PaulaSJordan: Wordshop

Harry’s Side Jobs, Part One

2012-02-26T01:09:00.000-05:00

Copyright 2012 by Paula S. Jordan

SIDE JOBS
Stories from The Dresden Files
by Jim Butcher
ROC Books, 2010

There are eleven stories to review in this excellent anthology – all but three or so of the shorter Dresden pieces written to date – and there’s a good bit to say up front about the collection itself. So I’m going to take this in two parts; anthology comments and the first three stories now, and the rest next time. Unless it takes three parts. Butcher’s stories are that good.

As regular readers of the Dresden Files Series know, Jim Butcher lets some time elapse in Wizard-Detective Harry Dresden’s world between one novel and the next. Gives you the sense that Harry’s always out there somewhere, making his way in the really-mean streets of Butcher’s urban fantasy Chicago, and not bothering to tell you about it unless it’s something notable even for him. Something like a more-or-less friendly zombie T Rex running loose in the streets. And all that time, between the books, Harry is living a human life as well as a magical one. Maturing. Growing in magical knowledge, power and skill. Meeting adversity. Collecting scars.

With these stories Butcher gives you a few vivid glimpses into Harry’s life between the books. You get to see him grow.

The first story in the collection – and they are given in the order of the Dresden Files chronology – is a treasure for any reader who is also a writer: the first Dresden piece Butcher wrote and, in his words, “an anxious beginner’s first effort” at marketable fiction.

Restoration of Faith takes place some time before Storm Front, during Harry’s apprenticeship at detective Nicholas Christian’s agency, Ragged Angel Investigations. Nick (who also appears briefly in Ghost Story) specializes in finding lost children.

On this occasion the lost – actually runaway – child is Faith, the smart, feisty, ten-year-old daughter of rich but unloving parents. After hiring Nick’s services to find her, they decide they’d rather not be known as the parents of a runaway. So they report her to the police as a kidnap victim, giving Harry’s and Nick’s descriptions as the perpetrators.

Two things impressed me about this story: the remarkably detailed backstory that Butcher had developed at that early stage and the level of writing skill he’d achieved in “only the third or fourth” story he’d ever written. Granted, he wrote it as a class assignment at the University of Oklahoma’s Professional Writing program, so he was not untrained. Even so, his ease with the language and keen insight into his characters’ inner lives were surprisingly good for a student writer.

As to backstory, a great many of the props, behaviors, and characters of the Dresden Files are already in place. Harry has his black canvas duster and a prototype of his power ring. He has a workable tracking spell and other dependable magical skills, complete with evidences of the system’s drawbacks and limitations. His intelligence, courage, sense of humor, and soft, self-sacrificing heart are already recognizable as the Harry of the later books. He encounters a powerful and nasty inhuman opponent out of fairytale who has violated the Unseelie Accords, and defeats it with the help, at first meeting, of a short, blonde, female ‘uniform cop’ named Murphy.

I call that a satisfying beginning.

Vignette, a brief piece written for a sampler handout at a convention, takes place between Death Masks and Blood Rites. For its length, and its quick midnight creation just before deadline, it gives some good, amusing insights into Harry’s life at that point in his still-developing career: the kinds of every-day distractions that could interrupt his studies, his relationship with Bob the Skull, and his cluelessness about certain aspects of the mundane world.

Something Borrowed takes place between Dead Beat and Proven Guilty. It came about when Butcher was invited to write a piece for Pat Elrod’s anthology My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding. He took it as an opportunity to explore the changing lives of the Alphas, the pack of young werewolves who were, at that point in the series, completing their college years and embarking into adulthood.

It’s a werewolf story almost – but not completely – without fur, exploring the impacts of both the mundane and magical worlds on the human lives of Alphas leaders Billy and Georgia on their wedding day. It is not, however, without magical challenges. Those come in the form of a powerful Winter Sidhe bent on avenging the Alphas’ involvement in the battle of the fairies described in Summer Knight.

Butcher’s character skills make for especially good reading in several insightful scenes: Billy’s response when a hung-over, post-bachelor-party Harry, at his snarky best, confronts Georgia’s snooty stepmother; Harry’s slow realization that Billy is no longer a kid; the first encounter between Murphy and Bob the Skull; and the maturing team-of-two trust between Harry and Murphy.

All in all it is a well developed, satisfyingly suspenseful story of search and rescue, deadly magical tricks and traps, a foray into Chicago’s treacherous undertown complete with Harry’s special brand of pyrotechnics, and the multifaceted power of a kiss. A good read.

That’s it for now. See you next time for more of Harry’s Side Jobs.

Favorite Reads of 2011

2012-01-18T12:36:00.000-05:00

Beyond all doubt my most momentous read of the year was Jim Butcher’s urban fantasy Dresden Files: the whole series through volume 13, Ghost Story, and including Side Jobs, a collection of his shorter works that interleave beautifully with the novels.

I love these books for the exuberance of detective Harry Dresden’s wit and wizardry, the vividly imagined cast of good and bad characters both human and not, and yes, for their thrill quotient. And on top of all that, Butcher is an excellent writer, particularly in the challenging realm of character development. As noted in “Jim Butcher and the Human Condition,” posted here on Dec 15, that’s his special gift: a clarity and depth of insight that is rare indeed.

