Blog Archives - When we all lived in the forest

Books 61-80

6/14/2014

Plot may be the bones of a story, but cadence, pacing, and effect are its blood, bringing life to its twitching little body...or killing it.

Here’s a synopsis of what I learned:

Red Mars – Create a real, three-dimensional setting for your readers.
Woman on the Edge of Time – Effect is powerful enough to injure readers. Be careful.
The Female Man – Ranting does not a story make.
Time Pressure – Plot is a literary convention. Story is a force of nature.
Way Station – Poor pacing steals a story’s thunder.
Pavane – A story does not science fiction make.
Downward to the Earth – Good pacing offers readers what they need when they need it.
Earth Abides – Realistic reactions and relationships.
Brain Plague – Fast pacing sacrifices reality.
Hyperion and Fall of Hyperion (Beowulf, et. al) – Strange surprises make great reading.
Nostrilia – Have good humor.
Berserker – Don’t write slight stories.
Snowcrash – Language + Ideas = Thought
Orbitsville – Plot is when stuff happens.
First and Last Men – Story scale affects emotional impact.
Roadside Picnic – The cadence of a sentence shadows what happens in the story.
The Year of the Quiet Sun – Reveals are bad.
Up the Walls of the World – Write so readers can follow emotionally.
The Drowning Towers – Realistic characters have many facets. Show them.
Grass – Make readers insane with glee at the descriptions of your landscapes.

#80: Grass by Sheri S. Tepper

6/14/2014

Dune-itis. This book has a serious case of Dune-itis. Dune is a desert planet, and Grass, well, it’s a grassy planet.

The Dune analogies are myriad. A noble family goes to a planet where the ruling class does not want them... to solve a problem which revolves around the unique and mysterious ecology of the planet. A religious organization which holds sway over the entire universe directs them in their mission. The book is well over 500 pages, very serious, longer than it should have been, given the stacking of effects and reveals took away from impact rather than adding to it.

Yet, there was enough to keep me reading, and one hundred pages in, the story developed its own heartbeat. The author, who was born in 1929 in Colorado, the same year as Betty, and wrote this book in 1988, has impressed upon me the fervent need to write amazing physical descriptions of your worlds. Set in a winsome, creepy world, the story grew enthralling, enrapturing: the deadly Joust, the goose girls, the telepathic foxen, even the heroic horses with their thematic names like “Quixote” and “El Dia Octavo.” At certain points, the prose smooths out and becomes lucid and enviable. In the last fifty pages, the book sinks back into its bad habits. An honest-to-God Deus Ex Machina paves the way for the ending, God himself. This is the first time I’ve ever seen God assigned dialogue in a science fiction novel, and delightfully, His words did not fail Him... but afterwards, I was frustrated that D.E.M., among some other extremely precipitous coincidences were driving the plot. Call me whiney.

This book still impressed me: the great parts were far greater than the bad parts were bad.

I finished this book, #80, today, July 7, 2007. Inspired by its finer moments, I also started writing my favorite story once again. It will veer away from hints and information that could hamstring it, and I will work hard to make the setting as memorable as it is in Grass.

#79: The Drowning Towers by George Turner

6/14/2014

I don’t know what it says about me that I eat up apocalyptic stories like candy. I really love these things. Since March, I’ve only had time to read snippets of my books at lunch breaks, but for this one, I dove in on weekends and after work, taking precious time away from homework and friends and chores.

Yes, overpopulation has been addressed in 1984 and Make Room! Make Room!, but Turner’s story takes its own route by examining how class and prejudices would be affected by global warming. His world is populated by a few privileged Sweet and millions of gutter Swill. The Swill have their own dialect, a kissing cousin of Riddley Walker’s marble-jawed language. The story jumps between several characters’ points of view, showing their changing relationships to other classes in their exhausted world. The reader’s relationship to the characters also changes: sometimes we like them, sometimes we don’t, depending what side of their personalities have been exposed to us. This was a clever literary technique that shadows the themes of the book: the perceived differences between classes depends on where you have recently been.

George Turner is the definition of why my reading list is precious to me. I would have never come across this heartfelt Australian writer and critic on my own. The book takes its cues from Hamlet, and was written in 1987: I have gone twenty years without knowing of it or his existence. I looked him up to thank him, but with regret, I see that he was born in 1917, and he died in 1997; I am ten years too late. It just about makes the points his book did: we cannot wait to do the right thing.

Wonderful lessons in characters – they have many sides, not all of them likable, not all of them appreciated by others. As characters grow, they go through stages, and their qualities change, adapting or not adapting to the situation, as the case may be. These qualities – which Vonda McIntyre also exercises in her writings – are revealed in the relationships between people.

#78: Up the Walls of the World by James Tiptree Jr.

