Aristotle Saves the Cat

Posted on by October 29, 2015
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Smart cat

I have 11 minutes of screenplay written for my adaptation of Desert Justice, a cop novel I recently completed. So far, writing it has been an amazing learning experience. I can already see how the novel needs to be reorganized.

I laid out a 110-minute beat sheet (see below) based on a chapter-by-chapter outline of the novel, and immediately saw that my novel’s opening was not the right place to start. Going through the beat sheet (a composite template I invented by combining generic plot points from Save the Cat and Aristotle’s Poetics), I had to extract only main characters and essential plot points, select the most dramatic and visual scenes, and ignore 95% of the narrative exposition. The result was an amazingly tight story, told in a better sequence than it was in the novel, and focusing more strongly on the arc of my main character.

I now believe that adapting a novel into a screenplay is the perfect way to improve the story structure. Enthusiastic as I am about the screenplay format, I have some ambivalence about how much of the story is left up to the audience’s imagination, or just left out altogether. For example, here is a random snippet from the novel that is presented by the third-person narrator and must be left out of the screenplay:

The men kept pull-over vests in the trunk, but rarely used them. It had been hard to get used to that, coming from patrol into detectives. Without Kevlar, a patrol officer feels like he’s walking around naked. But detectives are talkers, not shooters, and a bulky vest on civilian clothes makes you look like a turtle. Puts people off.

I could put those words into a character’s mouth and get them into the screenplay that way, but it would make poor dialog, and  besides, it’s not essential information to the plot. Later in the story the Kevlar vests play a role in a plot moment, but they can just appear from the trunk of the car without explanation. Here, the foreshadowing explanation just adds a little psychological coloring to the character. It’s that kind of nuance that makes novels enjoyable to write and to read, but a screenplay is strictly the vital amino acids, not the whole feast.

I’m realizing now that if you get the basics of the screenplay right, the novel it represents can be organized efficiently and effectively around those essentials. Unfortunately, it is not possible (for me) to write the screenplay first. I need the elbow-room the novel gives me to develop the characters in all their sprawling nuance before I can identify the essential elements of them, and of the story line. Maybe someday I’ll be so good I can sit down and from thin air, fill in my story points in column one of the template below.

Aristotle Saves the Cat: Beat Sheet Template

1 min = 1 page

My Story Points Main Beats Min Micro-Beats Purpose
Act 1: Opening Image 0 Status Quo (SQ) Est. MC’s world and character.
Hook 5 Show or tell the theme MC has a dominant trait and a hidden need (hamartia)
Inciting incident 10 Trigger event and… Disturbs the SQ, sets the plot in motion.
Reaction Story goal is set in reaction to trigger
15 Initial failure Initial actions fail, making things worse
Rubicon 20 Point of no return MC is way over his head, acts irreversibly, perhaps without realizing.
Act 2

 

 30 Romantic story begins, often badly MC acts, often overconfident, and fails
35 MC is bewildered Each response creates the next obstacle
40 Stakes are raised MC is not aware of hamartia; can’t go back
45 Escalation MC is tested, fails.
Turning point begins 50 Some hope is seen. The romance develops A plan becomes possible.
55 Obstacles escalate Despite best efforts, plan fails
Midpoint 60 Obstacles get stronger Relationships break down
The Pit 65 Hope is dashed No other options
70 Things get worse Seemingly insurmountable obstacle arises
All is lost 75 MC is ruined Dark night of the soul; Despair
Rock Bottom 80 Complete Failure Only ashes left; MC gives up.
Critical Choice 85 MC takes a chance New plan based on Irrational decision goes against type
90 Confront the inner demons Overcomes hamartia with courage etc
Act 3 95 Climax confrontation White vs black hats.
100 Reversal Overcomes story obstacle
105 Resolution and catharsis MC epiphany and triumph (or noble death)
Final Image 110 Mirrors the opening image New SQ. Nothing will ever be the same

The Skinny Detective

Posted on by October 26, 2015
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skinny-cop

I just completed a revision of my detective novel, Desert Justice, and it was major surgery. I took out 5,000 words, dropping the word count to a mere 70,000.

