JOURNAL #117

 

                                                            July 15, 2012 

 

           

July 4, 2012 may become a celebrated date, marking the announcement by physicists at CERN that they’d discovered evidence supporting the existence of the Higgs Boson, the “God particle.” I’ll confess here that I’ve been trying to get my mind around the function of a Higgs, which seems to be that it creates a kind of universal stickiness that imparts mass to everything else. I’m still mired in my relativity days, trying to visualize what it really means to have time run at different rates, why we age more slowly riding a jet than we do waiting in the airport.

 

Assuming most people were as puzzled about the Higgs as I was, I decided I’d look for a clear explanation, delivered in plain English, and record it here for my own future benefit. I’ve read every “simple” explanation I could find. And I think I understand what they’re trying to say, but I can’t see what actually happens. So I’ll settle for this: I loved seeing the physicists so excited, and I shared their excitement. They’ve made the point that there may be technological applications to come, just as the quantum breakthrough in the 1920’s gave us computers and cell phones and a lot of the other stuff that has changed our lives. But the reality remains: I still can’t figure out how a particle can pass simultaneously through slits in two different pieces od cardboard. But apparently they do. And physicists seem to have a reasonably firm grasp on the process. I’m probably just an example of the validity of the uncertainty principle.

 

In any case, let’s raise a glass to the people at CERN.

 

                                                          #

 

I discovered during my trip to Germany last month that I don’t tolerate long plane rides as well as I used to. The flight across the Atlantic ran to ten hours. I remember riding a propeller-driven aircraft from the west coast to Japan in the 1950’s, with stops at Hawaii and Midway. And it hadn’t struck me as being especially time-consuming. But ten hours now seems endless.

 

I had a book with me, of course. It was Chris Hedges’s The World As It Is. I was unfamiliar with Hedges, but he is a journalist who has spent considerable time in Africa and the Middle East covering the general chaos. He doesn’t have a lot of confidence in either party to get things right. He sees a world effectively run by corporate power rather than by democratically-elected officials. In his view, for example, the Irad and Afghan wars have been fought primarily because they produced substantial profits for a number of corporations. It’s impossible not to recall Eisenhower’s warning about the military-industrial complex.

 

Hedges makes it clear that he wouldn’t support either candidate in the 2012 presidential race. Whoever occupies the White House in 2013, he would argue, will be controlled by big money behind the scenes. That leaves Jill Stein, the Green Party’s physician candidate.

 

                                                             #

 

I just picked up a copy of a new Greg Benford collection, Anomalies. I’ve always enjoyed Benford. I first came into contact with his work back in my customs inspector days. He was one of the few writers who could keep me awake at 3:00 a.m.

 

Years ago, I paged through The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, but never really read it. That’s my next major project.

 

                                                            #

 

I’m discovering why the three later Star Wars films didn’t work. I think a lot of us sensed it at the time they were released. But I’ve gotten the point driven home. Prequals are more difficult to put together because you’re locked in. It’s no longer news that I’m currently working on Starhawk, an account of Hutch’s certification as a pilot, and her first few months on the job.

 

And I have to look everything up. What was the name of the restaurants on the Wheel? (Did they call the orbiting Earth station the Wheel, or was it something else? Why did I leave a six-year gap between the Porlogue and the first chapter?) You also tend to get locked in. E.g., it’s 2196, and there’s a presidential race going on. I’d planned on having it turn out as a victory for the incumbent. But I went looking through The Engines of God to see whether there might be any reference there to a winner. There wasn’t. But one of the headlines stated that “the elective president” had said something or other. That implies the challenger won.

 

Fortunately it’s not an issue, and so far it’s been clear sailing. But making everything match up can be exceedingly time-consuming. And it might keep you from following your instincts.

 

                                                                #

 

I expect to be doing a panel at worldcon with Mike Resnick on the virtues of collaboration. I’d pretty much stayed clear of collaborations. Maybe I was reluctant not to have complete authority over how things played out. I should say, though, that working with Mike on The Cassandra Project turned out to be a pleasure. Moreover, had I been left to my own devices, it’s a book that would never have been written.                                                  

 

 

 

                                                     JOURNAL #118

                                                      August 2, 2012

 

            SF conventions frequently bring in physicists and astronomers to discuss various scientific topics. Sometimes these are serious, as, e.g., an explanation of what the Higgs bosun is all about. Sometimes they take a lighter note, as in how we might move the Enterprise at hyperlight speeds without throwing an unbelted crew around the bridge. OsFest5, in Omaha this past weekend, had all of this. They brought in Professor Dan Claes of the University of Nebraska to discuss such far-out topics as the God Particle, the possibility that life exists on other worlds, and –my favorite—the physics of the superheroes.

            Superman has always been described as “able to leap tall buildings.” When I was about twelve, I listened to an episode of the Superman radio show in which Perry White and Lois go down at sea in an airplane. The plane sinks, leaving them to stay afloat as best they can. Fortunately, Superman arrived on the scene, plunged into the water, swam to them, took one in each arm, and leaped into the sky. How could he have managed that? What did he stand on? A couple of years later he dived under a ship and lifted it out of the water.

            Professor Claes smiled politely when I mentioned these feats to him. It wasn’t a good idea to take any of this seriously. Still, I’d always wondered where Superman’s ability to accelerate when he was in the air came from? Or how he could make a right turn? Or support a jetliner in midair?

