M. Darusha Wehm

Science fiction and mainstream books by award-winning author M. Darusha Wehm

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In Between Times

image mashup from originals by fairlybuoyant

As I write this I’m in one of those strange writing places. As a fairly accomplished procrastinator, I usually have between one and a hundred writing projects on the go in some form or another. Typically there’s a novel being edited, a short story being written and a couple of other things in various states of action.

At the moment, though, I’m kind of in between everything. I have a novel at my alpha reader, another that I’ve put aside in the editing process to simmer, a short story with beta readers and I’m prepping a novel. Okay, so that last one is something to actively work on, but overall I feel kind of like I’m out of work.

I know that as a self-directed writer, this situation is entirely up to me. I could start pounding away on one of those story ideas cluttering up my notebook, I could skip the simmer and get editing that novel, or I could just declare myself to be on holiday, spend my days playing Guitar Hero and finally finish Metallica’s One on hard (it’s just those meedlies at the end — I’m so close I can taste it!).

I’ll pick one of those options soon enough, but for now I’m kind of enjoying the somewhat weightless feeling of being in between projects. I haven’t had it for a long time and it’s interesting. Doubtlessly, something productive will come of it.

image via Gamespot.com

Where is the Serious SF?

photo credit: MythicSeabass via photopin

I read this article, Cowardice, Laziness and Irony: How Science Fiction Lost the Future by Jonathan McCalmont (found via Ian Sales) a few weeks back and have been mulling over what to say about it. It is long… very long and somewhat inflammatory. I am fairly certain that a lot of SFF writers would get pretty angry at what McCalmont has to say here.

That said, I think anyone writing seriously in SFF should read the whole piece and think about the issues it raises. McCalmont has strong opinions about what is wrong with SF today. I know that many people don’t think anything is wrong with SF today and my intention is not to argue that point. However, this article talks about a perceived sense of disaffection and irony in mainstream SFF nowadays.

I’m drawn to articles like this for two reasons: one) I want to write better, more serious, more complex SF and two) I personally find that, as a reader, I’m disappointed that the kinds of stories I like aren’t being published and critically lauded that often these days.

I say that item two is a matter of personal preference, but McCalmont argues that it’s a result of current SF’s “exhaustion” – essentially that writing about the world as it is through the lens of the world as it could be is just plain difficult, which is why it isn’t being done very often.

His first point is a refutation that writing about a plausible future is impossible because that future is already here.

The most common account of why science fiction no longer attempts to engage with the future is that the future is now deemed to be out of bounds. The world, we are told, changes so quickly that any attempt to predict the future would necessarily be out of date by the time the book was released.

I agree with McCalmont that this is a total cop-out. Sure, writing about any near-future that is based on the current state of the art is tempting the fate of having one’s “predictions” come true or be invalidated. But, so what? It’s fiction and its purpose is, at least ideally, to shine a mirror on the world in which we do live. Part of that world is rapid change, new technologies and obsolescence  Coming up with future-proof stories shouldn’t be the goal.

McCalmont then takes umbrage with the blurring of genre lines. Here, I am in two minds – as I’ve argued earlier, genre to me seems to be a bit of an artificial construction. That said, I did feel a stirring of agreement at this complaint:

The most obvious manifestation of science fiction’s exhaustion with the future has been an intentional blurring of the line between that which was traditionally thought of as science fiction and that which was traditionally thought of as fantasy. As Kincaid puts it, this “is a notion that has clearly taken root with today’s writers since they consistently appropriate the attire of fantasy for what is ostensibly far-future sf, even to the extent of referring unironically to wizards and spells and the like.”

(The article he’s referring to here is Paul Kincaid’s critique of Year’s Best anthologies – another worthwhile read on this subject.)

I think that the problem isn’t so much the lack of strong genre identity as it is a lack of seriousness of purpose to the storytelling. I think McCalmont is wrong when he argues that one leads to the other:

 …in order to produce such a story, a writer must reach the conclusion that genre boundaries and expectations are things unworthy of being taken seriously. The problem is that, once writers began treating genre boundaries with a degree of ironic detachment, they found it rather difficult to be serious about anything at all.

