Bonjour! I’m happy to report I am no longer sick, and even more happy to report that The Future’s So Bright is now available wherever better books are sold! To celebrate, after my felicitous cigar, I’m taking some time here to review a few of my favorite stories in the anthology. Read short fiction, hein?
“Emergence,” by A.M. Weald, took me by the first line, same as it took its author.
A duster bot was stuck again.
“Emergence” is that rarity of rarities, a post-apocalyptic story I actually enjoyed (otherwise pretty much limited to “By the Waters of Babylon”, “When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth”, and “Darkness”). The nature of the apocalypse is background radiation – mentions of long-gone nuclear winter and environmental conservation. The focus here is on the present, and on the future.
The duster bot is the responsibility of Kelle, of undergrounded Pod North, one of the four remaining centers of population on the North American continent. After removing the stuck duster and replacing it on the solar panels with a fresh robot, she flirts by phone with Arjun, of Pod West, who announces with a breathless “Guess. What.” that “they” are planning to link the disparate domes together – maybe even open them completely. They are interrupted by their compulsory time in the sun, where the politely-coercive authorities mandate mingling. Kelle pointedly doesn’t meet anybody, but Arjun does…
This story almost feels like a realistic, solarpunk-ish take on the Fallout vaults, scraped clean of their affected hypercynicism and sickly green filter of over-the-top human suffering. The authorities do seem a tad Orwellian, and the state of the surface and of technology (undergrounded telephone is the only form of communication except with the few hundred people you grew up smelling, and if you want electricity in your room, you better get biking on your post-Pelaton) give pause. But as disruptive as the hour of sunbathing is (repeatedly), and as awkward as the mandatory mingling is, these are recognizably ordinary people living ordinary lives, not beat-down sufferers like Winston Smith or exceptional culture rebels like John the Savage. The casual polyamory (with its attendant little dramas) just seems an extension of their ordinary lives.
Spoilers
And seeing the happy family out on the surface, reseeding the Earth with rich life, was sweet as can be – a victory for the common man.
What really gets me is the little details – the landline phones like Battlestar Galactica, Kelle’s touch starvation, Arjun’s casual romance with another man and how this interacts with his feelings for “his person” Kelle, the description of the sun room (which sounds exactly like coffee hour at St. Peter’s-by-the-Sea[tm]), the way they guess the ineffeable intentions of “them.” Per Carla Ra’s recent article, I very much write solarpunk as if it were fantasy, and I get the feeling Weald does too. These little details make Pod North feel not only real, but somehow familiar. I feel like I could live there.
I’ve been coping with a swollen jaw since last Thursday and the pain, while low, has been a constant in my sleeping and waking life since then. I look forward to a proper update next week, I have three or four started. Until then, read short fiction, imagine stranger futures, and enjoy this picture of my roommate.
“Write about what scares you, what inspires you, and what turns you on.”
Laurie Bland
This whole last sorry two years of writing (or not writing) have all been leading to this. It just took me this long to get over myself.
Two nights ago, my wife and I went out for our first date night since the baby. On the second or third toast, we raised our glasses and she looked at me expectantly, and a funny thing happened. Being a Quaker, I am well-versed in what it feels like to give vocal ministry. One is moved, there is something rising out of your soul and toward your lips, with immense pressure to be spoken, through you, and you have to work harder and harder to not say it, though you have no idea what it even is. I felt it behind my soul then, pressing on my teeth, and I opened my lips.
“I vow to write most of my SF/F/H either by Bradbury or as written ministry.”
We clinked glasses and I broke out in a cold sweat.
I’ve spent the better part of two years unable to write anything. No stories. No revisions. One or two drafts that are lifeless, inert, and enervating. Stillborn stories. Ever since I burned out in the post-NaNoWriMo funk two years ago, that’s been my life, with occasional outbreaks of radioactivity near the things I used to love. I’ve slowly regained freedom of movement there – cleaned out the radioactive storm near Marybeth, cleaned up the crater of Doña Ana Lucía. But actual writing? Or even revising? Just because I can reread now doesn’t mean I can produce.
But then I wrote something funny.
Or, rather, I didn’t, but the Divine did. The Muse, God, what you will, I believe it has no name and refer to it as “the sound of distant laughter” most days.
