Tag Archives: science fiction

513. Heinlein’s Time for the Stars

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Yesterday (June 25) I had a request from a reader for advice on which Heinleins to read after Stranger and Starship Troopers. I replied that my favorites were Door into Summer for the old compact Heinleins, Time Enough for Love for the later, long-winded ones, and Time for the Stars among the juveniles.

The exchange reminded me of a post I had written but not published, because I had an excess of Heinlein related posts going at the time. Here it is, slightly updated and finally published.

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Time for the Stars is one of my favorite Heinlein juveniles. I am using it here as a foil to Spirit Deer, in talking about core stories.

Spirit Deer was my first novel, written for adults but very short. I later stripped it of wife and adult friends, and turned into a juvenile. It appeared in Serial between June 5th and August 10th of last year. See 364. The Core Story and 398. Summing up Spirit Deer.

If you strip Time for the Stars and Spirit Deer both down to the core, and they are quest stories. The explorers on the torch ship Lewis and Clark are ostensibly seeking knowledge, but for the young communication techs (i.e. telepaths) that quest in inextricably bound up with a search for maturity. Tim, in Spirit Deer, is seeking survival, and a return to normalcy, but he cannot achieve that without finding maturity.

If you haven’t read Time for the Stars (and why haven’t you?), here is a brief summary.

Tom and Pat Bartlett are twin brothers who are part of an experiment to see if telepathy exists. They go along as a joke, and find that it is not a joke. The “secret language” they have used all their lives turns out to actually be telepathy. What they think other people can’t understand, they in fact cannot hear.

The discovery that makes this more than a parlor trick is that true telepaths can communicate long distances — proven as far as Pluto — and their contact does not show a speed of light time lag. Now relativistic starships can go out from star to star without having to return home to bring back their data.

Tom goes to space and Pat, the dominating twin, stays behind. Tom learns to assert his independence, especially as his stay-behind twin ages much more rapidly. The trip is grueling, the exploration dangerous, and eventually Tom returns home, still young while his twin has grown old.

That is all the summary I can give without spoilers, but how much do you need?

The voyage of the Lewis and Clark is a long trip away and a quick return. Tim, in Spirit Deer, has a quick plunge into the wild and a long return. They differ in detail, but the arc is home — away — home again.

There aren’t more than a billion stories with that arc, significantly including the Heinlein juveniles Starman Jones, Tunnel in the Sky, and Have Spacesuit — Will Travel, all of which are excellent. Upon returning home, these story’s characters characters are changed by their experiences. Jones’ life is most changed, with some losses and great gains. Rod Walker of Tunnel finds a career. Kip Russell of Spacesuit gets on with plans for his life, but his options are immensely augmented.

All four are Heinlein at his best.

512. Time Jacks

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Beginning last July I wrote a steampunk novel called Cost of Empire. It is presently seeking a home. I am now working on a second but very different steampunk novel called Like Clockwork. Besides being weird, it also insists on being about 65,000 words long. I really don’t know what I’m going to do about that; that would be a happy length for a 70s or 80s novel, but today’s market demands 100,000 words. Writing is easy compared to meeting the artificial needs of publishing, but short or long, LC is nearing completion.

(Of course, the post last Wednesday makes some of this obsolete. That is the problem with writing ahead.)

It is time to start thinking about a new novel. I have a time travel trilogy I began outlining about two years ago, just before Empire demanded to be written. I’ve been looking over my notes from then, to get my head in order before plunging in. At that time, I wrote a short first chapter, just to test things out.

Would you like to see it? I thought so. The novel will be called Time Jacks.

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In the middle of the continent is a state called Kansas, and in the middle of Kansas is a medium sized town devoted to Time.

Near the middle of the town is a university devoted to the study of time, its mathematical nature, manipulation, inviolability (or lack thereof), and philosophical implications. Bleekman University is the most theoretical of all theoretical institutions, where the finest mathematicians and the finest of philosophers meet and attempt to understand each other, while both are trying to understand Bleekman’s legacy.

