Tag Archives: memoir

724. Steampunk, Maybe

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Sometime about 2005 I found Kenneth Oppel’s Airborn at a book fair where I was teaching. It appealed to me, enough to think about writing something similar. It was classified as steampunk, a term I had not yet encountered.

I started looking around to find out what this steampunk was, and found the answer confusing. There were dirigibles everywhere in steampunk-world, but you were more likely to run into Jack the Ripper than airmen at work. The fantasy/horror end of the steampunk continuum was not to my liking.

I had plenty of straight fantasy and straight science fiction on my plate, so steampunk dropped down to the bottom of my consciousness where it would remain until the stars alligned, astronomically or astrologically.

That happened in 2017. Cyan had recently been published and I was a speaker at Westercon 70 in Tempe, Arizona. I decided to look in on every panel that had anything to do with steampunk. I wasn’t about to miss my chance to learn from the authors who were actually writing in the sub-genre.

I didn’t find many definiitons; in fact, there didn’t seem to be any boundaries. It seems that steampunk is a culture, or an aesthetic. (As opposed to an anesthetic, which a lot of accepted literature is.) Or maybe it was just a bunch of people having a fun return to the literature of their childhoods. For some, that meant Jules Verne; for others, Frankenstein.

It seemed to be a revisiting of the wonders and  horrors of science, when science was in its infancy. Most of the writers seemed to bunch up at the ends of the continuum — either Verniers or Steiners. I clearly belonged to the Vernier camp.

(Yes, I know Verniers or Steiners is a bad joke, but steampunk is a frequently lighthearted thing, and I’m in a mood today. Get over it.)

I visited a bunch of steampunk related panels, but all I found out about boundaries was that there aren’t any. I liked a lot of what I heard, but I couldn’t find my own place in steampunk. Then I visited a panel called The Science of Steampunk: What Makes the Gears Go Round?

The panel was divided between Verniers and Steiners, all of whom were steampunk authors. The Steiners had less to say, and looked a little bored. I concluded that they really didn’t care much what made the gears go round, as long as they had fun spinning them. The Verniers were looking for “real world” connections.

A series of speculative questions was put to the panel, including, “What real world changes could have kept steam power dominant further into the future?” No one had any great ideas. I suggested from the audience that a country with much coal and no oil would continue using steam for economic reasons.

That’s a probable scenario, but not brillant deduction. Then a bomb went off in my head.

What if that country were Britain?

What if WWI had happend early?

What if British efforts in that war had included an organization of spies, saboteurs, and assassins?

What if that group had assassinated Nikolaus Otto, Gottleib Daimler, and Rudolf Diesel, delaying the adoption of an internal combustion engine, and what if they had continuously sabotaged Zepplin’s work, while stealing his ideas?

What if Britain had another secret weapon, a real-world invention that has been forgotten by the real world?

Now I don’t mean to tell you that all of that came into my consciousness in a heartbeat, but the embryo of it did. I knew the real world situation circa 1860 — 1910 from studying history, including knowledge of the four critical German scientists and inventors.

I also knew about their secret weapon, and it is extremely obscure.

Also silly.

Also an example of a well intentioned law that made a situation worse.

However, that secret weapon could lead to a world where Britain, not Germany, had dirigibles, ruled the world, and was hated by everybody.

It was time to start writing, but I still had a question. Was this novel going to really be  steampunk?

We can talk about that next time, while I am telling you about the secret weapon.

more next week

713. You and Me

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About sixty-eight years ago I was sitting in a fourth or fifth grade classroom, learning that I should always say, “You and I,” and that I was never supposed to say “Me and you”. I didn’t know that right there in small town Oklahoma I was being given a double-whammy of British imperialism and English politeness.

I did know that every child was going to continue saying “me and you” outside the classroom, and I suspected that the teacher probably would too. Adults were always full of advice they didn’t follow themselves.

I also knew that the adults in my little town didn’t talk like the people on television, and certainly didn’t speak the same English that I was finding in all those books from the county library.

I’m not talking about accent. Books are silent. Whatever was written in them, echoed in my head in the same Okie accent that I spoke. Even the local newsman on KTUL Tulsa, who used different words in different places than the people in my town, did so in the same Okie accent.

The teacher said, “Never say me and you. Always say you and I.” The implication was, memorize it and don’t ask any questions.