I wrote a story for Unidentified Funny Objects, a humor anthology, the day before it was due. I watched the days tick down, couldn’t get away from wife and family to sit down to compose something as I used to could. So I woke up early, the morning before the deadline, went downstairs, opened my computer, opened a document, and prayed. “The God who inspired ‘Suit of Mirrors,’” I called, “let your words flow through me, I’m ready to stand aside and give the written ministry.”
The story was done two hours later. It needed no revising, just a better title.
Being a humor story, someone provided the better title five minutes after I sent it off, but that’s why my God is the God of distant laughter.
It’s a damn good story, and I had nothing to do with writing it. I just allowed it to write itself, using my hands, my computer, while my playlist played through my earphones. And, just like ‘The Suit of Mirrors’ all those years ago, it came out almost perfect on the first try.
The next night, we had our date night.
It’s terrifying, what I propose. I propose to write most of my SF/F/H this way, stories new and old, shorts and novels, even blog entries. This is written ministry, right now. I planned none of this, don’t rightly know where it’s going. But I know, and trust, it’s going somewhere, it will get there, and then if I have any sense in my head, I’ll shut my mouth and sit down and let the Quaker meeting go on.
It involves giving away control of my writing, my precious writing, the place where I should by rights have the most control over my life. But God afflicted me with another sickness of the soul two years ago, same as God did years ago at our Pacific Yearly Meeting of Quakers. And now I realize why. We Friends speak of “tender” and being “made tender,” and I was being made tender, so this way could open before me, this opening arise. So that my writing itself is dependent on the still, small voice that I, as a Friend, am supposed to listen for.
Bradbury is just another road to this place. He wrote those lists, one of which I shared last week, let a prose-poem arise out of one of the words, let a character arise out of the prose-poem, let a story leap out of the character, with only the barest control over any of it. And it’s what made him Bradbury. I’ve Bradburyed story after story through the years.
What I’m giving up (not permanently and not entirely! But giving up) is the other way, the way you know: the careful construction, the assembly of tropes like troops and drawing-up of battle plans to occupy the territory of a pre-determined story. The self-led, rather than Divine-led or subconscious-led, way. The violent way. Instead, I am to turn to the garden way, allowing things to grow in my garden and run wild and then harvest them in delight and anticipation.
“The Suit of Mirrors” is the best short story I’ve ever written, and I never wrote it. I should have learned my lesson then, but it took some humbling for me to give up having my own way all the time on these blank pages.
I wonder where the Divine will lead me next. I think I hear the still small voice in one ear.
Sorry for the lack of updates, all. Don’t know if you noticed, but it’s been a hell of a year.
First – my wife and I are indeed pregnant. She’s eleven weeks along now, and we found out yesterday morning that we’ll be giving birth to a baby girl. My wife’s (and daughter’s) Jewish tradition prevents us from revealing the name yet, but rest assured, we have one in mind. I addressed her in French by her name, and felt power there. I don’t want to loose that upon the world until she’s ready.
Until then, we’ve been calling her la Pousse: the Sprout.
If you’re interested in helping us out, my wife has a registry together here: Our BabyList Registry. If you’re American, I’ve got quite a list of French books over at Amazon.com.
We call her the Sprout because the day before the strip turned blue, my seeds sprouted. I started an autumn garden, un jardin potager, of Japanese and Chinese greens I ordered out of Kitazawa. And that day, the komatsuna greens and the hidabeni radishes pushed their first tiny leaves out of their Dixie cups.
They’ve grown a bit since, the komatsuna and hidabeni in particular bursting out into huge shaggy growths I had to harvest back just to give everyone else room.
That harvest ended up in here:
My wife’s first Japanese meal since the morning sickness started, and she used my own greens for it.
And she’s getting a story published! Her first in SF/F/H. She’s been beaming around, “just like my hubby!” The story is called “Yerushalmi,” about a family in genderqueer future Jerusalem, and it’ll be published in Solarpunk Sunscapes in 2022.
And …oh yes.
I’m writing again myself.
I was able to wring a first draft of a short story out in August, but it needs time to heal before I go after it again. In October, my friend in London recommended The Screwtape Letters to me. “Interesting,” I said as I closed the book, “but I wonder what it would be like with Buddhist mara instead of Anglo-Catholic devils?”
So, for NaNoWriMo, I worked on what I’ve worktitled The Gandharva Letters. Tahna, who is Thirst, sits on high in the divine realms, instructing her two sisters Raga, who is Desire, and Arati, who is Aversion, in the proper tempting of the Soul. The Soul might escape, you see, from the cycle of death and birth, and their father Mara would be most displeased to lose even one small soul.
