Category Archives: A Writing Life

434. S. L. in Occupation

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Last post was about my father in the closing days of WWII. After his wounds had healed, he was returned to his unit, now in occupied Bavaria.

How he felt about the German soldiers he fought, he never did say. In his stories, he never shot them — just scared them a bit. Somewhere along the line he had ditched his M1 Garand for a Thompson sub-machine gun with a broken stock. He carried it (he said) one handed by the pistol grip; in combat he pulled the trigger and recoil sent the muzzle swinging up and to the left, with a spray of bullets that sent the enemy sprinting for cover.

It was a good, clean story for the wife and kid, but once he almost slipped in the middle of telling it. Comfort and humor almost got swamped by blood and truth. He changed the subject. There is no doubt in my mind that, like a million other WWII veterans, he only told what his audience could bear to hear.

His feelings about German civilians were quite clear; these were his kind of people. Bavaria was a long way from the seats of power, and these were farmers and poor shopkeepers. He hated Nazis, and German generals, and politicians, but he liked the local people and they liked him. So did their daughters.

My father was handsome young man, full of life, full of fun, and he had money. The young German men were gone. They had gone to war and were now dead or in Allied POW camps. The German civilians were hungry. As I read between the lines of his stories, my father kept several families fed, in exactly the same way my grandfather kept several families of out of work townsmen fed with produce from his farm during the depression.

My father’s feelings for his Bavarian Germans were conditioned by his childhood. These were working people, like his own family and friends, and like the German settlers that lived around Owasso, Oklahoma where he was raised.

He fell in love with a German girl and they planned marriage, but he discovered that to marry her, he would have to reenlist and remain in Germany two more years. He was a homesick farm boy, ready to feel the Oklahoma dirt beneath his feet again, so he left his German girlfriend and came home. A year later he married. A year after that, I was born.

433. S. L. Goes to War

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I served but did not see combat. The Syd Logsdon in this title is my father.

World War Two was a presence in our home when I was young. My dad served, was wounded, and returned. It was the biggest and most concentrated experience of his life.

My dad was a storyteller, but all his war stores were humorous tales of incidents along the way, or descriptions of enduring exhaustion and cold, or brief, dry, cool descriptions of the techniques used to clear a town or take a pillbox. He went through some of the worst fighting in the war, but his stories were essentially bloodless.

These were not the kind of gung-ho stories that would lead to hero worship. He didn’t consider himself a hero, anyway. He was just one of millions who went where he was sent and did what he was given to do; that was enough.

I can see him in memory, telling his stories. Even as a child, I could see the pain in his face. He had to tell the stories — he couldn’t keep them in — but he kept the horrors shut up behind his eyes. I don’t know how much he told my mother when they were alone, but I do know how often her nights were disrupted by the terrors that came to my father in his dreams. PTSD they would call it now. Then, it was just the way men were, when they came back from war.

He joined the First Infantry Division as a replacement after D-day and fought his way across northern France. His view was a soldier’s view — a road here, a village there, this particular house, that particular pillbox. I don’t think he ever had a global picture of where he was. He left combat in an ambulance before the assault on the Rhine. He always said that wound kept him alive. He had an almost superstitious belief that he would have died on the Rhine.

He was there for the entire Battle of the Bulge. Roughly two hundred thousand American and German troops died in a small corner of the Ardennes forest. You can see windrows of the dead, in history books, in grainy black and white photographs. He never talked about that, although he was eloquent about the cold and the exhaustion.

The wound that sent him out of combat came under incongruous circumstances. After the Battle of the Bulge was over, his group had captured a stash of German weapons. The lieutenant in charge wanted to try them, so he, my father, and some other privates took a panzerfaust — a German antitank weapon — out to an open field. My father put it on his shoulder and pulled the trigger.

My father always speculated that some Jewish prisoner in a munitions factory had sabotaged the weapon, in hopes of taking out a German soldier. No one will ever know. The weapon exploded an inch from his head, and he spent the remaining months of the war in a hospital in Paris. more tomorrow

432. The Making of a Navyman

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I am writing a steampunk novel called The Cost of Empire. Here is a quote:

        He was a patriot. Unit A should have seen that. Patriots are not to be trusted; they act by their own lights, and they don’t always follow orders.
        Too bad for Unit A. Too bad for Daniel.