It wasn’t even grammatical. Let’s assume that we keep the other person first and ourselves second — it is “you and I” if we are using it as subject, and “you and me” if we are using it as an object. They didn’t teach us that.

Putting the person spoken to before the speaker didn’t really have anything to do with grammar. It existed because America grew out of British culture, before the rest of the world arrived. Britain was a stratified society in which you kept your head down unless you were top dog.

Don’t step in front of your betters. Don’t complain if they cut in line. Don’t speak until spoken to. And put your betters first in the sentence.

Any stratified society is dangerous, because your place in the system is never permanent or safe. If you work hard enough, you can rise — but if you slack off, you will fall.

That’s for the upper strata. If you are too far down, you had better plan to stay there, or your “betters” will make you wish you had. We are referring to Brits in Britain, high caste Hindus interacting with low caste Hindus in India, or anybody White in the era of my childhood, anywhere near the South, talking to anybody Black.

Until recently, and maybe still, that also included women trying to interact with men.

The English politeness — you and me, but never me and you — is not a matter of Mary Poppins sweetness and light. It is a word to the wise. Never assert your own value in a stratified society. Never put yourself first. Those above you will slap you down if you do.

— << >> —

In that class, I was actually being taught that grammar (in the larger sense of rules of language, both acknowledged and hidden) is what language is all about. It would be years later that I realized that an equally compelling case could be made for the idea that usage is what language is all about. Finally I came to realize that it is, and probably always will be, a struggle between those two positions.

To be short and snarky, usage is what people say, and grammar is what intellectuals tell people that they should have said.

So who cares? You do, probably, if you are or want to be a writer.

Language is always changing, and one advantage of being seventy-eight and being a writer is that I have lived long enough to see it happen. A disadvantage (from the same viewpoint) is that language always seems to move toward the more simple, at the expense of the measured, the stately, and the beautiful.

I hate it. I throw metaphorical bricks at my TV screen every evening because of the way the characters are talking.

Nevertheless, the changes are real. They reflect the language people actually speak. They make up the language you readers will expect to read.

— << >> —

When I was about fourteen, I knew I wanted to go to college, and I knew that the people there were not going to speak small town Okie. I got an authoritative book of grammar, Strunk and White, and made it part of my thinking. (It didn’t help my accent, but that’s another post.)

Even then, I didn’t buy into S&W as if it were the word of God, and over the years I have found that much of their advice was not helpful. No problem. I have never read a book without muttering, “Yeah, maybe?”, from time to time under my breath.

I know now that sentence fragments are as legitimate as sentences, and are frequently a great deal more expressive. Strunk or White would slap my knuckles for that, but who cares.

Are you a writer, or a would-be writer? I can’t imagine you coming this far into this post if you aren’t. There is a great variety of English out there. Pick and choose. Make it your own. Decide who your audience is, and how far you want to go toward sounding like them.

Especially,  be prepared for more changes in the future. Like it or not, change is coming.

709. Redneck Granny

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Here is my redneck Granny, who died long before the original of this was posted. I’m sure she would hate everything I have said here, but I love her anyway.

Redneck Granny

I started this blog late in 2015. When Black History Month rolled around in 2016, I had a lot to say — enough to fill the month with posts. This, somewhat modified, was one of them.

— << >> —

The first African slaves arrived in America about 400 years ago. If we count twenty-five years as a generation, that’s 16 generations.

Let’s look at the typical American today. He or she had two parents and they had four parents between them, and their parents had eight parents between them. And so forth. Up the line sixteen generations, that’s 32,768 direct ancestors. If you don’t believe me, do the math.

All those ancestors sent DNA down the line to make our average American. What are the chances that not one packet of DNA was out of Africa? What are the chances that there weren’t a lot more than one out of Africa in his/her lineage?

You might think whites didn’t mix with blacks in the olden days, but are you sure? Are you counting all the times when a white man was in charge, and a black woman didn’t have any say in the matter? They wouldn’t even have called it rape in 1619. Nor 1719. Nor 1819. In a lot of places they wouldn’t have called it rape in 1919. 2019 — maybe.

So much for black purity, but that isn’t any big secret. What about white purity?

How white do you have to look to pass for white? Three quarters? Seven eighths? How many generations does that take? Not many.

