Mars in 1995?

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Here's a curiosity--the cover story of the June 11, 1981 issue of Analog.  It wasn't fiction. "Mars in 1995!" by Bob Parkinson, with illustrations by David A. Hardy, was a sober explanation of how a manned mission to Mars would be feasible, only 14 years after that issue of the magazine came out. And though it didn't happen, many of the details of the imagined project showed up in subsequent robotic missions.

For me, the most interesting part of the article is a bit of background presented close to the beginning:

In 1970, at the height of its success with Apollo, NASA outlined its plans for a manned expedition to Mars before the end of the century. That was the pessimistic scenario--actually, they hoped that the first expedition would take place around 1987.

Alas, such plans required nuclear boosters, which for complicated reasons never came about. 

Perhaps this was just as well. We know a lot more about the long-term effects of living in space than we did in 1981, and it looks like such a voyage might require medical interventions that don't yet exist.

Still... The article is a glimpse back into a more optimistic era. Here's what Parkinson had to say about what the pessimists expected:

There are many in the space business who imagine that such an expedition belongs to the twenty-first century. By the mid-nineteen-nineties, they say, we may just be returning to the moon.

Thirty years later, we haven't yet done that either.

 

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John O'Hara . . . A Scandalously Neglected Master of the Short Story

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Recently, I picked up a copy of Collected Stories of John O'Hara, selected and edited by Frank MacShane, and what a good decision that was! It's far too easy to forget that at short story length, O'Hara was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. I've been working my way through it a story at a time, leaving space in between to think about what I've read and marvel at the craft of it.

This is not a Complete or Best Of volume--it leaves out "The Bucket of Blood," which to my mind is right up there with "Imagine Kissing Pete"--but it is chockablock with astonishing work.  "The Hardware Man" takes the rivalry of two hardware store owners a hundred years ago and invests in their conflict the moral gravity of two of Shakespeare's kings. "Our Friend the Sea" skirts the edge of melodrama but the big reveal, I think, is the contrast between the man the protagonist thinks he is and the man he is shown to be, to himself though not the world at large. "The Pig" has a very successful lawyer who has just discovered that he has six months to live. He confides in his best friend, mostly because he needs somebody to listen, but also because he has a difficult choice to make--and the friend's story of a combat incident in WWII is so apt that it convinced me it was how I should act, should the need ever arise. All these are clearly written with love of the form. "We'll Have Fun," whose meaning and intent I'm still mulling, required more research into the care and medicining of horses than the story's financial return could possibly have justified. (It also has a lesbian woman pleasantly free from all the tropes and assumptions of the times.)

And there is one story, but I'll not tell you which one, that reads light and frothy until, in the final sentence, O'Hara pulls the rug out from under the reader to show what's been hidden in plain sight all along.

During his lifetime, John O'Hara was known for his scandalous novels. O tempora, o mores! They are not scandalous anymore. Worse, a number of them were obviously quickly-written software for movies. As a result, his reputation is now greatly diminished. It was also unfortunate that his father's death while he was in prep school impoverished his family, which put the college of his dreams out of reach and left him too-obviously aware of his lack of social status ever after. Hemingway famously growled that someone "should start a bloody fund to send up a collection to send John O'Hara to Yale."

Forget all that. Read his short fiction. There is not a ghost of a whisper of fantasy or science fiction in anything of his I've read. Ignore that too. Read his short fiction. A lot of his stories start out looking like they're going to be formulaic. A pox on that as well. Read his short fiction.

The man was a master. He deserves to be remembered.

Above: The Library of America collection of O'Hara's stories. The volume I've been reading from doesn't have his picture on the cover.

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Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules For New Writers

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Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules for New Writers

1. Read everything. Read voraciously. Read so much that people who love you are concerned.

2. Write badly. Every day. Write prose so bad that writers whose work you loathe would spit on it. Then repeat. Repeat again. Repeat until you're sick of it. Then repeat.

3. Finish a story. You'll know it's done when every attempt to improve it makes it worse. You'll hate it. Send it out anyway.

4. Be rejected. Despise the editor as an idiot. Never entertain the notion that the editor might be right. The editor is an idiot.

5. Have your story accepted. Celebrate. Drink to excess. Do things you didn't intend. Use a condom.

6. Wait. You will be horrified to discover how long it can take for a work to see print. Go to the bookstore or the Web, depending, every day to see if it's out yet.

7. Exult. Your story/novel has been published at last. Now you can breathe.

8. Repeat all previous steps over and over. Repeat, repeat, repeat, for the rest of your life.

9. Die.

10. Spend eternity in Writers' Heaven, telling lies about how successful you were.

11/30/20

Above: Photo copyright 2023 by Marianne C. Porter. The text of Michael Swanwick's Ten Rules for Unpublished Writers is not copyrighted. Use it as you will. Have fun.

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Venice--and Why All the World Loves It

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Opus 40 in Saugerties, New York, is an ancestral work of landscape art. Sculptor Harvey Fite bought a played-out slate mine in 1938 and, shortly thereafter, began stacking slate to create a platform for his art. At some point, he realized that the platform was the art, and only one sculpture was placed upon it, as a focal point.

The result is a swooping and swirling topography of stone with narrow passages, pools of water, and short bridges, which you are allowed to walk upon. When was the last time you walked on a major work of art?

Wow.