Was the detective really so flabby that there were 5K words of deadwood on him? No. I had given him an avocation, to write pulpy crime novels as an outlet for his extremely angry, vigilante, alter-ego. The 5,000 words were his metafiction.

After reading through the novel after a six-month hiatus, I realized that the pulpy crime episodes were largely stereotyped vigilante stuff. The anti-hero was Clint Savage (a cop), angry at seeing criminals get off with light plea-bargains. He’d sneak up and pop them, inadvertently creating The Tucson Killer, which he was then tasked to catch.

Not only was Clint working the sterotypes, his story had no throughline and his character had no arc, which is how pulpy crime fiction often works. It was almost completely episodic, and really a lot of fun to write, but it interrupted the flow of my real story. When I looked at it objectively, the psychological connection between my detective and Clint was marginal. Clint was just too cheesy to be effective in illuminating my detective’s evolution from Manichean morality to self-doubt. So Clint got the scalpel. Hated to do it. He was a darling.

But now I’m on the edge of having a novella. I think 70K words still counts as a novel, but no question it’s thin. Reading it yet again, I was satisfied that it is also tight. I did not write the stuff that readers skip over.

At the same time, it’s not simplistic. It has three story lines woven together, one the Maguffin story, one a family story of three generations of cops, and of course, the romantic story. I can flesh out some of the secondary characters and I could add scenes where I have summarized. I do tend to over-narrate and under-dramatize, but I hate to introduce sag just for the sake of word count. I need some readers.

After that, I’m not sure what to do with it. The novel started out as a short story in 2011 and evolved into this. I’m a different writer now, and I don’t think I’d be interested in writing another detective tale, but I’d like to do something with this one, since I have it.

Maybe I’ll unfurl it at one of the online Backspace conferences (www.backspacewritersconference.com/) and see what happens. I’ve also got Left Coast Crime coming up in Phoenix (www.leftcoastcrime2016.com/) and I’ll see if I can generate any interest. For now, I think I’ll leave it skinny.

 

Three Movies

Posted on by October 24, 2015
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Ex Machina

Ex Machina

Writer and Director:  Alex Garland
Stars: Alicia Vikander, Domhnall Gleeson, Oscar Isaac

I read the screenplay for this movie while I was writing my own AI-android story, The Newcomer. There are similarities. The main questions are, what distinguishes a human from a sophisticated machine, and what would it take for an android to pass the Turing test?

In the traditional Turing test, a machine and a person are hidden behind curtains and the human judge must determine which is which by interviewing them. In Ex Machina, the machine is a beautiful female android (of course!) and that is known to the judge from the start. The test is, can the judge accept the robot as a sentient being, worthy of empathy and respect?

That’s a better test than the one originally proposed by Alan Turing, which depended only on linguistic competence to fool the judge, and it’s the same test I set for my android story. My answer was “No, humans cannot treat a machine with unreserved empathy,” because instinctive biological chauvinism inevitably leads to anti-machine bias. In Ex Machina, the answer is “Yes,” but what other answer could you expect for a young, handsome, male judge and a voluptuous, often-naked female android, sign-stimuli being what they are.

So while the questions posed are worthy of serious investigation, the answers offered didn’t seem serious. Instead, the movie devolved to voyeurism and even misogyny (if you can say that about robots). I saw that as a lost opportunity.

The mad scientist (always!) who built the androids (he built more than one, it turns out, for his sexual pleasure), is so over-the-top self-obsessed and borderline psychotic, that the character cannot be taken seriously, and the discussions he has with the young judge are philosophical boilerplate seasoned with locker-room leering.

Sci-fi fans love it, judging from reviews, but that may be because most sci-fi movies are so weak on concept that this one stands out by contrast. Even so, I saw it as pandering to stereotypical adolescent values and a tragic lost opportunity. (Of course, I have a competing story in the same vein, so that should be taken into account).

PhoenixPhoenix

Writer (screenplay) and Director Christian Petzold
Stars Nina Hoss, Ronald Zehrfeld, Nina Kunzendorf

A concentration-camp survivor returns to ruined Berlin just after the war. She undergoes cosmetic surgery to repair her injured face then searches for her ex-husband and finds him but he doesn’t recognize her. She learns from a friend that he was the one who betrayed her to the Nazis in exchange for his own freedom, but she loves him anyway. He thinks she looks remarkably like his ex-wife, who was wealthy, and he hatches a scheme for the two of them to recover her fortune.

