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Spring Shorts Story #3: Christopher Columbus, Wildcatter

Wow, has it really been almost three weeks since I finished another short story? I really need to get back into the game. Still, this was a fun one, and I’m really looking forward to turning it into something great.

As with the two previous stories, I used the Mythulu cards to come up with this one. Here’s what I drew:

  • STATISTIC: The face, pile, voice, or sacrifice that gives personal meaning to a problem previously encountered and ignored.
  • EXPLORER: Enchanted by novelty. Energized by challenge. Brave, joyful, and resilient. Worst thing that can happen is for life to become too predictable.
  • GHOST LIMB: When amputees receive nerve signals from non-existant limbs.
  • MINE: Gleaning useful or shiny resources from the earth. Runoff from mines causes ecologically devastating pollution.
  • DEBTOR: One who has received something they cannot yet repay. Leads to either accountability or slvaery. Not free to pursue their own heart until absolved.
  • WATER: Currency of life. Symbolizes connection. Breaks boundaries. Patient, responsive, nurturing.
  • VIBRATING: A gentle resonant sumble. Usually felt when some kind of energy is flowing freely, whether sound, electricity, or emotion.
  • RECOVERING: Half-healed from some kind of significant damage.
  • FUZZY: A soft, comforting layer associated with innocent living things.
  • ADORABLE: Too cute to be taken seriously. Cannot intimidate others, no matter how hard they try. Their boundaries are frequently ignored.
  • LOUD: Showy in a way that interrupts others. Uncomfortably irreverent, noisy, or insistent.
  • HUNGRY: Ravenous and/or so desperately poor that they cannot afford food.
  • TEMPLE: Home of the gods. Point of access where higher powers can be found and petitioned.
  • MONK: Offers total forgiveness. Able to see through deception, especially self-deception. Invites, but never forces.
  • THRESHOLD: A Doorway that leads to a new life. Once you cross a threshold, you cannot return the same.
  • WIND: Represents connection to the unknown. Responsible for storms, pollinations, erosion. Influences evolution, spread of disease, and pollution dispersal.

For most of these elements, I ignored the flavor text altogether. With “statistic,” for example, all I did was start the story off with a random statistic I heard somewhere. No idea if it’s actually true, but hey, it makes for a great story. And with “threshold,” I traded out the card I’d actually drawn with one that worked much better. Also, I’m not entirely sure how “wind” fits in with the rest of it, but it feels right.

I’m going to keep going through with these Mythulu-inspired stories until I’ve used all of the cards. That definitely won’t happen until after Memorial Day, which I’ve marked as the end of this Spring Shorts challenge, but I’ll keep track of which cards I’ve already used and continue to write short stories on the side. With luck, I’ll be able to write at least one more story here, and I may keep it up for a while in the summer just until I’ve filled up the buffer in my publishing schedule. But more about that in a later post.

“The god Luck is deaf in one ear…”

The god Luck is deaf in one ear, they say, the ear we pray to; he can’t hear our prayers. What he hears, what he listens to, nobody knows. Denios the poet said he hears the wheels of the stars’ great chariots turning on the roads of heaven.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Powers

Do all books deserve to be read?

From TV Tropes:

Half an hour after the show is over, a random viewer is staring into their refrigerator, vaguely bemused by the fact that their six-pack of beer has somehow become a two-pack of beer. Rather than work out how this might have happened, it occurs to them to wonder how in the hell Sydney Bristow went from Hungary to Melbourne, Australia, then to LA, all within 24 hours. Or maybe it occurs to them that they’ve never met anyone who actually named their dog Fido. It didn’t bother them during the show. It wasn’t until they discovered they were running short of beer that it became an issue.

When China Mike Glyer picked up my post a couple of days ago, I was skimming over the comments and saw one that said, in effect, “every book deserves to be read.” At the time, I thought “well, that’s obviously stupid” and moved on, but last evening I had a moment of fridge logic, almost exactly like TV Tropes describes (minus the beer, since I don’t drink).

Every book deserves to be read? Really? Prove it by reading the Bible cover to cover. And the Book of Mormon. And the Doctrine and Covenants / Pearl of Great Price. And the Complete Journal of Discourses. And every General Conference report going back for the last two centuries. Heck, even as a believing Latter-day Saint, I don’t think there’s anyone alive who’s read all of that.

Or how about Mein Kampf? Does that deserve to be read?

(I happen to believe that it does, but in a “he who knows himself and the enemy does not need to fear the outcome of a hundred battles” sort of way. And no, I haven’t read it yet.)

