Daniel M. Bensen's Blog, page 13

June Newsletter: Behold, a Dog

So there was my younger daughter, caught in an epistemological crisis. She’s five. Let’s call her Mikhaela.

It was one of those early summer days in western Bulgaria, when the clouds pile like surf over the mountains. Over the course of the day, the air gets hazier, the pressure and humidity rise until you feel like you’re carrying a sea in your sinuses. The breaking point always comes in the afternoon, when the steel blue sky finally cracks. Then it pours and thunders for fifteen minutes.

We weren’t yet at that breaking point. It was still just heavy and blue when I took Mishi and her older sister (let’s call her Juli), to the playground in our village. We spent a happy hour looking at bugs and trying to turn off the water fountain, and then this other little girl showed up with her grandpa. She was three.

We came out of Lockdown in Sofia in the spring of 2021. Mishi went to daycare for about four weeks, but even then we didn’t play with other kids in parks because Pavlina and I didn’t get fully vaccinated until the beginning of June. So that three-year old was the first time in a year I’d seen Mishi play with a younger kid in over a year. It was illuminating.

The three-year-old had a stuffed kitty and a T-shirt with a doggy on it. So far, so good. Everyone loves a carnivorous mammal. But she kept calling her stuffed toy “my dog.”

“That’s not a dog,” said Mishi, “that’s a cat.”

“No, it’s my doggy!”

Mishi, thinking she held the logical trump card, pointed at the dog on the girl’s shirt. “So what’s that on your shirt?”

“It’s a bear.”

“No,” said Mishi, still working hard. “That’s not a bear, it’s a dog.”

“No, it’s a bear.” The little girl rubbed the image on her shirt, thinking. “It’s a bear because it has long ears.”

Mishi’s fists bunched. Bears didn’t have long ears. And the ears of the thing on the other kid’s shirt weren’t long, because it wasn’t a bear, it was a goddamn dog.

“All right,” said Mishi, “let’s play a new game. It’s called ‘What is the Right Name for this Animal?'”

Juli, who has had more experience with younger children said, “let’s go play on the swings.”

I watched this all, reflecting on what a good father I was for teaching Juli that “someone else’s imagination can’t be wrong.”

But then I remembered our house guest of the previous week.

Once Pavlina and I were vaccinated, we invited this friend over whom we hadn’t talked to for two years. Ho boy.

She wasn’t an anti-vaxxer in general, I think. She just hated the Covid-19 vaccines, specifically. The vaccines that didn’t cause blood-clots would rewrite your DNA, and anyway the Coronavirus wasn’t so dangerous. Her parents were ruining their health staying in their home during the lockdown, when what they should have been doing was getting outdoor exercise and eating a low-sugar, vegetarian, gluten-free diet like our friend.

This, while we were sitting indoors, eating the raspberry pie I’d made for her. I admit I felt a twinge about that, but that wasn’t what got me.

What got me was the fact that I have been deathly ill (it was cancer, not Covid). At that time, if I hadn’t listened to my doctors, I might have died. Facts are important.

But I didn’t say that. To my credit, I also didn’t suggest we play “What is the Right Response to the Novel Coronavirus?” Instead, I went quiet. I stayed quiet for about two hours, then got up, saying I needed to make dinner.

“What are you making?” asked my vegetarian guest.

“Duck,” I said.

I felt guilty after that, but it wasn’t until Mishi’s “behold, a dog” moment in the park that I realized why. Haven’t I told my daughters that one’s imagination cannot be wrong? Had my friend attacked me? Or had she invited me to play a comforting game of Let’s Pretend?

When I was out of the room, pan-frying my passive-agressive duck breast, Pavlina extracted some more information: of course our friend bent her dietary restrictions when it came to eating dishes (such as pie) which had been specially made for her. She was happy she had chosen to live in Bulgaria. She was angry at her parents for another, personal reason. She had reasons for creating her fantasy, the same as me.

“So what should I have done?” I asked Pavlina.

“Exactly what you did,” she said. “Our friend triggered you, and you got out of there. You have to take your hand out of the fire before you start treating the burns.”

Okay, but what should I do next time? I’m not sure, but I’ll take the lead from my daughters.

Facts are important, but other kids’ imaginations can’t be wrong. What we’re doing here isn’t setting policy for the Ministry of Health or making corrections to the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature. What we’re doing is playing with each other.

No, I don’t want to play that game. I want to know what’s going on with your parents. How do you overcome your fear that you might get sick again? Do you want to go on the slide with me? Have some more pie.

***

And in other news…

Whoo-ee! What a month! A month for finishing things.

Petrolea’s serialization ended, so now you can read the whole novella starting here.

I wrote a little short story in the New Frontiers universe called Appendix.

I got some lovely copies of Interchange – its launch date is July 20th, but you can preorder the book now.

The virtual launch party for Interchange will be on the 27th of July (Tuesday) and you can Register here. If you post about the launch party (and tell me you did so), your name will go into the pot to win prizes. Right now there’s like three people in the pot, so your chances are pretty good.

And finally Wealthgiver gamma is done! This is the “meat” draft where I read through the whole string of scenes and made sure they push and pull against each other, and the whole story works (even if it isn’t pretty yet). This is also the first draft that’s open to critique, so if you’d like to read this rough draft of a story about nation-building cave-Thracians, tell me and I’ll send you a file.

And I read some stuff

The Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad

I liked it, but I wanted more. Maybe that’s the point. There’s this sense of massive, impenetrable depth. What the hell was Kurtz actually doing? Who was that woman with all the jewelry? I kept waiting to dig in and get to the real story, but the narrator couldn’t stay in the jungle long enough, or else he would have died too. It is also a pleasure to read something written by someone who came late to the English language, but loved and was amused by it.

Judaism by Geoffrey Wigoder

Part of a series that offer nice overviews of many religions. Good, basic information. It’s good to know this stuff.

