the 8 p.m. epiphany

That I may remain innocent of plagiarism, that title is a pun on a book called The 3 A.M. Epiphany, by Brian Kiteley. Basically it's a writing book. Its pages are littered with unusual but simple exercises (in the form of prompts) designed to work your writing muscles, stretch the literary tendons, push and shove your gray matter into nooks and crannies heretofore uncharted. I rather with I'd brought it with me to Korea, in fact. I've only ever given it perfunctory glances. Bought it new off Amazon and have hardly touched it, even though it looked like a kick in the pants. I intend to rectify that on my return to the U.S.

But in the meantime, I've been having some epiphanies of my own. Namely, how to ensure that my debut novel doesn't suck.

In hindsight, I'm almost glad I've let the novel sit around so long without trying to publish it. It's let me give it a good solid think. Inexorably, I've noticed inadequacies and imperfections. I'm ever so glad I didn't rush into publication and let those strident shortcomings slip under the radar. I'd like this dang thing to be perfect.

So, in idly thinking about what would make the book better—I've gotten to the point where the book is constantly simmering away on the back burner, and I can contemplate it and critique it almost subconsciously—I came to a realization. The book is boring. Flat. Dull. Thanks to my last rewrite, completed shortly before I left for Korea (late 2011 or something), the manuscript is no longer do disgustingly puerile. But it's still missing something. Oomph, I guess you'd call it. There's nothing in it that would hold interest. It's still somewhat shallower than I'd like. I must have subconsciously grasped this, and the matter must have been turning itself over in my head subliminally for months, ethereal and intangible, like the ghost of a rotisserie chicken.

Because, at 8 p.m. yesterday evening, I figured out what was wrong, and how to fix it. Was the book dull? Okay, spice things up a bit. I didn't have to think long about how to accomplish this. I'd bring in some of the characters I was saving for the sequels.

I cracked open my laptop during one of my free periods at work, and commenced a staff meeting with myself. These are the stenographer's notes:

Okay. How to integrate [Unnamed Major Characters #1, #2 and #3] into the story I've already got?

Excellent question. Are we including their backstories as well?

Whoof, I hadn't even thought about it. Seems logical to include Number One's cover story, and of course most of Number Two's tragic history, excluding the part she doesn't know about (that she's actually from the other universe). As for Number Three's...

I'm thinking we'd best leave his (and Number One's) for later. Drama bombs, good sir, drama bombs. Like Dresden in '44. Or was it '45?

No matter. Just enough to set up character. Now, are we confident that we've included enough? Are [the three aforementioned characters] going to be enough to sustain this story properly? Or are they too much? Character overload, so to speak?

Well, as Spartan as this story is right now (a protagonist, a deuteragonist, two antagonists, a few slavering beasts and and a boatload of war-crazed tribesmen), a few vivid characters couldn't hurt. They'd really help flesh it out.

We can at least give it a shot. If it doesn't work, we'll know it.

Glad we got that cleared up. Now the question is...how now, brown cow?

Now let's see...I'm thinking of pulling in some of the story elements from what I had planned for later books. Enrichening the story.

Is "enrichening" actually a word?

It is now. So. The story. We were originally planning the setting (after the cataclysm) in a fairly pastoral setting, with a few Babylonian and Akkadian cities scattered around, right? And the Babylonians and Akkadians running amok?

That sounds about right, yes. And our heroes caught up in the middle of it.

I should have listened to my gut from the beginning. That setting always struck me as somewhat...pedestrian. Bland. Unexciting. Static.

No need for reproaches, friend. What's happened has happened. Just be glad you're fixing it before you publish it. So, we need to spice up the setting a bit?

Right. Instead of leaving the place a wilderness, I think I'm going to make the landscape more recognizable. Really pull the audience into the story. Make them realize just what this story's about, and what actually happened during the apocalypse.

That sounds sound.

So...let's see here. What were the milestone civilizations after Mesopotamia? The Egyptians, right?

Yeah, them. And the Greeks, and the Romans, and the Arabs, the Carthaginians, and all the barbarian tribes up in Europe and whatnot.

Are the Etruscans in there somewhere?

Who the hell were the Etruscans?

No idea. Anyway, I think that's enough to go on. The chronological order of things isn't going to matter much, given the context of the story. Nor, really, will historical accuracy. We can play with this timeline as much as we like.

