare twitches from me to William. “So stop her! She won’t shoot you.”

William reaches out for me. “My sister had a gun, but that thing looks like – ”

I stick the taser in William’s armpit and press that button.

There’s no spark this time, just a hideous chattering sound like the jaws of a giant insect. But I keep my hold on the weapon as William spasms away from me. Brandish it like a cross in Mother’s face. She’s smart enough to get out of the way, but not smart enough to start screaming until I’m out the front door.

Clouds pile up in the northern sky, but ahead, the air between me and Future Pier is clear and blue. I haven’t my hat or the love of my family, but I’ve got the taser, my money, and the key to the Landau, which is right where I parked it.

I tear open my car’s door as they pour out of the house after me. Elmos and Ignacios, Denises and Cheryls. The Kishas advance on me like a troop of Valkyries, but I press the starter button and roar away down the street.

I don’t have much time. Mother will turn this whole city into a machine for capturing me. Billy is probably crying. I might feel a bit lousy about William. I don’t suppose I’ll be able to take him up on his job offer now. Mostly what I am, though, is glad to be in a position where I can just give up on all these mugs and get out of town.

I grip the wheel so hard it hurts and take a left turn onto Lake Shore Drive. Hooked streetlights and young trees flash past, and Future Pier stretches off to the east. Tickets on the time trains come dear, but I’ve got this big, valuable car, haven’t I?

I pat the dashboard. “Time to trade you up, old boy,” I say, “for something that can fly.”

Interchange is out

…give or take a few hours depending on your time zone.

If the “order now” button hasn’t appeared for you yet, whet your taste with the interviews I gave on

Writer’s History podcast

Time for Cakes and Ale podcast (upcoming)

and my publisher’s text interview

Some reviews:

Publisher’s Weekly: “Bensen writes with characteristic nuance, keenly balancing human drama and ambition against the incredible alien landscape of Junction…”

Philly Press Review: “…exotic biology that shomehow works and yet is nothing like anything on Earth.”

Science Meets Fiction: “Bottom line: Interchange is a marked improvement over Junction.”

and my Interchange playlists:

Beginning

Middle

End

But anyway it’s a lovely, misty morning here at Castle Cylon. The bindweed is blooming, the juniper hedge smells good, and my children are churning the pool. Enjoy your June 20th.

Here’s Interchange.

Family Preunion (3)

Our house is an elegant, stately Victorian on a street of elegant, stately Victorians, the big, peak-roofed gingerbreaded fruits of an orchard with pretensions. The street is packed with cars and arriving guests.

The party fills the living and dining rooms and the foyer in between with future relations and 1930s high society. Jenkins and the special staff hired for today hustle back and forth, exchanging coats for canapes and flutes of newly-legalized champagne.

William introduces me to his son Elmo, a sunburned and handsome young jasper with wild eyes, who’s talking about something called “marketing” with “Old Elmo” and “Very Old Elmo,” his gray-haired and no-haired future counterparts.

Elmo’s wife looks daggers at her husband as she tries to soothe a crying baby, which is taken up and cuddled by a Chinese-looking woman named Denise. Denise is no nanny, though. She breaks off cooing at the infant and yells, “Behave, Alex, or I swear to God!” at a gangling pickle-pus who must be her son, Billy’s great grandson.

Alex hastily puts down a flute of champagne, which is picked up and downed by his bald and miserable-looking 52-year-old counterpart.

“Old Alex must have learned he’s destined to have a heart attack,” whispers William. “Must be quite a shock.”

For her part, Mother has enthroned herself on a davenport at the other end of the living room. She has on old-fashioned evening gown, her hair poofed up around her head. Mucha could have found a better model for an illustration of The Sin of Pride, maybe, if he visited the court of Kubla Khan.

William identifies the women and girl standing around Mother as “the Cheryls,” before he bustles off to go kow-tow at the matriarchal shrine. Billy joins some other young kids in a game that seems to consist of clinging onto and being dragged around by the robotic legs of “Very Old Denise.”

I manage to snag food and booze without giving up my coat and try to figure out how to avoid trouble while I wait for William to come back and dump his revelations on me.

Mother might be a withered old stick in the mud, but she plays the hostess as if her life depends on it, and she flies in circles so lofty that we could run Chicago from our living room. Besides the music and caviar, we’ve got the the O’Hares, the Rathjes, and the Adlers. They all looking awful important with their diamond-studded tie pins and sequined evening gowns.

Or, they would look important, if the 1930s natives weren’t so spooked by the future people, who are wearing just about anything. And, in some cases, almost nothing. A glance tells me suits are destined to stay dull, while dresses will mutate wildly, turn into brightly-colored togas, dissolve into fuzzy, amorphous clouds, and finally sublimate into a force that simply makes it impossible to look at certain places on the wearer’s body. Wardrobe by hypnotic suggestion. I like the idea, but I guess it must get chilly.

I goggle at the future people so much that I don’t immediately notice that they’re all goggling back at me. Politely, of course. No more than a glance here and a comment there. Worse, Mother is watching me too, and her face, as William whispers in her ear, is dismal. That’s no big change for her, but when she looks me in the eyes, I see something terrifying: sorrow.

