Ted Rabinowitz's Blog, page 33
June 26, 2013
A Little Happy Dance
My short story Can Sucker has made it to the second round of reviews for Escape Pod's science fiction podcast. Woot!
June 21, 2013
Zeb's Scene
In response to requests, here's the classic scene from Revolt in 2100:
Zeb lay back, smoking, and let me stew. I knew that he smoked and he knew that I disapproved. But it was a minor sin and, when we were rooming together in the Palace barracks, I would never have thought of reporting him. I even knew which room servant was his bootlegger. 'Who is sneaking your smokes in now?' I asked, wishing to change the subject.'Eh? Why, you buy them at the P.X., of course.' He held the dirty thing out and looked at it. 'These Mexican cigarettes are stronger than I like. I suspect that they use real tobacco in them, instead of the bridge sweepings I'm used to. Want one?''Huh? Oh, no, thanks!'He grinned wryly. 'Go ahead, give me your usual lecture. It'll make you feel better.''Now look here, Zeb, I wasn't criticizing. I suppose it's just one of the many things I've been wrong about.''Oh, no. It's a dirty, filthy habit that ruins my wind and stains my teeth and may eventually kill me off with lung cancer.' He took a deep inhalation, let the smoke trickle out of the corners of his mouth, and looked profoundly contented. 'But it just happens that I like dirty, filthy habits.'He took another puff. 'But it's not a sin and my punishment for it is here and now, in the way my mouth tastes each morning. The Great Architect doesn't give a shout in Sheol about it. Catch on, old son? He isn't even watching.''There is no need to be sacrilegious.''I wasn't being so.''You weren't, eh? You were scoffing at one of the most fundamental-perhaps the one fundamental-proposition in religion: the certainty that God is watching!''Who told you?'For a moment all I could do was to sputter. 'Why, it isn't necessary. It's an axiomatic certainty. It's -''I repeat, who told you? See here, I retract what I said. Perhaps the Almighty is watching me smoke. Perhaps it is a mortal sin and I will burn for it for eons. Perhaps. But who told you? Johnnie, you've reached the point where you are willing to kick the Prophet out and hang him to a tall, tall tree. Yet you are willing to assert your own religious convictions and to use them as a touchstone to judge my conduct. So I repeat: who told you? What hill were you standing on when the lightning came down from Heaven and illuminated you? Which archangel carried the message?'I did not answer at once. I could not. When I did it was with a feeling of shock and cold loneliness. 'Zeb... I think I understand you at last. You are an-atheist. Aren't you?'Zeb looked at me bleakly. 'Don't call me an atheist,' he said slowly, 'unless you are really looking for trouble.''Then you aren't one?' I felt a wave of relief, although I still didn't understand him.'No, I am not. Not that it is any of your business. My religious faith is a private matter between me and my God. What my inner beliefs are you will have to judge by my actions... for you are not invited to question me about them. I decline to explain them nor to justify them to you. Nor to anyone... not the Lodge Master... nor the Grand Inquisitor, if it comes to that.''But you do believe in God?''I told you so, didn't I? Not that you had any business asking me.''Then you must believe in other things?''Of course I do! I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak -...atient with the stupid... generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don't propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don't demand that you believe as I do.'I let out my breath. 'I'm satisfied, Zeb.'Instead of looking pleased he answered, 'That's mighty kind of you, brother, mighty kind! Sorry-I shouldn't be sarcastic. But I had no intention of asking for your approval. You goaded me-accidentally, I'm sure-into discussing matters that I never intend to discuss.' He stopped to light up another of those stinking cigarettes and went on more quietly. 'John, I suppose that I am, in my own cantankerous way, a very narrow man myself. I believe very strongly in freedom of religion-but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit.''Huh?''Not every case-I've known the good and the humble and the devout. But how about the man who claims to know what the Great Architect is thinking? The man who claims to be privy to His Inner Plans? It strikes me as sacrilegious conceit of the worst sort-this character probably has never been any closer to His Trestle Board than you or I. But it makes him feel good to claim to be on chummy terms with the Almighty, it builds his ego, and lets him lay down the law to you and me. Pfui! Along comes a knothead with a loud voice, an I.Q. around 90, hair in his ears, dirty underwear, and a lot of ambition. He's too lazy to be a farmer, too stupid to be an engineer, too unreliable to be a banker-but, brother, can he pray! After a while he has gathered around him other knotheads who don't have his vivid imagination and self-assurance but like the idea of having a direct line of Omnipotence. Then this character is no longer Nehemiah Scudder but the First Prophet.'I was going along with him, feeling shocked but rather pleasantly so, until he named the First Prophet. Perhaps my own spiritual state at that time could have been described as that of a 'primitive' follower of the First Prophet-that is to say, I had decided that the Prophet Incarnate was the devil himself and that all of his works were bad, but that belief did not affect the basics of the faith I had learned from my mother. The thing to do was to purge and reform the Church, not to destroy it. I mention this because my own case paralleled a very serious military problem that was to develop later.