The story is just barely believable, a mix of Shakespeare and Hitchcock. The writing is spare and excellent. The acting is superb, especially by Hoss, who also starred in Peltzold’s other two movies, Barbara and Yella. Phoenix is by far the triumph of the trio (Barbara being a good second).

The writing is spare and effective, directing sure-footed and creative, and the music is intoxicating, memorable, and heart-rending, in the same way that “A Kiss is Just a Kiss” was in Casablanca. Moody lighting was perfection. Costumes and sets impeccable.

The screenplay is superb. As soon as I understood the lay of the land, I tried to anticipate the ending, and thought of several, but Petzold’s was far more sophisticated, understated, and effective than anything I came up with. A real pleasure.

When the story line verges on the implausible (man forcing a woman who is his wife to impersonate his wife), the very strong acting and directing keep you in the harness. Except for the slightly cartoony plot-line, this movie was, for me, perfection in the art and craft of moviemaking.

 

Paulette

Paulette

Director: Jérôme Enrico
Writers:  Laurie Aubanel (screenplay), Jérôme Enrico(dialogue)
Stars: Bernadette Lafont, Carmen Maura, Dominique Lavanant

In this comic romp, an elderly, bigoted, curmudgeonly woman in France has lost her business and her husband, and struggling on a meager pension, finally has her car and all her furniture repossessed (though inexplicably, she retains her apartment).

Observing the drug-dealers in her apartment block, she tries selling hashish on the street and is so successful (because who would ever suspect a granny?) that she becomes a major dealer and recovers a life of middle-class dignity, despite the fact that her son-in-law is a (black) policeman. What could go wrong?

One thing that does is that the local drug dealers are not pleased with her invading their turf and beat her up. Undaunted, she bakes cannabis-laced pastries and again becomes a huge success, this time with the help of her three goofy old single girlfriends. What could go wrong?

It’s a silly farce, often lol funny, with a strong, redeeming sentimental streak, and a forceful message: It is absurd for cannabis to be illegal. This movie skewers the law for causing so much trouble for so many people who are just trying to make a living and enjoy a harmless recreational substance.

It’s a clear advocacy piece and it’s careful to distinguish between natural cannabis and harmful hard drugs; explicit about the need to protect children from substances; and it acknowledges, ridicules, and rejects the criminal gangsterism that lurks around the drug world. The pro-cannabis message is thus nominally inoculated against the most obvious counterarguments.

Acting, directing, cinematography and music are all terrific, and the humor is pervasive, so that despite the silly story and the somewhat heavy-handed political message, and the racist remarks and the sometimes cruel stereotypes of old people, the overall result is a very enjoyable comedy.

Lish – Preparation for the Next Life

Posted on by October 23, 2015
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Lish preparation_Life at the Bottom of the Food Chain

The images and details in this novel are haunting. They linger in the mind days after you’re done reading. To me, that’s a sign of good writing.

Here are some passages with the kind of detail that characterizes this book, passages selected literally by thumbing at random:

“Billboards carried hepatitis warnings. Tall blue-black Africans gesticulated, selling something in the street. The way was narrow because of the vendors. A block of squid gelatin hissed on a grill.” (p 49).

“They made her wait. The register girl came in and said, Could you move? Flung her purse on a shelf under the counter. In the back a wok was getting beaten with a shovel. They brought the fish-tofu out. Stinky tofu is mad good, the register girl said, glitter in her wolf hair.” (p. 131).

It’s the story of a youngish Uighur woman illegally immigrated to New York City from China. She speaks only a few words of English at first, and not much Chinese either, which in New York is Cantonese, not the language of the Muslim west where she grew up. She finds horrible jobs in fast food places, where she is horribly cheated, and she sleeps in filthy rented rooms. It’s a heroic story of this woman’s struggle to stay out of jail and survive at the very bottom of the food chain in America.

