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702. Reaching Cyan

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Reaching Cyan

The year was 2086, the place, half way to Procyon. Stephan Andrax wrote in the log of the Starship Darwin . . .

There are two chronometers on the bulkhead. One forges forward at the speed of Everyday, ticking off seconds and minutes and hours and days that make sense to the body and soul. The other races. Seconds flitter by. A new day is born every three hours and twenty-two minutes. Einstein told us this would happen, a century and a half ago; when an object approaches the speed of light, time slows down.

Beside the chronometers is a viewport and beyond it are Dopplered stars which sweep through my field of vision as the ship spins. We are nearly six years into our journey. Halfway through our journey. Yet, for me, only a year and a half have passed.

And through all the years and hours of our journey, the smaller, fleeter chronometer will rush ahead at Earthtime while our time is slowed. All those I knew and loved, except my companions here on the Darwin, are aging seven times faster than I am. When we return, my agemates could be my parents, and my parents will be dead.

The mind perceives what the heart cannot comprehend.

— << >> —

Obviously, one of the joys of writing near-future extra-solar exploration is dealing with the delicious complexities that come from working in a relativistic universe. Thank you Albert Einstein.

The novel Cyan opens with the words of Stephan Andrax, but he will not be the main character. He is the great great (I never figured out how many greats) grandfather of Jan Andrax, who gave his name to the novel Jandrax. I wanted an obvious connection between that novel and its sequel (prequel?), but I kept Stephan mostly in the background by making him the captain of the Darwin.

Imagine that you are planning a ten person expedition to an unknown extra-solar planet. Assume a giant starship, designed for travel only in space, and a landing craft to carry the explorers down to the surface. That seems like how things would actually be arranged. What would happen if all the explorers were killed while going about their business? What if the landing craft were damaged beyond repair leaving everyone marooned on-planet?

Contingencies are what planning is all about. If everyone on the ground were killed or stranded, the knowledge obtained up to that point would still need to be transported back to Earth, so the planners of the Procyon expedition arranged to always have one crew member on board the Darwin. They selected an astrophysicist who would be best positioned to study Procyon’s system of planets by staying in orbit, and made him Captain. He would stay with the ship, just like one astronaut stayed in the CSM while two others descended to the surface of the moon in the Apollo program. That made Stephan important but mostly off camera, which is just what I wanted.

The groundside leader was the character I chose be our eyes for most of the action. Stephan Andrax was Captain in space; Keir Delacroix was “captain” on the ground.

Everyone except Keir had one or more Ph. D.s and was at the top of his or her field. Keir was also highly intelligent, perhaps at the next level down, but his skills came from a life spent in the outback of Australia. He was a rarity on overcrowded Earth, a man who had spent his time in one of the few places that was still wild. Each other crew member had a scientific specialty to bring to the study of Cyan. Keir was there to keep them all alive.

I chose the name Keir Delacroix in tribute to the actor Keir Dullea who argued with the computer Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Here is the list of the Darwin‘s crew, alphabetically, with their specialties and their alternate fields of knowledge.

Stephan Andrax    captain (spaceside) – astrophysicist
Debra Bruner        microbiologist – astronomer – medic
Petra Crowley       geologist – soils scientist
Keir Delacroix       groundside crew leader – generalist
Viki Johanssen      anthropologist – paleontologist
Gus Leinhoff         zoologist – biochemist – medic
Leia Polanyi          paleontologist – geologist
Ramananda Rao  meteorologist – cartographer – geologist
Tasmeen Rao       first officer (spaceside) – pilot (starship and landing craft) –  engineer
Uke Tomiki           botanist – biochemist – medic

— << >> —

I have a lot of things to do in this rejuvenated version of A Writing Life, largely having to do with upcoming releases, but I won’t forget Cyan. I will return to talk about how it came to be, perhaps once a month. You can get a jump on all that by typing Syd Logsdon Cyan into Amazon and reading it now.

next week there will be Christmas posts on Tuesday and Thursday

701. Approaching Cyan

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Approaching Cyan

Cyan is the name of a novel and the name of a planet.

I’ve been writing science fiction for fifty years, but I’ve been reading it even longer. When I began, NASA didn’t exist and the word astronaut hadn’t been coined. I was ten years old.

In the science fiction novels that filled my childhood, I rode on a thousand spaceships or starships to explore a thousand planets, but there was one novel I could never find. I never read of the discovery, exploration, and colonization of a planet — all the phases of what would actually occur — under one cover.