Patrick Rothfuss was another stellar find for 2011. His brilliant first novel, The Name of the Wind, Day 1 of The Kingkiller Chronicle, gives us the first third of wizard Kvothe’s story, set in a world somewhat akin to Ged’s in Ursula LeGuin’s Earthsea Trilogy. Kvothe’s experience of life and schooling is also closer to Ged’s than to Harry Potter’s, but on the far side of Ged’s rather than a point between the two. This is the story of a boy cast loose into an uninvolved, even brutal adult world almost from the start. And though he is not without friends, his pilgrimage of learning lacks the safety that Harry, and Ged to some extent, experienced in their trials, errors, and very survival in the course of learning. Day two: The Wise Man’s Fear, is high on my reading list for 2012.

My two favorite non-genre reads of the year were The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova, and The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks.

Kostova, whose first novel The Historian is (in my humble opinion) the finest vampire novel ever, takes her fascination with obsession in an entirely different direction in Swan Thieves. As in Historian, obsession drives figures on both sides of the protagonist-antagonist equation. This time the field of contest is French Impressionism: the art and life of a young French woman of that school, a modern-day artist obsessed with the Frenchwoman’s story to the point of attacking her masterpiece in a modern-day museum, and a psychiatrist obsessed with unraveling the roots of that artist’s violent action. While not a work of fantasy, this extraordinarily well-written story interweaves past and present so intimately that it is you, the reader, who are the time traveler.

In The People of the Book Geraldine Brooks creates an imagined history of an actual volume, the priceless Sarajevo Haggadah. Her stunningly beautiful and gripping novel weaves fiction together with fact, creating vividly imagined characters and stories to flesh out the actual tracings of its travels from its creation in thirteenth or fourteenth century Morocco through the many dangers of the intervening centuries. This is a story of passion and conflict and, above all, of devotion to a sacred and beautiful creation of human hands. If you love books, this is one you must read.

That's it. Happy reading in 2012!

Jim Butcher and the Human Condition

2011-12-15T04:43:00.000-05:00

Oh, how I love to disappear for a weekend into an interesting book with characters who catch my heart! Urban fantasy writer Jim Butcher’s people do that for me far better than most, and I’ve started thinking about how he does it.

I had never read Mr. Butcher’s work before a month or so ago, and I am taking his Dresden Files series in sequence; eagerly catching up with Wizard Harry Dresden and his tremendous challenges, both magical and human, in the even-meaner-than-you-thought streets of present-day Chicago. I’ve just finished the fourth one, Summer Knight, and it caught me even better than the first three.

Of course, urban fantasies have a serious edge in earning reader buy-in, set as they are in places and times like the ones we live in. If the baddies attack in the garden department of a Wal-Mart Superstore as they did in SK I am right there in the fray!

But Butcher’s gift goes far deeper than that.

Harry may be the most accomplished wizard actively practicing his craft on the street, but he is no immortal, and he faces adversaries far more powerful than himself on a regular basis. One of the many joys of these books lies in the cleverness and often downright comedy of his magical cheats and inventions.

But it’s in his characters’ inner struggles that Butcher shines brightest. When Harry is conflicted—and he is always having to endanger the very innocents he is fighting to defend—you feel his conflict in your bones. When he’s afraid, Butcher lets you know in ways large and small just exactly why this contest is so much scarier to him than most. Also, Harry is thoroughly invested in his struggles against evil and when things go desperately wrong, which they sometimes do, he carries vast loads of guilt.

That’s not to say that his world is all dark. He is a profoundly human and intelligent man, facing Butcher’s fiendishly imagined range of inhuman powers. But he faces them just as he does the same frustrations and ambiguities that life throws at us all: with that greatest of all human survival traits, a razor sharp sense of humor.

Still, when he’s confused or hurt or threatened, and especially when he’s thwarted in his efforts by skeptical officials of the mundane world or pigheaded members of his own, he may act out in ways that only deepen their animosity. But you, dear reader, have the inside track to his soul, and are never in doubt.

So. A brief look at what Jim Butcher does to pull you into Harry’s life and mind. But as to how he does it so well? That’s his special gift: a clarity and depth of insight that is rare indeed.

Zen Mind Meets Wildfire

2011-11-30T17:19:00.000-05:00

Fire Monks
by Colleen Morton Busch
New Penguin Press
New York, 2011

This book review may seem a strange post from a science fiction writer. No stars or planets, no aliens, no futuristic technology. What the book does offer is a wealth of insight into the behavior of wildfire (Physics), the tools of firefighting (technology), the politics of wildfire management (Psychology and ... er ... politics), and a blow-by-blow account of a passionate but cool-headed response to eminent disaster by five Zen Buddhist monks (action, thrills, suspense) that is the equal of any I have read in fiction or out. Oh, and a window into the Zen Buddhist mind that I found fascinating.

