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Walter Miller's Journal

6/30/2014

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                Walter C. Miller’s Journal

                  Sac City, May 10, 2092

               (In 2014, Sac City is known as
                   Sacramento, California)

            Keeping track of Tessa is a bit daunting, even for me, her father. Bethany and I always gave her free rein, and for most of her life, she stayed pretty much in the range of our own skeptical view of Marsco. Life on Mars afforded us that. And working for Herriff at his Van Braun Center in the gigantic rift valley of the Red Planet, Valles Marineris, a sprawling research complex dug into its cliffs, helped as well. Tessa is now in her early 30s, although physically she’s younger than that due to her hibernation trips. Most space-based Marsco Associates share in that, a protracted life due to icing on space journeys. I’m a good example of that, too. I’m in my 60s, but look like I’m mid-40.

            Now, however, Tessa has her own view of Marsco and of being an associate. Comes with the territory of nurturing an independent, thinking child, I guess.

            Bethany and I raised Tessa on Mars at the VBC from when she was a child until she was 18. We went there because Earth was on the verge of war. We could tell; all the signs were obvious. And we were right.

            Safe at Herriff’s VBC, I researched and Bethany worked on Martian water/ice recovery and reuse. Tessa grew. She was for many years the only child at the Center. Of course, with a war raging on Earth, on or in the orbit around the Moon, out even to some Asteroid Belt colonies, the population at the VBC didn’t increase much. Even in the other colonies, everything flat-lined for the three years of the Continental Wars. When they ended, the Wars that brought Marsco to power, it seemed best to remain in situ and not tempt a return to the Blue Planet. So Red Mars, named for the god of war, became a safe haven for a decade or longer as the atmosphere and politics on Earth settled down. The Blue Planet looked pretty brown from here, seen through a telescope, since its atmosphere was dust-filled, the by-product of war.

            But everything changes after a time. Bethany and I wanted to return to Earth eventually. We knew we were privileged being Marsco Associates, and we also knew Bethany was dying. She wanted to come home and die here on Earth.

            I had planned on returning to my hometown of Sac City, what was once Sacramento, California. (An infamous location during to the Wars.) But Bethany was too weak to take on the task of developing this plot of land, so we stayed in Seattle. By that time, Tessa was a plebe at the Marsco Academy there anyway. We remained as close to each other as possible. Only after Bethany died during Tessa’s first year in the Academy did I venture south to begin salvaging this land that has become my grange.

            That was nine years ago.

            Much can happen in nine years. For one, Tessa’s Marsco career has taken off. She graduated from the Academy and received her commission. She went to MIT, the Marsco Institute of Technology, which is actually the graduate research wing of the Academy. She charged through her course work and research. But before she actually dotted all the “i’s” and crossed all the “t’s” on her final project, her dissertation, she was moved back to the Academy to begin teaching. She’s there now, an officer, but not yet a holder of her doctorate. Pardon me for sounding like an academic, but no one should ever do all her doctoral grunt work, years of research, and not finish!

            But it’s more complicated; she’s more complicated. Makes sense given our complicated Marsco world.

            Once she was so in love with Zot, Anthony “Zot” Grizotti, a fellow Academy cadet, now on his way to Jupiter with his finger disks twitching away on a mysterious, black project for the VBC, my old cadre of engineers and researchers under the auspices of Herriff on Mars.

            I shouldn’t comment on his research, but—against all odds and tradition—Zot had been commissioned an officer after his Academy days then elected to pursue Hibernation Technology. To some, quite a career shift, if not a downright dead-end job for a Marsco officer. Better than Security, I guess, but still, icemen or hibermen aren’t that high up the Marsco pecking order. His clandestine research is tied to hibernation, that I will say.

            I like Zot. I love him like a son. But something happened with them. Tessa can be stubborn. That’s an understatement. And she took up with this pilot who was all smoke and no fire. Zot himself is a solid man, no guessing with him. He came and went here a few times; she refused to visit. Then, he was gone. Trekking to Jupiter, even with the best Marsco and VBC spacecraft (which I helped design), getting there and back safely is a four-year journey with no certainty of success.

            But this is mostly about Tessa. And now, today, she’s in a sort of No Man’s Land: not with Zot, not fully with anyone (not that it matters), and not fully graduated and not fully happy. Fully in Marsco.

             Not fully talking to me, either.

