Writing Fiction

Chabon's Yiddish Policeman

The Tyee has published my review of Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union under the title Israel in Alaska.

Happy Birthday, Ray!

Via the New York Times: Vintage Bradbury, Packaged Anew. Excerpt:

Though slowed by age, Ray Bradbury still speaks with exuberance. Hobbled by a stroke in 1999, he now dictates his work over the phone to his daughter in Arizona, who records and transcribes it before faxing edits back.

Mr. Bradbury works in an overstuffed leather chair in a den lined by shelves of VHS tapes of classic movies and history texts. The room is crowded with models of dinosaurs, rocket ships and Jules Verne’s Nautilus submarine, his own dusty Emmy, a friend’s tarnished Oscar and a 52-inch flat-screen television not unlike the ones he presaged in “Fahrenheit 451.”

“I’m surrounded by my metaphors,” said Mr. Bradbury, who acknowledges that the science in his books is often faulty and serves only as a vehicle for his fiction. He’ll provide the inspiration, he says, and let the scientists worry about the particulars.

“The arts and sciences are connected,” he continued. “Scientists have to have a metaphor. All scientists start with imagination.”

As Ray Bradbury turns 87 on Aug. 22, the celebrated science fiction and fantasy writer is taking something of a victory lap, partly the result of mining his extensive files for rare and unfinished work.

He will publish several long-forgotten works this summer, including experimental drafts and his earliest writings. In September William Morrow will release “Now and Forever,” a collection of the never-released novellas “Leviathan ’99” and “Somewhere a Band Is Playing,” with an expanded, limited edition of the latter to be simultaneously released by an independent publisher.

This caps a year in which Mr. Bradbury was awarded a special distinguished-career citation from the Pulitzer Board. “Leviathan ’99,” which Mr. Bradbury describes as “ ‘Moby-Dick’ in outer space,” was started in the ’50s, and though he has revisited it sporadically over the years, it was originally intended as a radio script for Norman Corwin. It follows Ishmael Jones as he accompanies a blind, maniacal captain of the “largest interstellar spaceship ever built,” tracking a great white comet.

You would have to be as old as I am even to know who Norman Corwin was...probably the greatest radio writer of the 1940s. And it's a great pleasure to think that Ray Bradbury is still writing and publishing.

Can it really be fifty years since I heard him speak at the Santa Monica Library, just after Sputnik? I'd heard him the year before in Pacific Palisades, where a large audience laughed at him when he said "We'll go to the moon and Mars, and eventually to the stars."

After Sputnik (this was 1957), he said: "We'll be on the moon in five years and on Mars in twenty-five." No one laughed. And even if he was wrong, no would laugh at him now.

Memories of Allen Ginsberg

CBC Radio this evening is running a Dutch documentary on Allen Ginsberg and his poem Howl.

Amazing how a poem written over 50 years ago is still alive and kicking. In 1957, I don't think we teenagers would have sat still for any poem written in 1907. But we sat still and listened to Howl, and Kerouac's On the Road, and a batch of less-remembered Beat works.

Two or three years later, I was a callow undergrad at Columbia in New York City, hanging out with the other wannabe writers on Columbia Review. One night Ginsberg and a couple of other Beats gave a reading at MacMillan Theater on campus. My tenuous connection to the Review got me a seat in the second row, right behind Ginsberg's father.

The master of ceremonies was F.W. Dupee, then a literary critic of awesome reputation (a year later I took a course from him and found him quite as intimidating as promised). Dupee in his conservative grey suit stood on the stage, looked out at the audience, and said: "The last time I introduced a poet on this stage, it was T.S. Eliot."

That brought down the house. We had clearly fallen a long way from the glory of that genteel anglophile anti-semite, but Ginsberg (in plaid shirt and jeans) didn't seem put out at all. We adolescent riffraff didn't care either. Eliot? Yeah, yeah, the Jew on the estaminet, do I dare to eat a peach, etherized upon a table, so what?

Ginsberg was a Columbia grad, only about 12 years away from the place, and when he took the stage he also took charge. He was articulate, confident, and careful to explain why he wrote his poetry the way he did: The natural length of a breath, he said, should be the length of a line of poetry.

He was smart, funny, and powerful, and of course he blew us all away. Some of us could have chanted the lines of Howl the way people can recite the lines from the Rocky Horror Picture Show or Beyond the Fringe.

He read from Howl, of course, and from other poems, including one for his insane mother that brought tears from his father sitting in front of me. After the reading, the Review crowd and a few others took him to an Italian restaurant just off campus, and the conversation was lively.

Of course I recall only what he said to me, but it was engaged—I mentioned Dalton Trumbo's Johnny Got His Gun, and he lit up: "Great novel!" That it was mentioned by a gawky, bespectacled teenager meant nothing. It was just a literary work he admired, and we talked as book-lovers about it.

In retrospect, some literary historians think that evening on Morningside Heights was a pivotal moment in American literature. A postwar literary generation had been publishing for a decade, but only now did it literally and figuratively stand up.