I did not follow the 1667 words/day NaNoWriMo plan, though. Still healing. So I promised myself “just one sentence.” Because that one sentence always becomes more. Just one sentence per day. A different stint …but a good one. I keep writing sentences, you see.
And last, I am practicing again. Not Roscoe Learns to Think, not yet, but…getting there. As with everything, more on our story as it develops.
My friends diagnosed burnout, and that’s definitely how it feels: grey, ashy.
Which is why I was surprised when, on a whim, I decided to watch Heavy Metal, and colors came back. My beloved wife and I had watched other things the past few months, and none of them really struck the same chord.
I kept experimenting, seeking out the sense of what I can only call “trippy wonder”. So far, this is what I’ve found that really brings the colors out, that creates mindscapes, that awes. I would love to find more, if you have recommendations. (And if you have a better word for what these things all share than “trippy wonder,” that would help, too)
If not, enjoy this sampling. It’s trippy. And pretty wonderful.
Music:
Kate Bush (especially her earlier albums, such as Hounds of Love)
WARNING: MAY CONTAIN KATE BUSH.
Pink Floyd (though each era has its own flavor)
Barrett
Waters
Gilmour
Movies:
Istvan Banyai’s Zoom
The Mind’s Eye series
Heavy Metal
Fair warning: Heavy Metal. NSFW.
Disney’s Alice in Wonderland
Literature:
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poetry
Nezahualcoyotl’s poetry
Things I’ve experimented with and didn’t quite work:
It was not for the reasons I feared, but because everyone who knows me needed to alert me all at once to the fact that a TikTok phenomenon of people singing “The Wellerman” had exploded on social media, leading to a surge of interest in sea chanties. Which was amazing, even with the blowing-up of my inbox.
In spirit of having been “the shantyman” on both ship and shore, I share with you this short essay on the nature of sea chanties. I wrote it in response to a question on the National Novel Writing Month forums about writing airship chanties, and I hope you enjoy:
My interview with the French Canadian Legacy Podcast is now live! With Jesse, I discuss “Glâcehouse”, No Time: The First Hour, and life in California, China, and the future.
(for a bonus, I got a bit more off-the-cuff about the Lady Washington and my time in the slaughterhouse for the preview…)
“Writing a book is an adventure. To begin with it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public.”
Winston Churchill
Everyone’s heard of a masterpiece – some great tour de force of art or craft. Fewer folks, but some, have heard of an apprenticepiece – now a miniature work of cabinetry, originally a kind of final project to prove the apprentice was ready to graduate to journeyman. Today, I’m going to talk about what I call a mistresspiece.
I call it a mistresspiece partly for the wordplay, and partly because the writer friend I was talking to and I could not for the life of us think of a masculine or gender-neutral term for “mistress,” as in a dedicated long-term lover, even though she thought it was mainly straight women writers that cultivate mistresspieces.
As for me: I love Doña Ana Lucía, I do. She’s been my main project for the better part of three years. I love the sheer, silly, solarpulp joy. I love the prose and the two-fisted action and the excuse to pull out another Cool Thing because that’s half the point. I look forward to many years and many books with her. But at this point, I also detest Doña Ana Lucía. Three years is a long time with one book, even a fun one. You get tired, you get bored, you get stifled. You need something different.
And your eye starts to wander. Ideas drift in front of you, one catches your eye, and it’s an idea that can work, and idea you like, an idea that likes you. It’s exciting. It feels illicit. And you promise you’ll just take a couple notes now and dutifully return to your current project, maybe call the idea back when you’re done…
…and then you wake up one morning with a chapter of the other project drafted, and it was the most fun you’ve had writing in months.
It always starts out fun, but slowly becomes more serious as you become more committed to the other project, almost as much as you are to your main project. Suddenly, you have two parallel serious writing projects: your masterpiece and your mistresspiece.
Here’s where the metaphor splits, because while cheating on your flesh-and-blood partner(s) is never not going to hurt them, cheating on your book is sometimes the best thing that could happen to it. I came back to Doña Ana Lucía after writing “Glâcehouse” renewed, and produced one of the best scenes of the novel. That was a short story, a winter fling, a stolen kiss of sweet prose. The effect goes double for mistresspieces – Doña Ana Lucía Serrano and Marybeth Delilah Potter influence and rejuvenate each other, although the two heroines and their two books could not be more different.