            That another complication in her life—me. Over the past nine years, I have been here, in my grange about 20 clicks south of central Sac City, in a sort of gray zone. And in our Marsco world, such a locale as this one is nearly impossible. Everything is discrete with Marsco, carefully delineated and separated: associate, sid (a denizen of a subsidiary), or PRIM.

            Most of the world is PRIM-listed. I have tried to find exact census data for PRIMS, but I doubt Marsco bothers to count them. I’d have to say probably 80% of the Earth’s population, possibly higher, is PRIMS. (No PRIMS live in space.) There can’t be any more than 5% of the population in Marsco. That leaves about 15% as sids, who have a substantially better life than any PRIM, but who aren’t associates. Their lot can’t be easy. A PRIM’s lot is pretty horrific any way you slice it. And Marsco aims to keep it that way.

            Associates live in Sectors, Marsco Sectors, or protected Cantonments near or in Subsidiaries. Sids obviously inhabit these subsidiaries, which are marginally better areas than PRIM areas: safe, clean, near Marsco hubs. PRIMS live in Unincorporated Zones, guarded by Marsco or their sid henchmen. Used as brutish laborers, kept disenfranchised, uneducated, distant from any self-respecting Associate.  

            And here I live, in this gray area. Technically, part of the large Sac City Subsidiary, but not really. It’s populated by too many Independent Grangers, Indies, who aren’t sids or PRIMS, and except for me, never tied to Marsco. And really, we’re not in a Zone, either, although it can look like it. Here I live, in no place really Marsco, although I live exceedingly well.

            To make it work, I’ve adapted selected space equipment like humidity condensers for ample and consistent water, and like my kitchen appliances that run off solar. And I’ve redeveloped these few acres of land to be productive. I do hire PRIMS to help, but pay them well. I’ve even started a small village for them down the road so they can live better, cleaner, safer than in any Zone. From there, some of my neighbor grangers also hire them, but an Independent granger is pretty suspicious of a PRIM. I’ve worked hard to establish mutual trust. Not as hard as those PRIMS work, but hard enough.

            So, I guess that sums it up. I’m technically on sabbatical from Marsco, but practically, I’m an Independent Granger and yet one with all the fingerdisks of a top lefter within Marsco. And my only child, Tessa, is estranged from me because of my writing.

            I should mention that. Even though trained as an engineer, I’ve only marginally kept active in designing any spaceships these days. I mostly spend my time trying to crack (yes, that kind of crack) to break into Marsco encrypted and secure databanks and old cobweb sites to research and write a factual and accurate history of how Marsco rose to power. The Ascendancy of Marsco. It’s mostly just fragmented data at this point. But, nearly fourteen voices tell their story of the prewar world under the Continental Powers, the draconian rulers of the Earth that Marsco took down.

            That was nearly 25 years ago. At the time of the Armistice, Marsco claimed its new role as world leader was strictly temporary until stability returned.

            Two and a half decades down the road, it looks like one group of draconian rulers has been replaced by another. Marsco seems pretty thoroughly ensconced in the power structures of Earth, the Moon and Mars colonies, even out to the Asteroid Belt colonies, the limit of its reach. Except for Zot heading towards Jupiter, Marsco has contented itself with staying inside, on this side, of the Belt.

            But I digress. Tessa is coming. She’s been sent pieces of The Ascendancy. I doubt she’s read any. It will be wonderful to see her, even if we are tense and combative. She is so like her mother—and me—for that matter. It will be great to have her here. I’ve much to show her.

            And she brings kilos of Seattle coffee, a commodity I have difficulty securing in this locale. 


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Guest Blog from Tessa Miller

5/31/2014

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Here is the first of several guest blogs written by characters from The Marsco Dissident. I hope you enjoy this insight into Tessa; I imagine this coming from her just before Book I begins in Sac City, in the year 2092.





Tessa Miller, of The Marsco Dissident, guest blog


            Most people don’t know the frustrations of being ABD: All But Dissertation. Of being stuck at the extreme end (the precipice?) of a long, arduous scholarly task. So I’ve got my data collected, my review of previous research completed, and here I sit. The Integration of Computer Systems with Propulsion Optimization: A New Model. Fancy title, long bibliography, clear numbers crunched, blank screen in front of me, and nothing.

            I could speak of my dissertation for hours, of its importance to Marsco, to science and engineering in general, to my plebes, to my career.

            But you’d rather listen to me to talk about my father, Walter Miller, and probably (you’d think?) my former, Zot.

            Procrastination: putting the trivial before the significant.