The book at first seems to be about an Iraqi war vet named Skinner, who, after four brutal tours of combat, suffers from severe PTSD and probably TBI. The story opens with him arriving in New York, just released from the military, so following the rule that the story will be about the first thing that moves, you think it’s about him. He seems like an interesting character, big, strong, hair-trigger rage. His challenge too, is to find food and shelter in the big city.

Early on, he meets Zooey, the Chinese woman, and she dominates the rest of the book while he drinks himself into oblivion amidst dreams and flashbacks about the horrors of the war. While she is all about discipline, hope, and hard work, he is all about self-indulgence and self-pity. Nevertheless, she clings to him because she has, almost literally, nothing else. He at least has a duffel bag with a laptop, a gun, and redundantly, some pornographic magazines. And he’s American, speaks English, and he’s a man. At first it seems like they might form a stable relationship around exercise and body-building, interests they both have.

They hang out together but he’s no good. He breaks promises and goes missing for days then shows up drunk. She becomes angry, refuses to see him, but he begs, so she relents and they make up. Repeat that sequence 25 times and you have the “plot” of the book. Obviously there is no plot.

The characters devolve into repetitious clichés and instead of character development. Fine-grained, street-level detail is substituted, but while it’s vivid, even that gets boring. It’s too bad, because Zooey is an original and interesting character, but instead of showing her, the author merely describes her, repeatedly. Skinner is a caricature from the start and his self-destructive tendencies lead to the obvious conclusion.

Thematically, yes, war is hell, the Iraq war was evil, veterans don’t get the treatment they should, and also immigration is tough, the laws inhumane, and life on the street is a horror. But none of that is really news. What I cared about was the character of Zooey, but that didn’t go anywhere. I’d say the book was disappointing, although I enjoyed the writerly skill of the fine-grained detail.

A block of squid gelatin hissing on a grill. I’m still thinking about that.

Lish, Atticus (2014). Preparation for the Next Life. New York: Tyrant Books (417 pp.).

Hizzoner’s Poems

Posted on by October 18, 2015
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20151018_AllZona(Sm)I just returned from a local book fair where I sat behind a table and greeted walkers-by, most of whom were other authors in the hall taking a break. Very few civilian customers from outside the hermetic literary world were present.

Such events are mind-numbing and the truth is, I packed up and left this one a couple of hours early. I do them because it’s the job, and it’s good for me. You never know what you might learn or who you might meet.

Today I nearly sold out my inventory of Hunter & Hunted (www. bit.ly/Hunter-Hunted). Only one left! When I reprint a batch at CreateSpace, maybe I should put on the cover, “Now in its Second Printing!” ( — of twelve – I’ll leave that detail off).

I gave away one copy of my other self-published novel, It Wasn’t Me (www. bit.ly/Wasnt-Me) to a fellow author who promised to review it. About half the people who promise to write a review actually do. The other half are too lazy to review it or didn’t read the book or read it and hated it.

I realized today that I needed to rewrite the back cover blurb on that one. Right now it describes a “psychological thriller” and that’s a little too psychological for a lot of people. They read that and put it down. That’s the sort of feedback you can only get from observing people interacting with the product.

I also learned that the display copy, standing upright on its little easel, should never be placed atop the stack of books. Why? Because nobody will touch that book. They don’t want to ruin the nice display, apparently. It acts like a “Keep Away” sign.

So I put the display copy behind the stack of books and people picked up the top book on the stack and thumbed it. Another “live and learn” lesson from watching customers.

I like the people who ask, “Which book has the higher body count?” and “Which one has the most blood and gore?” Those are my kind of readers!

When I walked around the hall, several authors accosted me as soon as I got to their table, immediately launching into explanation of the theme or explication of plot, often grabbing a copy and thrusting it toward me. They also inevitably had a tray of incomprehensible tchotchkes and a newsletter signup sheet. Some also had a bowl of candies or a plate of cookies and they encouraged me to take a sample of all these wares, while explaining what everything was and how good it was.

As a consequence of such vigorous selling, I never did pick up a book and look through it. My only thought was to get away. Maybe others love the performance. Not me.

To my surprise, at one table was the Mayor of Tucson, Jonathan Rothschild, selling his thin book of poetry (http://poetry.arizona.edu/content/reading-list-and-thoughts-poetry-tucson-mayor-jonathan-rothschild) A poetry-writing mayor – who knew? He was soft-sell and I did pick up the book and the poems were accessible and thoughtful. I went back later to buy a copy but he had disappeared.