It's nice when you leave yourself an out like that, isn't it? Perhaps you were cut out to be a sci-fi writer after all. If you can learn to ignore the thunderous sound of Isaac Asimov spinning in his grave, that is.

It's getting easier by the day. All right, so we've got historical context taken care of. But I want to be sure of something. Whenever people write alternate histories, or even history-based science fiction (A.E. van Vogt was a whiz at it) there's a certain risk involved. I'm talking about clichés.

What, you mean like, whenever people write about savage backward Bronze Age cultures, or the Roman Empire, or some fictitious blend of the two, there's always some big fight scene in the grand arena? Against wild beasts and monstrous sword-wielding gladiators?

Yeah, that. Happens all the time. Star Wars (like, two or three times); John Carter; Riverworld; Gladiator (I suppose that was a given, though); and a whole bunch of other historical and sci-fi stuff. It's a lead-pipe cinch. Whenever you talk about ancient cultures, real or imagined, some mention of The Games always pops up.

Sure does. You want to avoid that?

Yes. I want to avoid it. And somehow, avoid it WITHOUT avoiding it.

Come again?

I would like to work a nice big gladiatorial fight scene in there. Preferably with the hand of the love interest at stake.

Okay. We can do it. We just have to make it new and fresh. Or make it SEEM new and fresh.

At that moment, unfortunately, I noticed that I had three minutes to get ready for my next lesson. I hastily shut down the computer, snatched my textbooks and lesson plan, and hoofed it to class.

I think I got enough done. I was starting to digress, anyway. I didn't make any concrete steps toward figuring out where I was going to spread my hands and divide the plot—like Moses parting the Red Sea—and stick all this extra stuff in, but I've got all night to think about that. And tomorrow night. And possibly the three free periods I've got on Wednesday, too.

I'm tremendously excited. My manuscript, as it stands now, is a mere 58,000 words or so. That makes it pretty short for a novel. I'm not one to subscribe to the whole "longer is better" school of authorship which Douglas Adams poked fun at in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish, but I am rather pleased that this new material will double (perhaps triple) the overall length of this work. Makes it seem a little more legit, you know?

But beyond that, I'm excited to see the changes this will wreak on my manuscript. I think it'll really jazz it up. It'll transmute from bland sterility into explosive vivaciousness. It'll be punchy, hard-hitting, evocative, emotional, and just plain ol' fun. I'm looking forward to ushering it into that golden light.

I'll let you know how it all goes. And about my plans to publish it. I think I might be ready to try putting on the Kindle™...

the best sci-fi stories you've (n)ever read

Science fiction is arcane stuff. I get that. Not too many people are into it, except the science professor with the corduroy trousers and the geek down the block with the inch-thick glasses. More people are into fantasy (you know, that weird crap with unicorns and leprechauns and sparkly vampires and swords and magic and sexy witches) than sci-fi.

But I didn't come here to pontificate.

The odds are you're not a sci-fi fan. Two-thirds of you reading this probably aren't. Either that or you're a mere dilettante, someone who claims to love science fiction when the most you've ever done is go see Thor and Spider-man in the theaters, or glanced at Fahrenheit 451 in high school, or taken a shortcut through the sci-fi/fantasy section in Barnes & Noble because it was the quickest way to get to Dreams of My Father by Barack Obama at the mall entrance.

Oh, right. I'm not supposed to pontificate. [ahem]

So I'll help you out a little, because I happen to be a real sci-fi fan.

My collection includes everybody from James Blish to Poul Anderson, C.M. Kornbluth to John W. Campbell, Jr., Fritz Leiber to Gordon R. Dickson, Robert E. Gilbert to Edgar Rice Burroughs, A.E. van Vogt to L. Sprague de Camp...and it may soon extend to Piers Anthony, Robert Heinlein, Jack L. Chalker, and Orson Scott Card.

I know my stuff.

I know who Isaac Asimov is (and therefore I know just how much the Will Smith version of I, Robot sucked).

I have read pretty much every story that H.G. Wells or Jules Verne ever wrote.

I know what happened in the year 802,701 A.D. I can carry a gun for dinosaur. I know why sea monsters love lighthouses. I can (probably) flush out a shape-shifting alien. I've learned what a "gestalt organism" is. I know what lies at the earth's core. I can recite the Three Laws of Robotics. I remember what happened to Thor V. I discovered where Captain Nemo lives.

