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366. Three comments on Spirit Deer

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[1]  When I was a very young writer, I read everything in the library under Dewey Decimal 808. It’s called Rhetoric & collections of literature, but really, it’s where they stick all the how-to-write books. In one book of articles, there was a piece titled Multiply by Two. The author’s thesis was that it is always better when starting a book to have two people in front of the reader, to allow for conversation while setting the scene. That’s probably reasonable advice, but I disregarded it in Spirit Deer. Tim is completely alone by page six, and remains that way until the last page.

At the time I wrote Spirit Deer, it just seemed right for Tim to be alone. I had spent half my childhood alone, walking to round up cattle twice a day or on a tractor, endlessly circling innumerable fields. Nothing could seem more normal for Tim the adult, and that didn’t change when he became Tim the youngster. And it wasn’t just me. In the outdoor adventures I read as a child, boys were always out in the woods, and often alone.

I read those books in the fifties and I wrote Spirit Deer originally in the seventies. In 2017, I wonder if the cell phone generation has ever been alone, or ever will be again.

[2] Speaking of cell phones, the cell phone bit in Spirit Deer Post 2 was introduced because no modern kid would be without one. I didn’t want it in the story, so I used one sentence to both establish Tim as responsible and get rid of the damned thing. This scene also introduces a girl, who has no part in the story, but would be missed if absent in 2017. Her absence would have been taken for granted back in the seventies. Or the fifties. Or the thirties, or the nineteenth century. Actually, I see the automatic inclusion of females as progress, but I still wanted Tim to be alone in this story.

[3] Until Tim fires his rifle in Spirit Deer Post 3, he could always just go back to the campground and bike on the his grandfather’s place. There would have been no story. I wanted Tim to have some responsibility for getting himself into trouble. This book is about choices, so it would have been inappropriate for him to get dumped into the wilderness due to forces beyond his control.

This is very different from the original version of Spirit Deer where the hunt had been the legitimate act of an adult.

I also give Tim an out in Post 4 and he doesn’t take it. He could just walk away from his responsibility. But Tim is a moral being, as all my main characters tend to be. I like a stalwart hero. I don’t like the weaselly, vacillating type who finally talks himself into doing the right thing — in real life, or in the characters I write about.

Spirit Deer 3

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He hid his bike in the manzanita a hundred yards from the campground and took his rifle with him. Then he slipped a few cartridges into the magazine, just in case.

He walked into the woods. It was late October and the Sierra Nevada mountains of California were beautiful. The aspens were gold against the deep green of the firs and the air was clear and cool. As the morning slipped by he occasionally heard the shots of other hunters, but he didn’t see any deer.

By mid-afternoon, Tim reached a high valley, cut through by a small, swift brook. There he lay back with the sound of water in his ears. The rifle was across his stomach as his eyes searched the edges of the trees.

Five deer came out of the woods on an eyebrow of trail fifty feet higher up the slope and a long hundred yards away. A four point buck led the way, followed by three does and a yearling. Tim sat up and brought up his rifle. He took up slack on the trigger and squeezed gently, just as his father had taught him.

In the moment that Tim fired, the lead muley caught sight of him and pulled up short, then stumbled. His forequarters failed him and his chest hit the trail as his back legs struggled for balance. Then he was up again and running up the trail.

The other deer were gone. Tim’s attention had been all on the leader and he had not even seen where they went after they disappeared into the forest.

Now he was in a panic. Until he had fired that shot, he had not really admitted to himself that he was out hunting alone. He had just been “taking a walk”. If he turned away and went back down to the campground now, his parents would never know the truth. But Tim would know, and in the hunter’s code his father had taught him, leaving a wounded animal was unthinkable.

Tim plunged into the stream where it ran shallow across a bar of harder rock, holding his rifle high. He scrambled up the talus slope, using rocks and juniper as handholds. When he reached the point where the deer had been, he found the manzanita covered with a fine spray of blood.

Tim turned up the narrow, winding trail in pursuit of the wounded deer. Near the stream there were vines and underbrush, but as the trail climbed, it became more open. The muley was nowhere in sight.

There were a number of tracks on the trail, but only one set going in the right direction. Tim studied them for a moment, looking for some distinctive feature, but he found none. The deer held a grueling pace for more than a quarter of a mile before his tracks showed that he had slowed and begun to limp.

The situation didn’t look promising. The deer had run into an area of broken granite and stunted firs. It was not a place for an inexperienced tracker.