Seriously, though, how insane do you have to be to actually believe something like that? “All books deserve to be read.” That’s not the sort of thing that a person comes up with unless they’ve been programmed to think a certain way. Like, “all women deserve to be believed” (except for Tara Reade, of course).

Now, I don’t believe that there’s a nefarious conspiracy to deliberately program people like this commenter to read crappy books. But there is a lot of propaganda out there that follows the formula “all _____ deserve to be ______.” Case in point, believe all women. What probably happened was this commenter, who has already been programmed by this sort of propaganda, tried to reformulate it in a way that would make me look bad. As in, “Vasicek is such a heartless monster to DNF so many books. All books deserve to be read.”

Here’s the thing, though: books are inanimate objects. They don’t have feelings. They don’t care if you read them or not. But readers do care if a book wastes their time. Time is a scarce resource for all of us, and there are more books in the world than can be read in a thousand lifetimes. So if you want to have any chance of finding and reading the best books, you need to be discerning—and that means acknowledging that some books just aren’t worth your time.

This is why I’m such a firm believer in DNFing books early and often. There’s nothing I hate about reading more than slogging through a book that isn’t working for me, only to find that I should have DNFed it a hundred pages ago. That’s why I was so frustrated with Stranger in a Strange Land. I love many of Heinlein’s other books, especially his juveniles, but some of them really misfire for me. So now, I assume that the author needs to prove themselves with every book.

But Joe, doesn’t it bother you as an author that people are DNFing your books? Not at all! Reading is an act of collaboration between the reader and the writer, which means that everyone’s “best books” list is going to be subjective. Some of the elements that make a book good can be measured objectively, but those elements are going to hit differently for different people—and that’s okay. Besides, even Jesus gets one-star, “did not finish” reviews. Who am I to think that I’m better than Him?

I used to worry that I was DNFing books to easily. But over the course of this last year, I’ve come to trust my own tastes. One of the things that I do test this is to skip to the last chapter of every book that I DNF, and read that. In 9/10 cases, I find that yes, there really is something objectionable about the book, and I made the right choice. And in the 1/10 books where that isn’t the case, something about it usually sticks with me, so that I end up coming back and reading it later. One of those books for me now is Deadhouse Gates, which I am thoroughly enjoying.

But you can’t learn to trust your own tastes if you adopt this insane idea that “every book deserves to be read.” In fact, if I still believed that I needed to finish every book that I started, I probably wouldn’t be much of a reader right now, just like most Americans.

So no, not every book deserves to be read. And at the end of the day, it isn’t about the books at all: it’s about the readers.

An interesting personal discovery

I just made a very interesting personal discovery, gleaned from the data on my reading of the Hugo and Nebula winning books. Of the 110 novels that have won either award, I have now read all but 16 of them, which is enough data to get some reprentative results.

One of the best predictors that I will DNF a book is whether the author is a childless woman. Of the 18 books written by childless women, I have DNFed all but three of them (Downbelow Station by C.J. Cherryh, which I read years ago and would probably DNF today, and Network Effect by Martha Wells, which is a genuinely entertaining read, and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norell by Susanna Clarke, which I haven’t read yet). For childless men, it’s a little bit more of a crapshoot: of the 31 books written by childless men, I’ve DNFed 16 of them and read 11, but only 6 of those are books I thought were worth owning.

Conversely, one of the best predictors that I will enjoy a book is whether the author is a mother. Of the 20 books written by mothers, I have DNFed only 6 of them and read 8, all of which I think are worth owning. Of the six remaining books that I haven’t read yet, I will almost certainly finish four of them, and may finish all six. The only book by an author I haven’t already read and enjoyed is The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, which I am currently reading and will probably finish next week.

For fathers, it’s more of a mixed bag. Of the 40 books written by fathers, I have DNFed 19 of them and read 16 (12 of which I think are worth owning). Of the five that I haven’t read yet, I’ll probably DNF at least one or two, so it’s safe to assume that there’s only a 50/50 chance I’ll enjoy a book if it’s written by a father, a little better than if it’s written by a childless man but not by much.

So there’s something about female authors that makes me much more likely to enjoy their books if they’ve decided to have children, and much less likely to enjoy them if they haven’t.