            My favorite moment came when he did the math involved in the movements of the Flash, who could apparently travel several thousand miles across the country and return before you noticed he was gone.

                                                                        #

            Other than a good time, I got something else out of OsFest5: Several weeks ago Erin Underwood invited me to contribute a young Alex Benedict story to a YA anthology she’s putting together. It’s a tight deadline, so I spent a fair amount of time thinking about it while I was on the plane to Omaha. The possibility of radio mining has always appealed to me, and in fact Alex even mentions it in one of the novels. If you have an FTL capability, you are automatically able to track down long-gone radio signals, since you can outrun them. It helps if they are directional, rather than broadcast. And then all we need is a reason to recover an old transmission, and a way to surprise the reader. I had one idea that I thought would work nicely, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was too dark for a YA audience. Alex, by the way, will be about seventeen.

            Toward the end of the con, though, I discovered the story would work if I simply changed the climax. Alex will be about seventeen, and it will be our first glimpse of his uncle Gabe.

                                                                 #                   

            I’ve also promised a story to Tom Easton for an anthology whose theme will be the science fiction ideas that, at least to date, haven’t happened. Jet packs, flying cars,  housekeeping robots, Moonbase. It strikes me that SF, in contemplating the future, always thinks in terms of technology. There have been enormous technological strides during my lifetime. No denying that. But maybe the most critical changes have come in our attitudes. We seem to be growing more tolerant as a society. I suppose it’s easy for a white guy to say how sure, things are a lot better now than they used to be. Especially after a week in which a church refused to allow two of its members to marry because they were black and the church had never performed a wedding for African-Americans.

            Maybe things haven’t really changed. Maybe it’s just that I hang out with a different crowd now than most of the people I grew up with. But I just don’t see the same racial and religious intolerance I used to. We have a long way to go. I guess there’s no question about that. But at least we’ve taken a couple of steps.   

 

 

                                                              JOURNAL #119

 

                                                               August 15, 2012

            August through October always tends to be my busy season. That’s primarily because my annual novel deadline is November 1. This year I committed to do a half-dozen or so short stories as well, some of which have been submitted, with several still to be written. Worse yet, to be invented. This year also seems to have required a considerable amount of travel. I’ve already been to several cons. Coming up at the end of the month is the SF Worldcon, this year in Chicago. And in October, I’ll be guest of honor at the Baltimore Book Festival. (See the link on the home page.) I’m happy to report, though, that at least at the moment everything is under control.

            The nation has been enduring abnormal weather this year. Georgia has been no exception. We’ve not had much rain, but when it comes it has been torrential. Several minutes ago, I had to get to my car on a supermarket parking lot through as heavy a downpour as I’ve ever experienced.

                                                                        #

            In other places, I’ve listed favorite movies and SF novels. This seems like a good time, while I wait to dry off, to mention some favorite nonfiction. I’ll avoid classics. Voltaire and Herodotus don’t need endorsements from me. Come to think of it, neither does Churchill. But anything published after 1900 is fair game.

            I should add that I did make an effort to lock down my all-time favorites in this category, but it was useless. There are simply too many books and my opinions change from day to day. . Moreover, there are more books that I know would make the list if I could just find the time to read them. For example, S. E. Smith’s The United States Navy in World War II and Samuel Eliot Morrison’s History of the American People have both been watching me out of their bookcase for more than forty years. The only way I’m going to get to them is to retire from writing. I’m not excited about doing that.

            Anyhow, herewith a list of ten nonfiction books which have given me considerable enjoyment and opened my eyes over the past half-century. They are listed in no particular order:

            1. The Guns of August, Barbara Tuchman, Pulitzer Prize

                     A gripping account of the first month of World War I.

            2.  The Greek Adventure, Pierre Leveque

          The ancient Greeks, culture and history. Includes an account of, to my mind,                 the most significant Greek contribution to the modern world: comedy. (Science finishes second.)

3. Prejudices, H. L. Mencken, Library of  America (3 vols)

          Anyone reading these journals who is also familiar with Mencken knows that he is a friend of Priscilla’s.

4.  Black Holes and Time Warps, Kip S. Thorne

            Subtitle: Einstein’s Outrageous Legacy. Extraordinarily readable book on subjects  that usually leave me baffled.

5.  The Modern Mind, Peter Watson 

             Subtitle: An Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century.  Another one             impossible to put down. Take it to the beach, impress the ladies, and enjoy the             book all at the same time. 

6.  The Spirit of Seventy-Six, edited by Henry Steele Commager & Richard B. Morris

              Subtitle: The Story of the American Revolution as Told by Participants

7. Three-Upmanship, Stephen Potter

                 Three outrageously funny books in one: The Theory and Practice of              Gamesmanship; Some Notes on Lifemanship; One-Upmanship. Potter’s adage for        living the good life: “If you’re not one up, you’re one down.”

8.  The Shock of Recognition, edited by Edmund Wilson

Subtitle: The Development of Literature in the United States by the Men Who               Made It

9.  The Masks of God, Joseph Campbell (3 vols)

An examination of the development of mythology around the world. I once                  had an opportunity, when we were living in Chicago, to hear Campbell speak. As        has happened on other occasions, something got in the way. Now, of course, it is too late.

10. The Second World War, Winston Churchill (6 vols)

                   In Alex Benedict’s time, these volumes have been lost. Chase finds one of  them in a private library in The Devil’s Eye.