The sun was low, filling the land with shadows and strange suggestions of shapes. It was beginning to get cold, and Tim’s jacket was back at the campground, tied to his bike.

Tim sat down on a rock to scan the slope ahead of him. Finally, almost lost in the tangle of roots at the base of an uprooted ponderosa pine, he thought he saw a set of antlers.

Tim started up the slope and the muley broke from cover. With surprising speed, it went up the slope on three legs. more tomorrow

365. You wanna write?

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“You stupid-looking sons of bitches wanna write? Well, gwan home and write!”
Sinclair Lewis

This is the entire text of a lecture by Sinclair Lewis. It is quoted by John Masters, best selling author from the fifties and sixties, in his autobiography Pilgrim Son. Masters had just summed up his prospects as a beginning writer this way:

I could invest about two and a half years in making myself a self-supporting writer. I did not hesitate a moment in deciding it was a reasonable investment.

This was mid-1947. His evaluation was based on having severance pay after leaving the British Army in mid-career. Today’s equivalent would be a good day job.

In some ways, Masters is my touchstone for intelligent planning of a writing life. I read his autobiography early on, shortly after I had made a similar summing up, and had decided I could afford most of a year to see if I could write.

I’ve told my story before in the first three posts of this blog, and I repeated it a year later. I apologize to those few who were with me that early, but it needs telling yet again because it explains Spirit Deer, which is now appearing over in Serial. You will also hear more about Masters, both next week and later.

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I started my college career at Michigan State in Biology, and later switched to Anthropology. The draft put me into the Navy, and then I returned to the University of Chicago for a masters degree. I intended to continue with my Ph.D., but didn’t work out that way.

I had lost my chops. Learning how to study, learning how to learn (not the same thing), and learning how to play the game (definitely not the same thing) are a college student’s chops. After four years in the Navy, it took me some time to get my chops back, and by then the next year’s quota for Ph.D. candidates had been filled. My would-be career was in hiatus.

However, all was not lost. When my major professor read my Master’s thesis, he told me to reapply the following year and they would find a place for me.

I had an unexpected year off. What to do? I knew I could write, but didn’t know if I could sit down day after day and write hundreds of pages. This was my chance to find out. The day after Labor Day, September 2, 1975, I sat down in front of my typewriter to find out.

Writing a science fiction novel or a fantasy novel would have called for a lot of time spent in world building. That wouldn’t tell me what I needed to know. A historical novel would have called for even more research, and a detective novel would have called for crafting a complex puzzle. I wasn’t worried about any of those skills. I just wanted to know — could I write word after word after word, day after day, week after week? And would it be fun?

I needed a minimal research story, so I decided to send my protagonist on a deer hunt, where he would get lost. I would set it in autumn, in a part of the Sierras I could drive to in a day if I needed to be on the scene. I would roll in a storm, with low hanging clouds so he couldn’t find north and couldn’t send up smoke. I intended to let him get out on his own. Over the weeks I piled misery after misery on the poor guy’s head.

Within two weeks, I was hooked. I was having a ball. Getting lost in the woods and finding my own way out was infinitely exciting, since every night I could go to my comfortable bed while poor Tim Carson (he had a last name then) tried to sleep on the frozen ground.

I never reapplied to Chicago, but I did go on to write many other novels.

Spirit Deer 2

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Last year, Tim had been allowed for the first time to go with his father on his yearly deer hunt. Then his father had given him a rifle for Christmas, and this year they would have hunted together for the first time. There had never been any open agreement between them – that would have spoiled the whole thing – and his father would never have admitted that these were rewards for good behavior. Good behavior was simply expected. But if Tim hadn’t gotten control of his temper, the rifle and the hunt would not have been his.

Tim picked up an axe and took his anger out on the wood.

* * *

Tim was standing beside the pickup when his parents left the next morning. His dad tossed a worn leather satchel into the back and squeezed his shoulder. “Your mother is going to drop me off on her way to work,” he said. “Maybe I’ll be able to get a day between runs before deer season is over.”

“Now don’t you go driving crazy!” Tim’s mother said.

“You know me, Helen.”

“Yes, I do.” She turned and kissed Tim, and said, “There are leftovers in the refrigerator. You’ll have to make your own supper. I’m taking another double shift while Susan is having her baby. Maybe you ought to bike over to see your Granddad.”

“All right, Mom,” Tim said, but inside he was shouting, Not you too! He knew he shouldn’t be angry at either of them, but he was. After the pickup pulled out of sight, he wandered around the yard, feeling abandoned and feeling sorry for himself.