At another table I found an author selling her 120-page screenplays. They were on interesting topics and attractively bound with good cover art. (They were not, however, formatted per Final Draft standard, for some reason).

I wondered if this might be a good idea. A screenplay is short, easy-to-read, inexpensive, and performable (these particular ones granted performance rights). Assuming the story and characters are good, it seems readily marketable. While I did not find the one I glanced through compelling, that format is something to think about further.

And I drank way too much coffee.

 

The Hard Problem

Posted on by October 18, 2015
2

Brain

The Economist had an interesting series of articles recently on great unsolved mysteries of science including the nature of time, what is dark matter, and the one that interested me most, consciousness: What is it? Where is it? How do we study it? (http://www.economist.com/news/science-brief/21664060-final-brief-our-series-looks-most-profound-scientific-mystery-all-one?zid=314&ah=607477d0cfcfc0adb6dd0ff57bb8e5c9).

The article covered a lot of ground, perhaps too much for such a brief essay.

“I think, therefore I am.”  True, false or misconceived?

Are dogs conscious? Chimpanzees? Rocks?

What is sleep? What is unconsciousness?

These are all good questions, and I could supply a dozen more, but the article, reflecting the scientific consensus at the moment, assumes that consciousness arises from the brain, so the preponderance of the article is about neuroscience, with a smattering of comparative psychology (humans with animals).

And in the neuroscience domain, again keeping with consensus, the main question is, from where in the brain does consciousness arise?

The neuroscience approach fails to consider seriously the original question, what is consciousness? This, the article mistakenly dubs “the hard problem.” But that is not the hard problem, as commonly understood by researchers in consciousness. Everyone knows what consciousness is, because everyone has it. It is simply mental experience, such as the characteristic experiences of colors and tastes.

As philosopher Galen Strawson wrote in a letter to the editor a week after the article, consciousness is “… seeing crimson, smelling smoke, tasting mustard and so on. It is precisely this detailed knowledge of what consciousness is that gives rise to the real problem, which is to explain its existence, given that we appear to be wholly physical beings. How can neural processes be or give rise to consciousness? How is it that they are accompanied by consciousness?”

The hard problem is not what consciousness is, but to explain it. And Strawson is entirely correct to imply that the answer cannot be that it arises out of the brain. That is simply impossible. Why?

Because the brain is a physical thing, three pounds of protein, fat, and water. It is very complex, to be sure, but it is not magic. It is physical, can be measured and studied by science, and obeys the scientific laws of the universe as we know them.

Experience, on the other hand, is not physical. Thoughts weigh nothing and take up no space. Colors have no specific gravity. Sounds have no boiling point. Memory and imagination extend across time and space far beyond the dimensions of the skull.

There is no process, not even a wild speculation, for how a physical system like a brain could generate the nonphysical phenomena of experience. To do so it would have to violate many laws of physics, the laws of thermodynamics, for example. The hard problem is that experience is incommensurate with science in its present form.

In what direction might a solution to this conundrum lie? Strawson and I have had conversations and correspondence on this, as we have met briefly at various conferences on the topic of consciousness. We differ sharply in our gestures toward a solution.

Strawson believes that we have failed to fully understand the nature of matter itself. Presently, we believe that E=MC**2, and we have the standard model of particles, but none of that allows any room for experience. Perhaps we will find, Strawson has suggested, that matter has other properties, yet undiscovered, such as the property of being conscious. This view is sometimes called panpsychism, or pan-experientialism. Everything is conscious because matter itself has the property of being conscious (not all of it in the same way of course, but that’s a mere parameter adjustment).

I think not. That idea seems to me like stuffing the rabbit into the hat before the show.

Instead, I think it’s more reasonable to start with what we know for certain about consciousness. It exists, I have it, and so do most other adults. Facts, there. Not scientific facts measurable by physics, but undeniable facts nevertheless (it is self-refuting to deny them).

Starting with conscious experience as the given, is there a pathway to deriving the physical world, the body and the brain (without any supernaturalism)? I think there is, and I’ve explained how that might look and how it could be investigated.

