Science Fiction:  Plans, Sidetracks, and Endpoints 
   
     For over a year, I’ve been telling students and colleagues that I was willing to venture into the realm of teaching creative writing.  I am the Chair of an English Department quite famous for its writers. 
I’m not putting myself into that august group, but I wanted to pull my own weight in terms of taking on a
workshop.  The Department has recently begun a new class format that is the perfect venue.  
    
    Instead of a 4-hour weekly workshop, we have these new flexible mini-workshops for only 2 hours per week.  I didn’t need to go off the high dive; I was going to stand on the edge of the pool and dive (or belly-flop) with a short offering.  
 
    It was to be my first-ever sortie into teaching any type of sci-fi and/or creative writing workshop.  
 
    Although eager, I was nonetheless intimidated.  
 
    I shouldn’t be because, after all, I know  something of writing and something of sci-fi.  I have put together 4 such novels since the late 90s, working in a lonely and silent workshop (my home office) and pouring myself into a horrific world not so
farfetched from what we have now.  
 
    In these four linked novels, The Marsco Saga, I have space travel, love, political catastrophe, plus colonies on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids.  A war is about to break out; a ragtag band of optimistic (and literate) heroic dissidents are not willing to knuckle under; and a religious lunatic (living in a cave) is willing to destroy everyone else to prove his messianic beliefs are correct.  (I slapped
him into an Amazon rainforest cave long before
9/11.)
          
     The creative writing class was a great idea. 
Science fiction and fantasy are extremely popular. 
Since I’m on the verge of publishing my own books, I readily agreed to do a mini-workshop and let the dragons, war-bots, green-goo-attacker-globs, dark
and shadowy killer thingies fall where they may.

    Sadly, these “best laid plans” have fallen by the wayside. I fell behind over the summer so I never got a handle on a clear conception for the class; I had to beg off offering this class in Spring ’12.  To my surprise, my office door on campus was not surrounded by ranks of zombies, creatures from black lagoons, diaphanous and silken-clad alien women lusting for my soul but really desperately needing my blood and marrow to live.  

    Had these ET hordes assailed me, I would have cautioned them, don’t mess with me, you alluring creatures from a galaxy far, far away.  Marianne is
like the honey badger protecting me and will rip out your pulsing innards, you green-blooded beauties who talk in stilted English.  You know the kind, spandex accentuating them just right, threatening with chilling remarks like, “All your orbit bases and hunk-men are belong to us. . . .”
             
     It would have been a good class. 
              
     I had looked for a textbook and found the How
to Write Science Fiction and Fantasyby Orson Scott Card came with the highest recommendations.  I crossed paths with him once in graduate school before he hit it big as a fulltime sci-fi writer, but he wouldn’t know me from Obi Wan Kenobi.  

     His enormously successful Ender’s Game didn’t capture my attention when I started it many years ago.  Since I was then in my 40s, the appeal of youthful anxiety so central to the novel didn’t grab me, invite me into that world.  My nephews read him while in high school and loved him.  Card’s
protagonist has that dour, loner, teenage angst, which I had long since lost by the time I opened the novel.  It’s not that other works primarily written for young adults can’t hold my attention; I love all seven Harry Potter works and have devoured them twice.  The same is true of The Lord of the Rings.

    However, Card’s How to Write is helpful and honest about the struggles of trying to craft fiction professionally on a sustained basis.  “Don’t quit your day job” is just one of his many admonitions; “this gig is harder than it looks.”  And I love his understanding of the sci-fi genre and why some of us embrace it willingly: 
  
    “One surprising result of the ghettoizing of 
speculative fiction, however, is that writers have enormous freedom within its walls. It’s as if, having once confined us [sci-fi, speculative, and fantasy
writers] within our cage, the keepers of the zoo of literature don’t much care what we do so long as we stay behind bars.”  

     I hadn’t thought much about it, but when I created my world of Marsco (disease-ridden, dysfunctional politically and socially, rewarding and sustaining only an elite clique), I thought I was
simply exaggerating the world around us.  I explained to someone recently that the mainthe-reader-has-to-buy-this-exaggeration of the Marsco world is simply that the Third World is no longer out of sight on the other side of the world, but it’s on the next city block.  
 
