I was just thinking about how much I hate months with only thirty days when I remembered that, under the French Revolutionary Calendar, every month had thirty days. Every day had only ten hours, too, but they were decimal hours, that is, they had 100 minutes, and each minute had 100 seconds.

Of course, no one could ever adjust to this, and it was phased out, then outright canceled by Napoleon, who, foibles aside, had a knack for cutting away nonsense. But it didn’t take long for another metric calendar to chop months down to size and stretch weeks into “decades” - the Soviet revolutionary calendar came along a century later.

What is it that compelled the architects of these states to restructure such minutaie as the calendar? I don’t believe anyone had an ideological difficulty with the old calendar. We may imagine Pierre le Farmer at his plow, wiping his brow, and mumbling, “Curse this July heat! Oh, that reminds me of Julius Caesar, after whom the month was named - Caesar the Emperor. Yes, man ought to have an emperor, we ought to have nobility, and, for that matter, Christianity and noblemen and the petit bourgeois and all that. Yes, the old ways are better.” What sort of paranoia compels revolutionaries to rename even the months of the year?

They retitled the holidays, too, and that’s well and good; observing saints’ days might be conducive to genuine counterrevolutionary zeal.

I know in Soviet Russia, with the decade-week, they had only one day off per decade. You would work for nine days and have one day off. I suppose that’s a valid motive for the captains of industry or who-have-you; lengthen the week and squeeze more work from your peasants. It’s hard to imagine the leisure-loving French welcoming such a notion, but one may suppose that they were at least partially different in character then.

So, after our revolution, dear readers, whatever that may be, I propose an eight-week calendar, both for the sake of breaking with the establishment and for the three-day weekend.

Anyways, happy Messidore, everyone!

Posted in Anomalous | 1 Comment »

(I’m blogging about a wider variety of topics here. Why? Because I have thoughts, important thoughts that pulse like futuristic land mines in my cerebral topsoil, and I want the legs of your perception blown off by them.)

(For those of you who read my blog but don’t me personally - movie stars, exiled chamberlains, stockbrokers, circus acrobats, hiphop producers, caravan guides, mutant subhumans, defrocked monks - you should know that I live and work in Mokpo, South Korea. So I will write about South Korea more often than, say, a resident of Suriname would.)
(Suriname has an interesting history.)

I read the news and a variety of Korean blogs every morning while I eat my breakfast, just after my daily regimen of three thousand sit-ups, and I’ve noticed that North Korea’s been making an awful lot of noise lately. First they tested a nuke - okay, no big deal, they’ve done that before.

They followed this up by declaring that the truce ending the Korean War is “off” and that they would no longer be able to “guarantee the safety” of SK and US ships in or around their waters. (I love that phrasing. It implies they’re hard at work rescuing shipwrecked American sailors, or fighting off sharks or pirates. Their actual track record is not so fun.)

Then the ruthless murder of local fish populations via short and mid-range missiles, Kim Jong-Il accusing the US of preparing an invasion, and we have quite the exciting week. But I’m not worried, and it’s for reasons beside my personal radiation-born invulnerability.

The North Korean military leaders live on an elaborate fiction; their power depends on them never actually exercising it. Yes, they have the fourth biggest army in the world (behind China, US, and India), and definitely the largest per capita; almost one in ten Norks bear arms. Yes, their soldiers are fanatically eager to drown us capitalist pig-dogs in their blood, smother us with their corpses, etc. If you’ve seen their military parades, then you probably get the same chill as from a Nazi rally. These guys are seriously scary.

But they won’t attack. Kim Jong-Il and his inner circle have it too good. They have the run of their shitty little country, with its terrible weather and its appalling concentration camps and its persimmons and its total dearth of culture or human warmth; they have money, power, wine, women. I can’t remember on which blog I read this, but someone pointed out that the US and SK know the locations of their mansions and holiday resorts, and they know we know it, and the Norks know the accuracy of US-made cruise missiles. Serious aggression would meet with instant and devastating retaliation. The North would find itself in a war they could not win, with an increasingly pissed off populace; the only way the military could hope to retain its power would be to take KJI out of office via a coup (which would have even messier repercussions down the line, but in the meantime might be the best thing for the country).
My point is, once the North Korean military is put to use, it would spell the end of the regime. The wild card is whether the generals and KJI are smart enough, or sane enough, to understand this. That they haven’t attacked yet implies so.

