Bhakta Jim's Blog: Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class, page 8
December 2, 2015
Review: Time Enough for Love by Robert A. Heinlein
Time Enough for Love by Robert A. HeinleinMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Time Enough for Love came out when I was just starting my freshman year at a local community college. If you had told me back then that I'd have a higher opinion of this novel when I was 59 years old than I did back then I would have had reason to doubt you. Heinlein was my favorite author back then. I read just about all the Heinlein juveniles, plus most of his adult novels. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was (and remains) my favorite.
Then he started writing stuff like Stranger In A Strange Land, I Will Fear No Evil, and this. It seemed like a big change in direction for him. You need to understand that in 1973 S.F. didn't really have much to say about sex, or even gender. When I got my seventh grade library card several years earlier and was allowed into the upstairs library for grown-ups I was allowed to read non fiction, fiction in the "Young Moderns" section, and any science fiction. (Non fiction books about sex were kept in a locked case with glass doors. You not only had to be old enough to read them, you had to ask the librarian to get them out of the case for you. They were pretty tame books, too).
So for most of my life there was no sex to speak of in science fiction, and then out of nowhere it seems like Heinlein can't write about anything else.
I enjoyed I Will Fear No Evil, but this one tested my patience. Heinlein seemed to have an unhealthy interest in incest in this one. (As opposed to a normal, healthy interest in it). He seemed to believe that any brother and sister, given any opportunity at all, would do the nasty together. I don't have any sisters myself but I was pretty sure at the time that this wasn't true.
His character Lazarus Long is a dirty old man, a 2,000 year old dirty old man. Any resemblance to a similar creation by Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks is hard to find.
What I didn't appreciate when I first read the book was that Lazarus Long was actually a well thought out character. In the story a wealthy man who dies young founds an organization that identifies people who are likely to have a long life, based on their family history, and pays them to marry each other and have children. These families are called the Howard families after the wealthy donor. Lazarus was born in 1912, has been married many times (lifetime monogamy being unrealistic for people who stay alive for centuries) but only to long-lifers like himself (except once). This makes it more or less inevitable that he will marry and have children by one of his own descendants. The Howard families have to be inbred, and this has consequences.
Heinlein gave a lot of thought to what it would be like to live for hundreds of years (more than Mel Brooks did, at least) and the aphorisms collected in the book are what you might expect a man born in 1912 and still alive centuries later might come up with. ("Keep your clothes and weapons where you can find them in the dark" being one example. His aphorism describing what a human being should be able to do is one of my favorite quotes of any author).
I won't say this is his masterpiece, because it isn't. Still, there are some good yarns in here, and it is worth reading. Just bear in mind that you might appreciate Lazarus Long more when you're a grumpy old man yourself!
View all my reviews
November 20, 2015
Dramatis Personae: Lacey Philips
Lacey almost didn't make it into the novel. I started out by making a list of possible characters and giving them brief bios. Some of them didn't survive. Dr. Seaton had a butler, but I never wrote anything about him. I had envisioned Lacey as sort of a kept woman for Doctor Seaton, to emphasize his materialistic nature, but I never wrote of her that way.
The novel had several false starts. (Thank God for word processors. I'd never be an author without one). I had a pretty good idea of what the novel would be about and that was it.
I eventually got the notion that Lacey might be a satire of the character Kamala from the novel Siddhartha:
Siddhartha
Kamala is a fantasy character. She is presented in that novel as a famous courtesan who instructs and eventually falls in love with a nerdy young spiritual seeker. She is the kind of character I could take seriously as a college student, but not now. She is basically a nerd fantasy.
Lacey is a much more realistic character than Kamala (which isn't saying much). She is a star in the world of adult entertainment. She has an Amazon wish list that enables her to receive gifts from men she never meets. She has appeared in over fifty adult films and has written screenplays for many of them. She is well read and knowledgeable in many subjects, including Science, but her formal education ended after high school.
This isn't implausible. The adult stars that have a long career tend to be intelligent and well educated, as well as reasonably good actresses.
Lacey has high self esteem and a thick skin, both essential for one in her line of work.
She also has a sense of humor. That, more than anything else, made her important to the book.
It became clear to me early on that humor would need to be part of this book. To understand why, consider two different stories with similar themes: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut:
Atlas Shrugged
Harrison Bergeron
The premise of Rand's story is that a society that takes from a man according to his ability and gives him according to his needs (a phrase from the New Testament, not Karl Marx) would inevitably wind up with more needs and less ability. I don't argue with her conclusion, but she beats it into the ground and the story is utterly without humor.
Vonnegut's short story has a similar theme, but delivers it quickly and humorously. It didn't make as much money as Rand's novel did, but it is better in every way.
My story deals with serious subjects, like whether consciousness is material or something other, whether man has free will, etc. It could be deadly dull stuff without humor.
As one example of how Lacey adds humor to these serious subjects, early in the novel Uma Priya explains to her that the material world is only a perverted reflection of the spiritual world. Lacey thinks to herself that A Perverted Reflection would be a good title for an adult movie.
Lacey gets her name from Lacey Davenport, a long running character in the Doonesbury comic strip. "Philips" was suggested by Philip Marlowe. I happened to be checking out my book shelf for name ideas and I have a Raymond Chandler anthology. I chose the name "Lacey" because adult film stars tend to pick uncommon first names for their stage names. It turns out that particular name is not as uncommon as I had supposed, but Lacey she is and will remain.
In addition to making fun of Kamala from Siddhartha Lacey also turns some other Science Fiction tropes on their heads. Female characters in classic S.F. exist to be rescued and to help with the exposition. While Lacey does help out with some of the philosophical and religious exposition, in scientific matters she is more likely to explain than be explained to.
As for how Lacey winds up meeting Doctor Seaton and Uma Priya, that is barely plausible. I don't think that is necessarily a weakness in the story.
The novel had several false starts. (Thank God for word processors. I'd never be an author without one). I had a pretty good idea of what the novel would be about and that was it.
I eventually got the notion that Lacey might be a satire of the character Kamala from the novel Siddhartha:
Siddhartha
Kamala is a fantasy character. She is presented in that novel as a famous courtesan who instructs and eventually falls in love with a nerdy young spiritual seeker. She is the kind of character I could take seriously as a college student, but not now. She is basically a nerd fantasy.
Lacey is a much more realistic character than Kamala (which isn't saying much). She is a star in the world of adult entertainment. She has an Amazon wish list that enables her to receive gifts from men she never meets. She has appeared in over fifty adult films and has written screenplays for many of them. She is well read and knowledgeable in many subjects, including Science, but her formal education ended after high school.
