Tag Archives: time travel

725. Steampunk, Maybe Not

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If you didn’t read last week’s post, you should do that first. The picture above is a modern enthusiast’s model of Ofeldt’s invention, explained below.

I occasionally keep a digital diary of what I am writing. If I were better at remembering to make entries, my rearward vision would be clearer. This comes from the entries I made in the last half of 2017.

FYI, Durbar is an Indian term for a ceremony of submission to a Raja, which was later taken up by the British. That is real-world information.

— << >> —

The idea for the Durbar novel came at Westercon 70, July 4 weekend 2017. I began plotting as soon as I returned home, but failed to note the day I started writing. I finished the last chapter at 2:32 PM Monday, Oct. 23, 2017.

I sent completed novel, now titled The Cost of Empire, to Gollancz in London on January 2, 2018. On that same day, I began the first page of a novel with the working title Clockwork Christmas.

— << >> —

Clockwork Christmas later became Like Clockwork. We’ll talk about it another time.

2017 and 2018 were exciting years. It was as if the old days were back.

I had spent fifty years on the ever growing Menhir series, half as long as that working out the kinks in Cyan, and the other books I wrote during those middle years were completed in off hours while I was a working school teacher. Now I was free to write without day-job constraints, and things flowed freely again like they had when I first began.

What? You just want to know about the secret weapon
I mentioned last week?

No, I haven’t forgotten. Britain, in the novel The Cost of Empire, had a secret weapon called the McFarland engine. Our hero discovers that the McFarland engine was stolen from a Swedish-American inventor named Frank Ofeldt.

Ofeldt and his invention are part of our real world, and I already knew about him when I had my epiphany in Tempe. He is deeply obscure and his invention was silly, but it provided the perfect catalyst when The Cost of Empire burst into my consciousness. I would never have heard of him, except for my incessant reading in maritime history.

Ofeldt’s invention in the real world. Ofeldt perfected the naphtha engine, which is somewhere between a steam engine and an internal combustion engine. Naphtha (if you were my age I would just say lighter fluid and you would know what I mean) is heated and the naphtha engine uses it as a steam engine uses steam, to move pistons. Even though naphtha is combustible, it doesn’t burn at this stage.

The naphtha is recovered after passing through the pistons, cooled back to a liquid, then burned to heat incoming naphtha. The resulting engine was both weak and dangerous. It should have disappeared from history. Instead, the Federal government saved it — by accident.

The Feds passed a law forbidding steam engines on boats without a licensed operator. The newly rich of the nineteenth century often had twenty foot launches powered by miniature steam engines that they used to carry their rich friends around their private lakes. Suddenly they were illegal. Naphtha engines were not technically “steam” engines so they found a niche market and survived, at least for a few decades.

Ofeldt’s invention in the novel. Steam dirigibles existed early on, in the real world and in the novel. They were never practical because of the weight of water and coal they had to carry. In the novel, internal combustion engine technology had been deliberately suppressed. McFarland discovered Ofeldt’s invention, stole it, and produced functioning, if underpowered, fleet of British dirigibles.

i wrapped all of the other technologies in the novel around the naphtha engine. Our hero is a young airman in the British dirigible fleet who discovers the existence of the spy ring, the theft of Ofeldt’s invention, and the crippling blow that the engine’s weakness inflicts on British security. All this occurs while he is trying to understand why Britain won the German War, but is still the most powerful and hated nation on Earth.

— << >> —

If there is a moral here, it must be that nothing you know is useless, no time spent off task is really off task to a writer’s ravenous subconscious, and if a piece of knowledge is obscure, that just means that you get first crack at using it.

None of this answers the questions implied in the titles of these two posts. Is it really steampunk? Probably not.

I wrote The Cost of Empire and Like Clockwork in search of steampunk. When they were finished The Cost of Empire would probably fit better into the sister category of alternate universes. And Like Clockwork would probably be viewed as a classic time travel story.

Well, they both taste like steampunk to me, and categories are ultimately just a book seller’s concern.

The Cost of Empire
will be published next year
on May 12, 2027

Like Clockwork is too far down the queue of completed novels to promise its date of publication at this time.

705. The Year That Never Ends

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The Year That Never Ends

Once upon a time, in tenth grade, they force-fed me Dickens in the form of Great Expectations. No one should do that to a teenager. It put me off of Dickens for thirty years.

