Tag Archives: literature

193. Boys at Work

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By at Wk atwI grew up in the fifties, when men were men and women were women, at least in the movies, sitcoms, books, and in the minds of the adults I knew.

Reality was a bit different, of course.

Since we didn’t have modern conveniences – for the first few years of my life we didn’t even have running water – just doing “women’s work” was a full time occupation. Still, when you are young and poor, as my parents were, you do what is needed. When we moved to what became the home farm, there were no fences. My mother and I (I was seven)  put a fifty pound roll of barbed wire onto a crowbar and walked the quarter mile south boundary unrolling it, five times repeated, while my father set fence posts, tightened the strands with a block and tackle, and stapled up the wires.

Farm women did things like that whenever it was needed, but it wasn’t considered normal. It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be. Men had their work and women had theirs and crossing over was, if not abnormal, at least out of the ordinary.

I grew up. The fifties became the sixties. When women’s lib came along, I bought in 100%, but I still don’t criticize the old ways indiscriminately. They were a part of the way people made a living. Sometimes those customs made life unnecessarily hard on women – or men – but they weren’t without a basis in need.

The division of labor was also there in the books kids read. Boys read the Hardy Boys and girls read Nancy Drew.

The Hardy Boys worked for a living; they were detectives. But it always seemed more like play, and more like fantasy than reality. Tom Swift (Jr.) was worse; ten minutes at the drawing board and he would pass the plans on to the work force of Swift Enterprises. Three weeks later his rocket ship would be done. It felt like a portrayal of work designed for kids who had never worked, and who wouldn’t notice how fake it was. Frank and Joe and Tom weren’t kids at all. They were watered down, unrealistic pseudo-adults.

I’m sure there were plenty of books about kids living kid’s lives, with kid’s concerns, while their parents stayed in the background. I certainly read enough of those books after I became a teacher, but they never crossed my path when I was young. I don’t think they would have interested me if they had.

There was another kind of book that did interest me; fascinated me, in fact. You would not go far wrong if you called it apprenticeship literature. These were stories about young guys, usually in their teens, who wanted to become men. They worked. They learned from adults who knew the jobs the youngsters wanted to learn. They were young auto mechanics, or wipers in the engine room of a steam ship, or kids who did odd jobs at the air field so they could learn how to fly, or starry eyed young rocket engineers learning their trade.

I plan to spend the rest of the week on that kind of book.

190. Riddle of the Sands

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Riddle of the Sands was the first British spy story, according to Eric Ambler. Over the years, it has been a favorite of lovers of old-fashioned British writing and of small boat sailors, both real and wannabe. Riddle of the Sands is fiction, but it usually get listed with such books as Falcon on the Baltic (referenced internally) or A Voyage Alone in the Yawl Rob Roy – century old books about real small boat journeys.

Don’t expect a thriller; it may say thriller on your copy’s cover, but you know how unreliable back blurbs are. If you are a fan of Bond and Bourne, you’ll fall asleep by the third page, but it is one of my all time favorite books because it is so English, in the best sense of the word.

You might get the idea from the BREXIT posts and from 188. Before the Storm that I am down on the English. Far from it. It’s just that they spent several centuries as winners on the world stage, and winners get a lot of chances to do terrible things to the losers. America has now inherited their position, along with all its moral perils.

Riddle of the Sands is the story of two Brits, Davies and Carruthers, on an extended exploration of the waters off the Netherlands and Germany a decade before World War I. It unfolds slowly, in typical old-British fashion with intimations from the first that there is more going on than appears on the surface. Carruthers finally worms the truth out of Davies, and discovers that he is convinced that Dollmann, a German yachtsman of his acquaintance, is in fact a renegade Englishman acting as a spy for the Germans. Davies fears that there is a plot afoot to do great harm to England, and he has recruited Carruthers to help him ferret it out.

The plot against England is real and the danger is imminent, and its unfolding is properly slow and logical. But the charm of the book lies elsewhere, in the day to day work of seamanship as the two try to discover Dollmann’s intentions. And they are such good chaps, in the most English sense of decency, courage, and selfless patriotism.

Dollmann’s plot is uncovered, the British authorities are warned and danger is averted. Yet, at the end of the book, the author complains that the events uncovered by Davies and Carruthers have again been forgotten, and danger is still on the horizon.