Eventually, he went to his bedroom and sat down on the bed with his new rifle across his knees. It had never been fired, except on the practice range. He took the shells from the box on his desk and loaded it, then unloaded it again. Finally he dropped a half dozen cartridges into his pocket and picked up his pack. As long as both parents were gone for the night, he figured he might as well spend the time with his grandfather. Maybe he could get in some target practice, or maybe he could get his grandfather to tell some of the family tales about the old Miwuk Indian days.

He left a note for his mother and strapped his rifle across the handlebars of his bike. He turned up the main highway into the mountains, standing on his pedals to make the initial grade. When he got to the turnoff to his grandfather’s place, he hesitated. Up the road, only seven miles further into the mountains, was the campground where he and his father had parked last year when they went hunting. At least he could go there. He had all day.

The road rose sharply for those seven miles, and Tim was thoroughly winded when he arrived at the campground. Half a dozen empty campers were parked there, but there was no one in the campground. Everyone was out hunting.

Tim stood astraddle of his bike for a long time, running his hands across the smooth steel and wood of his rifle. He was sorely tempted to have his hunt anyway, alone. Finally he decided to just walk in the woods for an hour before he went down to his grandfather’s place. He reached for his cell phone to tell his grandfather, then remembered that it was at home.  The one girl he liked least had begun to call him twice a day, so he had stopped carrying it. more tomorrow

364. The Core Story

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photo by David Mayer

For the last month, these posts have been coming later in the day, in hopes of finding new readership in other time zones. I haven’t been happy with the results, so today I am reverting to the old posting schedule.

Over in Serial today, I begin presenting the novel Spirit Deer. I had some hesitation about this.

As it stands, Spirit Deer is a juvenile, not a YA. It would be suitable for most of the kids I taught in middle school, but too young for teenagers. It would stand with Island of the Blue Dolphins, not with Twilight.

It didn’t start out that way. When I originally wrote it, as an experiment to see if I could I write a complete novel, Spirit Deer was a book for adults. Tim had a last name, a wife, a job, a backstory, and other adult considerations. When he got lost in the woods and had to find his own way out, it was a catalyst for changing his life.

It was only 45,000 words however. That was too short for a western or a science fiction novel, even in the seventies, and way too short for a regular novel. And while the lost-and-found part of the story was fine, the relationships part wasn’t ready for prime time. It didn’t deserve to be published, and it wasn’t.

I moved on and my second novel,  Jandrax, and it was published. Fair trade; Spirit Deer had done its job by teaching me to write. It could be put away with no regrets.

But it wouldn’t die. The problem was, once you strip away the wife and the job and the friend and the adult concerns, the core story of how to keep alive when nature is trying to kill you was still powerful.

After a lot of years, and several other novels, I went back to Spirit Deer and stripped it down to it’s essence. At that level, Spirit Deer could have been about any male above the age of thirteen, all the way up to senility. To be fair, a woman could have endured what Tim endured, but I don’t think a woman would want to read a book about it. At least not in the eighties and nineties when the core story was tapping me on the shoulder and saying, “Don’t give up on me.”

Spirit Deer became a juvenile because of its length. When the wife and friend and backstory went away, there were only about 25,000 words left.

Consider this:

Man against nature, other men, or himself, is a story.
Man against nature, other men, or himself, plus gunfights, is a western.
Man against nature, other men, or himself, plus thugs, is a thriller.
Man against nature, other men, or himself, plus spies, is James Bond.
Man against nature, other men, or himself, plus sweet sex, is a romance.
Man against nature, other men, or himself, plus rough sex, is men’s action — a genre which has all but disappeared.
Man against nature, other men, or himself, plus sex, catching a big fish, and death on the last page, is Hemingway.

I didn’t want to add any of those plusses, and I didn’t want to make Spirit Deer artificially longer, so it became a juvenile. It’s still a good story, it taught me a lot, and it provides a lot for us to talk about as writers.

That is, I assume you are or want to be a writer, or I would have lost you in the second paragraph.

Spirit Deer will be presented in forty posts over in Serial, and there will be posts over here on A Writing Life expanding on the story, on being a beginning writer, and on how many ways a writer can present a core story.

Spirit Deer 1

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Spirit Deer
by Syd Logsdon

Chapter 1

Tim was packing for their hunting trip when his father came to his room. When he hesitated in the doorway, Tim knew that something was up, and that it wasn’t something good. He shoved another pair of jeans into the pack and said, “What’s the matter, Dad?”

