Back to the labryinth where either we are found or lose ourselves forever
For reasons noted best by cesperanza, I don't feel comfortable writing about "the story I keep telling." But I have been thinking about themes, and here are four bits of prose that always grab me, that I write around and read around:
1. "Some illusions are worth any price you pay for them ...." (Jane Mortimer, A Bitter Taste on the Tongue. My life would be very different if Jane's The Sin-Eater hadn't been just about the first XF story I ever read. She's also a mensch who answered my fawning fangirl feedback - say that ten times fast. I always remember this line as "Some lies are worth any price you pay for them," but it works either way.)
2. "You don't get to choose who you love. You only get to choose how." (The line so nice I used it twice.)
3. "He'd spent his entire life being offered things that were almost what he wanted, but for the single fatal flaw that made them completely unappealing." (Gigi Sinclair, who hasn't written enough SV.)
4. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living...." (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; don't say Social Studies never did anything for me.)
So I guess the themes are twofold: Fate versus Free Will, and Not Quite.
A grab bag of books:
David Fisher, Hard Evidence: How Detectives Inside the FBI's Sci-Crime Lab Have Helped Solve America's Toughest Cases: Although this book is from 1995, I thought it was excellent. It had some very neat materials on explosives I haven't seen elsewhere, as well as clear and comprehensive overviews of the various specialties at the Sci-Crime lab. With plenty of anecdotes, Hard Evidence would be useful to anyone who is interested in true crime and/or writing stories in which fingerprints, ransom notes, hairs, fibers, etc. play a role. It is a little Pollyanna-ish about the validity of the FBI's methods, especially the polygraph and fingerprint evidence, neglecting to point out that both of those are only highly reliable if really, really good people are doing the analysis; without real expertise, it's too easy to get testimony that sounds convincing to a jury but in fact is gibberish.
W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957: Auden wrote ,"No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible," which may explain part of why I didn't like The Rake's Progress, for which Auden wrote the libretto and Stravinsky the music. Alternatively, it could be that I just don't like opera. Anyhow, The Shield of Achilles has always been one of my favorite poems - the inexorable rhythm of "they were small/And could not hope for help and no help came" would be enough for me, but it's all like that, to "the strong/Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles/Who would not live long." And September 1, 1939 is now inextricably bound up in my mind with Sept. 11, 2001. There Will Be No Peace currently seems to be popularly read as also about political hatred, but it feels more personal to me, even if it's about depersonalizing hatred, and I was pleased to discover that Auden wrote it as a response to the intense animosity people held for him when he returned to Oxford. (As an aside, I don't quite know why more sites don't get sued for infringing copyrighted poems. While poets.org reprints poems with permission, I don't think most of the results I found on Google are authorized. Perhaps Auden's executors/heirs have better things to do than go after people who type in their favorite poems; perhaps they think the world is a better place when the unacknowledged legislators of the world can have their laws widely read.) I like Auden's shorter poems, as a rule; the matching Longer Poems has been half-read beside my bed for months. Auden is a scientist of love and of resignation to life's constant small failures.
Who could resist "Pick a quarrel, go to war/Leave the hero in the bar;/Hunt the lion, climb the peak:/No one guesses you are weak"? Or Five Songs, where "thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life," and somehow that turns into passion, the lover asking to be destroyed by love? Or Detective Story, with its conclusion that "Someone must pay for/Our loss of happiness, our happiness itself"?
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe: I've been unable to acquire a copy of The Science of Discworld, sadly, but I didn't feel that was a barrier to understanding this book, which is basically a slender Discworld fable about the wizards of Unseen University visiting Roundworld, a strange world that does not run on magic that the wizards created - well, they'll tell you they created it on purpose, but they'll tell you they did everything on purpose. The Discworld story, which includes an elven cameo, is okay, but it's mainly an excuse for Pratchett and his coauthors to discuss evolution (they're in favor) and the development of science and the scientific method. There was a funny reference to Shakespeare encountering the classic Discworld folksong The Hedgehog Song (the link is to a filk that is a bit more explicit than Nanny Ogg ever got). For those who don't remember, the refrain is "... but the hedgehog can never be buggered at all." But ultimately I thought the argument, such as it was, was incoherent. On the one hand, they believe that Man is the storytelling animal (no word on Woman, but she's probably cooking) and that stories are what make us advance. On the other hand, they're anti-superstition, and they like religious art because once you imagine God as an old guy with a beard, you're more likely to think, "Hey! That doesn't make any sense!" and turn to science. So, on fantasy, they are "either for it or agin it," as a friend of mine used to say, and ultimately it was not enough Discworld for the amount of time it took to read through all that pop science. A completist could, however, easily skip the non-Discworld chapters, because they have some references to Discworld but don't advance the story.