I don’t see the inherent connection there. Denying the validity of strong genre lines does not require the denial of other serious content. McCalmont even goes on to talk about genre-blurring books with strong socio-political aspects.

(I suspect that McCalmont is, like me, generally turned off as a reader as soon as supernatural elements appear. However, fantastic elements can be used in a rigourous, serious story. Zoo City by Lauren Beukes is a fine example.)

Ultimately it is that lack of seriousness that is the crux of McCalmont’s (and my) complaint. There is certainly a market for escapist fiction, and there’s nothing wrong with writing it or reading it. But there is something wrong with it being the only work that is available or lauded. And escapism does have the (I hope) unintended consequence of letting us forget the real consequences of actions. Just as death is merely an inconvenience in a video game, there are no real political and economic consequences of fictional societies that hand-wave away where all that fun stuff comes from.

While the idea of an escapist fantasy that allows middle-class white people to escape their historical responsibility is about as politically dubious as contemporary science fiction gets, the fundamental mechanics of the Nostalgic approach to science fiction are largely value free as they are principally about building a fictional past that fits with how people feel about the present.

and

In contemporary science fiction, the traditionally disenfranchised are encouraged to write as long as their stories do not remind us of the historical inequalities that marginalised these writers in the first place.

For me as a writer, it is a constant challenge to create a universe which is plausible within the constraints of physics and the current technological state of the art, yet “other” enough to be a vehicle to comment on some aspect of the current human condition. What draws me to SF is the ability to use a what-if scenario to examine contemporary issues in an entertaining rather than didactic way.

It’s a careful balance between pure escapism and political screed, and it’s not easy to strike that balance the right way every time. I know I fail and I’ve read writers much better than me who fail, too. But we still ought to try.

The challenge facing contemporary science fiction is to widen the cracks and to peer through the fractured veneer of neoliberalism in an effort to see what could one day come to pass.  These futures, though speculative, must always remain anchored in the present moment as the real challenge facing science fiction is not merely to create a possible future, but to create the type of possible future that is currently deemed unthinkable.

…

We are living in a science fictional world and this means that science fiction is in a unique position to help us to make sense of a dangerously unstable world. By rediscovering its ties to reality and using old tropes to explore new problems, science fiction can provide humanity with its first draft of future history.

Procrastination Pumpkin

photo credit: Darwin Bell via photopin

A couple of weeks ago I had a writing breakthrough and it’s all because of a magic pumpkin. This is its story.

(By “magic”, I mean merely special by dint of being used in service of solving a non-pumpkin problem. It wasn’t really magic. Magic isn’t real.)

I had been working on cobbling together the first real draft of a novel I’ve been fighting with on and off for about five years. I’ve descibed it before as wrestling with a kraken – as soon as I got a grip on one part of it, another would rear up out of the vast depths to smack me upside the head. It was, needless to say, a procrastinator’s dream.

I’d been diligently hacking away at the tentacles for a few weeks; forcing myself to face the beast each day, even if it were only for a few minutes. I was getting somewhere, but not fast. The end was not in sight.

Then one day, on a completely unrelated mission, I bought a big pumpkin. I like pumpkin a lot, particularly in baking, and here in New Zealand they don’t sell pureed pumpkin in a can like they do in North America. They sell actual pumpkins. So, hankering for pumpkin spice goodness (and having promised my friend a pumpkin birthday cake), I had to chop and cook and puree this bad boy.

Now, I like to cook and baking is okay, but I hate food prep. Chopping vegetables is boring, annoying work and trying to get into a pumpkin isn’t torture but it sure does suck. But here I was. This pumpkin wasn’t going to chop itself into pieces. Whatcha gonna do?

So there I was, staring at this pumpkin, and it’s just sitting there like a gourd. I did not want to chop up this pumpkin. In fact, I wanted specifically to not chop up this pumpkin. No problem. I’m a good procrastinator. So I just openend up that file with the kraken in it, which looked a hell of a lot better compared to this pumpkin. And a hour later that kraken was nothing more than calamari fixins.

