Category: Books and Reading

Another Neat Thing They’re Doing

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Scholars are using computers “to help reassemble more than 100,000 document fragments collected across 1,000 years that reveal details of Jewish life along the Mediterranean” — a task that previously had to be done by eye and hand.

A lot of the documents retrieved so far deal with the minutiae of daily life:  contracts and sales records and legal documents and even recipes.  For a historian, and even more for writers who are trying to recreate history for their readers, such details are golden, worth far more, sometimes, than the word about who defeated whom on the battlefield, and where.

(I’d be particularly interested to know the ingredients and techniques involved in what the article describes as a “particularly vile” recipe for honey-wine.  Purely as a matter of academic curiosity, you understand.)

 

Two from the Guardian

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Today’s “Go look over there!” links, both from the Guardian online:

First, we have the plagiarism scandal du jour:  The poet David R. Morgan got caught lifting other poets’ poetry and publishing it as his own:  American poet Charles O Hartman realised Morgan’s poem “Dead Wife Singing” was almost identical to his own, three-decades-old “A Little Song”.

Keep an eye on this one, folks; there’s no telling who else he may have stolen from.

Then, on a less dispiriting note, a column on overdone or imprecise metaphors:  “A catalyst is something that speeds up a chemical reaction but is itself unchanged at the end of the reaction. Someone who sparks a revolution by setting themselves on fire shouldn’t be described as a catalyst.”

Peeve of the Day

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Today’s pet peeve, O my readers (you patient and long-suffering lot), is presentism in historical fiction.

What, I ask you, is the point of writing stories set in the past if everybody in them — or at least every character intended to be liked or admired by the reader — thinks and at least desires to act like an enlightened specimen of twenty-first century humanity? And yet there is a market for such stories, possibly because not every reader-for-pleasure wants to spend his or her time working at the admittedly difficult job of empathizing with characters who might possibly hold opinions or indulge in practices of which twenty-first century persons do not approve. For it is an almost inescapable fact that even the most enlightened and progressive person of a past era will hold at least one or two opinions which are at best incomprehensible and at worst repugnant to the modern mind.  (They smoke like chimneys.  They spank their children.  They truly believe not just in the rightness but in the vigorous exportation of Western civilization and Protestant Christianity.  And so on.)  The past isn’t just another country; sometimes it’s practically another planet.  And space aliens live there.

In the immortal words of the old New Yorker cartoon, I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it.  But then, I’m a science fiction and fantasy sort of person, with the science fiction and fantasy cast of mind, which means that I’m the sort of reader who can derive pleasure from trying to think like a space alien for an hour or two.  That cast of mind makes the awareness that these people are not like us into a feature, rather than a bug, of true historical fiction.  The “not like us” factor is also what, in my opinion, distinguishes historical fiction from historical romances,† which choose to emphasize the points of commonality — the “these people are a lot like us after all” bits — rather than the points of difference.

†And I’ll save time right now by agreeing that it isn’t either the quality of the research or the quality of the writing that distinguishes historical fiction from historical romance — it’s the angle of approach. And I enjoy a historical romance as much as the next person, when I’m in the right mood.

Utterly Shameless Self-Promotion

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My co-author James D. Macdonald and I have a short story out on-line today, in both text and podcast form:  “The Clockwork Trollop,” over at this month’s issue of Beneath Ceaseless Skies.

Thought for the Day

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The shape of a good story in usually implied in all of its parts, including the beginning.

It’s always a good sign when the reader is able to guess at that ultimate shape from reading the first two or three chapters, rather like a paleontologist inferring the shape of a T-Rex from a couple of bones.  Conversely, if the animal as ultimately reconstructed turns out to be wildly different from the one suggested by that first handful of bones, an acute observer may well conclude that something went wrong — either in the final assembly, or in the selection of parts.

Most readers are more acute observers than you might think.  And writing a story whose front end promises something that the rest of the story doesn’t deliver is a prime route to reader disgruntlement.

Why Mary Sue?

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(As opposed to Marty, Gary, Sebastian, or Tom-Dick-or-Harry Sue.)

Well . . .

To begin with, Mary Sue was first identified in the wild in her female form, and therefore her name provides an umbrella term for the whole category. If a reader says of a male character, “He’s just another damned Mary Sue,” a listener familiar with the terminology will have no trouble figuring out exactly what the problem with that character is.

In addition, fanfic, where the term originated, was historically (and still remains) heavily though not exclusively a female activity.  It’s one of the few areas of endeavor that I know of where the default pronoun is in fact “she.” The Mary Sues that show up in fanfic are more likely to be female on that account.

Finally, male characters in popular fiction are more or less expected to be larger than life; nothing cultural is transgressed against when that happens. On the other hand, watch out for those sensitive, quiet, intellectual male characters, especially those of artistic bent. When looked at carefully, they often bear an uncanny resemblance to, if not the author, at least the author’s much nicer second cousin.