I take a step toward them, but Mother shakes her head. She jerks her chin toward the corner of the living room next to the punch bowl, where Rudolf is standing at the edge of a huddle of frightened 1930s celebrities.

“Ugh.” I mouth at her. “Rudolf?”

Mother jerks her head more forcefully.

I consider simply leaving. I still have all my money on me, but my mind goes to William and those dark hints he laid out in the car. What if he remembers something from when his sister ran away from home? What if something is fated to happen to me in the spring of 1930?

I find a full champagne flute and beard Rudolf by the punch bowl.

He tells me I look lovely again. Maybe he was expecting me to get ugly in the last half hour? I thank him, put a cucumber sandwich in my mouth, and try to chew slowly. This passes the time, and also helps to avoid gasping in surprise when Rudolf says, “I was thinking.”

“Mm?” I encourage.

“I was thinking of a trip to Denver,” Rudolf says. “There’s still snow there. We can ski.”

I might like to ski. I never have tried it. When I do, however, I believe I’ll take somebody else with me. I would rather not die of boredom on a mountain in Colorado.

Rudolf looks as if he might expect an answer.

“I’d rather drive than ski,” I tell him. “And I can do that right here in Chicago.”

“What about flying?” he asks. “Would you like to fly?”

This time I can’t help but gasp aloud, and Rudolf gives me a tiny smile. The minute upward hoisting to his toothbrush mustache might indicate that he knows that I would sell my left arm for the chance to fly an aircraft.

I test him. “Billy would want to come.”

Rudolf shakes his head. “It would be better with just the two of us. More romantic.”

More romantic, he says, the wet sock. But all I say is, “My mother won’t agree to it.”

“She already has. I spoke with her. We can leave tomorrow.”

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Where Rudolf is concerned, Mother stops pulling me back and sets to pushing me forward. And I can always enjoy that flight to Denver before shutting my hotel room door in Rudolf’s face. Besides which, I’ll have my taser with me.

I say yes, and we stare at each other for a few more minutes, while I imagine my hands on the steering yoke and the plane banking under me. Rudolf imagines God knows what.

“Hey,” someone says behind me, “hi!”

I turn and look down to see a little black girl in a bizarre outfit. It looks as if she’s taken some boys’ clothes and splashed bright-colored paint all over them. She holds out a hand, bold as you please.

“I’m Kisha,” she says. “Are you Ruth? I’m your un-un-great-granddaughter!”

“You’re my what?” I ask, but a noise from the door makes Kisha jump and puts hands over her mouth.

I follow the little girl’s gaze to the beautiful blonde who has just stalked through the door, and who now surveys us from the folds of her fur coat as if she’s auditioning for the role of Evil Queen in a Disney picture. I’m just considering about how much competition she’s got in this family when she looks me in the eye.

“You,” the Snow Queen mouths. Or maybe it’s, “No.” Her high cheekbones go livid and she crosses herself.

I take a step forward and she turns away. “No. I can’t do this.” She has the same accent as the little girl and the mug who sold me the taser. “Kisha,” she calls. “Come here.”

Kisha frowns at the blonde. “But mom – ”

“Now!” she this woman who I realize must be my granddaughter. “Jesus, these awful people. I should never have brought you here.”

“Ginevra,” William’s voice rises above the party noise. “What are you doing here? I told you to wait an hour.”

Ginevra? What kind of name is that, even? Billy was right about future people and their screwy ways.

“I didn’t trust you,” Ginevra says. “I was right not to. You haven’t told Ruth a thing, have you? Why is she still fucking here, William? Why are you over there talking to your fucking mother?”

William doesn’t get a chance to answer. “You there,” says Mother. “Who are you and what makes you think you can speak so to my family?”

Ginevra’s eyes jerk wide. Her upper lip curls.

Kisha runs to her mother. “I’m sorry,” says the little girl. “We can go. I’m sorry, mom. Please don’t be mad.”

Ginevra nods slowly. Still glaring at Mother, she turns her head to the left and spits deliberately onto a potted palm.

“What was that all about?” I ask once the ruckus has died down.

“Search me,” says Rudolf, uselessly.

But no, the ruckus still has some life in it. The blonde, Ginevra, strong-arms past a trio of tall black women who must be the old, very old, and very very old counterparts of Kisha. Mother in heaven, that kid will live a long time.

My three great-granddaughters march up to Mother, William, and the Cheryls. One of them says something I can’t hear. I do feel the temperature drop, though.

“I wonder,” I say as I watch chill spread from this witches’ row. “Why are all my descendants so mad?”

I’m not expecting an answer from Rudolf, but he gives me one anyhow. “None of them would come with me,” he says. “I met them at the airport. Betty and Ginevra and the Kishas. I told them I was to fetch them, but they wouldn’t come with me. They wouldn’t talk to me, even.”

I’m about to ask Rudolf if my descendants hated him as much as William did, but there’s the old bird himself, looking me straight in the eyes.

(next)