By then I was so high on achievement that dealing with the pumpkin seemed like no big deal, either. And the cake that it turned into was awesome.

So take that pumpkin-krakens.

photo by astrobri

Bad Books

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…by which I don’t mean poorly plotted or badly written books. I mean books containing subject matter which we find uncomfortable or disturbing.

Last week was “Banned Books Week,” and while I don’t really hold a lot of truck with thing-of-the-week weeks, there was a lot of talk on the internet about books that had been banned, so I’ve been thinking about it.

Like most writers, I’d argue that banning books is dumb if your goal is to get people to not read those books, especially if the people you’re targeting are kids or teens. I mean, what’s more appealing than a book the stodgy old farts think is BAD?

As Mark Twain said when the Concord Library banned The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: “Apparently, the Concord library has condemned Huck as ‘trash and only suitable for the slums.’ This will sell us another twenty-five thousand copies for sure!” (via this Flavorwire post of quotations from writers of banned books)

But why does a book get banned in the first place? It’s because there’s something in it that makes people feel uncomfortable, that makes them squirm. Something taboo.

Over at Write Anything, there have been a few conversations about whether or not there should be any topic that’s off-limits for a writer. Part one, part two and part three. They’re worth a read, but long story short, I argue no and other commenters point out that there are different ways of handling topics. Some say that if you want to write about touchy subjects you have to approach them with the “right” sensibilities.

I agree in some ways. If you want to write well about taboo subjects, then yes it’s important to really think carefully about the issues surrounding those subjects. But I’d still argue that we have the right to write however we want about whatever we want. We just can’t expect anyone else to like it.

It’s certainly true that people could (and most certainly have) written books that are racist, rude, hateful and vile. But to my mind, that’s a different kind of bad book – one that I don’t want to read, not one that I shouldn’t be allowed to read (or, for that matter, write).

Write Better: Link Roundup

photo credit: Mr. Wright via photopin cc

Two very different items to help us write mo’ better prose today:

Via Ripley Patton on Google+, Pro Writing Aid. It offers a free web service to scan chunks of prose for editing infractions. I was skeptical, but it caught some items for legitimate concern in the test piece I gave it. And it had me at homonyms – all that analysis does is scan for known homonyms, but by calling them out in red, you can easily see if you’ve got they’re or their in there.

I haven’t investigated their fancy dictionaries or the community on the site, but the editing tool looks like a great addition to the arsenal. Note the word arsenal. As I commented to Ripley, just as the prudent mariner does not rely on one navigation source alone, neither does the prudent writer rely on one editor (human or machine). #sailortalk

Now if I could just find a program that scans for typos that turn into real words. I can’t seem to stop typing form when I mean from. Seriously. It’s annoying.

In other news, this is form from back in April, but Colin Nissan’s The Ultimate Guide to Writing Better Than You Normally Do is among the most brutally accurate lists of writing advice I’ve read. The items themselves are the usual suspects, but the details. Ah, the details.

Enjoy!

Where Has All the Science Gone?

Image Courtesy NASA/JPL-Caltech

Among the people I follow online, there’s a lot of F* Yeah, SCIENCE! talk. From the way my internet looked a few weeks back, nothing happened in the universe except a rover landing on Mars. Folks I know talk about space, genetics, geology etc. like some people talk about fashion designers or movie stars.

But, the flip side to this is that there’s also a lot of talk about science and rationality being dismissed in the culture at large. SF author Peter Watts made a somewhat inflammatory post about this over on his blog, but it’s a topic that raises its head all the time in my circles.

I’ll come back to this.

On a seemingly unrelated note, writer/editor Ian Sales recently went on a tear about the Hugo awards (the annual fan-voted SF/F awards). While I agree with him on some of the category issues, the main thrust of his argument seems to be twofold: a) there aren’t enough “real” (ie. hard) SF stories on the ballot and b) it’s all a popularity contest.

Both of these points are, I’d say, answered by the very nature of the beast – the Hugos are voted on by the readers. So they are designed to reflect what’s popular*. And what’s popular isn’t hard SF.