Then I discovered A Christmas Carol, and Dickens rose to the top of my pantheon. I loved the book. I loved the other four Christmas books he wrote in subsequent years. I loved the movies made from the book.

I wanted to write the next great Christmas tale. (Don’t we all?) Instead I wrote a novel that was half Dickensian and half dystopian. It centered around the Clock That Ate Time and the Great Babbage, but it did take place in a variant Dickensian London.

The immediate call to write was both visual and visceral. It was a scene from the musical Scrooge, drawn from the book and repeated in most movie adaptations. Bob Cratchit’s children are waiting for him to finish work on Christmas Eve while staring through the window of a toy shop. And what a toy shop, filled to the rafters with all the kinds of toys that rich Victorian children might be given, but which were forever out of reach of poor children like Tiny Tim and his sister. There were even mechanical wonders like the clockwork strongman who suspends himself horizontally using only one hand.

Who was the man who ran the shop? He was nothing in the story that Dickens told, but I wanted to know. Who built the mechanical man? I wanted to know. What possessed the owner to set up a shop in the poorest part of London, where none of the children staring into his windows would ever have a chance to buy his wares? I wanted to know that, too.

Yes, writers are like that. They are likely to stare at a potted rose and wonder what kind of soil is in the pot.

The novel I wrote is called Like Clockwork. The toyshop is there. It is also called Like Clockwork, and it is overfilled with mechanical wonders all created by the man who runs it. His name is Snap. He is the man who built the Clock That Killed Time, although he has lost all memory of building it. He, and everyone else in his pocket London, will live forever — but at a cost. Every Midwinter Midnight, the citizens gather around the Great Clock to watch the year 1850 end — then begin again, invariant forever.

What follows is the Prolog to Like Clockwork, in the form of a note written by Snap’s wife, Pilar of the Sorrows, as the old year closes.

— << >> —

Prolog. (Or is it an epilog?)

“Tonight Snap has gone down to the Clock for Midwinter Midnight. In just a few minutes, the reversion will occur and I will forget writing this note. It will be midnight of January first, 1850. Not next year, nor last year, but the only year there is.

“It isn’t a bad year and it isn’t a particularly good year, but if it is to be my only year, I want more.”

Pilar laid down her pen and listened, straining to hear the song they always sang at midnight:

The year that ends, but never ends,

That ‘ere again unfolds,

We live that year forever and

We never shall grow old

It was probably her imagination. Surely voices could not be heard over such a distance. She rose to move closer to a window and as she did the note she had written ceased to be. All her memories of the past twelve months ceased to be. Her body sloughed off a year of age and it was January first of the last-this-next-only year.

Again.

— << >> —

You’ll get a chance to read Like Clockwork, but not for a while. There is strategy and pacing in how I intend to release my novels, and that grand plan calls for Like Clockwork to be published no sooner than 2028.

This isn’t intended as a mean tease; its just that I wanted to acknowledge Midwinter Midnight as, unlike Snap’s world, 2025 rolls over into 2026.

694. Our Very Own Alternate Reality

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Why is the bird here? He is a peaceful hope while we look at an ugly reality.

Our Very Own Alternate Reality

In these four posts we have come full circle, through a brief history of science fiction, which was stuffed into an even more brief history of five presidencies. Now we have meandered back to the subject of assassinations..

On November 22, 1963, John Kennedy was assassinated.

On July 13th, 2024, Donald Trump was almost assassinated.

On September 10th, 2025, Charlie Kirk was assassinated, which started this train of posts.

— << >> —

For at least a century, a staple of science fiction has been stories of alternate realities, and many of them begin with an assassination. In Keith Roberts Pavane, the assassination of Queen Elizabeth the first, on the eve of the invasion by the Spanish Armada, returned England to the Catholic fold and gave us a semi-modern world that still looks a lot like the Middle Ages.

Neat idea. Beautiful novel. But would you want to live in it?

Assassins are a strange breed. They are willing to change the future for all of us through an act that is far less certain than a roll of the dice.

Consider John Wilkes Booth. What if his derringer had misfired? We would never have heard of him. He would be lost to history along with the other would be assassin of Lincoln who made an attempt a year earlier.

If Booth had failed and Lincoln had lived, how different would our history be? How different would reconstruction have been? One person, even a well intentioned president, probably could not have completely forestalled the Jim Crow era, but it might have been a great deal less harsh.

A similar question — would the Viet Nam war have been so protracted if Kennedy had lived? No one knows.