(For anybody who cares: The Three-In-One Mind: A Mental Architecture, www. bit.ly/3-in-1-mind; The Purpose of the Body, www.bit.ly/Purpose-Body; Scientific Introspection: A Method for Investigating the Mind, www.bit.ly/scientific-introspection).

I will admit however, that my approach has zero chance of ever being widely accepted because it contradicts some of the most fundamental assumptions of the scientific method, such as that the universe is entirely physical, and that empiricism itself ultimately rests on biological sensory transducers. These are patently false assumptions, but they are pre-theoretic beliefs, or myths, not open to discussion.

Strawson’s approach, on the other hand, has the seeming advantage of leaving the scientific epistemology alone and projecting consciousness “out there,” into the world. All you need is something like Einstein’s cosmological constant to insert consciousness into the scientific equation.

I think that’s a very misleading approach, but compared to my own, it just might be better. Scientists and philosophers are extremely good at making data fit the explanation, and with enough linguistic games, who knows, Strawson’s approach might eventually play out. I won’t be around to see it happen.

 

Martian Update

Posted on by October 9, 2015
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Martian Movie _

I just returned from the movie, The Martian, with Matt Damon. I dreaded seeing it because I was disappointed with the book. But I considered it research, part of my self-education into the world of sci-fi. The movie is about as good as the book.

On the plus side, the pictures are fantastic, better than Gravity. I’m glad I saw it on the big screen (in 2D. 3D doesn’t do much for me except cause a headache). I really got a feeling for the Red Planet and a visceral sense of what an exploratory colony might be like. That’s the magic that movies conjure best.

The acting was surprisingly good, especially by Matt Damon, who has matured well, and by Michael Peña, who is consistently interesting.

On the dark side was the music, dreadful, annoying, way-too-loud disco. Yes, in the book there was a running joke about that being the only music left behind at the Mars base, but mercifully, a book is silent. Maybe I’m the wrong demo, but this was some seriously bad music, and worse, it was inconsistent with the mood of the story. It was joke music, and this story was a drama. It was a bad choice for both those reasons. Silence would have been the more realistic sound track, or barring that, something grand. Think 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Clarification: I love disco and I’m sorry its moment has passed, but I’m not indiscriminate.) If Scott was trying to poke Kubrick in the eye, he did, but he poked himself in the other eye. The sound engineering was otherwise decent, with lots of nice whining electrical motors and crackling radios.

I am sorry to report the screenplay was even worse than Weir’s original novel. It lacked even the meager wit of the book (except for the obvious fuck-you jokes, and even there, the f-bomb was censored out, so they couldn’t even get that right). Likewise, in the book, the Kristin Wiig character was a colorful, foul-mouthed PR person, but by the time the delicate-daisy censors got done, she had no lines left, yet nobody had the sense, or the authority to simply cut the character so she became deadwood.

Another serious flaw was that while the main thrust of the book was to glorify critical thinking, calm rationality, and methodical problem-solving, that would be uninteresting to most people, so the writers left most of it out and instead tacked on a ridiculous, preachy ending that was not just anticlimactic and ineffective, but truly cringe-worthy.

Editing was not successful. A simple “man vs. nature” story does not take 2.5 hours to tell.

The lack of interesting characters was a holdover from the book. As in the novel, these wise-cracking, jargon-spouting characters were, like M&Ms, covered in thin, crisp, candy shells. Nobody learned, reflected, or changed. Of course it’s a kinetic adventure, so it’s hard to complain about weak characters, but I can rise to the challenge.

Those glorious images will stay with me for a long time.

Murder, Maggots, Blood-spatter, and Lunch

Posted on by October 7, 2015
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blood-spatter

One reason I enjoy the Arizona Mystery Writers’ monthly meeting is the variety of expert speakers who help us write imaginative and realistic stories.  See (www.arizonamysterywriters.com).  This week, a captain from the county sheriff’s department will give a talk on the evidentiary value of bloodstain interpretation. He’ll show pictures of stain and flow patterns associated with various gunshot wounds.  And then lunch is served!

There’s something perverse about mystery writers in their love of the macabre. Nobody seems to get squeamish. Maybe it’s a self-selected crowd. I  remember nibbling a quesadilla while watching slides explaining how time of death can be estimated from maggot activity.  Lot’s o’ fun.