Why? Could it be part of that divide between the pro-science crowd and the anti-intellectuals? I’m not sure I believe there is such a pronounced divide, though I have to admit that as a fan and author of hard SF it is disheartening to see how completely fantasy and soft SF have taken over the field. Sure, there are still hard SF stories out there, but overall it’s not what’s selling.

So what is it about science that gets some people so excited, but turns everyone else off? How come people seem to be more interested in reading about magic than technology?

* Interestingly, many of the Hugo winners this year were also Nebula winners. I guess hard SF isn’t that popular with SF writers either.

‘A Night to Remember,’ part four

I am pleased as punch to present part of Simon Petrie‘s live-written serial “A Night to Remember,” featuring reluctant hotel detective Gordon Mamon. The first part of this story was posted on Monday on Simon’s site – go read it, then follow the links to get back here. A list of all parts is available here.

If you like this story, you should get a hold of Simon’s collection of short stories Rare Unsigned Copy.

This free-fiction folderol has been furnished by SpecFicNZ Blogging Week 2012.

A Night to Remember: Part Four (by Simon Petrie)

‘A Night to Remember’ is a seven-part story, written for SpecFicNZ Blogging Week 2012.

Part One of this story can be found here. Part Two is here. Part Three is here. A full listing of links to the story’s instalments, updated daily, is here.

Gordon stared at the remains of Claudia Iyzowt’s doorway. He wasn’t sure what kind of damage would be inflicted on a plastimahogany door by a rampaging villain in a suit of armour, but he was fairly certain he was looking at it. And of the heiress to the Iyzowt fortune herself, there was no sign.

She’d been in the room, though. The cooling mug of the vending machine’s atrocious coffee blend stood undisturbed on an occasional table near the room’s viewing window.

He pulled out his handheld, switched it to ‘Forensic’ mode, and waved it around the room in an attempt to find clues, DNA, fingerprints. The handheld took a minute to announce the detection of traces of five humans: Gordon Mamon himself, Iyzowt, and three long-time members of Skyward’s cleaning detail. Which, regrettably, made a certain kind of sense: suits of armour didn’t have fingerprints. Nor did waxworks. But the assailant’s DNA should still have left traces, assuming there was any kind of struggle …

No extraneous blood, nor skin cells. Not even a length of hair.

A sudden sway in the freight tower’s motion momentarily unnerved Gordon, and he turned to check the doorway behind him: nothing. Probably just turbulence: they weren’t yet clear of Earth’s atmosphere, and the space elevator’s braided filament was not immune to a little atmospheric push-and-shove. But the scene of the crime was never a good place to loiter.

Where was, though? The freight tower was a twenty-storey structure, with multiple access routes—escaladders, rampways, an old-fashioned staircase—connecting the floors. If he picked a good hiding point, he could stay undetected for a good long time … but it would be three days before the tower module completed its ascent to Skytop, and twenty storeys or not, he doubted his ability to stay concealed for that length of time.

Plus, regardless of the death threats he’d received, there was the small matter of Claudia Iyzowt herself. As the staff member on duty for the next three days, he plainly had a duty-of-care towards her. It wouldn’t do to cower meekly in some hidey-hole, while she was in the hands of … who?

He took the escaladder down two flights, and let himself into a dimly-lit storage room with three connecting doorways and a somewhat disconcerting conclave of waxwork pirates in sundry menacing poses. After sweeping the room, and those adjoining, for signs of life and detecting only himself, he applied his mind to the tasks at hand, which were, as he saw it: (1) to not get killed, (2) to locate and rescue Claudia Iyzowt in some manner commensurate with task (1), and (3) to apprehend or otherwise immobilise whoever might be the occupant of the mysterious suit of armour, provided that this could be effected without breach of criterion (1) and, if possible also, (2). Viewed in this way, the problem constituted a puzzle, and Gordon liked puzzles. (Though he generally far preferred them when they didn’t involve all this pain-of-death-or-serious-injury stuff.)

So: how to approach it?

The voice messages he’d received, those foreshadowing his appointment with certain death—quite aside from however paradoxically, unfairly vague was the concept of ‘certain death’ itself—had sounded not merely sinister, but angry. Which took a lot of doing, considering that the recorded death threats had featured a mechanical voice, impersonal and remote. Anger obviously made it personal, very personal. Gordon wondered who might hate him with sufficient intensity to not only wish him dead, but to go to substantial lengths to give effect to said wish.

