First, an update on my book. I’m about 220 pages into what I think will be a 300-page
draft. It’s coming along well but
taking turns I hadn’t expected.
All of a sudden robots are important (robots? I wasn’t planning to write about robots), and they are making
me have to rethink some earlier sections.
I can’t quite say that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but
at least I’m pretty sure I’m in a tunnel and not a cave. I’ve had to take a break from the book
for awhile as I get ready to direct Camp Multimedia, but I’ll be back on it in
hopes of having a draft done by mid-July—no, end of July—no, the end of the
summer. Well, we’ll see.
The issue of the New
Yorker currently on newsstands is their first Science Fiction issue. On a piece-by-piece basis, there are
some good reads to be found. I
really liked the Sam Lipsyte and Junot Díaz stories as well as the remembrance
by the recently deceased Ray Bradbury.
I wanted to really like the Jennifer Egan story, since it was a
quasi-continuation of A Visit from the
Goon Squad. I even read the
whole story on Twitter in the spirit of the thing (the entire story is told in
tweet-sized paragraphs). But the
story, a sci fi spy tale, was just okay, and the Twitter part of it seemed
unessential. It read more like
Lorrie Moore meets Roger Moore.
But, that said, what is odd about this New Yorker issue is the way the editors chose to put it together. It comes in two discreet sections that
clearly demarcate the literary writers from the SF writers. This enforced
separation is really unfortunate and it kept the issue from being more
interesting.
The first part consists of science fiction stories and
essays by writers with a literary reputation (in addition to those mentioned
above, there’s Jonathan Letham, Colson Whitehead, and Anthony Burgess). Again,
there was some good reading here, but is it really that big a deal to show that
writers of literary fiction can do SF-influenced work? That’s not news for anyone who has read
Michael Chabon or David Foster Wallace.
Or Marge Piercy or Haruki Murakami. Or George Orwell or Mark Twain. Can I stop now?
The other part of the issue involves short remembrances by SF-identified
writers like Ursula Lu Guin, William Gibson, and Margaret Atwood (though I
think of her as more literary) of their early encounters with science fiction. The majority of these pieces strike a
similar tone, combining a sense of SF as an illicit form of literature with the
pure pleasure taken in reading it.
In the aggregate, these pieces reminded me of Philip Roth writing about
masturbation in Portnoy’s Complaint.
If the New Yorker
ever does a SF issue again, they should do it the way they do their “Best
Writers Under 40” issues. Introduce
readers to a whole bunch of authors they probably don’t already know but may
really like. Plenty of New Yorker readers would be interested
in Elizabeth Bear’s stories on technology and female sexuality. They’d be intrigued, if sometimes
puzzled, by Cory Doctorow’s futuristic versions of social networking. And since the New Yorker throws a lot more money at authors than change-per-word
SF pulps, they could probably have gotten Paolo Bacigalupi to start writing for
adults again.