I found that Zeb was studying my face. 'Did I get you on the raw again, Old fellow? I didn't mean to.'
'Not at all,' I answered stiffly, and went on to explain that, in my opinion, the sinfulness of the present gang of devils that had taken over the Church in no way invalidated the true faith. 'After all, no matter what you think nor how much you may like to show off your cynicism, the doctrines are a matter of logical necessity. The Prophet Incarnate and his cohorts can pervert them, but they can't destroy them-and it doesn't matter whether the real Prophet had dirty underwear or not.'
Zeb sighed as if he were very tired. 'Johnnie, I certainly did not intend to get into an argument about religion with you. I'm not the aggressive type-you know that. I had to be pushed into the Cabal.' He paused. 'You say the doctrines are a matter of logic?'
'You've explained the logic to me yourself. It's a perfect consistent structure.'
'So it is. Johnnie, the nice thing about citing God as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove. It's just a matter of selecting the proper postulates, then insisting that your postulates are "inspired". Then no one can possibly prove that you are wrong.'
Zeb lay back, smoking, and let me stew. I knew that he smoked and he knew that I disapproved. But it was a minor sin and, when we were rooming together in the Palace barracks, I would never have thought of reporting him. I even knew which room servant was his bootlegger. 'Who is sneaking your smokes in now?' I asked, wishing to change the subject.'Eh? Why, you buy them at the P.X., of course.' He held the dirty thing out and looked at it. 'These Mexican cigarettes are stronger than I like. I suspect that they use real tobacco in them, instead of the bridge sweepings I'm used to. Want one?''Huh? Oh, no, thanks!'He grinned wryly. 'Go ahead, give me your usual lecture. It'll make you feel better.''Now look here, Zeb, I wasn't criticizing. I suppose it's just one of the many things I've been wrong about.''Oh, no. It's a dirty, filthy habit that ruins my wind and stains my teeth and may eventually kill me off with lung cancer.' He took a deep inhalation, let the smoke trickle out of the corners of his mouth, and looked profoundly contented. 'But it just happens that I like dirty, filthy habits.'He took another puff. 'But it's not a sin and my punishment for it is here and now, in the way my mouth tastes each morning. The Great Architect doesn't give a shout in Sheol about it. Catch on, old son? He isn't even watching.''There is no need to be sacrilegious.''I wasn't being so.''You weren't, eh? You were scoffing at one of the most fundamental-perhaps the one fundamental-proposition in religion: the certainty that God is watching!''Who told you?'For a moment all I could do was to sputter. 'Why, it isn't necessary. It's an axiomatic certainty. It's -''I repeat, who told you? See here, I retract what I said. Perhaps the Almighty is watching me smoke. Perhaps it is a mortal sin and I will burn for it for eons. Perhaps. But who told you? Johnnie, you've reached the point where you are willing to kick the Prophet out and hang him to a tall, tall tree. Yet you are willing to assert your own religious convictions and to use them as a touchstone to judge my conduct. So I repeat: who told you? What hill were you standing on when the lightning came down from Heaven and illuminated you? Which archangel carried the message?'I did not answer at once. I could not. When I did it was with a feeling of shock and cold loneliness. 'Zeb... I think I understand you at last. You are an-atheist. Aren't you?'Zeb looked at me bleakly. 