6/14/2014

Gelatinosities. That word is just one reason why I love this book. It’s written in a lovely way, and so smoothly, I didn’t even notice until I was on page 90 that it’s written in present tense. A second reason is that although this story starts out with exactly the same premise as Wilson Tucker’s The Year of the Quiet Sun – people collected by the government and sequestered away to participate in a top secret activity – this story is so much better. Human psychics can abandon their bodies. Utopic squid-manta-ray things have their thoughts and souls floating around them like halos. They switch bodies. It’s cool.

A third reason for loving this story, is that Tiptree shows how to let emotions climb through characters so the reader can emotionally follow : “But suddenly everything is gone – he has crashed into a stasis assaulted by light, colors, sensations. Floundering, he perceives dimly that this is embodiment. His naked life has become incarnated. A sense which isn’t vision is showing him the image of a landscape in which are immense, trembling globes. Utterly bewildered, he rolls or tumbles, his mind filled with jelly life. “Margaret!” he bubbles weakly, and then sees – knows – her radiance is there, flaring among the moving gelatinosities.”

Tiptree’s technique is beautiful: a description, an emotion or reaction, a perception, a poetic summary. She does it twice here, and all through the book. It worked really well for me.

#77: The Year of the Quiet Sun by Wilson Tucker

6/14/2014

Even before I went back and read the dedication to “friends who grok,” I knew this was a Heinleinic writer. Mostly because, in this book, the most valuable thing a woman can contribute to society is being attractive and accommodating. I know I keep coming back to this Heinlein thing, which may in itself be a lesson about writing. Writing that has a strong point of view, even a point of view you despise, has staying power, so much so you can see tremors of it in the works of others.

I kept reading in the hope that something fascinating would happen. Certainly, the potential was there. This book was written in the Vietnam-traumatized late sixties, is staged in 1978, and proposed nuclear armageddon by 2000. But it also anticipated see-through clothing (for women only), and short-term contract marriages (which the protagonist thought would result in a higher murder rate by scorned women), and a terrifying coup by black revolutionaries in Chicago. Oh, this story has not aged well.

The book spent three-quarters of the time getting ready to go to the bleak future, and nothing happened when it got there. The action had already taken place, and was described in summary. And worst of all, there was a terrible and strangely pointless out-of-left-wing reveal in the second to last chapter that the main character is, gasp, a black man. To make it worse, that man was named Chaney.

What was the point of all this? I don’t know. And that’s the problem.

The tangential lesson: a strong point of view can make writing great. The other, more horrific lesson is that reveals are bad.

#76: Roadside Picnic by Arkday & Boris Strugatsky

6/14/2014

A future where everyone smokes incessantly and drinks Vodka at lunch are the only tells of these Russian authors. Otherwise, it’s a wrenching, fascinating tale that reminds me of the darker moment of Alec Effinger and Roger Zelazny: in Canada, an unearthly “Visitation” leaves a city where Stephen Kingsian horrors defy physics.

The cadence of this story is a marvel. The language is a perfect shadow of the mood. For instance: “Redrick turned around for a second and slapped the old man’s face, feeling his prickly stubbled cheek. Burbridge sputtered and fell silent. The car was bouncing, and the wheels slipped in the fresh mud from last night’s rain. Redrick turned on the lights. The white bouncing light illuminated overgrown old ruts, huge puddles, and rotten, leaning fences. Burbridge was crying, sobbing, and snuffling. He wasn’t promising anything any more. He was complaining and threatening, but in a very quiet and indistinct voice, so that Redrick heard only isolated words. Something about legs, knees, and his darling Archie. Then he shut up.”

I am happy to find this book. When I first started looking for it, there were no copies under eighty bucks. But SF Masterworks came to my rescue once again: this was released in March this year, just when I needed it.

Cadence is more than pacing. Cadence is capturing the feel of your story with your turn of sentence. In the paragraph above, the prickly stubbled cheek immediately follows the slap, making it a shock to read it. The repetition of bouncing and sets of three words at a time, “Ruts, puddles, and fences,” and “Crying, sobbing, snuffling,” and “quiet, indistinct, and isolated,” and “legs, knees, and Archie” creates the sense of bouncing up and down the road. When Burbridge shuts up, it is abrupt, a short sentence. It is masterful.

#75: First and Last Men by Olaph Stapledon

6/14/2014

Oddly, this 1930 description of the hundred hundred billion years “history” of humanity’s existence was at the same time fascinating and forgettable. Given its scale and my inability to read this quickly, it was hard to remember everything – though it seemed cool while I was reading it. All along, I thought “There are so many amazing ideas , several authors could make careers by writing stories based on single paragraphs in this book.” But now, I am now hard pressed to say what most of those ideas were.

It would augment this story to illustrate it, so you can see all the different kinds of people, and maybe time lines. The winged people, the furry people, the seal-people, the people with brains so large they have towers built to hold them. There could be sidebars explaining different religions and technologies. You know, like a good science text book. It would be cool. (Ha! Arwen informs me there is such a thing.) I also wonder if the discussions on evolution and pre-genetic “human engineering” did not get this book banned in some times and places. And as was the author’s intention, this read like a history book, not a story, and he acknowledges the scale of it in his epilogue: “Great are the stars, and man is of no account to them.”

