Reading the Transhumanist Way!

The Arakawa house, not really that comfortable

Transhumanism is a poorly thought out philosophy that states that human beings, by altering their reality, can 'force' evolutionary change. It defies biology and is a bit of an offshoot from the crackpot 'immortality' movement. Immortality, of course, is scientifically ridiculous. The reason we dominate the world  as a species is because humans mutate and pass on the awesome genes, rewarding the Don Drapers and Ghenghis Khans of the world, while punishing and killing off the lame genes, like whatever gene predisposes you to play World of Warcraft and eat Doritos 12 hours a day. People have tried to work transhumanist ideas into architecture (e.g. the Arakawa house, depicted above) and art, but what I think they're really gunning for is the idea that in order to advance intellectually/genetically/etc..., one must embrace a challenging environment and one must try not to get too comfortable, a pretty obvious notion.

An experiment in transhumanist writing, or a literary practical joke, not sure which.

So, as a sluggish reader, I try to diversify my reading in such a way as to 'not get comfortable.' This, by itself can slow the reading down: new styles to get used to, a different cultural perspective, different eras, etc...A pretentious notion probably, but I'm by no means sitting around reading War and Peace, Gravity's Rainbow, or Ulysses. It's less painful than that.

I try to 'not get comfortable' by reading a different author every book and abstaining from reading series as much as I'm tempted. Although, I'm sometimes not able to stick to my guns (Gene Wolfe got me for five novels). With the shear volume of books and authors, this is a straightforward task. There's a ton of award winning Sci-Fi/Fantasy authors out there and at the rate I read, I will never exhaust my reading list. Basically, if one starts with Gollancz's SF Masterworks series, a reader could plow through 60+ amazing Sci-Fi novels and rarely encounter the same writer twice. And luckily, unlike TV or film, the quality you encounter content-wise is greater per product than any other media form (in my humble opinion).

Start Here

So, should reading be for pleasure or should it be work? It depends on your goals. I read sci-fi because I love the genre, and I'm also researching styles. Part pleasure. Part work. Occasionally, I stumble across books that I realize are important and influential, but that I simply don't care for (like listening to the band REM, I appreciate them, but don't enjoy their music). Most of the time, this isn't the case however. Some books are written with simple language but are outstandingly executed (George R Stewart's "The Earth Abides" comes to mind) and others are outstandingly written but poorly executed (Ian McDonald's "River of Gods", it's quite the mess'). Different books I enjoy for completely different reasons.

I wish I was a quicker reader but I'm not. (Rose tells me my lips sometimes move as I read . They don't, but whatever), This is my system and it seems to work for the most part, exposing me to as much different stuff as efficiently as possible.

Something borrowed... The World of Pandora

Not Pandora

As a kid, I used to stare at my father's album covers for hours. And back in the 70's/early 80's the era of progressive rock and arena rock was a watershed moment for album cover art. The albums were vinyl then and big! Not shrunken down to CD size. Now, most album covers have been reduced to thumbnails on iTunes, so what really is the point?. In fact, in the age of digital media, there are albums I'm fond of that I've never seen covers for. But those old LP covers, by no means 'high art', were wild and crazy and inspiring as a kid: spaceships, psychedelic planetscapes, and other assorted 'far out' stoner playgrounds of the mind. Master of this style of album art was a rock artist named Roger Dean whose YES and Asia album covers I fell in love with as a kid,

Roger Dean YES album art 

Now, when I watched Avatar like everyone else, there with my IMAX 3D goggles strapped to my head, I was truly blown away by the visuals. But after watching a few James Cameron's "king of the world" interviews, I realized he and his visual team were the undisputed "kings of Pandora". Unfortunately in all those exhausting DVD extra interviews (and maybe I missed it somewhere) there was no obligatory list of "influences" that brought Cameron to create Pandora.

I can get into the whole movie itself, and its whole "Dances with Wolves (in Space)" storyline, but I won't. There's been enough written about that. My beef with Avatar is the lack of credit Cameron bestowed upon the long history of visionary science fiction/fantasy pioneers that came before him. Personally, I enjoy  interviews where writers site their influences. It makes me want to climb up into the attic and dust off the H.P. Lovecrafts and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Because as I see it, nothing creative is truly original, it's always inspired, a gestalt of everything that's come before. I love knowing how somebody arrived at a certain creative point. A lot of times you'll be surprised that THAT came from THAT.