— << >> —

You might well ask why I am even bringing up the subject? Assassination is morally wrong. Isn’t that enough?

Are you sure you feel that way? What if someone in 1938 had assassinated Adolph Hitler? Wouldn’t we all be better off?

I think most people would ignore morality — or argue it away — and opt for a world without Hitler. If any one of us had been in the crowd in Nuremberg in 1938, with a rifle, a clear shot, and a sure means of escape, it would have been hard not to pull the trigger.

But what if Hitler’s replacement had the same goals, and the same hatred for the Allies because of the harsh treatment Germany received in the treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I? (It is a legitimate position.) What if the new leader were not an anti-Semite, and all those Jewish scientists had not defected to the west, like Albert Einstein did?

If all those Jewish-German scientists had perfected the atomic bomb first and used it effectively, we might all be dead.

When a science fiction writer sits down to change the world by introducing a change in the past, it can be great fun. I know. I’ve done it. But contemplating an assassination in the real world is a whole different thing.

Of course I’m sure none of you are thinking about doing anything like that. Eh?

Well, maybe one or two of you — and you are the ones I’m talking to. Before you load up your deer rifle and set out to save humanity, I have just one question.

Are you really sure what the result will be? Maybe you should just think it over for a while.

Go sit under a tree and watch the squirrels play. Eat a good meal. Drink a beer. Make love.

You’ll feel better in the morning.

Peace

691. Science Fiction Begins

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Science Fiction Begins

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

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

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

— << >> —

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The discussion continues next week.

653. Eve Learns to Sing

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If you want to put this excerpt from Like Clockwork into context, read Monday’s post. It takes place in the deserted shell of St Matthews Church, London, in the recurring year 1850.

The pocket London of the novel hangs uncomfortably between utopia and dystopia — pretty much like real life. It is a place where everyone lives forever in a peaceful world, but where alternative thinking is strictly avoided.

It is also a place where no one sings.

=================

Eve asked, “What are songs?”

The question hit him like a blow to the heart. Balfour said, “Didn’t your mother sing to you?”

“My mother was so desperate to live forever that she hardly lived at all. She held me and comforted me, but she lived for her work.”

“So she never sang?”

“Not to me. And I have never heard anyone singing here in Luddie London. Do they sing in the outer city?”

Balfour shook his head.

“Thank you for the book of songs, but these are just words on a page to me.”

“May I sing for you?” he asked.

For a moment her youth shone through her eyes and she nodded.

Balfour did not apologize, or say, “I’m not much of a singer.” This was not about quality, but about sharing. He found a familiar song and sang in a scratchy tenor:

Amazing Grace, How sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me
I once was lost, but now am found
T’was blind but now I see

Eve said, “I don’t like that song. I’m not a wretch. Don’t sing me a song about self-loathing. Sing to me about a garden.”

Balfour ruffled the pages. He said, “I don’t know this one. Give me a moment to work out the notes.” She watched him, head bobbing slightly, lips moving as he read the staff twice through, then sang:

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.

“Thank you. Oh, thank you,” Eve cried. “But that last line is wrong. If God gives the joy, then everybody would know it. Please go on.”

Balfour continued:

He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing;
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

I’d stay in the garden with Him
Tho’ the night around me be falling;
But He bids me go; thro’ the voice of woe,
His voice to me is calling.

Eve said, “Don’t sing that last verse any more. I don’t want to leave the garden. I’ve never seen a garden, and I so much want to.”

“Could you sing it?” Balfour asked.

“I don’t know. Repeat it a time or two more and I’ll try.”

So Balfour repeated, dropping the last verse, and changing the last line of the chorus to All others shall ever know. Eve squeezed her eyes tight and her head moved to the music. After he had sung the song twice more, he said, “Now you.”

She sang. There was neither hesitation nor shyness in her manner, and her voice was pure and light. Balfour knew she was not singing for him, nor for herself, but for God. It was so beautiful that it almost made him believe again.

Eve shook her head at the end; there were tears in her eyes as she said, “How can I have lived my life, and never have heard a song?”

She remained silent for a time, then said, “I do thank you, but I don’t think you brought these songs just to please me.”

“No, although I would have if I had known how much you needed them. I have been trying to talk to my friends about Before, but they won’t listen. The direct approach to changing their minds is not going to work.”

Eve smiled and said, “So?”