Indeed, it was.

189. World War Zero

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They called it the Great War, for its size and horror. The term World War I came later, to distinguish it from WW II, which came with even greater size and horror. Neither name is accurate. By 1914, Britain had already been waging world wars for at least 250 years.

Of course early Europeans had been fighting since the first Homo Sapiens Sapiens hit the last Neanderthal on the head with a rock. With increasing food sources, skirmishes became battles. With the rise of social organization, so that armies could stay in the field longer, battles became wars. With increasing population density, the wars could become both wide spread and long lasting, but a world war could not be fought until Europe exploded across the globe as the Age of Exploration morphed into the Age of Colonization.

Portugal began it all. Spain – including Columbus – came close behind, followed by the Dutch, French and English. Exploration led to colonization, and colonies were fought over. The Dutch were early world wide colonizers, especially in the Americas and the far East. The Anglo-Dutch wars of the 1600s were primarily fought in the North Sea, but the prize was world domination. The English won, New Amsterdam became New York, and the Dutch were left dominating the Spice Islands (basically modern Indonesia).

North America was fought over for centuries by Spain, England and France. Our French and Indian War was only one theatre in the globe spanning Seven Years War, fought by England and her allies against France and hers. That conflict involved Europe, the Americas, Africa, India, and the Philippines.

The Treaty of Paris ended the war, but not the fighting. A decade later, France was again fighting the English as allies of the newly forming United States. The three way battle between France, England and Spain continued off and on through the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon, and at every step the nations’ colonies were involved as actors or as pawns. The Louisiana Purchase, which defined America, came about because France, which had control of the territory through its control of Spain, needed to consolidate its position before engaging England, by obtaining money while getting rid of a vulnerable possession.

You should realize that I have left out innumerable wars, battles, and skirmishes to keep the size of this post in check. All this conflict was on a world wide scale, in pursuit of world wide trade. Call it World War Zero.

Needless to say, this much active history can’t pass without an accompanying literature. My personal interests are not military, but they are maritime, so I found myself caught up in the stories of “wooden ships and iron men” despite myself. I discovered Forrester’s Hornblower when I was in my twenties and read them all, several times. Hornblower is such a complex character, so full of ambition and self-doubt, that I can’t recommend him to everyone, even though he is my favorite. I would start someone new to this kind of novel with Kent’s Bolitho. He is a more normally heroic captain; I liked him quite well, but by the time I was half way through his adventures I had overdosed on the genre. Bear in mind that I had probably read all the Hornblowers three times before I discovered Bolitho, so that isn’t a criticism. For the last decade or so, O’Brian’s Aubrey and Maturin books have been widely popular. By the time they came on the scene, I had moved on, so I can only report them as hearsay.

188. Before the Storm

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On July 28, 1914, 102 years ago Thursday, World War I began.

The years just before the war were a high point in British life, at least if we judge by Masterpiece Theatre. John Buchan set his early espionage novel The Thirty-nine Steps in that era, writing it shortly after WWI had begun. The Riddle of the Sands (see this Wednesday’s post) was an actual prophesy of the coming conflict, since it was published before the war began.

After the Great War, as it was then called, Buchan and many others looked back to the pre-war era with longing. They saw it as a golden age. Perhaps; it depends on your perspective. Young men who expected to work their way up through the ranks of British society – like Buchan when he was young – saw a world of opportunity before them. Their perspective was very different from the working class poor trapped by industrialism.

It was certainly different from the millions in British colonies, toiling to keep the Empire rich, and the ruling class richer.

Victoria was dead; Victorianism wasn’t, at least on the surface. Baden-Powell had just organized the Boy Scouts. Conservatism, especially in sexual matters, was the norm – on the surface.

What was going on at gatherings in the great houses of England was often a different matter. There:

much silent and furtive corridor-creeping between one double bedroom and another took place. . . . During the day, a clandestine affair could develop unobserved . . . At night, the names written on cards slotted into brass holders on the bedroom doors were as helpful to lovers as to the maids bringing early morning tea. Assignations confirmed by . . . a whispered exchange over the candle that lit the way up the stairs . . . ensured that extra-marital sex went on with ease. . . At six in the morning a hand-bell rung on each of the bedroom floors gave guests time to return to their own beds before the early morning tea trays arrived.