Actually, I’ve said that before, a year and a half ago. Here is a repost:

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The military has no use for patriots, because patriots think for themselves. In combat, a soldier who shouts, “We must not do this,” is likely to get himself and his teammates killed. He has to go on, following orders.

So how do we turn patriots into yes-men? Boot camp. That’s what it’s there for.

Boot camp is not seen as something important, or morally debilitating. And, I suppose, compared the things that happen later in the field, it isn’t that important. But . . . without boot camp to turn patriots into soldiers, those later events could never happen.

This isn’t about me. I went through boot camp in neutral mode, observing, remembering, and trying not to feel. I wan’t always successful, but I was successful enough to survive intact. I was changed, of course, but by my own experiences, not by pre-programmed manipulations.

This also isn’t about the eighteen year old children who made up most of the recruits, who were eager to follow the path their elders had set, and ready to go over and kick some commie ass. (It was 1971) This is about one young man, and those he represents. He came into boot camp a patriot, ready to serve his country, full of love and compassion, but ready to do his duty. They broke him. I can still see him standing in the barracks before lights out, talking to his friends, saying, “This isn’t right. I joined up to fight for my country. Why are they treating us like this?” His friends laughed at him and told him that this was nothing, it was just getting him ready for what was to come.

It wasn’t nothing, but it was getting ready for his life to come. That was the point.

I never talked to him. There was nothing I could say. He was learning in front of my eyes what I had learned years before, at other hands, under other circumstances. But I never forgot him.

Boot camp is what in Anthropology we call a liminal experience, one that tears down an old identity in order to build a new one. The folks at boot camp are really good at this, even in mild boot camps like the one I experienced at the San Diego Naval Training Center. We could see the real thing across the fence at the Marine boot camp, and we thanked God every day that we weren’t Marines. While I was there, a Marine recruit who could no longer take the daily abuse, ran off and stowed away on a jet liner at the civilian airport just over the fence. Hours later the jet landed at his home town on the east coast and he fell out of the wheel well, frozen, asphyxiated, and dead. The Marines said good riddance. We worms (as Navy recruits are called) laughed. Learning to laugh at the death of others is part of the boot camp experience.

It was all choreographed indignation, play-acting inflicted onto a captive audience. They said that if we didn’t keep our barracks clean enough or our socks rolled tightly enough, the Trouble Shooters would come.

“You worms have been given socks to roll! That’s all we trust you with now! How can we trust you with nuclear bombs once you’re on an aircraft carrier if you can’t roll socks now!”  Every word was delivered at a shout.

Of course, the Trouble Shooters came. They always do. They came in the night, screaming in manufactured rage and tearing the barracks apart while we stood at attention in our shorts at the foot of each bed.

Near-naked, helpless, frightened into immobility, knowing that the only way to survive was to  let the insanity happen. Civilian identities dying; new, military identities growing.

The making of a Navyman. You could put it on a poster.

431. The Other Veterans

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This is an update of a post I wrote for Veteran’s Day 2015. Not many were reading yet, so I could simply repost, but a lot of things have changed since then. The new writing is indented.

I am an American; I vote. During my nearly thirty year career as a school teacher, I always went to the polls early and wore my ”I have voted, have you?” sticker throughout the day. Children would ask me, “Who did you vote for?” I never told them. Sometimes they would ask me, “Are you a Democrat or a Republican?” I never told them.

Teachers have a responsibility to be involved and have political opinions, because they are citizens. But they also have a responsibility to avoid shoving those opinions down the throats of their captive audience.

You are not a captive audience. You get both barrels.

I am one of the other veterans, the ones who went, did their job, and moved on. I don’t march in parades. I love America, but I still have a love/hate relationship with the flag. It stands for aspirations toward universal freedom, and when I think of it like that, I love it. But it also stands for the darkest of horrors.

