Alas for Gene Wolfe

Gene Wolfe, one of the greatest of science-fiction writers, has passed away. His work was subtle and superb. Wolfe wrote paragraphs you could lose yourself in, like a labyrinth, and come out a changed person on the other side. He thought profoundly about what story-telling means as few other writers have. He was honored inside the genre and sometimes outside it, but deserved far more honor in both places. Any account of 20th-century American literature that omits Gene Wolfe is incomplete.

There are many places to start reading Wolfe: his novella "The Fifth Head of Cerberus," and his epic masterpiece The Book of the New Sun. But I would put in a word for the short story "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories," a meditative story which, depending on how you look at it, depicts neglected boy losing himself in a book of pulp science fiction or a book of pulp science fiction entering a boy's abusive environment to salvage him. It's the title story of the hilariously-named collection The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories. (Wolfe also wrote "The Death of Doctor Island," which won the Nebula, "The Doctor of Death Island," and, somewhat later, "The Death of the Island Doctor.")

"The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories" was part of a famous and ghastly faux pas. The Nebula Awards MC, Isaac Asimov, actually announced at the awards banquet that "Island" had won that year's Nebula for Best Short Story, and Wolfe stood up to accept the award before Asimov realized that Wolfe was the runner-up. "No Award" had won for Best Short Story that year. If that sounds to you a bit like the story about Pynchon, the Pulitzers, and Gravity's Rainbow, both stories are from the same era and feature profound, boundary-pushing work. As I said, Wolfe was never honored enough, in his parish or out of it.

Here are just the first two paragraphs of "The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories":

Winter comes to water as to land, though there are no leaves to fall. The waves that were a bright, hard blue yesterday under a fading sky today are green, opaque, and cold. If you are a boy not wanted in the house you walk the beach for hours, feeling the winter that has come in the night; sand blowing across your shoes, spray wetting the legs of your corduroys. You turn your back to the sea, and with the sharp end of a stick found half buried write in the wet sand Tackman Babcock.

Then you go home, knowing that behind you the Atlantic is destroying our work.

Godspeed, Mr. Wolfe. You wrote in something far more durable than sand.

cross-posted from Dagblog. All comments welcome there, not here.

My First Short Story in a While

As previously mentioned, I have a new short story out this month: my first in 21 years. I am very happy about this. And, as promised, here's a taste and a link to the full piece. I hope you enjoy it.

The thing that broke your heart was, he could still fly. Nothing else to call it. There he was in those silly clothes, going wherever he pleased and not falling, as if gravity were just some tired social pretense and he’d grown too old to bother. But it wasn’t the same.

Writing Short Stories, Then and Now

I used to write short stories. Then, for many reasons, I stopped writing fiction. Today I had my first story published in more than twenty years. (It will be posted on the web in two weeks, and I will link to it then. If you can't wait, the issue's for sale here.) More stories may be along; we'll see. If it takes another twenty-one years, I'll have something to look forward to in 2039.

It's a little strange returning to an art form after two decades away. One of the things it means is that in my old stories, no one has e-mail. Most people didn't. Or cell phones. Any temptation to dredge up old pieces is held at bay by the fact that they've become historical fiction.

So what else has changed?

Electronic submissions have made the business of sending out stories easier, and vastly sped up response times for science fiction markets. I loved the ritual of going to the post office, and I enjoy an occasional return to that, but in the old days after stories went in the mail you had to put them out of your mind for at least a couple of months. Now you sometimes get a response in less than a week. Sometimes it's still months, of course, but things are more efficient.

(Literary magazines are still as slow to respond as always, or slower. Budget six months for a reply and be happily surprised if you hear back within three.)

The small cool science fiction magazines I used to love, with their tiny press runs, have largely been replaced by cool online science fiction magazines. That's a useful change, especially in terms of how many people potentially read a story. I didn't have many links to share in the old days. I'm back to being a fiction rookie again, trying to break in just as I did when I was younger, except that rookies today get to play for bigger crowds.