That quotation is from The Perfect Summer by Juliet Nicholson. John Buchan’s world never looked like this. (Some critics suggest that it would have been better if it had.) Nicholson has clearly cherry picked among the movers and shakers, the avant-garde, the spoiled children of the rich to whom the rules didn’t apply, to find the subjects of her book. She portrays a world of arranged, often loveless, marriages with gatherings in the great houses designed to facilitate swapping partners on the sly.

Discretion was the watchword. Letting the rest of the world in on your secrets, even if they had similar secrets, could lead to social disaster. Mrs. Patrick Campbell said, “Does it really matter what these affectionate people do in the bedroom as long as they don’t do it in the street and frighten the horses?” The answer to her rhetorical question was, Yes. It mattered very much. Just ask Lady Cunnard, who was in bed with Thomas Beecham when an early morning workman on a ladder saw the two of them through a crack in her bedroom curtain. The scandal almost ruined her.

This is the atmosphere in which the ruling class of England spent the summer of 1911, while their servants scurried about facilitating their dalliances, while the working class struck for higher wages and better working conditions, while natives in tropical colonies slaved in the pitiless sun. And while Germany hungered for their own colonies in a world where the early arriving nations had already gathered them up and sucked them dry.

Their days were numbered.

181. Star Trek on Sale

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In my favorite used books store, overstocked Star Trek novels went on sale recently, so I bought a sackful – mostly those that appeared to feature Spock.

I hated Star Trek when it aired in the sixties. I was about eighteen, and just coming off of five or six years or reading the best of “real” science fiction. I’ve mellowed since. Reruns today have a nostalgic glow, and besides, the Star Trek movies did a lot to wash the bad taste of the Littlies and the Will of Landru out of my mouth.

I’ve even come to appreciate Shatner. When Star Trek was in its original run, I thought Shatner epitomized everything that was wrong with the series. Now I’m a writer, so now I know better. It wasn’t Shatner, the actor, or Kirk, the character that made me wince. It was the words the writers sometimes put in his mouth.

Some of the stories were excellent, some were acceptable, and almost all had some leavening of humor. But there were clunkers – oh, my, were there clunkers. Looking back, I have to credit Shatner with extreme professionalism for keeping a straight face while saying some of the lines the writers fed him.

Best Star Trek episode — Balance of Terror

Worst Star Trek episode — The Omega Glory

There, how’s that for starting a controversy.

The novels I bought yesterday were as mixed as the original series. I sat down with _______ by _______ and found it so overwritten that I couldn’t get past page ten. Then I picked up The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah, and found it to be a pleasant read despite the title. (There will be a review tomorrow.)

About a year ago, I spent a few hours in another used bookstore, picking out a selection of thirty and forty year old books that I had read as a young man. I was struck by how many authors were there who had written one or two good – sometimes excellent – books and then disappeared. 

It’s hard to get published, and even harder to make a living at writing. Most writers also do something else. Many teach college English; many science fiction writers are actually scientists. I had some early success, followed by a career teaching middle school, so I know the drill.

Actually, this all has a long history. Mark Twain and Charles Dickens did not make their fortunes as writers, despite their success. Mark Twain was a raconteur, a humorist, a sparkling speaker who filled halls across America. He made a bundle as a speaker, which helped sell his books, which in turn helped fill the halls whenever he spoke. Charles Dickens was looking at poverty, half way through his career, when he wrote A Christmas Carol. He spent the rest of his life doing readings of that wonderful tale, and making the money his printed works were not providing.

I think that writing Star Trek novels must be keeping a lot of writers fed. The original TV series certainly did. As I was reading the wiki list of episodes to remind myself of the title of that excrecable tale of the Yangs and Comms, I saw Richard Matheson, Robert Bloch, Theodore Sturgeon, Fredric Brown, Harlan Ellison, Norman Spinrad, David Gerrold, Nathan Butler, and Jerry Sohl, all names I had known from science fiction novels outside Star Trek.

FYI, Nathan Butler is a pen name of Jerry Sohl. I read several of his novels in the local library in my early teens, but he never became a household name in the science fiction universe, despite an admirable list of publications. It appears that he wrote widely, but made his living in television.