 

                                                        JOURNAL #120

                                                       September 4, 2012

 

            This entry is behind schedule because I spent the weekend in Chicago at the World SF Convention. Cons, large or small, are always a special treat because they present an opportunity to meet with (or see again) readers and colleagues. The level of enthusiasm in these events puts fuel in the tank. These last few years, I’ve been thinking about retiring, moving out onto the porch, and just letting the days go by. But the cons make that impossible. Even when someone expresses annoyance with something I’ve done. That a character shouldn’t have been allowed to die, or that people will not live like us in the twelfth millennium Or whatever. There may be no higher compliment than the angry reader, because she has obviously gotten locked in and cares about what happens to the characters.

            The highest compliment I ever heard being paid to a writer did not come in the form of a Nebula or Hugo, or even a Pulitzer or National Book Award. It was the angry mob that showed up outside Conan Doyle’s home when he sent Sherlock over the Reichenbach Falls. They were out there threatening his life, but I can’t help thinking that Doyle was smiling throughout the entire experience.

                                                                         #

            Worldcon LXX was held at the Sheraton Chicago Hotel and Towers. I lived in Chicago back in the early eighties, and I couldn’t help being struck by some of the new buildings, beautiful glass and steel skyscrapers. Structures that could have served as illustrations in the SF pulps of my childhood. We’ve arrived in the future.

            A good crowd showed up for my first presentation, Friday evening, on “How To Ensure That Your Manuscript Gets Rejected.”  We talked about the importance of getting off to a quick start, avoiding overwriting, and so on. The key issue in much of this is to keep in mind that the writer’s purpose is not to tell a story, but to deliver an experience. Fiction is only working when the reader forgets he’s sitting in a chair with a book, but instead sits in the shelter on distant Orfano with the rest of the research team and feels the presence of a life form that should not exist on that world that doesn’t even have a sun. And yes, this is a moment from Starhawk.

            After that, I did an interview with Brent Bowen for Adventures in Scifi Publishing (AISFP) www.adventuresinscifipublishing.com. We talked about science fiction in general, and how most people tend to underrate their own abilities. And how, sometimes, in spite of everything you do wrong, you still get lucky.

                                                                 #

            Saturday I had lunch with two lovely ladies, Jean Saberhagen and Lynne Thomas. Lynne and her team brought home a Hugo that evening for best fancast.

            I was scheduled for a reading afterward. It’s usually best to use something that’s short and that generates some laughs. That brought me to a choice among three: “The Candidate,” “Nothing Ever Happens in Rock City,” and “Henry James, This One’s for You.” I went with Henry James.        

            Then it was on to: “Series: Why Do We Love/Hate Them?” My fellow panelists were Mike Moscoe, Ferrett Steinmetz, Lyda Morehouse, and Eric Flint. We tried to take it from the reader’s perspective rather than the writer’s. Whether we succeeded, I’ll have to leave to the people who were in the room. But it was a spirited discussion.

            I’ll confess that, despite having started my career with a determination to do no sequels, I discovered that I enjoyed going back to characters I’d written about earlier. It was like spending time with an old friend. And I know that will sound goofy to some, but I’m pretty sure not to everybody. My first sequel was Polaris, which revisited Alex and Chase, from A Talent for War. I was literally shocked at how relatively easy that book was to write.

After the panel, Mike and I joined Eric and his family for dinner.

I had the opportunity to participate with Fran Wilde in a writers’ workshop Sunday morning. Three people had submitted stories in advance, and I’ll confess that it will surprise me if Fran and I don’t hear more from them.

 Sunday afternoon was devoted to manning the SFWA table, and signing autographs, including a couple of copies of The Twilight Zone Magazine, December 1981. It contains my first story, “The Emerson Effect.”

Then a kaffeeklatsch at which the conversation ranged over how to tell the difference between good and dumb bosses (really), and why comic books and SF are good for kids.

I enjoyed a Fran Wilde reading at the end of the day.

                                                         #

Monday morning put me back at the SFWA table. I was scheduled to participate in an afternoon panel with people who’d collaborated over the years with Mike Resnick, the con guest of honor. It was tight with my plane and, in the end, I had to bypass the panel and make for the airport.

Let me say here what I’d have said at the panel, given the chance: There’s a long-held dogma that collaborations should be avoided. You have to work twice as hard, you lose control of the project, and you have to divide the money.

Even though I’d known Mike Resnick a long time, I wasn’t certain how The Cassandra Project  would turn out because of the common wisdom cited above. It was my first collaboration on a major effort. And it turned into a major surprise: I don’t think I ever enjoyed putting together a novel as much as I did last year, working on Cassandra.

Thanks, Mike.    

 

 

                                                                  JOURNAL #121

 

                                                                September 17, 2012

           

            The lunacy currently on display in the Middle East as a result of a film that almost nobody would ever have heard of were it not for the fiery reaction demonstrates once again the tribal qualities that, in an earlier era, served us well, but which now threaten to tear us apart. Our wiring connects us to groups. Church groups. Veterans groups. Political parties. Nations. Bridge clubs. It is one of the ways in which we understand who we are. And groups seem to function best when there are other groups, or individuals, or ideas, with whom we do not agree. Or which we deem trivial. And it’s not always a bad thing.

            We engage in Olympics, we join bowling teams, we compete with other schools to produce better science projects. Half a century after leaving the place where we grew up, we are still rooting for the same baseball team. The problem develops when there’s an ideology involved. When we assume that whatever world view we hold is correct, and anything that clashes with that is necessarily in error.