There’s one exception however. Many of our members absolutely cannot tolerate any description of cruelty to animals. Pictures? Out of the question. We had people walk out of a meeting when one speaker showed neglected animals in the homes of compulsive hoarders. The lesson for writers:  any degree of mayhem, murder and gore is acceptable, as long as you save the cat and never kill the dog!

I killed a dog in my very first novel, a thriller. I didn’t know this rule yet.  I’m thinking of going back to that (self-published) novel and trying to adapt it into a screenplay, just for practice. If I do that, I will let the dog survive.

I’ve got a screenwriters’ meeting coming up and I really should produce something for them, but I’m bogged down in the third revision of my android sequel. I’m having to write a whole new chapter, introducing a new character with his own backstory and everything.

It’s a prioritization decision. Too bad I have to sleep all those useless hours every night.

 

Baxter – Manifold Time

Posted on by October 6, 2015
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Giant+Squid3One’s personal viewpoint, constrained as it is by embodiment in time and location, is necessarily only one way of seeing things. Fortunately, we are capable of abstraction and generalization, so we can imagine viewpoints other than our own, and even, with enough imagination, a viewpoint that is nobody’s in particular, in other words, a “view from nowhere.”

In his 1986 book, philosopher Thomas Nagel said that “the view from nowhere” is both underrated and overrated. Those who dismiss it as ungrounded and therefore meaningless lack imagination and remain trapped inside their own skulls.

However the other extreme is to take an imagined omniscient, god’s-eye view and reason from that point. But we are human beings and we do not have a god’s-eye view of anything. To imagine that we do is akin to imagining flying pigs. You can do it, but nothing follows.

That is the fundamental error of Baxter’s basic premise in Manifold Time. If you imagine the arrow of time extending backward to the Big Bang and forward to an indefinite future, you can ask, “Why am I alive at this particular moment on the timeline?”  That’s a possibly useful question, and because nobody lives outside of time, only a view from nowhere allows you to ask it.

But Baxter goes much farther. If you can imagine the evolution of homo sapiens from the chimps, forward to the distant future, then surely you can imagine those humans who exist in the far future, and you can imagine that they might want to contact us here in the present and warn us of a forthcoming disaster. So the question becomes, how do you design a radio receiver that can capture messages from the future?

It’s a lot of fun, as is the design of the “Feynman radio” that accomplishes the trick, but any serious reader will realize the story has drifted into goofball-land. Imagining humans in the distant future does not imply anything.

We can imagine life on other planets because there is evidence and reasoning to support the speculation, such as the hardiness of bacteria, the simplicity of early life-forms, knowledge of conditions needed to support life, and the statistical probability of habitable planets. That is a far cry from imagining flying pigs or signals from future humans, for which there is no evidentiary or valid inferential basis.

So it’s fiction, you say. Give an author a break. Okay, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for the sake of a good story, even when the foundation of the story is utter nonsense. But this book takes itself seriously, as if it were an exercise in hard sci-fi, which it isn’t. It’s the equivalent of swords and dragons.

I do give the author credit for creativity. Sending exploratory and colonizing missions to nearby asteroids – for mining, what else? — is a well-worn trope but having the vehicle piloted by a highly trained, super-intelligent squid is a wonderful and almost-plausible idea. (Cephalopods are the only animals outside of mammalia that have a cerebral cortex). I loved the sections narrated by the squid. Extremely creative stuff.  If the book could have kept up that level of character-interest, it would have been a total winner.

Alas, it doesn’t. The squid quickly takes a background role while the humans strut and pontificate on the stage, in particular, the main character, Malenfant (which is French for “Bad Boy” – get it?). He spouts science and declares facts and plans and damns the torpedoes, and listens to the counsel of a Rasputin who convinces him that only he can save the future of homo sapiens from the catastrophe revealed by the Feynman Radio.

That solution is for humans to colonize the stars with his special (hand-waving) atomic rockets. But wait! The squid are already out there propagating (Malenfent did not know the first squid was pregnant when she left). So is it going to be a space opera with epic battles between squid and humans? That might have been good. But, no.