    Marsco has the power to control who crosses the street and when.  Today, in our real world, Israel is
walling itself away from Palestinians.  In the Marsco world, this is happening but on a total planetary level, not in the far corner of the Mediterranean.

    But, back to class!  We were to read Walter M.
Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, a novel I want my students to know.  In this Cold War-era story, the world has been destroyed by a nuclear war, typical sci-fi fare from that paranoid and wary age.  The novel is set at a remote monastery in the southwest desert of the old USA. There, the monks are hand- copying books because after the atomic conflagration, the survivors blamed
knowledge and the literate for ending their 21st Century world.  So, intellectuals, scientists, educators alike are doomed, hunted and
attacked with merciless savagery after the atomic fires died down. Any books that survived the war went up in smoke afterwards, scapegoats for the catastrophe that brought the world to the edge of
extinction.  

     As the novel begins, it is 600 years after the war, but the world is still in ruins.  Miller’s world is roughly analogous to the 5th or 6th Century of our real history after the Fall of Rome.  The monks at the abbey are painstakingly laboring away on vellum like real monks did in our distant past.  

     The next section is roughly another 600 years later, in what would be our own historical world on
the verge of the Renaissance. When secular scholars visit the monastery seeking any text that deals with
theoretical physics and engineering, the monks have already made a treadmill-run generator that allows their visitors to read by a primitive electric light.  The visitors are devastated when they realize their incipient theories are not in fact new ones, but rediscoveries from an old world long past; they’re doubly upset because these desert hermits are a century ahead of their fledgling scientific hypotheses.  
 
     The last section is set 2400 years after the first conflagration and the world is on the verge of a second nuclear holocaust.  Having forgotten their own history, arrogant and tech-mastering humans are condemned to relive it.

     Even though steeped in Roman Catholic monasticism (the monks are authentic Dominicans who still speak in Latin), and even though our own Cold War fears have eased, Canticle is a tremendous book.  Well-crafted.  Keenly paced.  Generously
described.  Readers feel like they have entered Miller’s Medieval, Renaissance, and Modern redux. 
He captures the political machinations of those trying to harness science for their own means, not for the good of the whole.  He creates believable characters caught in the political webs and intrigues of their world.  The science fiction creeps in; it does not saturate.  Radiation-mutilated humans with extra
heads or arms roam about, reminders of the nuclear war long past, of science run amuck, of hubris fouling the world. 
 
     The novel opens with the unwitting discovery of a fallout shelter and its long-buried mysteries totally
misunderstood by monks in their nearly-destroyed, post-bellum world; these discoveries are understood by the reader:  Air lock? “Can of kraut and pound of pastrami”? Fallout itself—a mysterious ogre?

     And, Miller asks, how do you make ethical choices in such a world?  Indeed, how do we, today, in our real, wrap-knuckles-on-the-solid-desk-world right before us, how do we make ethical choices?  How do we live amid the injustices of our world?

     I ask these questions in The Marsco Saga.  My characters tend to be of Marsco, of the top 1% of the world in terms of political power and the necessities of life.  They have safety and comfort, freedom
from disease, crime, and the grime of a nearly-destroyed world. Most of the world’s population is held down to languish on the “nasty, brutish, and short” lowest stratum of society.  How do my characters’ consciences allow them to live while aware of this?  How do they live at all?  Or love?  Move about with any degree of freedom while knowing that their world is built on the backs of the
oppressed?

     It’s an exaggerated world, but also one much like our own.  In Card’s words, I write behind these bars.  And I chose to locate there so I can control the canvas backdrop and ask questions about that oppressive environment.  How do we make ethical choices in our own world?  How do we live and love
without becoming calloused and cynical?  
 
    Good speculative science fiction isn’t about the science, it’s about the speculation.  The British war poet Wilfred Owen wrote:  “All a poet can do is
warn.”  
 
    So, too, with the sci-fi writer:  we write to warn.

[So sorry I am late with this!  I plan to write on a more regular basis.  I'll keep you posted.  Also, check for updates on my Facebook wall.]

 
  
          

[Dear readers:  My first entry of the school year was delayed due to the busy rush at the beginning of the semester and a nagging illness I had difficulty shaking.  That said, I plan to publish weekly for the rest of the school year. 
Thanks for hanging in!]

