Category: Literature

Reviving Asimov’s Foundation series

I regularly search for promising new science fiction to read. It’s shocking how little I find — based, at least, on reviews and on-line lists. When I can’t find new science fiction, I return to the classics. At present, I’m rereading Isaac Asimov’s 1951 classic Foundation.

Now is probably a good time to read (or reread) the Foundation series, because Apple is reported to be developing a series based on the Foundation books for the new Apple streaming service that is to start up next year. It was reported in 2014 that Jonah Nolan was working on a Foundation project for HBO. But, as far as I can tell, that never happened.

Just intuitively, I suspect that Apple’s focus on the high-end market is more likely to get Foundation right than would HBO (or, heaven forfend, Netflix). HBO would try to make an action spectacle of the story, and Netflix would dumb it down. Though there certainly are opportunities for visual spectacle in Foundation (it was Asimov who first thought of a vast galactic empire with an imperial capital planet that was one huge city), what’s remarkable about Asimov’s novels is that there is very little action. Mostly, the story consists of very smart and very powerful people sitting in offices or conference rooms and having highly intelligent conversations. That’s not exactly HBO or Netflix material.

Foundation is as timeless as any science fiction I’ve ever read. One of the few things that make the story feel dated is that Asimov seemed to assume that nuclear power would be the future’s answer to its energy needs. Asimov got that one wrong. Otherwise, Asimov’s imagination has held up brilliantly for 67 years. I believe it was Neil Goble, in the 1972 book Asimov Analyzed, who says that Asimov came up with the idea of the galactic empire after reading Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the first volume of which was published in 1776. (Newer histories of Rome, I suspect, would have led Asimov in somewhat different directions.) It was certainly from Asimov that “Star Wars” got the idea of galactic empire. It’s an idea that has dominated fictional views of the galaxy ever since then (though often there are backwaters in the fringes of the galaxy where galactic power is weak and where outlaws and rebels can hide).

And let it not be said that I am the only science fiction writer who stomps on religion (a good way to get vindictive 1-star reviews on Amazon). In Asimov, religion is useful for manipulating the ignorati into doing what elites want them to do (ahem), but otherwise Asimov uses a wide range of insulting words to describe religion. Asimov is often quoted as having said, “Properly read, the Bible is the most potent force for atheism ever conceived.” On the other hand, “Star Wars” took the galactic empire in a very different direction, with an elite mystical cult based on “the Force.” Asimov is 100 percent free of such magic. I’ll even venture a prediction here. The day will come when “Star Wars” will begin losing its mythical power, as the idea of “the Force” becomes increasingly dated and hokey.

As we learn more about the galaxy, and as we try to understand our failure to detect intelligent life on even one other planet (let alone a vast galactic civilization), I suspect that the idea of a vast, high-tech, militarized galactic empire is another idea that science fiction writers ought to be re-imagining. As we try to understand, even on our single planet, the dangerous consequences of globalization, specialization, unsustainable exploitation, and long supply chains for the necessities of life, the more it seems likely that a galactic empire, if there is one, might be too wise for all that.

Asimov understood the dangers of dependency on long supply chains. In Foundation, he writes: “All the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. This enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the administrative necessities of Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of the task…. Daily, fleets of ships in the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural worlds to the dinner tables of Trantor…. Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last millenium of the Empire, the monotonously numerous revolts made Emperor after Emperor conscious of this, and Imperial policy became little more than the protection of Trantor’s delicate jugular vein.”

What might a sustainable galactic empire — and its laws and regulations and technologies — look like?

A boys’ answer to #metoo

Yes, #metoo has exposed some ugly abuses of male power and male impunity. But most men are not like that. And there is nothing wrong with boys.

I won’t waste any words of my own. These young men sing the point quite beautifully.

In French:

Abandon entouré d’abandon, tendresse touchant aux tendresses…
C’est ton intérieur qui sans cesse se caresse, dirait-on;
se caresse en soi-même, par son propre reflet éclairé.
Ainsi tu inventes le thème du Narcisse exaucé.

I cannot find either a literal or poetic translation of the French that I like very much. So I will have a go at a poetic translation of my own:

Wildness surrounded by wildness, tenderness touching tendernesses …
It is your own self that ceaselessly caresses you, one might say;
Caressed inside yourself, lit by your own reflection.
Thus you find the answer to the prayers of Narcissus.
One might say, one might say, one might say …

The poem is by the Czech poet Rainer Maria Rilke, 1875-1926. The poem ostensibly is about a rose. But like most poems about roses, I don’t think it’s about roses at all.

London Spy


Ben Whishaw as Danny, and Edward Holcroft as Alex

Almost in despair that five perfectly good gigabytes of my monthly satellite data was hours away from expiring, I happened upon “London Spy,” on Netflix. It’s a BBC television drama from 2015 with five episodes. I watched the first two episodes last night. It’s fantastic.