The Initiate by James L. Cambias

Probably my favorite novel of the month. I can safely say now that I’ll buy whatever Cambias writes. He does worldbuilding splendidly and his characters aren’t bad either. Especially in the Initiate, the characters worked very well: an ex-soldier is recruited to destroy a secret, world-running cabal of wizards after one of their demons kills his family. Excellent stuff. I was disappointed by the ending, but the fun I had along the way more than made up for it. I spent every day anticipating the chance to read this book.

Carl Jung: How to Believe by Mark Vernon

A very short summary of the life and work of Carl Jung. It was good research for Wealthgiver.

Deep Work by Cal Newport

A good companion to Make Time, giving some psychological/philosophical underpinning. The basic idea is that you do a better job at whatever you’re doing if you dig in and work in a flow-state without distraction for 1-2 hours at a stretch. I was writing Wealthgiver at the time and experimented with the techniques in Deep Work (the ones I hadn’t already evolved in parallel) and they really did work. My criticism comes at the beginning, where Newport tries to scare you into reading him, and where he misunderstands the nature of management. A CEO close to me tells me that she also has to engage in deep work – it’s just that her deep work is built of many smaller conversations with clients and employees. So Newport was more right than he knew.

Legacy by Lois McMaster Bujold

I re-read this right after finishing my re-read of Beguilement, and that was a good idea. Beguilement and Legacy really are one story about people trying to fix the world around their relationship. My only wish is that I could find out more about that world. God damn they must have some interesting archeology.

She Dreams in Blood by Michael R. Fletcher

This is the sequel to Black Stone Heart, and continues the story of a re-incarnated Dark Lord as he tries to put his Evil Empire back together (by hunting down, murdering, and absorbing all the memories of all the other incarnations of the same Dark Lord). I enjoyed the first one, but I was expecting more from the second. I wanted to see new wrinkles emerge – things the main character didn’t know that turn the premise on its head. Instead She Dreams in Blood was more of the same, with higher stakes and larger collateral damage. I don’t think I’ll read the next one.

The Pigeon Tunnel by John Le Carré

Thoroughly enjoyable and instructive for both students of writing and the human condition. The spy novelist (and ex-spy) John Le Carré writes about his life and work from the perspective of a retired 80-something living in a Swiss Chalet. Not a bad life. And when the President of Italy requests that I give him one of my books, I’ll make sure to have one specially bound in leather with gold embossing. I didn’t know you could do that.

Family Preunion (2)

 

The time trains arrived just after Black Tuesday, and they saved us. Investors and humanitarians from the 22nd century dumped cash on the banks, stopped the trusts from crashing any further, and gave us the knowledge and technology to transform our world and rewrite our old destiny.

Their “railroad” sits within a circular, concrete platform at the end of Future Pier. It’s a cage composed of pipes that might be porcelain, except they glimmer with soap-bubble colors. No matter where you stand, the opposite side of the cage seems to vanish off into the distance.

“I can’t wait to meet my future self,” says Billy while I peer into the depths of time and potential.

“From what I understand, the people from down time are only what we might become,” corrects Rudolf, the tedious bore. “It is better to consider them as coming from another country.”

Sure. Another country. A country whose books contain between 45 and 203 years of extra history. There is some confusion about what the future people are doing here, since nothing they do in our version of 1930 will change anything about their own past. Mother says it’s something to do with tax-free import and export.

Rudolf takes out a cigarette and lights it. “Want one?” he asks.

“No thanks,” I say, looking past him at a row of bill-boards filled with futurese gibberish. “Bao’an’s multi-UI-e-cigarettes! Personal Maglev Packs! S. electrogenisis cultures Utility fog! Now in a can!”

“Would you like to buy something from the bazaar?” Asks Rudolf, bland as a butter sandwich.

I look sidewise at him. “No,” I say. “I didn’t come here to shop.”

Rudolf seems to accept that. He either doesn’t know I’m playing him, or else he just doesn’t care. “Your coat and hat are quite fine.”

The coat with the money and the weapon. I don’t know whether that remark was meant to be ominous, polite, or only dull. They all sound the same, coming out of Rudolf.

“It’s my driving outfit,” I answer.

Rudolf’s eyes go unfocused as he considers my response. “And where is your chauffeur?”

“I drove here myself,” I say. Over Mother’s objections, but she was too busy with preunion preparations to really stop me. It’s another reason why today is an excellent day to go camp out in Chicago. After I meet my future relatives, of course. A girl’s got her curiosity.

“You like to drive?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say from the depths of boredom and despair.

“Ah,” he says, staring at me. “Very good.”

My sanity is preserved by a violation of space and time. The soapy white cage emits a gong sound and a blast of cold air. Rainbow light shines through mist that wasn’t there a moment ago and my sense of down tips giddily outward. I stumble, and when I look up, the mist is parting over the smooth snout of a time train’s engine.

Another gong sound, and an oddly-accented voice speaks out of nowhere. “The Centuries Unlimited, now arriving at Black Station.”

The porcelain cage is only about five yards wide, but somehow the whole train fits inside, its silvery length tapering off to some distance you can’t properly call “up” or “down” or even “away.” “Thence,” I suppose.

From just this side of thence-ward, then, passengers begin to disembark.

I put my hand on Billy’s shoulder. “Would you look at that? Wouldn’t it be grand to take a ride on one of those things?”

Billy isn’t listening to me. He’s scanning the faces of passengers. “Hey,” he says, and stands up on his tip-toes to wave. “I think that’s me!”

I expected Billy’s downtime doppelganger to look like my father, but the man who walks up to us is older than my father. This “William” is like an uncle I never had: a pouchy, balding fellow in a funny green and red uniform. He looks tired, but that may just be from the train ride. I wonder how long it took? How many hours are there between 1930 and the 1960s?