            Or just shutting down. I’m good at that. Look at that pilot I hung with for far too long, partly to piss off Zot, and partly because everyone needs a companion. But I was shut down that whole time, drifting along, oblivious to all the warning signs of train wreck. You can’t break your heart a second time when you’re using Number 2 to put off dealing with Number 1.

            Why am I telling you this?

            So I don’t spill my guts about Walter and Zot, of course. I’m too controlled for that. Too emotionally detached. I have most people convinced I’m totally together. I’m the one without a hair out of place, my uniform impeccable, my exterior a spotless, polished veneer. My inner life? Turmoil replete with my ripped up guts I refuse to deal with.

            Then again, why not spill them?

            Walter C. Miller, Jr., PhD, Astro-engineer, co-designer of the Herriff-Miller’s that propel Marsco and those few Independent Shuttles that ply between the Moon and the Asteroid Belt. That Miller, he’s my father.

          You’d think that would help my career, except that he’s gone off the beaten Marsco track and become some sort of dissident. Not really a thorn in Marsco’s side. (He’s totally harmless, I’m sure.) But he’s not exactly a rose in a vase at its breakfast table either. He’s a questioner. More philosopher and historian than engineer now, even though back in his day, his theories garnered much praise.

            I should have visited him sooner, since he’s alone and widowed, but things got in my way. Ok, I let things get in my way.

            Zot was there a few times; he let me know that. Even out and out invited me to visit my own father at Walter’s grange near Sac City, that Sacramento, the former capital of the Continental Powers, Marsco’s last enemy, the last bastion of the Powers resistance. But, I refused to go. My excuse? Grading exams and continuing my dissertation research; used my status as an untenured prof at the Marsco Academy (where I’m an assistant professor of astro-engineering), pleaded that these were all vastly more important.

            Zot, Anthony “Zot” Grizotti. An ensign last I heard. (Which makes no sense: hibernation service doesn’t need officers, but there he is.) He’s an iceman, or a hibernation specialist, but not one on a routine Moon-to-Belt mission; no, he’s on some black mission for the Van Braun Center on Mars. Their ship, the Gagarin, is speeding towards Jupiter. Marsco’s first mission beyond the Asteroid Belt, first manned mission. Recon trip for Marsco, but why? For what?

          The crew manifest shows ample icing personnel without Zot. And he never signs any hiber reports, so his duties (even though he’s the sole officer among the hibermen) remain a mystery to me. If he’s in charge (an obvious conclusion), then why haven’t all those posted icing reports come out under his name? If he’s not in charge, what’s he doing on a four-year space flight that’s going beyond Marsco colonies within the Asteroid Belt all the way out to godforsaken Jupiter? What’s he doing?

            I’ve also checked the whole crew manifest: scientists, pilots and other flight crew. Some hot numbers, those gals on the Gagarin. And Zot, a brown-eyed and soulful iceman with a tale to tell and time to tell it, could put every gullible babe onboard into a swoon with his dark features. And if a swoon? But, Zot’s really not like that, all those rumors you hear of randy hibermen, taking advantage of whomever they wish once the crew’s iced.        

          Those two men aside, I do want to visit my father’s grange. Not to see Zot (who can’t possibly be there) and not really to see my father, Walter, either. I’m not seeking to bury the hatchet with him. A hatchet I put between us over Marsco.

          I miss his dogs. They’d be fun to see again. Io and Deimos. Mutts for sure, but loving.

            I have no siblings. No mother, either; she died several years back. At her funeral, when Zot and I were both plebes at the Academy, that’s when I first looked at Zot differently. That epiphany moment. Have loved him since, well, except I’ve stopped loving him now, too, because I don’t really love him anymore, not as much as I did once, so intensely and passionately. That kind of love someone doesn’t forget, except I have, or am forgetting it. And after having a relationship with Zot, rock-solid Zot, why was I with that space-jockey player who’s as sincere as mist and as consistent as smoke?

            Don’t ask.

            Shut down. Denial. Buttoned up. That’s me. And ever-truthful.

            Zot won’t be there.

            Walter will be. And his dogs.

            I have to go, if for my mother’s sake. It’s been three years since I’ve seen Walter. Long enough to forget Zot and return to my father’s place with some adult-daughter distance between us.

            I’m going by ground, too. High-speed bullet from Seattle to a Marsco Sector just north of Silicon. Then a local rust bucket from Marsco luxury to the Sac City Subsidiary. But it will be fine. I want to see how wrong my father is about Marsco. Want to see the transformation, positive transformation, that Marsco reports. Talk of denial. Walter denies all this Marsco advancement.