Now what are the chances that a whitish, black female would claim to be white if she could? Or a whitish, black male? Forget the twenty-first century when African-Americans are proud of what they are. Project your thinking back to when being white meant being free, and being black meant being a slave. Wouldn’t you pass for white, if you could get away with it?

I would. Some of my (and your) ancestors probably did.

More math. Lets say that by 1700 (eighty years into the era of American slavery, thirteen generations ago), one hundred partially negro girls could and did pass for white. That’s not a big number to surmise. In fact, it’s ridiculously small.

Let’s give doubters no excuse for their doubts. Let’s say that these passing girls only averaged two children who went on to have children. That’s certainly a minimal estimation. Their descendants are boys and girls who would disappear into the white gene pool.

That’s 408,000 offspring after 13 generations. Which is to say, in 2025.

Wow. And after a couple of generations, if Mom kept her mouth shut, none of them would know they were passing. They would believe they were white.

That doesn’t cover all the other blacks, male and female, who passed in the last four hundred years. That is only one hundred, starting in 1700. But there weren’t just a hundred, they didn’t start in 1700, and they haven’t stopped to this day.

There is one big change in the twenty-first century. People who are light skinned and could call themselves white, now often identify as black. It’s probably confusing for “white” folks who haven’t thought it through.

I don’t think it confuses “black” folks at all.

If math doesn’t impress you, if you think numbers lie, then let’s make it personal.

Rhett Butler was partly black. Scarlet O’Hara was partly black. Simon Legree was partly black.

You’re partly black. I’m partly black. And my Oklahoma relatives just disowned me.

That’s mighty white of them.

— << >> —

This was a modified version of a post from February 3, 2016. If you are wondering why this old “white” guy is so concerned with black identity, it is all a matter of upbringing. In my case, that means being raised on the edge of the South in the fifties in a culture that didn’t exactly hate blacks, but didn’t much like them either. My people fully believed in the separation of the races; the only good black was somebody who lived someplace else.

The problem with the community viewpoint was television. On the six o’clock news I saw black people being washed down the sidewalk by firehoses because they were marching for the right to be human.

They were right. We were wrong. Hardly anybody in my town got that message, but I did.

I escaped to college, where I studied Anthropology and got an extended view of what British imperialism had done to the black and brown people of the world.

Then I studied History, where I found out that English imperialism had been just as harmful to the ruddy-faced and red-haired poor in Scotland and Ireland. I also found out what white America had done to the Native Americans, the Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and even the Irish.

In California, where I now live, white incomers from the east now discriminate against the Latinos, who owned California after they took it away from the California Indians, and before the white east-coast Americans took it away from them.

Over the years I wrote about all of those displaced and disadvantage peoples in my blog and now that has all been gathered together for publication.

Originally I planned to call the book . . .

Your Redneck Granny is a Black Woman, and she doesn’t even know it

I had kept that provocative phrase in my back pocket for years, but when it came to reality, the title . . .

Your Redneck Granny has a secret

. . . seemed more likely to make a prospective reader curious enough to pick up the book.

I originally wanted to publish it early in 2026, but the five novels of the Menhir Series will take the whole year to release. Instead Redneck Granny is planned for release on January 20, 2027, just about a year from today. Keep it in mind and tell your friends.

700. Double Lives

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Double Lives

By 1984, I had published and perished (see the post from November 12th), but I wasn’t about to give up writing. Nevertheless, things were getting tight and something had to change.

I hadn’t left academia because I hated it. I just couldn’t find my place. I missed out on the popularity of ecological studies by just a few years, but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise. I had wanted to study the beautiful symmetry of animal interactions in the wild, but today ecologists study how fast Earth is going down the toilet.

There was one field I had an interest in, but had never studied, and that was History. I was about to change that, for three reasons.

First, I was writing every day, and making progress slowly, but it wasn’t making me any money.

Second, I was able to make a full day’s progress in a few hours. At that point, the well was dry. I had tried to push on past my limits, and that didn’t work. If I forced twice as many pages as came naturally in a day, the next day I was empty. I could write nothing until the well of imagination refilled.

Third, I really missed college. I had always planned on a Ph. D. and I felt empty sitting alone in a room with a typewriter.

And I still had most of my GI Bill.

