by Bruce BethkeIt is said that somewhere in the Far East, in the mist-shrouded K'themai Isles, there stands a great temple, built by the now-vanished K'bab peoples and dedicated to Otogu the Insatiable, Devourer of Days. In the heart of this temple there squats a grotesque giant idol, purportedly depicting Otogu himself, and while the idol is gilded with purest gold, the visage is that of a vast, flabby, and revoltingly toad-like creature, miserable with constipation. For though he consumes ceaselessly, despite all his straining, in the end, Otogu produces frustratingly little.
The K'bab legends as they have filtered down through the ages say Otogu is forever hungry because he feeds on nothing more substantial than time itself, and so is never satisfied. Further, the legends hold that in the very end Otogu will consume every last moment of every day, and in final desperation turn on himself, beginning with his own left foot and consuming even his own body until utterly nothing remains. And thus will the world end, although right up until the final seconds, Mankind will be too busy working to notice what's happening.
The K'bab peoples are long gone, now; their myth of Otogu, barely remembered. Jungle has reclaimed the once mighty but now nameless city, save for the weed-strewn courtyard and the vine-covered temple mound. The first white man to see the temple, the daringly brave but severely navigationally challenged pioneering aviator Wrong-Way Wojciechowski, thought it a magnificent ruin as he flew over, but was never able to find it again. Twenty years later the eminent archaeologist Professor Herr Doctor Arvid Morgenstern, working from Wojciechowski's journal, was able to rediscover the temple and reach it on the ground, but he sent out just one brief, cryptic, and sadly direction-free message before disappearing forever into the hungry maw of the mysterious green jungle. In his message, Professor Morgenstern claimed to have found proof that the temple was not in fact a ruin, but merely incomplete. According to Morgenstern the K'bab had just plain never found the time to finish the blessed thing, but they'd always meant to get back to work on it Real Soon Now...
A lesser writer, of course, would be content to say, "I got interrupted by Other Things Of Greater Urgency yesterday afternoon and that's why I'm scrambling to finish and post this column late on Sunday morning."
Of Challenges Large and Small
First up, I want to thank everyone who jumped into Friday's discussion. Your comments have contributed much-needed clarity and helped me/us refocus on just what we're trying to accomplish here. Thanks especially to WaterBoy, for jogging my memory. I needed that. Today is seven months to the day since my daughter died, and to be honest, I have trouble remembering what life was like before then, much less what I was doing or what worked well or didn't work at all. Some days the world before September 25th seems like dim memories from a previous life. I have lost track of a lot of details.
Thanks, one and all, for helping me to remember. The weekly Lesser Challenges will continue, and this coming Friday we'll be announcing the next Greater Challenge—and oh boy, have we got a doozy of a grand prize on the line for you this time!
Nope. Not gonna tell. Not even gonna hint. You're just gonna hafta wait....
The Dead Hand of John W. Campbell, Jr.
The Kid got a new assignment in school this week; he has to read and report on a science fiction novel. You'd think I'd be overjoyed, but—
He was given a choice: I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov; Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury; or The Andromeda Strain, by Michael Crichton—or as I tend to think of them, 1950, 1953, and 1969. (And the Asimov book is a collection of short stories published in Astounding and Super Science {mostly} in 1940 and 1941, while the Bradbury book is an expansion of a novella first published in Galaxy in 1950.)
Don't get me wrong. I adore Bradbury and think his career is a model to emulate, believe it's a pathetic crime that Crichton is not considered one of the foremost SF writers of the 20th century, and know rather more than a little about Asimov's robots. I was happy when The Kid picked I, Robot, as it gave me an excuse to introduce him to the stories of John Sladek.
But don't you think it'd be possible to include just one book with less dust on it on a high school's advanced placement class's approved reading list? It wouldn't even need to be a book by a living author, although that would be nice; just, something slightly less than forty years old? After all, SF is supposed to be the literature of ideas, that looks to the future.
So why is our collective gaze so firmly fixed on the rearview mirror?
Finding books for The Kid was no problem: around our house it's not so much a matter of "do we have the book" as "can we find it" and "which edition would you like?" But as I was pulling books for him to read, I started pulling other books off the shelves as well. Groff Conklin's two definitive anthologies, The Best of Science Fiction and A Treasury of Science Fiction, the books generally credited with kicking off the post-WW2 SF boom, were published in 1946 and 1948 respectively, and are filled with stories from the 1920s through 1941. Robert Silverberg's anthology, The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, which was used as a college textbook for years, has only one story written after 1959, and it's by Zelazny, and it stinks. Ellison's Dangerous Visions was first published in 1967—and I put it back on the shelf, because it hasn't aged well. "The door-sphincter irised open." How can you read that line and not laugh, now? Was the 1960's New Wave really only about writers working out their personal, political, and sexual problems in public, and finally getting the liberty to put "f-ck" and "sh-t" in a story and not have the editor change it to "frak" and "felgecarb?" Wow. What a giant leap for mankind.
Even the so-called revolution to which I contributed my little firecracker was thirty years ago—or as I put it, a lifetime ago, to answer those people who ask why I don't write now like I did when I was 25 years old.
No rhetorical question to end this segment. I'm just increasingly convinced that the genre is paralyzed by the long-dead hand of John W. Campbell, Jr., and the vast mass of inert material that's been built up over the past eighty years. Maybe it's time for someone to break that mold. Maybe it's time to declare the genre dead and move on. I don't know. Today.
Otogu Beckons
I've at least five more ideas in the queue this morning: a discussion of comparative writing group methods, some thoughts on "finding your voice," comments on books I've read lately, a preview of the other books now in the queue waiting to be read, some proposed tweaks in the site design, and questions about single-sourcing content to support the multiplicity of ebook formats now on the market. But I'm out of time to write this morning, and Otogu is grunting and snuffling loudly in the hall outside my office door.
Catch you later,
~brb
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