So if you’re getting tired of your current book, you might take a break, work on something else for awhile…even if it feels naughty. Just be sure to keep giving your main project love and care. And if that something else turns into something serious, too, you’ve found yourself a mistresspiece.
This is a question that came up a few times in the chatrooms and Zoom meetings of the Nebulas (which were fantastic, by the way, even if afflicted with Class-E lifeforms and even if I still don’t know how to make the laser bat stop lasering). Even the folks hip to the solarpunk jive weren’t too sure about solarpulp, so here’s some of my thoughts.
When I first started out, I described Doña Ana Lucía’s story as “solarpunk.” There have been a fewpeople who’ve tried to describesolarpunk, including me. But something was …different… about To the Future! as compared with 2312 or Sunvault. So I started calling it “solarpunk plus” and then, as the 30s/George Lucas influence became clearer, “two-fisted [tales of] solarpunk.” Finally, I realized what it really was: “solarpulp.”
solar…
…pulp
And I realized it wasn’t the first time I’d written it, either.
“6. Solarpunk embraces a diversity of tactics: there is no single right way to do solarpunk. Instead, diverse communities from around the world adopt the name and the ideas, and build little nests of self-sustaining revolution”
The Solarpunk Manifesto
Let’s imagine solarpulp as one of these little nests. There’s enough room and work to be done for everybody, I’d rather use my shovel to dig irrigation works than swing it at you. With that said, what then is solarpulp?
I wrote a story called “Fire Marengo” for a long-gone sailing magazine contest. It concerned Eli Shipley, able-bodied sailor, as he squares off against the twisted Sheikh of the Seas and two mad terrorists to rescue his friend Tchang and get out. This was in 2009, long before I or almost anyone else had ever heard of solarpunk, so it’s …different. The realistic wonder-tech is there in the form of the SS Sophie, a junk-rigged catamaran made of two former oil tankers. There’s the “astonishing unveiling of the new landscape” trope that’s the hallmark of solarpunk today, in the first sight of the Sheikh’s oil refinery-cum-palace. And casting a blonde, blue-eyed Welshman as the wicked Sheikh is punk as fuck, not to mention Eli’s destruction of his palace.
But it lacks the optimism of proper solarpunk: it’s a post-Peak Oil world where, as a friend said, “a fellow has to be clever to survive.” And Eli takes this in stride without question — he’s not book-smart, but he is a clever fellow when pushed up against the wall. And that’s the other thing that separated “Fire Marengo” from solarpunk.
It lacks restraint.
This isn’t a short story where the climax is two people talking around a table, or about one small victory against climate change, or a misunderstanding with high stakes. This isn’t a detailed study of psychological realism. This is an action story with larger-than-life characters duking it out and sneaking around and carrying on against a backdrop of punishing famine aboard the Sophie and gluttonous richesse in the Sheikh’s Palace as Japanese-made genejacks scuttle underfoot. Eli Shipley is a simple man of broad strokes, fighting like hell for shipmates and wishing he were ashore with one of them, a toke, a beer, and a big bowl of chili. He is a common man, a man of honor, he talks as a man of his age talks. And it is very much his story, a sailor’s yarn of a story, that he’s telling.
Doña Ana Lucía Serrano, in To the Future! and “Doña Ana Lucía Serrano y la Caja de Venuswood (Lady Ana Lucía Serrano and the Venuswood Box)” and her other adventures, does have the optimism of solarpunk. Almost moreso – she lives in what 99% of human history would call a utopia, where no one dies of hunger or exposure, no one remembers absolute poverty, lifespans reach 160 and the living is rich, and she’s studied enough history to know it. Her world still has a whiff of PROGRESS! to it, as if you’d gotten women the vote, banned the devil liquor, bought a car, and stock prices just kept rising. Safe enough to live in? You bet your bippy, mac.
And yet, her utopia banned war, but still suffers organized crime. The Crisis of Prithvi, where her father served humanity, was proof that humanity could still be monstrous and barbarous if pressed (and proof we can be noble and heroic if pressed, too). Their obsession with Earth and biology is near-pathological, and in the shadows, everyone plots to take the whole ball of wax or plots to take their ball and go home, come what may. Not to mention the lingering, life-support vestiges of colorism and bigotry.
It’s not too safe. Not too dull to be worth living in.