“Ruth,” William’s eyes go wide when he sees me. “How young you are. You’re just a girl.” He stands there, staring at me as if either I’m made of glass or he is.

I put out my free hand and yell, “Shake, sit, roll over!”

Billy laughs at the familiar joke, and William’s eyes go misty at a memory decades behind him. He grasps my hand and squeezes. He’s real, all right, a man from the 1960s with a grip as doughy as an accountant’s.

“I’m glad,” William swallows. “I’m so glad to see you again, Ruth. And looking so well. So happy.”

“Happy to meet you, hey.” I say, a bit up in the air. Are those tears in his eyes?

“Is that…” William squints past me, “Rudolf? Rudolf Bleirer?” He looks from the meat magnate’s son to me
and his expression goes from joyfully sad to shocked and mad. “What is he doing here, Ruth?”

Billy gasps at the rudeness of his older self, but Rudolf just blinks.

I guess that leaves me to answer the question. “Rudolf’s here to fetch the other guests,” I say. “He brought his own car.”

“Then I’ll ride with you.” William turns away from Rudolf and winks at Billy. “I’d like to be beside myself.”

Billy giggles and everyone relaxes but me. I’m wondering what happened – will happen? Is fated to happen? – between my little brother and the man Mother wants me to marry. I pat the taser in my pocket and decide not to worry.

“Ah,” says William after a Rudolf-less walk back down Future Pier and through the bazaar. “Our good old Imperial Landau.”

“Imperial” is the right word for it. The car is slow, safe, and eye-wateringly ostentatious. You can see why Mother would like it. Me, though, I want a Duesenberg. Something that flies.

“Hello there, old boy.” William runs his fingertips down the Landau’s hood and smiles sadly at me. “I remember you used to love driving this thing.”

“I still love to drive it.” I glare at Billy, who’s giggling again. “And I’m good at it, too.”

William squints at me before memory dawns. “Oh, that’s right. Our first joyride was in ’29, wasn’t it?” He taps the scratch on the Landau’s right front fender. “It was not to be our last encounter with Mrs. Allais’ mailbox, either.” His avuncular chuckle joins the merriment already underway from Billy. “I remember you told me you’d been driving before, but that was your first time, wasn’t it?”

You’d been driving? The fate of our language was worse than I thought.

I sniff. “I read books on driving.” I unlock the driver’s side door. “And anyhow I’m much better at it now than back in the fall.”

Billy gets into the car. “This is screwy,” he says. “We both remember Mrs. Allais’ mailbox, but you don’t remember this meeting we have today?”

“Your life departed from canonical history the day the time trains came.” William says, and slides in after Billy. “I grew up, went to war, and had all sorts of trouble before I married. Trouble I trust you will avoid.”

Billy quizzes William about his wife and children as the Landau wallows out of its parking spot. I feel like I’m piloting the like the imperial barque of a pharaoh.

“My sons might already be at the house,” says William. “They and the counterparts of my grandchildren from the stations down time from mine: Denise and Old Denise and Very Old Denise…” Another chuckle. “And the Cheryls. Oh my. What characters they are. What characters.”

I picture the time trains and their rail system, with stations at every generation between now and 2132. “How about people from the end of the line?” I ask.

“The Present, you mean? Yes,” says William. “I believe both Very Very Old Kisha and Emulated Gavrail have sent in their RSVPs.”

“Funny names they have down in the future,” says Billy.

“My boy, you don’t know the half of it,” says William. “Not the half of it.”

I focus on steering this land-yacht. There’s a certain type who lets this sort of “canonical history” get to him. The kind of guy who digs into what would have happened if the time trains had never come: the Great Depression, World War Two, and all. I think it’s a morbid and pointless obsession. Whatever happens, now that we’ve got a pipeline to the future, it’ll be a lot stranger than any old war.

We sail in stately sloth through the bazaar and into the city proper. Ranks of windows line the gray faces of skyscrapers. Cars run up and down boulevards as wide as all our possibilities. The wind reaches in through the open window and plays with my hair as I press on the accelerator.

“How different your Chicago is from mine,” says William. “So much smaller! But, I think, more hopeful?”

“Who cares about the dumb old city?” says Billy. “What will my kids be like?”

William harrumphs. “In fact, we don’t know anything about your potential children, Billy, as I’ve been saying.”

“I mean your kids.”

“Ah. Elmo and Ignacio, you mean. Why, they became members of the government of the Nuclear Commons. That’s my country.”

“The Nucle-what? That’s not a real country,” says Billy.

“well, for me, the time trains arrived in 1962. That was five years ago, and a great deal has changed since then,” says William.

“What’s changed?”

William tells Billy about “force shields,” and “the power of the atom,” and “the value of labor,” but I care less about the politics of William’s 1960s station than the people I can see here on the streets of Chicago, doing their business and living their lives. Enjoying their freedom.

The traffic tugs me as if I were swimming in a river before it becomes a waterfall. Not that I’ve ever swum in a river, or even seen a waterfall. All the more reason to fling myself into this one.

“It’s my turn now,” I say.

“Beg pardon?” asks William.

“I mean,” I stammer, “how about my future, hey?”

William is silent for just a little too long, and when he speaks, it isn’t to answer my question.

“Ruth, I’m planning to ask your mother to let you come work with me. We need skilled young people in the Nuclear Commons.”

I consider the offer as I swerve around some dope in a Studebaker. Once I’m back in the clear, I decide I would prefer to have a little fun before I’m passed from one minder to another.

“Mother won’t agree to anything like that.” It’s a good excuse, and it happens to be true.

“I’ll tell your mother that life in my station, that is to say, my historical era, is much better than here,” William declares. “We have more and safer food, better medicine, machines that wash your clothes…”

What do I look like, a servant? “How about flying cars?” I ask.