Try as he might, and discounting for the moment certain ugly incidents involving lost luggage, Gordon could only imagine one class of people who might hold such an aspiration. Murderers. And in particular, one small subset of the set of murderers.

He turned his mind to reviewing—in a totally non-spoilerish fashion—the outcomes of his previous cases.

Formey’s killer was clearly out of the equation. Kurtz’s attacker was, so far as Gordon knew, out of the system, safe in Alpha Centauri’s maximum-security facility, Alphatraz. And Havmurthy’s assailant, Gordon was sure, was still being questioned by the Saturnian police force. It might, in principle, be possible that an accomplice could be acting on behalf of one of these, but Gordon’s gut said otherwise …

Well, it fitted. The apparent modus operandi, the professional’s keen desire to stay in the game, the ruthless drive to settle any scores. Because when the other killers were eliminated from consideration, it left just the hit-man.

“Haier,” Gordon murmured to himself.

“Correct,” said a voice that was unrecognisable as Gunther Haier’s, from the suit of armour now advancing slowly through the room’s doorway. “Though there’s been a name change, along with everything else.”

Gordon retreated through the thicket of life-size pirate figures, backing towards one of the room’s connecting doors. Trying to remember whether the door opened inwards, or outwards. “Is that so?” he asked. “Why?”

The connecting door opened outwards. Good. Gordon pushed through, and started running.

Behind him, Haier—the suit of armour—was lumbering in pursuit. “Business reasons. Marketing. Image, if you will.”

“Didn’t think you hit-men cared about image,” Gordon called back, reaching the hallway and trying to choose between the rampway and the escaladder. Escaladder, he decided quickly. Upwards. Gordon wasn’t good with heights, and the escaladder was all about heights, but Gordon was even less good with impending violent death. And if Gunther Haier in a suit of armour wasn’t all about impending violent death, then Gordon wasn’t as shrewd a judge of homicidal character as he fancied himself to be.

“To a hit-man, image is everything,” Haier proclaimed. “Hence the armour, and all the other augments. So you can call me—”

At the foot of the escaladder, Gordon turned, transfixed by curiosity despite himself. “Call you what?”

“My new name,” Haier bellowed, with evident pride and not a little menace, “is Sir Tin Death.”

Part five is on Beaulah Pragg’s site.

Podiobooks.com – Back In Business

Good news everyone! Podiobooks.com, after a brief hiatus due to some urgent site cleanup, is back online with a snazzy new look.

You can still get quality free audio fiction, serialized into podcast-ready feeds. Check out the featured titles in your favourite genres, and if you’re looking for a recommendation, Nathan Lowell’s Trader Tales series is one of my favourites.

The Craft of Writing

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Grammar counts. Spelling counts. Constructing a well thought-out paragraph complete with coherent sentences counts.

You’d be surprised how many people argue about those points.

In this final instalment of a series about the three aspects of being a fiction creator, I’m going to talk about writing. The craft of writing well.

Oddly, this is the part of the equation which causes many writers and readers to argue. There’s certainly an idea out there that the quality of the story is the most important part. Grammar, formatting, cover art — all those things don’t matter if the story is good enough.

Part of me wants to agree. After all, most people read fiction for enjoyment, for escape. Hardly anyone would read an utterly dull book with perfect grammar, but there are many people who are content to enjoy a rollicking great tale with less than stellar spelling and punctuation.

This is, of course, because of these three different aspects to fiction. Some readers really do only care about the story. And, of course, if you’re a great storyteller, you can always hire or barter for other people to take care of the details. But if I’m serious about creating fiction, then the craft of the medium is an important part of the work. If I were telling stories through film, I ought to have a good working knowledge of the nuts and bolts of filmmaking. If I’m telling the story in written words, I should work on the craft of writing. Just as if I’m seriously trying to get other people to read my work, I have to tend the authorship part of the process.