“I just got a call from Mike Conway,” Tim’s father replied.  “He’s come down with the flu.”

Tim stood still with his hands resting quietly on the half filled pack, waiting for the rest.

“I have to drive his rig for him.”

“How far?” Tim asked.

Tim’s father came up and put his hand on Tim’s shoulder. “All the way to Chicago. I’m sorry, Tim”

Tim wished he was twelve years old again, so he could throw a screaming fit. He had been working on his temper these last two years, trying to be fair to his family, trying to be responsible – trying to be more like his dad. If he acted childish now, if he even whined, his father would be terribly disappointed in him. He didn’t want that, so he gritted his teeth and asked, “How soon will you be back?”

“That’s the rest of the bad news. I can’t pick up his load until tomorrow morning. Figure two days each way, and at least a day to unload and load at the other end. Five days; I’ll barely be back in time to make my own next run.”

Tim couldn’t believe it. It wasn’t fair. He had waited all year for this hunting trip and now it was going to be snatched away from him. He said, “I wish we had left two hours ago.”

Tim’s father shook his shoulder in a friendly way. “Then Mike would have driven sick. I’m glad I was here for him. He has been a good friend to all of us.”

It was true. Tim knew that; but inside, the selfish twelve year old he had been was screaming, “I hate it, I hate it, I hate it!” Tim was tired of being fair. His fingers tightened on the pack. He wanted to grab it up and throw it – preferably through a window, or at his dad.

But Tim saw his father’s eyes on him. He knew the look of disappointment that would come into those eyes if he gave in to childishness, and he never wanted to see that look again. His dad said, “Tim, I’m proud of you for taking this like a man.”

Tim couldn’t reply, and he couldn’t stand those eyes on him any longer. He nodded with set lips and left the room. He headed for the woodpile.

Two years ago, the last time he had thrown a tantrum, his father had taken him out to that woodpile. He had given the axe to Tim and had told him to chop wood. After ten minutes, when some of his anger had been drained away by smashing the heavy logs into firewood, his father had said, “Everyone gets angry. Everyone wants to have things go just right, and things never do. Now you’ve got a choice to make. You can cry like a baby when you don’t get your way, or you can act like a man. The next time you find yourself losing control, I want you to get up from whatever you are doing and come out here. Work it out, then come back.”

Tim had spent a lot of time at the woodpile that year. Gradually he had gained control of himself, and as his father grew proud of him, he had grown proud of himself.

It had been nearly a year since he had gone to the woodpile to take out his frustrations, but this was no ordinary disappointment. more tomorrow

Alien Autopsy (4)

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In Jandrax, I was happy to use modified mammals and birds. That was all the story needed. When I wrote Cyan, I faced a different situation. My crew was set down on an alien planet for one year, with the task of coming to understand its weather, geology, and ecology in order to prepare for colonization. They were all scientists, so their actions and conversations called for a deeper understanding of their new world than any other kind of science fiction novel would have required. That challenge was half the fun.

When I began Cyan, I had been studying ecology for about twenty years, starting back when I had to explain what the word meant. I later came to understand the essence of Earth’s taxonomy in the most rigorous possible way — I had had to condense it to a level which middle school students could understand without dying of boredom.

Terrestrial taxonomy looks something like this:taxon

Drop a salmon egg on the gunwale of your canoe and it will dry out in minutes. A chicken or turtle egg would survive the same treatment. This is the meaning of amniote egg (although there are other, competing meanings). Creatures who lack them, must lay their eggs in water. The rest of the chart should be clear, although simplified. For example, birds have scales on their legs as well as feathers elsewhere, and I skipped Dinosauria altogether.

I built up Cyan from the taxonomic level. If I had hadn’t been showing the planet through the eyes of a team of scientists, I would never have started out there.

It had to be weird but recognizable — that’s the key to all science fiction invention. It also required restraint. You can only explain so much to your reader without losing them, and beyond a certain point, your backstory is wasted effort.

I took grasses and weeds for granted. I gave my trees multiple trunks bound together, like a strangler fig without its victim. For something like insects, I made Chitropods – chitro sounds like chitin, and pod means foot, so the reader can be expected to infer an exoskeleton. Continuing the idea of inference, if we call the flying creatures who eat the chitropods pouchbats, the reader will draw a better picture in his mind that we could on paper.

The number of legs is important to Terrestrial arthropods, but I bypassed that by giving all chitropods many legs, but with only one joint each where each meets the body. This gave them a rolling gait “like caterpillars on crutches”.