But I have to couch this discovery by saying “one of the best,” because so far, the best predictor that I will DNF a book is whether it won a Nebula without also winning a Hugo. Of the 31 books that have only won the Nebula, I have DNFed a whopping 23 and finished only 3 of them, none of which I thought was worth owning. Of the remaining five, however, I will probably finish at least another three of them, and all are books that I will probably decide are worth owning (Falling Free by Lois McMaster Bujold, The Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon, and Powers by Ursula K. Le Guin—all of them written by mothers). If that is the case, then the child-rearing status of the author (provided that she’s a woman) will indeed be the best predictor as to whether I’ll enjoy the book.

As for the decade in which the book came out, I’m slightly more likely to enjoy it if it was written between the mid-40s (counting retro-Hugos) and the mid-60s. From the mid-60s through the 70s, I thought almost all of the award-winning books were terrible (the only exceptions were Dune by Frank Herbert, which is more a creation of the early 60s, and The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed by Ursula K. Le Guin).

I haven’t yet read all of the books that came out in the 80s and 90s, but it generally looks like a 50/50 split, slightly favoring books from the mid-80s and disfavoring books from the late 90s. For the 00s, there isn’t enough data right now to say one way or the other. It’s the one decade left where most of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books are still on my TBR.

But starting in 2010, the books all seem to become terrible again. The only exceptions are Blackout and All Clear by Connie Willis (whose heyday for the awards was really more in the 80s and 90s), The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu (a Chinese author who isn’t caught up in all of the culture war baggage here in the West), and The Network Effect by Martha Wells, which once again seems to be the exception that proves the rule.

“It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”

So I DNFed Timescape by Gregory Benford today. I didn’t like any of the characters, and the retro-future view of the 90s as a dystopian post-climate catastrophe wasteland was predictably bad. But this quote from the afterword got me to thinking:

Habitual readers of science fiction will feel right at home with some features of Timescape: the ecological crisis, the contact between past and future and resultant time paradox, the scientists working to solve a scientific puzzle and save the earth [sic], and even a certain amount of scientific theorizing.

For 70s science fiction, the idea of an imminent, inevitable, and nigh-apocalyptic environmental collapse was thought to be so ingrained in the genre that it was accepted as a foundational trope of the genre. As a consequence, 70s science fiction tends to age very poorly. Almost all of the “important” works of the era, like Timescape, are infused with this Malthusian nonsense, and accept as axiomatic that all of the big crises of the 70s would only get worse and worse.

In contrast, the science fiction of the 40s and 50s was all about how science could help us to overcome the crises of their time, not how those crises were fundamentally insurmountable. Small wonder, then, that authors like Heinlein and Clarke inspired us to put men on the moon and satellites into orbit. And what did the authors of the 70s inspire us to do? Certainly not to tear down the Iron Curtain, pull the world back from the brink of nuclear war, or reduce global poverty at the most extraordinary rate in history. And yet, all of those things actually happened.

It makes me think of this apocryphal Mark Twain quote:

It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you into trouble. It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.

So what are some of the current assumptions of the science fiction field that will make future generations of readers scratch their heads? What are the things that will make the “important” works of 2020s science fiction age rather poorly?

Racial essentialism is probably a big one. I sense a growing cultural backlash against the racism of the intersectional left, especially in the wake of the George Floyd riots of 2020. That’s why the term “white supremacy” is in vogue right now, because the word “racist” has lost all of its power through overuse. If Worldcon doesn’t survive the pandemic, then I suspect that at least a few future SF historians will draw a connection between the Hugo’s demise and N.K. Jemisin’s three consecutive Hugo wins in the 2010s.

Transgenderism is probably another. Laying childish things aside, a society that rejects the biological essentialism of gender is not even metastable, as we’re seeing right now with all of the rapes in transgender bathrooms and prison facilities, with the obvious social contagion driving LGBTQ trends in the rising generation, and with all of the ways that political correctness demands that we reject basic science, typified so perfectly by the pregnant man emoji. That doesn’t necessarily mean that gender norms will revert to what they were in the 50s—in fact, I tend to think that the norms of that era were only metastable at best—but I do think that there’s a major cultural backlash on the horizon.

There’s a lot of other low-hanging fruit: the cli-fi of our era will probably age just as poorly as the apocalyptic visions of climate catstrophe written in the 1970s, and books that are based on 20s feminism will probably age just as poorly as 20s feminism itself. But what about some of the more difficult things to predict?

One of the more subtle ways that our current science fiction may age poorly is the complete ignorance of worldviews that clash with the established narrative. I would say that there’s a refusal to engage with contrary narratives, but it actually goes much deeper, as many writers are so deep in their own echo chambers that they don’t even know that contrary viewpoints exist. This has less to do with partisan politics and more to do with all of the ways that social media has re-engineered our society. Future generations will probably see the effects of this re-engineering much more clearly, and will wonder that the science fiction writers of our age were so unaware of how it affected them—both on the political right and on the political left.

