Month: October 2002

It’s official: for the first time since 1997 a team other than the New York Yankees will win the American League pennant, and for the first time since 1993 (or 1994, if you count that strike-terminated year) a team other than the Yankees or the Cleveland Indians will represent the AL in the World Series. I didn’t get to watch much of the Yankees’ divisional playoff against the Angels, but I wonder if their loss has something to do with the age of their pitching staff. These guys — Clemens, Pettite, El Duque and David Wells — are all getting up there in years, and with all of the Yankees’ postseason play the last seven years, they’ve piled up a lot of innings. Assuming the Yankees retain pretty much the same lineup next year, they might want to look into adding some youth into their starting rotation.

As for the Angels, they seem to be an exciting team to watch. I expect them to be a handful for either the Twins or A’s.

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IMAGE OF THE WEEK

Pittsburgh Pirates second baseman Bill Mazeroski, approaching home plate, after hitting a home run in the bottom of the ninth inning in Game Seven of the 1960 World Series, giving the Pirates the championship over the New York Yankees.

Bill Mazeroski is considered by many to be the greatest defensive second baseman of all time, but his single greatest play was at the plate when he became the only player to ever end a World Series by hitting a home run. (He was eventually joined in this club by Joe Carter, who ended the 1992 World Series by hitting a three-run shot for the Blue Jays.) Mazeroski’s homer is one of baseball’s greatest moments, and is probably the greatest moment in the history of the Pirates franchise.

(An interesting bit of trivia is that Mazeroski’s shot made Harvey Haddix the winning pitcher of that World Series game. Haddix is known in baseball lore for a game he lost: a 1-0 defeat at the hands of the Milwaukee Braves, that one run coming in the 13th inning — after Haddix had pitched twelve consecutive perfect innings.)

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The new James Bond movie, Die Another Day, has a new trailer now. Like the previous trailers for the film, this one gives very little idea of what the film is about, except that Bond is apparently betrayed and “set up” for something. Judging trailers is dangerous business, but so far all three trailers for DAD have me thinking that the new Bond film doesn’t look much like a Bond film.

One thing that intrigued me, though: a snippet of Bond interacting with John Cleese, the new “Q”. Bond says something like, “So this is where the old things are” — and we can see, in the background, the one-man jet plane that Bond used in the teaser-sequence to Octopussy, and we also see another brief shot of Bond slipping underwater with something in his mouth that looks like the miniature rebreather that he used in Thunderball. I rather like the idea of Bond using an old gadget or two, if I’ve read the signs in the trailer correctly.

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I finished reading Eternity’s End, by Jeffrey A. Carver, yesterday and found it a frustrating read. This is a stand-alone novel set in a universe that Carver has written about before, called “The Starrigger Universe”. A Starrigger (or “Rigger”, as called in the novel) is a specialized space pilot who has the ability to navigate starships through “the Flux”, which appears to be a kind of “warp space” or “hyperspace” or something equivalent. Each ship has a team of Riggers who are responsible, therefore, for the ship’s faster-than-light transit, by delving into the Flux. The Riggers work the Flux by actually shaping it so that it becomes a visual metaphor for them to work with; at times, the Flux appears to be a cloudy sky, at times it appears to be deep underwater in the ocean, at times it appears to be something else entirely, depending on the needs and abilities of the Riggers. (All this is explained in the novel, which is the only one of the “Starrigger” novels that I’ve read.) Of course, navigating the Flux has its own perils, one of which is that if one strays into the wrong part of the Flux, one’s ship can seemingly vanish out of space-time entirely and only reappearing sporadically, becoming something of a “ghost ship”. The search for just such a ship, the Impris, forms much of the backbone of this novel, which can be partly described as “The Flying Dutchman in space”.