       “How I Spent My Summer Vacation”

    Way back in September 1974, when I first started teaching high school, I really did assign my 9th graders an essay on this topic.  It was a hot day, nearly 100 degrees, an easy temperature for the Sacramento Valley to hit at that time of the year.  The building had no air conditioner; the assignment turned out to be a flop.

     That semester, however, I did garner the absolute best excuse I have ever received from a student who did not do his homework and therefore was unprepared for a Monday morning quiz.  He wrote: “I am not prepared for this morning’s quiz because my father and me drove to Idaho to watch Evil Knievel jump the Snake Canyon.”  Knievel was unsuccessful in his jump; the student wasn’t particularly the best I ever taught.  His excuse, however, still ranks as my #1.

    The second best excuse came here at SMSU.  I had a world-class weightlifter in class.  His reason for missing:  tournament judges for an upcoming championship match came by his apartment that morning and demanded an immediate, unannounced, random urine test to make sure he was not using steroids to enhance his performance.  And so, he was late—but he passed that test.
           
     The semester after this particular incident, I was explaining to my advanced LIT class, one filled with mostly future high school teachers, the range of excuses we hear as teachers.  Of course, I began, Evil Knievel still ranks #1.  But when I next explained the weightlifting #2 excuse, his girlfriend (unbeknownst to me, a member of the class) blurted out, “But, it’s TRUE, he did need to give a urine sample that day.”  
         
     My third best excuse is actually the most chilling.  A student missed class because of a train accident in her home town, an accident that released a tanker car of chlorine gas.  The mustard-colored cloud forced the evacuation of the whole town. It made the national news. 
 
    Coincidentally, this was the semester I was teaching World War One poetry and could tie the accident to Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” about British Tommies being caught in a poison gas attack:  
    “Gas!  GAS! Quick, boys!" – an ecstasy of fumbling,
    Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
    But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
    And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. . .
    
     This past summer, in addition to trips to Arizona and Grand Marais, I read several excellent books. One, Beatrix Potter:  A Life in Nature, is an engrossing biography of an individual woman who changed the world even though confronted with her culture’s entrenched sexism.  At first aiming to become an amateur botanist and scientific illustrator, Potter was rejected by the decidedly male scientific community of her day.  Over time, her illustrations (which she fortunately kept) proved to be more accurate than many others of the day.  And her theories about mushrooms and how they spread was scientifically correct if not accepted until many years later.  When a work covering all the fungi of Britain was published in the 1990s, the author rediscovered her illustrations and used about two dozen in his work because Potter’s were finer than any other illustrations and photographs of this subject. Potter was long dead by then.
   
     And besides Peter Rabbit and Jemima Puddle-Duck and a host of other children’s favorites, Potter began buying centuries-old farms in the historic
and remote Lakes’ District and restoring them as working farms.  She supervised their renovation; hand-picked their managers; introduced Herdwick sheep (a breeding stock better suited to the harsh climate in Northern England); and eventually donated her considerable land holdings to the National Trust. Today, these farms are owned by the citizens of the United Kingdom.  The Lakes’ District had been the haunt of William Wordsworth and Samuel Coleridge and scores of landscape painters a century before Potter settled there; her actions saved a huge slice of English literary and artistic culture in perpetuity.
     
     My literary specialty is the British novel, so it’s no surprise I read a few novels this summer. I finally finished the 20-volume Patrick O’Brien series about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars.  O’Brien’s two heroes are unlikely friends:  Captain Jack Aubrey and Doctor Stephen Maturin. 
 
    “Mad Jack” is a devoted Royal Navy officer with the spleen to fire all his guns and the ambition to capture valuable prizes on the high seas.  In that era, officers grew extremely rich from such tactics that we would describe as piracy today.  The captain’s medical officer, Maturin, is a renowned surgeon, a naturalist, a Catholic whose family came from two natural enemies of England (Spain and Ireland), but an enlightened Renaissance Gentleman devoted to stamping out tyranny wherever he found it.  

     Napoleon is his arch enemy even if the Doctor has latent sympathies for his beloved Irish; he views France’s dictatorial Emperor as worse than anyone sitting on the English throne.  And, Stephen is a spy for the British, a way to insert him on shore for adventures in his native Spain and eventually the fledging United States and the rebellious areas of South America.  He is a way for O’Brien to introduce some cloak-and-dagger plot twists and elements that span a few volumes as subplots.   
      