On a lintel stone over the entrance to the campus is an engraving of Bleekman’s Theorem. It takes one hundred seventeen symbols, some of which are seen nowhere else in the history of human thought, and some of which are still disputed by those mathematicians and philosophers.

There are three other institutions in Bleekman — surely you guessed that would be the name of the town. Near the university on the north is the Institute of Applications, where the knowledge brought back from alterlines is studied before it is released to the world at large. Scholars at the Institute ask, ”How does it work?” and “What use can we make of it?”

Scholars at Bleekman University do not care for such questions. They spend their time — that statement is almost a pun in itself — poking about on the edges of the Universal Why, knowing that they will never penetrate to its core.

Scholars from the Institute and from the University rarely talk to each other. That may be fortunate for mankind. Opinions differ on this matter.

South of both is “The Academy”. It has a longer name, but no one uses it. Here the brightest and best from all over the Earth come to become Time Agents. Ten thousand are admitted each autumn, having been previously winnowed by harsh competitive examinations. After three years, a few hundred become technicians and a few dozen become agents.

As you might expect, the graduates are a cocky lot.

[I left space here for several paragraphs I wasn’t yet ready to write.]

Oh, you noticed? Not surprising, really. I mentioned the University and three other institutions, then only told you about two.

In the center of Bleekman is a dome, a hundred meters high and a thousand meters across. You can see it from space, but I can’t tell you much more than that. Agents go in through the dome’s only entrance and a year or so later they come out, changed forever. Within the dome are the mechanisms of transference, which anyone is welcome to understand. Just study Bleekman’s Theorem, and good luck to you.

There are many other exits from the dome, but they are all in other timelines; alterlines, most people call them. This Bleekman, this Kansas, this Earth, and this universe constitute the homeline.

Time agents go through the dome to various elsewheres and bring back treasure. They go with the courage of a lion and the stealth of a mouse, changing nothing, and stealing nothing but knowledge.

That is all I can tell you. No one knows more, except for the few who have passed the entrance exams and the three years of winnowing that produces time agents.

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Okay, it’s clearly a rough draft, but I like where it is going. This will be fun.

511. Novel or Novella

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If you don’t know about <tor.com>, it is a high quality on-line magazine of science fiction. For years they were one of the few places which would take unagented submissions for short stories, although they have recently changed that policy. They have been mostly closed to novellas as well, but they still have occasional open periods, and one has just begun.

Since most submissions end in, “Try again elsewhere,” I have not previously mentioned any of my own submissions in this blog. However this opening for novellas has brought up some things I want to talk about. Again (see also 146. Novella 1).

Before we begin, here is a piece of information. SFWA (Science Fiction Writers of America), the professional organization which awards the Nebulas, breaks stories into these categories:

short story    under 7,500 words
novelette       7,500 – 17,500 words
novella         17,500 – 40,000 words
novel            40,000 words and up

In the last few years, most people would add very short, or flash fiction, to this list.

I have been working since January on a novel called Like Clockwork, but it has been fighting back. It wants to be 65,000 words long. That would be just right for a submission in the 1970s or ’80s, but is too short to sell in today’s market, unless you are self-publishing.

I’m not. I have considered it seriously, but it calls for a skill set that I don’t have, and don’t want. So I continued soldiering on, hoping for inspiration. Then I became aware of the novella opening at Tor (dot) com, which left me with a choice — try to make Like Clockwork longer than it wanted to be, self-publish it at its natural length, or cut it drastically to create a novella.

My own first publication was a novella, To Go Not Gently in Galaxy in 1978. It was roughly the first third of the novel A Fond Farewell to Dying which I was then in the process of writing.

Cutting TGNG out of FFTD was easy. There was a natural break in the action that allowed me to end the story without leaving the reader feeling cheated.

Cutting Like Clockwork down to size would be another matter; I would have to remove about a third of the book. That would be painful, but would not be a new situation. The floor under my computer is already metaphorically knee deep with good writing that didn’t fit into various novels.

First I had to cut out a long section that took place before the main story. That was easy enough, except that it meant dribbling the necessary backstory into the rest of the book a sentence here and a paragraph there. Smoothly, you understand, and without letting the seams show.