I really wanted to read that book. Eventually, I had to write it myself.

The kind of science fiction I prefer — and write — is based on reality, humanity, and scientific accuracy. The key question I continually ask myself is, what is likely to actually happen when the day comes. And the day that interests me most is something past tomorrow, but not too far past.

I can imagine 2050, but it really doesn’t interest me. It will look too much like today. I prefer to look forward a hundred years or so.

The novel Cyan opens in 2086, which seems a contradiction to what I just said, but I began writing it about 1980. It just took a long time to complete.

I also had to keep changing the year dates on what I was writing. Real world manned space exploration had slowed to a crawl. Who could have predicted in 1972 when the last astronaut left the moon, that fifty-three years later no more humans would have gone beyond low Earth orbit? Certainly no science fiction writer would choose to imagine that.

So what planet would I want to colonize? Mars? Of course not. Half the fun of science fiction is world building, and Mars is far too well known to be of interest. It would have to be a planet around another star, and if it was to be colonized in the next hundred years or so, it would have to be nearby, at least in stellar terms.

Actually, any extra-solar colonization in the next hundred years requires a major stretch of the imagination, but science fiction writers are in the imagination business.

So what are out near neighbors in the galaxy? Here is a list:

Sol, our sun, as a starting place.

Alpha Centauri, about 4.3 light years away.

Sirius, about 8.6 light years away.

Epsilon Eridani, about 10.5 light years away.

Procyon, about 11.4 light years away.

Epsilon Indi, about 11.8 light years away.

Tau Ceti, also about 11.8 light years away, in another direction.

Other than specks and oddballs, that is the full list of star systems within five parsecs of us. I will add two more, just beyond five parsecs, because they were part of Gordon Dickson’s writings in his Dorsai novels. You’ve read them, right?

Formalhaut, about 16.6 light years away.

Altair, about 16.7 light years away.

— << >> —

Click here (or type in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_nearest_stars ) for a Wikipedia article that will list 56 of the nearest stars, including some very small ones, and tell you more than you ever wanted to know about them.

— << >> —

Jandrax, my first published novel, was a lost colony story. The FTL ship Lydia malfunctioned during a jump, stranding colonists and crew so far out that they would never return.

The novel Cyan would be a prequel, taking  place hundreds of years earlier in the same imagined universe. It was intended from the first to be one of a group of novels, so I wasn’t just choosing a star and planet for a single story, but deciding what to do with the whole nearby neighborhood.

It seemed during my youth that every author of a novel about early extra-solar exploration landed on Alpha Centauri. I didn’t want that, so I made the planets of that star system barely habitable. Alpha Centauri lives in the backstory, but I don’t plan a novel about it.

Sirius, on the other hand, is 23 times as luminous as the sun. It struck me as a perfect place to put a colony of humans who were quite satisfied to live in space habitats, with no desire to take up planetary life. That became the setting for Dreamsinger, a novel which I have been sparring with for several years now. I offer no predictions about when it will be completed.

As the novel Cyan opens, limited colonization of the planet Cinder, around Alpha Centauri B, is underway. Explorers have not yet returned from Sirius. When they do, half way through Cyan, they will tell of a system unfit for colonization. Later, a group of dissidents will prove them wrong, leading to Dreamsinger.

There are three starships waiting to leave Earth. One is the Darwin, scheduled for Procyon and the as yet unknown planet Cyan. The other two will head out to Epsilon Eridani and Tau Ceti where they find prime, Earth-like planets.

Writing a story about the exploration and colonization of a prime planet would be a dead end for me. Something not related to the actual colonization would be needed to jazz up the story, and that was exactly what I was trying to avoid.

Cyan, on the other had, had plenty of challenges on its own. It was — and was designed to be — a place to tell a story about how exploration and colonization might actually take place.

I’ll tell you more about Cyan next week, but if you don’t feel like waiting, just go to Amazon and type in Syd Logsdon Cyan and you can buy the novel today, as an ebook or as print on demand.

more about Cyan next week

696. Then Life Happened

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Then Life Happened . . .

Donald Maass, noted author and literary agent, said that there are many authors who have “both published and perished”, referencing the publish-or-perish dilemma facing young academics.

In 1984 I was one of those authors.

I had been writing full time for about eight years. Just looking at the dates you would say nine years, but I had taken a 15 month hiatus from writing to become Stanislaus County Red Cross Director, a job of massive satisfaction and hair-pulling frustration.