In many ways, this aspect of the work is the easiest, since it is entirely a skill which can be learned. There are numerous writing courses, books on craft, technical manuals on grammar and punctuation, which can all help people improve their skills in this area. Also, there are technological tools available which help with some parts of this process.

My point with this series is to highlight the many aspects of the serious print fiction creator. It’s not enough to be a perfect grammarian, just as it’s not enough to tell a great tale. To be on top of one’s game all these aspects need to be involved: authorship, storytelling and writing skill.

A Post-Genre Future or Read Any Good Books Lately?

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Chuck “Hilarious Potty-Mouth” Wendig has a good piece up about the shifting value of genre labels in fiction. He’s not the first person I’ve seen with this idea; Charles Stross talked about this back in May.

I’m particularly taken with Wendig’s notion of More Granularity:

Think of fiction as having aspects or elements (and those of you who game in the RPG sense will see the value of this) — a piece of fiction might have a “time travel” aspect, a “tragedy” aspect, a “detective” aspect. One novel might be “serial killer / robot / erotic love triangle.” Another might be, “dinosaur / noir / bioethics.”

It seems clear to me that in other than the most basic of genre plots this is already what’s going on in genre fiction. Really great mystery stories are about a lot more than just figuring out whodunnit – they’re also romances, war stories, alternate histories, literary fiction, buddy stories… the list goes on.

The point of genre has historically been, both Wendig and Stross argue, to help readers find things they’ll like. Judging a story based on its genre is something I think most of us do, usually to our detriment as readers. There ought to be a better way — and there is: recommendations.

Some of the best books I’ve ever read were recommendations from friends. I was an SF anti-fan for years, until I was handed a copy of The Player of Games by Iain M. Banks. It’s Space Opera, but so much more. It was the more that enchanted me — and it’s that more that’s the common aspect to all the books I’ve ever loved, regardless of the label on the shelf where they’ve been placed in the bookstore.

I still get recommendations, both directly from folks I know and also indirectly from my connections on Goodreads. But there is certainly a way to harness technology and networking to make a more robust recommendation system. Wendig has an idea, referring to the story aspects discussed earlier:

Think … of a Pandora-like app that searches your e-book library and uses these very axes and aspects to help you discover new authors and stories. I want that! And I think we need it, too.

Someone need to make this. Seriously.

The Future Is Now

Photo by Will Lion

I recently came across this pretty old (2010) article from Discover Magazine which reminds us that the future is now.

Our Baudrillardian hyper-reality is one in which world-altering inventions must be instantly integrated into our lives or we begin to fall behind, to fall out of reality. If you met someone who didn’t use a cellphone or computer and had no idea what the internet was, would you say that person shared your reality? Really?

Not only does the article point out that our current reality is about as sci fi as you can get, but that “our current visions of the future are actually outdated in relation to current technology.” This really struck me, as a writer who is imagining future futures, and struggling with what kinds of fantastic yet plausible things might populate such a future. Food for thought.

Tell Me A Story

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I love Henry Rollins. I love his music, his books, his tattoos. But mostly, I love his stories. I’ve seen his spoken word shows live several times and I’m always in awe of his ability to spin a yarn.

The ability to tell a compelling story is the second aspect of being a fiction creator that I want to talk about. To me, this is the part that relies most on innate talent and less on skill. Some people are just great storytellers.

Unlike authorship or good writing technique, it’s hard to teach storytelling. Sure, there are formulae, tropes and structures which help move a story along. And there’s always the tried and true method of just bringing in a man with a gun*. But the really great stories don’t come from a paint-by-numbers kind of process. They are built from an alchemical combination of the author’s experience, imagination and creative prowess.

I do think that we can become better storytellers by coming into contact with more better stories. Watching great films and tv, reading widely, delving into memoir, playing narrative-driven games — all these aspects of storytelling can expose us to different kinds of stories, different takes on those X number of basic plots that are the basis for all tales.

* This is not to imply in any way that Raymond Chandler is anything less than a brilliant storyteller. Seriously. Go read some Chandler. Everything else can wait.

This post is the second in a series about the three aspects of being a fiction creator: Author, Storyteller and Writer.