I am now older than my characters. In my twenties, my typical science-fiction narrator was about 45 years old. I had real storytelling reasons for that: one way to write about the future is to use a character who's old enough to have lived through the key social or technological change, and who remembers how things were before. On the other hand, I used a middle-aged protagonist at least once in a straight-realist story, so I don't know what I was thinking. My go-to protagonists are still middle-aged, but now I don't have to imagine what that's like. A 45-year-old narrator might just be me with marginally better knees. And maybe some of the emotional tone I was reaching for as a younger writer, the rueful complexity I associated with my elders, is nearer to my midlife grasp. At least I'd like to think so.

Fiction writing is no longer my vocation. I've learned there's something else I'm better at. I will never know how well I write either scholarship or fiction, because that's something you can never know about yourself. But I know which one I write better. The best thing I have ever written is a scholarly article about Shakespeare, and so is the second-best thing. Ten years from now, that will still be true. If I had been asked twenty-five years ago whether I'd prefer to be a better fiction writer or a better Shakespeare scholar, I wouldn't necessarily have chosen the way it's turned out. But no one gets asked. It's great luck to feel any vocation as a writer, and I'm grateful. It feels like ludicrous good fortune to discover I can still publish in a second field, years after leaving it behind.

Knowing that fiction won't get me anywhere means I don't have to worry about getting anywhere with my fiction. I can write short stories because I don't have to make a living from them. It's no longer possible to make a living writing short stories. Even commercial markets (and I should say Apex Magazine has been both fair and generous) won't pay a month's rent or mortgage in America, and no one can sell a story every month. But my stories don't have to pay my rent. Neither do I need to use stories to get attention for my novel, or worse yet my unfinished novel, or get myself an agent. If I write a novel, I'll try to get it attention, and probably an agent too. But right now the point of my stories is to be the best stories I can make them. If I end up writing a novel, the point will be to create the best novel I can. There don't need to be other reasons.

I suppose this is all to say that my ambition is to write fiction with "a professional's skills but an amateur's goals." But I lifted that phrase from the scholarly article I have coming out next month. I'm better at some things than others.

cross-posted from, and all comments welcome at, Dagblog

For Le Guin

Ursula K. Le Guin was my hero. Urusla K. Le Guin is my hero still. She is gone from this world, and only her words are left to us. Those words are marvels.

I remember driving to a college interview with a copy of The Dispossessed on the passenger seat beside me, in case I arrived too early. My first computer password, at the beginning of college, was an anagram of her name. I remember reading The Dispossessed again when I moved to California, to console myself to the strangeness of the new planet where I found myself. And The Dispossessed is on my bedside table again, tonight.

For the last two falls I have been teaching my graduate students The Left Hand of Darkness. Last fall, I realized their edition had a typo, a crucial, meaning-changing typo, on the novel's last page. I went through my house looking for other editions to compare. It turns out I had five.

I have blogged in the past about the debts I owe to Le Guin as a writer, and those debts have only matured as I have:

I no longer know how many times I have read The Language of the Night.  [I]t was my first example of how to write an essay about a piece of fiction. More importantly, it was my first model of an essayist's prose, and I could not have had a better. Le Guin's prose, lucid and evocative, as clear and as complex as running water, still gives me my sense of what a paragraph or a sentence ought to be.

[snip]

I was all too slow to be aware of it, but this is the truth: I am trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. I am always trying to write like Ursula K. Le Guin. This is no less so because I do it without thinking of it; it is only more so. .... She is the essayist I wanted to be when I grew up, and she is the stylist whom I, having grown up, would like to be. ... In the middle of my life, better late than never, I am obliged and honored to acknowledge her as my master.

She was a late bloomer, who published her first novel the year she turned 37, and her first undeniable masterpiece, The Left Hand, the year she turned forty. That has always been a lesson to me.