     Since I started reading the series in the summer of 2001, I have watched this pair woo and wed elegant ladies and then watched one of them lose his beloved wife.  I’ve witnessed in brilliant prose as “Mad Jack” Aubrey attacked French, Spanish, Moroccan, Dutch, and American men-of-war.  I’ve seen the pair cast adrift on the sea, tossed up helpless on deserted islands, been too hot, too cold, too hungry, been overstuffed with the delicacies of the era, been drunk, sober, and been consumed by a cocaine addiction.  They also play a respectable selection of violin and cello pieces together when not waging war or discovering the latest mammal or aviary specimen.    

     I had thought that O’Brien was going to return the pair to England at the end of Volume Twenty, Blue at the Mizzen.  Jack has defeated a superior fleet in the South Pacific as he helped Chile free itself from Spain; Stephen has aided in the political intrigue while pointing out (accurately) the flora and fauna of the South America coastal areas.  Jack’s wife and children are waiting at home in Kent; Stephen has proposed to the one stunning woman who can match his scientific wits.  Napoleon is out of the scene, but trouble is brewing and so. . .

     O’Brien was about a third of the way into his 21st novel when he died.  I have the publisher’s attempt to put the partial manuscript into novel form, but I found it uninviting knowing it will just end without a clear plot conclusion. Yet I envy O’Brien’s grit to keep going, handwriting fifty thousand words, fully committed even in ill health to reach the last paragraph and period of #21.  Surely, the writer’s equivalent of dying with his boots on.  
 
     Also this summer, I ordered the DVD set of The Pacific and watched that.  For those of you who don’t follow HBO Productions, The Pacific is the companion to Band of Brothers, the HBO series that told the story of the “The Screaming Eagles,” the 101st Airborne Division in Europe during World War II.  The Pacific follows various Marines as they land on Japanese-held tropical (and fortified) islands to fight a determined enemy and the horrific jungle itself.  Both ten-hour mini-series are worth the effort to watch, as graphic in language, action, and accuracy as they are.  Although made-for-TV movies, they hold nothing back.

     After I finished The Pacific, I downloaded to my Kindle two of the memoirs the film used as sources, Robert “Lucky” Leckie’s Helmet for my Pillow:  From Parris Island to the Pacific and E. B. “Sledgehammer” Sledge’s With the Old Breed:  At Peleliu and Okinawa.  After the war, Leckie became an award-winning AP journalist; Sledge earned his PhD in biology and was a beloved professor for many years.  Both are now dead.  The war stories are harrowing and graphic, not to sensationalize the violence, but to make a point:  war is hell and should not be glorified.  
 
     But both authors accurately point out that those young Marines in the Pacific suffered    unimaginable horrors to defeat a determined enemy capable of unimaginable horrors.  Neither war survivor wanted to write about their buried memories of friends dying painfully, of buddies being mutilated by the weapons of modern warfare or by a cruel enemy, of malaria and other jungle-borne diseases ravaging their own young, healthy bodies.  But they felt compelled to in order to put their post-War demons to rest.  So write they did of these gruesome miseries, of their own fears, and frankly, of their own eventual hatred for their fellow humans whom they killed with ruthless and merciless efficiency.  (Lucky was a machine gunner, Sledgehammer part of a mortar team.)   

     Enrolling in college after his discharge, Sledgehammer was asked by a perky coed what he learned in the Marines that could be used to foster his education.  “I worked with explosives,” he softly replied, embarrassed by the question.  “Well, that might apply to engineering,” the overly-helpful coed chirped.  Bending down to her ear, he whispered, “The Marines taught me to kill Japs. I learned really well and got damned good at it.”  
 
    Upon seeing a stage production of the upbeat South Pacific soon after it first opened on Broadway, Leckie began writing Helmet for my Pillow so people in the peaceful USA wouldn’t think the South Pacific war was a musical.  He succeeded.

     This gives you a glimpse of how I spent my summer on top of Chairing the Department, traveling to a few weddings and graduations, and working on my own sci-fi novels, The Marsco Saga.  By Christmas ’11, you will be able to download the first, The Marsco Dissident, onto your e-readers.  An electronic stocking-stuffer.

