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.]
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.]
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