For twenty-seven years, I had to endure the flag salute five days a week in my classroom. Understand, there were days when I said it with my whole heart. There were also days when I could only remember the dead on both sides in that useless war in Viet Nam; on those days, I said the words through clenched teeth.

But I said them. I could have refused. I might have been fired, or I might have won my case on first amendment grounds. Either way, the children I was there to teach would have had their education disrupted. It was my problem, not theirs, so I gritted my teeth and said the words.

Even the words “under God”, notwithstanding that I stopped believing in God when I was fifteen. But every time I said them, I thought of the children who have to pray five times a day facing Mecca.

NFL players, I get it. I support your right to protest. I agree that the situation you are protesting is unacceptable. Nevertheless, I think you are making a mistake. The people who see you kneeling can’t get past the flag. You are alienating the people you need to convince.

My draft number was 41.

Heinlein said slavery is not made more appealing by calling it Selective Service. I agree, mostly; however conscription levels the field. Without conscription, the white and the rich would not have protested so loudly as they (we) did, and the Viet Nam war would have gone on much longer.

When I got to boot camp, I was surrounded by whites, blacks and variations. There were only two who stood out — me, and one other guy. I was 24, mature, married, and with enough life experience to resist brainwashing. The others were all malleable, except for one recruit. I’ll tell you his story on Monday.

During my last year in college I signed up for a term in the Peace Corps. Then Nixon did away with the Peace Corps deferment. The Marines were drafting, so I joined the Navy.

I wasn’t trying to avoid death; I was young enough to foolishly assume I wouldn’t get killed. I just didn’t want to shoot anyone who was defending his homeland.

Four years later I was a civilian again, the Viet Nam war was over, and the general opinion had shifted. Most Americans had come to believe that the war was a mistake.

Thirty years later Bush Two sent troops in to find weapons of mass destruction that never existed, as if we had learned nothing.

I am a veteran; I believe in defending my country against real enemies. But I’m also a retired teacher. When I see starry eyed children who can’t wait for their chance to plunge into battle –- well, pardon my lack of enthusiasm.

There will be three more veterans’ posts next week.

430. The Rocket’s Red Glare

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from Congreve’s original work.

“Oh, say can you see . . .”

No, this is not going to be about the NFL. It’s going to be about the rockets which figure into the anthem, into history, and into the steampunk novel The Cost of Empire, which I am now writing.

Rockets got their start in China, where they were used as fireworks and as military weapons. Just keep that in the back of your mind. We are going to start in the present and move backward in time, but not all the way to China.

When the average American sings the Star Spangled Banner — or mouths it, since it is a hard song to sing — it is unlikely that the image in his mind looks anything like the rockets which actually burst in air over Fort McHenry. My generation has V-2 rockets in our DNA, largely because early SF films used actual films of V-2 rockets as stand-ins before special effects were perfected. A later generation has Saturn-V rockets imprinted on their brain. To both, rockets are pointy ended cylinders with the flames coming out of the bottom.

Not so in 1814. The rockets that rained down on Fort McHenry looked more like fireworks rockets. They were called Congreves and a page of drawings of them is given at the top of the post. Some were explosive tipped. Some were parachute flares, which “gave proof through the night that our flag was still there.” All were guided, more or less, by a long stick that acted like a rudder, similar in function to the fins on a V-2.

They were nothing like accurate. That was the way of things before modern times. If you recall the battle of Agincourt in the movie version of Henry V, the English longbow men drew back together and fired hundreds of arrows simultaneously at a high trajectory, which rained down en masse on the French. The battle of Hastings was lost when King Harold Godwinson looked up at a bad moment and caught such an incoming arrow in the eye. Muskets in that era were also nothing like accurate, so lines of musket men firing together in the same direction managed to hit somebody, but probably not the targets they were aiming at.

William Congreve (not the playwrite and poet) gets credit and naming rights for the Congreve rocket, and he did make improvements, but his work was based on rockets captured in India.  Which brings me to why I’m writing this post. Here is a quote from The Cost of Empire. An Englishman who has gone native in India is speaking:

“About a hundred years ago this whole region was called Mysore and Hyder Ali was in charge. He fought the British and all the Indian princes around that kept shifting from the British side to his and back again. After he was killed, his son Tipu Sultan took over and formed an alliance with the French.