That also describes the main problem I had with Eternity’s End. The idea of a ghost-ship in space, and the search for that ship, is a very interesting one, and those parts of the book which deal with that search are fascinating and even gripping. However, that whole plot is part of a larger one, involving some kind of vast interstellar conspiracy into which one man, a Starrigger named Renwald Legroeder (that name didn’t help matters any), falls unaware. Legroeder is on the run almost immediately in the book, and he doesn’t know why. He is also tagged as the fall guy for a ship that was captured by pirates before the events of the novel; his insistence on the reality of the lost ship Impris, which he sighted during a pirate-encounter, is suppressed; he is framed for murder; he is enlisted by the intelligence apparatus of an alien race….and after all that, he goes in search of the “ghost ship”. The total effect is that I was never exactly sure of what story I was being told. Is the novel about the ghost ship? is it about humanity’s stalled colonization of space? is it the Ludlumesque espionage thriller where a normal man tumbles into something that marks him immediately for death? is it a story about space pirates? is it a vast space opera? is it a legal thriller?

Eternity’s End turns out to be, in some measure, all of those things — so much so that the novel feels schizophrenic. The focus is constantly changing, so that there is no one central conflict that drives the novel forward. There are times when, as one conflict is beginning to gather steam, Carver steps back and forcefully reminds us of the earlier conflicts that are still simmering on the back burner. One would expect all of these conflicts to boil together into a single, explosive climax, but they don’t; instead there is a series of climaxes that take place over the novel’s last 150 pages. And there are so many plots going on that some of the most interesting ones are shortchanged, and some of Carver’s most interesting ideas are introduced and then completely ignored. One such idea is that on the stranded Impris, time actually moves at different paces at different parts of the ship — so one married couple has found a closet where time moves slowest, and that’s where they stay, so they can be together. Of course, the ship’s eventual rescue would have implications for that couple — in fact, for everyone on the starliner that has been stranded for 120 years — and yet, none of those implications are ever explored, much less even mentioned. The plight of the Impris could have been a harrowing novel of its own, but here it is merely a giant MacGuffin to drive the rest of the plot. Other ideas are also left underdeveloped: the secretive military organization whose commanding officer is not even named until the book’s last 75 pages but who becomes the main villain behind it all, the competing pirate societies, Legroeder’s coming to terms with his neural implants, the fact that the implants themselves seem to be sentient beings — all of these ideas are left on the table, mentioned but never expanded.

Eternity’s End, unfortunately, reminds me of a dish that should be baked in the oven at 400 degrees for 45 minutes, but is instead baked at 325 degrees for 30 minutes. Parts of it are undone, and as a whole it doesn’t come together.

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But what if you write and write and write and you don’t seem to be getting any better and all you collect are printed rejection slips? Once again, it may be that you are not a writer and will have to settle for a lesser post such as that of Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

–Isaac Asimov

I love writing. Except for those days when I hate it.

This is one of the latter days.

Before my move, two weeks ago, I had four stories out at market. In the last three days, that number has dropped to one. Opening the mailbox to find an envelope inside, with my own address written in my own hand, is always disappointing. To see my SASE sitting in the mailbox three days in a row is positively disheartening. You can try to brace yourself for it; you can tell yourself every time you put a story in the mail that it’s going to be rejected; you can plan the next market for that story’s submission for when the rejection comes; you can even print out the next submission copy for that day….but it still stinks. Those rejections have cumulative weight. Each one hurts more than the last; each one lets a little more air out of the bubble. With each rejection in the mailbox, the doubt grows: I should have sold something by now….someone should have bought just one of my stories by now…. I know that this is irrational, that every writer endures it, that in some cases the rejections pile up for years before that glorious day when the SASE contains a contracts instead of a form-letter. So now it becomes an exercise in masochism: how strong is my conviction that writing is my truest, best destiny? I want to say it’s as strong as ever. The stories are still inside of me, and I still write them because I have to. But at what point does the wellspring taper off to a trickle, and then stop entirely? Never, I can only hope.

My first rejection letter ever came two-and-a-half years ago, for a vampire story called “Graveyard Waltz”. It was actually encouraging to get that first rejection letter, because at the time I took it to mean that I was officially “in the game”, that my hat was in the ring. Someone once said that “Ninety percent of success is just showing up”; that first rejection was my first official indication that I was showing up. (Of course, it helped that the editor of the magazine in question had scrawled a personal note at the bottom of the form-letter, telling me that it was despite the rejection a good story, and she looked forward to my next submission. Unfortunately, I’ve never submitted to that market again, because it’s a vampire-story only market, and I haven’t written any vampire stories lately. I can’t force myself into genres that easily; I take the stories as they come.)