My third novel publication, Todesgesanga, came in 1984. It was a German translation and renaming of A Fond Farewell to Dying. Todesgesanga means Death Song, which I admit is a more accessible title.

Counting a cover novella in Galaxy in 1978, Todesgesanga was my fourth publication, all by major magazines or publishers. David Hartwell was my agent. If you don’t remember him, he was top notch. He was reading everything I sent him.

Life was good, on the surface, but my two ongoing novels were both fighting back.

Cyan was a bigger SF novel than I had yet attempted. The world building was huge, but by 1984 that part was finished and the novel was well underway. My ten explorers had made the near lightspeed journey to the eponymous planet and had completed their year of exploration. They had returned to a much changed Earth where I provided about 30,000 words of near disaster to disrupt their lives before they returned to Cyan with colonists. They were saved on Earth by the villain of the piece, Salomon Curran, but now that they were all back on Cyan, Curran’s presence had become a problem I couldn’t solve.

Curran was so huge to the story, and such a bastard that he would dominate the rest of the novel if I let him. Cyan would become about Curran instead of being about the colonization process, and I couldn’t have that. I finally killed him off, summarily, and submitted to novel to David Hartwell. He rejected it, and he should have. It wasn’t finished; Curran had to die a different way. But how?

I was alternately writing in Cyan and in The Menhir Series. That work was even bigger in concept. I could write scenes in that world all day long, but which scenes? I still have boxes of lovely, useless text that I wrote before I knew what it was that I needed to write.

I was in the middle of world building, and character building, and arms and armor building, and city building, and religion building, and magic building. Even horse-replacement building. I needed all that to write the right words, but writing words was the way to discover all of that. Some of one led to some of the other, which led to some of the first, which led to . . .

Looking back now, I see that I was doing it all correctly. I just didn’t have a clue how long it was going to take.

Basically, my problem was that I wasn’t making a living.

In those days novelists were given relatively small advances against earnings. If the author’s percentage of the publisher’s earnings exceeded his advance, he got paid more. If he had a best seller, he got paid a reasonable amount, and his next book got a larger advance. Several good sellers in a row, and an author could eat, sleep, and pay his rent. Several best sellers in a row and he would be well off.

That rarely happened. The norm was that a book by a non-best-selling author would never pay back the advance. The authors of those books had both published and perished.

For one cover novella, two novels, and a foreign reprint, I made about $10,000. That is for eight years work. Even in 1970s dollars, I could have made more digging ditches, or on welfare.

Something was going to have to change.

— << >> —

But not right now. Next week we have to talk about Trump again. (Sorry!) Then comes Thanksgiving, which will call out two special posts not related to writing. Our present conversation will continue on December third.

695. The Birth of a Series

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We interrupt this post . . .

     Today’s post is still here, a few paragraphs down. However, last night Prop 50 passed in California, and I have to address that first.

     Most Trump haters and most Democrats are celebrating. I am not, even though I am as anti-Trump as anybody. I understand the logic of the proposition. I understand why so many supported it. If it helps move Trump out of power, great. But . . .

     Proposition 50 is a blatant gerrymandering of California. It is Trump’s evil, perpetrated by his opponents. It disenfranchises about one-third of California voters.

     When those who oppose Trump look for moral leaders in the days to come, where will they find them? Not among California Democrats.

Now back to the post in progress…

This is a rune board, a device for divination in the World of the Menhir.

The Birth of a Series

For me, the road to becoming a writer was convoluted, largely because becoming a writer was never my goal.

I wrote well, including snatches of fiction that never went anywhere. I wrote college papers by the dozen and my first masters thesis, without ever considering being a novelist. That would take five more years. I’ll have to zip through those years quickly to avoid boring you.

In 1969 I was a senior in college. In the first draft lottery my number was 41. That would mean a letter from Uncle Sam saying, “Greetings, Boy, you are now in the Army.” That notice would come five minutes after I graduated, so I joined the Navy on a delay program.

I spent the next four years as head surgical tech in the dental service of the Camp Pendleton Naval Hospital. I became head tech almost immediately on arrival because I was the only enlisted man with a college education.

I stood across from the oral surgeon handling the suction and handing him instruments as we extracted about a thousand impacted wisdom teeth. (That’s a calculation, but not an exaggeration.) We were getting Camp Pendleton marine recruits ready to go to Viet Nam, where wisdom teeth would be the least of their worries.