'Don't call me an atheist,' he said slowly, 'unless you are really looking for trouble.''Then you aren't one?' I felt a wave of relief, although I still didn't understand him.'No, I am not. Not that it is any of your business. My religious faith is a private matter between me and my God. What my inner beliefs are you will have to judge by my actions... for you are not invited to question me about them. I decline to explain them nor to justify them to you. Nor to anyone... not the Lodge Master... nor the Grand Inquisitor, if it comes to that.''But you do believe in God?''I told you so, didn't I? Not that you had any business asking me.''Then you must believe in other things?''Of course I do! I believe that a man has an obligation to be merciful to the weak -...atient with the stupid... generous with the poor. I think he is obliged to lay down his life for his brothers, should it be required of him. But I don't propose to prove any of those things; they are beyond proof. And I don't demand that you believe as I do.'I let out my breath. 'I'm satisfied, Zeb.'Instead of looking pleased he answered, 'That's mighty kind of you, brother, mighty kind! Sorry-I shouldn't be sarcastic. But I had no intention of asking for your approval. You goaded me-accidentally, I'm sure-into discussing matters that I never intend to discuss.' He stopped to light up another of those stinking cigarettes and went on more quietly. 'John, I suppose that I am, in my own cantankerous way, a very narrow man myself. I believe very strongly in freedom of religion-but I think that that freedom is best expressed as freedom to keep quiet. From my point of view, a great deal of openly expressed piety is insufferable conceit.''Huh?''Not every case-I've known the good and the humble and the devout. But how about the man who claims to know what the Great Architect is thinking? The man who claims to be privy to His Inner Plans? It strikes me as sacrilegious conceit of the worst sort-this character probably has never been any closer to His Trestle Board than you or I. But it makes him feel good to claim to be on chummy terms with the Almighty, it builds his ego, and lets him lay down the law to you and me. Pfui! Along comes a knothead with a loud voice, an I.Q. around 90, hair in his ears, dirty underwear, and a lot of ambition. He's too lazy to be a farmer, too stupid to be an engineer, too unreliable to be a banker-but, brother, can he pray! After a while he has gathered around him other knotheads who don't have his vivid imagination and self-assurance but like the idea of having a direct line of Omnipotence. Then this character is no longer Nehemiah Scudder but the First Prophet.'I was going along with him, feeling shocked but rather pleasantly so, until he named the First Prophet. Perhaps my own spiritual state at that time could have been described as that of a 'primitive' follower of the First Prophet-that is to say, I had decided that the Prophet Incarnate was the devil himself and that all of his works were bad, but that belief did not affect the basics of the faith I had learned from my mother. The thing to do was to purge and reform the Church, not to destroy it. I mention this because my own case paralleled a very serious military problem that was to develop later.
I found that Zeb was studying my face. 'Did I get you on the raw again, Old fellow? I didn't mean to.'
'Not at all,' I answered stiffly, and went on to explain that, in my opinion, the sinfulness of the present gang of devils that had taken over the Church in no way invalidated the true faith. 'After all, no matter what you think nor how much you may like to show off your cynicism, the doctrines are a matter of logical necessity. The Prophet Incarnate and his cohorts can pervert them, but they can't destroy them-and it doesn't matter whether the real Prophet had dirty underwear or not.'
Zeb sighed as if he were very tired. 'Johnnie, I certainly did not intend to get into an argument about religion with you. I'm not the aggressive type-you know that. I had to be pushed into the Cabal.' He paused. 'You say the doctrines are a matter of logic?'
'You've explained the logic to me yourself. It's a perfect consistent structure.'
'So it is. Johnnie, the nice thing about citing God as an authority is that you can prove anything you set out to prove. It's just a matter of selecting the proper postulates, then insisting that your postulates are "inspired". Then no one can possibly prove that you are wrong.'
June 19, 2013
When I Think-
-of all the fan-dicks and Randniks who think Heinlein's master work is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, it makes me weep.