This isn't implausible. The adult stars that have a long career tend to be intelligent and well educated, as well as reasonably good actresses.
Lacey has high self esteem and a thick skin, both essential for one in her line of work.
She also has a sense of humor. That, more than anything else, made her important to the book.
It became clear to me early on that humor would need to be part of this book. To understand why, consider two different stories with similar themes: Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand and the short story Harrison Bergeron by Kurt Vonnegut:
Atlas Shrugged
Harrison Bergeron
The premise of Rand's story is that a society that takes from a man according to his ability and gives him according to his needs (a phrase from the New Testament, not Karl Marx) would inevitably wind up with more needs and less ability. I don't argue with her conclusion, but she beats it into the ground and the story is utterly without humor.
Vonnegut's short story has a similar theme, but delivers it quickly and humorously. It didn't make as much money as Rand's novel did, but it is better in every way.
My story deals with serious subjects, like whether consciousness is material or something other, whether man has free will, etc. It could be deadly dull stuff without humor.
As one example of how Lacey adds humor to these serious subjects, early in the novel Uma Priya explains to her that the material world is only a perverted reflection of the spiritual world. Lacey thinks to herself that A Perverted Reflection would be a good title for an adult movie.
Lacey gets her name from Lacey Davenport, a long running character in the Doonesbury comic strip. "Philips" was suggested by Philip Marlowe. I happened to be checking out my book shelf for name ideas and I have a Raymond Chandler anthology. I chose the name "Lacey" because adult film stars tend to pick uncommon first names for their stage names. It turns out that particular name is not as uncommon as I had supposed, but Lacey she is and will remain.
In addition to making fun of Kamala from Siddhartha Lacey also turns some other Science Fiction tropes on their heads. Female characters in classic S.F. exist to be rescued and to help with the exposition. While Lacey does help out with some of the philosophical and religious exposition, in scientific matters she is more likely to explain than be explained to.
As for how Lacey winds up meeting Doctor Seaton and Uma Priya, that is barely plausible. I don't think that is necessarily a weakness in the story.
November 19, 2015
Dramatis Personae: Doctor Charles Seaton
Doctor Charles Seaton is the scientist and inventor who assembles the team that creates the first conscious machine. In a conventional Science Fiction novel he would be the hero.
He isn't the hero of this novel. An important character, but not the hero.
To make it clear that he isn't the hero of the book I had to give him some serious flaws not normally found in Science Fiction protagonists.
Not Tragic Flaws, mind you. Charles Seaton isn't a Modern Prometheus or any other kind of Prometheus. His flaws are ordinary, and don't affect the story that much.
I had to make him smart enough to be an expert in AI, and he had to be a wealthy businessman to be able to fund such an enterprise. (The public sector could do that kind of research, and in real life might be more likely to do it, but it worked better for the story to have a businessman do it).
While Charles Seaton is a successful businessman, you couldn't call him a good businessman. His business partner runs everything except product development. Seaton runs his part of the company in a separate building with its own rules and culture. The rules and culture of the other building are a mystery to him.
I got the name "Seaton" from the novel Skylark of Space by Edward E. Smith. This novel was one of the very first space operas, and it's hero Richard Seaton is the prototype Competent Man found in so much Science Fiction. He not only knows everything about Science, he is also in superb physical condition, has a wealthy friend who is also a talented engineer, and has a girlfriend from a wealthy family who is beautiful and a Doctor of Music.
E.E. Smith needed his Seaton to be all of that to tell his story. I had a bit more flexibility with mine.
I got the name Charles from Charlie Chaplin. When coming up with names I generally look at my bookshelf. I have a copy of My Autobiography which I will get around to reading one day.
My Autobiography
In addition to being clueless about business, my Seaton is awkward in most social situations, especially those involving women. He is idealistic to the point of being naive, and believes in dreams that most of the world has given up on. He likes cars with bubble tops, as just one example.
The world he lives in is not quite a dystopia, but it's getting there. The percentage of people in the U.S. who have rejected science and don't trust scientists has only grown a little, but the lengths they will go to reject scientific knowledge has grown much more. This is an inevitable consequence of an increasingly complex world.
Seaton is an atheist, but he has a strong moral sense. His greatest fear is that he might turn into the hero of an Ayn Rand novel. That does not seem likely to happen.
Seaton is friends with Uma Priya's father, who was once his teacher. That is enough to bring these two characters into the same orbit, but not enough to tell the story I wanted to tell. For that, I needed a third character.
But about her, more later.
He isn't the hero of this novel. An important character, but not the hero.
To make it clear that he isn't the hero of the book I had to give him some serious flaws not normally found in Science Fiction protagonists.
Not Tragic Flaws, mind you. Charles Seaton isn't a Modern Prometheus or any other kind of Prometheus. His flaws are ordinary, and don't affect the story that much.
I had to make him smart enough to be an expert in AI, and he had to be a wealthy businessman to be able to fund such an enterprise. (The public sector could do that kind of research, and in real life might be more likely to do it, but it worked better for the story to have a businessman do it).
While Charles Seaton is a successful businessman, you couldn't call him a good businessman. His business partner runs everything except product development. Seaton runs his part of the company in a separate building with its own rules and culture. The rules and culture of the other building are a mystery to him.
I got the name "Seaton" from the novel Skylark of Space by Edward E. Smith. This novel was one of the very first space operas, and it's hero Richard Seaton is the prototype Competent Man found in so much Science Fiction. He not only knows everything about Science, he is also in superb physical condition, has a wealthy friend who is also a talented engineer, and has a girlfriend from a wealthy family who is beautiful and a Doctor of Music.
E.E. Smith needed his Seaton to be all of that to tell his story. I had a bit more flexibility with mine.
I got the name Charles from Charlie Chaplin. When coming up with names I generally look at my bookshelf. I have a copy of My Autobiography which I will get around to reading one day.
My Autobiography
In addition to being clueless about business, my Seaton is awkward in most social situations, especially those involving women. He is idealistic to the point of being naive, and believes in dreams that most of the world has given up on. He likes cars with bubble tops, as just one example.
The world he lives in is not quite a dystopia, but it's getting there. The percentage of people in the U.S. who have rejected science and don't trust scientists has only grown a little, but the lengths they will go to reject scientific knowledge has grown much more. This is an inevitable consequence of an increasingly complex world.