“Yes, in fact,” says William. “We import maglev cars from stations further down time, but I’m personally in favor of field-supported vehicles, which we can produce locally.”

I stopped listening at the word “yes.” “They dear, these flying cars?” I ask.

“Well,” says William. “A maglev car would cost about as much as however much you paid for this Landau, I suppose.”

“Wow,” says Billy. “Flying cars! Imagine that, Ruth!”

I do. I imagine the skies over Chicago filled with flying cars, with me in the fastest one.

“Ah, yes,” says William. “My sister used to love flying, too.”

As much as it tickles me to hear little-kid slang like ‘love flying’ coming out of this old bird’s mouth, I don’t like the melancholy in William’s voice. “You mean I don’t love to fly any more in the future?”

“Not you,” he says, too quickly. “Your canonical counterpart. She…she stopped flying, yes.”

“Why?” I ask, worried. It would be one thing to never get the chance to fly. But to start and then stop?

“William?” says Billy as the old man’s silence stretches.

William sighs. “I will tell you, Ruth. Not now, though. Not here.”

“Nobody here in the car but us,” I say.

“I promised Mother she gets to hear the future news first.”

The way he says “Mother,” I know I can’t change William’s mind.

“Then promise me,” I say. “After you talk with Mother, you’ll come find me and you’ll tell me my fate.”

“Not your fate, Ruth,” he says and I hear in his tone, I hope. “But I promise I will tell you what happened to your counterpart. In good time.”

“‘Good time,'” I say. “Cute.”

William doesn’t laugh.

(Next)

Family Preunion (1)

Family Preunion (A Centuries Unlimited story)

The taser fits right in my hand: light as a pack of cigarettes and cool as a sleeping beetle.

“Press the button,” says the man from the future.

I press it and the taser spits a fat blue spark. Pigeons flee over the bazaar at Future Pier and I laugh out loud.

It’s the spring of 1930, with grass blades peeking out of the mud and the kind of Chicago air that you might like to swim up into.

“Rudolf’ll be sore when he finds us,” Billy frets.

I give my little brother a pat on his cap and glance around the bazaar for signs of the approach of any son of a meat-magnate. “You let me handle Rudolf, kid.”

“And he’ll tell Mother.”

“I’ll handle Mother too.”

Billy gives me a dubious look.

“I will,” I tell him.

In fact what I intend is avoiding Mother entirely during the Preunion party. Afterward I’ll escape her house and go frolic at liberty through the seedy underbelly of Chicago. When I return home safely on the day after tomorrow, Mother will be so impressed at my foresight and self-reliance, she’ll have no choice but to cut the apron strings.

Billy isn’t done whining. “I don’t like that dingus, Ruth. Who do you need to give the electric cure, anyhow? You could knock somebody up with that thing.”

“Um,” says the man from the future. “What. No?”

“He means kill someone,” I translate.

“Oh. Naw. Hurts like fuck, though.” The man grins at our expressions. “That’s the way we talk where I come from, kids.”

The salesman’s fresh complexion and the zipper on his cardigan make him look like a kid himself. And not a rich one, judging by the blue canvas pants with the rips across their knees. He doesn’t act like a street urchin, though. He acts like a grifter.

“Now,” says the man from the future, “if you guys do want to kill somebody, I stock a little magic trick that’ll be illegal as soon as your government finds out about it…”

Billy grimaces as if someone has snuck a slingshot onto the school yard. “You can’t sell deadly weapons to girls.”

“What? Where’s the girl?” The salesman squints at me. “He mean you? You told me you were 19.”

“You bet I did,” I say. “And I was on the up and up.”

The man from the future scowls. “Shit, you Up-timers. Learn to speak modern English.”

That comes out “learn-na speak marrern Ing-lish.” Some kind of English this mug speaks.

“I’ll take the taser,” I enunciate clearly, “if you would be so kind as to sell it to me, sir.”

The grifter’s shoulders move. “That’ll be 5 dollars.”

Billy whistles. “You could eat out for a week on that.”

I pat my coat’s pockets. We’re both dressed for the party with our up-time relatives, me in my cloche hat and evening dress under the coat that’s almost too heavy the weather, Billy in a more fashionable cap and cardigan. The knee-socks spoil the look, though.

“Why do you want that taser dingus anyhow?” he whines.

“Why, to grill five sacks of hamburgers,” I say, “with onions and pickles. What do you think I need it for?” I find my roll of cash, peel off a bill, and hand it to the grifter.

“Awesome,” he says. “Anything else I can interest you in? If you’re into personal defense, I’ve got mace, keychain weapons, Swiss army knives…”

I don’t see any maces or chains. Or the Swiss army, neither, but before I can ask for clarification, Billy tugs on my sleeve.

“Don’t run away, Ruth.”

I sigh. Billy found out about my run-away plan this morning, when he saw that roll of cash.

“I’ll only be gone for a night or two,” I tell him. “And dummy up about it.”

“What’s the point if you’ll only be gone a day?”

“You want me to stay away forever? And I said dummy up.”

Billy’s voice drops to an agonized whisper. “But Mother says the streets full of down-time disintegrators and ray-guns getting sold to malcontents and agitators.”

I hold up the taser. “Maybe I’m looking forward to doing some agitating of my own, hey?”

I put the taser down, though, and wipe the smile off my face, when I see Rudolf.

“Ruth,” my suitor slips through the crowd with the determination of a spawning trout. The face of one, too. “Billy. There you are.”

“Rudolf.” I mutter the down-time merchant’s vulgar word and stuff the cash and the taser into my pockets. “There you are. Because we have also been looking for you.”

Rudolf stares me in the eye and smiles with his lower lip. Maybe he’s trying to tell me something with that look he’s giving me, or maybe it’s just gas. It’s hard to tell with him.