After nearly four years of that, the Navy let me go three months early so I could go back to school for a masters degree. The war was winding down and the military was cutting back, so they were happy to see me go.

One thing happened during those four Navy years that would change my life. I just didn’t know it at the time.

My wife worked at the base library, and early on she took a reference librarian class at a local college. It was a night class, so I went along with her when I could. One night in the stacks, with nothing to do but watch her do her homework, I took down a copy of Beowulf and thumbed through it. One short phrase jumped out at me . . .

— all that lonely winter —

. . . and I had a vision of a young boy, sitting at an open wind hole, high in a stone tower. It was quite visual, and it came with a full understanding of his plight. The vision had nothing to do with Beowulf, beyond being vaguely medieval. Beowulf was just the trigger.

The boy was an orphan. His father was a knight who had been killed in battle. The tower was part of the castle belonging to the uncle who had taken him in, and the boy was destined to become a pawn to his uncle’s plans. He would to be raised as a warrior with only one task, to kill the knight who had killed his father.

That man was his uncle’s primary enemy. The boy was a means to remove him, with no repercussions against his uncle. But the boy didn’t want to kill anyone. He only wanted to live his life in his own way, and that wasn’t going to happen.

The next day I went to work as usual. In the afternoon, we had a patient cancellation, so I took that hour to write the opening chapter of a novel that would tell the boy’s story.

That was nothing new for me. I had written many first chapters of novels to nowhere when I was younger, but this one felt different. I wasn’t a writer then, and had no plans to become one, but this felt like the start of real story. The year was probably early 1972.

Three years later I sat down and actually wrote a novel. It went unpublished, as it should have. I a wrote another one — Jandrax — that was published. Then I pulled out the twenty hand written pages about the boy in the tower, typed them fresh, and kept going. By the time I had written a manuscript as long as Jandrax, the story was just getting started. I knew I wasn’t ready yet to write the rest, so I wrote another science fiction novel instead, A Fond Farewell to Dying, which was published in 1981.

Time passed. Lots and lots of time.

On Jun 9, 2021, I finished the boy’s story. Actually, he turned out to be a great deal more than just a boy. I made a note to myself that said, “Finally, after 49 years, I am satisfied.”

The result was one very large novel, or a series of five moderately short ones. It would work either way. I plan to release it through most of next year. Overall, it will be called The Menhir Series. Tentative dates are:

Let me interrupt. This was posted on November 5, 2025. The dates then given will not be met and have been removed. As I said at that time, things are fluid.

My new best estimate of publication dates, as of Dec. 3, 2025, are:

The Morning of the Gods

May 27, 2026

Firedrake

July 15, 2026

The Lost Get

September 2, 2027

Whitethorn

October 21, 2026

The Scourge of Heaven

December 9, 2026

Caveat — everything is still fluid in this relaunch of A Writing Life. These are the new projected dates, but much of what I will have to do to make them happen is new to me. Stick with me and I will explain things as I learn them, just like I did while Cyan was being prepared for publication.

693. New Wave, New Frontier

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New Wave, New Frontier

We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard . . .

John F. Kennedy, September 12, 1962

Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon.  Eisenhower began the space program, Johnson saw it through, and Nixon got to be the president who placed a phone call to the first man on the moon. Nevertheless, it is Kennedy we most closely associate with space, largely due to the speech above.

Kennedy’s presidency was short — January 20, 1961 to November 22, 1963 — two years and ten months.

He began by creating the Peace Corps, then failed to provide air support for the Bay of Pigs fiasco. He saw the USSR build the Berlin Wall, faced Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile Crisis, and gave support to Civil Rights activists — but not enough support in the eyes of many.

Kennedy was a young man undergoing extreme on-the-job training. He was beloved by many and hated by many — nothing unusual in that — but a full and balanced evaluation of his Presidency is not possible because it was cut short.

What we can say for certain is that he was a modern President in all senses, and it was his charisma that set us on a path to the moon.

And then he was gone.

— << >> —

Meanwhile, regarding science fiction . . .

In 1961 Arthur C. Clarke’s A Fall of Moondust became the first SF novel selected to be a Readers Digest condensed book. That seems about right, since Moondust was Clarke at his most bland.

A Clockwork Orange, The Man in the High Castle, Cat’s Cradle, Dune, and Planet of the Apes also came out during the Kennedy years, and they were not bland.