Seaton is an atheist, but he has a strong moral sense. His greatest fear is that he might turn into the hero of an Ayn Rand novel. That does not seem likely to happen.
Seaton is friends with Uma Priya's father, who was once his teacher. That is enough to bring these two characters into the same orbit, but not enough to tell the story I wanted to tell. For that, I needed a third character.
But about her, more later.
November 16, 2015
Dramatis Personae: Uma Priya
There are three important human characters in the novel, and Uma Priya is the most important of the three. You might consider her the main protagonist of the book.
I chose Uma Priya's name from a list of baby names that the Hare Krishna movement published on a website. I like the name, but when I wrote it in the story I was constantly wondering whether I should write it out in full or just use "Uma". Donald Westlake wrote a series of novels about a character named Parker and found himself writing sentences like "Parker parked the car." It must be a common problem for authors.
Who the main character would be had to be determined by what needed to happen in the story. I needed a character who would be extremely troubled if someone created a machine that possessed consciousness.
That's harder than it sounds. Many devotees in the Hare Krishna movement believe that the Apollo Moon landings were faked. They believe this because the Puranas describe the Moon as a heavenly planet where demigods live, and because the Puranas state that the Moon is farther away from the Earth than the Sun is. People who can believe that would have no problem believing that a conscious machine was a fraud.
The character I needed for my story had to be very religious, but at the same time having a nuanced understanding of the scriptures she followed. On top of that, she needed to have an above average scientific education.
She would also need to be a woman. I knew that much before I knew anything else. When I was involved with the Evanston, Illinois ISKCON temple back in the late 1970's I spent more time than I really should have hanging out with female devotees. This happened mostly because the first devotee I talked to at the temple was a woman named Mishrani devi-dasi.
Any member of any cult group (which the Hare Krishna movement definitely was back then, but is less so now) will try and make a prospective new member feel special and will pay more attention to him than anyone ever has before. That is standard recruiting practice. Mishrani did that, but over a period of time we actually became good friends. I had read many of the movement's books before I ever set foot in a temple, and that may have helped.
What I noticed about the matajis (a Sanskrit word meaning "mother", which is how male devotees were supposed to think of them) is that their life was very different from the male devotees. Men shaved their heads; women did not. Men took vows to be lifetime celibates; women were expected to marry. Men could be temple presidents and hold other positions of responsibility, but "head cook" was about as much as a woman could aspire to. Men wore saffron robes, but women could wear colorful sarees and jewelry. Men needed to be initiated disciples of a guru before they could marry, but women did not. In effect, their husbands would be like gurus to them. Women distributed (sold) many more books and magazines than men did, but men got praised more for this activity. The best male book distributors did better than the best female book distributors, but they did it by basically being grifters.
It seemed to me at the time that women were better devotees than men. This went against the doctrine we were taught, but that was my conclusion, which I kept to myself.
What is interesting is that when Krishna was on Earth His greatest devotees, by far, were His wives and the cowherd girls He grew up with. This is an accepted part of the doctrine. Male devotees actually aspire to understand the love of the gopis, who were cowherd girls who loved Krishna even though they were all married to others.
Thus it was that I decided that the protagonist of my story would need to be a woman.
To make her experience the inner conflict the story required, I made her a child of divorced parents who broke up because they disagreed on how she should be educated. Her mother would be a very serious devotee, and her father would be a scientist who studies consciousness. I gave a lot of thought to creating a character equally devoted to Science and Spirituality and just what that would mean.
I have never met a devotee like Uma Priya and seriously doubt that someone like her exists, but I think I made her plausible.
I chose Uma Priya's name from a list of baby names that the Hare Krishna movement published on a website. I like the name, but when I wrote it in the story I was constantly wondering whether I should write it out in full or just use "Uma". Donald Westlake wrote a series of novels about a character named Parker and found himself writing sentences like "Parker parked the car." It must be a common problem for authors.
Who the main character would be had to be determined by what needed to happen in the story. I needed a character who would be extremely troubled if someone created a machine that possessed consciousness.
That's harder than it sounds. Many devotees in the Hare Krishna movement believe that the Apollo Moon landings were faked. They believe this because the Puranas describe the Moon as a heavenly planet where demigods live, and because the Puranas state that the Moon is farther away from the Earth than the Sun is. People who can believe that would have no problem believing that a conscious machine was a fraud.
The character I needed for my story had to be very religious, but at the same time having a nuanced understanding of the scriptures she followed. On top of that, she needed to have an above average scientific education.
She would also need to be a woman. I knew that much before I knew anything else. When I was involved with the Evanston, Illinois ISKCON temple back in the late 1970's I spent more time than I really should have hanging out with female devotees. This happened mostly because the first devotee I talked to at the temple was a woman named Mishrani devi-dasi.
Any member of any cult group (which the Hare Krishna movement definitely was back then, but is less so now) will try and make a prospective new member feel special and will pay more attention to him than anyone ever has before. That is standard recruiting practice. Mishrani did that, but over a period of time we actually became good friends. I had read many of the movement's books before I ever set foot in a temple, and that may have helped.
What I noticed about the matajis (a Sanskrit word meaning "mother", which is how male devotees were supposed to think of them) is that their life was very different from the male devotees. Men shaved their heads; women did not. Men took vows to be lifetime celibates; women were expected to marry. Men could be temple presidents and hold other positions of responsibility, but "head cook" was about as much as a woman could aspire to. Men wore saffron robes, but women could wear colorful sarees and jewelry. Men needed to be initiated disciples of a guru before they could marry, but women did not. In effect, their husbands would be like gurus to them. Women distributed (sold) many more books and magazines than men did, but men got praised more for this activity. The best male book distributors did better than the best female book distributors, but they did it by basically being grifters.
It seemed to me at the time that women were better devotees than men. This went against the doctrine we were taught, but that was my conclusion, which I kept to myself.
What is interesting is that when Krishna was on Earth His greatest devotees, by far, were His wives and the cowherd girls He grew up with. This is an accepted part of the doctrine. Male devotees actually aspire to understand the love of the gopis, who were cowherd girls who loved Krishna even though they were all married to others.
Thus it was that I decided that the protagonist of my story would need to be a woman.
To make her experience the inner conflict the story required, I made her a child of divorced parents who broke up because they disagreed on how she should be educated. Her mother would be a very serious devotee, and her father would be a scientist who studies consciousness. I gave a lot of thought to creating a character equally devoted to Science and Spirituality and just what that would mean.
I have never met a devotee like Uma Priya and seriously doubt that someone like her exists, but I think I made her plausible.