The first time (of many) I visited Opus 40, I thought it was the best and only time I would ever get to walk on a world-class work of art.

And then I came to Venice.

I am by nature a creator. I use that term, rather than maker, because makers have physical skills I regretfully lack. But I share the common compulsion to make things. So, on my recent visit to Venice, I took dozens of photos and posted them on social media.

People praised me for the beauty of my photos.

No credit to me. Stand anywhere in Venice, close your eyes, point your phone in any direction, and click. Voila! A beautiful photograph.*

Because Venice, taken as a whole, is a physical work of art. I say that as someone who has wandered through many immersive works of art. For reasons of history and commerce and empire, the city of Venice is a coherent artwork. Start anywhere, wander wherever. You will be enchanted.

And if you take photos, they will all be beautiful.

And I have to add . . .

Ambling through obscure streets and sotoportegos, I was struck by how many people looked joyful. Couples taking selfies had unforced smiles. A woman reaching the top of the Rialto spontaneously broke into dance. Everywhere, one saw happy faces.

Of course, Marianne and I were there in January, where there are a minimum of tourists and all the usual reasons to be happy. But it was striking. And it made me happy in turn.

 

*I exaggerate. But only slightly.

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CROWS AND SILENCES by Lucius Shepard

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Look what came in the mail! Crows and Silences is a collection of four novellas by Lucius Shepard with an introduction by yours truly. As the dust jacket says: 

A combination of misfortunes prevented Lucius Shepard from breaking out into the literary world beyond SF and his elevation to the Pantheon of writers remains always just a breath and a wish away In the meantime, here are four tales of people hoping to survive the daily trauma of their lives. All caught in a world of crows and silences and trying to make the best of it.

 

The book comes from Subterranean Press and it’s both beautifully and solidly made. The cover and an interior illustration are by Aurélien Police, and the title is taken from the text of one of the novellas within. The four novellas are "Kalimantan," "Skull City," "Louisiana Breakdown," and "Colonel Rutherford's Colt." If you’re a fan of Lucius’ work, you want this book.

 

Issued in an edition of 500 numbered hardcover copy. You can buy  one here. Or go to Subterranean Press and wander about, wistfully browsing, here.

 

And if you want a frustrating taste of the introduction I wrote...

 

Here’s how it begins?

 

          Let’s start with a story. Lucius Shepard was headed home, drunk, at three in the morning. This was when he was living in a bad neighborhood in Staten Island. A derelict came stumbling out of the darkness toward him and Lucius reached for his wallet to dredge out a couple of bucks. But then the man stuck a gun in his face and pulled the trigger.

          Click.

          No bullet.

          Pulling the gun back, the man stared down at it in astonishment and giggled.

 

And the story goes on from there. SPOILER ALERT: Lucius Shepard lived. Though not, alas, to the present day.

 

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E-Book Sales! Two of Them! Now Through January 3 Only!

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As happens with some frequency, Open Road Media is having an e-book sale. Actually, two of them. As clipped from the email they sent me: 

ISBN13	Title	Author	Promo Type	Country	Start Date	End Date	Promo Price
9781504036511	Tales of Old Earth	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Rank Boost	CA	2024-12-27	2025-01-03	$1.99
9781504036474	In the Drift	Swanwick, Michael	ORM - Rank Boost	US	2024-12-27	2025-01-03	$1.99

Tales of Old Earth is a short story collection and In the Drift is my first novel. If you've been curious about either of them and were hoping to get them cheap... well, here's your chance.

I believe in the soft sell.

And to make this post less boring . . .

When I submitted the manuscript of my first novel to Ace Science Fiction, it was titled simply The Drift. But my editor there quite rightly observed that this made it sound like a horror novel, like The Fog or The Hunger or The Exorcist.

Then they retitled it In the Drift.

It was a terrible title, but I could not think of anything better. 

The novel was a fix-up of three previously published and closely related novellas connected by two short-shorts written to connect them. And the first novella was titled "Mummer Kiss."

A year or so later, I received the French translation from Denoel. It was titled Le baiser du masque. I got out my Petit Larousse (this was before the Web, children) to see what that meant.

It was titled Mummer Kiss.

And I felt like such a fool for not having thought of that myself.

 

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A Random Memory and a Small Observation

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Here's a random memory: Back in the seventies, there was an underground comix series called Insect Fear which basically tried to outdo EC Horror comics. I was talking with then-Philadelphian friend Judith Weiss about the latest issue, which she had also read, and she amiably dismissed it by saying, "They should have called it Women Fear."

In an instant, I saw her point: Every story in the book had an assertive, large-breasted woman who received her violent comeuppance at the end. I had missed this not because I sympathized with the underlying misogyny but because the stories were all made up of narrative tropes that went way, way back to EC and long before. I was so used to them that I couldn't actually see them.

And a small observation: I was reading something about the old hippie days of the sixties and seventies which presented feminism of the time as being little more than a list of complaints. And God knows women had good reason to complain. But I was there and I can assure you that the feminists were rarely "strident." Mostly, they calmly explained things they knew that men didn't understand. They assumed that you'd mend your ways once you saw what they were.

Perhaps they were giving us more credit than we deserved. But we shouldn't portray them in a negative manner when all they were trying to do was make the world a kindlier and saner place.

End of sermon. Go thou and sin no more.

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