The Avatar Exhibit at Seattle's EMP

You won't find any bigger fan of Cameron. I loved the first two Terminator movies and Aliens is a classic, but to not acknowledge where this all came from leaves me, as a fan, frustrated. So when the EMP/SCI-FI museum opened it's "World of Pandora" exhibit I felt less than inspired to check it out, even though I'm a huge sci-fi fan and the museum's only five minutes away. If Cameron had just said, "oh man, I love those Roger Dean album covers, I was totally inspired." I'd have given him more credit.  Maybe he was worried he'd have to share some of the 2 Billion+ dollars he made off the flick. I enjoy when artists/directors/writers give little windows into the creative process. But having critics answer for you with nonsense about "pure genius" I find much more dull.

Avatar 2?

So, sadly, when I think of Avatar, I don't think about its groundbreaking visual effects (which really are truly astounding), I think of a bunch of Thundercats wandering a Roger Dean album cover acting out Pocahantas. Sometimes knowing where art came from is almost as important as the art itself. Otherwise it just seems borrowed pastiche...

The Navi (the way I see them)

The Empty Chamber: Part 3 ... apathy, abandonment, time to move on

Damien fights off one of Grim's undead minions

I finished The EMPTY CHAMBER when I got back to Seattle and started working at Boeing. At the time, I'd made a stab at 'cleaning it up' but editing really wasn't my thing at the time. I wasn't really good at it, my sense of flow was off, comma usage was all over the place, and short/brief sentence structure was painful. As many beginning writers do, I was bogged down in colloquialisms, a rampant disdain for grammar in the thinly veiled guise of 'style', and way too many words with the pretension that nothing shall be cut!  Nothing, absolutely nothing could possibly be cut. Every sentence, every chapter seethes with too much wit and humor to possibly ax, right? Not satisfied with the end product, I wrote an epilogue to The EMPTY CHAMBER, piling on the word count even more until the beast soared to  125K.

Damien on the road and armed

In the end, it was a jumbled mess with far too many pop-culture references, vampires, werewolves, gorillas, demons, and wise cracking punks to clean up in to a consistent tale. That, and I think it failed message-wise and probably theme-wise. People I gave it to actually seemed to like it for the most part (at least they read the whole thing) but after a few failed queries to agents, I had to be honest with myself. This novel was flat-out unpublishable as it stood. I suppose, if I had passion for it, I could have hammered on it, slimmed it down, let the a critique group and their long knives strip it to the bone, but I didn't want to do that. I was restless.

Our hero encounters the obligatory werewolves

The EMPTY CHAMBER was an experiment. Like an empty basketball court at night, it was a place to practice up, get my chops down, experiment with a novel length fiction form, gauge how much stuff you actually have to think up plot/character/setting-wise to fill up a book's worth of words. And I think this is the hardest part for a writer, to abandon that first novel when its time is nigh.

Damien takes the plunges into the underworld

When this moment actually occurs varies. And if you truly believe your first novel is thee ONE, who am I to tell you to abandon it. By all means, if you have the passion to re-write, re-edit, shop it, mop it, overhaul it, then push on., go forth. My threshold was far less. Not that I didn't love The EMPTY CHAMBER, I most certainly did, in fact so much so, I actually illustrated each chapter (some of the art included in this post), but I really needed to move on as a writer.

Damien, sporting his 90's era tattoo, consults his soul agent on afterlife options

Some things did come out of it that I'm still quite proud of. The epilogue add-on, more or less a short story, provided a means to explore new terrain (I might actually post that to the blog at some point). My writing had improved quite a bit over the seven years.

Damien in a moment of repose with afterlife friends

And one idea I still rather enjoyed was the concept of a 'universal afterlife', a purgatory clearing house for souls where all of mankind's religions barter for the righteous (and the damned). The EMPTY CHAMBER's protagonist, Damien Faust (how's that for a name?), as apart of his redemption must head into purgatory and retrieve his soul from Grim with the help of his soul agent. An obvious theme going back to pretty much every modern myth and religion since time began, I'd managed to put my own bureaucratic existential spin on it, not new, just different. I liked the idea, so much so, I recently incorporated elements of it into a comic script for my college roommate (comic writing, a post for another time).