November 8, 2015
Dramatis Personae: GISMO
My previous posts about my novel talked about the notion behind it. Logically you might think the next topic should be about plotting the book. It won't be, because:
1. You might want to actually read the book, and knowing too much about the plot might hurt that experience.
2. In my writing process, the characters came before the plot. I knew what the book would be about, and I knew what the central conflict would be, more or less, but I didn't know how it would be developed or resolved until I figured out who the characters in the story would be. I started out by listing some characters and giving them little biographies. Some characters got thrown out. Some might have been throwaway characters but ended up becoming important.
I'm going to make some posts about these characters.
If you're going to write about what happens when you make a conscious machine then that machine must be an important character in the story. In my case it is a character that shows up when the story has been underway for quite some time, but that doesn't make it less important.
I call this machine GISMO, because I had to call it something.
GISMO may be unique in science fiction. In every story about a conscious machine I've ever read, the machine starts out without consciousness and then acquires it through what is basically a miracle. Think Mike in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Think Colossus, The Forbin Project. Think the robot in Short Circuit or the personal computer in Electric Dreams.
Now if you ask me, you do not want to make a machine many times as intelligent as a human and then let it develop consciousness through a miracle. If there's one thing Science Fiction has taught us is a bad idea, that's it.
Isaac Asimov gave some thought to how to keep robots from enslaving humans and came up with his famous Three Laws Of Robotics. Then he wrote a whole bunch of stories showing different ways that robots could get around them. These stories and the Foundation novels are what he is best known for.
I do not expect my work to be as well loved as Dr. Asimov's. Having said that, I have come up with a reasonably good plan to keep intelligent machines from gaining consciousness and running amuck.
It is simply this: you want to develop a machine that has consciousness, but no intelligence to speak of, and limited perception. You add these things later, and you add them gradually.
OK, maybe this isn't the most brilliant thing you ever heard of, but if so, why have you never read a story about someone doing that?
GISMO starts out as a machine that can feel pleasure and pain, but has the intelligence of a gerbil and very limited perception of the world. Why a gerbil? My brothers and I had three gerbils as pets when I was in high school. They definitely could feel pleasure and pain, and that's all you could say for them. They were conscious (except when they were sleeping, which was much of the time) but unintelligent, and they were no threat to the world.
Gradually the scientists who build GISMO give it senses and intelligence, and wind up with something that gives them a problem that no conscious machine in literature has ever given anyone, ever.
No, I'm not going to tell you what the problem is. You'll need to read the book. What I can tell you is that the solution to that problem leads to the situations that take up the last half of the book.
I'm proud of this, by the way. Not as proud as Ayn Rand was of Atlas Shrugged, but reasonably proud. It may not win a Hugo, but this novel is different from any S.F. novel you've ever read.
1. You might want to actually read the book, and knowing too much about the plot might hurt that experience.
2. In my writing process, the characters came before the plot. I knew what the book would be about, and I knew what the central conflict would be, more or less, but I didn't know how it would be developed or resolved until I figured out who the characters in the story would be. I started out by listing some characters and giving them little biographies. Some characters got thrown out. Some might have been throwaway characters but ended up becoming important.
I'm going to make some posts about these characters.
If you're going to write about what happens when you make a conscious machine then that machine must be an important character in the story. In my case it is a character that shows up when the story has been underway for quite some time, but that doesn't make it less important.
I call this machine GISMO, because I had to call it something.
GISMO may be unique in science fiction. In every story about a conscious machine I've ever read, the machine starts out without consciousness and then acquires it through what is basically a miracle. Think Mike in The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress. Think Colossus, The Forbin Project. Think the robot in Short Circuit or the personal computer in Electric Dreams.
Now if you ask me, you do not want to make a machine many times as intelligent as a human and then let it develop consciousness through a miracle. If there's one thing Science Fiction has taught us is a bad idea, that's it.
Isaac Asimov gave some thought to how to keep robots from enslaving humans and came up with his famous Three Laws Of Robotics. Then he wrote a whole bunch of stories showing different ways that robots could get around them. These stories and the Foundation novels are what he is best known for.
I do not expect my work to be as well loved as Dr. Asimov's. Having said that, I have come up with a reasonably good plan to keep intelligent machines from gaining consciousness and running amuck.
It is simply this: you want to develop a machine that has consciousness, but no intelligence to speak of, and limited perception. You add these things later, and you add them gradually.
OK, maybe this isn't the most brilliant thing you ever heard of, but if so, why have you never read a story about someone doing that?
GISMO starts out as a machine that can feel pleasure and pain, but has the intelligence of a gerbil and very limited perception of the world. Why a gerbil? My brothers and I had three gerbils as pets when I was in high school. They definitely could feel pleasure and pain, and that's all you could say for them. They were conscious (except when they were sleeping, which was much of the time) but unintelligent, and they were no threat to the world.
Gradually the scientists who build GISMO give it senses and intelligence, and wind up with something that gives them a problem that no conscious machine in literature has ever given anyone, ever.
No, I'm not going to tell you what the problem is. You'll need to read the book. What I can tell you is that the solution to that problem leads to the situations that take up the last half of the book.
I'm proud of this, by the way. Not as proud as Ayn Rand was of Atlas Shrugged, but reasonably proud. It may not win a Hugo, but this novel is different from any S.F. novel you've ever read.
November 7, 2015
A Canticle For Liebowitz
A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.My rating: 5 of 5 stars
I can't remember if I read this book before my days in ISKCON or after, but whichever it was I was not mature enough at the time to appreciate it. However, parts of the book stayed with me and no doubt influenced my own first novel.
I just finished listening to a 15 part radio adaption of the novel which you can download for free here:
https://archive.org/details/ACanticle...
This radio drama was very faithful to the book and made me appreciate it all the more.
The novel is unusual for science fiction because the protagonists are monks. They are presented sympathetically. Even though some of the things they do might be considered foolish, they are not fools. I am not particularly religious, but I was intrigued by these characters and moved by their story.
View all my reviews
Ron Goulart
The Hellhound Project by Ron GoulartMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
Ron Goulart did a lot of novelizations and cash and carry prose, but if you want to read the kind of science fiction he did on his own this one is a good one to try. Goulart was a satirist more than anything else. He took the conventions of science fiction and respected them while exploring their potential for humor. He cranked out a lot of books but they were always entertaining.
This is sort of a futuristic spy adventure, in which a young man who has fallen on hard times is asked to impersonate a long lost member of a wealthy family. Some members of the family are up to no good, and he has to find out what they're up to.