            I know it’s true. Marsco said so. Why would Marsco lie?

            What does it have to gain by being opaque? It’s always been transparent with its intentions since it seized power, I mean, gained power, reluctantly taking up political power to run the whole world after the Continental Wars devastated the Earth, the Moon colonies, and even some of the sites on Mars.

            It’s a Marsco world, and Marsco’s doing a fine job running it.

            And Zot on the Gagarin and Walter sequestered at his grange, they’ve taken themselves out of the Marsco world. If that’s really possible.

          Crazy. Insane. Enigmas both. Men! 



                                    *
The Marsco Dissident is available now on Amazon for e-readers only. It will be available in print on July 20, 2014. I hope you enjoy a copy in whichever format you prefer.

            


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Restarting at Long Last!

5/18/2014

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                       Restarting at long last!

            After a long hiatus, I’m re-launching my blog with a slightly different format. I intend to post twice monthly, one my own piece and one a guest-written piece. So, here is my first blog in ages.

            As many of you know, Southwest Minnesota State University has a yearly distinction, the conferring of the Cathy Cowan Award, an honor given to a faculty or staff member who has over five years of service and has demonstrated devotion to the campus and the community. I am this year’s recipient.

            With all due humility, here is the text of my acceptance. (For those who do not know, the mascot of Southwest is the Mustang. We are the Mustangs!)


Picture
             Cowan Award Thank You Speech
          SMSU Commencement, May 10, 2014

            President Gores, Distinguished Dignitaries and Guests, Parents and Family of our Graduates, Faculty and Staff, and today’s Graduates, thank you all for acknowledging me as this year’s Cowan Award Recipient. I am touched and honored more than I can say. 

            My thanks also to Marianne and Elaine, my wife and daughter, who have helped and encouraged me throughout my twenty-five years here. In fact, today marks forty years of my academic career, from high school teaching and college teaching in four states coast-to-coast and eventually to Southwest in 1989.

            I also want to thank my nominating team for their belief that I am worthy of this distinction, especially since I know all the other 11 Cowan Award recipients. I stand in awe among and with the pillars of this university. Thank you.

            But it is to you, our Esteemed Graduates, that I want to speak:

            A girl enters a wardrobe and finds herself in Narnia. A hobbit leaves his hole and ends up fighting dragons. Dr. Who enters his TARDIS and lands wherever the space-time continuum takes him. You entered Southwest years ago, and here you are today.

            These all seem different, but they are all in fact the same.

            Here’s how: Maybe you came right from high school or maybe as a transfer student. As a graduate of another college or a parent whose children just entered kindergarten, or even a high school student beginning your university career early. You might be someone who crossed a street, the state, a state line, or an ocean; it does not matter. At whatever stage of life you came from, you stepped out of your familiar world into a world you did not and could not truly imagine before.

            This excellent university has brought you to places as far from your previous lives as any magic doorway could. And it has helped make you a citizen of a broader world, a more thoughtful and deeply-concerned citizen, an inquisitive citizen.

            Oh, Southwest may have trained you for a job; perhaps you start next week. Or, it prepared you for graduate school, law or medical school, or to return to that family farm or a family business. Whatever and wherever, you return as a traveler from a foreign land. And as you move on from Southwest to the next stage of your lives, you do so with vision and ideas expanded from those you once had when you came. Savor this! Savor all of this!

            Wherever you land next and next and next, you go there transformed by your efforts, indeed, sometimes transformed in spite of your efforts. Savor that transformation! Be proud of it. As Thomas Paine reminds us: “The mind once enlightened cannot again become dark.”

            This dark world needs your enlightened citizenship.

            In her address at a commencement several years ago, J.K. Rowling stated, “We do not need magic to transform our world. We carry all the power we need inside ourselves already. We have the power to imagine better.”

             And so, Graduates, of whom we are so proud, as your amazing lives unfold, transform your world. Transform our world. Bring it your light. Imagine for us all a better world.

             And if in a year or ten or twenty-five, when you look back on the road you’ve just trod, let no one, including yourself, ever say, “You did too little with your life; you shone too dim; all because you dreamed too small.” Dream BIG with your lives and your loved ones, with your communities and your careers.

            Play BIG.

            And remember always, you are not Shetland ponies!

            You are Mustangs!

            Play BIG!

            Congratulations once again and thanks to all of you for allowing me this slice of your wonderful day.
                                                                                                        *

            If you are a longtime reader, thanks for looking once more at my blog. If you are new to the Eclectic Blog, welcome.