Rudolf Bleirer is the son of a baron of sausages, and has spent the fall and winter asked me to marry him on a more or less weakly schedule. I would be more flattered at his persistence if it weren’t so clear that he’s only after my family’s political influence.

Since, for her part, Mother is only interested in his family’s money, she guesses it’s a match made in heaven. She’s the one who told Rudolf to help me fetch party guests from Future Pier, maybe hoping the task would require the boy to demonstrate his marriageable qualities.

“We’re to meet our guests over there, hey?” I point down the peir and Rudolf’s eyes track the movement as if he’s about to flick out his tongue and swallow my hand.

“Yeah,” says Billy, “let’s blouse. I want to meet my future self.”

The salesman shakes his head, mutters something about blouses, and turns to fleece some other natives of 1930.

(next)

Wealthgiver gamma is done!

Wugh! Wealthgiver! My plan was to read through the string of scenes I’d made in the alpha and beta drafts of this book and add what needed adding. Putting the meat around the bones and the heart, you might say. It was a new kind of editing for me – adding rather than subtracting to make things better.

Over the course of two and a half months, I evolved a Process:

xxx
1) Blank page – grab the image that comes
2) crack open old scene and make outline
3) put new stuff where it belongs in outline
4) read through and integrate
5) add + sign and move these instructions to next scene
xxx

With that text in hand, I ground down through my manuscript, growing new images, breaking and re-setting plot elements, and generally making sure that all the pieces pulled against each other. The result isn’t pretty, but it moves.

Wealthgiver
Complete muscles (gamma draft) finished at 73,706 words
Begun (writing) at 9:09pm on Thursday, April 8th 2021 in the Parents’ Keep of Scenic Castle Cylon.

First line: “Kori Chthamali was 16 when she realized that the myth of Persephone was about her.”

Finished at 3:40pm on Wednesday, June 30th 2021, in the Grandparents’ Chamber of the Balkan Tower of Matriarchy.

Last line: “His laughter sped across the valley and echoed back, deeper.”

Finally, Wealthgiver is ready for beta-readers. Send me a message if you’re interested.

Now I’m going to take a break and wait for Interchange to come out. Happy summer, everyone.

Virtual Scifi Triple-Launch!

Hosted by Magers and Quinn book store, we’re celebrating the launch of three new scifi books by Trilby Black, Neil Sharpson and me (Daniel M. Bensen).

When: Tuesday July 27th, 11am Minnesota time

Where: virtual!

How:

REGISTER HERE

Registration is $5, and attendees will receive virtual event access and a $5 off code for use at magersandquinn.com. Attendees also have a chance to win prizes during the event! Follow @magersandquinn or the authors on social media and share our posts about the event, and you’ll be entered to win fabulous prizes!

Appendix (a New Frontiers Story)

I remember I was out on a mission with my translator Plamen. We were way out in Aaha space, trying to sell a magnetic confinement fusion device as “human folk art.”

Here was the scam: you take this stellarator coil, which ought to work in theory, but has never managed to produce electricity economically. You sell the stellarator to an alien art collector, talking up its historical value as an example of the primitive handicraft of fusion power generation. Then it’s – whoops! something must have damaged the stellarator during delivery. So sorry! We’ll drop the price if you help us repair it. Then, we pay careful attention to the repairs, take our notes back to Earth, hand them to whoever we want to win the next Nobel Prize in physics, and Bob, as they say, is your uncle.

It didn’t work out that way. Of course, Plamen and I were given thorough check-ups before we left Earth, and of course we ate nothing but what came out of our Amazonian kitchen replicator. But I developed appendicitis, anyway.

I tried to muscle through it during meetings. I’d be doubled up in pain while male Aaha art students climbed over my back. They thought I was flirting with them! It wasn’t going to work.

Plamen said he had to do something. But what could he do? We were in a “nucleon arts college” tethered like a balloon to a neutron star made of negative matter, somewhere that isn’t even in Earth’s light cone. The Aahas had bought two-way ride vouchers for us with a return trip in three months, and a new one would cost more than the Earth (outside Amazonia) produced in a year. We were stuck, and medical facilities here would have no idea what to do with an appendix.

I still don’t know how Plamen found them. Some sort of alien social media? I shudder to think. All I remember is sweating on my cot while they poked at me. Aaha fingers, Beezle bugs, and some terrifying barbed thing that Plamen called a “gynosome.”

They weren’t doctors. There weren’t artists, either, exactly. And certainly not scientists. They asked me questions like “what is the diplomatic protocol for negotiations with your gut flora?” and “is cellulose a popular building material on Earth?” and “to the best of your memory, when was the last time your species engaged in folivory?”

I was given something to drink that tasted like electrolytes. “Calcium ions!” I heard one of them say as my vision went blurry. “Didn’t you do a project like that back in college?”

“Yes, but I never thought to combine it with hind-gut fermentation. What an idea! Symbiosis has been done to death of course, but making the mutualists prokaryotic is a good twist.”

When I regained consciousness, I had a headache and a potbelly, but the pain in my gut was gone.

When questioned, Plamen told me not to worry, the new tissue was all made in the kitchen replicator. When questioned again, more loudly, he said he was sorry. He’d been desperate. That’s why he’d delivered me up to a gang of speculative biologists.

“We can always get it removed,” he said, poking my large, new gut. “And in the mean time, you can eat all the leaves you want.”

Interchange in the mail

Look what arrived in the mail today. Thank you Jennie Goloboy, Don D’auria, and Pavlina, who took the pictures.

The virtual launch party is coming up on July 27th. Stay tuned for how you can win some various books, as well as these nice bookmarks.

May Newsletter: Waste and Sacrifice

There’s a certain mental trap.

You’re drawing a map of a far-future Quebec. Or maybe you’re trying to determine a sound change from Proto-Indo-European to Ancient Thracian. In this case,  I was rejiggering an outline.