June 18, 2013
Star Trek and Star Wars and JJ Abrams
A few weeks ago, Jon Stewart interviewed J.J. Abrams on The Daily Show. After getting over the "Gasp!" moment when Abrams admitted that he didn't "get into" Star Trek - and then did a slow-motion walk-back and recover - I found that I was really, really interested by one question they were batting around: What was the difference between Star Wars and Star Trek?They both agreed there was a big one. Stewart said that Star Wars felt like a Western, or a samurai move, a dueling gunslinger kind of thing. Abrams agreed. "Star Wars never felt like a sci-fi thing, but Star Trek does." And he's right, I think. But why?
Structure. Not story structure; structure in general. Whether the structure is political, military, or cultural, Star Trek is interested in it, and Star Wars is not. It's a difference that shakes out in a lot of ways.
For instance, Star Wars is interested in individuals doing Force-y type stuff. There are different races, but only one culture: Whether you're Wookie, Hutt, or protocol droid, you're a character recognizable from human literature, often to the point of archetype...or stereotype.
Star Trek, on the other hand, is really interested in differences. Sure, sometimes that interest was ham-handed (how many times did they explain sex and love to Data?) but the appeal isn't just in meeting aliens who look different; it's in meeting aliens who behave differently. You might think that the portrayal of Klingons is as cliché warriors, but at least they behave differently from Humans. That can only happen if your stories deal, on some level, with structures like civilizations. Get rid of that structure, and your story is entirely about individuals.
And then there's the stuff everybody associates with space opera - blazing blasters, strafing space ships, and battlemechs. If you don't care about structure, you can't give an audience a sense of the wider conflict. Because war is about armies, and there's nothing more structured than an army. So in dealing with the space navy/future army side of things, Star Wars can only tell stories of battles - but Star Trek tells stories of wars.
And remember all that trade conflict gobbledygook from the second SW trilogy? If you don't care about how things are really structured, then all talk of economics, politics, law...is going to be gobbledygook. Inevitably. Because none of it will really affect the outcome of the story. But because Star Trek cares about structure, it can have a scene where two diplomats get into an argument, and make it actually dramatic:
"There will be payment for your slander, Sarek!"
"Threats are illogical. And payment is often expensive."
If you're interested in structures, it gives you more room to play.
Just sayin'.
June 14, 2013
Looks Like a Sale for "The Saturday Dance"
Hey, gang-
It looks like I've just sold my Voudoun-based short story, "The Saturday Dance," to Lore magazine. I'm jazzed because Lore is a great magazine. I'm also happy because it's print - a new world for me. It will come out in Lore 4 in either September or October of this year.
It looks like I've just sold my Voudoun-based short story, "The Saturday Dance," to Lore magazine. I'm jazzed because Lore is a great magazine. I'm also happy because it's print - a new world for me. It will come out in Lore 4 in either September or October of this year.
June 12, 2013
Fifty Essential Epic Fantasies? Really?
So, over at io9.com, Charlie Jane Anders is talking about these lists of the "50 essential epic fantasies," and how the lists reveal that a lot of people aren't really clear about the nature of epic fantasies.
I think she's missing the point.
It isn't that people don't know what an "epic fantasy" is...
It's that there simply aren't 50 essential ones. Period.
There just aren't enough titles to fill up these lists, and that's why books like Perdido Street Station and The Dragonlance Chronicles (God save me!) pop up in them.
Ironically, the list that actually contains the most interesting titles - Ian Sales' - is the one that Charlie singles out as containing the least epic fantasy.
Bottom line, there are maybe a dozen essential epic fantasies, especially if one accepts that an epic fantasy cannot be essential if it's also badly-written crap. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Far- [rest of title deleted at request of Mendelssohn's publicist and lawyer]. And series count as single works:
Lord of the Rings
Narnia
Conan
The Once and Future King
Nine Princes in Amber through to The Courts of Chaos
A Wizard of Earthsea
Moorcock's Eternal Champion (or, if you're in a lighter mood, Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser)
Watership Down
Mythago Wood
The Chronicles of Prydain
and the source material:
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Aeneid
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Paradise Lost
The Divine Comedy
The Mabinogion
Beowulf
The Bible
How do you know I didn't just pull this list out of my a**?