(Why wouldn’t they win, especially when they almost stomped the South fifty years ago? Many, many reasons, but quickly:

1. Now we’re ready for them. Last time, they attacked by surprise, when most of SK’s soldiers were on vacation, and the US had little presence at all. Now the US has 28,000 soldiers here [and 60,000 more in Japan], and the South has 650,000. They are well trained and ready for action.
2. They don’t have the resources to sustain a campaign. They don’t have the fuel or ammunition or funds for any kind of prolonged action.
3. Their military - the soldiers have poor training, poor equipment, and very, very little experience. SK soldiers have fought in Iraq, Afghanistan, off the shores of Somalia, and trained extensively with US forces. And US forces, without any sort of patriotic exaggeration, are really, quite seriously, among the best in the world. We’re losing the Iraq war and lost Vietnam because those are asymmetric conflicts. Against NK, it would be a brutal and speedy conflict.
4. Their allies - Russia isn’t Communist any more, and China barely is. The Chinese turned the tide of the last war, but now their commercial relationships with SK and the US are worth much more to them than any idealistic ties to the North. Neither of these states is truly Communist, and they’ve got nothing in common beyond the nominal level. China was quite embarassed by the last nuke test.)

So why the noise? I think KJI’s dying. It’s almost certain that he suffered a stroke last fall, and recent pictures do not have him looking good. Compare his tubby old self to his now jowly, grey-haired corpus, and it’s plain to see that he is not in good health. The most recent batch of PR photos from the North show him at the dedication of a swimming pool; he’s barely propping himself up with the poolside ladder. It’s sad. So he concocts a misdirection, he rattles his sabres to get the attention away from his obviously failing health, he makes noise. His ships lob a few shells at some empty patches of ocean, his artillery splinters a few South Korean trees, and he can tell his people how he repelled the imperialists, and chase away the generals and heirs hovering vulturelike over his bedside, for another day.

I’m not 100% certain that KJI’s death will be the best thing for NK - as Saddam’s downfall showed us, a stable tyranny is desirable compared to anarchy - but it certainly would be a good thing.

What’s the danger? If KJI truly lost his mind and launched a full-scale attack, and the generals did not remove him from power, then all he could do would be to hammer the South with short-range conventional cruise missiles while stacking up North Korean bodies along the DMZ. Naval and air attacks would be repulsed with almost no damage to SK and US forces; their ships and planes are simply too outdated, and the crews untrained; they don’t have enough fuel to train their pilots. A ground assault would cause a good amount of destruction, with his million suicide troops, but the allies would hold them at the DMZ. They would certainly never make it as far as Seoul.
There would be instant diplomatic pressure from not only the UN et al, but also from their “allies” China and Russia. (The quotes indicate nominal allies - they don’t have any kind of mutual protection pact, because China and Russia aren’t batshit insane.) There would be fighter-bombers blowing holes in Pyeongyang 24/7, as well as cruise missiles from US and SK battleships pounding their military installations. It would be the end of the country as a sovereign entity. The best NK could hope for would be a lot of South Koreans dead from cruise missiles and along the DMZ.
Something like this might happen, regardless, if NK keeps rattling that sabre. Lee Myung-bak (South Korea’s George W. Bush) is pissed off right now. He’s never been known for his patience with the North, and he has something of a domestic crisis with former President Roh’s recent, awful suicide. A little shock and awe might direct public attention away from his own dire unpopularity, as well as make him feel better. Neo-cons aren’t known for their forebearance with dictators.

I don’t want a war, even a quick, victorious one. I just want some missiles to explode a few unpopulated mountains and bits of ocean so the government will get scared and close schools for a week, and I can stay home and play video games.

Posted in Korea | No Comments »

I wanted to like this one. I really did. Just look at the last post and you can read almost exactly that. “Caribbean steampunk” seemed a can’t-miss genre fusion, but, alas, it missed. The flaws weren’t so much in the conception - that was original and interesting - but in the execution.

The plot is assembled of clichés: a hero with amnesia and a mysterious past, an invading enemy, hidden technology of the ancients. That’s fine. Clichés are powerful and useful when leveraged well. Unfortunately, the book rarely capitalizes on these elements and elaborates them appropriately. But the plot isn’t the problem; it’s the prose.