These are throw-away inventions. They could have been applied to any ecosystem and they are not systemically related to each other. They alone would be good enough for most science fiction novels, but not for one about scientists teasing out the essence of their planet.

Here we need a key differentiation, from early in evolution, from which a thousand lesser differences can be derived. I decided that on Cyan, early in the development of chordate life, the vertebral column doubled at the posterior, giving Cyanian sea life twin tails. That changed everything. Earth fishes evolved legs from their fins. Cyanian “fishes” evolved legs from their split tails, so every Cyanian land creature is a tail-less hopper, fundamentally different from anything on Earth.

On Cyan, the classes are Pseudo-pisces, Amphibia, and Inturbia. No reptiles, no birds, no mammals, no dinosaurs. The Amphibia are cold blooded. Inturbia are inefficiently warm blooded. The term Inturbia should imply “internal body temperature un-perturbed by external changes”. Not every reader will get that, but writers should reward their best readers by not spelling everything out.

There are a thousand other details, but for that, you will just have to download Cyan.

All this is not to say that I didn’t invent interesting alien creatures. Kavines are incredibly fierce. Dropels, especially after they became domesticated, are cute and tasty. In the southern part of the upper continent, the Cyl developed something close to sapience, leading Viki to . . . nope, sorry, that’s a spoiler. I just started with taxonomy so they would all fit together.

Of course, too much consistency without outliers would be boring, so I added the globe wombs. The explorers see them shining in the treetops from their first minutes on the planet, and it takes a while for them to figure out what they mean.

Inturbia have live birth. Cyanian amphibs have to return to water to lay their eggs, except for one group, the Sphaeralvids, who produce globewombs. When a Sphaeralvid mother comes to term, she moves to a sunny spot in the treetops and exudes a transparent, leathery sac filled with a clear fluid like seawater. Into this she deposits fertile ova, then defecates. Algae from the Sphaeralvid mother’s bowels convert the feces into biomass and the Sphaeralvid nymphs fed off the algae.  When the feces are gone, the globewomb walls break down, leaving the now sizable nymphs free to face Cyan on their own.

Neat, huh? That is entirely too much detail for most books, but Cyan was written to show, realistically, what exploration of a new world might be like. This is just the kind of detail a crew of scientists would be recording.

Aside:      Shortly after posting this, I received a digital copy of the print-on-demand version of Cyan to proof. I spent May 29 and 30 in close reading of all 315 pages. The taxonomy and ecology of Cyan are backstory, dribbled out in bits here and there, but what the reader sees up front and in their faces are the individual alien beings. I realized that I need a fifth Alien Autopsy post to devote to the Cyl (the cover critter), but there is no space for it here. You will find it next Thursday over on the A Writing Life side of this website.

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I began Cyan a few years after I wrote Jandrax, and set it in the same universe but hundreds of years earlier.

I also have in mind a third novel set in the same universe, but very different. It will take place on Stormking, a prison planet with a Uranian inclination to the ecliptic. The people who make up its population are not scientists, but outcasts. They have no interest in taxonomy. They meet the creatures native to their world one by one, and all they care about are which ones can they eat and which ones want to eat them. This time I’ll stop worrying about how these alien creatures make up a logical system, and just weird them up big time. That ought to be fun, too.

Alien Autopsy (3)

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Imagined alien life forms can range from nearly human to outrageously strange. They can be imagined to meet story needs, or imagined first, with stories arising from their peculiarities.

Actually we can do even more. We can imagine whole ecologies. And again, we can go from minimalist to extreme. Arzor from Norton’s Beast Master is suspiciously like the American southwest, but Dune is a desert with an ecology quite a bit developed beyond any desert on Earth.

My first science fiction novel Jandrax [see note at the bottom of the page] is set on a deeply frozen planet, with only the equatorial region ice free. The only area I developed was a plain roughly a thousand miles across, centering on a massive freshwater lake. I stranded a starship with a load of fundamentalist passengers and a relatively unreligious crew, and watched the fireworks as they found two quite different ways of coping with the local ecology.

The area in question never sees rain, but during the cold season, snow and sleet falls, then melts during the (slightly) warm season. Viewed locally, this results in a dead season of snow, a brief season of wild plant growth during which massive migratory herds move through, and then a long season of dry, warm aftermath until the churned and destroyed vegetation is covered with new snow, where it and its seeds will wait for the next melt.