La Doña herself is a multisensory, simulflowing, highly-trained paragon of human accomplishment. She can climb up the bark of a tree or a crenelation of a havela while solving orbital mechanics in her head and keeping time by reciting San Juan de la Cruz. She is swordmistress, tango dancer, seductress, professor, adventuress, and noted scholar. She holds herself to an iron-clad set of standards, from as frivolous as her shade of lipstick or source of coffee to as profound as spending every Easter with her family or attacking only those who are armed and aware of her presence. She is best in her Six Worlds, and good enough for any world, certainly good enough for ours.
And she, too, is larger than life, large as Zorro, large as Doc Savage, large as Princess Aura and the Domino Lady.
I’ve been sitting on a quote here, that’s too long to include, but too important to leave out. This is the quote, bits of which I’ve kept in mind this entire time. This is a famous quote from Raymond Chandler, and some of you already know what it is just from the context.
Here it is, the heart of the article:
“He must be a complete man and a common man and yet an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor, by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things. He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks, that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness. The story is his adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in.
If there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.”
Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder
This, I think, is what distinguishes solarpulp from solarpunk. Like solarpunk, we have a sustainable civilization (or at least notes toward one), optimism (even guarded optimism) as a claimed weapon, a “post-“ (capitalism, colonialism, cynicism) perspective, inclusivity*, and a desire to both imagine a future you’d want to live in, and get us halfway there.
Where we diverge is:
Solarpulp is about the story. It’s not about setting up themes or setting out technological ideas — though both are fun — it’s about telling a rip-roaring yarn that will make the audience cheer. Inspire them to go out and be the change you see in the world.
Solarpulp is about action. Solarpunk stories can be contemplations, but solarpulp needs to move, to struggle, to seek out, to accomplish, to adventure. There must be doing, or there is no pulp.
Solarpulp is about larger-than-life characters. The twin quotes are “he must be the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world,” and “if there were enough like him, I think the world would be a very safe place to live in, and yet not too dull to be worth living in.” These are the people who inhabit solarpulp.
Solarpulp is about ideas in action. Doña Ana Lucía lives for historicity. Eli Shipley stands for shipmates, for crew. The Sheikh has lived with his monopoly so long, he’s forgotten how to fear. Doc Vikki lives the yankee Dream, it’s why she’s disturbingly sociopathic. They may or may not talk about them, but the larger-than-life characters are motivated by big ideas, and they struggle for those ideas against each other.
Alright, so that’s what solarpulp is. Where did it come from?
As it turns out, Planet.
If solarpunk can collectively point to 2312 as the seminal work or grandfather-piece, then solarpulp can certainly point to Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Larger-than-life characters? Ask the druidic Lady Deirdre Skye or the twisted Sheng-ji Yang or aggrandizing Nwabudike Morgan. Action? If the other players don’t get you, the mindworm boils will. Ideas in action? The living embodiments of seven human philosophies duke it out on a hostile and strange alien world through building rival civilizations. About the story? Oddly enough for a Sid Meier game, yes, a thousand times yes. And if you haven’t played it, I won’t spoil it. It’s too …transcendent.
How about the optimism? Through human ingenuity (and maybe ecological harmony) you can alter the face, and fate, of Planet. Sustainable civilization? You don’t even have to play Deirdre to learn quickly the necessity, and means, of doing so. Inclusivity? The Mario faction is led by an Indian man, the militant rifle-thumpers by a Latina. Post- thinking? Separation from Earth has radically changed all the balances and now such forces are curtailed or contained, depending.
Ah, but does it have that one essential trope of solarpunk, that unveiling of the new landscape and the new reality it represents?
I reached back from Alpha Centauri’s starting point, to liberally strip both George Lucas and his inspirations in the pages of Dent and Republic reels of everything that wasn’t nailed down. I reached for Dune, of course. I reached forward to the post-Buffy, post-TV Tropes awareness of tropes and their manipulation, specifically reconstructing all those adventure tropes I love. I reached out toward my sailing experience and my time in China.
Solarpulp requires none of this, although “a story about everything I thought was cool when I was fourteen” isn’t a bad place to start. As long as you keep it noble and bright, having your “best in their world and good enough for any world” hero(ine) struggling for and with her ideas — always on the move, always in the thick of the action — against that sustainable, inclusive backdrop that left the old –isms far behind, you’ve got solarpulp.
And I want to read it.
*Indeed, one of the punk ways that I solarpulp is by taking folks underrepresented in the original pulps, like Latinas, working-class Jews, bisexuals, and Quebecois, and giving them starring or strong supporting roles as heroes and villains. Like Americana’s America, everyone has always been welcome here, especially if they weren’t.
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