Tassajara, located east of Big Sur in California’s Ventana Wilderness, is the oldest Zen Buddhist Monastery in the western hemisphere. The terrain is steeply mountainous and heavily forested. Tassajara itself sits in a deep rift among surrounding ridges with a long unpaved mountain road its only link to the outside world.

in June of 2008 a single lightening storm set off more than 2000 fires across California. Two of those wildfires converged and burned their way through the Ventana toward Tassajara. Resident students and monks worked night and day preparing defenses for the monastery: clearing and digging firebreaks, setting up a system to pump water directly from Tassajara Creek to feed fire hoses and a rooftop sprinkler system, clearing combustibles, wrapping vulnerable structures in fire retardant materials, and training as firefighters.

As the fires slowly advanced, friction between overlapping firefighting agencies led first to hope that outside help would be available, then to complete disappointment. Through a series of requested, then encouraged, evacuations the original large group of residents at the monastery was gradually winnowed down to 20. Then, as fire threatened the only road out, all were told they must leave. And leave they did. But halfway along the road five monks (four men and one woman) turned back to maintain the pumps that fed the hose and sprinkler systems and to use the skills they had been practicing for weeks to fight the fire.

I was especially fascinated by two particular aspects of their fight against the flames.

The first was the behavior of the fire itself. Under the influence of the varying topography in its path and the varying temperatures, strengths, and directions of the winds that drove it, the fires first seemed to threaten the monastery from one direction, then from another, changing direction sometimes minute by minute as the flames were diverted by one set of forces and encouraged by another, all constantly in flux. In the end, 50-foot flames entered Tassajara from three directions at once.

The second and most fascinating aspect was the way these monks, steeped in the traditions of Buddhism, approached their encounter with the fire. Buddhism, as I (a complete ignoramus on the subject) understand it, involves constant practice to achieve a deep understanding of and harmony with nature, including the effort to live constantly in the moment, seeing each moment’s most critical needs as they emerge and moving to address them, calmly, and with presence of mind.

In the author’s words:

As a ring of flame looped around Tassajara ... They just got to work, doing something extraordinary with the mind they cultivated in their daily practices and activities. On another day, it might have been a bell that needed ringing, a soup that required stirring, a broom that needed picking up. At one o’clock on the afternoon of July 10, it happened to be a fire hose.*

And they did it. For six full hours these five trained amateurs, together with their fire hoses, their sprinklers and pumps, and the inexhaustible waters of Tassajara Creek, met the fire and won. Some small supporting buildings were lost, but the main structures, with their treasuries of books and tools and memories, survived intact. And while there were some bad moments with smoke, the monks’ worst after-effects were aches, pains, exhaustion, and dehydration.

I have included two nearly identical photographs, below, because each tells something a little different about them.

This was taken soon after the fire had left Tassajara grounds. The monks are, left to right, Graham Ross, Mako Voelkel, Monastery Director David Zimmerman, Abbot Steve Stucky, and Colin Gips.**

This was taken the following day, after food, a wash, more hours of vigilance for flare-ups, still-insufficient sleep and, at last, a time to put on their robes.***

* Fire Monks by Colleen Morton Busch, New Penguin Press, New York, 2011 Page 181
** Photo by Mako Voelkel
*** I could never locate credit information for this photo, which appears on the cover. I can only assume that it too was taken by Mako Voelkel. The design is by Susan Walsh.

CATHERINE ASARO: AURORA IN FOUR VOICES

2011-11-18T00:31:00.000-05:00

Imagine a city set deliberately in perpetual night, where light itself has become a medium of glorious art, the architecture designed to capture, reflect, and refract it a myriad subtle ways, even its people bred to near-crystalline reflectivity. Imagine too that all their art, philosophy and design rests in expressions of mathematics and scientific theory, that the single root of their vast creative impulse is a perfect fusion of art and science, and that all of it is achingly beautiful.

Can you grasp it? Can you get your mind around the notion of art and science as one indivisible concept? It is a viewpoint utterly alien to our human culture of mind/body, ethereal/material dichotomy, but to author Catherine Asaro it is home turf.

A ballerina – with a Harvard PhD in chemical physics. A NASA consultant in futuristic propulsion systems and author of brilliant character-driven hard-science fiction in her Skolian Empire series – whose fantasy novels are carefully constructed metaphors for advanced theories of science and mathematics. Asaro may have achieved in “Aurora” the definitive expression of her own creative style.

And it is a good story. In that city of dreams and dreamers one man is living a nightmare, captured, as Asaro says, like light reflecting and re-reflecting within the facets of a diamond. Except that eventually the light can escape.

Can art/science prevail over one artist/scientist gone wrong?

“Aurora in Four Voices,” nominated for both the Hugo and the Nebula in 1998, is now reappearing as the title novella in a collection of Asaro’s shorter works. Orders accepted at http://www.isficpress.com.

Breaking News: There will be an EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW with Catherine Asaro during @HomeCon II, appearing December 2-4 on Darkcargo.com, and a computer near you!

Long Dry Spell ...

2011-11-09T22:54:00.000-05:00

Hello all.

I know it's been quiet here for a while and I am sorry. There has just been too much going on. But I'll be back soon with some new thoughts and observations.

Thank you all for your interest.