About that same time a movement occurred inside SF which became known as the New Wave. That’s a problematical name, like Roosevelt’s New Deal. The New Deal isn’t so new 93 years later. The New Wave isn’t so new 60-some years later either. Still, if felt new while it was happening.

If a young SF fan today were to read something from the New Wave for the first time, they would be likely to say, “But didn’t people always write like this?” No, they didn’t. Before the New Wave, SF writing covered new and exciting concepts, but the style was generally pretty stodgy.

The New Wave was the era of Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. Le Guin, J.G. Ballard, and Roger Zelazny. And many others, but I am mentioning my favorites. I had loved SF before these folks came along, but the fact is, they just wrote better than those who came before them.

By the time the New Wave had been digested and made the norm, science fiction had generally reached it’s present stage. It was, and still is, a genre loved by a few, read by many, and avoided by even larger numbers. It’s style and tenor is no longer particularly distinguishable from the mainstream. There are a few best-sellers and a lot of stories that appear briefly then disappear into the ooze of indifference.

There were still a few changes to come before we would reach 2025. Computers would make writing — and especially revising — easier, so books got longer. Much longer. In the seventies, SF novels often ran 50,000 words. Today you would have a hard time selling one unless it was twice that long.

No agent or editor in the seventies would have even opened a Neal Stephenson manuscript.

Computers were at the heart of the other main change since the Kennedy/Johnson era. Special effects made it possible to create believable futuristic movies and television programs. While I offer no comments on the variable quality of story and acting, modern SF movies look beautiful. It is no wonder the center of SF attention has moved from books toward video.

I object to that, but who cares what I think.

— << >> —

When Kennedy was inaugurated, there were about 3000 Americans in Viet Nam. They were not called troops; they were called advisors. By the time Kennedy was assassinated, that number had grown to about 16,000.

Then Lyndon Johnson took over. He lied to the American people. He lied to Congress. He posted weekly kill-counts that were entirely imaginary. He promised victory. He expanded American military activities to adjacent countries. It gained him reelection in 1964, and cost him the chance to run again in 1968.

Nixon won and — in my opinion, since no one will ever know what really went on in that man’s mind — rode the war and the faltering peace talks to reelection in 1972. The he declared victory and pulled out.

Viet Nam fell.

Nixon could have pulled out four years earlier, with the same result. Johnson could have pulled out eight years earlier, with the same result. There would have been one difference, however.

Fifty some thousand Americans died in Viet Nam. According to Encyclopedia Britannica, an estimated two million counting all countries died due to the Viet Nam war. They didn’t need to die.

I occasionally meet Viet Nam vets who wear caps reminding us of their service. I have no quarrel with them. They were sent, they went, they did what their country told them to do. And there but for the grace of God go I.

I was also in that draft, and I enlisted. I spent my four years stateside, but that was nothing but luck. I could have gone over like the ones wearing the Vietnam Vet caps. And if I had, I could now be sixty years in the grave.

Tens of thousands of us knew Viet Nam was a mistake and said so. No one listened. I’m still angry, and I make no apologies for that.

— << >> —

Bouncing back to science fiction again — to the SF of alternate realities — here is the question all this poses. What would Kennedy have done, if he had lived?

We can’t know the answer; we can only speculate. Kennedy made big mistakes, then stood tall against Khrushchev. He learned. Would he have learned enough? Maybe not — but maybe he would have.

Folks, we are living in our very own alternate reality, initiated by Lee Harvey Oswald on November 22. 1963.

I also have a question for Oswald himself. Why did you shoot Kennedy that day in Dallas? Did you think you were going to make the world a better place?

What were you thinking?

The discussion concludes next week.

692. The Space Age Begins

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The Space Age Begins

Britain measures eras by the reign of its Kings and Queens. America measures eras by Presidents. In our look at the beginnings of science fiction, we are about to enter the Truman/Eisenhower era, even though neither man will be our focus.

— << >> —

Hiroshima changed everything.

Science fiction people had read Einstein, or had tried to, so they knew about nuclear fission. They knew that an atom bomb could be built, and were expecting it. A few even got in trouble because they used atom bombs in stories, when the FBI was convinced they had it locked into secrecy.

For the rest of the country, Hiroshima was a shock to the heart.

It didn’t take long for the Russians to get the A bomb. Then we got the H bomb. Then the Russians got the H bomb. Welcome to my childhood.