     Meanwhile, keep reading in good health!    

Books Do Furnish Rooms

                My summer break is finally here.  I look forward to two events during the summer:  writing more and reading more.  I’ve already moved into the pages of three books although my break from teaching is hardly two weeks old. 

For the past fifteen years or so, I’ve been making my way through Patrick O’Brien’s twenty-novel set of his Aubrey/Maturin seafaring works about the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic era.  I have only 100 pages left of the 19th novel, The Hundred Days, plus volume 20 (Blue at the Mizzen) to finish.  A must read for summer 2011.

                I also have been reading a recent biography, Beatrix Potter, A Life in Nature, by Linda Lear.  Potter was more than a writer of colorful and fascinating children’s books.  She was a naturalist who was not accepted during her time (in part because she was a woman) and a conservationist well before such a thing existed.  (I’ll have more to say about Potter as the summer progresses; she’s still a teen at the moment.)

                As we drove to and from Arizona right after graduation (my excuse for no blog last week), Marianne read First Family:  Abigail and John Adams by Joseph J. Ellis aloud as we tooled along.  Abigail and John were feisty, independent thinkers; we would do well to label them both as “Founding Fathers” of our democracy.  Marianne and I were enthralled by the coalescing of so many currents in their lives:  politics (obviously), but also home and often tragic family life, plus a passionate love for each other.  They are a good model for contemporary committed couples given the carnage of marriage we see all too often in the American political landscape these days.

                Lastly, I also opened a book I bought at Ypres last May while there with SMSU students, Dunkirk:  Retreat to Victory by Julian Thompson.  The author, a major general in the Royal Marines and a professor at King’s College, London, starts with the British Expeditionary Forces actions against the German Blitzkrieg while in Flanders in May 1940.  He does so to stress the heroism and tenacity of the BEF before it was overwhelmed by the Panzer onslaught and left huddled on the Dunkirk beaches awaiting evacuation by the Royal Navy—the final part of the story we all know.  Thompson shares an absorbing tale of French military blindness and Belgium wishful thinking, that their neutrality would save them this time, in 1940, although it hadn’t in 1914.

                I guess it’s no secret that I am a book lover.  Whenever I am in someone’s house which has a bookcase, I am not much of a conversationalist, I’m a library browser.  I love seeing works I have heard about but not read, and also seeing my favorite works proudly on display.  I especially love seeing works I teach on a shelf somewhere.  It makes me feel that teaching novels isn’t so esoteric and irrelevant.

                I recently spied dog-eared copies of Matilda and James and the Giant Peach which reveals that the adults of the house read to their children.  Roald Dahl teaches kids about more than just chocolate.  Houses with older kids (many now at college) usually have a tattered copy of To Kill a Mockingbird.  It’s not surprising that this work has remained timeless.  Its exposure of racism is as pertinent today as in the early Civil Rights Era. 

                I’m always excited to see Cry, The Beloved Country on a shelf, especially when its binding tells me it has been read.  This novel has one of my favorite characters, Msimangu, a young, dedicated priest fighting racial injustice with Gandhi-like fortitude and determination.  The work is an eye-opener for sheltered students who have no idea of what lurked under the oppressive stones of empire building.  Move the Imperial stones aside, and they see that in the ooze underneath, the history of colonialism (European or not) is an ugly history.

                It’s the same with All Quiet on the Western Front.  Here is a story of youth and honor and gullibility.  And then of disillusionment and horror.  I am convinced that some wars need to be fought; World War One was not.  Europe blundered into the slaughter and could never justify the carnage.

For a war that couldn’t be avoided, witness our Civil War, a war which should be viewed in its rawest contrasts and not glossed over with some fervor that celebrates “the honor-bound Confederacy” as actually having a real cause, now lost.  It was a war over the ownership of humans.  Black slaves as chattel, nothing more or less.  I don’t often see it on a bookshelf, but pick up a copy of The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara to witness the awful truth of that slaughter made worse by Southern “gentility.”