Viewed from the starship stranded in orbit, there is a moving line of green, eating up a mass of white, and followed by a growing gray, brown temporary desert.

I won’t tell you what happens to the people. That would be a spoiler to a book I’m hoping you will still read. Instead, let’s look at the alien creatures, starting with the herbivores.

Herbies are burrow bodied, tapir headed, fleet and harmless. Humpox don’t get much description, but don’t need it, with that name. Trihorns are as deadly as they sound. All are mammals, as are the carnivorous longnecks and krats. There are also huge carnivorous toothed birds called leers. They ended up on the cover.

These are the deliberately realistic creatures, all mammals and birds, devised in an era when warm blooded dinosaurs had not yet reached public awareness. In another part of the book, there is an interlude on an island which may be a hallucination or perhaps an encounter with the local version of God. Here the rules of realism don’t fully apply, and we find winged people who would never stand up to the laws of aerodynamics, and an insufferably cute, seal-faced, plump flying mammal called a dilwildi.

The example of Jandrax goes straight to the notion of purpose. Weird critters for the sake of weird critters is entirely valid. I love a weird critter novel. But Jandrax was my first full fledged novel, designed to show human interaction in a harsh, ice-age environment. It contains an entire religion, devised for the purpose of providing conflict. The ecology of the world was central to the story, and it was developed, but the individual alien creatures just needed to look right in an ice age environment. Nortonian minimalism is at work here.

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I was in high school when I  first read Richard McKenna ’s novella Hunter, Come Home. It was a deeply moving, human story of manhood, honor, and love. It also had a second dimension, the description of an entire sentient ecosystem in peril and fighting back.

Here is a brief summary. Mordinmen were descendants of a lost Earth colony which had fought a generations long war against the dinosaur-like creatures which inhabited their planet. Manhood had become symbolized by the killing of a dino, but now the dinos were scarce and poor families, like Roy Craig’s, could no longer afford a hunt.

Mordinmen had now claimed another planet and were setting about to destroy its native ecosystem, in order to rebuild it in the image of their home planet. Red dots (successful hunters) were running the show, assisted by blankies like Roy who was working toward the time he could make his kill on the new planet. Hired as specialists, the Belconti biologists were providing the virus-like Thanasis used to destroy the native life.

When the story begins, the fight to transform this new planet has been going on for decades, and it is failing. Now the Mordinmen, against warnings by the Belacaonti, are about to unleash newer, harsher, more dangerous plague on the planet.

That’s about as far as I can summarize without a spoiler alert. Roy Craig wants more than anything to be a full fledged member of his machismo society, but his blanky status leaves him marginalized and frustrated. At the same time, he is drawn to the relatively gentle society of the Belaconti with whom is is working, symbolized for him by the woman Midori Blake.

Other than the dinosaur like creatures imported by the Mordinmen, there is only one other alien species — the entire planet they are all on. The native life of the planet is totally interconnected, essentially a one-world-tree (shades of Gaia).

There is a three way contrast in Hunter, Come Home. The Mordinmen, from a macho society built on killing are placed in contrast to the Belaconti, scientists who understand and treasure the ecosystem they are trying to destroy, and they in turn are contrasted to the interlocked, semi-sentient native life of the planet. Roy and Midori are each caught in conflicting loyalties as the planned apocalypse moves forward.

This is one of those cases where world building, culture building, and alien species building work together seamlessly. more tomorrow

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[You can find Jandrax in used book stores. It is also available on this website, in an annotated form. Eventually it will be placed in Backfile, but I’ve been busy. I you want to read it here and now, your best bet for navigation is to begin by clicking the March 2016 archive and find Jandrax 2, then read and slide up, skipping every other post — archives alternates posts from the two blogs on this site. It is a bit of a pain. You can get Jandrax most days through Amazon’s cadre of used book stores. If you want the annotated version, in which I explain the various foibles of a young author, I plan to put it into an easily accessed form in Backfile, as soon after Westercon as I can find the time.]

Alien Autopsy (2)

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This material is the second post of four for the panel “Alien Autopsy: the biology of ET” Posts for the rest of the panels will be published in A Writing Life.

You can write a story and make up aliens – sentient or otherwise –  to fit. Or, you can make up aliens, and write a story about some peculiarity of their makeup. Decades of stories were about human mutants (not technically alien, but close enough) with psi powers. if you didn’t live through the fifties, you probably don’t realize how many ESP wielding mutants there were in science fiction, long before Professor X and his X-men made it to the comic books.

