Fantasy, Sci-Fi, and Other Fictions
It’s Mustache March! While I don’t plan on subjecting my clean upper lip to this old U.S. Air Force tradition and its popular civilian following, I have to admit that mustaches have always tickled me. So in honor of the old manly art of the mustache, I present to you some of the great Mustaches of Literature.*
*Mustaches only! No beards!
Look, I don’t have anything against Philip Pullman. A lot of people whose reading tastes I share and respect have adored his books; I just have yet to read any of them. The Golden Compass is one of those titles that’s perennially on my “to read” pile, and one day it will fight its way to the top, after which I can decide if I have any bones to pick with C.S. Lewis’s self-proclaimed adversary, or if I want to pick up the next book. Maybe I’ll even do both.
I know it’s not in vogue in these days to grant the validity of a position you don’t share, but I understand Pullman’s critique of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, and I respect the heck out of the fact that his chosen method of rebuttal was to write his own novels (which, again, I have yet to read, but one day will, really). This is how art facilitates great cultural conversations. (Although it is a shame that Lewis (1898-1963) and Pullman (b. 1946) were never contemporary enough to directly exchange a few characteristic, sharp-witted and sharper-penned intellectual ripostes.)
What I just can’t wrap my head around is Pullman’s much more puzzling comments about J.R.R. Tolkien, as expressed in his recent interview in The New Yorker. Here’s the relevant portion, excerpted in full:
Continue reading “Pullman, Tolkien, and the Absurd Antithesis”I’m a few days behind announcing this here on the blog, but my short story, “Dear Parents, Your Child Is Not the Chosen One,” can now be read for free at Diabolical Plots!
This story came out of two things I was wondering when I wrote it:
(1) My kids had been listening to a lot of Harry Potter audio books (still are, in fact), and as a teacher, I kept wondering what kinds of professional responsibilities the Hogwarts faculty were dealing with behind the scenes.
A story about all the grading work they probably have wouldn’t have been that interesting (one supposes the faculty all have time turners to get through the marking), but a story about dealing with overbearing parents? Now that might be something… (Lord knows the Malfoys must have eaten up a lot of Dumbledore’s time).
(2) I was wondering about the kinds of people who crave some special mantle they feel entitled to, but just… aren’t. We all know about sf’s actual Chosen Ones: the Harry Potters and the Skywalkers, the King Arthurs and the four Pevensie children, and so on.
But what about the ones who want to be Chosen, but just aren’t cut out for it? Or worse yet, the ones whose parents want them to be the Chosen One?
And so was born one Ms. Madeleine Whimbley, teacher of Intermediate Feats and Virtues at the Avalon Preparatory Academy for Adventurers, and the present story, collected from her correspondence with the parents of one Rodney Goodblood, unacceptably average student.
I had a lot of fun writing this one! Hope you enjoy.
My story, “A Truer Account of Sir Geoffrey and the Dragon,” is out now in Galaxy’s Edge Magazine No. 40! It will be free to read there from now through October.
Two or three years ago, while teaching The Hobbit, I was talking with my class about Smaug and dragons in general, and their propensity for hoarding gold, and how it might symbolize (among other things) the greed of a bad king. You can certainly see this in Beowulf, and it also resonates in The Hobbit, where the real antagonist turns out not to be Smaug, nor even really the goblins, but the dragon hoard that the good guys nearly come to blows over.
In the course of that class discussion, I quipped that it might be funny if there was one dragon who had actually earned all his gold legitimately, but knights-in-shining-armor kept challenging him anyway. It got a chuckle from the class, but the idea stayed with me. Eventually it turned into this story. Whether or not the dragon narrator actually has earned his hoard legitimately…? I’ll let you be the judge!
Hope you enjoy!
Bering a parent is hard.
Being a writer is hard.
Being a writer while also being a parent? Well… if you’ve tried, you know it’s not for the faint of heart.
In case you missed it, I wrote a blog post for the SFWA Blog last month, called, “Writing While Parenting,” a 10-step ‘guide.’ Hopefully it gives my fellow writer-parents a good, commiserative laugh, some practical ideas, and maybe even a little inspiration.
If you’re looking for more advice, best-selling author John Scalzi also gives some practical writing-while-parenting tips here, and there’s some good stuff in the comments on his piece, too.