The EMPTY CHAMBER still sits on my hardrive, I pop it open from time-to-time with the good intention of one day rewriting it. But I doubt I will. Like nostalgia, it's fun to visit the past from time to time, but you can never really go home again.

Settings: The Moon

From Harrison Schmidt's Incredible Vacation Slideshow

Back in graduate school, I had the opportunity to see Harrison Schmidt talk about his trip to the Moon. As the last man on The Moon and the Apollo program's only astronaut scientist, he was fortunate enough to have spent more time on the surface than the most (Buzz and Neil only spent a few hours at The Sea of Tranquility), and as a result, his vacation slideshow was more entertaining than your vacation slideshow. One thing that strikes you about seeing an Apollo astronaut in the flesh is the undeniable fact that that human being, the one standing before you, has set foot on another world, another planet. From then on, that tangible world, easily seen with the naked eye, mountains, seas, craters and all, becomes a different muse. And the fact that human beings have walked, driven, slept, ate, and urinated planet-side, for me, only adds to the wonder.

The Moon in more exciting times

Lately, The Moon has taken a back seat to more exotic Sci-Fi locales (Mars has been the 'in' destination of choice for the past 25 years). There's a 'been there, done that' feel about the place, which I think is unfortunate. Besides Heinlein's seminal "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" and Arthur C. Clarke's short story catalog (including The Sentinel, which would become 2001 A Space Odyssey), The Moon provides little more than a simple set piece for most current Sci-Fi (there are, of course, exceptions) and for those wishing for something more akin to Cameron's Pandora, it can fall a little flat.

The Moon, even a little boring for a recycled Sam Rockwell clone.

But I like to write plausible science fiction, and for myself, the Moon is plausible by the mere fact that we've already been there. If human beings are to build a future there, that gray dusty world will function more as a job site, and as a veteran of many remote, at times desolate, Earth-side job sites, I find The Moon churning with fiction opportunity, but not in the Buck Rogers space opera kind of way, more of an existential kind of way. So much so, my current novel is set there.

The Moon, as I would see it.

Watching 2001, there's a scene where Dr Floyd is on The Moon in a meeting to discuss the Monolith discovery. While a segue to other events, that windowless, somewhat stark, meeting room hinted at an everyday future where human beings work and make a living on the Moon. Basically, if I were to one day go to the Moon, or some one like me, it would be a business trip where I would spend my day couped up in a yawn-worthy meeting to review engineering data for some lunar-based satellite tracking hardware. I wouldn't be there to liberate a race of 9ft tall blue Thundercats from the military industrial complex, I'd be there complaining about the food, the shuttle delays, and the time-zone changes (28 day days are a killer). But taking the future for granted is what science fiction doe best, to marvel at the mundane.

If we are to become a true space-faring people, not just dabblers and one-offer, we will have to conquer the Moon. It's a journey will we have to take, and as a science fiction writer, that truth is undeniable. But how will we do this? What new technology will make this achievable? As it sits now, we neither have the inclination nor the financial incentive to exploit the lunar landscape. But that could easily change just as the human condition changes. Just as European empires could conceive of little reason other than gold to venture to the New World, right now human beings find little other reason to travel to the Moon than to say we've been. But I believe that's myopic and narrow sighted, just as I find defunding general scientific research narrow sighted. Ever onward, you never know what you're going to find.

Finding One's "Voice"

In much of writing and writing criticism there's this elusive nebulous thing called "voice". Reading the many writer/agent/editor blogs, there's a lot of reference to "voice" but little definition. There's also a much parroted opinion that nothing else matters besides "strong characters", toss plot, toss narrative, toss ideas, themes, concepts, etc... unless you don't have strong character readers can relate to, enhanced by your own personal voice , you're going to get rejected and everyone's going to hate your stuff. Beginning writers, go off into the wilderness and find your voice!!!

This may be true for the Literary Fiction adherents, but for genre, this notion differs quite a bit.

I like to think things are more complicated than that sort of rote advice. For starters it depends on what you're writing, and who you're writing for.... One easy place to start with the concept of "voice" is to replace the noun with "style." One reason "voice" gets substituted instead of style is that, in my humble opinion, there's a lot of first-person narrative novels in certain genres that get a lot more publicity than others. And when you're getting a chapter of witty sassy saucy Bridget Jones in Bridget Jones' Diary, the "voice" of the writer is obvious. But when you write in multiple viewpoint third person, the "voice" comes down to "style" and is much more difficult to characterize.