                On the lighter side, when I see that children and adults have devoured Harry Potter, I am especially pleased.  In Marshall when the intense frenzy of the final Potter books hit, I was among the first to get my hands on Book VI and Book VII.  Locally, I got the 10th copy of The Half-Blood Prince in the summer of ’05; in ’07 I had slipped to 23rd when buying The Deathly Hallows.  Either way, I was there at the stroke of midnight in our community bookstore, now unfortunately closed, to gather with witches, warlocks, nerds, geeks, book-freaks, and cyberpunks willing to try a different genre, plus all those enlightened parents who wanted to foster their youngsters’ passion for the right kind of magic, reading.  I feel at home among these devotees of Rowling.

                It’s a rare house that does not contain any of J. R. R. Tolkien’s works.  The Lord of the Rings is almost as ubiquitous as the Bible.  If Tolkien is there, I am almost certain of finding C. S. Lewis as well, Narnia and Screwtape and perhaps a personal work about his tragically lost wife, Joy.    

                While scouring my friends’ bookshelves, I am pleased to see a variety of cookbooks.  Before Abigail and John Adams caught our attention, Marianne and I read aloud My Life in France, the well-crafted autobiography of Julia and Paul Child during their European sojourn that eventually lead to her writing The Art of French Cooking.  (“And the rest is history,” as they say. . .)  I enjoy seeing other cook books as well from vegetarian to Indian to “eat fresh and local” newbie works.  It’s also encouraging to see a host of works about food production in America:  Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and Schlosser’s Fast Food Nation.

                Books do furnish rooms.  Travel.  History.  Science for the non-scientific.  Art.  Photography.  Fiction, including sci-fi.  An occasional slim volume of poetry.  I love a crowded bookcase with cock-eyed books stuffed in them.  The montage shows that these volumes are for reading, not decorating.  It’s a positive sign.  As summer comes to warm us, don’t forget time for reading.  Devour a novel or two (or a dozen) this summer.  It’s good for your soul.  Read to a bored kid.  Buy them books.  Ask them what they are reading and share how much you enjoyed reading about Tom Sawyer or Elizabeth Bennet.  Live it up!

                Two novels you can’t see on a bookshelf yet are my first two Marsco Saga works, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant.  They are speculative fiction which brings in many elements of today’s political chaos into a story set 90 years from now.  I plan to have them available for Kindle download in June or July this summer.  Meanwhile, I have loaded two chapters of the first novel on this website if you wish to take a look.  (Follow the Marsco link on this webpage.)

    

                Libya:  2011 – The Great War 1914-1918

        “Only the dead have seen the end to war.”  George Santayana 

    I am sure much of the political irony about Libya is lost on the average American college student.  I think that’s the case because the average American knows little about World War I, “The Great War” which raged in Europe, Africa, parts of Asia, and on all the oceans from 1914 to 1918.  It ended nearly 100 years ago and yet we still live with the repercussions of that debacle.  

    My comments are in no way intended to be a defense of Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, the self-proclaimed Libyan “King of Kings,” the horrific despot who runs Libya, as all despots do, with an iron fist.  He’s not much of a tyrant since he really only controls a bit of sand and beach plus thousands of square miles of dry wadies and desert wastes dotted with an occasional oasis.  If Libya didn’t sit on vast reserves of oil, few would pay attention to it or to its ranting lunatic of a ruler.  (Compare Libya to the Sudan, and you will know what I mean.)  

    Pan Am Flight 103 and Lockerbie aside, (and Gaddafi was only tangentially involved with these after the fact, it seems), Libya hasn’t hurt Europe, and Europe only cares for Libya when her refugees clamor to seek safety in Sicily or when oil prices soar.  

    And yet, Libya is front page on our few remaining newspapers and on our incessant 24-hour networks.  Today isn’t the first time armies are pushing along the Mediterranean coast road and then falling back as airpower shifts the balance of power.  It happened in the early 40’s during World War II.       

    The crux of the irony right now, however, isn’t World War II, it’s World War I. French and British jets are pounding Gaddafi and his armed forces.  The US is aiding in this, especially with cruise missiles, but the Europeans are the ones driving this campaign.  Since the British, French, and Americans are part of NATO, NATO is also involved, which means, (if you are following me), that Turkey is involved.  Turkey has been a member of NATO since 1952.

    And so, here is the historical irony.  European and Euro-Asian nations (Britain, France, and Turkey) are exerting a military presence over North Africa yet again.  Thumb through any world history book, and you’ll see that these nations have done this all before.  Turkey was once the Ottoman Empire and in the Great War, the Ottoman Turks allied themselves with the Central Powers, Germany and Austria-Hungary.  