She was an American Taoist, a real one, in a country where many who profess Taoism are deceiving themselves. She had no space for self-deception; the Tao, after all, is about dispensing with illusions. Her perspective was unblinking and undeceived, looking straight at truths most shy from. Many would call such a perspective cold but, precisely because she was so free of illusions, her viewpoint was astonishing warm. She wrote fantasy, but never trafficked in or tolerated the everyday lies and fantasies that our society breathes. Her novels took you to another planet, where you found yourself facing the truths of human nature that you shied away from every day.

She was fearless. She could not be intimidated. And her craft was profound.

I am thinking of her husband tonight, Charles, to whom she was married for decades, and who clearly served as helpmeet to her in a way that men of his generation expected of their wives and not themselves. Le Guin wrote, again and again, of deep monogamous bonds, the pairing for life, in a way that has to be, in part, a profound tribute to her own partner.

I would take, gladly, another year or two or five of her words, of whatever she was able and willing to share. But she had already written her last novel, and knew it. When she no longer had the physical stamina to write a novel, she faced that truth. Her accomplishment is complete tonight. She has already achieved more than anyone could ask.

Ursula Le Guin did not believe in heaven. She found the idea of an afterlife suspect. So all that remains of her tonight are her words. They will always be there if you want them. Let me say what a comfort they can be.

cross-posted from Dagblog, where all comments are welcome

Never Trust an Action Hero: Star Wars' Lost Politics

Star Wars: The Last Jedi has hit the cineplex and begun raking in the customary astronomical profits. But the film has some angry detractors among hard-core Star Wars fans (a minority, I think, but a loud one) who complain bitterly that The Last Jedi is unfaithful to the Star Wars tradition. I'm not going to talk about the new movie here, and I'm going to do my best to delete discussion of it in comments (no spoilers!) for at least the next week. But I'd like to talk about the old Star Wars movies, the originals and the prequels, and the ambiguity that George Lucas tried, but failed, to give them.

The original 1977 Star Wars movie, the one now retroactively called "A New Hope," is filled with references to earlier film classics and it ends with a big one. The final sequence, in which Princess Leia hands out medals in a big military assembly, is a very clear reference to Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, the most visually-powerful Nazi propaganda film of all time. This is widely known, but poorly explained. Everyone agrees that this is a Triumph of the Will homage; very few people can persuasively explain why.

I think the best explanation is that this was George Lucas's failed attempt to add some moral complexity. After spending the whole movie very obviously associating the Empire with the Nazis (calling them "Stormtroopers" is not subtle), Lucas turns at the end and codes the Rebels as Nazis too. Whoa! Maybe I need to rethink things! Now, that move certainly does not work as intended, and basically never has. An audience of eight-year-olds is never going to catch the Leni Riefenstahl reference. Most people watching a summer popcorn movie aren't. And even if you do notice it, it doesn't work. The movie that comes before that scene is too joyful, too seductive, and too simple-hearted for that sudden moral twist to work. By the time you get to the end of the original Star Wars, everyone wants the good guys to be good and the bad guys to be bad, period. No arty little film-school reference, coming from left field with no preparation, is going to derail the audience at that point. No way.

Lucas seemed to give up trying to cast doubt on his good guys' politics through the next two sequels. But he went back at it hard during the prequel trilogy, which is filled with moments where the heroes mess up catastrophically. The prequel trilogy is three movies about people losing their democracy. They start with a Republic and blow it. And, over and over, it's the good guys, the Jedi and their allies, actively blowing it. There's no moral equivalence; Palpatine and his flunkies are clearly evil. But time and again we have scenes that are pretty clearly meant to inspire moral confusion. Yoda introduces the Stormtroopers for the first time. Jar Jar, who is an idiot but a good-hearted idiot, votes Palpatine into power. These are meant to be moments where the audience steps back and says, "Whoa! The good guys did what now?" Those emotional beats don't land, any more than the Triumph of the Will reference landed in the original movie. Audience members don't respond the way Lucas seems to be asking them to. Maybe it's that the prequels are actually more ambitious, morally and artistically, than Lucas could execute. (To say they're ambitious is not to say they're good: many bad movies are the burning wrecks of ambitions that were beyond their makers' skill.) Maybe Lucas would have been able to pull it off earlier, but had lost a step. Or maybe this would have always been beyond his grasp as a story-teller, because getting across moral complexity has never been his thing. He certainly didn't pull it off. But equally certainly, he tried.