Hey, I write the stuff.
Trust me.
I think she's missing the point.
It isn't that people don't know what an "epic fantasy" is...
It's that there simply aren't 50 essential ones. Period.
There just aren't enough titles to fill up these lists, and that's why books like Perdido Street Station and The Dragonlance Chronicles (God save me!) pop up in them.
Ironically, the list that actually contains the most interesting titles - Ian Sales' - is the one that Charlie singles out as containing the least epic fantasy.
Bottom line, there are maybe a dozen essential epic fantasies, especially if one accepts that an epic fantasy cannot be essential if it's also badly-written crap. Yeah, I'm looking at you, Far- [rest of title deleted at request of Mendelssohn's publicist and lawyer]. And series count as single works:
Lord of the Rings
Narnia
Conan
The Once and Future King
Nine Princes in Amber through to The Courts of Chaos
A Wizard of Earthsea
Moorcock's Eternal Champion (or, if you're in a lighter mood, Lieber's Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser)
Watership Down
Mythago Wood
The Chronicles of Prydain
and the source material:
The Iliad
The Odyssey
The Aeneid
The Epic of Gilgamesh
Paradise Lost
The Divine Comedy
The Mabinogion
Beowulf
The Bible
How do you know I didn't just pull this list out of my a**?
Hey, I write the stuff.
Trust me.
May 28, 2013
How Does Superman Shave?
So, Gillette is using the question as part of their marketing campaign - pretty cleverly, I think. They ask famous nerds like Kevin Smith and Bill Nye what their theories are, and they come up with some pretty elaborate (the Mythbusters' Large Hadron Collider Theory) and pretty painful (Kevin Smith's Comet Theory) solutions.But I have a simpler, more obvious explanation.
Superman gets his powers from the rays of Sol, our yellow G-type sun. Under the rays of a red sun, like that of Krypton, he becomes a normal being, as vulnerable to sharp objects as anybody else. So all he needs to shave (and trim his hair, and wax, for all we know - that is a pretty skintight suit, after all) is to replicate red-sun conditions for a while until his beard softens up, and then go to it. Maybe he carries a scruff until a really good sunset; or he has a special darkroom kitted up with red-sun LEDs.
Of course, that means that for ten minutes a day, Earth is defenseless as Superman grooms himself. Which means that the day you see Superman sporting an elaborate, time-intensive hairstyle is the day he has stopped caring about his job. Get ready to kneel before Zod.
ETA: And for those who only know Mayim Bialik from the Big Bang Theory...wow. Just wow.
May 9, 2013
I Wish Vernor Vinge Weren't So Freaking Smart
Some of you may remember how I've hyped Doc Vinge in the past. The man who predicted the Singularity (which allowed Ray Kurzweil to become king of the celebrinerds) and got to cyberspace before Gibson.Well, my favorite Vinge work is A Deepness in the Sky, which contains half a dozen mind-blowing concepts, some of them utterly terrifying. One of the creepiest is the "Larsen localizers," the great-great-grandchildren of RFID chips: dust mote-sized computers that individually contain a tiny bit of sensing and processing power, but together form into an immensely powerful network that can monitor virtually everything that happens in the localizers' covered area. This leads to "ubiquitous law enforcement" - tyrannies that make Big Brother look like Ron Paul.
Well, guess who's working on Larsen localizers now, 14 years after ADITS came out? Just about everybody. Here's the original announcement.
May 7, 2013
May 6, 2013
May the Fourth Be With You
Looks like I missed the boat. Apparently, May 4th is unofficial Star Wars Day. A nerds-only holiday based on a pun and a fictional universe, and I didn't know about it. Not only did I NOT know about it, but CNBC got there first!I have clearly and definitely transitioned out of fandom. I was never wholeheartedly part of it, but it's clear that I'm way, way gone from it now.
I think I can live with it. It's sort of a feeling of...reverse shame.