“So we’re going to be sneaky. I’m are going to entertain them with excerpts from A Christmas Carol and you are going to sing sad love songs to them.”

“What good will that do?”

“Everything. It’s an formula that storytellers have used since the beginning of time. Tell them a story, and hide the message. They’ll listen to the surface, and then spend days trying to figure out what you really meant.”

Balfour and Eve do that thing with little visible results until other events intervene. Then Balfour says to Eve:

“The people are milling about and angry today. I don’t know if it is safe to go out.”

“We must. You need to read the third stave where Scrooge embraces a new life and I need to sing songs of change.”

“They are in no mood to listen.”

“They always hear, even when they don’t listen.”

=================

Obviously, since this is a blog by a writer on the subject of writing, Eve’s criticism of the two hymns is my criticism, which I hoarded for a lifetime until I found a place to express them.

There is one more song in Like Clockwork, the only song remaining in this London. Everybody sings it at Midwinter Midnight. That song turns out to be new lyrics to an old melody, and when Eve decodes it, she uses it to drive the last nail into the coffin of that pocket London.

Meanwhile, even an ex-Christian can feel the joy of carols and can miss hymns like In the Garden. Right or wrong, they express human longing for goodness.

651. Beyond the Toyshop Window

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It’s classic, the scene of Tiny Tim and his sister looking through the toy shop window while waiting for Bob Cratchit. The world is cold behind them, but inside it a wonderland for children.

You’ll find this in most movie versions of A Christmas Carol. There is even a scene early in Tim Allen’s Santa Clause which is quick homage, with elves hidden among the children. I don’t think that scene ever appeared in the book. I’m not going to swear to it. I’ve read the book many times, and I don’t have time now to prove it to myself, but I’m pretty sure.

The first time I saw that scene in the 1970 movie musical Scrooge, it hit me hard. I wanted to know what else was going on in that toy shop. I wanted to know who ran it, and who made the toys. They couldn’t have been made by the silly proprietor in the movie. Their maker had to have a story to tell — or a story for me to tell.

I was particularly taken by the toy strong man, who eventually appears in critical scenes in Like Clockwork.

So . . . I wanted the builder to be highly intelligent and troubled. I named him Snap early on, with no idea why; then I had to scramble for a reason later in the process. I decided he should be a clock maker; now, why was he making toys instead? He had been cast out, of course, but from where and by whom? I had no idea when I started writing.

I wrote the first chapter and it fell out like water from a tap, including the name of the toy shop, which became the name of the book. Like Clockwork would start out as the story of a toymaker in a clockwork world. It smelled like steampunk, but I found out later that it was a pure time travel story.

At the end of the first chapter Snap turned around and there stood Balfour.

Robert Louis Balfour Stevenson is one of my favorite authors, and Kidnapped, the story of David Balfour, ranks right up there with A Wizard of Earthsea and The Old Man and the Sea as one of my three favorite books. As soon as my Balfour appeared unexpectedly on that London street, I knew that he was an avatar of RLS, but I made sure Balfour himself didn’t know it for quite a while.

Do you want to know where Like Clockwork came from? Other than from an image out of the movie Scrooge, and a lifetime of living, imaginatively, in Dickensian London, the answer is — out of left field. It has been a long time since a book has so completely written itself, chapter by chapter, line by line, with little foreknowledge on my part.

There is an exception to that. The ending came early and largely complete, but filling in the parts between was largely sans outline, sans planning, and sans any kind of reason. That may be part of why I like it so well.

Then Chapter 26, titled 62 – 54 = 9, which was the seventh chapter in my screwed up table of contents, fell out onto the screen. The opening sentence read, “Hemmings was a computer.” I didn’t see him coming at all. I just thought I needed a Babbage to balance the Great Clock. I had no idea how much it and Hemmings were going to take over.

It’s been fun. Throughout the novel there are little pieces of cultural reference and homages, sometimes humorous and almost always hidden. Scrooge himself is almost completely absent, except in feel, until near the end of the novel when he appears briefly in a cameo under an assumed name.

=============

Now that Snap had taken Pakrat with him, and Eve had sent a message that she would be gone today, Pilar was left alone with Lithbeth. She bundled her into a jacket, locked the toy store behind them, and set out to shop. They wandered the streets as if on holiday, talking with the cart vendors, and occasionally buying potatoes or onions. Lithbeth’s eyes were everywhere; she was almost never on the streets in the middle of the day, and things looked different in the strong, filtered light.