Valerie Freireich, Becoming Human: Alexander is a toolman, an Altered person without the rights of a human being. He's a probe, genetically modified for greater skill in observing and analyzing human behavior so he can assist the rulers of the Polite Harmony of Worlds in maintaining their rule. He's also got an expiration date - probes enter flare at around thirty, when their metabolisms speed up and they essentially eat themselves alive. The people of Neuland seek admission to the Harmony, but they're genetically modified so that they can't feel pain, and there's uncertainty as to whether they're human or not. When the emissaries from Neuland offer to cure Alexander's beginning flare, he's forced to make a choice. And that's just the first, oh, twenty pages. Freireich's worldmaking is pretty comprehensive; I haven't even told you about the Harmony's quasi-religion or its battles against the crossmen and alans, a Christian-Muslim melding under the rule of an emir. I found myself less than thoroughly engaged in whether Alexander and the Neulanders would be recognized as human by their fellows, perhaps because the stakes were so obvious and because Alexander's life as one person didn't concern me as much as the fate of an entire planet, but all I had was Alexander's POV (this is not quite accurate, but to say more would be a spoiler). Still, Freireich is clearly talented, and her characters seemed to have a range of plausible prejudices and blind spots. I'll keep an eye out for other books to see if the next one has more of a spark.
Dean Koontz, Shattered: This book was published the year I was born. Koontz has been churning out these somebody's-chasing-me-and-I-don't-know-why books for over thirty years. That's impressive, in a sort of scary way. He's gotten better over time - this book has a lot of telling where showing ought to be. There is one genuinely creepy scene in a motel laundry room, but other than that I can't really recommend reaching into the Koontz back catalogue.
1. "Some illusions are worth any price you pay for them ...." (Jane Mortimer, A Bitter Taste on the Tongue. My life would be very different if Jane's The Sin-Eater hadn't been just about the first XF story I ever read. She's also a mensch who answered my fawning fangirl feedback - say that ten times fast. I always remember this line as "Some lies are worth any price you pay for them," but it works either way.)
2. "You don't get to choose who you love. You only get to choose how." (The line so nice I used it twice.)
3. "He'd spent his entire life being offered things that were almost what he wanted, but for the single fatal flaw that made them completely unappealing." (Gigi Sinclair, who hasn't written enough SV.)
4. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like an Alp on the brains of the living...." (Karl Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte; don't say Social Studies never did anything for me.)
So I guess the themes are twofold: Fate versus Free Will, and Not Quite.
A grab bag of books:
David Fisher, Hard Evidence: How Detectives Inside the FBI's Sci-Crime Lab Have Helped Solve America's Toughest Cases: Although this book is from 1995, I thought it was excellent. It had some very neat materials on explosives I haven't seen elsewhere, as well as clear and comprehensive overviews of the various specialties at the Sci-Crime lab. With plenty of anecdotes, Hard Evidence would be useful to anyone who is interested in true crime and/or writing stories in which fingerprints, ransom notes, hairs, fibers, etc. play a role. It is a little Pollyanna-ish about the validity of the FBI's methods, especially the polygraph and fingerprint evidence, neglecting to point out that both of those are only highly reliable if really, really good people are doing the analysis; without real expertise, it's too easy to get testimony that sounds convincing to a jury but in fact is gibberish.