I’ve looked up a couple of reviews this morning. Let’s just say that the reviews are “mixed.” Those that are critical are snarky. But pay no attention to the snarky reviews, because such reviews are aimed at simple folk who stream simpler fare about simpler characters. “London Spy” is for those who need a more challenging story diet. It’s beautifully written and beautiful to watch. It’s psychologically disturbing, and it’s excellent mystery of the sort that the British do so well. In the plot, a vulnerable London naif, because of love, gets pulled into a dangerous situation in which he is way over his head.

Ben Whishaw is Danny, a troubled underachiever and hopeless romantic who would like to get his life together. Edward Holcroft is Alex, whom Danny meets along the Thames riverfront when Danny is having a very bad day. Jim Broadbent is Scottie, a much older man whose care and attention have kept young Danny alive as Danny made mistakes that could have been fatal.

I had recently watched Whishaw as Richard II in “The Hollow Crown,” a superb 2015 high-budget version of Shakespeare’s play. Whishaw is an incredibly gifted actor who can play a king as convincingly as he can play a young London slacker with a drug problem.

Script writers rarely get mentioned, and that’s a shame. This script was written by Tom Rob Smith, a young British writer and novelist who is only 38.

Tom Rob Smith writes about the kind of characters that most people don’t care much about, people whose lives are usually lived in the shadows. Danny works in a warehouse. Scottie managed to survive a typical case of blackmail, moral destruction, and emotional isolation. And yet such characters occur and again and again in real life in all times and places. I recognize them because they are my own Jake and Phaedrus characters. They’re always in over their heads, they’re always in it for love, and if they can survive, then despite the scars and damage they always turn out to be more resourceful than we — or they themselves — thought them to be.


Jim Broadbent as Scottie

J.B. Priestley


“An Inspector Calls,” BBC, 2015

J.B. Priestley had never particularly been on my literary radar screen. He should have been. I will work on that.

Last night, with quite a few gigabytes of satellite data to use up before my account does its monthly reset, I was determined to find something good to stream, which seems increasingly hard to do. On Amazon Prime, I came across “An Inspector Calls,” a 2015 BBC production of Priestley’s most famous play, with which I was unfamiliar.

It was one of the best films I’ve seen in years. The cast is superb. Who says that stagey productions are slow? I couldn’t avert my eyes or take a bathroom break. I was late putting the chickens to bed.

The play was written in 1945. It is set in 1912. I generally love films that are based on plays. I’m sure that this is because such films, of necessity, emphasize the work of the writer. There will be no special effects and no loud soundtrack. No effort will be made to hold the interest of those with short attention spans. Much will be demanded of the cast. Some exertion of the mind will be required. We will be reminded of why we love the English language.

For an overview of Priestley’s biography, I started with the Wikipedia article. By the third paragraph, Priestley had earned my permanent respect: “His left-wing beliefs brought him into conflict with the government, and influenced the birth of the Welfare State. The programme was eventually cancelled by the BBC for being too critical of the Government.” The program the article is referring to is Priestley’s radio program on the BBC in the 1940s. Here’s a short sample from Youtube, June 1940, in which Priestley is talking about the evacuation of Dunkirk.

Is “An Inspector Calls” didactic, as some critics complain? You bet it is. The headline on a review in The Spectator reads “An Inspector Calls is poisonous, revisionist propaganda — which is why the luvvies love it.” I must be a luvvie. Any play that after almost 75 years still gets under right-wing skin that badly is not to be missed. And that play’s writer is not to be forgotten.

Writers’ lives matter. As surely as odious propagandists such as Ayn Rand helped to pull us all into the right-wing swamp in which we are now mired, so also left-wing propagandists such as J.B. Priestley helped to prepare the world for the liberal policies and institutions that brought decades of shared prosperity after World War II. But in more recent decades, right-wingers have been winning the propaganda wars, and thus they have succeeded in reversing and rolling back the very policies that enabled the Golden Age that cranky old conservatives still glorify — the 1950s. I am at present reading a new book by Robert Kuttner, Can Democracy Survive Global Capitalism?, which tells the story of how those liberal policies came about in the days of the New Deal, and how they were reversed. I will review that book soon.

As the BBC understood in reviving “An Inspector Calls,” we have regressed, badly. Priestley’s Eva Smith, a poor factory worker who struggled for a better life but was blocked at every turn, is still very much with us. The wealthy Arthur Birling also is entirely recognizable, though I would have to say that Arthur Birling, in fictional 1912, shows a capacity for truth and kindness and transformation that I fail to detect in today’s rich lords of the universe — at least those who have political and media power.