Another less obvious thing is our generation’s lackadaisical and often schizophrenic attitudes on the importance of the family. When the chaos of the 20s is finally in the rear-view mirror, I suspect that there’s going to be a major groundswell of public interest in forming, cultivating, and maintaining strong families—largely because I suspect that’s how we’re ultimately going to find our way out of all this chaos. There’s a reason why Augustus Caesar, founder of one of the greatest empires in world history, placed such an emphasis on the importance of the family. Much of today’s science fiction takes it for granted that “love makes a family,” which was never true in any age—not even our own. It also takes for granted that found family is an adequate substitute for the real thing. With mutual commitment and great personal sacrifice, it can be, but that isn’t usually expressed on the page.

Does this feel a bit too much like wishcasting? How am I wrong, or what are some of the other things that I’ve missed? It’s probably just as difficult for us to answer this question as it is for a goldfish to comprehend what water is, but it is an interesting exercise, and hopefully a useful (or at least entertaining) one.

Reading Resolution Update: April

My 2022 reading resolution: Read or DNF every novel that has won a Hugo or a Nebula award, and acquire all the good ones.

In 2007, when I was a sophomore in college, I went up to Salt Lake City with some friends and was browsing the awesome (and fairly run down, even at the time) used bookstore near the Gallivan Plaza TRAX stop, which has since changed names and moved to another location. It was a really awesome used bookstore, and I determined to buy a SF novel while I was there, since I was really getting back into SF after my mission. I saw a massive 600+ page trade paperback edition of Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh, and since I was reading Downbelow Station at the time, I decided to get that one.

For the next fifteen years, I lugged that book everywhere, through more than a dozen moves (though for the biggest move, where I made the pioneer trek in the wrong direction and repented 8 months later, I boxed it up with my other books and left it in a friend’s basement). In all that time, I never actually read it—or even opened it up, really—but it was always there, somewhere in the middle of my dismally long TBR list.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to read it: I just didn’t have (or make) the time. Downbelow Station had been an okay read, if not spectacular, but I had really enjoyed some of C.J. Cherryh’s shorter books, like Merchanter’s Luck and Voyager in Night. Also, space opera books about sprawling galactic empires were right up my wheelhouse, so it didn’t seem odd for me to own such a book that I hadn’t yet read. In fact, most of the books that I owned throughout this time were books that I wanted to read but hadn’t gotten around to yet. If I have a superpower, it’s an uncanny ability to acquire books no matter where I am. Unfortunately, I’m not as good at reading them.

Fast forward to 2022. I’ve gotten married, had a daughter, launched my own writing career, and become a homeowner—and I’m still lugging this massive 600+ page trade paperback book that I’ve never read. But I’ve just set a resolution to read (or DNF) every Hugo and Nebula award-winning novel, and Cyteen is on the list. So around the middle of March, I finally open it up and start reading it.

After about a month, I decided to DNF it.

It’s not that it was terrible. Perhaps you enjoyed it, and that’s fine. I just found it to be too drawn out and confusing. I think C.J. Cherryh does better when she’s focusing on just a few characters, rather than trying to give the grand sweep of galactic civilization or whatever. I didn’t finish Foreigner for similar reasons. Maybe someday I’ll return to that one and Cyteen, but for now, I’m counting it as a DNF.

But the thing is, I was hauling around this massive book for most of my adult life. When I bought it in 2007, I figured that since it had won a Hugo, it had to be good. Perhaps, if I’d read it back then, I would have been more patient with it and slogged through to the end. Perhaps I would have decided it was just as good as Downbelow Station. Or perhaps, if I read Downbelow Station today, I would end up DNFing it as well.

The point is, I wish I’d been a lot more discerning about my reading when I was younger, and not just acquired books that I hoped to read “someday”… because books (at least the paper ones) are heavy and take up a lot of space. And a lot of them really aren’t worth reading. Of course, you’ve got to read a few stinkers to figure out what you really like, so it isn’t always a waste… but libraries exist for a reason.