Wealthgiver had hit a block. I’d pulled our hero into the lightless subterranean corridors of the Cult of Hades, okay. He’d come to terms with that and had his first language lesson. The Prophetess liked him. But then what?

Pavlina said I should go right into the steamy sex scene. It’s got masks. I’m excited about it. But, no, our hero needs to try to escape first, because…because why? Because he’s a defector from the Russian army. He felt madness closing in around him, and he got out of there, even though it meant abandoning a patient to his death.

Yes! That feels right. And it’s only 9:30. I have until 11 when I have to go downstairs and take care of the girls. Plenty of time.

So now, when the protagonist is again surrounded by madness, of course he’ll try to hit this new nail with the same old hammer. He’ll try to escape, but it won’t work, because it’s the right solution for the wrong problem. That will for him to change – he’ll inflect. A new solution! That’s the sex.

But that won’t be the end of the story, because love with the Prophetess is the right solution for the right problem, but the protagonist isn’t yet the right person. That’s another inflection. After that, he’ll be solving the right problem with the right solution as the right person, but…uh…

Now it’s 9:45. That’s okay.

Okay, Dan, think of it in keystone scenes. We have our hero being pulled under the earth. Keystone 1. We have sex with the hereditary sibyl, vessel of Persephone the Light Bringer, the Fruit Bearer, Maiden of the Mountain. Keystone 2. Then there’s the echolocation fight…no, that’s not a keystone scene, that’s an “action scene.”

Now we have two keystone scenes (come back to the third later), two inflections (come back to that third later), and what about the action scenes? Before I finished writing them down I was thinking about the arcs of the other characters, the three phases of the Eleusinian Mysteries: Descent (káthodos), Fasting (nêstis), and Ascent (ánodos),* and how my outline is mirrored around the mid-point of the story. Every scene has a mirror image…but did I put the mid-point in the right places? What if I move the midpoint and re-number everything?

It’s 11. I should be downstairs with my kids, but I have all these questions open! If I stop now, I won’t be able to remember what I was doing. I don’t remember what I was doing. But there’s this logical problem, and it’ll just take a moment to solve. Now its solution reveals that logical problem. But that ripples back to the first one.

I’m moving things between four documents and an email. I’m scattering slightly different copies of the same sentence all through my manuscript. The outline is in tatters. How can I come back to this mess tomorrow? I have to clean it up! It’s 11:30, it’s 12, I have classes I have to prepare for and children who need a father, but I have to I have to I have to

I finally managed to wrench myself out of my chair at 12:20. I stumbled to the bathroom, frantically chewing my writing-reward chocolate. It was an hour and a half later than I wanted it to be, and I’d made approximately zero progress. And this wasn’t the first time. I wanted to rage at myself. I wanted to tear my hair and scream.

But for the first time that morning, I made a good decision. I hugged myself. I said, “Good job. You did a good job.” I swallowed the chocolate and waited for my eyeballs to stop vibrating. Then I wrote in my journal. “I got caught in a loop.”

Congratulations. I had successfully discovered a certain type of failure.

Did I not like it? Good. I determined to use that pain to push me to repeat my mistake. Do the hard work of figuring out what will happen in the story, not the easy work of juggling classification schemes. Cut yourself off at 11 like you’re tripping a circuit breaker. Read your journal from last week before you start work this week and see the pitfalls ahead of you. Spend your afternoon writing time on outline rejiggering, and leave the morning for writing. Keep yourself open. Let the water flow through you.

None of this self-advice was new to me. I’d been meaning to do editing and outlining in the afternoon, but every day when the time came, I always found something easier to do. After the Great Rejiggering Crisis of ’21, though, my discipline came easily. If I started writing in the afternoon as well as the morning, then all that time I burned was worth it. Not wasted, but sacrificed.

Last week, I got through three chapters. I am on track to finish this draft by the end of the month, and send it to you.

In other news…

“Levski’s Boots“‘s anthology, Tales from Alternate Earths 3, will be out on September 3rd. If you want an early look, though, consider reviewing an Advance Reader Copy. Tell me if you’re interested.

I finished the serialization of Petrolea, which you can read in all its completeness here.

I probably won’t do something like this again. It didn’t bring much traffic or generate much buzz as far as I can tell. But I did make a connection with one reader, which is more central to my mission than “traffic” and “buzz.” Next time I’ll figure out a way to connect with people and make some money.

And speaking of making connections and not making money, I’m very excited about this youtube series I’ve started with my friend and mentor Paul Venet. We’re collaborating on teaching business communication and creativity, and we’re discussing books on those subjects. The first up was Becoming Fluent by Richard M. Roberts and Roger Kreuz, so go and see our review and response. Add your own.

I went to the Sofia Book Fair! It was full of people! People who aren’t in my family? Those people are real? I was in Lockdown for a long time. Ah, but the reason I risked my well-I-at-least-got-the-first-dose immune system on those suppurating crowds was because Emil Minchev launched his new book, Must. If you can read Bulgarian and have read the first three books in the series, go buy this one. If not, well, you have some homework now.

Hey, did you catch that reference to future-Quebec? Yes, Simon, Jason, Artyom, and I are working on the First Knife Sequel. We do have a map, some percentage of a script, and some very toothsome character designs by Artyom.

Here’s a fun little conversation electric fungi.

The Centuries Unlimited is still out being shopped. Fingers still crossed.

We’re coming up on Interchange‘s launch. July 20th Have you ordered your copy yet? Hmm…

And finally, I think I can share the date for the launch party for Interchange. It’ll be on July 27th (Tuesday) at 7pm Bulgaria Time. Place: virtual! Our host, the Magers and Quinn Bookstore of Minneapolis, MN. They’ll give me a link, and I’ll give it to you. We’ll also have book give-aways and other prizes, so stay tuned.