“It’s an old story. The same pattern happened all over India, as we British took over one region at a time. But this story has a kicker. Rockets.

“Rockets came from China. Everybody knows that, but they were widely used in India as well. Hyder Ali and Tipu Sultan used them extensively; some of their rocket brigades had over a thousand men. Rockets were made that exploded, that set fires, and even that had sword blades attached so when they came down spinning, they made a bloody mess of British ground troops.

“When the Mysore wars were over, the winners sent hundreds of captured rockets back to England. Congreve studied them and replicated them. The Congreve rockets we used all throughout the Napoleonic wars were just English versions of what Hyder Ali had used against us.”

The old guy is telling this story because a group calling themselves the Sons of Hyder Ali have built an arsenal full of rockets. They have bad feelings toward the British and a plan concerning the flotilla of dirigibles our hero is serving on.

I would tell you more, but that would be a spoiler.

429. Scales, digital and ridiculous

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Ah, the good old days. They really sucked.

Even the phrase sucked falls into that category. I know that most of those who read this will not remember, but there was a time when nobody said sucked. It ranked up there with the “F” word. I remember when it arrived on the scene in my middle school students’ vocabularies, how it was an issue for a short time, and how two years later teachers were saying it. That’s what happens when a perfectly good forbidden word becomes common; it loses its flavor.

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I have a great respect for Science Olympiad, but I never liked coaching, so I always volunteered to judge events instead. I enjoyed taking on new events that needed to be shepherded through their first year of implementation, and that led me to build a lot of gadgets to use in judging the contestants’ gadgets.

The people who think up new events in Science Olympiad often show an Olympian detachment (pun intended) from reality. Case in point — and forgive me if my numbers are off, I’m writing from memory — in two events students had to build light structures and test them to destruction. First it was a bridge, and a few years later, a tower. The lightest bridge or tower that held the most weight before failing won the event. There was a formula for weight vs. load, and specifications for what constituted failure.

The students applied the weight by pouring sand into a suspended bucket and there was a set maximum. If the structure held the maximum, the lightest structure won. If the structure failed, the weight vs. load formula was invoked. All in all, it was a well thought out event.

Except for one thing. The load was in pounds — up to ten, as I remember — and the weight of the structure was in grams. Let’s do the conversion.

1 pound equals 16 ounces
1 ounce equals 28.35 grams
Therefore, 10 pounds equals 4536 grams
And 9 pounds equals 4082.4 grams
That is a difference of 453.6 grams

Did I lose you? Just look at the cartoon at the top for a moment, regain your equilibrium, and come back to me. There is no final exam on this. This is just memoir about how much fun teaching science can be on a small budget.

To measure mass in grams, you could use a triple beam balance available in any science class. To measure ten pounds, you have your bathroom scale. But wait a minute, that ten pound maximum-weight bucket of sand has to be measured in grams! How do you do that?

You do it with levers, using the gizmo pictured at the top of the page. I actually built it, and used it all the years I was associated with that event. The lever makes the scale read about 160 pounds when there are 10 pounds in the bucket. That spreads out the difference between two similar weights. The box the adult is staring at is my old Mac SE, with a preprogrammed formula in a database. The formula is:

Scale reading in pounds after the sand has been added (times) conversion factor to grams (minus) weight of bucket in grams ——- all this fed into the formula for comparing load in grams to weight of the bridge or tower in grams, a formula provided by Science Olympiad.

At the event, all I had to do was watch the contestant, and stop her/him at the moment the structure failed. He/she was only given ten pounds of sand to work with, so overfilling could not happen. I typed in the reading from the bathroom scale and the computer gave me the score — after I had built and tested the device, programmed the database, and provided ten pounds of sand, calculated to the nearest gram on the same device.

Fun? Of course it was fun. I volunteered to do this, remember?

Was it accurate? No and yes. No, there was too much friction for the gram readings to be accurate, but the friction was the same for every trial, so yes, the ranking of the contestants was completely reliable.

