Ted Rabinowitz's Blog, page 42

The Gimme

As in "just give me this one departure from fact, and I'll spin you a tale that will blow your mind." It's a staple of all fiction, but it crops up the most in F/SF.

There is an economy of the Gimme. Don't use one more than once a story. It should have ramifications. It should generate surprises. It should allow for wonder, shock, recognition, laughter, sorrow.

It wasn't about the free stuff, Mitt (political rant)

It wasn't about the free stuff, Mitt - we just didn't like you.

We didn't like the way you flipflopped like a gaffed salmon. We didn't like the brazen way you did it, or your Etch-a-Sketchin' aides, or the way you ran from your biggest achievement in the primaries (healthcare, by the way, not LBOs), only to circle around and try to take credit for it again in the general election. To us, it looked like more than cynicism - it looked like contempt for your fellow Americans. Did you think we wouldn't notice? Or that we wouldn't care?

We didn't like the stories of you as a high school bully. It would have been one thing if you had owned up to it, demonstrated an understanding of what you had done, and apologized like a man. Instead, you weaseled away from it, like a politician.

We didn't like the outright lies, like that commercial about shipping car production to China. Neither did GM - car company repudiating a Republican candidate? First time ever. (See Paragraph 2, above, "Did you think we wouldn't notice?")

We didn't like your belief that a low capital gains tax is sound economics, but low interest on college loans is a handout.

And finally, all of us moochers didn't like your selective blindness to your own free stuff: an exclusive, expensive education; guaranteed connections to powerful networks of friends and family; access to family loans for, say, a first house. We didn't like your blithe assumption that the poor are poor because they don't share your work ethic, as opposed to not sharing your head start. Yes, you worked hard. So do janitors, administrative assistants, porters, waiters - we ALL work hard. Do you really believe that breaking up companies does more for this country than nursing?

Good-bye.

Up on Another Site

Hey, hey-

Holly's Bargain Books!

Why Is That So Good, pt. 3 - "They Called Him Mahasamatman"

When I first read Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light, it messed up my prose style for three years. I was only a teen at the time, so I was fairly impressionable; but still. Three years...

And it wasn't just my mind that got blown. George RR Martin himself, now the most media-successful fantasist since Tolkien, wrote that when he read the first lines of that book, "a chill went through me, and I sensed that SF would never be the same. Nor was it."

Zelazny was a member of SF's New Wave, the late '60s-early '70s crew that emphasized style and literary quality in speculative fiction. JG Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Sam Delaney and others stood up for the idea that SF was as worthy an endeavor as any middle-brow offering by Lessing or Mailer. Zelazny had earned a Master's in Elizabethan Drama from my own alma mater, but he was also a passionate explorer of myth, folklore, martial arts, and Asian religions. He incorporated all of it into his work, making him perhaps the first writer of speculative fiction since Tolkien to ground his most successful stories firmly in myth. He did this years before anyone had heard of Joseph Campbell, before Star Wars reinvigorated the Hero's Journey concept, before Bruce Lee and then anime conquered American culture and made all of us aware of kung-fu. He was the guy at the top of Everest, waiting to hand us sandwiches when we arrived to stick our flag in the peak.
Lord of Light takes place on a colony planet after the destruction of Earth. The crew of the ship that colonized the place have monopolized technology to grant themselves immortality and superhuman abilities. The rest of the planet, occupied by the colonists and their descendants, has been recreated as the world of the Hindu scriptures, complete with castes and mechanically-aided reincarnation. But one of the crew, a formerly apolitical man named Sam, decides that the colonists deserve a break. He rebels, and as his fellow crew members have become the gods, he takes on the role of the Buddha.

So let's see what GRRM was talking about. Here's the first two pages of Chapter One, without the introductory summary and quotes with which Zelazny prefaced each chapter:

His followers called him Mahasamatman and said he was a god. He preferred to drop the Maha- and the -atman, however, and called himself Sam. He never claimed to be a god. But then, he never claimed not to be a god. Circumstances being what they were, neither admission could be of any benefit. Silence, though, could.

Therefore, there was mystery about him.

It was in the season of the rains...

It was well into the time of the great wetness. . .

It was in the days of the rains that their prayers went up, not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords or the spinning of prayer wheels, but from the great pray-machine in the monastery of Ratri, goddess of the Night.
The high-frequency prayers were directed upward through the atmosphere and out beyond it, passing into that golden cloud called the Bridge of the Gods, which circles the entire world, is seen as a bronze rainbow at night, and is the place where the red sun becomes orange at midday.

Some of the monks doubted the orthodoxy of this prayer technique, but the machine had been built and was operated by Yama-Dharma, fallen, of the Celestial City; and, it was told, he had ages ago built the mighty thunder chariot of Lord Shiva: that engine that fled across the heavens, belching gouts of fire in its wake.

Despite his fall from favor, Yama was still deemed mightiest of the artificers, though it was not doubted that the Gods of the City would have him to die the real death were they to learn of the pray-machine. For that matter, though, it was not doubted that they would have him to die the real death without the excuse of the pray-machine, also, were he to come into their custody. How he would settle this matter with the Lords of Karma was his own affair, though none doubted that when the time came he would find a way.

He was half as old as the Celestial City itself, and not more than ten of the gods remembered the founding of that abode. He was known to be wiser even than the Lord Kubera in the ways of the Universal Fire. But these were his lesser Attributes. He was best known for another thing, though few men spoke of it. Tall, but not overly so; big, but not heavy; his movements, slow and fluent. He wore red and spoke little.

He tended the pray-machine, and the giant metal lotus he had set atop the monastery roof turned and turned in its sockets.