And finally, some stuff I (really!) liked:

The Shadow Out of Time, The Whisperer in Darkness, The Colour Out of Space by H.P. Lovecraft

I got these three stories bundled together in a Penguin Classic volume.

As with most of the horror stories I read, I loved the beginnings and was frustrated with the endings. Why didn’t these narrators do anything? Their victim-hood becomes a parody. A man has talked in his dreams with beings from the beginning and the end of the history of intelligent life on Earth, then discovers his dreams might be real. He says: “For was not this whole experience…a horror beyond all reason?” How about an honor above all reason? How about a wonder? We can cower in the fear that nothing can be alright again, or we can find faith that it will be.

The Emperor’s Railroad by Guy Haley

I liked A Champion of Mars enough to read this one, even though I don’t like zombies. Now I remember why I don’t like zombies. I had trouble sleeping after reading this book before bed. That would have been bad enough, except that the zombies didn’t seem to have anything to do with the worldbuilding. They were just plunked in there, apparently at the whim of some godlike post-human or AI. The novella was very well written, and there were bits of some interesting meditations on the nature of the decay of man’s works over time, and what that means for our work now, but I didn’t see much new.

Beguilement (The Sharing Knife)

A fun, cute re-read after a long time. I remember hearing somewhere that The Sharing Knife was Bujold’s attempt to follow the romance formula (meet-cute, will-they-won’t-they, etc.) If so, she does a splendid job. The lovers are sweet, their courtship is interestingly difficult, and most importantly for me, there’s something else going on besides sex.

The world of the Sharing Knife is deceptively simple. It looks like Little House in the Big Woods with monsters and magical forest people, until you realize that those forest people are the descendants of sorcerer-lords whose magic nearly destroyed the world a thousand years ago. There are big, high-stakes problems cunningly entwined with the characters’ relationship. The solutions are complicated and tricky.

How to Win Friends and Influence people by Dale Carnegie

The great-granddaddy of self-development/marketing/management advice books. Its advice is still good: be generous to other people, praise them honestly, remember that their wants are as important to them as yours are to you. I also very much respect the way the book was written – based on advice given to successive crops of students, then modified based on their feedback. That’s real.

At first, I didn’t realize it had been written in 1936 (the references to Roosevelt, Lincoln, and Al Capone finally clued me in). So, yes, it has become out-dated. The places where the advice doesn’t hold up any more are the places where so many Americans started following it that the rest of us developed counter-strategies. The world moves on, creating space for the next generation of self-development books.

The Godel Operation by James L. Cambias

A very fun book. It reminds me a bit of the singularity stuff from the 2000s, but written with more heart than most. An ancient AI (who may either be a war criminal, a hunter of war criminals, or both) shepherds his well-meaning but dimwitted human buddy through a solar-system-wide treasure hunt. The plot sagged a bit in places, and there were a few places where I wish we’d dug in more (like the climax). First-rate world-building though. After seven or eight thousand years of civilization, every place, art-form, technology, and social structure has become a revival of a response to an imitation of a splinter-faction of a cult built around a myth based on a rumor about something that still happened centuries after the present day. There is an awesome sense of deep time, which doesn’t stop the ephemeral fluttering of human emotions from finding their meaning.

A Country Doctor’s Notebook by Mikhail Bulgakov

Oh man! Why did I wait so long to read this book? Well, because I thought its medical horror stories would trigger me, that’s why. But it turned out to be much lighter than I thought it would be.

Bulgakov manages to talk about some fairly hideous stuff (emergency tracheotomies, heroine addiction, the Bolshevik Revolution) with just the right mixture of humor, pragmatism, and that’s-just-how-it-is shrugging to get the message across without scaring or depressing you.

Things fall on us. We try to deal with them. We end up accomplishing something. Maybe it’s not what we hoped it would be. But how boring would life be if it were predictable? What matters is the crisis is behind you. Now go take a nice, hot bath.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

Well.

This is the best book that I have ever read.

This is what you can achieve with fiction. This is what you can do as a human being! The depth of compassion and insight. The unflinching way Tolstoy nails our human failings to the wall. How we can make ourselves and each other miserable, but keep reaching for something better. He knew our hunger.

Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir

Fun, fast, and interesting. Like a spaceship powered by algae.

I very much admire the way Weir experiments with each book. It’s clear he’s stretching himself. In The Martian, he wrote harder-than-hard SF. In Artemis, he expanded his cast of characters. In Project Hail Mary, he dialed down the number of characters (although it’s clear he’s learned something about writing relationships) and upped the stakes. This is an end-of-the-world scenario.

Weir also brought back the tight focus on a character struggling with nature. This clashes a bit with the enormous, existential threats he deals with, but there’s a twist there that I found very satisfying.

And it’s funny in a different way from either The Martian or Artemis. I was reminded of the Bobiverse, but rather better.

Borrower of the Night by Elizabeth Peters

Light and fun. Very ’80s. I don’t like Vikky Bliss as a character as much as I like Elizabeth Peabody, but the Bliss books do atmosphere better. In this case it’s gothic, complete with ghosts, animated suits of armor, and a lonely tower room where scheming witched hunch over their Ouija boards. Welcome to Schloss Drakenstein!

The Craftsman by Richard Sennet

Recommended to me by Paul Venet. This book finally did yield to me, but only after I’d gnawed on it for four or five months. Sennet is an academic’s academic. He’s never met an Ancient Greek word or outmoded social theory that he didn’t think was relevant to the discussion. But he really does have something important to say.

There is something about making things. It can fulfil you. You make something and you think, how could I have made it better? You try again with a different process. And again. From object you have process, practice, ritual. A person’s life.

Sennet’s insights and advice are practical. He gives you a way to think about what you’re doing, and how you’re improving it. As hard to chew as this book was, it gave me an ingredient missing from such very useful books as Greene’s Mastery and Knapp and Zeratsky’s Make Time. The Crafstman specifically targets what to do once you’ve mastered a skill: stand on top of it so you can reach the next one.