About three years after Science Olympiad retired the event, digital scales which would measure that much sand to the nearest gram became available for under five bucks at every-guy’s-public-man-cave, Harbor Freight. Thank goodness it didn’t come earlier and ruin my fun.

428. Ve Speak Goot English

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This is from today’s post in Serial:

(Language), Neil knew, was a real problem for those families who went back and forth between Mexico and the United States. The brightest children leaned to speak, read, and write English, but they were illiterate in Spanish. They could speak the lower class Spanish used in their homes, but they usually could not read or write it. Worse, their dialect was no more suitable for a good Mexican school than an American hillbilly dialect would have been suitable for a high school in Boston.

Fiction has its place. It can make us think and care, but plain old non-fiction can sometimes get things across more quickly. To wit:

We are a nation of immigrants. Everyone knows that.

Spanish is an immigrant language. Yep. Everyone knows that, too. However, so is English. If we we spoke a language that isn’t an immigrant language, we would all be speaking Cherokee, or one of several hundred other native tongues. Aztec, anyone?

English got here first. No, actually it didn’t. Of European languages, Old Norse got here first with the Vikings, but it didn’t last. Spanish got here second. English, French, Portuguese, German, Swedish — the list could get tedious if we let it — are all late comers.

English won.

Now we are zeroing in on the truth. The French gave up the right to provide the language of choice for about half of the USA when Napoleon sold Jefferson the Louisiana Purchase. Spanish lost out as the language of choice in Florida, Texas, New Mexico, Utah, Nevada, Arizona, part of Colorado and Louisiana, tiny corners of Wyoming, Mississippi, Alabama, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and all of California at the point of a gun. Or, a bunch of guns. That’s roughly a third of the lower forty-eight.

Like it or not, it happened, and it is irreversible. English is the language of the US, despite the innumerable other languages spoken by our immigrants. They came here, procreated, the original speakers died, and their offspring now speak English.

So why are the Spanish speakers different? It is certainly not because of anything wrong with them. It’s quite simple. When Germans immigrated, they didn’t go back. Modern immigrant Spanish speakers, primarily Mexican, documented or undocumented, go back and forth.

Migrant labor is typically seasonal. Besides, wouldn’t you rather spend winter in Mazatlan than Minnesota if you could? Hordes of Anglos do it, and they don’t even speak the language.

Not all people of Spanish background move back and forth. Many of them came to the US and stayed. Tens of thousands of them were already here to greet the Anglo pioneers when they arrived. See map above! Millions of them don’t speak any Spanish, just as Nils Hansen of Kenosha, Wisconsin (hypothetical person) doesn’t speak Danish. There is a word for these people — Americans — and they don’t pose any language problem in the schools.

Those who do go back and forth are not going to stop doing so. It works for them. Summer labor in the US, then back to Mexico for its mild winters and lower costs is not just logical, it’s capitalism. It’s entrepreneurship. It’s survival for the Mexican families and cheap food for you. Drive by any field in California at harvest time and count the Anglos bending their backs in the sun. Your total will be zero.

A wall won’t change it. A path to citizenship won’t change it, either. The idea of a hermetically sealed border is a Trumpean delusion.

So where does that leave the children of migrants? In a tough spot, to be sure. They often don’t spend the whole school year in schools in America, and they often don’t enroll while they are in Mexico. Many don’t learn to speak, read, and write English as well as their Anglo or permanent Mexican American classmates. Some barely speak, read, or write English at all. They speak Spanish, but they often don’t read or write it.

Solutions? That would take a shelf of books, not a post.

427. A Grave Story

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The paragraph below comes from Symphony in a Minor Key. Neil McCrae has read a ghost story at Halloween, timing it to end just as the bell rings in his sixth grade class.

Half the students leaped to their feet screaming, then broke into laughter, and went out for their break repeating juicy bits of the story to one another. Neil sat back with a feeling of satisfaction, mixed with amusement at his own self-indulgence.  There was a lot of theater in Neil McCrae, but he kept it on a tight leash. Once in a while, though! Just once in a while it felt good to cut loose.