Through the grimy windows of an ancient building, Lithbeth saw a small man on a high stool, pen in hand, marking something in a thick ledger. His quick, bright eyes caught her as she passed, and he sent her a smile. She waved back, but then the Ogre came.

He was no larger than the other man, but powerful in his anger. He began to berate the clerk, and Lithbeth turned her face away.

Pilar put a hand on Lithbeth’s shoulder and said, “It’s best not to look into that window. It only makes old Countinghouse treat his clerk even worse than usual.”

“Why does he do that?”

Pilar shook her head. “Some men are like that,” she said. “A master can make his servant’s life a joy or a misery even in small things.”

“Snap would never do that.”

“No, he would not,” Pilar said, and felt a brief moment of peace. Snap would never do that.

=============

Of course, like Scrooge, Countinghouse has to have his come-to-Jesus moment. It comes on almost the last page of the novel.

=============

Dickens stopped dead in the street. The old scarecrow Countinghouse stopped likewise, and cringed at the sight of him, feeling a premonition of things to come.

“Who are you?” Dickens asked, in a voice firm with purpose.

“Countinghouse, not that it’s any of your business.”

“It is my business. Mankind is my business, but you in particular are my business. And you only call yourself Countinghouse because you have forgotten your name.”

“If I have forgotten it, let it remain forgotten.”

“There has been enough of forgetting. It is time to remember. You and I have much business together.”

=============

Poor old codger, people just won’t leave him alone.

640. The Synapse Emerges 1

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Life is weird, and strange things happen. It is almost enough to make you believe in a master plan, although it remains questionable whether that would be divine or diabolical. In any case, if there is a plan, it’s a hoot.

I’m going to tell you a story that began in January of 1976 and came full circle on October fifth, about a month ago. I have to warn you though, only old writers, new writers, or wannabe writers are likely to be be interested.

But really, who among you hasn’t either built a world, or wanted to?

In the fall of 1975, I sat down to prove or disprove my ability to churn out 40,000 to 50,000 words and call it a novel. By Christmas I had succeeded, although it wasn’t good enough to publish. Right after New Years, I set out to write a “real” novel, science fiction, with world building and everything. It was to be a lost colony book, so I had to get my people stranded, and that meant inventing an FTL drive. I took all of five minutes to do it.

     A sphere floating in space, silver against a backdrop of stars.
     The stars shift their colors, doppler down, out. The sphere hangs alone in darkness where here and there are concepts yet unborn. Six antennae project; it is not so much moved as displaced. First it is here, then it is there, but it never crosses the space between here and there . . . Synapse drive can cross the galaxy in a heartbeat.

from Jandrax

All done. I blew things up and left my people who-knew-where, and I didn’t have to think about that star drive again.

Synapse? It was just a word that came to mind, with no real connection to brain cells except that it seemed to imply something, without specifying what.

Beware of what you create, Dr. Frankenstein.

I wrote the novel Jandrax, and it was published. Picture a young author leaping with joy.

A few years later I started Cyan and had to invent a non-FTL star drive. (For more, check out the post coming November 20.) This time I put some thought into it so that it had some reasonable underpinnings. Lots of years passed and eventually Cyan was published, but I wasn’t through. I now had a world full of people I really liked, and some of them were young enough to continue exploring on the decrepit old starship Darwin.

The trouble was, I’d blown up the Earth, and I couldn’t count on it to recover for a long while. Someone had to write the Monomythos which had driven/would drive the plot in Jandrax, and someone had to invent the Synapse. I had to find them hidden among the population of Cyan, and I had to find motivations for both of them to do what I knew they had to do.

Writing prequels is like doing a time travel paradox story. He invented this, because he had to, because he used it on page 92 of a previously published book, that takes place in the new book’s future. See, time travel.

There was no problem with the Monomythos. I decided to have its writer be a rational young man who had grown up under the influence of a religious fanatic, either his father or a father figure. That’s right up my alley and the writing of it has been dribbling along recently on days when other writing is stalled.

In fact, the whole sequel to Cyan has been dribbling along in lots of pages of notes-to-self. Darwin is too old to push to previous accelerations, so the next journey will need cold sleep. No problem, there are 60,000 cold sleep units left over from Cyan’s colonization.

But that brings up something else.