“What a load of manipulative, hysterical tosh,” rants The Spectator. That’s what they always say about anything that disturbs their nasty little Ayn Rand world, and plenty of fine writers have vindictive 1-star reviews to prove it. May Priestley’s heirs write on, and may we somehow manage to find them out there in all the noise and bile and razzle.


J.B. Priestley, “Let the people sing.“

Ken’s third book is out

Ken’s third book is out. You can buy it in bookstores tomorrow (April 10, 2018) or you can order it from Amazon now.

I hardly need to say how proud I am of Ken, with his third book published at the age of 34. Here’s a link to the Kirkus review. And here’s a link to the Amazon page.

And as long as I’m feeling proud, check out the dedication in the photo below. I have been thanked in the back of many books. But this is the first that ever got me a dedication.

The murder of the inverted pyramid

Once upon a time, when newspapers were both noble and strong, editors and publishers regarded readers’ time as very valuable. Editors and publishers understood that newspaper readers were trying to absorb as much information as possible in the least amount of time. They knew that most readers would not finish most stories. Readers would read until they had absorbed enough of a story to meet their needs, then they’d move on to another story, or move on with their day. Once upon a time, editors and publishers did not try to manipulate readers to rip off readers’ time and attention.

These days, many publications — especially on-line publications — actually withhold information and tease readers with information in order to extract more attention and more clicks. Headlines promise much more than the story contains. There are far fewer editors these days to advocate for the reader. The closer a publication is to the lower end of the business, the harder it tries to gain clicks and attention with the least possible information. Reading a newspaper used to be an efficient use of time. But reading on line is increasingly a kind of warfare, in which the reader has to fight with the publication to get at the information (and there may not be much information, no matter how many paragraphs you read).

One of my pet peeves is the anecdotal lede. Everybody writes them now, and there is no bigger time-waster in the world. A lede is the first paragraph of a story. Editors spell it lede because lead has a very different meaning in publishing, a meaning that goes back to the days of Linotypes. Anecdotal ledes, though, go back at least to the 1980s, when they suddenly became a fad with every newspaper reporter in the world. It was claimed — it still is claimed, actually — that anecdotal ledes “pull the reader into the story.”

No they don’t. They waste about five paragraphs of reader time and give reporters a chance to show off what bad writers they are. And who says we want to be pulled in, even if an anecdotal lede could trick us into that? I keep a collection of anecdotal ledes. Here are a few examples:

The New York Times:

• On a Sunday in early December, Marcus Brauchli, the executive editor of The Washington Post, summoned some of the newspaper’s most celebrated journalists to a lunch at his home, a red brick arts-and-crafts style in the suburb of Bethesda, Md.

Aren’t we just dying to know what was served?

I’m an alumnus of the Winston-Salem Journal and have watched that once-great local newspaper, which once won a Pulitzer, shrivel into oblivion. My collection of bad ledes from that newspaper is particularly large, because they never would have gotten past the copy desk when I was there.

The Winston-Salem Journal:

• John Barr is sipping a cup of coffee in the kitchen as his wife, Alysse, finishes up the baths of their three children, Ty, 5; Hunter, 3; and Gionni, 1.

Wow. It was almost like being there.

• Hello Kitty was popular. So was soccer. Hannah Montana was there, but only slightly more common than a hammerhead shark fighting a swordfish.

Sounds like my high school, too.

• Elizabeth Nesmith couldn’t talk or eat Sunday afternoon.

Me neither.

• As the sky over Washington Park turned hazy Friday night, Joe Tappe strolled down the sidewalk from his house at Gloria and Park avenues, crunching over fallen leaves and carrying a plate of dip.

By the fourth paragraph, maybe we’ll know where he was going.

Der Spiegel:

• The blades of the wind turbine are made of plain wood painted red, and they measure exactly 1.2 meters (3.9 feet) long. Their curved edges are only roughly sanded.

I am so pulled into the turbine!

When I encounter anecdotal ledes, I skip immediately to the fifth paragraph to see if the story begins there. If it doesn’t, I move on. When I was at the San Francisco Examiner and the San Francisco Chronicle, whenever we had the perennial debate about why we were losing readers, I’d always say that it was because the anecdotal ledes were driving readers away.

It’s not uncommon these days, in on-line publications and even in Washington Post op-eds, to see the lede withheld until the very last paragraph. That is nothing less than abuse of the reader.

Maybe I’m hopelessly old-fashioned, but, as I see it, readers have rights. One of those rights, when reading for news, is the right to the inverted pyramid. But I’m just a voice in the wilderness, in a time when we need the inverted pyramid more than ever. I don’t have a clue what to do about it, other than not to give our attention to those who abuse it.