Having written one novel in first person, and two and three-quarters novels in third person, I would say establishing voice in the former is a lot easier than in the latter. So how would I describe my voice/style? That's a challenging question, and why I believe its more of an organic process that evolves out of influence and what you find works and what doesn't writing-wise. The marching order "go forth and find your voice!" is in my opinion unhelpful writing advice, despite certain agents/editors craven adherence to demanding authors with a "unique voice". It's a bit of Macguffin.

I write science fiction and while very conscious of character, I will admit "strong characters" is my weakness, but again, my favorite books and novels -my influences- have characters that are more established by circumstance than background. Case in William Gibson's Neuromancer, while loosely defined, is unapologetically two-dimensional. But Gibson's voice was his style, and as the seminal work of cyberpunk, he established a pithy street sensibility spiked with its own lingo and futuristic edge that worked outside its main character. Philip K Dick, one of my favorite authors, has novels filled with interchangeable characters that in themselves are not very memorable, but as representatives of the human condition, fit the everyman role that makes the novels work as a whole. You are Joe Chip in Ubik, you are Decker in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, what they look like, their nuanced mannerisms, their "fatal flaw"... less important as the idea as a whole, per se... I'm not making excuses, but my intention isn't to write the next Holden Caufield (which much to JD Salinger's credit, wasn't his intention either, ergo no "Catcher in The Rye 2: I Hate College Phonies Too."), it's to perfect and make more interesting the concepts and ideas I find interesting.

My voice is my style, and my style emulates more of the sensibilities of my influences than a first-person tone, although depending, that may evolve with the next project.

The Empty Chamber: Part 2

Suffering under the yoke of thesis writing, my third year into graduate school, this post should really be called "The Winter of My Discontent: Part 2", but I digress...

Having passed my Phd qualifier my second year into graduate school, but broken of spirit, poverty worn, I decided to opt out, get my Masters degree and move on. So my third year in Wyoming was a strange one. My girlfriend at the time had broken up withe me the summer before and moved out of state, which if you've ever broken-up with someone while in Wyoming, it is a guaranteed dry spell of a year or more. (This statistics based on demographics and geography alone: 400K people, 100K sq. miles, it's almost Boyle's Gas Law at that point). So with another sub-zero, alcohol fueled, high altitude winter ahead, there was quite a bit of time to kill. Firing up Word 95 on the venerable 386, I sat down to write.

The Buckhorn Bar "The Buck" Laramie, WY

I still had the 3.5" floppy from my home-stint prior to Wyoming, with what would become the first chapter of THE EMPTY CHAMBER. So, I decided to add to it. It was an entertaining concept (see THE EMPTY CHAMBER: Part 1), something I could work with, lighthearted and fun and a welcome departure from the excruciating task of mashing together a Masters Thesis. BTW, if you want to read that gem, mosey over to the Wilson Science Library at the University of Wyoming in Laramie and look up "Microwave Remote Sensing of Roadway Conditions using Cascade Correlation Neural Network Architectures", it's a page turner.

This was 1998/99, a few years before the "paranormal" publishing craze that's now transmogrified into the whole Twilight phenoma/monstrosity/what-have-you. A decade earlier, the seeds were sown for the boom. It was only a matter of time. By indulging its tropes, I was not reinventing the wheel, not by a long shot. The angsty, but too whimpy for punk, goth sub-culture of the 1980's had carried over into the 90's like a hangover, thanks to Ann Rice, Vampire The Masquerade, customized fangs, and Bauhaus reunion tours.

Coupled with an almost religious sense of nostalgia, the wayward Fluevog/trench coat/eyeliner crowd  kept the candelabra fires alight. Goth pop-culture was on the verge of going mainstream. Merely an observer, not an emulator, I realized it would provide a nice fantastical twist to the college 'rock and roll' adventure I was attempting to write, like Hunter S. Thompson meets Bram Stoker. So I wrote, no outline, no sense of direction, the plot developing en route. It was, in no uncertain terms, a mess of a manuscript.