I don’t know about you, but loose ends keep rolling around in my head long after I’ve moved on to other books. In Cyan, between 10 and 20 percent of the cold sleepers never woke up. Their bodies were fine, there was just nobody home. I had created that as an unexplained fact, but ever since then I’ve been wondering why things should work out that way. I decided to let Debra and Beryl figure it out in the sequel.

If you don’t know who Debra and Beryl are, for God’s sake go buy a copy of Cyan and read it. (LINK)

Using the computer’s file of DNA patterns from the 60,000 who set out from Earth, Debra and Beryl discover that a certain cluster of seemingly unrelated genes is present in all who died, and absent from all who lived. Further research is indicated, but it provides an absolute predictor of who will die in cold sleep.

One of the people (still unnamed, let’s just call him Frank for now) who is ready to depart on the new exploration finds that he has the deadly gene cluster and can’t go. When the Darwin departs without him, he is motivated to find an answer to faster than light travel.

All of this was worked out during the last six months, well before yesterday’s epiphany.

I’m only half way through this odd tale, and this post is already long enough, so I’ll to finish on Wednesday.

633. Good Books for Kids

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When I was a child, I read as a child,
I thought as a child, I understood as a child:
but when I became thirteen,
I switched to Clarke and Heinlein.

That pretty much screws up 1 Corinthians 13:11. And it isn’t exactly true. When I was a child, i.e. about twelve, plus or minus, I read what was available, and it wasn’t always great. It was primarily science fiction and mysteries, by which I mean Tom Swift, Jr. and the Hardy Boys. You could buy them in a toy and hobby store on the main street of Coffeeville, Kansas, one of the towns we shopped in. There were no bookstores; there were libraries, but I didn’t know that yet.

The Stratemeyer Syndicate, which ground out novels for kids like Hershey’s grinds out chocolate bars, was actually the best thing that ever happened to rural American youth for most of the twentieth century. I read them, my grandfather read them, and kids were still reading them when the millennium rolled over. They weren’t very good. In fact, a lot of them were terrible, but they were there. For a kid out in the sticks who liked science fiction, the choice wasn’t Tom Swift or something from Arthur C. Clarke. It was Tom Swift or nothing.

When I started going to libraries a couple of years later, my possibilities were expanded, but it was still a small library. I read a lot of things that I would never have touched if more had been available. I read a lot of books meant for adults, but that’s the goal anyway. I also read books way below my level, because they were there.

I recently remembered a book I hadn’t thought about since those days, The Wonderful Flight to the Mushroom Planet by Elanor Cameron. I was too old for it when I read it, but I still loved it, so much that I tried to find it again. No luck, but I did get a copy of the sequel.

I couldn’t read it. I could barely read it when I was thirteen, but if I had gotten to it when I was eight, I would have been in love.

That got me to thinking about what makes book a juvenile, as they were called then. The Mushroom Planet books would not have qualified. They were for children. Juveniles were for boys who were anxious to become men.

Of course there were juveniles for girls, but girls and boys were separate species in the fifties, so I can’t report on their books.

Heinlein did a lot of juveniles which I’ve already talked about. (See posts 311 and 513) My real favorite juvenile writer was Andre Norton, and I’ve done a few reviews on her as well. (For science fiction see posts 262 and 263, or others see posts 260 and 261.)

What Heinlein, Norton, and many other juveniles authors had in common was that their characters were not yet adults but were given adult roles by the author. The Heinlein characters were often learning a futuristic trade under an adult. Norton’s characters were often being stranded on an alien planet. Outdoors and with no other kids in sight — she was channelling my childhood.

Today’s young adult books seem to be quite different from yesterday’s juveniles. First, they are targeted for slightly older audience, and second, 2019 isn’t 1959. The audience itself is different.

I can’t imagine a modern kid reading the early Nortons I loved so much. With only slight exaggeration, those Nortons were about a young person alone in a wasteland, trying to survive the dangers of nature, and modern kids live in crowded cities trying to survive the dangers inflicted by the adults around them.

I wouldn’t want to be a modern kid, and I understand why the books of my childhood probably wouldn’t mean much to them.

I taught middle school for twenty-seven years and I tried to keep abreast of what was available for my students, but I’ve been out of that loop for a while. I used to go to every Scholastic book sale to see what was new and good. The answer — damn near nothing. The few good books the kids had to choose from were mostly reprints from way back when.

Those book sales were where I found Fog Magic by Julia Sauer. It’s a wonderful book but it was published in 1943. Later I found A Storm Without Rain by Jan Adkins published in 1983. That’s still almost four decades old. Both were time travel stories of the old style; that is, without a time machine. The kids just went back in time and never understood how it happened.