W.H. Auden, Collected Shorter Poems, 1927-1957: Auden wrote ,"No good opera plot can be sensible, for people do not sing when they are feeling sensible," which may explain part of why I didn't like The Rake's Progress, for which Auden wrote the libretto and Stravinsky the music. Alternatively, it could be that I just don't like opera. Anyhow, The Shield of Achilles has always been one of my favorite poems - the inexorable rhythm of "they were small/And could not hope for help and no help came" would be enough for me, but it's all like that, to "the strong/Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles/Who would not live long." And September 1, 1939 is now inextricably bound up in my mind with Sept. 11, 2001. There Will Be No Peace currently seems to be popularly read as also about political hatred, but it feels more personal to me, even if it's about depersonalizing hatred, and I was pleased to discover that Auden wrote it as a response to the intense animosity people held for him when he returned to Oxford. (As an aside, I don't quite know why more sites don't get sued for infringing copyrighted poems. While poets.org reprints poems with permission, I don't think most of the results I found on Google are authorized. Perhaps Auden's executors/heirs have better things to do than go after people who type in their favorite poems; perhaps they think the world is a better place when the unacknowledged legislators of the world can have their laws widely read.) I like Auden's shorter poems, as a rule; the matching Longer Poems has been half-read beside my bed for months. Auden is a scientist of love and of resignation to life's constant small failures.
Who could resist "Pick a quarrel, go to war/Leave the hero in the bar;/Hunt the lion, climb the peak:/No one guesses you are weak"? Or Five Songs, where "thoughts grow like feathers, the dead end of life," and somehow that turns into passion, the lover asking to be destroyed by love? Or Detective Story, with its conclusion that "Someone must pay for/Our loss of happiness, our happiness itself"?
Terry Pratchett, Ian Stewart & Jack Cohen, The Science of Discworld II: The Globe: I've been unable to acquire a copy of The Science of Discworld, sadly, but I didn't feel that was a barrier to understanding this book, which is basically a slender Discworld fable about the wizards of Unseen University visiting Roundworld, a strange world that does not run on magic that the wizards created - well, they'll tell you they created it on purpose, but they'll tell you they did everything on purpose. The Discworld story, which includes an elven cameo, is okay, but it's mainly an excuse for Pratchett and his coauthors to discuss evolution (they're in favor) and the development of science and the scientific method. There was a funny reference to Shakespeare encountering the classic Discworld folksong The Hedgehog Song (the link is to a filk that is a bit more explicit than Nanny Ogg ever got). For those who don't remember, the refrain is "... but the hedgehog can never be buggered at all." But ultimately I thought the argument, such as it was, was incoherent. On the one hand, they believe that Man is the storytelling animal (no word on Woman, but she's probably cooking) and that stories are what make us advance. On the other hand, they're anti-superstition, and they like religious art because once you imagine God as an old guy with a beard, you're more likely to think, "Hey! That doesn't make any sense!" and turn to science. So, on fantasy, they are "either for it or agin it," as a friend of mine used to say, and ultimately it was not enough Discworld for the amount of time it took to read through all that pop science. A completist could, however, easily skip the non-Discworld chapters, because they have some references to Discworld but don't advance the story.
Valerie Freireich, Becoming Human: Alexander is a toolman, an Altered person without the rights of a human being. He's a probe, genetically modified for greater skill in observing and analyzing human behavior so he can assist the rulers of the Polite Harmony of Worlds in maintaining their rule. He's also got an expiration date - probes enter flare at around thirty, when their metabolisms speed up and they essentially eat themselves alive. The people of Neuland seek admission to the Harmony, but they're genetically modified so that they can't feel pain, and there's uncertainty as to whether they're human or not. When the emissaries from Neuland offer to cure Alexander's beginning flare, he's forced to make a choice. And that's just the first, oh, twenty pages. Freireich's worldmaking is pretty comprehensive; I haven't even told you about the Harmony's quasi-religion or its battles against the crossmen and alans, a Christian-Muslim melding under the rule of an emir. I found myself less than thoroughly engaged in whether Alexander and the Neulanders would be recognized as human by their fellows, perhaps because the stakes were so obvious and because Alexander's life as one person didn't concern me as much as the fate of an entire planet, but all I had was Alexander's POV (this is not quite accurate, but to say more would be a spoiler). Still, Freireich is clearly talented, and her characters seemed to have a range of plausible prejudices and blind spots. I'll keep an eye out for other books to see if the next one has more of a spark.
Dean Koontz, Shattered: This book was published the year I was born. Koontz has been churning out these somebody's-chasing-me-and-I-don't-know-why books for over thirty years. That's impressive, in a sort of scary way. He's gotten better over time - this book has a lot of telling where showing ought to be. There is one genuinely creepy scene in a motel laundry room, but other than that I can't really recommend reaching into the Koontz back catalogue.