Instead the story goes on with more twists and turns than a plate of fusilli, and at some point the reader can’t remember what the point of any of it is. Worse than lack of a coherent plotline, the characters are flat and all dialog is expositional. Characters simply recite questions and answers to each other. Relationships are perfunctory and unmotivated (especially between Bad Boy and his Main Squeeze, who he treats abominably). There is just nothing going on and no reason to keep reading unless you care about the endless stream of manufactured mini-dramas (will his funding be cut off???)

Except the squid, Sheena 5, the first one launched. That character is an original and has a very strong voice and is magnetically compelling. It proves that Baxter knows how to write, if only he were not so obsessed with wormholes, time folds, gravity distortions, speculative cosmology and all manner of woo-woo borderline science displayed with the same exhibitionism as Malenfant shows. What a lost opportunity. We wanted the  squid book, Baxter, as any early reader would have told you. The rest of it is five-hundred pages of pointless nonsense.

Baxter, Stephen (2000). Manifold Time. New York: Random House/Del Rey. (474 pp).

 

Garbanzo Gazette

Posted on by October 6, 2015
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SWwordI found myself reading the Garbanzo Gazette, official organ of the Silver City Co-op, while enjoying a mushroom and feta quiche with sweet-potato crust. I learned that most coops struggle with the Diet Coke Dilemma: customers request that soda when faced with an array of cold-pressed, all natural, organic fruit juices. The co-ops that deign to sell Diet Coke quickly find it becomes their best-selling beverage and end up cutting back on their “healthy” juices. What’s a conscientious vendor to do?

That’s just one insight into small-town life. Another is being told there is a serious heroin problem here, but the streets are safe because the gangs only come out at night. That would explain why I heard gunshots at three this morning.

So far, I’ve become light-headed more than once from climbing stairs too fast, forgetting that I’m at 6,000 feet, gotten a bee-sting on my hand, and sunburn on my nose. I feel like I’m at summer camp. Maybe I should braid plastic strips into a lanyard.

Mostly because of the town’s charming ambience, the Southwestern Festival of the Written Word Book Fiesta (www.swwordfiesta.org) has been a hoot. I’ve sold a couple of my self-published books. I hate sitting behind the table, smiling like an idiot to walkers-by, so I have a tiny purple bucket with some dollars in it to make change and a sign saying “The Honor System.” That way I can attend lectures and readings. My table-mates were horrified. “It looks like a tip jar,” one said. “I’m not above that,” I replied. “What if somebody takes a book and doesn’t pay?” another said. “I only hope they enjoy it.”  However, I admit that the only books I’ve sold have been in-person. People don’t buy the books because of the books. They buy the books because of me. The price I pay by sitting there is way higher than the price they pay.

I’ve enjoyed readings and talks by Lily Hoang (english.nmsu.edu/lily-hoang) who re-wrote the I Ching in her own poetically impressionistic way. Brilliant idea, nice writing. Orlando White is a Diné (Navajo) poet (OrlandoWhite.com) obsessed by the letters of the alphabet who writes odes to each one. Utterly fascinating stuff, and great reading. I went to a “panel” on mystery writing by authors Jonathan Miller (www.rattlesnakelaw.com) and Judith van Gieson (www.judithvangieson.com). I was surprised to hear van Gieson say of her latest publication, “Oh, no, it’s just a mystery, not a novel.”  What?

Amazingly, few presenters have copies of their work for sale at the talks, and if they do, it’s one or two copies of only one title, often hardbound.  What?  There seem to be many hundreds of festival attendees, I’d guess around 500. Unclear on the concept, I’d say.

Tonight is the festival banquet (“Evening with the Writers: Meet, greet, and eat.”) Should be tasty. I bought a ticket more out of anthropological interest than anything else. I will sacrifice my chance to dine at a huge Mexican restaurant nearby with a prominent sign at the front door, “We support concealed carry,” which is a great relief, since I forgot to bring my holster.

Tomorrow morning I look forward to a session on “Electronic Literature,” the blending of computer-generated text messages with flash images and recorded spoken words.  After that I look forward to driving home and getting back to work. This event has reminded me that I’m just as good a writer as anybody here, and so I need to do it.