In this world everything is synthetic or imitation and is advertised as such. That's a running gag in this book and several others by Goulart.
View all my reviews
One way to write a Science Fiction novel, part three
The birth of a notion. Or two.
I said in a previous installment that a good science fiction novel needs to be about something, and that something can begin with a notion.
I want to talk about the notion(s) that led me to write Shree Krishna And The Singularity.
I saw the first Star Wars movie (Chapter 4, but nobody knew that back then) shortly after I stated reading Srila Prabhupada's books.
I must sound like a snob thirty years later, but I thought it was derivative. I had read Science Fiction for years and could identify things in the story that had been borrowed from S.F. classics I had read. All S.F. authors stand on the shoulders of giants to some extent, but if you're going to borrow someone else's idea you want to do something to make it your own, not just take it as is and mash it up with other borrowed ideas.
I agree that Lucas put stuff on the screen that had never been seen before and brought S.F. to a whole new audience. That isn't nothing, but the story could have been better.
A couple of years later I was a fairly serious devotee in ISKCON. The one thing I hadn't done was accept a spiritual master. In the early days of ISKCON Srila Prabhupada was the only spiritual master. If he accepted you as his disciple he would pretty much run your life in return for taking you back to the spiritual world with him. He had been a devotee all his life, and I was impressed with him. I read all his books, and while I found his commentaries repetitive he clearly was teaching me something new and profound.
Srila Prabhupada died in 1978. He left behind an organization called the GBC which was in charge of the movement, but no actual spiritual masters. There were men who were allowed to accept disciples, but Prabhupada had never claimed that these men had reached the end of the path and were capable of bringing others to the end of the path.
This was an awkward time to be a devotee, because a devotee is required to have a spiritual master, and is required to worship him as if he was God. (You don't believe that your guru is God, but you treat him like God). These menu had divided the world up into zones, and if you lived in a guru's zone you were required to be a disciple of that guru. If you wanted a different one, you'd have to move into his zone.
I had a job I wasn't willing to give up, and I wasn't all that taken with the idea of having a guru. I could have avoided accepting one longer, except for one thing: I wanted to marry one of the women in the temple.
The whole sad story may be found here:
The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim
The short version is, I was in love with her. She liked me, but had taken a vow never to marry. I might get her to change her mind about that if I was an initiated disciple of a guru, but not otherwise.
The thing that bugged me about our gurus is that they didn't seem to be necessary from any practical point of view. They would never tell anyone anything that Srila Prabhupada hadn't already said in his books. In return for parroting that stuff they expected to be worshiped.
So one day Tamal Krishna Goswami, the guru for our zone, said he'd accept me as his disciple if I followed the rules and donated half my salary to the temple. I wouldn't have to move in or shave my head. There would be a probationary period before he would accept me, but if I was an exemplary devotee it would happen.
I agreed to this and started a routine that took every waking hour and greatly limited my sleeping hours.
Subconsciously, I kept looking for some indication that Tamal Krishna Goswami had something to teach anyone that would not be found in Srila Prabhupada's books.
Then one day he said something that would qualify. He told us that two year's after Srila Prabhupada's guru died, world war two began. Two years after his guru died, world war one began. It would soon be two years after Srila Prabhupada's "disappearance" and that could only mean that world war three would soon begin. This war would be atomic, and would kill off most of humanity. It would be up to the devotees to rebuild civilization and become the dominant religion of the survivors.
I don't know if Tamal Krishna came up with this alone or if several gurus collaborated on it. I suspect some collaboration was involved.
I thought it was really lame. Also derivative:
A Canticle for Liebowitz
If I hadn't been in love with a devotee I might have given up on ISKCON at that point. Maybe I wasn't much of a devotee, but I knew lousy Science Fiction when I heard it.
Over the next few days we heard more plans for how we would survive this coming apocalypse. The woman I loved took these seriously and called them "nectar", the generic term in ISKCON for anything really spiritual. I couldn't, but didn't say anything.
But the seed was planted that would one day develop into a notion. I had heard a bad Hare Krishna Science Fiction story. So what would a good one be like?
Thirty some odd years later I thought of this. I decided that the story would need to be about how the Hare Krishna movement became really important, but in a way that did not require wiping out the whole human race. My story would be about how the movement would become important, but for reasons that nobody in the present movement could possibly predict.
So what could they not possibly predict? The answer would have to do with consciousness. The very first thing they teach you in the Hare Krishna movement is that you are not your body. You are a spirit soul that suffers because you identify with a body.
Currently there is no way to prove that this isn't true. (Other things in the Hindu scriptures can easily be proven false, which is why many in ISKCON think the Moon landings were a hoax).
Suppose that somebody made a machine that had consciousness. That would be even more impossible for a Hare Krishna devotee to accept than Moon landings. Suppose that one devotee had enough knowledge of science that she had to accept it. Suppose this acceptance led to the Hare Krishna movement becoming more important somehow, rather than totally irrelevant?
Those were the notions that led me to write this:
Shree Krishna And The Singularity
I said in a previous installment that a good science fiction novel needs to be about something, and that something can begin with a notion.
I want to talk about the notion(s) that led me to write Shree Krishna And The Singularity.
I saw the first Star Wars movie (Chapter 4, but nobody knew that back then) shortly after I stated reading Srila Prabhupada's books.
I must sound like a snob thirty years later, but I thought it was derivative. I had read Science Fiction for years and could identify things in the story that had been borrowed from S.F. classics I had read. All S.F. authors stand on the shoulders of giants to some extent, but if you're going to borrow someone else's idea you want to do something to make it your own, not just take it as is and mash it up with other borrowed ideas.
I agree that Lucas put stuff on the screen that had never been seen before and brought S.F. to a whole new audience. That isn't nothing, but the story could have been better.
A couple of years later I was a fairly serious devotee in ISKCON. The one thing I hadn't done was accept a spiritual master. In the early days of ISKCON Srila Prabhupada was the only spiritual master. If he accepted you as his disciple he would pretty much run your life in return for taking you back to the spiritual world with him. He had been a devotee all his life, and I was impressed with him. I read all his books, and while I found his commentaries repetitive he clearly was teaching me something new and profound.
Srila Prabhupada died in 1978. He left behind an organization called the GBC which was in charge of the movement, but no actual spiritual masters. There were men who were allowed to accept disciples, but Prabhupada had never claimed that these men had reached the end of the path and were capable of bringing others to the end of the path.