There were four main characters and four lesser characters in Like Clockwork, all paired off. One pair had to be dropped. Some of the things that they did for the plot had to be shoehorned into the lives of the remaining pairs. Smoothly; without letting the seams show.

Much was lost. The Great Babbage, companion to the Great Clock, simply went away. It was reduced to a couple of off-hand references, and that really hurt.  Altogether, it took me a month to chew 65,000 words down to 39,000 words. I submitted it earlier this week, retitled The Clock That Ate Time.

Will you be reading it soon? The writer’s psychotic optimism says yes, but I didn’t destroy any of the files that I cut, and everything that was removed can always be restored if necessary.

That’s my recent history, but it is only worth telling because it points out a larger problem.

Only certain lengths of story can find a market in today’s world. There are homes for flash fiction and for short stories, and novellas can occasionally find their place, but the lengths between 40,000 words and about 90,000 words reside in a wasteland. That is really unfortunate, since most of the best novels in the history of science fiction were in that range.

It’s all a matter of fashion. The best of today’s science fiction would have been rejected unread as too long to publish just a few decades ago.

To put it bluntly, then and now both stink if you have a good story that is the wrong length.

All this is somewhat malleable but there are stories that need to be a certain length. If you are a young writer, this profiling by story length is one more reason self publishing may be your future.

506. The Great American Read

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The Great American Read or
What is that book doing on the list,
and where is my favorite?

If you want to start a fight, make a list of great books, then step back while every reader on Earth disagrees with you.

When the Great American Read was announced, I couldn’t wait to see the list. I love lists of great books. It turned out, however, that these weren’t great books, but favorite books. That is a major distinction. Great books or influential books would include the Koran, The Wealth of Nations, Das Kapital, and a raft of works everybody has heard of, but few have read. That list would not include Fifty Shades of Grey or The Martian.

It reminded me of a collection called Best Remembered Poems which included a selection of Purple Cow poems but did not contain Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress. Popularity and quality are different categories.

As I worked my way deeper into the GAR, I found that the original list of 100 came from a group of readers carefully selected for diversity. That’s all very twenty-first century, but it is likely to find oddball books as well as good ones.

Not that I am complaining. If I made a list of my 100 favorite books, no one would else like all of them either. That’s just the nature of the game.

The GAR people ask, “Which book is your favorite?” I read the list and didn’t find my favorites. A Wizard of Earthsea wasn’t there, which was criminal, but not surprising. Kidnapped wasn’t there, nor was anything else by Robert Louis Stevenson. That was surprising. What about Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde?

As a side note, in 2014 The Guardian did a list of the 100 best novels and Kidnapped came in number 24.

So I looked at the list and started to make notes.

There were 8 books I had read and liked — Tom Sawyer, The Call of the Wild, The Count of Monte Cristo, Dune, The Hunt for Red October, The Lord of the Rings, Siddhartha, and The Sun Also Rises. None of these were my favorites, and only Tom Sawyer and Siddhartha would be runners-up for that title.

I won’t identify those I didn’t read or didn’t like, but . . .

There were 4 I read but didn’t like.
There were 4 I read part way through and tossed.
There were 3 I knew enough about to avoid.
There were 2 I read, but found them to be nothing special.
There were 8 I had not read, but I had read other books by the same author. This included authors I had liked and ones I had disliked.
There were 3 which were on my to-read list. I subsequently read one of these and demoted it to nothing special.

There was also one book — Moby Dick — that I read as a child in an abridged version, and plan to read in its entirety when I have a spare decade.

Looking at my tally, you might think I’m picky. That’s probably true, but there are a thousand books in my read-and-liked category that weren’t on this list. I just don’t seem to read what everybody else reads.

How about you? There is a reply button at the top of the post.

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The original question was, what is your favorite. For me, out of this list, it would be The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  The Lord of the Rings beats it for scope, The Sun Also Rises beats it for gravitas, but it seems to me the only way to choose from such a varied list is to judge a book on how well it does what it sets out to do. For that, TS beats them all.

If I didn’t have to choose from their hundred, I think I would choose The Old Man and the Sea.