Since the novel is based on my teaching career, it will surprise no one that Neil and I share a few characteristics. Keeping theatricality on a tight leash is one of them. Telling ghost stories on Halloween is another. This is one of those stories, based loosely on a joke I read in Boy’s Life back in the fifties.

Of course it’s a true story. I wouldn’t lie to you.

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I had two brothers as students. I had one in my class one year, and his younger brother the next. They were always hanging out together. Some brothers get along; come don’t. These two were great friends.

They were outdoors types. The liked to fish and hunt. Their dad would take them canoeing, and sometimes the three of them would camp out together.

The year I’m thinking about, the last year I knew them, their dad had been really busy all fall, so they were on their own. They decided to go off together in the canoe, and go camping along the river.

I didn’t mention, did I, that the Tuolumne River runs along about a mile from the school where I taught? Or that the regional cemetery is right along the river? Of course, the students I told this story to, already knew that.

Since it’s a true story, I have to keep the details straight.

This particular fall had been rainy, and both brothers were involved in soccer, so they kept putting off their canoeing and camping trip. September came and went, and then October, and by the time November was just around the corner, they were getting pretty desperate to go. That’s probably why they decided to go on the last Friday night in October.

I probably wouldn’t have gone, myself, because it was Halloween, but these two had a habit of daring each other, and that often got them into trouble. So they went. They put in the river at Fox Grove and intended to sleep somewhere about five miles west, then paddle on down to Legion Park the next morning. Their mom was going to pick them up there. Too bad she never got the chance.

Everything went along fine for the first hour. They got a late start, but that didn’t matter since they could camp anywhere. It’s pretty wild down along the river. They got past the rapids under the bridge. They were pretty tame rapids. Things went well for the first few miles, but then fog began to form. That was fun at first.

Did I mention it was Halloween?

The fog hung in the old trees along the river bank, but they could still slip along below it. At first. Then it got dark, all the sooner because the fog was cutting off the moonlight.

Did I mention there was a full moon? That was part of the reason they went that night, because they thought they would be able to see by it’s light. They hadn’t figured on the fog. Pretty soon they couldn’t see anything. They got on down the river for a while by instinct. If you’ve been on the water enough, you get a feel for currents, and anyway, you can’t get lost on a river. It only goes one direction.

Still, it started to get dangerous, not to mention creepy, so they pulled up on a mud bank to think things over. They also had been drinking two liter Pepsi’s, if you know what I mean. They had to take care of that little chore, and they did, but while they were looking for a bush apiece, they got separated. They could hear each other clearly, but the river banks threw back such echoes that they couldn’t find each other. And then they couldn’t find the canoe. Finally, Joe – that was the younger brother – found a path up and shouted to Tom – that was the older brother – that they should climb out of the river bottom and meet on the flat land up topside. Tom shouted back to go ahead, so Joe went up.

That might not have been the best idea they ever had. They had made it further down the river than either one realized, and when Joe got to the top, he found himself in the cemetery.

Now Joe wasn’t particularly spooky. Camp fire stories of ghosts just bored him. But this was a real cemetery, and the fog in the trees looked like Spanish moss hanging down – you know, like in the stories of the bayous. He didn’t like it. He hollered for Tom, but got no answer. Then the fog thickened and the moon, which had been mostly obscured, disappeared completely. He found that he couldn’t see anything, so he put his hands out to feel, and found himself moving along, guiding himself by the tops of tombstones. He didn’t like that much either, but what are you going to do?

Tom, meanwhile, thought he had found a trail up, but it only led him into a bramble of raspberry bushes. It took him ten minutes to work his way through them and by the time he made it up to the top, his clothes were in tatters and he had blood all over his hands from fighting the thorns. He staggered out on top, panting with the effort, and found himself in the cemetery, too.

I know all this because I was one of the ones who went looking for them then next day, after someone had found their abandoned canoe. It was easy enough to track them, first by river mud footprints, then prints in the soft soil. We knew which was which because Tom’s shoes were much bigger, and besides, there were all those drops of blood.