I think I'm pretty qualified to judge what constitutes "good" sci-fi and "bad" sci-fi.

If you're not a science fiction fan, but have been curious about the genre, the following would be my pick. I have here, for your consideration, a list of what I believe represents the best science fiction written in the last hundred years. Some authors' names you may recognize, some you may not. The stories themselves are, to you, probably unfamiliar. Even if you haven't read them, though, you've probably seen them on the silver screen. A lot of these were made into classic, memorable, or semi-memorable films.

More importantly, though, these works have influenced me on a profound level. Someday I hope to be half as good as the people who wrote them. If you, dear reader, should choose to peruse them, you'll receive a crash-course in the mind-blowing storytelling and incredible writing the world of science fiction has to offer.

And as an added bonus, you just might mutate into a full-blown sci-fi nut. Here's hoping.

I was originally going to make this a ten-item list, but you can't read three science fiction anthologies (and have a used book store in your town bursting with dog-eared arcana) without, you know, winding up with a few more favorites than you'd like to admit. More to the point, however, there is absolutely no way to distill an entire genre down to ten items. I needed enough leeway to clue you in on both the genre's classics and its lesser-known short works in order to give you the full picture of the organ's merit and the writers' genius. Then again, you lot are uninitiated, uncultured swine, and I can't overload your gnat-like attention spans with as much material as I'd prefer.

So here you go, twenty items. I slaved over the list for months. I picked these works because (a) I liked 'em and (b) they will literally blow your mind. I dare you to read even three of them and see if your universe hasn't widened a smidgen.

1. The Fog Horn . . . . Ray Bradbury (short story, 1951; inspired the 1953 film The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms)
2. Who Goes There? . . . . John W. Campbell, Jr. (novella, 1938; adapted into 1951's The Thing from Another World and 1982's much more faithful The Thing by John Carpenter)**
3. Black Destroyer . . . . A.E. van Vogt (short story, 1939)*****
4. Nerves . . . . Lester del Rey (novella, 1956)**
5. Code Three . . . . Rick Raphael (novella, 1963)*****
6. The Spectre General . . . . Theodore Cogswell (novella, 1952)***
7. Thy Rocks and Rills . . . . Robert Ernest Gilbert (short story, 1953)*****
8. A Pail of Air . . . . Fritz Leiber (short story, 1951)*****
9. The Time Machine . . . . H.G. Wells (novella, 1895; so much better than the two movie adaptations)**
10. E for Effort . . . . T.L. Sherred (novella, 1947)***
11. The Last Question . . . . Isaac Asimov (short story, 1959)*****
12. A Gun for Dinosaur . . . . L. Sprague de Camp (short story, 1956)*****
13. Heavy Planet . . . . Lee Gregor (short story, 1939)***** 
14. Scanners Live in Vain . . . . Cordwainer Smith (short story, 1948)*
15. Arena . . . . Fredric Brown (short story, 1944; provided the basis for a Star Trek episode of the same name)* 
16. The Machine Stops . . . . E.M. Forster (short story, 1909; adapted for TV in 1966 as part of the U.K. sci-fi series Out of the Unknown)***
17. A Rose for Ecclesiastes . . . . Roger Zelazny (short story, 1963)* 
18. The Big Front Yard . . . . Clifford D. Simak (novelette, 1959)***
19. Microcosmic God . . . . Theodore Sturgeon (novella, 1952)*
20. Call Me Joe . . . . Poul Anderson (novella, 1957)**

A in case that wasn't enough, here a few stories I thought deserved a nod. They may not be as "good" as the ones I've listed above ("good" here having the meaning of deep, profound, insightful, provocative, didactic, romantic, or mind-blowingly awesome)...but they're fun. So there.