505. Heinlein and the Hippies

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I have come to realize the value of a post title in finding readers, but I try to avoid bait and switch. To provide a balancing bit of honesty, this isn’t about the effect Stranger in a Strange Land had on the Free Love generation, but on the relationship between Heinlein and one particular group of hippies, the Jefferson Airplane, aka the Jefferson Starship.

For the relationship of hippies to Stranger, see 160. Stranger in a Strange Land. That way I don’t have to tell you again that I read it early and found it to be a dud.

As for me, I was a half-way hippie. I opposed the war, grew a beard, let my hair go long, and dressed in rumpled casual. The wild, multi-colored garb of TV hippies was largely a media invention. Real hippies wore Army surplus because it was cheap, which was also one of my sartorial motivations.

However, I didn’t do drugs and I was in the wrong place in the wrong time. My college roommate spent the Summer of Love in California; I spent it looking for archaeological sites in the backwoods of Michigan. He told me all about it when he came back in the fall; I had been out of touch and didn’t even know it had happened.

The only thing I understood as it happened in 1967 was the music, blaring out of the car radio as our survey crew drove around looking for archeology sites. I particularly liked that new group the Jefferson Airplane.

Which brings me to the heart of the post. In 1969, Paul Kantner wrote Heinlein a letter asking permission to quote from his work. I knew this, after a fashion, from contemporary gossip, and it was evident in the lyrics soon after, but I didn’t get confirmation until the second volume of Heinlein’s biography came out (see below). I’ll quote some of Heinlein’s reply:

I am pleased by your courtesy . . . Bits and pieces from my stories have been used by many people . . . and it is rare indeed for anyone to bother to ask my permission.

Heinlein gave permission and went on to ask for some autographed albums in return, since he was a fan of their work. Who knew?

The album Blows Against the Empire came out about a year later, by Paul Kantner and the Jefferson Starship. Despite the title. it was actually a compendium band filling in the time between the breakup of Jefferson Airplane and its later rebirth as Jefferson Starship.

It would be impossible to overstate how much music from this era was fueled by LSD. If you seek out the full lyrics, you’ll see how many drug references I have left out of what follows:

from the cut Hijack

You know – a starship circling in the sky – it ought to be ready by 1990
They’ll be building it up in the air ever since 1980
People with a clever plan can assume the role of the mighty
And hijack the starship
Carry 7000 people past the sun
And our babes’ll wander naked thru the cities of the universe

7000 Gypsies swirling together
Offering to the sun in the name of the weather
Gonna hijack – hijack the starship

from the cut Starship

Out – the one remaining way to go
Free – the only way to fall
The light in the night is the sun
And it can carry you around the planetary ground
And the planetary whip of the sun

Mankind gone from the cage
All the years gone from your age

If you are at all familiar with Heinlein, you will recognize that this imagery is from the novel Methuselah’s Children, originally serialized in 1941, which was also the first appearance of Lazarus Long. Of course Kantner reworked it. The hijackers are not Howards fleeing for their lives, but drug-fired hippies whose faith in everything turning out well is a bit laughable in hindsight.

Like all the first half dozen Jefferson Airplane or Starship albums, I loved it. If you are younger than old, there is an excellent change that you’ve never heard music that shows the spirit of innovation and experimentation that was the hallmark of the 60’s. The music that appears on TV flashback programming is fine stuff, but it is also the tame stuff. The raw stuff doesn’t get replayed.

If you are curious, give this album an online listen, although you may not care for it.

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Robert A. Heinlein, vol. 2, The Man Who Learned Better by William H. Patterson, Jr, p. 312. FYI, the subtitle does not refer to a change of heart by Heinlein, but is RAH’s idea of one of the three or four basic plots in fiction, and one he often used.

503. Colliding Conventions

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On the fourth of July weekend in 1939, the first World Science Fiction Convention (Worldcon) was held in New York City. 200 people attended. It has met yearly since, except during WWII.

Despite its name, Worldcon didn’t leave the United States until 1948, when it was held in Toronto. It didn’t leave North America until 1957 when it was held in London. It didn’t leave the English speaking world until 1970 when it was held in Heidelberg.