I like the rejections from Weird Tales most of all, because the editors there (George Scithers, Darrell Schweitzer, and a few other assistants) actually take the time to tell you something of why they rejected the story. In the case of the one that arrived today (“The First Wish”), they noted both the story’s length (it’s at the outer limit of their standard word count) and its lack of a strong plot (not a surprise at all; the story in question isn’t plot-driven at all). It’s also not really in their genre. So why did I submit it to them in the first place, with all those cards stacked against me? For one reason, basically: word-count. With the exception of “The City of Dead Works”, “The First Wish” is my shortest story — at 8,750 words. Brevity consistently eludes me in my “short” fiction, which has the side effect of severly limiting the number of markets to which I can submit. There are simply few markets that are open to works of novelette length, so after a story of mine has been rejected three times — maybe four — it’s pretty much out of commission, unless I become aware of a new market accepting stories of that length. This also rules out just about all of the smaller markets that I know of. I’d love to be able to send my stories off to the smaller markets, the ones that pay a tiny amount plus a few copies, just to see my work in print somewhere. But I don’t know of any of those markets that deal in the lengths at which I work.

I’ve wondered for a long time if I should do anything about this: whether I should keep writing my stories at what feels to me to be their natural length, or whether I should try to “teach myself” to write actual short stories. Most days I lean to the former; some days, though, I wonder if I shouldn’t attempt the latter. The story that I’m writing now is shaping up to be another long one. I have a few story ideas that probably could be short ones, but I won’t know until I get to them. And of course, all of this has nothing at all to do with the big project: the unfinished novel that is getting quite close to completion.

The last chapters of Dr. Asimov’s Second Foundation are called, respectively, “The Answer That Satisfied” and “The Answer That Was True”. My answer, for now, is to keep on writing. I’m not sure if that answer satisfies, or if it is true. I hope it’s both, because it’s the only answer I have right now.

Back to the desk.

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I hope that when I am 94 years old, I am as active as Jack Williamson. This SF Grand Master is still spinning out fine tales and novels, and he’s still winning awards. This is a man who started writing SF when the term for the genre was “scientifiction”, and his earliest submissions were to Hugo Gernsback (for whom the Hugo awards are named). He is also credited in the Oxford English Dictionary for coining the word “terraforming”. There’s a good interview with Williamson in this week’s Science Fiction Weekly.

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Strange things are afoot: the Minnesota Twins won a postseason game outside the Metrodome. Wow. (The Twins have the distinction of playing in the only two World Series — 1987 and 1991 — in which the home team won each game. Both times the Twins were the team with four home games, so they won both Series.)

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A small complaint about my recent move: my chances of seeing Spirited Away in a theater may have gone down quite a bit. The film is in a slow, gradual release. I have no idea if it was even going to play in Buffalo, and now that I’m in an even smaller town than Buffalo, I may miss out entirely.

But I have high hopes. One bit of niftiness came at our new local grocery store, which has a typical Halloween-type display with big cutouts of cartoon characters in Halloween outfits. This place actually included Kiki from Kiki’s Delivery Service, a Totoro from My Neighbor Totoro, and the dragon from Spirited Away. To see these characters in a grocery store display was somehow deeply satisfying.

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The tallest building in Syracuse is 21 stories (or so). That’s apparently about to change, as construction is about to begin on a 47-story hotel that will be part of the gargantuan shopping-entertainment-restaurant-hotel complex that is in the planning stages. They’re building the hotel first, even though the rest of the project doesn’t exist yet, because the company involved believes that the construction itself will be a tourist draw. I’m not sure about that — did people go to Boston to see the Big Dig being dug? Maybe they did, I don’t know….anyway, the whole shebang is called Destiny USA. I’m still a bit fuzzy on why they want to build something like this in a fairly small town in Upstate NY, but it still sounds interesting to me. Too bad they couldn’t do it in Buffalo.

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My level of anticipation for The Two Towers has officially been upgraded from “Really looking forward to it” to “Nearly drooling”, on the basis of the new trailer. In this day and age of junky marketing for junky movies, it’s so amazingly refreshing to see a film project where everyone involved is saying, “You know, let’s get this one right, shall we?”

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