Doesn’t that sound familiar?

180. Exiled on Stormking

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Every science fiction writer has his own style. Mine is built around stories that take place in the near future, in which I try to imagine what would actually happen. Stories of far flung galactic empires or invasions by advanced life forms are certainly legitimate, and I occasionally like to read them. But I write about what I think is most likely to actually happen.

That calls for choices and the most basic is, will or won’t mankind find a practical, artificial immortality. I can’t think of a more basic divergence in fictional timelines. If we do, then events in A Fond Farewell to Dying and its two sequels strike me as entirely logical, even likely.

If not, then we are likely to go on breeding and increasing in population. We are also likely to explore our tiny corner of the galaxy before anyone perfects a faster than light drive. None of our present technologies would allow that. There are a dozen possibilities under consideration, but I am neither impressed nor interested. As I said in 23. Star Drives, it seems more likely that something out there which no one has thought of yet will slap humanity in the face and completely change physics.

You don’t think so? I suggest that you read some of the history of science. Science usually gets things right, but it seems to chase a whole battalion of wild geese first. In the short run, whatever is believed today is likely to be disproved tomorrow. Clinging too tightly to current doctrine is no way to predict the future.

In Cyan, an off stage character named Lassiter discovers that gravity has an inhibiting effect on the conversion of matter to energy. Do I believe that is so? Of course not. I do believe that we are due for a game changer fully as outré as that sometime in the next fifty years. Set your clock.

Cyan, due out momentarily, sets the stage for the exploration of nearby stars at relativistic speeds. While we are exploring Cyan around Procyon, off stage we learn a little about the planetary resources of Alpha Centauri, Sirius, Epsilon Eridani, Tau Ceti. and Epsilon Indi. Call it world building times six, it is a setup for a series of novels.

The first sequel to Cyan, plotted but not yet written, will be called Stormking or Dreamsinger, probably the latter. Stormking is a planet around Sirius A. Perturbation from Sirius B have given it a Uranian tilt, although paleontological evidence shows that this is a relatively recent phenomenon. The human colony lives in space habitats; they are beltmen from Sol’s asteroid belt who have escaped Earth’s destruction. They chose Sirius because Stormking, the only planet in the sweet spot for human life, if basically uninhabitable.

These refugees traveled to Sirius to avoid planetbounds, but during the crowded, decades long journey they had to embrace either fierceness or civility. The former would have killed them, but choosing the latter weakened their spirit.

They no longer tolerate deviations from the norm, yet they are too civil to institute punishment. What choice remains? They send their deviants into exile on Stormking.

Most of them died. A few lived and had children. By the opening of our story, most of the population of Stormking was born there. They have violated no laws, but their rough natures will not allow them to be repatriated.

Antrim, who has been tagged to act as anthropologist and study these children of outlaws, has just arrived on Stormking. He will learn more than he could ever imagine.

175. 1776, the movie

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Ah, June 29th. Its just about time to watch the movie 1776 again. It is a family tradition to watch it every year just before Independence Day.

My wife and I saw it first as a play on July 4, 1976, in an outdoor presentation. We had gone to the big city – locally that means San Francisco – to rub elbows with the crowds on the day of the Bicentennial. That afternoon, we were hooked. When it came out as a movie, we went to see it, then bought the VHS. Yes, this was before DVDs, or downloading, or streaming, or TiVo; actually, I think it was before we had bought a VCR, but we wanted to always have a copy.

1776 is a great patriotic rush of a movie but I wouldn’t recommend that you learn your history by watching it. The Columbia Companion to American History on Film says that “inaccuracies pervade 1776, though few are very troubling.” Maybe, but I’m not so sure. Some of the best parts of the movie just didn’t happen.

In fact, the wiki summary of historical accuracy praises the play while documenting error after error until you get the impression that nothing in it was true to life. See the movie first, then read the quibbles, because 1776 is not a historical movie, but an allegory, or better still, a retelling. It goes to the essence of the hesitation and worry, even fear, that attended the event, all wrapped in a story of arrogance, honest outrage, pride, and sacrifice. The writing is beautiful, the quips are side-splitting. Much of the dialog is taken from the words of people who were there, gleaned from works written by them years later.