             At this point in my career, I am off for the summer and will teach only 66% next academic year. The following two academic years, I will teach 50% each year. At that point, I will fully retire. This change allows me to write and publish more. The Marsco Dissident, now available in e-download only, will be available in print this summer. (Details forthcoming.) Marsco Triumphant, Book II of the four-part Marsco Saga, will be available in print and e-download in December 2014. Watch for them.

             Thank you all for checking out my blog and for checking out my fiction. I will be posting a guest blog by Tessa Miller, one of the main characters in The Marsco Dissident, in about two weeks. She will be speaking of her frustrations with the Marsco world and her life just before she enters at the start of Chapter 1. I’m sure you’ll enjoy hearing from her. 

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Marsco Readings and Reports

9/28/2013

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September 28, 2013 – Saturday – Grading and Game Day

            Okay, so I am slow on the uptake of technology. I have begun to make PowerPoint presentations for class in the past year, for example; it’s taken me that long to get going on that.

            I was looking for my Cloud connection today, so I can send my work from my office computer to my laptop easily. Instead of finding the Cloud, I found this instant blog link. So, I’m writing this “entry” in my journal this morning with the intention of posting it via my computer right to my blog. We’ll see if it, one, works, and two, if I have anything to say.

            I started my blog to get more buzz out there about my work, specifically The Marsco Saga, my four-volume speculative sci-fi piece. I am happy to report (as many of you know) that the first novel, The Marsco Dissident, is now available on Amazon for e-reader download. It has been up since June and sales are happening.

            This month, I did a pair of radio interviews locally (NPR hasn’t called yet). These shows were via SMSU and owe their manifestation to Jim Tate who is the campus PR guru. Jim organized them and was my front man for them. In a word, they were a hoot. I had never really been on a show like this. (I have to add, by the way, that Jim is part of a gaggle of SMSU folks who have made this project possible: Jim, Marcy—the cover, Dana—Kindle format, Neil—encouragement to go to e-publishing format: SMSU all!)

            The first locally, KMHL in Marshall, I sat in the booth with the glass separation and deadening sound. Earphone and mic. I saw the radio host on the other side of that dividing glass. It went pretty well. The second I was at home and did the same over a pre-arranged phone call. I liked the first better; it gave me a sense of “being on the air” as opposed to just chatting and looking at all-too-familiar surroundings. Those listeners who heard me said I did a creditable job. I thought so, too.

          I was asked to speak of future projects, so I explained that all English profs have at least one novel in them parodying academic life. That caught the campus attention. I do have such a novel organized; it will have to wait until after The Marsco Saga and The Aries-Augustan Saga are published; both multi-volume sci-fi works. Marsco is finished; Augustan is underway.

        My two readings went extremely well on Tuesday September 17th. At noon I was at the Marshall/Lyon County Library. That night back at SMSU.

     The Library garnered a small crowd of 16 listeners. But, they listened and asked good questions. This experience was a great warm-up for my evening reading.

     Back on campus, I spoke and read to 115 people. I was blown away by their attendance and interest. I spoke, read my first passage and then answered some questions. Once more, good questions. Then I read a second passage with answers following. My whole time went an hour. Not sure how many sales I made, but it has all generated a host of Spur articles, (our campus student newspaper) and a bit of buzz in Marshall.

     To current readers and owners of The Marsco Dissident, I once more say thanks. To future readers, I do want you to know I have reduced the price to $3.99. Dissident can be downloaded to a Kindle, an iPad or iPhone, or any PC with the right (and free) app. I am looking into print-on-demand; will keep you posted on that. Of course, I won’t chase away the chance to have a publisher pick it up for mass marketing. To viewers of this blog who might be unwilling to buy the book, there are two chapters posted on my site that give you a taste of the novel. Enjoy them first before you download the whole piece. I am sure they will convince you that my work is worth the time and effort to read.

     Until next time, good reading and Go, Mustangs!  And Go, Irish! Beat the Sooners!

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Science Fiction: Plans, Sidetracks, and Endpoints

10/26/2011

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  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 Fantasy
by 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.]

 
  
          

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"How I Spent my Summer Vacation"

10/1/2011

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[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!    


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Books Do Furnish Rooms

5/25/2011

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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.)

    

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Libya: 2010 -- The Great War 1914-1918

4/13/2011

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                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.       

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Time

4/7/2011

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                                 “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.  
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