The Second Campaign Challenge:

2011-10-03T23:54:00.000-04:00

Write a blog post in 200 words or less, excluding the title. It can be any format, whether flash fiction, non-fiction, humorous blog musings, poem, etc. The blog post should:
•include the word "imago" in the title
•include the following 4 random words: "miasma," "lacuna," "oscitate," "synchronicity,"
For those who want an even greater challenge (optional), make your post 200 words EXACTLY!

Imago Meets Mortality

She woke that hundredth morning to the same flawless smiles and elusive harmonies of the three gallants who had sung for her birthday all those days ago, and were with her still, their manly beauty perfect in her dreams.

She loved them. Loved them all. Yet knew her father never would, never could, consent to see her wedded to all three.

She wailed. She wept. She tore her hair. Today must be the day! She would find the tavern where her dull-eyed swain, that uninspired magician, had heard them sing, he said, and brought them in their satin clothes – one gold, one green, one garnet red – to beguile her holiday.

And arise she did, and dress her prettiest, and go – though the coachman doubted the place she named, and dropped her a half mile away in fear of going nearer.

Did she shy at the muck of the filthy street? Did she shun the tavern’s stench? Not she ... till the taverner revealed a lacuna, the gutter that she’d overlooked where her gallants gently slept, unmagicked, drunk, the gold and green and red besmeared with mire. And oh! Not least, the dank miasma hovering there. They would oscitate in synchronicity!

Third Campaign - First Challenge

2011-09-07T14:20:00.000-04:00

I am participating this month and next in Rachael Harrie's most helpful Third Writers’ Platform-Building Campaign

Thank you Rach!

The story below was written in answer to her First Campaigner Challenge, which was to:

1) Write a short story/flash fiction story in 200 words or less, beginning with the words, “The door swung open."
2) As an added challenge, end with the words: "the door swung shut."
3) As a still greater challenge, make the story 200 words EXACTLY!

I went for all three requirements! I hope you like my story.

The Door

The door swung open heavily, crunched against the inner wall in spite of all Jenny’s strength. She hadn’t wanted to be seen, only to see ....

There were shouts from below, male shouts. A woman with a kind face started up the cinderblock stairs.

Jenny wavered, but Jake would be back soon.

The babies were crying now, the ones he’d left to her. The oldest, nearly four, would be taken soon. She didn’t know where. She tugged at the heavy door and its inside locks, now trying to get it closed.

That was his little joke: a prison with the locks inside. But locking him out would lock out the food as well, and the slop bucket in.

The woman had heard the babies and told the men below. She climbed the long stairs slowly, calling to Jenny in a sad, exhausted voice.

“Please. We’ve come to help you.”

But Jake could find her anywhere. He had told her how it would happen: how he’d kill her right after he killed her babies.

She squeezed behind the door, back against the wall, and pushed. It swung heavily, shutting out the woman’s voice. She pushed again, and the door swung shut.

Just Plain Common Sense

2011-08-28T04:29:00.001-04:00

Ever notice how one person’s common sense approach to a particular task can seem totally wrong to someone else? There they stand, each looking at the other with identical, superior smirks, thinking ‘well, either you’re born with common sense or you’re not.’

But are you? Born with it, I mean.

Take an issue like safe driving speeds. Most anyone would agree that it’s ‘just common sense’ to drive more slowly on icy or wet roads than dry ones, or on curvy roads than straight ones. But what about conditions that are not obviously that different to the eye or to the body’s subliminal sense of motion?

Before the US interstate highway system was built, most people here considered the fastest safe speeds to be 40 or 50 mph. The new divided-highway design made the Interstates safer at higher speeds, but many people wouldn’t buy it. As others adapted more quickly to the higher speeds, the un-adapted ones endlessly complained that ‘people these days just don’t have any common sense.’

Why didn’t they accept the greater safety of the Interstates? Could be that the old notions of safety were just stuck in their heads too rigidly to be changed. Or maybe it was something else. Maybe the highway in front of them just didn’t look any safer than the older roads, or it didn’t feel safe to drive at higher speeds with the scenery flying by. If that’s the case, it would seem to suggest that common sense is not an innate quality after all, but rather a system of sensations, learned in the muscles and eyes, of what it looks and feels like to travel at the speeds you grew up with.

And if that’s the case, that common sense is learned through each child’s ordinary life experiences, then maybe other things – other ideas – that seem so totally unintuitive to us now can come to feel commonplace once we’ve experienced them, or simply spent more time considering them. Like the time- and mass-altering implications of near-light-speed travel. Or multiple universes, or multidimensional space.

Libraries and Their Keepers

2011-08-12T01:57:00.000-04:00

Darkcargo recently posted a discussion of ‘older reading devices’ (i.e.: books.) (“Everyman’s Library,” http.Darkcargo.com) As a companion piece to that, I’d like to offer a thought or two on the places of enchantment and discovery where those ‘older reading devices,’ were to be found, i.e.: ‘older libraries,’ and the Librarians who brought them to life.

My earliest memory of a library was of a single pleasant room attached to the general store in my grandmothers tiny Louisiana town. My brothers and I would climb the steps to the long unpainted porch that served both establishments, say polite hellos to the chorus of old men wearing down the benches outside the store, and pull open the screen door at the end of the porch.