The original GI Bill was generous. I had used some of it getting my first masters at University of Chicago, but if I worked things right, there was enough left to get a second MA in History. There was a school in easy driving distance, California State College, Stanislaus. A few years later it became California State University, Stanislaus. I was a California resident, so tuition was low. If I took just enough classes to be a full time student, it would take longer to get my new degree, but that was part of the plan. There would be enough GI Bill money left over after books and tuition to fill in some of the blanks in my personal economy, and I could work all day again — half on novels, half on getting my History degree.

The plan worked for several years. I had something new for my brain to chew on in those dead half days when my novel writing had run dry, yet I was still able to make progress on my novels. I wrote fiction all but the few months near the end when I was writing my thesis.

That thesis would be The Crisis in American Shipping and Shipbuilding, 1862 – 1914. Yes, I started out as a dry land Oklahoma boy, but my grandfather in Florida was in the Coast Guard auxiliary. From him I inherited a fascination with all things maritime.

Plan B worked for about three years, and now I had a second MA. But to twist the words of the old country song, even though I wasn’t completely broke, I was still badly bent.

Plan C was more permanent.

I had worked as a substitute teacher and found I really liked middle school kids. No one else seemed to, so there were plenty of jobs available. I went back to school again at the University of the Pacific — my fourth college — for a summer session, took a one year internship, and worked my way into teaching by the back door.

For a while, there was no more writing, but there was money. Teachers don’t make much, but writers often make nothing, so my salary seemed like a fortune.

Most of my effort in the first few years went to learning my trade. You see, what they teach you in Biology is useful, what they teach you in Anthropology will broaden your mind, what they teach you in Social Science is enlightening, what they teach you in History is wonderful. I know. I’ve been through all of them.

What they teach you in teachers school is pure BS, so the first thing I had to learn was how to teach. Fortunately there were plenty of people to help me, experienced teachers who had learned it just like I was, in the classroom.

There was also a lot of delayed life to be lived. Being a writer is a lot like being a monk, and the pay is a lot like being unemployed. When I was a writer, I couldn’t afford a computer. Now that I wasn’t a writer, I could.

After a few years, I was writing again, now part time. My wife and I finally made it to Europe, and that brought about the novel Raven’s Run. Then I wrote a novel about teaching called Symphony in a Minor Key. The Menhir Series kept limping along, slowly growing, book by book. Before it was completely finished, I wrote a sequel in the same world with a different main character called Who Once Were Kin.

I finally solved the conundrum of Cyan, and the second half became a pleasure to write. When Cyan was finished, it sold to EDGE of Canada.

In support of its release, I started this blog.

More about that next Wednesday.

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.

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.

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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.

689. Birth of a Blog

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I started the blog you are reading on the twenty-ninth of August, 2015. I took a hiatus in 2020, because of covid. Here is what I said that day.

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Yesterday, here in California, the Governor requested that all people over 65 self-isolate. That makes sense to me, and I passed that milestone seven years ago, so my wife and I are going to hunker down and become temporary hermits. That isn’t too much of a hardship since we live in the country and keep a well stocked larder anyway.

This change shouldn’t bother my blog, but it does. I’m not worried for my wife and myself, but worrying about the rest of the country and the world beyond weighs on me. It has also been getting harder lately to come up with new things to say, especially on subjects that don’t call for hours of research for a post that will be read in three minutes. This is post 678, after all.

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Actually, A Writing Life had more than 678 posts. From day one it was a double effort, a website called A Writing Life with almost daily entries in a blog of the same name (causing some confusion) and a secondary blog on the same website called Serial which provided many of my fiction writings in serial form.

According to WordPress who handles my blog and keeps track of such things, I had 1280 posts when I restarted this blog.

During the hiatus, seven posts trickled through, so make that 1273 posts in less than five years. I know I was working my tail off during that period, but it still boggles my mind.

I made a lot of friends during that period, but after six years off most of them probably don’t even know I’m still alive.

I am.

I disappeared but I never went away. During those years I finally put the last period on a five book series of novels I have been working on since 1972 called The Menhir Series (fantasy). I completed two new novels The Cost of Empire (alternate universe) and Like Clockwork (time travel), and am fighting with another called Dreamsinger, a sideways sequel to Cyan which won’t quite come to heel yet.

You will be seeing all my works, old and new, in e-book format in the next few years. The Cost of Empire and Like Clockwork won’t be published for a while, so I won’t name their release dates. Too many possibilities lie between now and then.

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.