    And at this time, the Allies, specifically the British and French (along with their attendant empires) tried to first invade Turkey through the Dardanelles, the ill-fated Gallipoli invasion that made Australian and New Zealand soldiers famous.  (The movie, Gallipoli, helped make Mel Gibson famous to Americans; it’s still worth viewing.)  When this invasion failed, the Allies tried a different tactic.  At this time, the Ottoman Empire stretched through what are today independent nations.  (Perhaps not free nations in any political sense, but independent nonetheless.)  Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Saudi Arabia, to name only a few nations once dominated by the Turks.  Not as far around the Mediterranean coast as Egypt and beyond all the way to Libya, but in the far reaches of the Mediterranean and down to the Persian Gulf, Ottoman Turkey ruled for centuries without rival.

    Wars have a way of producing an opportunistic guise for adventuring countries.  Britain and France, then the number one and number two European empires and thus the number one and two empires of the world, were no exception.  In heartfelt political proclamations about the rights of peoples to command their own destinies, the British mainly (with the French clamoring for a share of the spoils) destabilized the Turks.  (Another fantastic film, Lawrence of Arabia, tells this story; it is also worth watching.)

    Come 1919 when the whole area was at peace and the new maps drawn, it was no surprise who controlled the areas and who didn’t.  But this heartfelt concern for the locals was a deception.  The European empires wanted to replace the old Turkish Empire with their own, and they did just that.  

    At Southwest Minnesota State University, I teach a great deal about World War I in various classes:  20th Century British LIT, a First-Year Experience class whose topic is solely the Great War, various Global Studies seminars (in which we actually take students to the battlefields of Belgium and France).  As a scholar of the history and literature of the British Empire during this specific period, I often remind students that wherever there is tension in the world today, probably Europeans drew the maps.  And they probably drew them in 1919 with the Treaty of Versailles in which the victorious Empires thought that their myopic vision for the world (which was based on the sacrosanct idea that they were right at all times) was not just the best vision for the world, but the only vision for the world.

    It took a second world war to disabuse them of this notion.

    What a difference a war makes.  The end of World War I with its ill-conceived Treaty of Versailles was actually the beginning of World War II.  World War II ended with the United Nations and its two major tenets:  make war impossible and end colonialism.

    With jets hitting targets in Libya, perhaps part of the UN Charter doesn’t seem so successful.  And with these former colonial powers leading this charge, perhaps the second part of the Charter is being overlooked as well.  History will be the judge.  And the irony isn’t lost on the observant.  

    Back in college, I remember reading about the cycle of history:  anarchy becomes tyranny because people want stability more than anything else so they surrender to a strongman.  From this tyranny, an oligarchy rises as the tyrant needs to share power to keep it.  This becomes an aristocratic system as entrenched families pass their power down through the generations.  From this, people clamor for political power, hence republican and democratic ways of governing rise up.  But these all fail in time and collapse back into anarchy which sets the whole political landscape in motion once again.  

    The future world I create for The Marsco Saga explores modern democracies after they fail.  The main characters are struggling amid their personal success:  they are part of the power structure which has risen from post-democracy anarchy to give the world stability.  But, they chaff against the draconian methods Marsco employs to stay in power.  The few chapters I’ve posted give you a sense of this central tension running throughout the novels.       

                                 “Hurry up, please, it’s time!”
                                  T. S. Eliot, The Wasteland

    I have always been fascinated by time, the passage of time, the effects of time.  Even as a boy, at midnight on New Year’s Eve, I burned the past year’s freshly-completed calendar as if to signify that its time was truly gone.  Even today, I mark off the days on my calendar one at a time as if to anchor time.  Today is done, I think drawing a diagonal mark across the box with the date, tomorrow awaits.  

    And the older I get, the more the years fly by.  I often remind my colleagues at Southwest Minnesota State University that I originally intended to stay here three years.  We came in 1989.  I assured myself, “three years and onto somewhere closer to family, somewhere with a warmer climate.”  Three years has grown into nearly twenty-two.