The message that George Lucas has repeatedly tried and failed to get across in his Star Wars movies can be boiled down to: never trust an action hero. If you are looking for rational democratic governance, a bunch of impulsive, shoot-from the hip adventurers are really not your guys. They're just not wired that way. And this is a fair point. The Jedi are not the same as the Empire or the Sith or, God forbid, the Nazis, but you can see why the Sith view the Jedi as such a valuable recruiting pool. The prequels very deliberately shows the good guys' action-hero impulses being played, repeatedly, by Palpatine's manipulations. But they're vulnerable to those manipulations because their heroic instincts are naturally a little un-democratic. That's not my spin. That's the plot of Episodes II and III.

Action-adventure stories like Star Wars naturally have a little bit of authoritarian bias built into their DNA, whatever their superficial politics. Or, to put it another way, these stories have a natural authoritarian lean that a storyteller has to work around. Remember, a lot of these basic stories come from monarchical societies. Celebrating a class of armed overlords is the natural groove path.

Part of this is that adventure stories mostly solve problems through violence. The good guys are never going to spend a Star Wars movie registering voters or hammering out a legislative compromise. Their basic approaches to problem-solving are 1) shoot it, 2) blow it up, and 3) cut it in half with a sword. And people enjoy that more than a story about committee work. (Our girl Senator Amidala gets fed up with the whole being-a-Senator thing and flies off to kick some ass, leaving the trusty and reliable Jar Jar with her vote. How's that work out?) Now, democracies do sometimes have to use military force, and most good adventure stories pay at least lip service to democracy and freedom. "Beating People Up for Freedom" is the unofficial Jedi motto. But that adventure story structure also lends itself easily, even naturally, to politics that glorify violence and believe in imposing control from above by force.

But more importantly, good adventure stories focus on a small group of individuals, and on things that a few individuals can do in a story. Star Wars makes a lot of World War II references, but it's not really set up for D-Day; a vast battle where every individual only makes a small contribution isn't really how these movies work. It's always going to be about a few central characters taking decisive action. And that makes for good storytelling. But if you don't watch it, that can quickly devolve into a narrative where a few Special Shiny Important People make all the decisions for everyone else. In fact, it's hard to raise the stakes of the story without doing that. Things go Game of Thrones so fast you might not notice.

Look: at the end of Star Wars, Luke Skywalker is a promising young pilot who manages to score a decisive hit in a key battle. By the end of Return of the Jedi, the question of whether anybody in the galaxy ever gets to vote hinges on how Luke Skywalker happens to work out his feelings. The superficial question "Should the galaxy be ruled by one man's decisions, or by the people themselves?" stealthily changes to "Which one man should make decisions for the rest of the galaxy?" Sure, the happy ending is foreordained, so we don't really worry that people are going to stay under the Empire's thumb. But we're spent the last few hundred years in the real world working to reach a point where a couple of super-elite individuals get to decide everyone else's destiny. Maybe we shouldn't be leaving these decisions up to a Skywalker. And in fact, the three prequel movies are about the folly of letting a Skywalker make these political decisions. Anakin Skywalker working out his feelings is the original problem.

But don't take it from me. Take it from Yoda, who more than once during the prequels makes it very clear how badly he and his associates have failed. The never-trust-an-action-hero idea is not mine; it really does belong to George Lucas. He's just never managed to sell it.

 cross-posted from Dagblog (all comments welcome there, not here)

Today in Jedi Studies (Self-promotion Edition)

Yesterday, I had a small humor piece published by McSweeney's Internet Tendency.

It's called "Questions for the Jedi Vice-Chair of Graduate Studies"

Do I absolutely have to construct my own lightsaber to graduate?
Will you accept 30 hours of transfer credit from the Dark Side?
How will being at one with the Force prepare me for today’s job market?

You can read the rest here:

(Comments, as always, welcome at Dagblog)