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, John Clellon Holmes—not all are remembered now, but they had all found something in the American vernacular that expressed a new sensibility. Mark Twain and Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams gave them a new way to use the language.

Using that language, they could talk, really talk, about drugs, insanity, sexuality, religion, and life under the threat of catastrophe—and we privileged suburban boys could at least try to grow up in the world that Ginsberg and his friends had framed so well.

It was an opportunity not many young writers ever get, and I hope I have not entirely wasted it.

Thinking about Philip K. Dick

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker has a long, thoughtful essay about Philip K. Dick: Blows Against the Empire. If you haven't read Dick, you've probably picked him up by osmosis through movies like Blade Runner.

I read some of his work in the 1960s, and especially liked The Man in the High Castle (which Gopnik dismisses as the least interesting of Dick's novels). But I didn't take him all that seriously; among Genre-Writing Thinkers, Dick seemed to me far behind Vonnegut. Still, Gopnik makes some important points about Dick and his era, and I may have to revisit some of the novels.

You think you have problems as an SF writer?

Via a Chinese website, English.eastday.com: China's sci-fi lags behind US. Excerpt:

About 100 years ago, Lu Xun (1881-1936), one of the greatest Chinese modern writers, said, "To guide China's development, science fiction should be the starter."

That was his far-sighted comment after completing the translation of Jules Gabriel Verne's "From the Earth to the Moon."

However, even now most people don't quite understand Lu's idea, and it is even more difficult to find a brilliant Chinese sci-fi article.

In 1980s, China published over 30 kinds of sci-fi magazines and newspapers, with hundreds of original sci-fi and popular science articles.

But today, "SF World," with a circulation of 500,000, is the only surviving sci-fi magazine in the country. Each Chinese sci-fi work may only have 20,000 copies printed. In contrast, the United States prints 148 sci-fi periodicals, and publishes 2,000 sci-fi books every year, some of which boast six-digit circulations.

Jiang Xiaoyuan, dean of Science History Department of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, believes fantasy and imagination are valuable, because the 80 days around the world, the ascent to the moon and the invention of submarines have all come out of Jules Gabriel Verne's novels into reality.

Now, China only has less than 100 professional sci-fi writers, only a dozen of which have any fame. On the other hand, there are over 1,000 state-appointed science academicians, with Dr Pan Jiazheng being the only one to write sci-fi articles in his free time.

In 2003, Zheng Wenguang, known as China's "sci-fi Father," passed away, which
temporarily attracted public attention.

I don't know about those "148 sci-fi periodicals," but it's too bad that a country modernizing as fast as China doesn't have a literature to explain what's happening.

From Fiction to Nonfiction

Poor old Henderson is on hold again: I've agreed to do a second edition of a nonfiction book I published 30 years ago. It's called Go Do Some Great Thing: The Black Pioneers of British Columbia. It was quite successful in its time, but it's been out of print for many years. The subject really deserved more research, and I'm having a wonderful time digging around online; meeting all those amazing folks again is like going to a class reunion. I'm also blogging about it at Pioneers.

By chance, a letter arrived this morning from a reader that fiction writers might want to consider:

Years ago I was inspired by a science fiction writer who visited my English class in high school. My class was reading Fahrenheit 451 and after I spoke to Ray Bradbury for a few minutes he told me that I had a gift. He read my science fiction short story to the class after it was determined that I was the lucky one to have won a science fiction writing contest. Ray Bradbury told me to pursue writing and never give it up.

Today, I am a nurse mainly because my Dad said there isn't any money in writing. I have written some stories over the years, even some songs (sold one to the country music market). I didn't earn very much for that song by the way.

How do I get focused? I have a few GREAT non fiction stories to tell. How does anyone make a living at writing? What does it take? Do you just have to know the right people?

I still vividly recall hearing Ray Bradbury speak in Los Angeles a couple of times, way back in the 1950s (I read The Martian Chronicles in 1950, when I was 9!). So I can understand the impact his judgment must have made on you.

So what if you've decided to try your hand at nonfiction? How do you get focused? And can you make a living at it?

The Perfection Problem

A reader has sent me an interesting question, and agreed to let me answer it here:

The time period of this book is an era at or near the beginning of the middle ages but not actually in history, so is basically a fantasy genre, and is based for teenage audiences. In the novel, two factions battle over the destiny of the human race.

The "good" faction has fewer warriors than the "bad or evil" faction but the warriors on the "good" side are basically the best combatants the world has ever seen. The best word to describe them is angelic, as they excel at everything they do, whether it is art, construction, war, and even farming.

In this novel all of the plot events lead up to a massive siege of the greatest fortress city imaginable, where the "good" guys desperately try to fend off the massive "evil" army. Here is where I've hit a bump in the road. I need help with the city itself.

Since the "angels" built this city, i imagine it to be perfect, and totally massive. It holds the entire race of the perfect humans (which is about 250,000 people) and is designed to be virtually impenetrable. I need your help for some advice on the details of the city, a push in the right direction, if you will. I want this city to be the greatest thing the main character has ever seen, and much more. This is probably the most important location in the entire novel so I need it to be flawless.