You are driving, and almost out of gas, but you have two passengers who both need a ride. One fell at a construction site and has a steel bar through her chest. The other needs to quit smoking or she will develop emphysema in thirty years. With your limited resources, is it better to go the emergency room, or the late-night drugstore which sells nicotine patches?
Of course you go to the emergency room. But of course, this is a false choice.
In this spirit, I want to take on the nonsense about climate-change spouted last Friday by a reactionary writer named Bret Stephens, on the political affairs talk show Real Time with Bill Maher. Maher mentioned a study by scientist James Lawrence Powell showing that in almost eleven thousand scientific studies of climate change, only two studies denied it was caused by human activity. Stephens answered Maher’s challenge thus: (more…)
Author: Anthony Dobranski
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Fighting nonsense and spin, climate-change edition
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Use your dreams in life and art
At a recent party with fellow writers, I mentioned my last story had come to me in a dream. People seemed surprised, which I found surprising. Dreams have been essential to me, both in art and in life, and to hear other writers don’t use them is like hearing they don’t use their legs.
Dreams are not messages from beyond or from some benevolence inside oneself. They are a cognitive filing act to help store and retrieve information. This is why dreams are hard to remember. They are not meant to be saved.
My personal belief is that they lay the groundwork of intuition and creativity — the mind connects what you just learned against what you already know and experience, creating associations that allow you cognitive leaps. An unprovable opinion, but it works well for me.
But, just as analyzing urine tells doctors what your organs cannot, dreams contain information you can use. For a writer of the fantastic especially, dream images and scenarios are a rich inspiration. Dreams help with living too. In dreams, you see things you wouldn’t let yourself see in waking life, without a fully functioning you to object to them, to deny them. For one example of many, a dream of a three-way with an ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend fully cured me of any resentment about the breakup. Not that it revealed repressed attractions — only that I had lost sight of the difference between loving, and winning. (And perhaps that there was no love on offer, for me or my successor. At least, that’s how it turned out.)
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My new novel – published as a serial – and, why do it?
I’m so sorry! I have never shared my new novel with my blog. I think in part it’s because I view this as a less promotional space than a reflective one. I’ve posted about it in its future home, however, so I should talk about it here too. Perhaps more reflectively.
Starting in the first quarter of 2015 I will be publishing a serial historical mystery online at the Forest Hills Connection. It’s set in Washington DC in 1942, inspired by the wartime work of the National Bureau of Standards, which included proximity fuses for bombs and early uranium enrichment, along with many other unglamorous but vital duties such as alloys, radio crystals and weaponry sights. It’s also inspired by the strange life of Washington’s home front, a sleepy city become a world power and flooded with the nation’s first cadre of single women office workers. Here’s a promotional article with photos from the era.
The book came accidentally, an idea from the editor of our local neighborhood website to develop a serial novel about the neighborhood’s history, informed by the popularity of the historical articles the site publishes. Most neighborhoods at best have only a couple of novelists so my name came up quickly. I researched and I found myself interested.
But lots of things interest me. Novels are work and serials unfamiliar ground. I haven’t wanted to do anything but fantasy and sci-fi in decades. As a career move, another fantasy would be more in order, or a continued focus on short stories (but more about that in the next post). And it’s not as if I’m being paid.
So in the spirit of professionalism, in wanting my fiction to be more than a hobby — is this good business or bad?
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Jerk with binoculars finds wonder
There’s a house on my block that’s being rebuilt, a new plywood and lumber skeleton on the same foundation.
I walked the dogs at midnight, just down the block and back. From across the street they barked at the dark construction site. On the old front stoop I saw a slow cigarette smoked by a man in shadows.
This is not a street of trespassing midnight smokers. One theft down the block last month. At home, I called the cops.
They came in minutes. From my rear terrace, hiding in darkness, I saw three police talking to one guy. I went to my house and got binoculars. 8×42, a good pair. Yes I am now a creepy neighbor, but at least I was dressed. A man in a clean white polo shirt talked gamely to three police. Probably working in the basement. I felt a little bad. The police stayed a while, ten minutes and more, the man talking and talking to them. The longer the police stayed, the more illicit it all felt. I stopped watching.
In my stealthy dark, Orion hung in bright points on our city’s indigo skies. I looked through my binoculars and saw wonders. (more…) -
The cyborg in a time of prolonged war
A friend recently told me that the old TV series The Six Million Dollar Man, about a grievously-wounded astronaut fitted with human-looking but superpowered prosthetics, was being rebooted. I vented about this a while — I have issues with the constant readaptation of the recent pop-culture past, driven by the marketer’s fear of an unsure product — but a recent panel I had seen at the World Fantasy Convention put me in a kinder mindset.
The panel discussed the rise in European horror fiction after World War 1. Fiction helps us process the world (to a great degree, scientists now think), even the horrors of war, if it can address it. Even today, Outside the Wire’s Theater of War presents Sophocles’s Ajax to communities vulnerable to PTSD. In the US after the Civil War, and in Europe after World War I, horror stories helped society work out the true horrors they had seen and still saw, the desolation wrought around them, and the wounded disabled survivors.