So what this experience really tells me is that Mrs. Vasicek and I are doing the right thing by taking our family to our local library once a week. Also, it tells me that the second part of my resolution—to actually acquire all of the books that I think were worth reading—is just as important as actually reading them. Because, if the ultimate goal is to “seek… out of the best books words of wisdom,” then it’s not enough to just make a list: you actually have to read the damned things, and keep your own personal library in order to revisit those words and share them with others. Because ultimately, you have to discover which books are the “best books” on your own, and your best books list isn’t going to be the same as anyone else’s best books list. Which means that you can’t rely on anyone else’s list. You can use it as a starting point to make your own list, but that’s all you should use it for.

So now I want to go through all of the books I’ve acquired over the years and figure out which ones I ought to get rid of, because Cyteen certainly wasn’t the only one. In fact, most of the books in our family library are books that I haven’t (yet) read. By my count, there are just under 150 of them, totalling about 55k words. Even at a rate of 100 words or two hours of reading each day, that’s still going to take almost two years… and that’s not counting all the library books that we’re sure to check out in the meantime.

Oh well. I suppose this is more of a process than anything else. Journey before destination, and all that. And I’m sure I’ll have fun in the process, since despite the fact that I DNF far more books than I actually read, I do genuinely enjoy reading.

In any case, here are all of the Hugo and Nebula award-winning books that I read (or DNFed) in the month of April:

Books that I read and plan to or have already acquired:

  • Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge (2007 Hugo)
  • Blackout by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula) (audio)

Books that I read and do not plan to acquire:

  • Blackout by Connie Willis (2011 Hugo and Nebula) (print)

Books that I did not finish:

  • A Time of Changes by Robert Silverberg (1972 Nebula)
  • The Gods Themselves by Isaac Asimov (1973 Hugo and Nebula)
  • The Fountains of Paradise by Arthur C. Clarke (1980 Hugo and Nebula)
  • The Claw of the Conciliator by Gene Wolfe (1982 Nebula)
  • Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh (1989 Hugo)
  • Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (1991 Nebula)
  • The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson (1996 Hugo)
  • The Moon and the Sun by Vonda N. McIntyre (1998 Nebula)
  • Parable of the Talents by Octavia E. Butler (2000 Nebula)
  • 2312 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2013 Nebula)
  • Beyond This Horizon by Robert A. Heinlein (1943 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2018)
  • The Nemesis from Terra by Leigh Brackett (1945 Retro Hugo, awarded in 2020)

Total books remaining: 26 out of 110 (currently reading 12 and listening to 3).

Thinking about getting back on Twitter

So now that the world’s richest African-American—who has done more to save the world from the evil sun monster than everyone at COP 25 put together—has now bought Twitter and promised to bring back free speech to the platform, I am seriously considering whether I ought to make a new Twitter account and become active on social media again.

I deleted my Twitter account back in 2016, before the elections, and blogged about it (in less than 140 characters, of course) by saying “life is better without it.” And that’s true. Life is so much better without a Twitter addiction, and that’s the one thing that makes me reticent to get back on the platform.

There is no doubt that our current incarnation of Twitter, before the Elon Musk takeover, is a toxic dumpster fire of outrage and stupidity. But it is also the public square. Life without social media is a lot healthier in a lot of ways, but it does turn you into something of a hermit as far as the internet goes.

The thing is, I’m not very optimistic about Musk’s makeover of Twitter doing much to change the toxicity of the platform, because I think that toxicity has less to do with politics (though that certainly is a factor) and more to do with the dangers of social media addiction itself. In other words, I think our toxic politics is a symptom of social media toxicity, not a cause. The first half of The Social Dilemma really got this right, though the second half was mostly just bad propaganda about the threat of “misinformation” to “our democracy.”

So before I get back on Twitter again, I need to come up with some personal rules in order to keep it from becoming addictive, unhealthy, or toxic to my author brand. Back in 2010, Douglas Rushkoff came up with a sort of ten commandments for digital media, and that seems like a good place to start. His ten commandments are:

  1. Do not be always on
  2. Live in person
  3. You may always choose none of the above
  4. You are never completely right
  5. One size does not fit all
  6. Be yourself
  7. Do not sell your friends
  8. Tell the truth
  9. Share, don’t steal
  10. Program or be programmed

I probably ought to reread the book where he explains all of these commandments. It’s a quick read, with some good theory and a lot of practical wisdom. It is over a decade old, though, so I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff we’ve learned since then. Some of these rules probably don’t go far enough, while other may go too far.

In any case, I’m not going to get back onto Twitter until I have a plan, because the last thing I want is to get addicted to all of the toxic outrage and watch as my career (and possibly life) implodes because of it.

What personal rules do you follow when using social media?