by Bruce BethkeGood morning, and welcome to the special "I Forgot to Set my Alarm Clock for Daylight Savings Time" edition of my still-unnamed column. The first order of business today is to remind everyone that the "Name This Column" contest is still running, so keep those ideas coming. If we keep at it long enough, something brilliant is bound to turn up.
While working on this column last night, it struck me that The Saturday Evening Post would be the perfect title. However, it turns out that The Saturday Evening Post magazine is still alive, after a fashion, and not only that, it still claims to be a paying market for original fiction. The magazine that launched or uplifted the careers of Ray Bradbury, Agatha Christie, William Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, C. S. Forester, Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Gallico, Louis L'Amour, Sinclair Lewis, Edgar Allan Poe, Sax Rohmer, William Saroyan, John Steinbeck, Rex Stout, Jack London, and P. G. Wodehouse, among many others, should not be ignored. Someone check out their fiction submission policies and report back to the rest of us, okay?
Delving into the history of The Saturday Evening Post, I learned that, "After the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Post columnist Garet Garrett became a vocal critic of the New Deal. Garrett accused the Roosevelt administration of initiating socialist strategies." Garrett, it seems, was some kind of proto-libertarian, and a huge number of his works are available online at mises.org. Heh. I like him already.
Turning to other topics, I'm embarrassed to admit that we wasted two and a half hours watching 2012 last night. I was in the mood for a good, mindless, popcorn movie with lots of sh!t blowing up, and as a former Los Angeleno, watching the San Andreas let go and my old neighborhood slide into the Pacific was a perverse delight. But this movie once again reinforces my argument that much of science fiction is merely apocalyptic literature for atheists, and once again, Roland Emmerich has slapped together an "epic" composed entirely of scenes, ideas, and motifs lifted from earlier, better movies—in this case, oh, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, War of the Worlds, U-571, Titanic, Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, his own Independence Day (which is disturbing in some way I can't quite pin my finger on), Paul Gallico's The Poseidon Adventure (see how I cleverly tie the elements of this column together?), and most of all, When Worlds Collide, along with a half-dozen others that were painfully obvious to me as I was watching it but can't bear to think about now. When even Karen says, "Hey, didn't Jeff Goldblum say those lines in Independence Day?", you know you're watching a pastiche, not a film.
Helpful hint to would-be epic writers: if you're going to write an "it's the end of the world, who will survive?" story, be sure to include at least one character who the audience will want to survive.
I mean—harping on this much longer than I intended to—by the end of this mess I really had the feeling that I'd been watching the story of the filling of the Golgafricham "B" ark. These are the best and brightest; the people who have been selected to survive, to rebuild civilization and repopulate the world? And not one of these morons was bright enough to realize that you never build a ship with engines that can only be powered up after a John Cusack-type character, in a prolonged scene of great drama and self-sacrifice, removes an insignificant obstruction from a tertiary system? For Pete's sake, it's exactly the opposite! No matter what else happens, you want those engines to keep running! A ship without motive power and steerage is a wreck waiting to happen. If nothing else, how are you going to keep the bilge pumps running and the stupid thing afloat?
Sheesh...
Okay, I've had another cup of coffee and stopped hyperventilating. Turning now to the subject of Gun P0rN, I'd like to direct a few of you—and you know who you are—to the website of my old friend, photographer Oleg Volk. If you're looking for lots of sexy photos of guns, feel free to browse the galleries and drool as much as you want. Fair warning, though: Oleg's site is not work-safe.
Changing topics again, Arisia asks: "So a good writer thinks about the political structure of his story's universe, even if he never overtly mentions it?"
In the immortal words of Dr. Peter Venkman, "I'm fuzzy on this whole good/bad thing." I think an effective writer gives some thought to and jots down a few notes about a whole lot of backstory issues that will affect his or her characters' attitudes, assumptions, and actions, but won't necessarily appear on-stage. In fact the story is usually better if they aren't mentioned overtly: I have read a lot of stories that were merely thinly disguised screeds for or against some political, economic, or social theory. Considering SF's roots in 19th century Utopian literature I suppose this shouldn't be surprising, but generally it gets in the way of the story, and self-identified "libertarian" science fiction writers are usually the worst.
Whoa. Wait, back up a tick. Make that, "if the writer is writing a story set in some place and time other than contemporary mainstream western civilization, the writer should give some thought to..," etc., etc. If you, like Paul Gallico, are writing a mainstream contemporary story, you can pretty much count on your readers sharing most of your implicit assumptions. But I think the single most jarring and irritating thing to find in a story set in some exotic, distant, or ancient locale is a character who speaks and acts exactly as if she was just teleported there, values and conceits intact, from a shopping mall in Pasadena.
Then again, the late George Alec Effinger got great mileage out of exactly this idea in Maureen Birnbaum, Barbarian Swordsperson. Good luck finding a copy of it.
Finally, re Miko's questions about shifting points of view: I think the general idea is that it's okay to do it, provided a.) it's consistent with your chosen narrative technique, b.) you don't do it too often, and c.) you give the reader some clear clue that you're doing it. For example, in Maverick, which is written entirely in Third Person Limited, I put in a chapter break each time I changed P.O.V.—which sometimes made for some short chapters, but that's okay—and cued the reader by using the P.O.V. character's name as the chapter title: e.g., "Janet," "Derec," "Maverick," and so on. Then, as the plot threads started coming together and multiple P.O.V. characters began appearing in the same scene, I began using place names as chapter titles and stuck to using one character's P.O.V. in that scene.
Do we need a discussion of the differences between Third Person Limited and Third Person Omniscient?
If you're telling the story in First Person, it's generally a bad idea to change P.O.V., period, unless you really club the reader over the head with the change notice. In short stories, first-, second-, or third-person, it is generally better to avoid changing P.O.V. unless there is a compelling dramatic reason to do so. In looking for a good example of the latter—while simultaneously working on my new web site—I'm afraid I caved-in to my inner Roland Emmerich and got self-referential, and so I would now like to direct your attention to Appliancé as an example of a short story with a P.O.V. shift, and a compelling dramatic reason for doing so.
Your thoughts, comments, and observations, s'il vous plait?
~brb
P.S. And one quick afterthought: there are still plenty of review copies waiting to be claimed, with more being added all the time. If you've ever wanted to try being a book reviewer, here's your chance.
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