Worldcon is best known for the fact that it gives out the Hugo Awards.

In 1948 the LA Science Fantasy Society started a west coast convention (Westercon) for those who couldn’t afford to go east for Worldcon. This competing event also meets yearly.

In those years when Worldcon meets outside North America, a North American Science Fiction Convention (NASFiC) is held somewhere in the US.

This year’s Worldcon 76 will be held in San Jose, California August 16-20. In 2019, Worldcon will be held in Dublin, Ireland, so a NASFiC should be held. The bid, which will be decided in San Jose, is for Layton, Utah on July fourth weekend.

This year’s Westercon starts tomorrow in Denver. Next year it will be in Utah — Layton, Utah, to be precise.

Yes, you did see them palm that ace.

In 2019, Westercon, which began as an alternative to Worldcon, and NASFiC, which occurs only when Worldcon is somewhere else in the world, will be the same convention. I wonder how that is going to work out?

Just fine, I would imagine.

I attended Westercons 33 and 34 in Los Angeles and Sacramento shortly after my first two novels came out. I attended Westercon 70 in Tempe last year just after Cyan was published.

In preparation for that convention, I made eighteen posts here on a number of subjects that would be covered on panels in Tempe. If you missed them, or if you want to see “How to Build a Culture” which I presented at Westercon 34, click on Westercon in the menu bar at the top of this page.

This year I am skipping Westercon 71, Denver, for my first Worldcon, just down the hill a hundred miles or so in San Jose. This should be fun.

502. Harlan Ellison

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When his book Love Ain’t Nothing But Sex Misspelled came out in 1968, Harlan Ellison said that the title “reflects an attitude toward reality I would dearly love to see come to pass”. I disagreed — I still do — but it didn’t matter.  Ellison was out there kicking American culture in the shins, and that was good enough for me. He was an angry man in an angry era.

I never met the man and I stopped reading him after about 1970, so this is about early Ellison. He was a major part of my life through his short stories, still some of the best ever written, but I lost track of him about the time he went to Hollywood.

I read him through the time when I dumped God, watched blacks being fire-hosed in the deep South, escaped my parents, met up with the rest of the world, watched Americans on TV burning Viet Nam to the ground, and sat listening to the first draft lottery. My number was 41, by the way. Yikes! Everybody was angry on one side or the other of every issue (sound familiar?).

Through all this, Harlan Ellison was writing stories that kicked ass and took names. He was the perfect writer for the era.

He died yesterday (June 28th). I saw it this morning on a trailer sliding by under pictures of the latest atrocity on my morning news cast. I haven’t checked out the details yet. I don’t need to before writing this, because this is bibliography, not biography.

There were a lot of angry people writing things in the sixties. Most of them have been forgotten. Harlan is remembered because he made the things he wrote come real and resonate at a level beyond the moment. His short stories were the best I ever encountered, occasional clunker notwithstanding.

I went to my bookshelf and pulled out Paingod, I Have No Mouth & I Must Scream, The Beast that Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, From the Land of Fear, Earthman, Go Home, and Love Ain’t Nothing but Sex Misspelled. The first five are paperback. You can write them down when you finish reading and go to your neighborhood used book store, where the best in literature resides.

I say that because I just took a moment to check my local library’s online catalog. There are twelve entries on Ellison, all from late in his career, or things for which he wrote introductions. When he was hot, he was a newsstand sensation.

Newsstand: a place to buy newspapers, magazines, and paperback genre fiction. In other words, ephemera. You would never find War and Peace at a newsstand. You also wouldn’t find any of these books five months after they were published.

You will also find Ellison in a lot of anthologies beginning with the word Best . . .. He won a lot of Hugos and Nebulas, not always for his best work.

That’s it. The rest is a laundry list and the admonition to seek these out and read them. You’ll never find better.

Get Love Ain’t Nothing but Sex Misspelled and read it all, but pay particular attention to the Preface, and Pretty Maggie Moneyeyes. If you want to read the most honest writer’s autobiography ever submitted under the name of fiction, try Final Shtick.