The Truth by Terry Pratchett

A re-read. Pratchett is one of those authors that grows with you. This time around I was taking notes as he wove together the mystery (who’s screwing with the Patrician this time?), the plot (will our hero save the day and get the girl?), and the merciless excavation of the human instinct to be bored by vitally important information.

Pratchett had some things to say about the free press, all right. I wish he were still alive, so he could tell us what to do with Facebook.

Phew. That’s a lot of books I read last month. Fingers crossed I can get through both Wealthgiver and The Confessions in June.

Bye!

*I just spent about half an hour making sure I got the Greek right.

Petrolea 18b

Only one year. Victor bit his lip. He knew that once the station had gestated its new landers, he and Feroza would have company on the back of the Leviathan, and their honeymoon would be over. But ships from Earth would come with people from Earth. Important people.

Feroza’s thoughts ran in the same direction. “I’m not sure I like the sound of a military corvette.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t worry,” Al-Onazy waved a breezy hand. “There is something growing in one of the hangars up here that looks like it could be a good deal scarier than any human-built weapon.”

“And I certainly don’t like that,” said Feroza. “Taking up arms against the governments of Earth–“

“Which brings up the subject of Dr. Merchant’s official pardon,” Al-Onazy cut in smoothly.

“She did save all of human civilization,” Victor agreed.

Feroza gave him a cynical look. “I suspect it is more to the point to say I still understand and control the mechanoids better than any other person. Isn’t that right, sir?”

Al-Onazy’s eyes were cold above his smile. “Once our weapon hatches, there is nobody else I would trust to pilot our new gunship. For the time being.”

She went silent and thoughtful after that, letting Victor handle the end of the conversation.

“Hey,” said Victor, pulling off the helmet. “Don’t borrow trouble, all right? We stopped Petrolea from sporulating. We took care of a threat to human civilization.”

“And put it into the hands of a cold-hearted corporate villain,” grumbled Feroza.

Victor put his arm around her. “Well, we’ll take care of him, too.”

She looked up from the hollow of his shoulders. “Why, you helpless romantic, are you offering me an interplanetary war?”

“An interplanetary empire,” Victor corrected. “We can tell the mechanoids to build a pyramid for you, or a flying throne, hey? And then everyone can look at you and think, ‘oh, her flashing eyes and something something hair.” He rubbed his lips over the stubble on her head.

“Floating hair,” said Feroza. “To me, that suggests my palace will be in space. Now kiss me again behind my ear. And close your eyes with holy dread…”

Victor did close his eyes, breathing in her scent. Feroza had her amnesty, Al-Onazy had his mechanoid-wranglers, and Victor had a little before the rest of humanity caught up with them. Self-assembling space habitats, alien technology, and a route to the stars would all come later.

“For we on honey-dew hath fed,/ And drunk the milk of Paradise,” Feroza quoted. “Speaking of which, the still probably has breakfast ready for us. Would you like to take me back home?”

“Home?”

“For the next year, anyway,” she said.

Victor took brushed his hair through the silky fuzz on her head. “Aren’t you worried about spending so long stuck with me? What if you were right the whole time and I’m, uh…”

“Insufferable?” Feroza knotted her eyebrows in mock-concentration and put a hand on his belly. “Of course I can’t know without further study.”

Victor squirmed under her fingers. “Good thing there’s this whole giant alien city to distract you.”

Feroza took his hand. “Let’s explore it together.”

 

THE END

Petrolea 18a

Chapter 18

“When beaten, gold shines.”

“What was that?” asked Feroza.

“I think the saying fits this place pretty well.” Victor spread his arms to indicate the cavernous space where they had slept. The whole thing, alien frescos, gargoyles, and all, had mushroomed out from their humble hut on the back of the Leviathan. Every day since they’d convinced the Dragons to fly them back up here, Victor and Chinni had found a new chamber to explore together. It was luxurious, as long as they were willing to get down on their hands and knees and crawl through the corridors built for creatures without arms or legs.

“I have an even more apropos quote,” said Feroza. “Let me see… I would build that dome in air, / That sunny dome! those caves of ice! Something, something Weave a circle round him thrice…How did the next part go?”

“Caves of ice is right,” said Victor, rubbing his forearms. Even in the thermal lining of his suit, his hands and face prickled with cold. The aliens had kept their homes above freezing, but not by much.

“Oh, yes. It goes Beware! Beware!/ His flashing eyes, his floating hair! / Weave a circle round him thrice …” Feroza rolled over, lithe as an otter in her own thermal lining. Victor was just starting to think about some creative ways to get warm when his helmet rang with an incoming message.

“The orbital station must be above the horizon,” he said.

Feroza handed the helmet to him. “And here is Al-Onazy, right on time to interrupt my recitation.”

Victor had actually had to launch one of the Rocket-seeds to get it to carry his Radio Tick into orbit. From there, he’d been able to worm his way into the communications system of the transformed orbital station. Its computers hadn’t survived the conversion from human to mechanoid, but the place had grown new instrumentation powerful enough to track down a tiny lifeboat filled with refugees and broadcast a message at them. Victor gave them the shock of their lives.

“It’s absolutely incredible,” Al-Onazy’s face appeared in the visor, freshly shaved and starry-eyed. “The creatures have actually improved the station. It’s larger, more efficiently laid-out, except for the diameter of the corridors. And there’s something generating electricity that we think is a very small fusion reactor. We have heat and light and air to last a hundred years!”

“And food. We’ll be able to send feedstock to you on the next Rocket-seed,” said Victor. “We can last until rescue comes in…what? Six years?”

“One.” The chief grinned into his camera. “The trans-Jovian liner that was going to pick us up has been outstripped by a military corvette. That remark Dr. Merchant made about building your own spaceship scared someone very badly.”