This was an awkward time to be a devotee, because a devotee is required to have a spiritual master, and is required to worship him as if he was God. (You don't believe that your guru is God, but you treat him like God). These menu had divided the world up into zones, and if you lived in a guru's zone you were required to be a disciple of that guru. If you wanted a different one, you'd have to move into his zone.
I had a job I wasn't willing to give up, and I wasn't all that taken with the idea of having a guru. I could have avoided accepting one longer, except for one thing: I wanted to marry one of the women in the temple.
The whole sad story may be found here:
The Life And Times Of Bhakta Jim
The short version is, I was in love with her. She liked me, but had taken a vow never to marry. I might get her to change her mind about that if I was an initiated disciple of a guru, but not otherwise.
The thing that bugged me about our gurus is that they didn't seem to be necessary from any practical point of view. They would never tell anyone anything that Srila Prabhupada hadn't already said in his books. In return for parroting that stuff they expected to be worshiped.
So one day Tamal Krishna Goswami, the guru for our zone, said he'd accept me as his disciple if I followed the rules and donated half my salary to the temple. I wouldn't have to move in or shave my head. There would be a probationary period before he would accept me, but if I was an exemplary devotee it would happen.
I agreed to this and started a routine that took every waking hour and greatly limited my sleeping hours.
Subconsciously, I kept looking for some indication that Tamal Krishna Goswami had something to teach anyone that would not be found in Srila Prabhupada's books.
Then one day he said something that would qualify. He told us that two year's after Srila Prabhupada's guru died, world war two began. Two years after his guru died, world war one began. It would soon be two years after Srila Prabhupada's "disappearance" and that could only mean that world war three would soon begin. This war would be atomic, and would kill off most of humanity. It would be up to the devotees to rebuild civilization and become the dominant religion of the survivors.
I don't know if Tamal Krishna came up with this alone or if several gurus collaborated on it. I suspect some collaboration was involved.
I thought it was really lame. Also derivative:
A Canticle for Liebowitz
If I hadn't been in love with a devotee I might have given up on ISKCON at that point. Maybe I wasn't much of a devotee, but I knew lousy Science Fiction when I heard it.
Over the next few days we heard more plans for how we would survive this coming apocalypse. The woman I loved took these seriously and called them "nectar", the generic term in ISKCON for anything really spiritual. I couldn't, but didn't say anything.
But the seed was planted that would one day develop into a notion. I had heard a bad Hare Krishna Science Fiction story. So what would a good one be like?
Thirty some odd years later I thought of this. I decided that the story would need to be about how the Hare Krishna movement became really important, but in a way that did not require wiping out the whole human race. My story would be about how the movement would become important, but for reasons that nobody in the present movement could possibly predict.
So what could they not possibly predict? The answer would have to do with consciousness. The very first thing they teach you in the Hare Krishna movement is that you are not your body. You are a spirit soul that suffers because you identify with a body.
Currently there is no way to prove that this isn't true. (Other things in the Hindu scriptures can easily be proven false, which is why many in ISKCON think the Moon landings were a hoax).
Suppose that somebody made a machine that had consciousness. That would be even more impossible for a Hare Krishna devotee to accept than Moon landings. Suppose that one devotee had enough knowledge of science that she had to accept it. Suppose this acceptance led to the Hare Krishna movement becoming more important somehow, rather than totally irrelevant?
Those were the notions that led me to write this:
Shree Krishna And The Singularity
November 3, 2015
One way to write a Science Fiction novel, part two
In part one I tried to convince you that writing and publishing a science fiction novel is a lot easier than it was thirty years ago. In this installment I'm going to talk about the actual writing and how I learned to do it.
I remember back in High School when I found out that we would be reading The Martian Chronicles for English class. Not only had I already read it twice, I had checked it out of the high school library that very day intending to read it a third time.
It should have been an easy assignment for me, but it wasn't. I had become possessive about Ray Bradbury. I felt that he was writing for me and for people like me. I didn't think a mere High School English teacher could really understand Ray Bradbury. Shakespeare, sure. Dickens, OK. F. Scott Fitzgerald, maybe. (I had my doubts when I read The Diamond As Big As The Ritz).
But not Ray Bradbury.
The worst thing was one assignment where she asked us to write a Science Fiction story that fit into the world of The Martian Chronicles. I didn't know how to make up a story. Nobody ever tried to teach us that. She taught us about Tragic Flaws and other things, but nothing about what a story is and how to make one. I managed to crank something out but it was terrible and I knew it.
It would be years before I figured out how to make a story. One resource that was incredibly helpful was Trial and Error by Jack Woodford:
Trial and Error
If you look at the listing for this book you'll see that it helped more than one Science Fiction writer get started, even though it has nothing to say about Science Fiction specifically.
(Actually he did have something to say about Science Fiction in one of his books. Judging it by the covers of S.F. magazines, where young women were frequently at the mercy of bug eyed monsters, he thought the whole thing was a blind for sadism).
In any case, to make a story you need to have a protagonist with a problem, and the story is how he solves the problem or otherwise learns how to deal with it. The solution might be clever, but if you aren't writing a mystery story it doesn't need to be.
For Science Fiction the problem needs to be something that someone living in the present day could NOT have, or it must be caused by something that does not exist in the present day. If you don't follow this rule you have a "Bat Durston", which is a non S.F. story dressed up in S.F. trappings. In the old days authors sold the same stories to multiple genre magazines using this method. You can't get away with this now. Even Firefly, which could be accurately described as a Western in outer space, did more than that.
The second rule for making a Science Fiction story is that the story must be about something. When you figure out what your story is about, that tells you what must happen in the story, what characters are needed to tell it, what the main problem is, what leads up to it, and how it must be resolved.
An S.F. story can be about more than one thing, but it can't be about nothing. (Or more accurately, it can be about nothing, but it won't be any good).
A story might start with a notion. For example, Heinlein had a notion for Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers
He wondered if there was a reasonable way to limit who could vote in U.S. elections. In real life many ways of limiting who could vote had been tried: male only, white only, 21 and over only, property owner only. He proposed that it might be limited to veterans. Not career soldiers, but people who had served but were not currently in the service. It's an interesting notion, and it keeps the novel from becoming just another space opera.
(What I find interesting is that most people think of Starship Troopers as a conservative novel, but if Heinlein's proposal was ever implemented very few of our current conservatives would be allowed to run for office).
The book is about something, not just spacemen fighting aliens with futuristic weapons.