Get as many of the others as you can still find. There will be some overlap since Love Ain’t . . . was mostly a self-chosen best-of. The gems awaiting you are not only the rest of the stories, but all of the highly personal introductions that never made it into Love Ain’t . . ..

I particularly recommend that you look at Earthman, Go Home to see what bad editing can do to a good writer. Not only was the original title Ellison Wonderland changed from something charming to something thumb-fingered dumb, but the cover contains every robot cliché that Ellison would never have used.

501. Preface to Robert Louis Stevenson

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As anyone who has read even a few posts here knows, I started AWL to find readers for my novels, specifically for Cyan which had just been accepted by EDGE. I had no idea how many interesting people I would meet along the way. Some of them were fellow writers of science fiction, fantasy, and steampunk, some were fellow bloggers who wanted to be writers (this post is for you, as you’ll see at the end), and some of the ones I met indirectly had been dead for many years.

Of course, I had been discoursing with dead people all my life. Imaginary people, as well, starting with Victor Appleton II, “author” of books I was reading before I got my first library card. If you don’t recognize “him”, “he” was a house pseudonym belonging to the Stratemeyer group. “He” wrote the Tom Swift, Junior books which were my idea of science fiction when I was ten.

Come to think of it, many of the people in the Bible that my parents introduced me to were imaginary as well as dead, but a wise man doesn’t talk about to that in public.

One of my favorite friends-I-never-met is Robert Louis Stevenson. He has been a part of my life for decades, and I recently had cause to dig deeper into his personal story while putting together an upcoming series of posts.

Very early in his career (1878), long before anyone had heard of him, Stevenson wrote a travel book about his voyage by canoe on some European rivers, called Inland Voyage. I’m not recommending it to you, but it went into my massive pile of turn of the century — that’s nineteenth century — marine and canoe travel books, after I had skimmed it and found this in his preface:

To say truth, I had no sooner finished reading this little book in proof, than I was seized upon by a distressing apprehension.  It occurred to me that I might not only be the first to read these pages, but the last as well; that I might have pioneered this very smiling tract of country all in vain, and find not a soul to follow in my steps.  The more I thought, the more I disliked the notion; until the distaste grew into a sort of panic terror, and I rushed into this Preface, which is no more than an advertisement for readers.

A preface is only an advertisement for readers? Imagine that! If Stevenson had been writing 140 years later, he would have had a blog, and wouldn’t I love to read that. Also, consider the notion that one of the world’s most successful writers started out thinking that no one would ever read what he was writing.

Of course, there were thousands of other writers in 1878 who thought no one would ever read their writing, and no one ever did. We never knows in advance what will happen. We just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, and hope.

500. Heinlein’s Harems

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Heinlein did not invent group sex, but he tried to take out a patent on it.

               (Disclaimer: I made that up about the patent. It’s called hyperbole, the use of exaggerations and untrue statements for effect. The difference between hyperbole and lying is that in hyperbole, you don’t expect anyone to believe you.
               If you offer exaggerated or untrue statements with the style, cadence, and straight face of hyperbole, but you expect to be believed, that’s lying disguised as hyperbole. You may have seen this happen recently. At least one of our leaders makes it public policy.)

The world first became aware of Heinlein’s preoccupation with group sex in 1961 with his novel Stranger in a Strange Land. I didn’t buy in; I couldn’t accept the underlying idea. A successful family of multiple males and females didn’t seem likely. Most 1+1 marriages fail, and a lot of the ones which don’t fail, should fail. The idea of a whole passel of people living together in one big happy sexual family without exploding from the stresses generated strained my willing suspension of disbelief.

Hippies tried it a few years later. It was a lot of fun for the alpha personalities, but not so much for the shy ones who just went along with the idea. Communes tended to fall apart quickly.

Kings often have multiple women. In the orient, they called them harems. In the west, they called them mistresses. But any family of the 1+n style can’t be very successful. It will always result in one tired guy and a lot of women feeling blue and lonely.