What neither boy knew was that there was a funeral scheduled for that Saturday. The groundskeepers had dug the grave, and it was standing open. Tom found it first.

Of course, it was pitch dark, so he found it by falling in. The groundskeepers had done a good job. It was seven feet deep, with straight-up sides, three feet wide and seven feet long and completely impossible for Tom to get out of. And did he try! He leaped. He scrambled. You could see the next day where he had dug his fingers into the sides of the grave, with no success. I’m sure he shouted, but no one could hear him. I wouldn’t be surprised if he cussed a little.

Eventually, he exhausted himself and sank to the ground, curled up in a ball, and decided to wait for morning. He was half asleep when Joe found the grave the same way Tom had.

Joe fell in, and the sound of a body falling into the grave with him sent Tom to his feet. He slammed himself back against the side of the grave, wanting to scream, but no sound came out. It never occurred to him that it might be Joe, but every other monster from every movie he had ever watched went running through his head. He squeezed back into a corner of the grave in abject fear, while Joe picked himself up, turned, and began leaping and scrabbling at the wall of the grave.

About that time, just enough moonlight came down into the grave that Tom could recognize his brother. Joe slid back to the bottom of the grave for the third or fourth time as Tom reached out his bloody hand, with tattered sleeves hanging down, and touched his brother’s shoulder. His voice was hoarse from fright as he said, “You’ll never make it out of this grave.”

But Joe did. He screamed and gave such a leap that he outdid himself, caught his fingertips on the lip of the grave, scrambled like a madman, and was gone.

Tom was still there when we found him the next morning. I won’t say he was all right. I don’t think he was ever all right again. But he was there.

Joe was never found. They dragged the river. Friends, neighbors, and strangers turned out in the search, but it was useless.

Tom and his family moved away soon after, but I get Christmas cards from his mother every year. She tells me what Tom has been doing, but she never mentions Joe.

Me either. Except every year about this time I feel the need to tell his story. Just a cautionary tale, you understand. Nothing to do with me, whatsoever.

I wouldn’t lie to you.

426. The Five Plots of Time

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It is a dubious tradition to produce articles like The Three Basic Plots of Fiction, or The Four Kinds of Traditional Hero. I’ll add my bit, even though I’m dubious myself.

The Five Master Plots of Time Travel Stories

This grouping came out as I was thinking about The Map of Time. Time travel has a long and tortured history as a set of concepts hung uncomfortably between science fiction and fantasy. None of it makes much scientific sense, although I do read a lot of actual (?) scientific theory which demonstrates that even scientists can waste their lives reading too much SF. It would make more sense to simply call all time travel stories fantasy, but they always require a time machine, so they must be science fiction — more or less.

Then again, Einstein would hate FTL stories. They violate relativity, but that doesn’t keep me from reading and writing them.

Let’s just tackle this mess in the spirit of fun.

Master plot #1.     A man tries to change history and fails. He is doomed to failure, no matter what, because the past can’t be changed. The entertainment in this kind of story is in making the reader think the hero will succeed, and fouling him up at the last minute in some clever way.

Master plot #2.     A man tries to change the past in some logically forbidden way. The classic form would be that our hero goes back to kill his father before our hero is born. The stars go out; the universe ends.

I am not fond of this form. It’s too much too simple. Perhaps a good writer could make it work if we know that the victim-to-be is the hero’s father, but the hero does not. (Shades of Oedipus!) Then we would anticipate that this is a type one story, and be taken by surprise when the hero succeeds and the stars go out. That might work, but I doubt it.

Master plot #3.     This is a variation on 1 and 2. A man tries to fix a tragedy by going back in time, but instead makes things worse. This is just a variation on the notion that, “You can’t make the world better, and you shouldn’t try. Just accept your fate.” Literature is filled with this Christianity based defeatism, epitomized by The Monkey’s Fist.

The Greeks called it hubris. I don’t buy it. For me, a man without hubris isn’t much of a man.

Master plot #4.     A man is in a world different from ours. He tries to change the past, succeeds, and his world morphs into the “real” world, i. e. ours. If the reader accepts that he is reading an alternate timeline story, and is taken by surprise by the ending, it can work. Brunner used this bit in Times Without Number, but that novel had enough quality to succeed even with a different ending. Zelazny did a beautiful variation in the short story The Game of Blood and Dust.