Suddenly the future had become the present. Everybody was still driving ancient looking cars (no cars had been produced during WW II) and dressing like people in the old movies, but their world had been ripped open by futuristic perils.

Literature reacted to the situation. The Saturday Evening Post, that bastion of American norms, broke tradition and published a science fiction short story, The Green Hills of Earth by Robert Heinlein. Colliers Weekly published Wernher von Braun’s article Man Will Conquer Space Soon.

Von Braun also partnered with Disney to produce three episodes of Disneyland (as the Disney TV program was then called). The first, in March of 1955, was called Man in Space. This was followed by Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond is later seasons. These were humorous and relied heavily on cartoon animation, but they showed American youth what the future held in store.

Eisenhower’s presidency saw a worsening of the Cold War, the rise of ICBM’s to deliver H bombs, and the development of satellites. The push for space flight had been properly begun. NASA was formed in 1958.

Space flight is key to science fiction, but it is by no means the whole of the genre. SF, by its nature, is always out ahead of contemporary science, and the giants of science fiction were producing major works during this period. The main difference from the golden age was that there were more novels, fewer short stories, and people had stopped laughing at the genre.

This was the era of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End and Issac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, while Robert Heinlein revised his novella Methuselah’s Children into a full novel.

This era also saw the rise of near future “science fiction”. The quotation marks are there to point out that this wasn’t really science fiction at all, because it was reacting, not predicting. Atomic power, atom bombs, jets, and rockets had been the stock in trade of science fiction fifty years earlier when they did not exist. Now they were the stock in trade of mainstream writers because they did exist.

Fail Safe was probably the most notable of these near future science fiction novels. It began as a short story in 1959 and was revised into a novel that appeared in 1962. In it, an American bomber is mistakenly on route to destroy Moscow with nuclear bombs. The American President, who cannot call back the bomber, must sacrifice millions of American lives to avert a world destroying all out nuclear war.

On the Beach was even more somber.  Years after a nuclear war, people of Melbourne, Australia wait for inevitable death as fallout from the northern hemisphere drifts down upon them.

No fun novels for a no fun time.

There were many others. Philip Wylie, who was already an established science fiction writer, turned out Tomorrow and Triumph. I read both in high school.

This new sub-genre of science fiction continued to gain readers who might never have read Clarke or Heinlein. In 1984 it reached apotheosis when Tom Clancy published The Hunt for Red October.

— << >> —

Over the course of this blog, fifty year anniversaries of events from the early space program kept happening, and I kept writing about them. By the time of my covid hiatus, those posts had grown into a book to be called Brief but Glorious.

Of all the books I plan to e-publish, it is the most dubious. Not the text — that’s fine — but I want to illustrate it heavily with NASA photos, and I don’t know what kind of technical problems that will cause. I have tentatively scheduled it for October 2027, but that could change. I’ll keep you posted.

The discussion continues next week.

691. Science Fiction Begins

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Science Fiction Begins

If you don’t like that title, here’s a longer one.

Science fiction begins as literature, becomes a genre, sinks to a sub-literate state in the eyes of the intelligentsia, regains legitimacy in the Saturday Evening Post, and then consumes the universe.

I like the short one better. And by the way, this is just a quick survey. If you don’t like the way I’ve chopped up history, write your own. After all, most SF “scholars” disagree — on everything.

— << >> —

Science fiction has been around for a long time, although the early stuff is hardly recognizable. You could make the argument that it truly began when writers started using machines instead of supernatural beings to do marvelous things. That is why we look to H. G. Wells instead of Charles Dickens for the beginning of time travel stories.

Scrooge visited the past, present, and future, but it took three spirits (plus Marley) to pull it off. Wells did it with a time machine.

Jules Verne’s Five Weeks in a Balloon (1863) and H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine (1895) are a good enough place to start looking at science fiction. Both were considered literature from the beginning. Verne’s writing style was held up for emulation by the French establishment. H. G. Wells was a respected social commentator. In that same era, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward was a call for society to perfect itself — science fiction ideas spoken by the voice of the elite.

But what if you are an outsider, with a coarser voice?

Later, rougher, more exciting writers of science fiction didn’t fit the proper mold. They were frequently not all that interested in uplift, they just liked the idea of the future. Their characters were more likely to carry a ray gun than to address Parliament. Through the early decades of the twentieth century a whole generation of young men (and a few young women) found excitement in reading this kind of science fiction presented in the form of short stories in inexpensive specialty magazines.