Not Something You Hear Every Day

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Ever since the rise of the novel in the 18th century, mimetic realism has been the unmarked state for fiction in English (of fiction in other languages, I lack the authority to speak.)  Everything else is genre — science fiction, fantasy, romance, mystery, moribund genres like the western and nearly extinct ones like the nurse novel — and yes, literary fiction.  The fact that literary fiction occupies a position of high prestige doesn’t exempt it from having its own tropes and clichés and habits of thought, and doesn’t exempt it from Sturgeon’s Law.†

But it’s not often you encounter a writer of literary fiction actually admitting to the fact in public, as J. Robert Lennon does in the March 29th issue of Salon.

†Named after the science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon, to whom someone once said, “Ninety percent of science fiction is crud.” To which Sturgeon replied, “Ninety percent of everything is crud.”

Snow Out of Season

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It’s April, but with all due respect to T. S. Eliot, no one up here in far northern New Hampshire is breeding any lilacs out of any land, dead or otherwise.

Instead, we’ve got the freeze-thaw cycle still going on, putting frost heaves and potholes into all the roads, and turning the frozen ground into deep, thick mud of the sort that used to sink Tiger tanks on the Eastern Front.   When I was an undergraduate doing a seminar on Robert Frost, I thought that mud-time was something Frost had made up for poetic purposes. Then I moved up here, and found out otherwise. (He wasn’t making up the bent-over birches, either.)

It’s always odd when you encounter in real life something which you’ve previously only encountered via art. I can only imagine what it’s going to be like for legions of science fiction fans on the day the space aliens finally arrive.

Chasing the White Whale

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An outside observer, surveying the existing canon of the science fiction genre, might well be forgiven for asking, “What is it about sf writers and Moby-Dick?”  Melville’s classic sea story about Captain Ahab and the white whale has been the springboard for more than one science fiction novel — Samuel R. Delany’s Nova has echoes of it, and Philip Jose Farmer’s The Wind Whales of Ishmael is a direct homage, and just this past year China Miéville’s YA novel Railsea had the protagonist following a one-armed captain in a vengeance-hunt for a giant white burrowing mole-rat, or “mouldywarpe”, named Mocker-Jack.

Giant burrowing mole-rats aside, what are the attractions of Moby-Dick for writers working in the science-fictional mode?

Well, obviously, there’s the whole obsessive-vengeance-quest plot.  Vengeance may be morally dubious as all hell, but there’s no denying that as plot engines go, it’s a winner.  It comes with automatic interesting backstory, since the object of the vengeance-quest must have done something impressively dramatic to set the protagonist on his or her course of action (framed him for treason and stolen his girlfriend, killed his father and usurped the throne, shot up her wedding and killed her fiancé on her wedding day . . . that sort of thing.)  It pretty much insures that the protagonist isn’t going to be spending the book contemplating the landscape and doing nothing, and it has the promise of a violent and exciting payoff at the end.  And finally, if the writer is inclined that way, it has lots of scope for contemplating law and morality and justice and mercy and other chewy thematic issues.

Beyond all that, though, is the fact that the one of the key concerns in Moby-Dick is Captain Ahab’s desire to “strike through the mask” — to find out what, exactly, is the real nature of the white whale.  Is it a brute beast acting according to its nature, or is it an active and malevolent adversary?  Or is it merely the agent of some other, greater intelligence?  This desire to see beyond the surface of things, to find out the true nature of the universe, is also one of the key concerns of science fiction.

And this thematic similarity, I think, is a big part of what attracts science fiction writers to Moby-Dick.

The Return of the Intellectual Packrat

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By way of apologia for having been Away From Keyboard for a couple of days, have a couple of nifty research sites.

The Memoirs of Pascal Bonenfant.  The site name notwithstanding, this isn’t actually anybody’s memoirs; rather, it’s a collection of research sources and links for 18th-century social history.  There’s a database of thieves’ cant, and a page with recipes from a period pharmacopoeia (I really want to know what the “Powder of Millepedes” — Take Millepedes prepared 12 grains; Saffron 3 grains; Flower of Benjamin, Salt of Amber, each 2 grains; Ginger 1 grain; Oil of Aniseed 1 drop; Bring all to a Powder — was supposed to be prescribed for), a “List of the Flying Coaches, Stage Coaches, Waggons, and Carriers” going in and out of London in 1721, and a plethora of other fascinating things.

And then there’s the Food Timeline page.  If you want to find out the wholesale price of wheat in Philadelphia in July of 1762 (5.5 shillings the bushel), or the cost of a  Thanksgiving turkey in New Jersey in 1931 (39¢ a pound), this is the place to look.

Because if you really want to write about the past and make it real for your readers, you don’t just want the wars and the politics.  You want the food and the drink and the furniture of everyday life as well.