My first library book, rediscovered

I have a clear memory of the first book that I ever checked out of the public library. It was Space Cat, by Ruthven Todd. It’s a short (72 pages) science fiction children’s novel.

Whether I was in the second or third grade, I’m not certain. I think the book would have been within my reading ability in the second grade. I doubt that I could have been kept away from the public library until I was in the third grade. I would have been eight or nine years old, and the year would have been 1956 or 1957. I recall that it was a weekend afternoon. After we got home, I went straight to my room and read the book. I finished it well before suppertime. I believe I cried when the story was over. I begged to go back to the library for more books, but my father said, sorry, not today.

I’ve thought about this book often. For some reason, last week it was in my mind long enough that it occurred to me to check and see if the book could be bought from a used book seller on Amazon. Indeed, there were many copies available. They’re not cheap, because I saw from the reviews that I’m not the only person who remembers this book from childhood. I got a good copy that had been discarded from a school library. It cost me $44.20.

Ruthven Todd, I was not surprised to learn, was a Scotsman, from Edinburgh. He had a bit of a dissipated life, it seems, and became an alcoholic. Space Cat, which was published in 1952, made him some money, enough that he wrote a few sequels. The American version was published by Charles Scribner’s Sons in New York.

Tonight I think I’ll drink a toast to Ruthven Todd and read to the cat a few lines from Space Cat:

Slowly, ever so slowly, the bright moon started to climb up the sky, and Flyball twitched a possessive whisker toward it. That was his Moon. None of the others really knew anything about it. He purred gently to himself, basking in the admiration of the earth-bound. Then he burst into a cheerful song:

The Moon is only the start,
Says Flyball the flier.
We’ll reach the stars yet
Going higher and higher.
We’ll voyage right round space
To the ends of the sky.
Oh, no one ever can guess
How far we will fly!”


Illustrations by Paul Galdone

Ursula Le Guin

After the death of Ursula K. Le Guin this week, it was heartwarming to see so many beautiful eulogies and obituaries. Rarely is a fantasy and science fiction writer accorded so much respect in the mainstream. I can add very little, except to say that in addition to her fiction, she was a fine essayist and advocate for the science fiction and fantasy genres. It’s out of print now (and expensive), but I highly recommend her 1982 book The Language Of The Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction.

On a more personal note, Amazon sales of my novels spiked yesterday and today. I had a busy day, and I didn’t have time until this evening to try to figure out what might have caused the spike in sales. Then I figured it out. I owe it to Ursula Le Guin. I run ads for my books on Amazon. The ads are displayed when someone searches for certain terms. For each of my books, I have 100 to 200 search terms. For as long as I’ve been running Amazon ads (going on two years), by far the search term that sells the most books for me is “Ursula Le Guin.” People who read Le Guin seem to like my books. Obviously many people have been buying Le Guin’s books this week. In searching for her books, they came across mine. I don’t claim to be in Le Guin’s league, but I do think we are kindred spirits — heretics, take us or leave us.

Thank you, Ursula Le Guin, not only for your books, but for having helped my sales. I’m not sure how to return the favor, but I think the least I can do is to write your publisher begging them to reprint The Language of the Night.

If you haven’t read Le Guin, I’d recommend starting with The Left Hand of Darkness. It was outrageously head of its time, first published in 1969.

Are we all Buttercup now?


Buttercup

A couple of days ago, I finally got around to watching “The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2.” It was good psychotherapy for trying to psychologically survive this week’s terrifying Republican train wreck in Washington.

I have been doing my best to avoid political posts. Partly this is because the mainstream media and the reality-based commentariat are now fully aware of what Donald Trump is and just how much danger the Republic is in. There is nothing I can add. But I do want to link to a piece by Dahlia Lithwick in which she writes about a question that I also have been gnawing on — that is, are we so far gone that the rule of law can no longer save us? The piece is at Slate with the headline Is It Too Late for Robert Mueller to Save Us? I also should mention a column by Andrew Sullivan at New York Magazine: America Is Trapped in Donald Trump’s Delusional World. Sullivan has a gift for describing the kind of criminal depravity with which we are surrounded.

I’ve also been painfully aware of the fact that sane and decent Americans no longer have a leader. Trump voters have their Hitler, but we have no one. We’re on our own.

All we’ve got to keep us sane and functioning is story and metaphor. “The Hunger Games” is a beautiful story for our times. But the characters of that story, unlike us, had their heroine to pull them through — Katniss.

The scene with Katniss and Buttercup near the end of “Mockingjay Part 2” is one of the most effective film scenes I’ve ever seen. It is the emotional fulcrum around which the entire story finally shifts from horror to relief. In the real world, we’re still waiting on tenterhooks, cringing like Buttercup, clinging to hope that the law will see us through.