Scale! In every paragraph is encompassed a fiery idea, plot, and theme, which is wonderful to behold, yet as distant and unattainable as a star. To give it emotion and relativity, situations must be examined much more microscopically, within the idea, plot, and theme. The scale of a story can affect the quality and type of emotional impact.

#74: Orbitsville by Bob Shaw

6/14/2014

What would you do if you accidentally killed your boss’s kid?

Never mind that this Irish author’s book suffers from “White Room Syndrome” or that none of the characters were sympathetic for me. This book is a lesson in roller coaster plotting, in action and reaction, and “setting up the spike” for the next chapter. For example, in the first seven chapters:

Ch 1: A flickership commander accidentally kills boss’s kid, and his boss is president of all people. He hides the dead child and runs away.

Ch 2: Knowing he and his family are in danger, he runs home. Just as he gets them to his flickership, his boss discovers her son’s death and demands the commander’s head.

Ch.3: The commander and his family board the flickership and flee. They and the crew realize there is no safe world to run to.

Ch. 4: They travel as fast as they can for months, hoping to find a theoretical planet. They discover a “spaceship” that is millions of miles wide.

Ch. 5: They test the impervious surface and travel around it. They find a fleet of three thousand ships gathered together.

Ch. 6: The ships are abandoned. They hover over a gigantic hole in the spaceship, which the commander enters.

Ch. 7: The “ship” is a hollow world – Orbitsville – filled with empty, grassy landscape, a sun, and breathable atmosphere. The Commander realizes his find will make him too famous to kill, and sends a message home.

So, there. Very well done. A great plot is like a great ice-skating routine. There is always motion, always something happening that is interesting or exciting or nerve-wracking, and each event flows into the next.

#73: Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

6/14/2014

“She just looked at him over the rotating pencil like, how slow can a mammal be and still have a respiratory functions?”

For the last dozen books I’ve read, there have been many pleasant and/or interesting reads, but none were as much fun as this book. There are a lot of reasons: (1) This is well-written, wacky cyberpunk that grabs the bloomers from William Gibson and tears the knees out of them. It’s the scifi masculine version of Emma Bull’s Bone Dance, which came out at just about the same time; (2) Great characters, especially Rat Thing (Fido B-782); (3) This is the first book I’ve read that was written in present tense throughout, and it literally rolls around like an action movie; (4) those action scenes are, uh, perfectly executed, breathless and fun; (5) it is scientifically imaginative and zany; and...

...(6) It demonstrates perfectly that Language + Ideas = Thought. Stephenson made up his own slang and language to convey his world. Words like “franchulate,” “burbclave,” “poons,” and “refus” not only give this world their own flavor, but convey how the world thinks of itself, and are witty nods to 1984 and Clockwork Orange. Moreover, each of these words is also an idea. Franchise + Consulate = Franchulate: in this world, business and government are the same creature. Impressive.

(7) The scenes are almost complete stories in themselves: a few examples are the pizza delivery, a fight in a hops field, the computer-generated Dark Sun metaverse, the Raft, New Hong Kong Consulate, and a glimpse into a world of the Feds that actually makes 1984 seem quite benign. (Did I mention I just started a temp job with the federal government? I found that part particularly chilling.) Some veer up on the curb with ridiculous premise, but all of them feel wild, emotional, and smart. I just thought this was the kind of book that all readers thirst for... except that there is no real ending at all.

The story just stops. But given everything else, it’s forgivable.

Language + Ideas = Thoughts. I am enamored of the concept. It ties into my thoughts about words and ideas creating structure and images as the “ornaments” of the story. Wow. I will have to play with this.

#72: Berserker by Fred Saberhagen

6/14/2014

Daleks, Cylons, the Terminator, the Borg and their immense cube, the machines of the Matrix, and the Death Star most likely all owe their existence to this book. That being said, this collection of stories about Berserkers, a fleet of ancient moon-sized machines predisposed to destroying every “life-unit” in their path often feels slight, if not preposterous. I did not read the last two of the twelve stories.

Fred Saberhagen can surely write. The introductions to each story, written by pacifistic alien observers, is written with an “alien” syntax, and each story changes timbre slightly, to reflect the voice of differing protagonists. Every once in a while, there is a truly thoughtful line: When I remember the truth, it will be terrible. Still, when the Berserker inadvertently cures a man’s cancer was my only favorite story. Saberhagen wrote the first story in 1963, and had made a franchise of novels and stories that exists to this day. I’ll pass.

Writers need to write valuable stories. Even if they are silly, stories need to be of value to the reader. Remember what Michael Swanwick, Kelly Link, and Holly Black all said? “Your story is about the most important day of the character.” Don’t write slight stories.