    Wordsworth speaks of “a spot of time.”  He is so accurate when he explains that some moments in our lives become significant at the exact moment they happen and then also take on more or shaded meaning(s) as we move away from those events.  A visit to a monument, for example, can come to mean much more than the actual trek there.  In his case, his first visit to Tintern Abbey and second visit with his sister five years later both took on deep meaning.  The ruined Abbey hadn’t changed all that much in the five years between his visits, but his life had.  He saw those ruins in such a different light the second time.  And on his repeat visit, he also saw them as his sister, experiencing them for the first time, would have.  It was as though he knew this experience two or three different “times” at once.  

    He is so impressed with his experiences, he is so sure of their current and future influences on him, that he states that he knows the memories of these visits will bring him such happiness and support “In which the heavy and the weary weight / Of all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened.”  Indeed, these visits are so powerful to him he senses that such experiences allow us all to “see into the life of things.”  These aren’t just tourist destinations; these are spiritual events with mythic, life-changing consequences.  He gladly acknowledges “with pleasing thoughts / That in this moment there is life and food / For future years.”  

    Wordsworth and others have noted this.  I think it’s the job of the poet, the artist, (photographer, novelist, essayist) to arrest us to a moment we might otherwise not notice, ones we habitually overlook. 

    Today, a colleague and I were speaking of Harper Lee.  To Kill a Mockingbird has been relegated to adolescent coming-of-age LIT by so many, but its enduring force still surges for many young readers.  In perfect pitch Lee wrote a depiction of a time and place in our history that (for the most part) is gone, but which still lurks in many parts of our society although in more nuanced and subtle ways.  

    Looking at the stark, blatant racism of the Deep South in the Depression fixes the attention of high school readers today, arrests the attention of many who hardly know the significance of a black man as president.  That’s a fact (Obama in the White House) they can just take for granted.  Blacks already populate their sports and entertainment world, their school lunchrooms (as teachers and students not just janitors) and their TV screen:  the news, weather, sports are all brought to us by a shifting palette of American colors, not just European White (and Male)—the TV skin tone of my youth.  

    Compare how Mockingbird has stayed with the young readers of today while Catcher in the Rye has diminished.  Holden Caulfield no longer jives with youth because his world was so narrow that today it seems stilted and privileged.  Scout’s world is mostly gone, except maybe in the Tea Party’s image of what America should return to, but her world is alive with variety and promise.  Holden’s isn’t.  His cynicism is old hat; it’s this generation’s cynicism now.  Our youth sense Scout’s optimism; they’re drawn to it.  As cynical as they are, our youth are repelled by Holden’s self-loathing righteousness.  It is too much their own pessimism.  

    My fascination with time drew me to science fiction.  I devoured the classics from Jules Verne to H. G. Wells to Bradbury.  I grew up with Spock and Kirk first-hand, before syndication and without spinoffs.  Star Trek was raw, laughable special effects—that a ten-year-old can do on a desktop today—but I was loyally, glued to the screen of possibility:  diversity (only we didn’t call it that then), intelligence winning over superstition and ignorance, and of course other-worldly adventure.  I stood in line for three hours to see the original Star Wars on that second day it opened.  I ended up seeing it five times within the next month, always with fresh eyes. 

    My own speculative fiction, The Marsco Saga, forces readers to pay attention to time.  As much as I love Dr. Who, I don’t play any tricks with “time warps” or “dual times” or “overlapping realities.”  Marsco time is the gritty look at our time with all its flaws, played out to the least desirable extreme.  Earth, 2092.  Marsco dominates the planet and solar system out to the asteroid colonies with the time-honored strategy of naked power.  As democracies run their course and collapse, they begin disenfranchising their citizens who are least educated, the most costly in terms of social services and the least likely to produce any profits.  This puts a bit of the “Third World” next to every developed city or area around the globe.  Nations downsize.  And they protect themselves with barbed wire and checkpoints, surveillance, and armed troops.  They select and screen who can use their vast computer network, the only one left standing.

    The Marsco World is a world not so different from our own, exaggerated for effect but not as speculative as we would wish.  I have posted a few chapters of The Marsco Dissident on this blog and hope you enjoy them.  This summer, I plan to have the first two novels, The Marsco Dissident and Marsco Triumphant available for e-book download.  I hope you will take the opportunity—and time—to enjoy them.