• The Escape Orbit . . . . James White (novel, 1983)
• The Island of Doctor Moreau . . . . H.G. Wells (novel, 1896)
• Harrison Bergeron . . . . Kurt Vonnegut (short story, 1961)****
•  At the Earth's Core . . . . Edgar Rice Burroughs (novel, 1914) 
• Tale of a Computer that Fought a Dragon . . . . Stanislaw Lem (short story, 1977)****
• The Gods Themselves . . . . Isaac Asimov (novel, 1972)
• A Clockwork Orange . . . . Anthony Burgess (novel, 1962)
• I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream . . . . Harlan Ellison (short story, 1967; made into a computer game in 1995)
• The Hammer of God . . . . Arthur C. Clarke (novel, 1993)

And that's the list. Pick a few out and give 'em a whirl.  You won't regret it. All I ask is that you read, think, and above all, enjoy.

That's what sci-fi is all about.

* The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume I, ed. Robert Silverberg, 1970.

** The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume IIA, ed. Ben Bova, 1973.

*** The Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Volume IIB, ed. Ben Bova, 1973.

**** The World Treasury of Science Fiction, ed. David G. Hartwell, 1989.

***** The World Turned Upside Down, ed. David Drake, Eric Flint, & Jim Baen, 2005.

e-hiatus, day 5

We woke up at about ten o'clock. We ate brunch and got down to business. Miss H job-searched while I worked on the novel some more. At about 1:00 p.m., I was stricken with severe writer's block, so I went ahead and wrote that piece on A.E. van Vogt which was posted earlier. Things failed to improve after that, so I cheated on my hiatus and checked Facebook. I'm quite glad I did, because one of my friend's mothers (an English teacher at the community college) invited me to a writer's workshop on the 21st of December. I could really use some input on my writing, so I think I'll go. Might learn something useful, you know? I just have to be sure to pick a suitably noncommittal part of my novel to avoid plagiarism.

The rest of the day passed. I spent it finishing Starship Troopers (wow, what a book) and watching the movie Duel (1971) on YouTube. Excellent entertainment on all fronts. Miss H and I also came to a decision about our futures, but I won't go into that here.

I will say that the withdrawal symptoms have hit me hard...or rather, the boredom and emptiness associated with breaking a habit. I no longer find myself taking my phone out of my pocket automatically (in fact, I have no idea where my phone is). But I still open Facebook and Hotmail without even thinking about it whenever I turn on my computer. I must train myself out of this. Between job searches and novel sessions, I find myself wandering around the house, kneading my hands, wondering what to do with myself. I managed a walk with Dash yesterday but that was about it. Miss H and I have begun work on another 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle, and that should help keep me occupied. Maybe I'll teach myself Chinese ten or something to keep from going nuts.

Squaring my shoulders and hoping for a more productive day tomorrow! Postman out.

recommended reading

I'm supposed to be working on the novel right now, but I've got writer's block. Trying to link up an entirely new wodge of characterization and action with a previously-written chunk of exposition is harder than I thought it'd be. Plus I'm trying to figure out how to get my protagonists into the bad guy's fortress without, say, going up to the front door and knocking (which Main Character No. 1 was planning to do). Dramatic writing is tough sometimes, you know?

So instead I'll give you a book review. Or rather, I'll break with tradition and give you an author review.

I just finished reading Transgalactic by A.E. van Vogt, which was not a single story, but several: two novels from the Mutant Mage series (The Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn), a couple of stories from The War Against the Rull series, and Mission to the Stars, a stand-alone novel. So instead of reviewing each and every tale, I'll just tell you about A.E. van Vogt and his writing, and how they struck me.

Now, in any discussion of writing, there's two bits of writer-lingo you need to know: "planning" and "pantsing." I had never heard of these terms before I entered the blogsphere. I never even bothered to ask anyone what they meant. The sentiment was there, and the context, and I gradually deciphered both. "Pantsing," as near as I can tell, means wading into your story without only the most meager idea of what you're about—flying by the seat of your pants, as it were. Perhaps you've got a skimpy outline (or no outline at all), but you've done no preparation, taken no notes, nothing. You just dive right in and see where the story goes. "Planning," as you've already guessed, is the exact opposite: taking time to meticulously plan your story, outline it, map it, shape it, mold it, develop your characters, create a detailed setting, and set the story down accordingly.

Van Vogt and I are pretty similar. We're pantsers, mostly. Van Vogt would get an idea, knock out a beginning, look it over, nod, and continue on with it. He never bothered to go through beforehand and outline everything. I can tell van Vogt pantsed because of what he usually wound up doing to his stories: he retconned them into full-length novels and even novel series (what he called "fix-ups"). A lot of the early tales he wrote about bands of intrepid spacemen coming across nasty monsters in the middle of space were collated and grouped into one single tale, The Voyage of the Space Beagle. The same thing happened with the stories which make up The War Against the Rull.