            The world is becoming an increasingly dangerous place because the tribalism is connecting with advancing technology. One obvious problem is that the dingo who once had to rely on nothing more threatening than a knife can now get his hands on an M-16. Or maybe even some bioweapons. Keeping atomic bombs out of the hands of lunatics has become a serious challenge.

But the increasing availability of advanced methods for killing large numbers of people isn’t the only danger. There’s another that, had I been writing this last week, before all the fires, I’d have called more subtle: The ability we all have now to communicate on a planet-wide scale. Nobody has to get past an editor anymore to go global. So we get a deranged guy in California who makes a film and puts it out there for whoever’s loose in the cloud. If a couple of the viewers turn out to be rock-throwing true believers, things can get fairly ugly.

                                                                     #

I wish I could say that intolerance was limited to the Middle East. We’re not burning things, or storming government buildings, but we’re still dealing with our own failure to recognize that maybe somebody else has a point, that some of our dearly held beliefs might not be valid. There are still holocaust deniers running loose. And don’t even ask about climate change. It was remarkably easy for George W. Bush to talk the country into invading Iraq. At the time we all laughed at the French, who tried to tell us it was crazy. (Remember Freedom Fries?) It reminds me of the problematical story of the church authorities who would not look through Galileo’s telescope at Jupiter because they were afraid they’d actually see moons. That would have been an assault on the Aristotelian position that the Earth was the center of the universe.

                                                                    #

We’re surrounded by efforts to remake our schools. One of the larger problems connected with establishing strong schools is concerns how to ensure strong teachers. Teaching is 85% showbiz, and it does take some talent. (I say this with a painful understanding that I did not always get it right.) Consequently we have to come up with a method to determine the capability of the people at the head of the classroom. I don’t pretend to have one. But the concept that usually surfaces, that showed up in No Child Left Behind, and that is now front and center in Chicago, is to use standardized testing of the kids to determine the capability of their instructors. And to do it on a straight line. The higher the score, the better the teacher.

This is egregiously unfair. Parents play a substantial role in the success of their children. Some kids arrive at school with a considerable advantage. If your pay is going to be determined by their grades, make sure you teach in a school where the parents are involved. That gives you a running start, and then some.

Schools concentrate on language, history, science, and math. That’s good. But maybe not good enough. You won’t usually find critical thinking on the curriculum. If it’s going to happen, it’s inevitably up to the individual teacher to broach the topic, and she does so at considerable risk. Most parents, and most administrators, are not likely to encourage teaching kids to doubt concepts their families hold, but for which there is no proof. Most parents, I suspect, do not really want our kids to arrive at their world view by giving it honest thought. We are more inclined to want them to accept our world view.

But sometimes, maybe, you should look through the telescope.

 

                                                              JOURNAL #122

                                                               October 2, 2012

 

            The Baltimore Book Festival provided a glorious weekend. Tents everywhere loaded with books. I wandered from the Black Writers Guild to the Romance Writers to the Radical Writers to the Friends of the H. L. Mencken House and to several dozen more. Some places had all sorts of books on display; others specialized.  Sometimes in volumes explaining how to keep healthy, or figure out today’s politics. Sometimes they provided classics or explained the concepts of eastern religions or invited passersby to learn about Islam.

            Daedalus Books had a section on titles that have been banned in sections of the USA at one time or another. I got some surprises. Of course I knew about Huckleberry Finn. Tropic of Cancer, Catcher in the Rye, and some others. But I did not expect to find Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy. Or The Lord of the Rings, which apparently was considered satanic by some of the citizens of Alamagordo, NM, who burned all copies they could find. Others included One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,  The Lord of the Flies, Ulysses, The Grapes of Wrath, The Great Gatsby, Slaughterhouse Five, Brave New World, Animal Farm, Catch-22, For Whom the Bell Tolls, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Farewell to Arms, The Sun Also Rises, and Of Mice and Men.

     It’s impossible to miss the SF connection. Several years ago I assisted in a discussion in a book store arranged by a teacher who was prohibited from talking about Harry Potter in the classroom. This happened despite (or maybe because of ) the fact that Harry was extremely popular. The fact that it was an ideal way to get kids passionate about books was secondary to the concern that the book was teaching kids how to perform witchcraft. Or at least that seemed to be the major concern.

            I went looking for other SF/ fantasy titles that have been considered sufficiently dangerous that they should be kept out of the hands of children and pretty much everyone else. Among them were The Twilight Series (no surprise there),but why would anyone object to Stranger in a Strange Land? Another was A Wrinkle in Time. And, incredibly, Fahrenheit 451 and 1984. Makes me wonder if I missed the point of those two.

                                                                      #

            One of the tents belonged to SFWA. We did panels, gave out some free books, delivered readings, and threw in some music. The operation was organized and run by Catherine Asaro. Catherine is a physicist. She’s been a professional dancer. She sang a few songs, demonstrating  a magnificent voice. In her spare time she writes gripping SF novels. One, Quantum Rose, won a Nebula. I’ll admit here that watching her in action, as I did this weekend, leaves me with a sense that I’ve spent most of my life doing little more than hanging out.

            Her most recent SF novel is The Ruby Dice.

                                                                     #

            Several people at the fair knew that my 2013 novel will be Starhawk, but they wondered what lay beyond that. A few wanted a sequel to Ancient Shores, others another round with Dave and Shel, the two time travelers. There were other suggestions, but most seem to prefer Chase & Alex. This is normally the time when I am finishing the current year’s assignment and beginning to think about what’s next. I can report at this point that I have no idea as yet. The doors are open.