This period, beginning in the thirties and lasting until roughly World War II, was often called the Golden Age of Science Fiction. (Remember, golden ages are always in the past somewhere.) A great deal of high quality science fiction was produced, along with the usual kinderdrivel. Science fiction had left the mainstream and become a niche interest, ignored or derided by most people.

Science fiction also acquired its own name. The Time Machine was just called a novel when it was published, but now science fiction had become a genre. Calling it sci-fi was forbidden by those who loved it. Everybody else just considered it cheap trash.

I wasn’t there for all that. For most of the Golden Age, I wasn’t born yet. I saw the science fiction of the golden age when it was reprinted in the paperback books published in the sixties, seventies, and eighties.

My actual connection with Golden Age magazines was brief but exciting. A few of them were still around when I began writing, and my first publication was in Galaxy. It was a novella called To Go Not Gently, and the cover of Vol. 39, No. 6, 1978, showed my character Ram David Singh walking uneasily down the Avenue of Abominations in New Bombay. I was over the moon.

It was also the last issue of Galaxy, although there were later attempts at resurrection.

So science fiction began as just a part of normal literature, then went on the gain an intense fan base as well as the disdain of everyone else. Heinlein and history were about to change that.

The discussion continues next week.

686. It Was Fifty Years Ago Today . . .

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It Was Fifty Years Ago Today . . .

If you are my age, music from Sergeant Pepper just popped into your head in honor of that title. But you probably aren’t my age — 77 — so it probably didn’t.

Today, I’m throwing myself a digital anniversary party. I’ve earned it.

Today is September 2, 2025. It’s also the day after Labor Day.

In 1975, on the day after Labor Day — also September second — I sat down at a home-made plywood desk, in the tiny back bedroom of a rented house, in front of an electric typewriter to try something new. I was going to find out if I could write a novel.

I didn’t doubt my intellegence, nor my skill with language. What I doubted was whether I could sit down day after day and think of enough interesting things to say to fill up a novel.

I was going to give it my best shot.

At the time, I was reconsidering my plans. I had always intended to be a scientist, initially in ecology. The problem was that I was a decade too early. No one had heard of ecology in 1966. Michigan State University had only two classes even close to the subject when I arrived and they were both in Fisheries and Wildlife, not Biology.

I switched to anthropology and spent five years pursuing that goal. I loved it as long as I was studying work done by other anthropologists, but the idea of field work (sitting in a mud hut recording local gossip, to be snarky about it) did not appeal.

I had never considered writing novels. I had started a dozen, just for fun, but inspiration always ran out about page ten. Now,  I had a little time on  my hands, so . . .

To my amazement, between September and Christmas, I turned out a novel. It was simple and short — a hunter gets lost in the wilderness and, after many adventures, finds his way back to civilization. I used the local Sierras which I knew well and kept my hero so lost that I never had to worry about absolute accuracy in describing his surroundings.

It was unpublishable, but that isn’t unusual for first novels. The important thing was that in four months I had neither stalled nor stumbled as I worked my way through 45,000 words, which was just long enough for a novel in 1975.

I could write a whole novel! Who knew? Certainly not me.

After Christmas I started doing the research and world building for a novel of science fiction. It was finished by the end of 1976, sold by 1978, and published in 1979. The title was Jandrax, from Ballantine under the Del Rey imprint.

Now I was a published writer. Who would have believed it. Certainly not me.

I’m still working at my trade after fifty years, so it’s happy anniversary to me.

I am also using this anniversary as the starting point for a rebirth of my blog A Writing Life. Keep coming back, mostly on Wednesdays — we still have a lot to talk about.

681. Anniversaries

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I’m still here.

I’m not quite ready to come back to the blog yet. I have a lot of things planned, but they have all been impeded, first by covid, then by an unprecedented heat wave, and now by a layer of smoke that burns the eyes and hides the sun. Welcome to California.

The title of this interim post is Anniversaries, and I have two of them.

Forty-five years ago I sat down to write my first novel. The actual date varies a little because it was the day after Labor Day, and that is the way I celebrate it. In 1975, it came on September second. This year it came on September eighth, but on that day it was too hot to start the computer in my un-airconditioned writing shed.

Life giveth and life taketh away. In the last four days the temperature has dropped from 110+ to something almost comfortable, but only because the sun had not been able to penetrate the smoke cloud that covers the entire state. I can’t breathe, but I’ve stopped sweating and I can turn the computer on again.

