I know at least one of my readers has been asking, “When will you talk about your own work? When will you talk about science fiction?”
The time is now. I’m lacing up my nerd shoes. The chronometer is striking thirteen.
Let’s land on this planet.
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I write science fiction and fantasy (these are both encapsulated by the umbrella term “speculative fiction”, but umbrella terms, to my mind, are depressingly vague: I write science fiction and fantasy). I have several short stories in online magazines, and many more in the making. They talk about…well…robots and ballerinas. The Scopes trial. Hamlet. Unicorns. Imaginary detectives. The train we might ride after death.
I’ve been on this road for a long time: I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was seven years old, and I never changed my mind. This has, every once in a while, been a rather cantankerous thing to carry on my back. I hit a period at the end of adolescence where I could only transcribe what happened to me, and that in only the most fragmented and self-depreciating manner. I well remember that rage, the rage of not trusting the validity of anything I said. The only solution was years of hard work, varied reading, and concentration.
I needed to learn to integrate my wacky subconscious with my equally wacky (but more plotting) conscious. Now, here I am. I just wrote a scene where a poet and a Shakespeare scholar talk about time machines in Las Vegas.
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Philip K. Dick said, “The true protagonist of a science fiction story is an idea.”
This may be right. One of science fiction’s first missions, (going back to when it lurked dark and squiggly in Jules Verne’s mind), was to hypothesize. If there was a tunnel to the center of the Earth...
If there was a world of humans without gender…
If we found a planet with a sentient ocean…
If a dissatisfied man could buy better dreams…
What I love about science fiction is the leap: you leap into a new reality, and then you imagine the ramifications of the change. Also, SF is one of the most important genres of the modern world: the point of it is, after all, to think about science. Since the results of the industrial revolution are rearranging both the quality and quantity of life on this ball of dirt, I think it has become quite pertinent to think about science.
Ideas, though, however well-articulated, get muddy when they’re expressed through the actions of characters. And fiction is always about the actions of characters. Characters: I love them even more than ideas. I love it when someone has a largely inexplicable quirk, like wanting to wrap mountains in cellophane, or carrying a battered blue suitcase with them to an alien planet.
We could all vacation in Mordor if we wanted, but it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without Frodo and Sam.
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I was rereading Tom Robbins’ book Still Life with Woodpecker the other day, when I came across the line, “There are essential and inessential insanities.” Robbins (wisely) doesn’t pin these down, only adding, “Inessential insanities get one in trouble with oneself. Essential insanities get one in trouble with others. It’s always preferable to be in trouble with others.”
My essential insanity is creativity. My essential insanity is saying, “Yes, absurd and uncontrolled things come from my mind: I’m going to clear a space for them and consider their vast implications.”
Much of the human psyche is logical, but much of it is beyond (or below) that, working itself out through dreams, emotions, and sudden revelations. What happens when these inner realities are forced to meet? Well, they interweave and redefine each other. Fiction is born from this entanglement. The writer of fiction needs both analysis, and…we’ll call it “openness of mind”.
For example: In a story I wrote about six months ago (as yet unpublished), a character is sent back in time to the Cretaceous, the last and greatest age of the dinosaurs. It is a permanent exile. She meets another human there who’s suffered the same fate, and the first thing he says to her is, “You’re lucky. You still get flowers.”
As the story explains, flowering plants didn’t evolve until that very Cretaceous, that twilight of dinosauria, where (when?) my character was stranded. If she’d landed one millimeter further back on the timeline, her world would have been pinecones and ferns. I knew this logically, from a paleontology class I took in college: but the line, with its perfect specificity and (dare I say) poetry, surprised me. It bubbled up.
In the 1969 introduction to her classic The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote that fiction attempts to say in words what cannot be said in words. In other words (ha ha), the details of stories surpass summary. They can by no means be broken, intact, down to ideas.
But the ideas need to be there.
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One idea I have is that the world can be just as uncontrolled, just as absurd, just as unbelievably symbolic as anything that comes from a writer’s mind. The tag on my green tea bag (the brand I drink always prints famous quotes) just told me that Pancho Villa’s last words were,
“Don’t let it end like this. Tell them I said something.”
And I want to say something to finish this post, something forthright, something concrete. My best first shot was, “Enough of this. Intergalactic Coffeeship away!” Which didn’t seem to fit the tone.
Tone, however, is one thing I can control. So let’s throw caution to the winds:
Enough of this. Intergalactic…
Coffeeship…
Away!
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