Another example of something that is saved from being a mere space opera by being about something is Joe Haldeman's The Forever War:
The Forever War
In this case the concept was that soldiers fighting an interplanetary war might feel alienated upon coming home because time dilation would have caused hundreds of years to pass while they were away fighting.
So there you have it. Figure out what the book is about, and everything else will follow. In the next installment I'll describe how I made that work with Shree Krishna And The Singularity.
I remember back in High School when I found out that we would be reading The Martian Chronicles for English class. Not only had I already read it twice, I had checked it out of the high school library that very day intending to read it a third time.
It should have been an easy assignment for me, but it wasn't. I had become possessive about Ray Bradbury. I felt that he was writing for me and for people like me. I didn't think a mere High School English teacher could really understand Ray Bradbury. Shakespeare, sure. Dickens, OK. F. Scott Fitzgerald, maybe. (I had my doubts when I read The Diamond As Big As The Ritz).
But not Ray Bradbury.
The worst thing was one assignment where she asked us to write a Science Fiction story that fit into the world of The Martian Chronicles. I didn't know how to make up a story. Nobody ever tried to teach us that. She taught us about Tragic Flaws and other things, but nothing about what a story is and how to make one. I managed to crank something out but it was terrible and I knew it.
It would be years before I figured out how to make a story. One resource that was incredibly helpful was Trial and Error by Jack Woodford:
Trial and Error
If you look at the listing for this book you'll see that it helped more than one Science Fiction writer get started, even though it has nothing to say about Science Fiction specifically.
(Actually he did have something to say about Science Fiction in one of his books. Judging it by the covers of S.F. magazines, where young women were frequently at the mercy of bug eyed monsters, he thought the whole thing was a blind for sadism).
In any case, to make a story you need to have a protagonist with a problem, and the story is how he solves the problem or otherwise learns how to deal with it. The solution might be clever, but if you aren't writing a mystery story it doesn't need to be.
For Science Fiction the problem needs to be something that someone living in the present day could NOT have, or it must be caused by something that does not exist in the present day. If you don't follow this rule you have a "Bat Durston", which is a non S.F. story dressed up in S.F. trappings. In the old days authors sold the same stories to multiple genre magazines using this method. You can't get away with this now. Even Firefly, which could be accurately described as a Western in outer space, did more than that.
The second rule for making a Science Fiction story is that the story must be about something. When you figure out what your story is about, that tells you what must happen in the story, what characters are needed to tell it, what the main problem is, what leads up to it, and how it must be resolved.
An S.F. story can be about more than one thing, but it can't be about nothing. (Or more accurately, it can be about nothing, but it won't be any good).
A story might start with a notion. For example, Heinlein had a notion for Starship Troopers.
Starship Troopers
He wondered if there was a reasonable way to limit who could vote in U.S. elections. In real life many ways of limiting who could vote had been tried: male only, white only, 21 and over only, property owner only. He proposed that it might be limited to veterans. Not career soldiers, but people who had served but were not currently in the service. It's an interesting notion, and it keeps the novel from becoming just another space opera.
(What I find interesting is that most people think of Starship Troopers as a conservative novel, but if Heinlein's proposal was ever implemented very few of our current conservatives would be allowed to run for office).
The book is about something, not just spacemen fighting aliens with futuristic weapons.
Another example of something that is saved from being a mere space opera by being about something is Joe Haldeman's The Forever War:
The Forever War
In this case the concept was that soldiers fighting an interplanetary war might feel alienated upon coming home because time dilation would have caused hundreds of years to pass while they were away fighting.
So there you have it. Figure out what the book is about, and everything else will follow. In the next installment I'll describe how I made that work with Shree Krishna And The Singularity.
October 31, 2015
One way to write a Science Fiction novel, part one
I will soon publish a massively rewritten versions of Shree Krishna and the Singularity on Create Space, Amazon, and Nook. I think I spend more time revising this book than I did writing the first version.
It took me a long time to figure out how to write a novel. I don't think I could have done this when I was younger, although I certainly tried back then. One thing that I know for sure is that technology has made it much easier to write and publish a novel than it was thirty years ago, when I first tried to write.
The word processor is a godsend to writers. If you look at writing advice from the science fiction authors I read growing up much of it seems to be about how to avoid rewriting. For example, Ray Bradbury advised writing only short stories to begin with. He famously said you should write one short story every week. At the end of a year you'd have 52 short stories, and he defied anyone to write 52 bad short stories. According to him, it couldn't be done.
He advised against writing a novel right away, because you could spend a whole year writing a novel and have it not turn out that well, whereas if you spent the same amount of time doing short stories you'd have something good to show for it.
Robert Heinlein had a similar piece of advice: Do not rewrite except to editorial specification. When he started writing the pay rate per word was low enough that if you had to do multiple drafts of anything you might starve.
He had another piece of advice, which was to keep everything you write on the market until sold. Eventually someone would be desperate enough for content to buy it.
There is a well known story about L. Ron Hubbard where he typed his stories on a continuous roll of butcher paper fed into his typewriter, so he didn't have to spend time putting individual sheets of paper into the typewriter. I don't suppose he did a lot of rewriting either.
Reading about these authors, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to be an author I'd have to learn to knock out something good on the first try.
I tried to write a book before I had a word processor. It was a memoir of my years in the Hare Krishna movement. I wrote a first draft, made copies of it for ten cents a page at a local community college, put a cover on it, and gave it to friends to read. Then I put it in a box for thirty years. Just the thought of all the work I'd have to do to get it in shape to submit to a publisher was enough to keep it in that box.
If I had that manuscript one week after the Jonestown massacre it would have been easy to find a publisher for that book, but every year that went by made that draft less worth revising. It needed a lot of revising. I didn't even have a good title for it.
I got my first PC a few years later, plus a dot matrix printer. It didn't occur to me to use it to write anything right away, and the printer was a big part of the reason. A dot matrix printer uses a continuous sheet of paper like L. Ron Hubbard's butcher paper. The paper had holes in the sides to help the printer guide it through the rollers. When you were finished printing you had to tear off the part of the paper with the holes in it and separate the individual pages. Print quality was described as "near letter quality," which was aspirational. It looked like crap. There was no way you could take pages printed on a dot matrix printer and send them to a publisher.
Why couldn't I just send the word processor file to the publisher? There was no internet and no email back then. I programmed computers for a living and nobody had these things yet. The heros of science fiction novels didn't have them.