Buckell’s writing is competent. It is adequate. It is aggressively inflexible and - I hate to say it - unimaginative. The author falls back on the same sentence structures repeatedly, and often reaches for the same expressions. Example. Many things “explode”. Pain explodes, light explodes, snow explodes, fire explodes, and eventually the word loses its explosiveness.
Also, Buckell has a habit of asking rhetorical questions in narration that kill any subtlety that may have developed. Some soldiers are faced with the decision of ambushing the enemy or warning the village. Rather than state the dilemma and let the reader develop the tension in his own mind, he belabors the point with this: “Who stayed to face more Azteca, and who got to run down the mountain to do the warning?” This is one example of a frequent occurrence. Every plot point, every moment of crisis is spelled out for the reader, indicating a lack of trust in the reader’s intelligence, or perhaps a lack of confidence in the author’s own ability to communicate his thoughts. That hints at a novice at work - though Buckell had a host of short stories under his belt by the time he wrote this. Maybe reading his later novels would show an evolution of his prose.
Finally, he has another stylistic tick that drives me nuts. He uses periods to separate clauses or phrases that might be separated with commas. Let’s see. “He could find her again, in fifty years. If Pepper wasn’t angry enough to kill him first.” Another: “The slow trek continued. As John faded out again.” I think this is an attempt to add dramatic emphasis, a full stop rather than the pause a comma would indicate. Lynn Truss talks about the “death of the comma” in Eats, Shoots, and Leaves. Elimating commas lead to more “muscular” writing, she says, and, largely, this is true - to a certain extent. We like unbroken sentences. Commas imply weak grammar, a thing stated with pauses and hesitation rather than spat out, Hemingwayesque. But when taken to this extent, the effect is simply ridiculous. It’s the equivalent of the Lost soundtrack. Every slightly dramatic moment is punctuated with trombones swelling ominously, or taiko drums pounding and trumpets blaring. “As John faded out again. Duh-Duh-DUHDUH!”
Combined with the redundant and unimaginative prose style, the reliance on a few rote images, and the lack of subtlety, it seems that Mr. Buckell doesn’t have or doesn’t trust his internal editor, the objective critic that reads as the writer writes. Fortunately, this is something that one can develop; I’d have to check his later novels to declare that definitively. He continues to sell books and garner accolades, so there’s something there. As it is, the prose displayed in this book is bland and graceless enough that it transforms a brisk plot into a drag.

On the bright side, I enjoyed the unique take on the traditional scifi setting. The Caribbean elements were fresh and interesting, and the “technology of the past” worked really well. We were never assaulted with science (as in, say, a Robert Reed novel), nor were we bored with interstellar histories. The backstory and the tech came out in the form of legends, providing an interesting commentary on the transformative effect of culture on information. That I enjoyed. His cultural insights were more interesting than the rest of the book.

It inspired me to write scifi. I’ve shied from the genre due to my lack of scientific knowledge, but I think I could do it as he does it. The layer of myth and culture that he slathers over the science puts technical details at a comfortable distance.

It also made me reconsider the WOTF contest. After four or five unsuccessful entries, I gave up in frustration. But Buckell’s success reminds me of just how much that contest can make a career. I’ve got a long break before I need to revise Khatima. I dislike writing short stories now that I have completed novels, but I’ve got time on my hands - why not?

Readageddon tomorrow!

Posted in Reading | 1 Comment »

Finished it last night. This is one of those works that I will digest, pythonlike, over the course of days, if not weeks. Every word of his is written in stone, and there are many words on many pages.

It’s one of those books that you carry inside you. It’s one of those books that convinces you of the existence and potency of witchcraft, because its effect is that of a spell.

I’d like to be more specific, but I feel that I will reduce the power and impact of this work through trying to describe it. Like describing the Grand Canyon. “It’s big - REALLY big!” doesn’t cut it. You just have to go there yourself.

But let’s give it a shot. Wolfe creates a reality impossibly distant from our own, yet linked, with enough recognizable factors to really show us the alienness of this far-far-future. He builds his own mythology effortlessly; you don’t even realize that he’s building it; and in the process he sanctifies all of creation. The books that actually alter your perceptions are few and far between, and they become fewer as we head into the grey territory of adulthood, middle age, old age; we become less susceptible to influence by something so immaterial as a book, which after all is just a stream of thought on paper - and what is less material than thought? But, just as Camus’s The Plague makes heroes of all humanity, The Book of the New Sun makes a cathedral of the phenomenal world. This isn’t an exaggeration or an idle description; it does not merely state this claim, it makes it. The book makes this happen.

Then there are sword fights, mutant man-apes, giant mad scientists, homonculi, mandragorae, aliens (or “cacogens”), spaceships, lightning guns, mad magicians, salamanders, killer glowworms - the novel succeeds as one helluva dark fantasy as well as an elaborate hymn. Books like this make me want to kick in the head of people still stuck on the “genre fiction isn’t Literature” nonsense.

I look forward to reading the follow-up, Urth of the New Sun, though that’ll have to wait until I can acquire it, God knows when. I made the mistake of asking for it for my birthday, still over three months off, which means I’ll have to wait to see if anyone gets it for me before I can just go ahead and order it from the inexhaustible depths of the internet.