Master plot #5.     A man tries to change history, but instead creates a new timeline, or crosses over into an existing alternate timeline. This isn’t a trope; it’s a genre. Alternate timelines can be wonderful, but they are often cheap knock-offs, based on the notion that you don’t have to create anything, you just rearrange what already exists.

They aren’t even time travel stories, unless someone moves from one timeline to another. Pavane is an alternate timeline novel, but not a time travel story, since every actor in the novel remains tied to his own timeline throughout, and is never even aware of the existence of any other.

Okay, I will admit that any bright twelve year old could invent more plots, or could knock holes in these. I present them merely as a mental exercise — a fourth dimensional Rubik’s cube — for your amusement.

Have fun arguing.

425. Goodreads as Textbook

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I bought The Key of Time several years ago from E. R. Hamilton’s, my favorite purveyor of remaindered books. It looked and sounded good, but so did the half dozen others that came in the same order. I put Key aside and it stayed in my to-read pile until I became immersed in Steampunk. It seemed to ooze Steampunk, so I dove in.

I planned to review it in this blog. You saw the results on Monday in post 423. 85 Pages: a review, so named because I couldn’t get past page 85.

That got me thinking about Goodreads. I’ve only been involved with Goodreads for about a year and a half, but I am impressed by the intelligence of most of the reviews. Since I discovered it, I have treated Goodreads almost like a textbook on what intelligent readers want.

Here are Goodreads’ stats on The Key of Time by Felix J. Palma, translated by Nick Caisto:

10289 ratings                2127 reviews                rating 3.37 out of  5

That’s a lot of ratings and reviews. Many Goodreads books have almost none. The 3.37 rating is fairly normal. It’s hard to find a book on Goodreads that doesn’t garner mixed reactions.

I decided to pick a few Goodreads reviewers who agreed and disagreed with my take. Here are some examples — or rather excerpts, for the sake of space and so I don’t step on anybody’s copyright.

Traci said, It was amazing.

. . . Do you enjoy magic tricks even though it’s all sleight of hand? . . . I loved every moment I spent with this new and talented author.  . . . one of my favorites, of the year. Beautifully written.

Did Palma get his act together after page 86? Were the last 524 pages better than what I read?Did I miss something?

Frances seemed to think so, with some reservations.

Frances said, (I) really liked it.

. . . I was beginning to wonder if I wanted to continue. At times I groaned (but it). . . . soon became compelling enough to finish. When I finally read the last page . . . I (was) . . .  pleased to have read such a creative and unique book.

I have to admit that I also felt compelled to continue as well, despite the insipid “hero” and glacial pace. It reminded me of all the times I’ve tried to read Dickens’ longer books. But this isn’t Dickens. It’s more like pretend-Dickens. For me it was finally more irritating than intriguing.

Velma said, (I) did not like it. and recommended the book for “someone willing to edit it, heavily.”

Time travel! Jack the Ripper! Automatons! What’s not to love?!? Well, as it turns out, almost everything. . . . it took every ounce of stick-to-it-iveness I could muster to get through this convoluted, interminable literary maze. WHERE, I ask you, was the EDITOR in this hot mess? . . . (Palma is) a decent, if grandiose, storyteller and he mimics to perfection the florid style of the period he set this novel in . . . But come on, Félix, enough with the meandering, the inconsistencies, the convenient last-minute reprieves . . . I was all set to love this book, what with it being about the re-writing of the history of the earliest science fiction and all, but it wasn’t to be . . .

Velma pretty much sums up my reaction. If you look at her whole review on Goodreads, she is even angrier than this excerpt shows.

What is the takeaway? About Goodreads, that is. I’ve had my say on Palma.

Goodreads won’t tell you if a book is good. It will tell you all the different things readers think about it. And that is its value — many looks from many directions. I will continue to check it out, after I read something. Whether I love a book or hate it, I always learn something from Goodreads reviews, even it is is just public taste.