Sometimes a single biological factor, with its secondary ramifications, may suggest a whole species and their culture, as in Gardner Dozois novel Strangers.

It is the bittersweet story of a love affair between an Earth man and an alien woman of a people called the Cian. Throughout the novel, Dozois drops hints about the central paradox of Cianian culture, but Farber, his hero – if that is the right word – doesn’t pick up on them. Because he doesn’t understand his wife’s culture, he chooses to have children by her, thinking that is what she wants, and in the closing chapters Dozois drops a house on all of us when Farber – and we – discover that Cianian culture is all built around the fact that, because of a biological defect, its women always die in childbirth.

Technically, this is a gimmick story, but it is so well done that it doesn’t feel like one. Strangers is build around Cianian culture, but Cianian culture is built around the structure of its aliens’ reproductive biology.

There have also been a lot of less salutary books written about aliens with odd reproductive structures, but lets not go down that road.

(Aside: My novel Cyan, named after the planet which was named after the color, has no relationship to Dozois Cian, or the thousand other Cians — characters, book titles, and authors names — to be found if you type cian into Goodreads.)

Those of us that grew up with the original Star Trek knew aliens as humans with big masks and padded clothing. CGI made quite a bit of progress in removing that limitation in movies and subsequent TV programs, but the wildest aliens aren’t products of technology. They have been around for more than a century in novels. Remember War of the Worlds? Great monster. Even better radio broadcast.

Larry Niven’s Puppeteers might be hard to reproduce in a movie, but that doesn’t stop readers of Ringworld from enjoying them. In fact, that may be part of the appeal. We science fiction readers enjoy having a cadre of writers producing phalanxes of weird critters that would leave lesser readers shaking their heads.

No one has read all of science fiction, but I’ve read a lot. And in my slice of the SF universe, I have never found a writer who created more or weirder creatures than E. E. Smith, PhD; aka Doc Smith.

Smith was not available in either of the two libraries that were the centers of my childhood universe, but when I got to college, one of my roommates was a fan. He wisely started me on Galactic Patrol, and I read through to the end, then circled back. Take my word for it — keep the same order. If you start on the putative book one, Triplanetary, you’ll probably never make it past page five.

(Another aside: books four through six were written from 1937 through 1948, all appearing in Astounding. Smith wrote “book one” in 1934, unconnected to the rest. When he got a chance to see the complete series published, he rewrote Triplanetary to fit the others, wrote an entire new “book two”, First Lensman, and tweaked the rest. They fit together, and the first two have moments of excellence, but the last four are the essence of the tale. If you find the style too old fashioned after two chapters of Galactic Patrol, move on; you were born too late.)

You will, however,  miss a menagerie of strange aliens, both sentient and otherwise. I’ll describe just two; first Worsel:

. . . there was hurtling downward toward them a veritable dragon: a nightmare’s horror of hideously reptilian head, of leathern wings, of viciously fanged jaws, of frightfully taloned feet,  of multiple knotty arms, of long, sinuous heavily-scaled serpent’s body.

This is the creature who will become the second most formidable Lensman, and Kennison’ s best friend. The third second-stage Lensman was Tregonsee:

This . . .apparition was at least erect, which was something. His body was the size and shape of an oil-drum. Beneath this massive cylinder of a body were four short, blocky legs upon which he waddled about with surprising speed. Midway up the body, above each leg, there sprouted out a ten-foot-long, writhing, boneless, tentacular arm, which toward the extremity branched out into dozens of lesser tentacles, ranging in size from hair-like tendrils up to mighty fingers two inches or more in diameter. Tregonsee’s head was merely a neckless, immobile, bulging dome in the center of the flat upper surface of his body — a dome bearing neither eyes nor ears, but only four equally-spaced toothless mouths and four single, flaring nostrils.

These are the minions of civilization; the baddies look worse.

Part of the power of these descriptions comes from E. E. Smith’s writing style. In flipping through the internet while writing this, I ran across a comment that if the Lensmen series were to be offered for publication today, it would not be accepted. That is absolutely true, but it is also true that without the Lensmen series, there would be no Star Wars, nor any other space opera. The Lensman series set the pattern that all others would follow, and nothing that came after was as good as the original.

Heinlein was Smith’s friend, and our best picture of him, from RAH, shows Smith as the original of the Gray Lensman, and shows his wife as the original of Clarissa MacDougal. Much of the charm of the series lies in Kennison’s Boy Scout incorruptibility. Those who say he has no personality are wrong. He simply has a personality that is out of the modern norm. Like Jesus. Which is exactly what he should be, as the end product of thousands of years of Arisan work in perfecting human DNA.