I went through a lot of computers and eventually got one that could connect to the internet using a modem. That didn't get me to start writing again either, but I had learned to program a PC by then and I got an account on Sourceforge so I could share the code I had written with the world. They even gave me a website I could use to tell the world about what I had created.
I went through a few more years and a few more computers and one day I read about a project called One Laptop Per Child which was going to make laptops that cost one hundred dollars that governments would buy in bulk and give to children for their education. It would have a user interface called Sugar and possibly a hand crank you could use to keep it charged.
I became involved in this project and wrote a manual for it called Make Your Own Sugar Activities! for a website named FLOSS Manuals. The software I used to write the book not only made a website, it also could generate an e-book or even a printed book from what you wrote. The website would submit files to Lulu.com and would get whatever profits came from selling the book.
My family was very impressed with the printed book, except for one thing: my name was not on the cover. FLOSS manuals are usually written by a team of people who are credited inside the book but not on the cover.
The book was licensed so that anyone could distribute or publish it as he liked, so I looked into publishing it on Create Space and found that the process was really simple and really cheap. I came up with a new cover with my name and picture on it and published it using Create Space.
I didn't sell a lot of these, but I realized that at last all the things that kept me from being a writer had gone away.
I didn't need to get it right on the first draft.
I didn't need to print it out, ever.
I didn't need to keep sending it to publishers with a self addressed stamped envelope until it was sold.
I didn't need to convince a publisher that it was something that he could make money selling. Create Space books and e-books don't need inventory and distribution. They are created when somebody buys one. They stay in print forever. They never wind up on remainder tables. There is no way to lose a fortune publishing a book that doesn't sell. If nobody likes your book it hasn't cost you much to learn that.
Finally, I didn't need to follow Bradbury's or Heinlein's advice to become a writer, except for two points mentioned by Heinlein:
1). You must write.
2). You must finish what you write.
In the next installment I will talk about how I actually learned to write a science fiction novel.
It took me a long time to figure out how to write a novel. I don't think I could have done this when I was younger, although I certainly tried back then. One thing that I know for sure is that technology has made it much easier to write and publish a novel than it was thirty years ago, when I first tried to write.
The word processor is a godsend to writers. If you look at writing advice from the science fiction authors I read growing up much of it seems to be about how to avoid rewriting. For example, Ray Bradbury advised writing only short stories to begin with. He famously said you should write one short story every week. At the end of a year you'd have 52 short stories, and he defied anyone to write 52 bad short stories. According to him, it couldn't be done.
He advised against writing a novel right away, because you could spend a whole year writing a novel and have it not turn out that well, whereas if you spent the same amount of time doing short stories you'd have something good to show for it.
Robert Heinlein had a similar piece of advice: Do not rewrite except to editorial specification. When he started writing the pay rate per word was low enough that if you had to do multiple drafts of anything you might starve.
He had another piece of advice, which was to keep everything you write on the market until sold. Eventually someone would be desperate enough for content to buy it.
There is a well known story about L. Ron Hubbard where he typed his stories on a continuous roll of butcher paper fed into his typewriter, so he didn't have to spend time putting individual sheets of paper into the typewriter. I don't suppose he did a lot of rewriting either.
Reading about these authors, I came to the conclusion that if I was going to be an author I'd have to learn to knock out something good on the first try.
I tried to write a book before I had a word processor. It was a memoir of my years in the Hare Krishna movement. I wrote a first draft, made copies of it for ten cents a page at a local community college, put a cover on it, and gave it to friends to read. Then I put it in a box for thirty years. Just the thought of all the work I'd have to do to get it in shape to submit to a publisher was enough to keep it in that box.
If I had that manuscript one week after the Jonestown massacre it would have been easy to find a publisher for that book, but every year that went by made that draft less worth revising. It needed a lot of revising. I didn't even have a good title for it.
I got my first PC a few years later, plus a dot matrix printer. It didn't occur to me to use it to write anything right away, and the printer was a big part of the reason. A dot matrix printer uses a continuous sheet of paper like L. Ron Hubbard's butcher paper. The paper had holes in the sides to help the printer guide it through the rollers. When you were finished printing you had to tear off the part of the paper with the holes in it and separate the individual pages. Print quality was described as "near letter quality," which was aspirational. It looked like crap. There was no way you could take pages printed on a dot matrix printer and send them to a publisher.
Why couldn't I just send the word processor file to the publisher? There was no internet and no email back then. I programmed computers for a living and nobody had these things yet. The heros of science fiction novels didn't have them.
I went through a lot of computers and eventually got one that could connect to the internet using a modem. That didn't get me to start writing again either, but I had learned to program a PC by then and I got an account on Sourceforge so I could share the code I had written with the world. They even gave me a website I could use to tell the world about what I had created.
I went through a few more years and a few more computers and one day I read about a project called One Laptop Per Child which was going to make laptops that cost one hundred dollars that governments would buy in bulk and give to children for their education. It would have a user interface called Sugar and possibly a hand crank you could use to keep it charged.
I became involved in this project and wrote a manual for it called Make Your Own Sugar Activities! for a website named FLOSS Manuals. The software I used to write the book not only made a website, it also could generate an e-book or even a printed book from what you wrote. The website would submit files to Lulu.com and would get whatever profits came from selling the book.
My family was very impressed with the printed book, except for one thing: my name was not on the cover. FLOSS manuals are usually written by a team of people who are credited inside the book but not on the cover.
The book was licensed so that anyone could distribute or publish it as he liked, so I looked into publishing it on Create Space and found that the process was really simple and really cheap. I came up with a new cover with my name and picture on it and published it using Create Space.
I didn't sell a lot of these, but I realized that at last all the things that kept me from being a writer had gone away.
I didn't need to get it right on the first draft.
I didn't need to print it out, ever.
I didn't need to keep sending it to publishers with a self addressed stamped envelope until it was sold.
I didn't need to convince a publisher that it was something that he could make money selling. Create Space books and e-books don't need inventory and distribution. They are created when somebody buys one. They stay in print forever. They never wind up on remainder tables. There is no way to lose a fortune publishing a book that doesn't sell. If nobody likes your book it hasn't cost you much to learn that.
Finally, I didn't need to follow Bradbury's or Heinlein's advice to become a writer, except for two points mentioned by Heinlein:
1). You must write.
2). You must finish what you write.
In the next installment I will talk about how I actually learned to write a science fiction novel.
Bhakta Jim's Bhagavatam Class
If I have any regrets about leaving the Hare Krishna movement it might be that I never got to give a morning Bhagavatam class. You need to be an initiated devotee to do that and I got out before that
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