                                                               #

            Jeff Carlson fueled his SF career with the Plague Year trilogy. Now he’s back with The Frozen Sky, based on a novelette of the same title that took first prize in the 2007 Writers of the Future contest.   

                      

                                               

 

The cover description: BENEATH THE ICE.

Something is alive inside Jupiter’s ice moon Europa. Robot probes find an ancient tunnel beneath the surface, its walls carved with strange hieroglyphics. Led by elite engineer Alexis Vonderach, a team of scientists descends into the dark… where they confront a savage race older than mankind…

            My preference in science fiction doesn’t run to interstellar war or invasions from outer space. I’ve been there too many times. What I do look for is narratives of discovery. What’s out in the dark? I haven’t read The Frozen Sky, but it sounds like my kind of novel.

----------------------------------   

http://www.amazon.com/The-Frozen-Sky-Novel-ebook/dp/B009GLM5LG/  Kindle

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-frozen-sky-jeff-carlson/1113016229    Nook

 

                                                            JOURNAL #123

                                                            October 16. 2012

 

            The second draft of Starhawk is, finally, finished. My first drafts are always unreadable. Consequently, nobody ever gets to see it. Not even Maureen. (Maybe especially not Maureen, who’d spend two or three months trying to make it work before probably suggesting that I find an alternate career.)

            The critical thing about a first draft doesn’t have much to do with how smooth the prose is. What it does is allow you to find out whether all the pieces fit. Whether  the characters work, and the logic makes sense. It doesn’t mean, though. that it represents how the final narrative will look. But it does guarantee, more or less, that there is a coherent story line. Or, at least, it warns you that there isn’t. Then it’s on to the second draft, which usually provides a sense of how the finished novel will actually look. 

            Years ago, I was working on Deepsix, in which the action centered on several people stranded on a world that was only a couple of weeks away from diving into a gas giant. Conditions on the surface were being disrupted by the gravitational aberrations generated by the approaching event. Two starships were in orbit, but they had no way to reach the team on the ground because both landers had been on the surface when an earthquake hit. Moreover, no outside help could reach them in time.

All I needed was a way, under those conditions, to manage a rescue, and the book would write itself. For me, that has been a reasonably successful approach. Create a problem, or a mystery, figure out a rational solution, and writing the novel becomes easy. Of course, it’s that ‘rational solution’ part that can get you in trouble. With Deepsix, I had devised a plan in which the orbiting starships would put together a single cable, long enough to reach the surface, and throw one end of it over the side. The people on the ground would grab the cable, secure themselves to it, and get lifted to safety. Tricky, I thought, but doable. A nice clean solution.

I could see no problem with it, and I was about 70,000 words into the first draft when I mentioned the plan to a couple of physicists. Both dissolved in laughter. The consensus seemed to be that the cable would kill anyone who touched it.

I was by then too emotionally involved in the narrative to quit on it. So as a reward for pointing out the defects in my reasoning, one of the physicists, Walt Cuirle, received a challenge: Find a solution, Walt. Please. He came up with an idea. Fortunately. And I learned a valuable lesson from the experience: I don’t know physics very well. Check stuff out before plunging ahead.

                                                      #

There’s a better than fair chance that most people reading this are either writers, or have some ambitions in that direction. So I can’t resist pointing out a second, more consequential, lesson to be derived from that kind of experience. Sometimes there are aspects of a project that can’t be checked out in advance. You simply have to sit down, do the writing, and leave yourself open to whatever judgment shows up.

A substantial number of readers have commented on the fact that Alex Benedict narrates A Talent for War, the first book in the series. And that Chase becomes the narrator with Polaris.

I’d produced about 80,000 words of the first draft of Polaris –roughly three-quarters of the book—when I realized I was using the wrong narrator. Alex had figured too much out. But it was information that I couldn’t hand the reader at that point without spoiling things. The problem is that information or ideas that the narrator has cannot be held back from the reader. I won’t try going into an explanation. It just doesn’t work. Moreover, the ideal narrator has to be able to ask the questions that people ordinarily would ask. “So what was it about the dog that set you off on that line of thought, Holmes? I mean, it didn’t bark or anything like that.” “That’s the whole point, Watson. It didn’t bark.”

So I threw out most of the 80,000 words and brought Chase back to narrate the action. And, in the process, decided why Holmes would never have been able to operate without the good doctor. 

                                                       #

A connected lesson is that a writer has to get away from the natural inclination to treat his own work as if it’s somehow sacred. A Talent for War was originally written as military SF. Note the title. But I was three-quarters of the way through that one as well when it dawned on me that it would work much better as a mystery. That what it needed was, say, a history professor living a couple of centuries after the war, who would try to uncover the truth about that long-ago struggle. I got rid of most of the text in that one as well, the history professor became an antiquities dealer, and the world moved on.

There is not much in my life experience more painful than spending the better part of a year writing a sizable piece of a first draft and then throwing it out. But I’d have lost a good bit had I not been willing to do it.

                                                              #

Incidentally, I just finished proofing “A Voice in the Night,” a story for Futuredaze, a YA anthology. It’s Alex at 15. The story was inspired by, and is dedicated to, Jean Shepherd. Those of us who’ve achieved the requisite age know who he was. And will probably never forget.                               

