Crashing the World of Kurt Vonnegut

Well, this is science fiction related, so I'll include it here.  This semester I had a fiction writing class in which students read a novel by Kurt Vonnegut (either Slaughterhouse-Five or God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater) and then wrote a parallel story that extends but does not contradict the world of the book.  It was a great exercise for students in that it was a way of acknowledging influence while creating something original.  In fact, I now think of how miserable it is to read fiction in a writing class that is all about "finding your true, inner voice."  In a class like that, all the fiction you read is just about the voices that are already taken and which you should therefore try to ignore.

Anyway, this kind of project would be worth doing in any writing class, but what made it unique is that Amazon has struck a deal with the estate of Kurt Vonnegut so that such stories (oh, all right, I'll call them "fan fiction") can now be published for the Kindle.  This ups the stakes for students in that those who choose to do so know that their work will be publicly available (this has the added benefit that proofreading suddenly becomes more important than ever).

I was the guinea pig for the class.  I wrote and published a story that takes Billy Pilgrim's wife, Valencia, as its protagonist.  She's a minor character in Slaughterhouse-Five, and I've always thought her portrayal was a little unfair (particularly now that I know the marital trouble Vonnegut was going through when he was drafting S-5).  Does it make sense that Montana Wildback can tell when Billy time travels, but his wife, Valencia, can't?  In my story, "What Valencia Knew," I put Valencia's perspective in the foreground and allow her to become as interesting of a character as any other in the novel.  And, yes, there are aliens involved.  Click on the link if you want to check it out (and you don't need a Kindle, since you can use the Kindle Cloud Reader).

One of the students in the class, Brian Pals, has already published his parallel story.  "Unmanned, or the Passion of Frenchie" is an extension of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater.  Brian did a great job staying true to the novel while writing a unique extension of it.  For a while, his story was ranked #1 on the Kindle Worlds Contemporary best-seller page, so congrats to Brian!  More work by the students in this class will be published within the next month or so, and I'll make sure to post when it is all available.

In which the blog becomes more of a diary...

... which is probably the fate of most blogs, after all.  Like many things, they start with a rush of enthusiasm, persevere out of a sense of responsibility, and eventually fade as interest wanes.  It's not that I've stopped writing (I figure I have about 40 pages left to draft of my novel), but when I have time to write I want to work on the book.  Blogging seems a luxury.

Or, in this case, a bit of an excuse perhaps.  I'm rethinking one of the chapters I'm drafting, which mean throwing away a few days worth of work.  That's sad in the way that burning a dinner is, only in that case you can order out for pizza.  When you trash a section of a book, you still have to make dinner, so to speak. 

I heard a new term yesterday: declinism.  It means what you think, that everything is going to hell.  Since my book is a anti-dystopia (which is different from a utopia), it actually works very well to have some declinist characters.  In fact, I love the irony of having a declinist who also believes himself to be immortal.  And he's a hypocritical sociopath, so the perspective is a blast to write.  My model for this chapter is the Jason section of The Sound and the Fury, which gets overlooked because it is not as difficult as the Benjy and Quentin sections, but it's a masterpiece in its own right.

Okay, enough distraction.  Time to get to work.

A bad blogger's redemption

Forgive me, blog master, for I have sinned.  I started my blog about my SF project with great enthusiasm and made great progress.  Then life caught up, and now it's a battle to find the time to work on the last 1/3 of my book.

But I am giving a reading of material from The Cord at the new Red Cedar Books in Waterloo on Feb. 21.  You're invited: http://www.facebook.com/events/487106258015884/487115688014941/?notif_t=plan_mall_activity

The Oddness of the New Yorker’s Science Fiction Issue

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.

“So, what’s your book about?”

“So, what’s your book about?”

That’s a reasonable question, and it’s one I haven’t done a very good job answering to date.  But at a party when someone asks me what I’ve been up to and I say I’m writing a novel, that’s the next question. Usually, my response is “It’s a science fiction novel about a space elevator.”  That’s true, but a little deceptive.  After all, if you asked Toni Morrison what Beloved was about, she could say “Kentucky and Ohio,” which is also true but kind of misses the point.

I’m not writing a science-fiction-as-engineering-thought-experiment novel, so my book doesn’t focus on how you build the machine that lifts people from Earth into orbit without rockets (as interesting as that may be).  It wasn’t that I was trying to be misleading in my response, but since I’m only about halfway through my first draft, I didn’t really know what my book was about.  Like many people, I write via intuition with a sense that a book will emerge at the end of the process.  And, since I’m learning as I write, I’m slowly figuring out what in fact my novel is about.

So, I think I’m ready to take a stab at this.

It was helpful to read an interview with SF writer Kim Stanley Robinson that had been forwarded to me by Jason Bradford.  In that interview, Robinson has a great quote:

It’s almost as if a science fiction writer’s job is to represent the unborn humanity that will inherit this place – you’re speaking from the future and for the future. And you try to speak for them by envisioning scenarios that show them either doing things better or doing things worse – but you’re also alerting the generations alive right now that these people have a voice in history.

This excerpt really spoke to me because my novel takes place across a range of generations, moving backward in time.  The first section is set in a future “present,” then the second section takes place among the grandparents of the first section’s characters.  The third section involves the grandparents of the second section’s characters, which gets us pretty close to the present.  As a result, I’m regularly writing about characters who have only the vaguest sense of the future they will make possible, but they are nonetheless looking to shape it.  The characters across all three sections (at least the good ones) strive to build the world they themselves will never inhabit.  I have found this process very inspiring.

If it’s possible to write an anti-dystopian novel that’s not a utopia, that’s what I’m trying to do. 

But, let’s get back to the main point.  I need a good line at a party.  How about this (with apologies to Kim Stanley Robinson): “I’m writing a book about a space elevator.  It’s about how what we do now affects people two or four generations after us.” 

Now, bring on the hors d'oeuvres.