A light rain was falling upon the building, the lotus and the jungle at the foot of the mountains. For six days he had offered many kilowatts of prayer, but the static kept him from being heard On High. Under his breath, he called upon the more notable of the current fertility deities, invoking them in terms of their most prominent Attributes.

A rumble of thunder answered his petition, and the small ape who assisted him chuckled. "Your prayers and your curses come to the same. Lord Yama," commented the ape. "That is to say, nothing."

"His followers called him Mahasamatman..." The first paragraph of the book starts off as myth, and then immediately deflates it, going from the grandiloquent "Mahasamatman" to the prosaic "Sam" in two sentences. Not only is that contrast an attention-grabber from the start; it also lays the groundwork for a tension that runs through the entire novel: Are its main characters simply lordlings who have used technology to grant themselves superhuman abilities and immortality? Or are they, on some fundamental level, actual deities? The grand and metaphysical balloon is constantly punctured by a prosaic needle - and then reinflated.

The paragraph also tells you something immediate and fundamental about Sam, the protagonist: He's not above using ambiguity for political ends. He's a schemer.

And all of this ambiguity is wrapped in language that wavers back and forth between prose and blank verse, giving it an incantatory quality that Zelazny interrupts whenever he wants to move from the elevated to the realistic. Break it into clauses, and it reads like William Carlos Williams:

It was in the days of the rains
That their prayers went up
Not from the fingering of knotted prayer cords
Or the spinning of prayer wheels
But from the great pray-machine
In the monastery of Ratri
Goddess of the Night.

(The one time I was fortunate enough to meet Zelazny, he told me that he wrote poetry every day to sharpen his chops.)

Then there's the "pray machine." Notice that the mechanism has a spinning metal "lotus" on the roof. Of course, the lotus is a symbolic flower in Buddhism; it represents purity and rebirth, and its eight petals represent the Eightfold Way of Buddhist doctrine. But the lotus is also a wide, bowl-shaped flower...you know, kind of like a parabolic radio antenna. And this "pray machine" is offering many "kilowatts of prayer." It's one of the book's great running gags - yes, this Hugo winner has running gags - to use elliptical references and descriptions. Sam, Yama, and their advanced gear are seen from a devout, pre-technological perspective. A radio telescope is a lotus; a nuclear explosion is "the tall man of smoke who wears a wide hat." Beneath the language of deities and supernatural events are things that would be instantly recognizable to a modern reader. You can practically feel your mind spinning as you read, trying to visualize each reference, and wondering if it is alien, or truly familiar. It's another way to maintain that constant tension between the prosaic and the numinous.

There's a bunch of other terrific stuff in the book, but I'll save that for a later post. Or, you know, you can just buy the book and read it yourself.

How much would it take to storm-proof New York?

What we want to avoid...Interesting article in the Atlantic.

Storm surge barriers, built-up dunes, effective levees, underground power lines. The cost is big, but not insane, considering the damage already done by Sandy.

The storm surge barriers are pretty impressive. What is it about the really big civil engineering projects - they always feel like they're just on the cusp of science fiction.

Bloomberg Just Cancelled the NYC Marathon

Someone saw reason at City Hall.

At the best of times, the marathon is a mixed bag for NY residents: great and a fun thing to watch (or even do) once or twice. It boosts tourism. It also snarls traffic hopelessly, packs the sidewalks, and turns otherwise quiet neighborhoods into bedlam. Worse, it demands an increased police presence, increased sanitation, increased engineering and transit presence, and so on. Meanwhile, there are still big chunks of the city without power. My take is that when they decided to go on, the mayor's office hadn't really understood the extent of the damage.

ETA: The marathon boosts the NYC economy by $350 million a year. Understandably, that's a lot of bucks that might be used to help recovery efforts. But that's money that only goes to emergency services partially, indirectly, and over time, in the form of taxes. And what of all the businesses that can't take advantage of the marathon, because they have no power? Closing it - still the best decision.

The Trains Are Running Again

A bit.
Above 34th Street.
But that in itself is a big thing. I actually went into the office.

But many lines are still closed, and the real killer are all the lines that link the different boroughs. (For my non-US readers, New York City has five divisions, or boroughs, and only two of them - Brooklyn and Queens - are NOT separated by water from the others.) It really drives home the point that even with the "Outer Borough Renaissance," Manhattan is still the center.

Still long lines outside of Trader Joes. But by Tuesday, people were already eating in restaurants on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

But even if you got lucky, you know someone who didn't.

I Just Did a Post for Samantha Combs-

- called "Writing Scientific." Check it out here.

What a mess.

Well, I got lucky.
The Upper West Side got off fairly well. We kept power, for instance. I lost internet and phone, but they're back now.
But the power is still out south of 40th Street, I'm told.
The subway system is flooded, and no one knows when the trains will be back.
The buses are running, but on a Sunday schedule.
Cities and neighborhoods directly on the water are flooded, including a lot of Jersey towns that had started to become the new gentrifying areas.
I guess I had assumed this would be like Irene, last year - sloppy, untidy, inconvenient, but with a city that ultimately recovered in a day.
This seems more extensive. And like any New Yorker, I get twitchy when the subways are seriously down for the count.

Sandy, 7:00 PM

We're heading into the peak area now, apparently. Until about ten o'clock, the winds will be the strongest. It's a little nerve-wracking, but I know that I am so much better off than so many other folks. The eye of the storm made landfall in southern New Jersey, and I'm many miles away in Manhattan. Really, all I have to worry about is, at the absolute worst, a power outage...although the wind noise does make me neurotically twitchy about broken glass.

Best wishes to everyone.