 

                                                      JOURNAL #124

                                                     October 31, 2012

     Maureen and I hope that those caught in the track of the storm come through in the

 

best possible condition. It's the stuff of science fiction, but unlike a narrative, reality

 

can hurt.

                                                                               # 

Halloween for most people is a happy time, filled with chocolates and kids going door to door and Batman costumes and brooms. I’ve always enjoyed it, especially on the night I showed up at a party dressed as a Roman soldier, but it has, if not a dark side, at least a sober dimension. The point of Halloween, as best I can make out, is to fend off those things we used to fear, skeletons, ghosts, witches, night creatures, by turning them into figures of ridicule. But it’s no coincidence that the event arrives at the end of the farming season, when the crops were in the barn and we were shutting down for the winter. It is our time to laugh at the darkness, especially at that inevitable night that, in the end, takes us all down.

For me, Halloween has always been a season when I become a little more aware of the passage of time, the loss that inevitably comes with it, and consequently of the value of our day-to-day existence. At the turn of the century, I was eating lunch regularly with five guys I worked with at the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center. It was always a good time. In 2000, I dedicated Infinity Beach to my partners, with a comment: “They haven’t quite worked out the secret of life, but they know it has something to do with lunch.”

Actually, I think we knew pretty well what it was about.

                                                                   #

That group is no longer intact. There’s been retirement, other assignments, moving on. The world has changed. Still, those were good hours. And the six of us might even, at some future date, be able to put another lunch together. But it won’t be the same. We’re older, we don’t work together any more, perspectives are different. Even the restaurant we traditionally used, Spanky’s, is gone.

When I was a teenager, I played third base for the South Philadelphia Quakers in the Sandlot Sports Association. We had a decent team over several years. Usually finished over .500. Then, in 1953, as we got close to the playoffs, the team was ripped apart by a dispute. Three of our key guys walked away. (You do stuff like that when you’re 18.) The rest of us pulled ourselves together as best we could, made the playoffs, but got eliminated early. Ed Garrity was our shortstop. We’ve kept in touch over the years. Recently he and I were talking about how much we’d give to be able to go back for just one afternoon and play another game with that team. The ironic part of this: Neither of us could remember what the argument was about.

At the time it happened, we were enjoying ourselves. But I don’t think any of us had a clue just how priceless those days were. What had been sacrificed to that dispute.

Carpe diem, baby.

When I was teaching high school English a few years ago, I periodically mentioned to my students that the day would come when the school would have been converted into a parking lot or a care facility for seniors. And they, the students, would drive by and see the grounds. And they would wish there were a way to go back for a single morning, sit through another of those boring English classes, anything, just to be again with old friends, to relive good times that got by when nobody was paying attention.

Lunches, ball games, English classes. Who would ever have thought they were priceless?

That’s what Halloween is to me. Recognize what we have. Enjoy the moment. Have a hamburger with friends.   

 

 

                                                     JOURNAL #125

                                                   November 18, 2012

 

            The schedule has all but run me down this month. The reason is that the deadline for Starhawk was November 1, and I was underwater at the time. But I’m happy to report it’s gone in. Usually that means I can relax through the Christmas season before starting work on next year’s novel. (I hope that, by the time the holidays have ended, I’ll at least know what next year’s novel will be.)

            I’ve committed to do a pair of short stories for anthologies edited by Tom Easton and Ben Bova, so they are up next. Whatever happened to retirement?

                                                                #

            We took an evening to go over to St Simons Island to watch the Island Players do Cabaret. The show was brilliant. We’ve attended regularly for over twenty years and I remain impressed at the quality of the performances. Especially when they have a good script to work with.

            For those not familiar with Cabaret, the show is set in Germany during 1930-31, and we get to watch a group of entertainers at a German club trying to pretend everything’s just fine, life is good, and there’s no real need to get upset over this guy Hitler. The killer number in the show, for me, occurs at the end of the first act when a boy who’s about ten years old comes onstage and sings “The Future Belongs To Me.” It’s the only time we see the child in the entire performance. But as you can imagine, the moment is a show stopper.

                                                                       #

            Last weekend, the Georgia Literary Festival took place on Jekyll Island. It provided a chance to talk with Steve Berry, an old friend and a New York Times best-selling writer. Steve’s latest is The Columbus Affair.

Several of his novels feature Cotton Malone, an antiquarian book dealer, who solves historical mysteries. If this reminds you of anything, I should mention that Cotton lives in our era. But anyone who enjoys the Alex Benedict novels might give Cotton a try.

            The Columbus Affair, by the way, is not part of the Malone series, but the historical puzzle is there nonetheless.

                                                                  #

            I was invited, as part of my responsibility to the festival, to talk with Susan McLemore’s writing class at Glynn Academy in Brunswick. The experience made for an enjoyable hour or so, and left me with a sense that, despite all the negativity about the future that surfaced during the presidential campaign, we will be fine. Unlike the unfortunate young man in Cabaret, the future is there for these young women and men to control, and they look perfectly capable.

            Incidentally, some pictures from the writing class can be found at:    http://www.facebook.com/jackmcdevittbooks?sk=wall&filter=12               

                           

                                                        JOURNAL #126

                                                     November 30, 2012

 

            Those of us with an interest in space exploration experienced a couple of fairly breathless weeks when news leaked out from NASA that a big story involving Mars and the Curiosity Rover was imminent. That they were checking their data before releasing a statement. The story turned out to be that there was still no indication of life on the planet. It reminded me of the 1975 punch line on Saturday Night Live that “Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead.” I don’t recall whether they led into that with an announcement of breaking news.