Finally, here’s a goldmine panel of parent-writers as well. Enjoy!
‘Tis true: there’s magic in the web of it…”
Othello, III.iv
Quartos.
Folios.
Textual variants.
Conflicting versions.
Competing editions.
Authorship questions.
Given the maze that is the textual history of the works of William Shakespeare, I love the fact that the Internet has become home to a hyper-textual labyrinth of so many high-quality Shakespearean resources.
I’ve never been one to sweat a folio versus a quarto, or a Stratfordian versus Oxfordian versus Baconian author. Whatever. I just like the plays. I love the language. I also like to geek out when I find some new online version or digital tool about the Bard, going all the way back to the early days of the Internet with MIT’s Complete Works, or the original digitized Shakespeare Insult Kit. (Still a hit with the high school crowd, I’m happy to report).
More recently, I’ve been using the Folger Library’s excellent Folger Digital Texts, which are a lifesaver when you realize you forgot your own copy of the book in the middle of teaching Midsummer, or just when you want an easy, clean way of putting a passage from Hamlet on the screen for the class to look at together.
Then just last week, I thought, “There must be an easy way to search for every instance of a word in the complete works of Shakespeare.” Turns out there is, and it’s called Open Source Shakespeare, which has a nifty search engine that does exactly that. At the time, I was looking for title ideas for a new sci-fi story (the word “device” appears 53 times in Shakespeare, as it turns out), and just now, I used it to find the quote at the top of this post (“web” appears 12 times). Check it out, nerds. Sorry about making you stay up past your bedtime.
I’m sure there are more. Even in the process of searching for the image I used in this post, I discovered Internet Shakespeare Editions. There goes my night.
What are your favorite online Shakespeare resources? Share in the comments! I’d love to know.
A brief public service announcement from the Office of Grammatical Pedantry:
The past tense of the verb “to lead” is spelled “led,” not “lead.”
More and more lately, I’ve been seeing this error. I blame that quirky verb “to read” and the natural human desire for consistency.
But come on, this is the English language. What’s consistency?
Even cultural bastions like The New York Times and The Boston Globe aren’t immune. From The Boston Globe (3/31/19):
“The incident lead to an 11-day inpatient hospital stay…”
For what it’s worth, the spelling error isn’t the most disturbing thing in that article, which is about kids being hospitalized for Fortnite addictions, but still. Ugh.
You might be wondering, Well why shouldn’t “lead” and “read” work the same way? I don’t have a real answer, but I do have a theory, completely ungrounded in anything but my own guesswork:
Here’s a handy mnemonic for you to use: If you don’t use “led,” I’ll see red.
And if you don’t believe me, here’s Merriam-Webster on the subject:
There is some persistent confusion about lead and led. Or, we should say, there is confusion about the leads and led. Lead is both a noun and a verb, as most people know. There are several unrelated nouns spelled lead: one most commonly refers to a metal (as in, “The paint was made with lead”), and the other most commonly refers to a position of advantage (as in, “Our team was in the lead”). The verb lead is pronounced /LEED/, with a long e; the noun that refers to a position or advantage is also pronounced /LEED/, with a long e; the noun that refers to the metal, however, is pronounced /LED/, with a short e. To this moderately convoluted situation, add the past tense and past participle of the verb lead, which is led and pronounced like the metal noun lead with a short e. The homophonic confusion leads to homographic confusion, and you will therefore occasionally see lead in constructions where led is called for (as in, “She lead the ducklings to safety” instead of “She led the ducklings to safety”). The correct past and past participle of lead is spelled led. If you aren’t sure whether to use led or lead as the verb in your sentence, try reading it aloud to yourself. If the verb is pronounced /LED/, use led.
So please, in your writing, lead by example so everyone who might read you can learn that lead is not like read, and if you’ve already led by example, then everyone who might have read you owes you a debt of gratitude for taking the lead on led so we can put this stupid mistake to bed.
One of my favorite novels, Jane Eyre, begins with one of my favorite opening lines:
“There was no possibility of taking a walk that day.”
A bit further down the page, you learn that ten-year-old Jane is “glad of it.”
It’s a great opening line because it marks the transformation Jane will undergo by the time she’s a young woman, for whom taking walks–whether pacing the hallway, posting a letter in the village, or fleeing illicit and/or ill-advised betrothals–has become a way of life. In fact, walking is one of the ways she’s able to exercise any freedom or agency at all within her constrained life.