Heinlein multiplied his multi-person families throughout the rest of his career, and to be fair, he did once portray such a family falling apart in the novel Friday.

Let me paint you a picture.  Start with a bunch of naked people. The men are okay looking and the women are beautiful. No exceptions on that issue. They are all young; that part is easy enough since they are all Howards and therefore semi-immortal. Put them in a luxurious lounge, with self-aware computers attending to their every whim. Now let the sex begin — but it doesn’t. Instead, we get endless, interminable, unquenchable talking about sex.

I read Stranger in high school. Three years later, in college, The Harrad Experiment was all the rage. It was about a school which encouraged its students to experiment with free love (as it was called in that era). My roommate read it and complained, “They don’t do it; they just talk about it.” I can’t verify that statement. It sounded so much like Stranger that I gave it a miss.

               (Disclaimer: Heinlein is one of my favorite authors. I re-read him more often than anyone but Zelazny. On the subject of sex, however, he sees the smiles and ignores the strains. For him, the cup is neither half-full nor half-empty. It is overflowing. It’s a nice idea, but it strains my credulity.)

When I wrote Cyan, two kinds of multi-person families showed up. Saloman Curran was the product of a ring family. That appears first in Chapter Six, Stranded on Earth [3] in the odd way that book is laid out. Ring families were a disaster for adults and children alike, and their structure goes a long way toward explaining why our villain was so villainous.

The ten explorers who set out on their multi-year journey to Procyon were a family of another kind, and one that worked out fairly well. They were young, healthy men and women, cut off from contact with any other humans, and stimulated by the excitement and danger of exploration. Sex was sure to happen anyway, so NASA made sure they were compatible during training. Read between the lines of that statement. I didn’t set the situation up for titillation; I was working out what I thought might actually happen. Once the explorers returned to Earth, the ten-some did not last. It had existed due to a particular situation, which was not likely to be repeated.

               (Disclaimer: Yes, I know this was supposed to be the future, yet the explorers are all apparently hetero. I started Cyan in the early eighties for that audience. If I were writing it today, I would have to change some things, but it’s really too late now.)

Heinlein was trying to shake up a moribund society, and make it look at what might happen. I was trying, a generation later, to figure out what probably would happen.

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Briefly, back to hyperbole as humor. Once in a meeting, I said with a straight face that, “Only stupid people exaggerate. Smart people use hyperbole.” Most of my friends just looked at me (that happened a lot). The one friend who got it, roared.

Yes, I know. It isn’t funny in cold print. It’s all a matter of timing.

499. Triple Tease

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Thomas Anderson of Schlock Value has an ongoing love/hate (largely hate) relationship with blurbs. I mostly share his view, but things have changed since the era, mostly the 70s, which he reviews. When Cyan came out, I had the chance to write the blurbs myself. In fact, I was asked to write three blurbs of 10, 25, and 75 words, from which the publisher would choose.

Squeezing a whole novel into twenty-five-words-or-less is an interesting exercise. I decided to try it again on the novel I’m presently writing, Like Clockwork, but with a variation. 10, 25, and 75 is really hard. I’ll wait until the book is finished for that, but I did write short, shorter, and really short candidates.

Here are the results.

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The year is 1850. The year is always 1850. Now it is November and a year’s worth of progress toward understanding is in jeopardy. In a few weeks will come Midwinter Midnight, when the Clock that Ate Time will reset, it will be January first once again, and all that has been gained will be lost from memory.

Snap, who helped to build the Clock and regrets his actions; Balfour who was another man in another life; and Hemmings, formerly a computer, who now figures differently — these three, with Pilar, Eve, Lithbeth, Pakrat, and old man Crump are determined to set Time free again. And if they fail . . .

The year will be 1850. The year will be 1850 forever.

119 words

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The year is 1850 — again. A year’s worth of progress toward understanding is in jeopardy. In a few weeks it will be Midwinter Midnight, when the Clock that Ate Time will reset, it will be January first once again, and all that has been gained will be lost from memory.

50 words

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The year is 1850 in a this alternate London, where time has no hold. There are only a few weeks left to restart the future.

25 words

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How’s that for a tease?