In fact, there is no lack of historical material to work from in reconstructing the event, even though it was conducted in secrecy. These were literate men, with a clear picture of their own historical importance. Most of them told their own stories in later years.

Unfortunately, they tend to disagree on what actually happened. Years after I first saw the play, I went back to college for an MA in History, and thereafter set about trying to make my own knowledge of the event more accurate. It is surprisingly hard to do. Even the date July 4 is in partial doubt. The Declaration was approved on July 4. Jefferson, Adams, and Franklin claim that it was signed that day, but only a hand written copy then existed, and not all members were present. Those present may have signed the hand written copy – or not. We just don’t know. Certainly the printed version that we now view in the National Archives was not ready for some weeks. It was signed on August 2, but not by every member, as not all were present. Some signatures were apparently added piecemeal later on.

I care about historical accuracy, but when I am watching 1776, I let that go by and immerse myself in a moving theatrical experience. Now don’t bother me any further. I’ve got the DVD cued up.

172. Flash Fiction Day

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Today we have a short post on a short subject.

This Saturday, June 25, is Flash Fiction Day in Great Britain. The nice thing about the internet, is that even Americans can click on a British site, so you can check them out.

The term flash fiction is relatively new to me. I discovered it about a year ago while I was writing the blog entry A Very Short Story over on Serial. That entry has since been moved to Backfile.

The story in question was Koan; at 175 words, it would not be eligible for Saturday’s 100 word contest, but it’s short enough not to take itself too seriously, which seems to be important in flash fiction.

I remember, many years ago, one of the science fiction magazines ran a series of vignettes (think of vignette as an old word for flash fiction), then ran a contest for “The Shortest Science Fiction Story Ever Told.” The subject of the contest was, “The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door . . .”

Most of the entries were forgettable, but one stuck in my mind for its cleverness, brevity, and sheer laziness – yes, what else would you call adding only seven words. The entire story read:

The last man on Earth sat alone in his room. There was a knock on the door. It was the last woman on Earth.

Snicker!

I have to warn you about the British website. There isn’t any science fiction there. It’s all fuzzy and warm and about feelings and relationships. Very academic, very much “literature”, pretty much what you would expect from a site which announces Supported using public funding by ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND on its masthead.

If you want another kind of flash fiction, just Google. There are all kinds. For example, National Flash Fiction Day in New Zealand is on June 22, because it’s the shortest day in the year – in the southern hemisphere. I like that.

So, how shall I end this bit? Of course — A flash essay about flash fiction. Eighteen words ought to do it.

Steak is good. Vegetables are good. A balanced diet is admirable. But there’s nothing wrong with potato chips.

160. Stranger in a Strange Land

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Stranger in a Strange Land proves that Heinlein was a hippie guru. Starship Troopers proves that he was a right wing madman. —-  From last post.

That’s nonsense, of course, but they do seem to stake out the two ends of the Heinlein continuum.

I’m a great fan of Heinlein, but neither of these books is a favorite of mine. I first encountered Stranger hiding in plain sight. It was 1963; we had just moved into a new high school. I was special assistant to an English teacher who was too lazy to shelve books himself. He let me put up all the new arrivals for the new library and Stranger was one of them, looking innocent in hardback with a Rodin statue on the cover. It wouldn’t have lasted long in rural Oklahoma, except no one else ever read it.

Stranger talks a lot about sex, in a fashion the hippie generation (in full disclosure, that would be my generation) took to be an anthem of free love. To many, it was the answer. That was a silly reaction, because Heinlein wasn’t in the answer business; he was in the question business. If you want to know what Heinlein was trying to do, just read what he said:

NOTICE:
All men, gods, and planets in this story are imaginary. Any coincidence of names is regretted.

In other words, “I dare you to to believe I’m not talking about you.” Compare it to the introduction to Huck Finn.

NOTICE
PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.
BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR, Per G.G., Chief of Ordnance.

If that sounds just a trifle similar, remember that Heinlein was a great fan of Mr. Clemens.