Writing away in my basement apartment, a raging high-plains blizzard outside, I was having a good time. Back then, before rejection and failure reared its ugly head, fiction writing was exploratory, something new, a much needed outlet. Conjuring every quirky 'what-if' I'd ever indulged, I tossed it in to the mix then threw it against the wall to see if anything might stick. I hadn't read one book on writing, nothing on style, this was pre-blog era, so no online advice to help me gauge the industry's status quo. And I think at the time it was for the best. Inundating myself with reality was not appropriate. I didn't really take it that seriously. Just to be able to say to folks, "yeah, I wrote a novel", would have sufficed. The whole cold-hard-brutal facade of the publishing world and its stark set of knife-edge statistics wasn't even a concern. I had bigger fish to fry, I had to get the hell out of Wyoming. 

So after I turned in my thesis, successfully defended, and packed up the U-Haul. THE EMPTY CHAMBER remained unfinished, to be completed later. Stay tuned for the Part 3...

NOTE: I do intend to put up a synopsis of THE EMPTY CHAMBER complete with illustrations at some  point. I think putting up the full MS for folks would be cruel and unusual punishment, that and the editing required to make it anything but a full blown embarrassment would be too exhausting. But never say never, I guess.

Settings: Red Desert Wyoming

America's Empty Quarter

Setting for stories... this differs wildly from author to author. Some camp out in their hometowns, endlessly mining off-beat nooks and quirky crannies for specific scenes. Familiarity breeds authenticity among specific writers (e.g. Stephen King's Maine, H.P. Lovecraft's New England, etc...) other writers create settings where most of their stories are based, rarely deviating (Robert E Howard's The Hyborean Age, Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom) while most writers use a gestalt of places real, imagined, or inspired by to create a specific setting for their stories.

Writers of science fiction are given a gift to extrapolate settings to their liking, stretch them into the future, break them off into a parallel universes, or inject them with whatever needed weirdness is required to create an affect. All creations are derived from personal influences, and throughout my 38 years, I've kept a catalog of places filed away for later use. These places, actually visited or virtually visited, proved evocative enough to leave their mark. Some I've already used for stories, others I intend to use in the future, some I may never use. So for the blog, I'll try to highlight a few places that have "stuck" for whatever reason...

Somewhere on I-80, East of Rock Springs, WY

The first place is what I call America's "Empty Quarter", the least populated stretch of territory in the least populated state in the contiguous United States. It's called Wyoming's Red Desert or The Great Divide Basin, and I first drove through it on my way to Laramie, Wyoming for graduate school. If you've done the cross-country drive, say from Seattle or San Francisco to the East Coast, you've probably passed through it via I-80. Living in Wyoming for three years I had the opportunity to criss-cross the expanse many times with that Wyoming tag line stuck in my head "Like No Place On Earth". And Wyoming, and especially the Red Desert, is so much so, it doubled as Planet Klendathu in Verhoeven's classic Starship Troopers (inspired by Heinlien's novel of the same name.) One can't help but expect to see Mad Max's V8 Ford Falcon zooming up in your rear view mirror while driving its empty highways, or see a radioactive zombie horde stumbling over the hardpan starved for human flesh.

Hell's Half Acre, Wyoming (aka Planet Klendathu)

I've always found vast empty places intriguing. They're blank canvases for the imagination and by their very nature typify one of Science Fiction's major tropes, to explore, colonize, and conquer the universe's vast emptiness. Gazing out over the rolling nothingness and tortured landscapes of the Red Desert, one doesn't see Earth, filled with its cities, people, plant-life, water, etc... one sees Arakis, Mars, Tattoine. I think wasteland creates fear in the human psyche. They're meant to be avoided, or crossed (the Mormon handcart pioneers were nearly wiped out crossing the Red Desert's vast expanse) and in this modern 20th/21st Century it also serves as a warning of things to come, especially in this age of global climate change, global nuclear war, and resource depletion.

To conquer a place in one's mind, is to conquer a place. I think it's the terrestrial version of stargazing. Just as we look up into the stars to marvel at our insignificance, we venture into wastelands to indulge our meekness. It's no wonder the world's prophets sought enlightenment from the desert, even an atheist like myself sees the spiritual attraction.

Anyway, I can't recommend a family vacation to the Red Desert, really. But if you're passing through, stop for ice cream at Farson, WY's infamous ice cream stand or buy a pair of "authentic" native american moccasins from Evanstaon WY's Little America, and take in the nothingness.