            Another odd story surfaced within the last few weeks: Italian scientists claim to have spotted neutrinos moving more quickly than light. Scientists around the world are apparently rattled. I have to confess that, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not like climate change. I don’t have a dog in the fight. It’s more of a make-up-your-mind-and-call-me-in-the-morning issue.    

            We’ve also spotted water and organic molecules on Mercury. Not the best place to be if you’re an organic molecule. Nobody will be surprised to learn that, when I was growing up, I was a very serious Buck Rogers fan. As best I can recall, Buck operated exclusively in the solar system. There were Jovians and Venusians and, I guess Plutonians, and so on. And you had to look out for pirates. But I don’t recall that Buck headed out to the stars. That probably arrived with the TV series. Anyway, in later years, I was disappointed as, one by one, the planets got eliminated as homes for other races. I still recall my reaction when the first pictures of the Mars landscape came in, and when I saw the temperatures on Venus.

            An announcement concerning the discovery of a free-floating planet (i.e., not attached to a star) was recently posted by a reader at the facebook website.                  (http://www.facebook.com/JackMcDevittFiction)  I was surprised to hear responses that suggested the existence of such bodies had been doubtful. Now we know, people were saying, that there might be a lot of these things out there. How could it have been otherwise? There are probably billions of planetary systems in the Milky Way, and I doubt you could have a pair of stars pass reasonably close to each other without getting some serious disruption. The stars have been drifting around out there for billions of years. Ergo--?

            We’re lucky. We live in the galactic suburbs. The nearest star is extremely far. Nothing big is headed our way, or is even likely to show up in the general neighborhood. That may give us a jaundiced perspective. But if it sounds boring, be patient. Eventually we’ll get Andromeda.                                                                #

            Scientists have also apparently found the links among Neanderthals, Australopithecus and modern humans. Dating in those years must have been an interesting experience.

            On a similar subject: Chris Matthews ran a clip with Pat Robertson admitting that there were once dinosaurs, that they existed before the Bible, and if people insist on denying established science, they will lose their children. I wonder where that came from?

            The current Atlantic reports that Ark Encounter, a theme park, is being assembled by Answers in Genesis, a group that supports literal biblical interpretation. This is the same organization that erected the Creation Museum. The ark will be 510 feet long, which, if I’ve read the article correctly, is the length directed by God.

            Not big enough, I don’t think, to accommodate a pair of T. Rexes amid a slug of other animals.

                                                                   #

            Pat Robertson is right. (I never thought I’d hear myself say that.) You can’t take seriously anybody who denies scientific fact. We might question the conclusion, but if there are moons circling Jupiter you can no longer claim the Earth is the center of the universe. Which brings us to climate change.

            The icecaps are melting, oceans are rising, Sandy ripped up the northeast, and we just came through an election in which the subject never got mentioned. The New York Times this week published charts showing where we’re headed if the rising oceans continue, which of course they will since we are still clogging the atmosphere with pollutants. I’ve had the opportunity over the years to talk with a number of climatologists. Can’t find one who thinks we don’t have to worry about going underwater. Or that humans don’t at the very least share a chunk of the responsibility. We are going to have to build sea walls. Or close down the big coastal cities. (The majority of us were too short-sighted to head for North Dakota.)

            Anyway, where I’m going with all this: I’m open to any good offer for a nice south Georgia house, good view, pleasant climate, within easy reach of the beaches.

 

 

                                                        JOURNAL #127

                                                       December 16, 2012    

 

            A local organization of Star Trek fans have put together several films featuring the starship Farragut, which is operating during the era of the original series. One of the people involved, Dan Scanlan, writes for Jacksonville’s newspaper, The Florida Times-Union, and also appears regularly as a TV correspondent. I’ve known Dan for a number of years, and had seen segments of the Farragut productions. So when he invited us to attend a Farragut Fest last weekend, I was pretty sure we’d be in for something unusual.

            We were. The Farragut group had assembled a production stage in Kingsland, GA, that rivaled anything I’d seen in the original series. The Fest was advertised as an open house. Come in and visit the production sets. Hang out on the bridge of the Farragut, visit the transporter room, have a look at the shuttle interior, visit the captain’s cabin, and, in general, wander around the ship’s interior and meet some of the crew.

            That evening we watched the latest Farragut entry, “The Price of Anything,” which included a rendezvous with the Enterprise, and a cameo appearance by Captain Kirk. For those not up on their Star Trek lore, by the way, Lt. Jim Kirk’s first assignment was to the Farragut.

            “The Price of Anything” was, as we expected, a solid piece of work, done at a professional level. It boasts outstanding special effects, a solid script, and a good cast, and should appeal to anyone who has enjoyed the voyages of the Federation starships. (And who among us hasn’t? 

             The event turned out to be much more than a tour of some sets and a chance to watch a new Star Trek adventure. There was a time travel connection there somewhere. We were back in the 60’s, a series with vast potential was just revving up, and a young Enterprise crew was in the area.