Heinlein had always been a chatty writer. It was a big part of his charm, and why he was able to get scientific ideas across so painlessly. Look at the first part of Have Spacesuit, Will Travel. It is a highly technical exposition of how a space suit works, that nobody else could have managed successfully. Heinlein put his technicalities into the words of a naive young enthusiast, and the boy’s personality pulled us along.

Stranger was a project that Heinlein had wrestled with for years, and when he finally wrote it, he took no heed of market pressures – including length. Even after Putnam asked him to cut the book, it still ran 160,000 words.

For the religious right, it was blasphemy; for the hippie generation, it was the word. For me, even as a teenager, it was a wet firecracker. All chit-chat about sex and everything else, but nothing ever happened. A book that sets out to disrupt society cannot be dull. Stranger was dull.

For me, the best thing about Stranger was that its success allowed Heinlein more freedom from constraints, especially length constraints. He had been a master of compression. Look at Time for the Stars or Door into Summer. Every sentence, even the chit-chat, carries the story forward at a brisk pace. 

Heinlein never wrote like that again, but his later, longer stories – despite occasional clunkers – are fine in a new way. They allowed him to sit in a metaphorical easy chair and tell long, rambling stories to those of us who loved to hear him talk.

156. A Prince of the Captivity

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John Buchan is a late-blooming inheritor of the literature of Kipling and Scott. He is best known for a minor thriller, the Thirty-nine Steps, and for its four sequels featuring Richard Hannay. He also wrote A Prince of the Captivity which, for my money, is the apotheosis of the Hannay books.

Buchan was the son of a Free Church of Scotland minister. He had a traditional education, culminating is studying the Classics at Oxford, where he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem The Pilgrim Fathers. His background suggests a man heavily influenced by conservative Scottish religion – which is about as conservative as religion gets.

His books bear out that suggestion, and none more so than this one.

A Prince of the Captivity

As the story begins, Adam Melfort is on trial for forgery. His friends, and there are many, do not believe his confession, and we quickly learn that they are right. His empty-headed wife has forged the check which he admits to. He goes to prison. She goes free, flittering on through her empty life, divorces Adam, and disappears out of the story.

Prison is barely described. A Prince of the Captivity is not a story about external events, but about what happens in Adam’s mind and soul.

In a typical novel, the previous sentence would be a reviewer’s signal to avoid it at all costs. Not here; the external events that forge Melfort’s soul are drawn from the toolbox of a skillful writer of thrillers. This story moves rapidly, with a few tedious exceptions, but when each part of the story comes to a close, the result, win or lose, means less than the changes it brings to Melfort.

Melfort is on a mission. His time in prison has pulled him out of normal society, and he now feels that whatever remains for him to do must be done from the shadows. He was an officer in the British Army, with a brilliant career before him. That is gone now. He passes World War I posing as a simple-minded peasant on a Dutch farm where the occupying German troops laugh at him, play cruel tricks on him, and otherwise ignore him. They do not know that he is running a ring of spies, made up of others as unprepossessing as he.

After the war, Melfort must find his life’s mission on his own. He leads an expedition to Greenland to find and save a missing explorer, then sets out to find leaders of quality to whom he can lend support. All those he chooses fail him, but he only moves on and continues his quest.

All this sounds vague and tedious, but it isn’t. This is still the Buchan of the Hannay books. The external events that make up the book are sharp, dangerous, decisive, and exciting. You could ignore the sub-text and read it as a thriller. The cover blurb on my copy calls it, “A thunderingly good read,” and it is. But it is also much more than that.

The Hannay books begin with England in danger, move to England at war, and end with England after the war, supposedly at peace, but not at peace with herself. World War I tore English society apart, and shook her certainty. The depression which followed made things worse.

A Prince of the Captivity, published in 1933, moves beyond the Hannay books. It reeks of discontent and hidden in the background is the sound of boots marching and armies mobilizing. Adam Melfort sacrificed his future to save his wife, and now he has to sacrifice anew. England sacrificed to win the Great War, and now it will have to sacrifice again.

Most critics were not kind to A Prince of the Captivity. I’m not surprised. Melding a thriller, an apotheosis of a personal moral code, and a vague prophesy of coming disaster is not easy. Perhaps it is not possible. Buchan didn’t do a perfect job of it, but he did write a fine novel. A Prince of the Captivity is my favorite of the dozen or so Buchan’s I have read.