Next up: Tobias Buckell’s Crystal Rain. I’ve been following his blog for a while now, examining his success for a number of reasons - for one, he’s young, which means he’ll probably be writing for decades, barring some disaster - too many of my favorite authors turn out to be dead. I feel I should be closer to the cutting edge of what’s happening in my genre if I’m going to make a living in it. Maybe not on the edge, but within spitting distance.
Furthermore, Mr. Buckell maintains a strong web presence and, I understand, leverages that to increase his readership, something from which aspiring authors can learn.
Finally, the cover features what appears to be a pirate boat strapped beneath a bat-winged blimp, with parrots fluttering about. One of the pirates has a hook for a hand, and with the other clutches a pistol with an oversized barrel. He clings to the rigging with his hook while pointing the pistol at another bat-winged blimp that pursues them. Yes, this looks good.

Posted in Reading | 2 Comments »

Wrapped the first draft of Khatima today. It stands at 79,000 words, making it a rather short novel, but still long enough to be called a novel by most publishers’ standards. I read somewhere that publishers were wanting shorter books these days, what with the systemic failure of Earth’s economy. Price of paper is going up and all that.

And, of course, a story should always be exactly as long as it is. When you run out of story, stop writing. This story had about 79k in it, and that’s where I stopped. So I’m not worried about the shorter length. (Papillon ended at 112k.)

Wow. My brain is fried.

Certain books went into the writing of this Khatima, and I’d like to note them.

Books that directly or indirectly inspired Khatima were:

• Rice, by Su Tong. Some guy, Five Dragons, rises to the top of an occupation-era Chinese city by virtue of his utter ruthlessness and unscrupulousness. This gave me the idea of an unsympathetic protagonist, someone unconstrained by morals - a sort of Nietzchean superman. (After having this idea, I referred, mentally, I suppose, to Crime and Punishment, the original text that critiques the superman concept.)
• Barry Lyndon, by William Makepeace Thackeray - ditto. A totally repellent protagonist, an unreliable narrator who twists his account to make himself look good, though his horribleness usually shows through. Thanks to Joel, who gave me this as a Christmas present!
• The Book of the New Sun, by Gene Wolfe. Also features an unreliable narrator, but mostly valuable for teaching me to be fearless with vocabulary.
• Years of Rice and Salt, by Kim Stanley Robinson. The mammoth, magnificent alternate history saga that did so much to familiarize me with the cultures concerned and the nature of wisdom and history. I also took the protagonist’s name from this book. His Khatima is a much better person than mine; the name struck me as simply beautiful.
• Lord of Samarkand, by Robert Howard. His own superman theory offers good fodder for adventuring, and his use of setting is rich. I also found his treatment of Tamerlane in the title story was remarkably nuanced, and gave me some great ideas for developing my own sociopath warlord.

Those were the books that inspired or informed mine. As for research, though, I found the following texts invaluable, or at least helpful.

• The Mystics of Islam, by Reynold A. Nicholson, which I actually had to read several times throughout, and referred to as late as - today. Clear, concise, with a good selection of samples of the surpassingly beautiful Sufi poetry.
• A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell. I’ve always loathed and dreaded reading philosophy, which created a regrettable gap in my education. I made up for it by plowing through this book. Russell makes philosophy interesting and digestible. Two of his other essays, Why I Am Not a Christian and Free Man’s Worship, informed later passages of Khatima; Khatima borrows and perverts his humanism (which I quite admire) as a tool for justifying her actions.
• Misogyny, by Jack Holland, a history of “humanity’s oldest prejudice.” Revelatory. A lot of it went into my book.
• I think I read four different histories of the Crusades. Regrettably unhelpful were Piers Paul Read’s The Templars and Stephen O’Shea’s Sea of Faith.
• The Arabian Nights, as translated by Sir Richard Burton. This volume gave me a lot of flavor and revealed much of the cultural paradigms of the time, as well as material for monsters, magic, and other fantastic elements that I was able to use. And, really, any fantasy story set in the “Orient” owes a debt to this seminal work.
• The Bible and the Koran, by God or whoever, are books to which one occasionally refers when writing a novel of religious warfare.
• The Internet, by Everyone, was invaluable, particularly gutenberg.org, the Catholic Encyclopedia at newadvent.org, sacredtexts.org, and, of course, Wikipedia, whose loving compass encloses all mortal affairs.

And now, a break.