The room was no more than ten feet by twenty, with windows on the front and one side wall, Miss Duckworth’s small desk to the right of the door, and all remaining wall space filled with books. In the center was a table where featured books were displayed, and where members of the summer reading club colored in a segment of a smiling bookworm for each book we read.

Miss Duckworth was a world-expanding experience for me, with her suggestions of such new friends as the Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew, and the fabulous adventures they enjoyed. When she discovered that I liked science fiction, she made sure that I found all the six or eight volumes with the space ships on their spines. Later still it was biographies, maybe twenty in all. and I read all those as well.

She never had an assistant that I knew of. When she was ‘indisposed’ the door inside the battered screen was locked. Her own pay, if she was paid, was surely very small. What I regard, then, as the gift of her time, was pivotal for me. Though other libraries have followed, with flashier technology and limitless collections of more serious and challenging fare, Miss Duckworth’s was the cornerstone of my reading life.

And I wonder, for all the convenience and variety of e-books dropping magically into your reading device, isn’t something missing? And I’m thinking of something more than the bulk and heft of words resting physically in your hand. I am thinking of the absence of that other hand that put the book into yours.

A Gift of Light

2011-07-31T00:22:00.000-04:00

I asked my Dad for the moon once. It hit him hard. I think it was the first thing I’d asked for that he couldn’t give me. (I was, of course, very young.) He would have liked to know, many years later, the extraordinary teacher who gave me all the stars.

Sheridan Simon, PhD – a real doctor, as he liked to say – was an astrophysicist, and my physics professor at Guilford College in Greensboro, NC.

He was unforgettable in the classroom, a chubby, laughing figure, always in motion, keeping students engaged in our challenging subject through his own joy in the work and the force of his wicked wit. In addition to his regular classes there were brilliant interdisciplinary courses, conversations in lunch lines and grocery stores, memorable lectures to local astronomy clubs, endless office hours demonstrating difficult solutions on his "magic" blackboard, and dark nights with a dozen half-frozen students pointing battered telescopes at the stars.

How good a teacher was he? I may be among those best qualified to say. I was fifteen years out of college, with no serious science and a smattering of calculus, when I signed up almost on a whim to audit his no-math astronomy course. No math, I quickly came to understand, did not mean no brain. He taught the physical concepts of astronomy from the bottom up: building a framework from students' personal experience of the universe, (the way your gut feels on a roller coaster, the way a ball will orbit your head on the end of a string, the way a balloon works), then hanging upon it such astonishments as the big bang, curved space, and the evolution and death of stars.

He opened a window in my mind that I had never known was there. I soon changed to for-credit standing in the astronomy class, and three years later I had a degree in physics. Three more years and I was one of a number of Sheridan's students working in the space program. Others have worked in engineering, biophysics and biochemistry, astronomy, the technology of physical research, and yes, as teachers of physics.

That was the serious stuff that Sheridan gave me. The important stuff.

But he gave me the fun stuff too.

During the ‘70’s and ‘80’s he was known to readers of sf magazine classifieds as a professional astrophysicist offering to design planets, to order, for science fiction writers. He created well over a hundred of them as a result of that ad, from cosmic strings to Earth-like planets with oval suns, all richly imagined and all rigorously based in physics. Knowing of my interest in the field, he gave me a one-of-a-kind collection of theories, insights, and algorithms from his planet-building toolkit.

I have been putting that material to work recently, hammering out an imaginary planet of my own, and it has brought him back most vividly across the years. All his intelligence, his imagination, and his unshakable optimism for the future.

Sheridan always expected the best from his students, too. Giving the commencement address the year I graduated, he took the opportunity to hand out a final set of assignments: End hunger, he told us. Cure disease. End war. We won't do that, of course. Or not all of it. But whatever good we may do with the things Sheridan taught us is his work as much as ours.

Note that addressing a professor by his or her first name is the norm at Guilford, a Quaker college still practicing the precepts of ‘plain speech.’ Though ‘thee’ and ‘thou’ are no longer used, they do still avoid titles and honorifics of any kind, which creates a remarkably democratic atmosphere on campus.

We Have Met the Aliens And They Are Us, Part 3

2011-07-16T19:21:00.000-04:00

What might the 1930-1935 series of first contacts by Australian gold prospectors with stone age inhabitants of the New Guinea highlands tell us about possible future meetings with extra-terrestrials? There are some useful insights in spite of at least one major disconnect.

Though the visible differences between the two cultures were profound – at least to the black natives seeing whites for the first time – the invisible differences were even greater. When the well-armed, self assured ‘great white hunters’ met the vulnerable, primitively-armed highlanders, each side was completely ignorant of the other’s views and intentions and disastrously misread the other’s reactions.

Those same kinds of differences would likely be factors in a first meeting with ET, and could be equally disastrous. But the natives’ belief that the whites were their ancestors returning from the dead led them to react much differently, both emotionally and physically, than humans would be likely to react to ET today. We might be terrified, amazed, disgusted, intimidated, fascinated, or violent, or all of those things in turns, but we wouldn’t be searching among them for grandma and grandpa. So that part of the New Guinea encounter doesn’t tell us very much.