Because of our improved ability to save the lives of the grievously-wounded, our 21st-Century wars are increasing both the number of young disabled people and the public’s frequency and depth of engagement with prosthetic devices. There’s things to say about that, well-suited for telling through a Steve Austin figure.
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On technology in fiction
Modern and future readers don’t need to be convinced that technology will improve to magical levels; we’ve seen it happen in our lifetimes, in our children’s. To explain more than absolutely needed is to write for the past, but the dead will not read us.
So I have become pointedly effacing on the subject of gear. I don’t want to say anything not immediately needed for the story to continue. It is enough that a tool acts; the tool itself should be as invisible as a butler, and the action the thing of import.
This is a stylistic choice, a convention, but it is informed by function. (more…) -
Optimism and Zombies
Almost fifty years ago, Stewart Brand wrote in the Whole Earth Catalog that we were as gods and that we might as well get good at it.
At roughly the same time, George Romero made Night of the Living Dead.
Guess which one inspires our culture today?
Fifty years from now, the zombie might have the quaintness of little green men, but for now, they are everywhere. Newt Gingrich observed some time ago that for better or worse, the Earth is about human beings now. The zombie is our reflexive response to the disgust this idea rightly inspires: a fear our modern world is a fragile thing that fights nature, enabling concentrations of power that persist when they should rightly decline. The zombie says that we are Greek gods, petty and short-sighted, bad gods. Fifty years ago, our lone Gnostic writer Philip K Dick wrote pulps; today his work still inspires movies.
Perhaps we should be more optimistic. Last weekend I attended Woolly Mammoth Theatre’s inaugural Zombie Workshop, to kick off their spring 2015 satire Zombie the American. Along with zombie movement explorations (we form herds so quickly when we pretend to be dead) and hilarious script scenes, the theater hosted a discussion of “zombie economics” with the law professor Ilya Somin. (more…) -
Making a busy life into a busy blog
The blog has been stale although I have been busy.
In posts across the web, that “although” is a “because” — you know you’ve read it, here and a thousand other blogs. Which is a problem. It’s one thing to know silent business is a missed opportunity to self-promote, another to make it an aspect of writing and not an intrusion. With Jeff VanderMeer’s Booklife, I am learning how to change that.
I am late to Jeff VanderMeer’s excellent fiction, but when the esteemed Paulo Bacigalupi mentioned VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, & Acceptance) on three separate panels at CapClave, I took it for advice — and I loved Annihilation. (The others wait for Xmastime.)
But, in the dealer’s room at World Fantasy Convention, after VanderMeer signed my copy of Annihilation, I passed a table that had his book Booklife. Just the title made my heart both sink and rise. A booklife? What’s that? I want one. I really do. (more…) -
We might be the first intelligent life
The Economist this week reports on the work of Tsvi Piran and Raul Jimenez, calculating the frequency of gamma-ray bursts. This is not an arcane question.
Gamma-ray bursts are incredible yet short-lived generations of energy, cause as yet unknown, great enough to kill all life on a planet as close to the blast as 10,000 light-years (just shy of six quadrillion miles). The closer you get to the center of a galaxy, the more frequent gamma-ray bursts are — and thus, the more inhospitable that region is to life.
Douglas Adams described our home star as being in “the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy.” Turns out, the galactic suburbs may be the only place life could survive long enough to become intelligent.
But wait, there’s more. By Piran and Jimenez’s reckoning, our galaxy is one of the ten percent of galaxies with a high “metallicity” — meaning, with stars full of elements other than hydrogen and helium. In metal-rich galaxies, gamma-ray bursts are rarer. So, not only are we made from the ashes of older stars, but we live in a place with enough star-ash that we are less threatened with gamma-ray extinction.
In short, we might be among the first intelligent life forms.
This is a lovely, trippy idea, made earthier and more bitter by our recent brush with nuclear armageddon. It is also an idea almost completely unexplored in fiction or myth.
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On scaring people with writing
The Atlantic notes with alarm the bizarre saga of Patrick McLaw, a writer and teacher put under medical evaluation seemingly for the violent story lines of his self-published novels, to media reports wholly absent of reminders of the right of free speech. Although subsequent reports hint, weirdly, at greater issues, Ken White nicely states the concern that not only do governments overreach, the media often serves them as “obliging stenographers.”
I’m curious about the more general notion, that an imagined horror is somehow more threatening when the person imagining it is somehow related to the situation. Is it really so much worse if a teacher pens a novel about a school-shooting? If a colonel penned a novel about a rogue officer, would it affect the colonel’s career in a way Stanley Kubrick never had to worry about? Can an air-traffic controller not write about a disturbed pilot, or a lawyer write about a corrupt judge?
Must we outsource our dark sides to disinterested parties, absolved of ill intent by the condom of “research”?