Posted in Khatima | No Comments »

Khatima is in the home stretch. I expect to be finished with the first draft this week. Let it sit for a few weeks, read some Zhivago, and come back to carefully stitch up plot holes and deflate my prose. Like draining blisters. My style tends to get rather bombastic at times, so when I re-read it later, I am stricken by its excess, by its overwrought melodrama. I’m comfortable with a certain amount of mélédrame; it’s a genre like any other. Hugo wrote in the mode of mélédrame. I also feel that, when writing of magic and demons, to a certain extent, verisimilitude must be put aside. I once got a crit from a friend with the comment, “No one talks like this.” True, but no one rides black-winged pegasi, either, and that was in the story, too. So I like to think of my prose as heavily stylized; the question becomes whether it is so stylized that it interferes with comprehension (I hope not!) or tone (possibly) or characterization (potentially).

What I dislike is the concept that style and storytelling must be at odds. Someone - Marion Zimmer Bradley? W. Somerset Maugham? Phineas J. Butterball? - said that good writing, like good breeding, never calls attention to itself. Another article I read, “The Reader’s Manifesto,” (now a book apparently - good for him) attacks at length the self-absorbed, self-obsessed, inflated prose of Annie Proulx, Cormac McCarthy, Don Delillo, and a whole mess of authors we consider the modern masters. The writer tackles the conundrum that calling a book “very readable” seems to be damning with faint praise. He posits that the author’s job is to disappear, to erase the barrier between reader and content, that is, the barrier between the reader’s brain and the author’s brain. I agree with much of this. Not all.

The last newsletter from the quarterly Writers of the Future contest teased an article with the SECRET TO THE GREATEST WRITING: “L. Ron Hubbard knew it. Anne McCaffrey knew it. Etc etc.” Click through and it turns out to be: “Style must serve the story, not the other way around.”

These two examples both foster the notion that style and substance must be at odds, and that substance is inherently superior. I think I would rather read a plainly written marvel, by the likes of Lois McMaster Bujold or, oh, George MacDonald Fraser or Carson McCullers than a beautifully embroidered nothing like Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Any Henry James. Books so interested in their own bookishness that they forget their duty to the reader. (Duty to the reader is a whole ‘nother can of worms.)

But I have read so much incredible literature that delivers on both counts. Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun, which I’m reading now. Sinclair Lewis. W. Somerset Maugham. Moby Dick. Zola. Dostoevsky. Theodore Sturgeon. These are books that bear the indelible fingerprints of their makers. They could not have been written by anyone else.

To conclude, then, we find that the answer, boringly, lies in the middle ground. Too much style and too little substance may win you Pushcart Prizes, but leave you an overwrought intellectually elite totem of snobbery (and broke, too). Substance without style might sell books, but hollow you out inside; one day, you throw yourself from your balcony to the jagged rocks below, and they find nothing within the shards of your author-shaped shell.

So, dear reader, accept please that books are books, and they are not simulacrums of reality, they are not vessels of pure thought that you can inject via hypospray directly into your own brain. They are not your thoughts; their job is to warp your thoughts into the author’s thoughts. For now, the limitations of technology require that we suspend our disbelief; while we are at it, why not accept that a sorceress in 12th-century may speak a bit more dramatically than we do?

Posted in Writing | 3 Comments »

That is, “God is love.” I feel a bit nasty after writing today’s (horrifying) instalment of Khatima, and am expiating it by reminding everyone that God - whether you mean the Neo-Platonic Source of Being, Ahura Mazda, the Pantheist Everything, the Buddhist Nothing, or the classic Abrahamic Yahweh - is love. How nice. Hugs, kisses. Feeling better.

Khatima stands at 58142 words, a mere 3358 behind quota. Good work today. Good writing, in the service of horrifying themes. As the book (indulge my pretention for a moment) is a study of the nature of evil generally and the fallacy of nihilism specifically, but disguised as a critique of organized religion and misogyny, I am ever-vigilant to make sure that it does not tip from darkness for a thematic purpose to darkness for its own sake. Today, I came close to that line, and the passage may need a heavy revision to pull it back. But, for the first time in a week, I’m not frustrated with the novel, and I’ve worked my way to the second Interlude, which means I get to shift narrators and tone and style for a few days.

I feel that the “philosophy” in Khatima is more mature than in Papillon; could be because I read some books on the subject matter this time. It feels like I’m saying interesting things. I may discover in a few months, upon revision, that I have simply rephrased banalities. It’s a danger. It comes with the territory. Ecclesiastes: “There is nothing new under the sun.” I don’t know why I could hope to escape that. But I do!

Posted in Khatima | 1 Comment »