A likely similarity with meeting ET is that the highlanders, though the majority population in their own valleys, were a tiny minority on the planet as a whole. They could kill the few visiting whites easily enough, but retribution would be quick and devastating, as eventually it was to some populations there.

Likewise, at least in the usual science fiction scenario, a few ETs arriving today would likely have vast backup in numbers as well as technological superiority. So, the likeliest outcome of any meeting with them would be instant transformation of Earthlings in one of two ways: 1) sudden undreamed-of technological and (possibly) social improvement, or 2) sudden toast. The third possibility – years of doubt, skirmish, and political mayhem over what to do about them – would differ from 1) or 2) only in the suddenness of the outcome.

So not much to be learned from New Guinea could help with that, either.

But what if it didn’t happen that way? What if a few ETs, more interested in studying us than wiping us out – or at least not sure yet – were to come here quietly? Meet just a few of us, just ordinary folks, here and there? In that scenario, learning from mistakes made in New Guinea might be very helpful indeed.

Here are few thoughts worth considering:

• Response to First Contact:
o Do not shoot first. You might need to shoot very quickly, but
shooting immediately could get humans killed for nothing.
o Do not assume aliens’ good will, but don’t rule it out either.
Offer welcome and keep an open mind as long as reasonable.
o Do not be either dominant or servile.
o Communicate! Explain ourselves as clearly as languages allow.
o Be alert. Observe. Make every effort to understand their
behavior. Learn as much as possible.
o Keep major secrets secret.
o Do not steal anything.

• Gauging the Newcomers:
o The more stable and ‘mature’ an off-planet culture, the more
likely to offer peaceful and productive relations with the
planet it approaches.
o Good intentions might be shown by polite curiosity about our
planet, our technology, and our people.
o Impolite or demanding questions, kidnapping, theft of
technology or raw materials, or overbearing behavior of any
kind should be evaluated and responded to with caution and
forethought.

• Preparation as a people.
o Grow up! The more stable and resilient a culture, the better
able to survive a first encounter with aliens.
o Deal firmly with belligerent or loose-cannon behavior from
humans, whether individuals, or military or social leaders
of any stripe.
o If conflict comes, join forces across the Earth and fight back!

The most useful take-away, though, might be just to study the faces of New Guinea natives seeing whites for the first time.

1933 photo by Michael Leahy, printed in First Contact – New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, Viking Penguin, Inc., New York, NY, 1987. pp 2-3.

We Have Met the Aliens, and They Are Us, Part 2

2011-07-02T23:09:00.004-04:00

Following the May, 1930, first contact between Australian Mick Leahy’s gold-seekers and the previously unknown stone-age population of the New Guinea highlands (see Part 1, link above) the Aussies continued straight across the island for several weeks. Seems they were afraid to go back the way they had come!

Leahy and his party were typical of the general Aussie prospector attitudes of their day. They were young, strong, bold, greedy, rash, and absolutely certain of their ‘rights’ to whatever they could find and take. Australians were also deeply distrustful of the native peoples. According to a New Guinea coastal resident of the time, “The natives of this Territory are mean souled, thieving rotters, and education only gives them an added cunning.” p18

So in spite of their peaceful early meetings, Leahy’s party began to fear that the highlanders would turn against them once the initial wonderment faded. They issued axes to the porters, posted guards at night and kept moving ahead rather than retrace their steps through villages they had already visited. For seven weeks they contacted new populations in one isolated valley after another before emerging on the far side of the island. Sadly for the highlanders, they found traces of gold in many of the rivers they crossed. Explorations and prospecting expeditions continued through the mid-1930’s.

As noted in the previous post, the highlanders believed their own people turned white after death, and welcomed Leahy’s company thinking the whites were their ancestors returning. This pattern continued through contact after contact until Leahy’s concern faded. Of a later expedition he wrote, “Not once did we feel ourselves in any real danger ....” and boasted “ ... a white man could probably go anywhere in New Guinea with no better weapon than a walking stick ....”p29

But he was wrong to think that his mere arrival in a village could cause so much excitement. He didn’t realize that the natives were observing and analyzing everything the whites did. The highlanders feared that some of their ancestors might mean them harm, and certain non-human inhabitants of the spirit world were believed to be brutal to living humans. So they swarmed around their visitors hoping to learn who and what they really were.

And they found clues. The white men’s skins did not fall from their bones at night, as the natives expected of dead people, and they ate and drank like living humans. As one elderly highlander told researchers Connolly and Anderson in the 1980’s, “Their skin might be different, but their shit smells bad like ours.”p44

Word of their discoveries reached villages the whites had not yet visited, and native opinions began to change. In time, Leahy began to notice an increasing “timidity” in the natives, but was completely unaware of its cause.

First blood came during a 1931 expedition when nomadic tribesmen attacked a prospecting camp. Leahy was clubbed nearly to death. Others in his group were wounded with arrows, and six tribesmen were killed. A later attack on other prospectors killed the leader and most of his party.