This didn't happen with everything van Vogt wrote. He did some pretty good stand-alone novels, like Slan in 1940. (Well, he was going to write a sequel, but the poor sap was stricken with Alzheimer's disease and died before he could finish the first draft. His wife and Kevin J. Anderson went ahead and finished it, though, and it was published in 2007 as Slan Hunter.)

It's interesting to see this kind of approach in science fiction. I mean, traditionally, sci-fi writers are not only writing for fun and profit, but to make some kind of commentary on the human condition. All you have to do is read the first chapter of Starship Troopers (I'm twelve chapters in, actually) and you'll see just how strongly Robert A. Heinlein felt about duty, military service, war, and patriotism.

With van Vogt it's more subtle. He's not quite so blatant in his advancement of anthropic commentary, but there are certain facets of human civilization which deeply interest him, and they manifest strongly in his work. He had a thing for totalitarianism. Dictatorships and monarchies fascinated him to the point that some considered him a closet apologist. The Empire of the Atom and The Wizard of Linn revolve around a technologically advanced but culturally retarded civilization based on Earth, thousands of years after nuclear apocalypse and interplanetary war have almost annihilated the human race. Humankind lives in great cities and primitive villages, worships "the atomic gods" in huge temples, and governs itself with a tenuous and iron-fisted oligo-monarchy closely resembling the Roman Empire. Ancient spaceships from Earth's golden age still remain, but no one knows how they work; temple scientists are still able to operate the great machines, but their basic principles are lost to the ages. When colonies on Venus and Mars rebel against the ruling Earth government, the Lord Leader embarks thousands of spearmen, archers and horse cavalry in the giant spaceships. They fly to the other planets, and fight primitive wars on their hostile surfaces. Dissenters and rebels are uniformly executed; political rivals are sabotaged, betrayed, poisoned, exiled; and there is no end to the scheming, backstabbing, backbiting, and guile of the ruling families of the Empire of Linn.

Unto this chaos is born Clane, a mutant (his mother strayed too near one of the temples wherein the atomic gods were worshipped). His deformities prevent him from ever attaining the seat of power; indeed, he would have been killed outright had he not been the grandson of the Lord Leader himself. Instead, Joquin, a clever adviser to the Lord Leader, takes the young Clane under his wing, and fosters the boy's genius-level intellect. When the Lord Leader dies and a war of succession breaks out, Clane remains safely in the background, pursuing scholarly and scientific studies. Clane is too smart for his own good, but is able to disguise his gifts beneath mutation and shyness. He discovers the science behind the atomic machinery in the temples and aboard the spaceships, and then divines something else even more sinister: humanity was not wiped out by a nuclear war, but an alien race powerful beyond belief. What's worse, this alien race is rebuilding, rearming, and will soon return to claim Earth and her colonies. Clane, and Clane alone, can stop them, if he can ward off intrigue, betrayal, scheming, conspiracy, and barbarian invasions long enough to weaponize the technology of the ancients.

The series is sort of like I, Claudius meets The War of the Worlds. And it is freakin' awesome.

These were van Vogt's interests: power struggles, imperialism, totalitarian states, dictatorial societies, and political intrigue (with a good dash of exobiology thrown in). Such makes for engaging reading, particularly in the context of science fiction. Van Vogt's style is pleasant as well: he never minces words or proselytizes. He is direct, and just descriptive enough to give you the essential details (and let your imagination do the rest). There is poetry in his prose (particularly in delineating the cold beauty and vastness of space). He is a master of suspense, and can throw in quite a few twists and turns in a plot, leaving you unsure of what disaster or obstacle will overwhelm his characters next.

I have a soft spot for van Vogt. For one, he was unappreciated in his time: he won few awards, his critics were many and vocal, and he was overshadowed by the more famous names in the biz. I expect my lot will be the same (in fact, I prefer it that way).

But more importantly, I think both Arthur Elton van Vogt and A.T. Post write for the same reasons: not to make a point, not to silence critics, not to bewail the follies of the human race...just for fun. I know what I like and I write about it. So there.

I'd recommend the man to anyone who had some free time to be wowed in.