by Bruce BethkeAnother Sunday morning; another column. Already it's hot. The brassy sun beats down with barely a breath of wind for relief, and the dog has gone from seeking out spots of sun to lay in to seeking out spots of shade. Somewhere nearby a mourning dove is cooing. Down in the garden, the ripe strawberries are demanding to be picked. The plum trees are loaded with small, hard, green promises of plums to come, and we've got green tomatoes on some plants already, with blossoms on the rest. Summer comes fast and hard to the North Country. It's as if even the trees know: three months, and that's it. Four months, tops, and then after that, expect snow.
I lived in Southern California for a while, decades ago. Loved it; hated it. It's not so much a matter of missing the change of seasons as of missing a sense of time. Southern California feels like forever; like there's no sense of urgency because there will always be tomorrow. Hey, it's a nice day today. (But isn't it always a nice day?) Let's blow off work and go to the beach. It'll keep 'til mañana. Besides, you're going to be 22 years old forever.
Up here in the North Country, there's always a sub rosa awareness that the world makes no promises. Make hay while the sun shines. Use today, because tomorrow, it might be raining. Or snowing. Except in July, when it hails.
A line of tornadoes blew through the state last Thursday, bringing reports of baseball-sized hail in some places. People died. A small town northwest of here was simply wiped off the map. Tornadoes are freakish things; they can reduce one house to matchsticks and not scratch the paint on the house across the street. In Southern California you get earthquakes, which are, in a weird way, communal events. Everyone gets hit by the earthquake, and shares in the aftershocks. Besides, you can go years or even decades between big ones.
One summer, decades ago, when we lived further out in cow country, we had tornadoes once a week—every Wednesday evening, I think—for something like six weeks straight. One of the strangest things I've ever seen was a barn that had been hit by the previous night's a tornado. It was as if the building had simply exploded: the wreckage was scattered in small pieces over about a half-mile radius, including large sections of the heavy steel roof, which were crumpled and twisted as if made of aluminum foil. And yet the hay bales that had been stacked inside the barn were untouched, and as neatly stacked as they had been the day before. There simply was no longer a barn for them to be inside.
Maybe it's just life up here in the North Country. Maybe it's the age and mileage, or perhaps it's simply the events of the past year finally catching up with me. In any case I'm acutely aware of time this morning, mostly in the sense of realizing that there will never be enough of it. Not to write everything I want to write about; not to develop every idea for a story I've got squirreled away; not to read everything I want to read. I've barely enough time to do the things I must do these days, much less to get started on whittling down the list of things I want to do.
I had a great ambitious list of things I wanted to columnate about this morning: continuing last week's discussion of the roots of science fiction; presenting my thesis that there is a 20-year utopian/dystopian cycle that's been repeating in popular culture for the past two and a half centuries, of which science fiction is merely one form of outgrowth; talking about some books I've read recently; and presenting The Kid's thesis that the Jean-Claude Van Damme movie Cyborg is actually a metal band music video, only without the music. (We got in 86 minutes of quality father/son time last night watching it, and laughed throughout the entire thing.)
If nothing else, I really wanted to write this morning about The Limits to Growth, a profoundly depressing eco-catastrophe book produced in 1972 by the Club of Rome think-tank. For it just so happens that I also have here a painfully serious and long out-of-print hardcover non-fiction book, produced in 1974 by a symposium of leading science fiction writers whose names you would instantly recognize, in which the authors collectively argue that if you aren't taking The Limits to Growth into account, you simply can't be writing serious hard science fiction.
After which it appears from history that the authors collectively did go off and write a whole lot of now-forgotten painfully self-important eco-catastrophe and overpopulation novels, while the readers ignored them and got busy rediscovering high fantasy and Conan the Barbarian. While the heavy-hitters were off plumbing the depths of dystopia, the market embraced Star Wars.
Today's short lesson, then: always bet against the trend. If everyone else is writing utopias, write a dystopia. If everyone else is bumming out, write something uplifting. There is no profit in being a me-too, and always a long-shot chance at producing the must-read book that will be seen as being on the cutting edge of the counter-trend. Here endeth the lesson.
And now, I've got to go pick strawberries.
Posts