Scarred and partially deafened by his injury, Leahy took a new, harder approach to the highlanders, as did others who followed him. He and his brothers didn’t provoked violence, but never hesitated to defend themselves. At least 41 highlanders were shot dead by Leahy or his porters from 1932 onward.

By then, Australian officialdom had taken notice of the explorations and the peoples they discovered, and began to extend control into the heartland of New Guinea. But the whole of the interior was not visited until the 1960’s when Australian patrols still met occasional pockets of “uncontacted highland people.”p9 Fortunately for the highlanders, colonialism was going out of fashion. They endured only 45 years of foreign rule – 1930 to 1975.

Next post, we’ll look at memories of first contact from highlanders and prospectors of the 1930’s who were interviewed in the 1980’s.

Here’s a small foretaste: when Dan Leahy, Mick’s younger brother, was interviewed he recalled hearing “ ... the thin mountain air full of sound.” It was the native news system “... sung and echoed from hilltop to hilltop in the eerie melodic wail the highlanders [used] to project messages across their valleys.”p 2-3

Notes:
First Contact – New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, Viking Penguin, Inc., New York, NY, 1987. Page numbers as indicated.

Here is a video with footage from Leahy and Connolly-Anderson.

We Have Met the Aliens, and They Are Us

2011-06-11T01:36:00.001-04:00

There’s some fascinating new thinking on the possibility and possible nature of extra-terrestrial life. I’ve been reading some of it, research for my work on an alien contact novel set in the Southern Blue Ridge, and I’ll explore some of the theories in upcoming posts. But first, a real ‘first contact’ that we know something about: the most recent meeting (in 1930) – and likely the last – between modern humans and a previously unknown stone age human culture.

New Guinea lies in the Pacific just north of Australia. Its rugged coastline is backed by steep, forbidding mountains long believed to stretch unbroken across the length and breadth of the island. In 1926 gold was discovered in costal rivers and Australian prospectors rushed to claim it in such numbers that by 1930 the most accessible sources were nearly exhausted.

Queenslander Michael Leahy realized that the gold in the rivers must come from sources higher up, and went to investigate. In a single day’s hard climb he and his party reached the nearest heights and saw, looking inland from that height, not endless mountains, but grassy, open country. That night they were amazed by countless pinpricks of light stretching far into the interior of the island.

They spent a sleepless night, expecting attack at any moment. But on the following morning, May 26, 1930, the band of highland natives that arrived to look them over included a group of women – a sign, according to a costal native in Leahy’s group, that there would be no fighting.

“The men ... [came] ... in front, armed with bows and arrows, the women behind bearing stalks of sugarcane,” Leahy later wrote*. “We waved to them to come on, which they did cautiously, stopping every few yards to look us over. ... we could see that they were utterly thunderstruck ....

“One old chap came forward gingerly with open mouth, and touched me to see if I was real. Then he knelt down, and rubbed his hands over my bare legs, possibly to find if they were painted.... The women and children gradually got up the courage to approach also, and presently the camp was swarming with the lot of them, all running about and jabbering at once, pointing to ... everything that was new to them.”

It was later learned that this particular group believed that their people turned white after death, and that the Australians were their loved ones returning.

First contacts continued in New Guinea for several years as Leahy and his group explored the island from one isolated valley to the next. Most encounters were relatively peaceful, but sadly not all. Leahy kept a journal, took thousands of photos and even shot film documenting the natives’ reactions. In the 1970’s Australian researchers Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson came across this material and interviewed both explorers and native highlanders who still recalled those events, producing both a film and a book entitled First Contact.

In the next post we’ll take a look at some of the ways native groups reacted to the prospectors, and vice versa, through those early years. In later posts we’ll consider the possibility of extra-terrestrials, what they might be like, and ways that they, and we, might handle that first introduction.

* The Land That Time Forgot, Leahy, Michael, and Crain, Maurice, Funk and Wagnalls Company, New York and London, 1937, as quoted in First Contact – New Guinea’s Highlanders Encounter the Outside World, Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, Viking Penguin, Inc., New York, NY, 1987. pp 24-25.

Nebula Weekend 2011

2011-05-25T20:33:00.000-04:00

This was my first Nebula Weekend. It seemed cheeky to go - no story in the race, not even a full membership - but I was cordially received. I saw some old friends and met some new ones. And I learned so much!

Chairman Peggy Rae Sapienza and her committees produced a pleasurable and informative series of events, panels, workshops and tours without overwhelming the attendees with choices. For one thing, the events were comfortably scheduled. There were several nice long workshops and area tours, 2 1/2 to 3 hours each, as well as hour-long panels. There was time for leisurely meals, and to visit and network between events. Civilized.

Best of all for me were the workshops. I attended an unforgettable one by Tim Esaias entitled Warfare for Writers with detailed examinations of castles and fortifications around the world and a segment (with excellent take-home exercises) on getting warfare (accurately) onto the page. Another by Paul Haggerty and Gayle Surrette on Improving Your Website was also vastly informative. Details passed along by a friend who attended Janice Shoults' Cooking up a Book Launch will also be very useful.

Two panels that I particularly appreciated were one on "Old Ways/New Ways" in writing and publishing, and "Hints for Graceful and Subtle Self Promotion."