            “The Price of Anything” isn’t available yet online. Links to other Farragut shows, as well as “Star Trek Continues” episodes, can be found at the fan page, along with some photos of the visit.   http://www.facebook.com/jackmcdevittbooks?sk=wall&filter=12                                                                                                     #

            Tom Easton and Judith Klein-Dial have picked up a story for their forthcoming anthology, Impossible Futures. The anthology theme requires that the story deal with scientific projections that writers anticipated but which never happened. Like the jet pack or the atomic-powered car. I’m contributing “Searching for Oz,” in which the science connection is with SETI.             In other news,  Analog has purchased the rights to “Glitch.”

                                                                    #

            Speaking of time travel, we have a theatrical group in Brunswick staging radio broadcasts of movies from the 1940’s. There was a popular series during that period, Lux Radio Theater, which adapted popular films for a one-hour radio broadcast. Usually they brought in the movie stars to reprise their roles.

Golden Isles Arts and Humanities is doing the same thing for us. Several months ago, they staged a radio broadcast of The Maltese Falcon. Last night they performed It’s a Wonderful Life, directed by Heather Heath. And Casablanca is coming up.

Casablanca is my all-time favorite film. And I have to admire Heather and her crew for taking it on. How can you possibly replace Bogart as Rick? Or Bergman as Ilsa?

Judginmg from what we’ve seen so far, they’ll manage.

                                                                  #

            Christmas 2012 will forever be associated with the attack on little kids in two Connecticut classrooms. I’ll admit up front I have no immediate solution to the gun problem. But I can’t believe we shouldn’t at least make the effort to prevent criminals and lunatics from getting their hands on automatic weapons. At least….

            A decent first step would be to require background checks without exception for anyone trying to buy a gun. People with a history of violence should be denied firearms flat out. Automatic weapons should be banned for everybody. I don’t pretend these measures would solve the problem. But they’d be a start. 

            A few people will object, but nobody’s right to own guns is worth the lives of a bunch of innocent kids.         

 

 

                                                       JOURNAL #128

 

                                                      December 31, 2012

            My apologies to anyone who was inconvenienced by the disappearance of this section of the website a week ago. Somebody wasn’t paying attention to incoming bills –the identity of that individual is of no consequence--, and the entire operation collapsed. We have begun replacing the more recent entries. And I appreciate everyone’s patience.

            The reality is that I haven’t kept up with the technological avalanche of the last twenty years. I first became conscious of the wider world during the 1940’s when we lived with a console radio. That world –Jack Benny, Gangbusters, Mr. Keene and I Love a Mystery— vanished with the appearance of TV at the end of the decade. Some in my family thought that buying a television would be an exorbitant act, if not a complete waste. It had no future. Life, they thought, was essentially static.

            But everything seemed to be changing. Suddenly there was plastic everywhere. Our Kodak box camera got replaced by a Contax S. And any doubts I might have had about the way things were going were literally blown away one morning in the spring of 1952 when I sat in front of my TV set and watched the detonation of an atomic bomb at Yucca Flats.

            It reminded me of an old Buck Rogers story in which someone had lobbed an atom bomb at Buck and Wilma, and they reacted by diving into a ditch. The world was changing, baby.

            I have to confess that the past two decades have moved too quickly for me. The prospect of chasing down the latest electronic development at our local Radio Shack every month, and figuring out how to make it work, was daunting. And of course neglecting the latest advances made catching up down the road increasingly difficult. I miss the twentieth century. Now I’ve become the guy warning people not to buy the latest Z-box because they won’t last.

            Truth is they probably won’t. But for a different set of reasons.     

                                                                           #

             We watched a couple of movies this week, one my all-time favorite, and the other the only film fantasy that I would love to have written.

            Casablanca is incredible. Put together the ten most famous lines from the movies, and five of them, I’d bet, have originated in Rick’s Café Americain. Recently, 1940’s-style radio script versions of great films from that era have surfaced around the country and are being performed by local theatrical groups. This is done as a broadcast, with the actors standing at microphones and the audience able to watch the director and the sound effects people. Of course the commercials are updated for local businesses.

            We watched one of our own theater group stage It’s a Wonderful Life two weeks ago. Coming up over the next four months will be Our Town and Casablanca. I’m beginning to suspect I live in the cultural capital of Georgia.

            The other film, the fantasy, was Midnight in Paris, written by Woody Allen. An American writer discovers that when you are in Paris, if you pick up the right vehicle at midnight it will carry you to places where you can meet Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, Cole Porter, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and other celebrities who hung out in France during the 1920’s.

            I’ve been disappointed in the more recent Allen films. But this one’s a blockbuster. Woody still has it.

                                                                      #

            My book club is reading Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind. I don’t often agree with Bloom, but one comment of his gets right to the heart of a lot of our problems: The fact that we have different, and often opposing, views on politics, religion, and the culture in general, isn’t what causes conflict. The real issue is certainty. Most of us, he maintains, don’t distinguish between a fact and an opinion. We are not prepared to admit we might be wrong about some long-held view. And any piece of evidence constituting a challenge to that notion is consequently dismissed out of hand.         

            I was discussing the issue with Scott Ryfun at lunch a few days ago. Scott is a local radio talk show host, a supporter for some reason of the Dallas Cowboys, and also a member of the radio theater group. He played the announcer in It’s a Wonderful Life. While putting away a hamburger, he commented that the tendency to cling to an opinion emerges at least partially from our tribalism. “We tend to join opposing groups,” he said. “Look, if a Cowboys fan and an Eagles fan can sit and break bread together, then we should all be able to get along."

            This is written as we roll to within a few hours of the fiscal cliff. A little optimism, anyone?

                                                                  #

            Happy new year to all of us. And good luck.