All this works, and the hundreds of weird aliens work, because E. E. Smith’s writing style is essentially naive. His rolling cascades of description could only come from someone who is so sure of himself that he is incapable of embarrassment.

It’s been a long time since that kind of writer has been in vogue. more tomorrow

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Alien Autopsy (1)

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Kinnison and Tregonsee well visualized,
with Worsel drawn badly as an alligator.
Interior illustration from a 1941 Astounding.

Raven’s Run concluded Monday, May 22. A new novel, Spirit Deer, will begin in Serial on June 5. Meanwhile, I am scheduled to participate in five panels at Westercon this year. Posts relating to the panel “What Makes the Golden Age Golden?” were presented in Serial last week.

This material is for the second panel “Alien Autopsy: the biology of ET”. Posts for the rest of the panels will be published in A Writing Life.

Take one human being. Count his parts. Now start changing the appearance, number, or configuration of those parts. You might come up with:

A two headed mutant on a century ship.
A seven foot humanoid with curving horns coming out of his forehead.
A human who consists of “four-hundred-odd pounds of rawhide and whalebone”, because his ancestors colonized a high gee planet.

See how easy it is. And that, by the way, was a quiz. All three examples are from major writers of science fiction. Their identities are at the bottom of the page. Sometimes, a little tweak all it takes, and for that you don’t need any help. Anyone could do it, although not everyone does it equally well.

     The first of these three was a monster/villain type, and that was all the critter building required to let him do his job.
     The second was an ersatz Amerindian and everybody knew it. By the way, the term Amerindian was used by anthropologists for a short time before Native American took over, and this author may be the only one to have used it in science fiction. Hint, hint.
     The last human variant was a fairly major character, with an actual personality (albeit a cardboard one) and he looked like he did because he had to, in order to play the role assigned to him.

These are all humans, or the galactic equivalent of human. Sentient beings. HILFs. A HILF is a Highly Intelligent Life Form, a term coined by Ursula Le Guin, which should have replaced sentient being, but never caught on. Sentient actually means “having sensation”, not “having intelligence”. An earthworm is sentient in the dictionary sense, but science fiction speaks its own language.

Non-sentient (in the SF sense) beings can also be created by simple tweaks.

The people of Gorth in Star Gate ride larngs; I’m referring to the original novel by Norton, unrelated to the movie or TV series using the same name. A larng is shaggy, clawed, and has a bad temper, but basically he is just a hairy horse with an attitude. On Arzor — Norton, again, in Beast Master and its sequels — humans have to watch out for yoris (think alligators with a poison gland) while they herd frawns (analog to big-horn sheep) across a landscape suspiciously like the American southwest.

I’m not complaining. Beast Master is one of my favorite Norton novels. There is plenty of intrigue, adventure, battle, and family turmoil. It didn’t need a full scale exercise in critter building. In fact, more imagination devoted to that aspect of the novel would just have slowed things down.

Marion Zimmer Bradley, in Hunters of the Red Moon and its sequel The Survivors,  gave us a mammalian snake, complete with nipples, and a giant hyper-fast weasel. She also gave us some sentient beings — there was the cat-critter and the dinosaur-critter. Again, I am not making fun. These sentients had plenty of individuality and charm, but it came from their cultures, not their body structures.

You might call this the minimalist approach; it’s surprising how often it works. Norton was the master of the technique. Gordon Dickson could paint a whole landscape in twenty words. If you have a story to tell, and that story just requires local color, it’s often best not to waste your efforts and your reader’s time in excessive descriptions of the local flora and fauna.

You can combine the minimalist approach with an occasional zinger that brings you reader up short. Marion Zimmer Bradley did that in The Survivors with the proto-saurian Aratak. In the middle of the action, he gets a pheromone soaked calling card from an enemy proto-saurian and disappears. Weeks later he comes back with a smile on his face, ready to take up the quest where they were when he deserted his companions.

I have read hundreds of stories with minimally different aliens. They were all as good, or bad, as the underlying story allowed. I never felt cheated.

However, if you want to go to the next level, and make your aliens really different, that works too. We’ll look at that tomorrow.     

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Oh, yes, I almost forgot. The quiz. The examples were from:

Robert Heinlein, Orphans of the Sky
Andre Norton, the Norbies from Beast Master
E. E. Smith, Galactic Patrol, referring, of course, to Peter vanBuskirk.