I also stumbled across a fine steampunk novel, before I really knew anything about steampunk. That would be Airborne by Kenneth Oppel, published 2004. At least we are getting into the right millennium.

Harry Potter? Tried it, couldn’t read it. Twilight and the Hunger Games? Don’t want to, and if you don’t know why, I could never convince you.

Good books for kids are rare. Fortunately they stay around forever.

Why didn’t I mention A Wizard of Earthsea? You can’t pigeonhole it as a juvenile or a young adult book. It’s literature. Buy it for your kids and read it yourself.

609. Alternate Universes

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During the Golden Age, most of Heinlein’s short stories linked together to make a complete future world. I didn’t know that at the time, since I wasn’t born yet. I discovered his Future History as his short stories began to be reissued in collections, when paperback books were relatively new. In the opening pages of several of them there was a chart of future history, showing times, scientific developments, and social changes, all keyed to the stories built around them.

Future history in science fiction is a first cousin to alternate history, which is sometimes seen as SF and is sometimes shelved with ordinary historical fiction.

Historical fiction isn’t history. Studies of history may be inaccurate, even deliberately so, but they aren’t fiction. Sometimes they may be as far away from truth as deliberate fiction, but that’s a whole ‘nuther can of posts.

Historical fiction may be romance, adventure, war, moral advance or moral decline, or any other type of story, just as contemporary fiction can be. It simply uses history as a place for things to happen, just like a boy meets girl story can take place in Palestine or Paducah.

Alternate history does the same thing, but with an additional twist. The author makes a choice of where and when to make a historical change, and then invents a fictional world based on that change. After that, as with science fiction, the story the author tells may resemble ordinary fiction, or it may depend on events special to the created world.

Almost all science fiction creates some kind of future history. Heinlein gets first mention because he coined the term, but his buddy E. E. Smith’s Lensmen series creates an even bigger, badder, and bolder alternate universe. Gordon Dickson had his Childe Cycle (known to ordinary mortals as the Dorsai books), and there are dozens, probably hundreds, of other examples.

Alternate history does the same thing, but starts earlier in time. Fantasy, from Tolkien to Diskworld, creates entirely non-ordinary worlds. Only contemporary and historical fictions are impoverished by a lack of world building.

Once a writer creates a universe, there is a temptation to return to it. After all, much of his work has already been done. The result may be an enriching of the imaginary world, or a steady decline in quality due to self-repetition. It depends on the skill of the author.

My own writings live in two variant futures, one variant past, and a variant past created by time traveling meddlers from a variant future. And a fantasy world.

The variant past story is The Cost of Empire, which could be shelved with science fiction (at a stretch), steampunk (easily), or alternate history. A dishonest capitalist steals a new type of engine; he also talks the British government into starting a spy organization which he then uses to sabotage other engine types, skewing industrial development. That’s backstory; if you are curious about the actual story, the opening pages were presented in posts 486, 487, 488, and 489.

In one of my variant futures a scientist named Lassiter discovers a glitch in our understanding of physics which allows easy total annihilation of matter. That means a star drive for nearby star systems, with all the complications of near light-speed travel, but no FTL. This led to world building for all the stars within about five light years of Earth, and to the novel Cyan which explores one of them.

Such multiple world building calls for other novels, including the one alluded to in Monday’s post.

Not to belabor a point, but the world building in Cyan and the world building in The Cost of Empire are both based on a technological innovation. The only real difference is that one change took place in the past and one will take place in the future. SF and alternate history are often two faces of the same coin.

Incidentally, the Cyan universe came about after I wrote my first published novel Jandrax. I asked myself, where did this universe come from? How did it start? What were the ancestors of the people in Jandrax doing a few hundred years earlier? Then I filled in the missing pieces, and Cyan emerged.

My other early published novel, A Fond Farewell to Dying, is based on a historical change and a technological development. The world in general comes into being through a confluence of nuclear war and rising oceans, ending with the northern hemisphere devastated, and India as the last best hope of scientific culture. The technological event is the creation of a practical, artificial immortality. That world called for two sequels which have been outlined, but not yet been written. One of them has recently been calling my name, so maybe soon.

In FFTD, the bombs fell in the future, so it is clearly SF. If the bombs had fallen in 1957, it might be categorized as alternate history — but probably wouldn’t be because of the immortality theme.