This spring, finding myself too-often and too-easily hunched over a screen, I’ve been trying to take daily walks. Sometimes I have a few (slightly misquoted) lines from Wordsworth ambling through my head (“Up, up my friend, and clear your looks, or surely you’ll grow double!”), and I almost always find that Wordsworth is right. In fact, I don’t think I’ve ever taken a walk that made anything worse, and a good many have made things better. Of course, Wordsworth was worried about people getting too caught up in their books; one wonders what he would think of our screens.
Wordsworth and his Romantic compatriots were on to something. I doubt it’s a coincidence that they too were in the middle of technological revolution and its consequential cultural upheaval. As we grow more and more constrained by technologies that seduce us with certain freedoms while furtively depriving us of others, we would do well to follow Jane’s example and look for whatever little opportunities there might be for a walk each day–that humble exercise of body, mind, and human freedom.
Technology to most people these days means something with a screen, or maybe anything electronic. Or if someone has a little historical sense, maybe they also take into consideration internal combustion, or even that ancient artifact, the steam engine.
Then again, these days, we’re not very good at thinking about technology, and why should we be, when most of the discourse about technology is driven by the people who sell it to us?
Continue reading “Postman’s Five Laws of Technology”Gene Wolfe passed away today. There are plenty of writers who knew him personally and will memorialize him beautifully. I’m just one reader who didn’t discover him until well into adulthood.
In a way, I consider myself lucky. I have almost his entire literary opus at my feet, stretching out to the horizon before me. I can count on one hand the stories of Gene Wolfe I’ve read so far: “Memorare,” The Fifth Head of Cerberus (twice), “The Friendship Light,” and The Knight. I’ve just started The Wizard. I’ve also read a few interviews and essays here and there.
I have yet to be anything but wildly impressed by it all. When I recently finished The Knight, it was in the grips of a physical exhilaration I have not felt from a book since first reading Tolkien as a boy. The Fifth Head of Cerberus needs no praise from me, but I already know I’ll be reading it yet again. “The Friendship Light” terrified me. “Memorare” I’ll be rereading tomorrow because it seems an appropriate way to honor his memory. Then back to The Wizard.
You know that feeling you have when you’ve finished the last page of a great book, or the last book of a great author, and you recall in a flush of nostalgia how it was when you first set out on that particular reading journey? There’s nothing quite like reading great books for the first time, discovering their wonder for yourself, knowing in the back of your mind what the moment is. That’s where I stand with Gene Wolfe as a reader right now. It’s not a bad place to be.
I never met Gene Wolfe, but I did get to meet his longtime editor once, the late David Hartwell. It was at Readercon a few years back, where I was lucky enough to score a seat at a kaffeeklatsch with Mr. Hartwell. I knew he was a big-time, venerable editor at Tor Books, but I did not realize at the time that he was Gene Wolfe’s editor–that he had been responsible for bringing Gene Wolfe’s great works to the world.
Well, in the course of the conversation, Mr. Hartwell mentioned that he knew one editor who didn’t believe anyone really enjoyed reading Gene Wolfe; people just liked to show off and act like they did. I had read one, maybe two Gene Wolfe stories at that point, and I had enjoyed them. So I asked David Hartwell, “Do you enjoy Gene Wolfe?”
He paused, nodded, and said matter-of-factly, “I do,” and moved on with his stories and sage advice.
You don’t know what you don’t know, and I didn’t know to be embarrassed by my question until I discovered sometime later that I had in fact asked Gene Wolfe’s editor if he enjoyed reading Gene Wolfe.
Whoops!
As for Gene Wolfe, he enjoyed Tolkien, so it seems fitting to end with some words from the latter:
Before him stood the Tree, his Tree, finished. If you could say that of a Tree that was alive, its leaves opening, its branches growing and bending in the wind that Niggle had so often felt or guessed, and had so often failed to catch. He gazed at the Tree, and slowly he lifted his arms and opened them wide.
J.R.R. Tolkien, “Leaf by Niggle
“It’s a gift!” he said.
Gene Wolfe was a gift. David Hartwell enjoyed Gene Wolfe. Lots of other people, it would seem, enjoy him too.
Here’s to the many words of Mr. Wolfe that I look forward to enjoying still.