Any of these would be well worth attending if they are offered again.

My thanks to everyone concerned for making the whole weekend so enjoyable and productive. I'll be back!

Getting The Writing Right

2011-05-16T21:55:00.000-04:00

In the last post I talked about the wonders of the NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) for getting a rough draft written all the way to THE END. NaNoWriMo can be a tremendous help to a new fiction writer, and finishing that rough draft is a worthy accomplishment. But if your rough drafts are like mine it'll take more than NaNoWriMo to produce a book you'll be proud of.

It’s the difference between a stack of words (the rough draft) and a piece of effective writing that will be fun, or moving, or exciting, or informative to read.

Converting the former to the latter is a two-fold task: first, learning to see the flaws in the rough draft, and then to augment, focus and groom it into an enjoyable read. I don't know any way to learn that except by doing it.

When you've organized and edited the rough draft till it makes sense to you, you'll want to find someone else to read it, to be sure you've gotten your meaning across. Family and friends tend to be useless for this. They don't want to hurt your feelings, so they may not tell you the very things you most need to know. For many of us the best thing is to find a writer's group, one that will read your work with care and critique it both honestly and fairly.

I like a small group, maybe 6 to 8 compatible writers, some moderately and some professionally experienced, who are knowledgeable about science fiction. I want honest, meaningful, compassionate comments on ways that I can improve my work, from a group where every member is both learning and teaching the intricacies of our craft.

When the group - and you - feel that your work is as good as you can make it, it’s time to consider your next step. Should you try the markets right away, or find a professional editor to give your book that extra touch of polish? If you’re serious about being a good writer and selling in good markets, whether on-line or off, you might want to consider the editor. Good writing does not grow out of good editing alone, but bad editing can erode a good story’s appeal for publishers and readers alike.

There’s another reason to produce the best book you can. If the Internet gets overloaded with too much thinly imagined, unfinished fiction, it could drag down the on-line market for the more careful writers – the ones whose writing we all want to read.

We all can help protect our future reading pleasure by being sure our own efforts are the best they can be before we market them.

Harness That Inner Editor

2011-05-06T13:57:00.000-04:00

Is your inner editor zealous to the point of paralysis? (That’s your paralysis, not the inner demon’s.) Yes? Then you know how it can hobble your productivity, driving you to get every word right, and right now! So you struggle to finish even a sentence without editing the thing to death.

That was me. I could finish a short story. Eventually. But a novel? Apocalypse would come first. But now — Ta da! — I have a 115,000 word novel in solid second-draft form, complete with ending.

Magic? Nope. It was National Novel Writing Month, a contest held each November in which everyone who finishes a 50,000 word first draft in thirty days is declared a winner. No big prizes beyond the sense of accomplishment, but winners can buy a T-shirt to prove they did it. I was one of some 32,000 winners world-wide in 2009. With another month of writing by the same rules, I topped 100,000 words.

As you can tell by the dates, I am still a slow writer. But now I can finish!

So how does it work? You send your inner editor (temporarily!) to summer camp and forget about her. Then you unleash your creativity and forge ahead on that ROUGH draft. Bash it out. Just keep typing at break-neck speed. And do NOT look back.

Now, what you’ll have at the end of that thirty days will not be pretty, so please do NOT foist it on an unsuspecting public as it is.* But seen in another light it could be magnificent, a scruffy, elemental mass of words in which a good novel lies waiting like a sculpture in rough stone: a beginning, a middle, and – miracle of miracles – an end! So fetch your inner editor back from Neverland and start cutting away everything that isn’t novel. Then you can layer, add nuance and polish to your heart’s content.

This may not be the solution for you, but it does work for me. And if the problem sounds familiar it couldn’t hurt to try it. Http://www.nanowrimo.org/.

And blessings on thee.

*If you're new to fiction writing, please see the next blog for a rough guide to writers' groups and maybe a professional editor.

Introduction and Welcome

2011-05-06T13:32:00.000-04:00

Welcome to the Wordshop!

It is not my intention to blather pointlessly about myself, but in case you find an interest in what I have to say here I think it's only fair to let you know where I stand career-wise and what I am trying to accomplish. I'll keep it short.

I have been reading science fiction since I was seven, and my earliest attempts at writing date from about the same time. Along the way I've written poetry, PR, a biographical history of women in my county, news articles, professional papers on orbit analysis, some mainstream short stories, and a whole lot of other stuff that wasn't science fiction.

Now I am working my way back to my roots, with two stories in Analog as a result.

My first novel, a 'people-to-people' alien contact story set in the Southern Blue Ridge Mountains, is now in second draft: 115,000 words with a good bit of research and refinement still to come. I am also laying the ground work for a platform to promote this book and hopefully others after it.

It's late to be doing this. (I have retired from the nine-to-five world.) But I admire the folks who come to full expression of their art later in life, and who succeed. Late bloomers. I’d like to become one of them, and I intend to give it my best shot.

I have a lot to learn, a lot to think about, and a lot of curiosity – both in general and in detail – about the universe and its inhabitants. I hope it all makes an interesting blog.