Writers write. Putting novels into categories is the job of editors, critics, and booksellers. We do make life hard for them sometimes.

My latest novel, Like Clockwork, takes place in a quasi-Victorian pocket London and won’t have any direct sequels. It could be published as steampunk, but it is actually a straight SF time travel story.

However the future world of the time traveler who is Like Clockwork‘s hidden prime mover has infinite possibilities. In that world Einstein got it right, there can be no FTL, and only century ships are a possibility. Adventurous souls need not despair, however, because there is sideways travel in time. For fear of destroying their own existence, time travel in this culture’s own timeline is forbidden, but travel to alternate universes is the order of the day. 

My fantasy novels all take place in one created world, but that’s a whole different set of posts.

602. What Story Next

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Every writer writes about writing eventually, and Balfour is my way of doing that. As his name might suggest, he both is and is not Robert Louis Stevenson. In what follows from my novel Like Clockwork, Balfour has just had a vision, and now he is seeking privacy to think about it. The vision was sparked by his visit to Snap’s toy shop, where he has met Snap’s wife Pilar for the first time.

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With the fog and the waning of the day, the streets had become dark. There were lighted windows here and there. Occasionally there were beckoning gaslighted rooms of grog shops, where warmth and noise spilled out into the street, but these were few and widely spaced.

When he walked with Snap through Inner London, Balfour found himself surrounded by friendly faces. Now that he was alone in the fog and dark the pedestrians around him drew back from him. Their movements seemed furtive and the shadows seemed full of danger.

All the things which passed before his outer eye were noted and flagged for memory — peering faces, vendors shouting their wares, signs plastered everywhere with messages like “Now is Forever” and “You Can Turn Back the Clock.” But mostly his mind was full of an inner vision of Pilar which, if nurtured, might become a story.

It was not of the real Pilar which he saw, but a Pilar whom his mind had abstracted and made symbolic. She stood tied between two coarse ropes, fighting both of them. It was not an image of sexual bondage. These ropes were forces, made manifest in his mind, which were tearing her in opposite directions.

Balfour knew from experience that if he could hold the image now, without understanding, it would morph and change over the coming weeks. Pilar herself would probably disappear. Someone else would a take her place, and the forces would be manifested in new ways. When the process had ended, and the story was completed, Pilar would be gone; yet without her the story would never have been triggered.

He walked far and long, mind racing, lost in thought, but eventually the world outside his mind reclaimed him — violently.

A ragged ruffian stepped up to block Balfour’s way.

Balfour had moved on past most of the light, and the few pedestrians who remained nearby were all scurrying for cover as if they knew and feared this man.

Balfour gripped his cane loosely, ready to parry or thrust, and felt a rush of adrenaline that washed away the picture of Pilar.

The man was massive, short, and angry. It wasn’t a transitory anger that could be avoided or worked around. This anger came from deep in his past and now encompassed his entire being. His heavy brows were furrowed above deep-set eyes and his mouth was set in a permanent snarl.

Balfour did not notice those details in the moment, but an internal photograph of the man was burned into his memory. He had a few coins, and he would have gladly have given them up, but robbery was not the reason for this encounter. Robbery was the excuse. The reason lay much deeper, and no amount of money would assuage the hatred in those eyes.

The mouth came open; words came out. Balfour only heard the roaring in his ears and his eyes focused on the man’s right hand as he reached beneath his loose coat and withdrew a blade.

It was a moment of deja vu. Balfour had known that the blade would be there. He was already moving when it emerged.

Balfour was no physical match for the man, but he was well trained in the use of a gentleman’s cane, and he had that momentary advantage conferred by precognition. He did not try to strike at the man’s wrist, but brought the cane across in a swinging, two-handed blow to the temple. The loaded head did the rest. There was a wet crunch of crushed bone as his assailant crumpled to the cobblestones. The blade clattered from his hand.

Balfour was already backing away, but the attack was over.

This man had been too full of wrath to have companions, and the dark street was empty of witnesses. Balfour turned away and walked back toward the gate to Outer London. There would be no outcry. There would be no inquest. Some time in the night, the body would mysteriously disappear.

Balfour knew all this because it had all happened before.

And it would all happen again.

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It’s perversely comforting to find that I am not the only one struggling to find the best next story to tell. If this seems a bit familiar, it is a precursor to my Halloween post last year, October 29 and 31.