In a world where people are dying of covid, out of work, fearing eviction, and in many cases hungry, a little sweat, some stinging in the eyes, and a bit of cabin fever is the definition of comfort and luxury.

I don’t forget that.

Hard times aren’t new. Ninety some years ago in my birth state of Oklahoma my father couldn’t see the sky either, but then it was from the dust storms that were wrecking everyone’s lives. We go on.

Nineteen years ago, things got tough in a hurry here in America, and everything changed. That’s the other anniversary. I spoke of it in an early post of this blog, back in 2015. I’m repeating it here.

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I was in the shower getting ready for a day at school when my wife called to me. A plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time I dried and dressed, the second plane had hit.

Twenty minutes later, driving to work, I listened on the radio as the towers fell.

All day long I taught science, keeping to the lesson plan. I didn’t want to teach, and no one wanted to listen, but it was necessary to keep a semblance of normalcy. Every break we teachers watched the television, but we didn’t take any news back to the classroom. These were young children. They needed to be in their own homes, with their parents, before they began to deal with the details of America’s disaster.

At the end of the day, I drove home. I had upon me the need to write, but not of the tragedy. Others wrote that day of what had happened to our country, and wrote well. I needed to write of love and joy and beauty – and of my wife who is all those things to me.

Poems come slowly to me; usually they take years to complete. This one rolled freely about in my head as I drove, and when I arrived at home, I only had to write it down.

                   There Am I

Where there is water, there am I.
In sweet, soft rain and in hard rain,
driving and howling,
or filling the air with luminescent mist.
Water is life, and there am I.

Where there is sun, there am I.
In the soft heat of morning or in the harsh afternoon,
or heavy with moisture, forcing its way through clouds,
or dry as a lizard’s back.
Where the Sun is, is life, and there am I.

Where Earth is, there am I.
Whether dark loam, freshly plowed
or webbed with fissures, hard as stone,
or sandy, or soft as moss.
Where Earth is, is life, and there am I.

Where life is, there am I.
rain forest or desert,
broad plains of grass or brooding jungle,
Where life is, there am I.

Where She is, there is life,
and sun and rain and earth, and all good things.
Where She is, is life,
And there am I.

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Things got tough in 2011, things are tough in 2020, things have often been tough throughout history, and things will be tough again in the future. But life abides, beauty abides, joy abides, and love abides.

Stay well, friends. Be good to each other.

679. The Nightingale Sings Again

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I’m not all the way back, although I will be eventually. Even while I am in covid-hiatus, I will have occasional cause to say something that won’t wait for better days, and this is such a case.

Two years ago, JM Williams produced a new take on an old Hans Christian Anderson story The Nightingale.  I reviewed it  positively at that time. Now he has published a cleaned up version of his novella. The changes in the text are insignificant, but the look of the work is vastly improved.

In the original, Williams said, “There are certain themes in the original story that still resonate . . .” and in the new version he says, “Certain themes in the original story still resonate . . .” In the original he says “ . . . the lie was an integral part of his plan.” and in the new version he says “ . . . the lie was an integral part of his plot.” Those are the kind of tiny changes a careful author makes if he is given a do-over. I know; I drive myself crazy with those kind of changes in my own work.

Such small changes aren’t reason enough to visit the story again, but in the first edition, the formatting got out of hand. Nothing was indented. In chapter three, it went from single space between paragraphs, to double, and then back again. Later the right margin slid to the middle of the page.

I’m sure that some of Williams’s readers must have given up along the way. If so, they really missed out.

Now all this has changed. The new version is a clean and professional as anything out of Doubleday. Nothing stands between the reader and the story, and it is a fine story.

This is what I said about The Nightingale two years ago, except this time I can give it the 5 stars the story deserves.

JM Williams retelling of the classic fairy tale sees the world from the ground up. King Gregor is about to name an heir but villainy is afoot, with two princes and a princess in contention, and magic tipping the scale. Royalty can’t help; instead, the son and daughter of the village blacksmith, with advice from a witch too old to act on his own, have to try to save the day. The characters are warm and relatable, and the action is believable. If you like a slash-em-up, this isn’t for you. If you like real people working to make their world better, give it a try.

While you are at Amazon picking up a copy of The Nightingale (be sure to get the one with the brightly colored bird on the cover) you might as well pick up a copy of Cyan. It’s going to be a long time before we once again complain that we don’t have enough time to read.

Stay well.