Not a lot has changed since I last posted to the Blog. Of course, Donald Trump has continued to bluff his Whatever-ish way through the campaign season, and at this point it appears as though Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will face off. (But anything can happen; a lot of what goes on before the official nominations are over seems --at least to me-- as behind the scenes, and under the counter. When it comes right down to it, the really important decisions are not for the general public to participate in. So, is it a democracy, really?)
Anyway, as I see it, the important thing is not to let the bastards grind us down. If we dwell too much on how powerless we are, we lose the motivation to do even the little that we're permitted to do, and that little can surprise the powers-that-be, and make them resort to desperate measures, as happened in the elections of 2000, where the Supreme Court had to thoroughly discredit themselves, and give the Presidency to George Bush, Jr, who was ultimately made the fall guy for the entire Iraq War Debacle. (And a better fall guy we could never have found.) So I'm focusing on my writing, and re-reading my favorite books, and such things as make me feel better than watching the news would make me feel.
I reported to you that I was re-working the Sleeping Beauty story with a lesbian angle (not a new idea; there is at least one other attempt), in the spirit of an erotic ballet, in literary form. But that has come to a halt; I don't have a sufficiently uninterrupted period of time by myself, for various reasons, and so I just can't get any momentum going.
Several years ago, when I had left the --rather fantastic, at that point-- Helen story aside (because a friend of mine had encouraged me to write a story that had at least a slight chance of being read by people other than just me) I began to write Alexandra over a little more than two years, which meant that I had forgotten where I had left Helen.
After Alexandra was finished, I began to think of myself as a possibly mainstream writer, in the sense that the books had an iota of a chance of being read. So I decided to write a Science Fiction story, based on the character of Helen. In this story, Helen, disappointed in love, decides to join a space expedition, and is put aboard in hibernation on an enormous space ship. After writing close to a thousand pages of that, I went back to Helen (which was still on actual paper) and discovered to my horror that I had made Helen have almost total amnesia, and Helen had been reduced to a simple woman whose memories stopped around the age of about 12. Somehow I had shut this development away in my mind, and had forgotten it. The Helen story was quite interesting, but there was no way that that Helen, who was an amnesiac and had lost all her musical skills, could be this Helen.
Obviously, I was not going to explain all that in a foreword to the Science Fiction story. So I decided that these would be two different Helens, and arranged in the Summer of 2014 that I would publish the completed story in the Summer of 2015. So in July of last year, I was furiously writing the ending of The Music of the Stars, which the science fiction story was called, and finally finished it a few days before it was to be released.
The Music of the Stars is a little different from a typical Science Fiction novel. The story is not driven by dramatic scientific facts and events. The issues are more intimate, and small-scaled. Some of the topics I addressed are:
What is cloning really like? Helen discovers that a certain person on the ship had cloned herself, and then the spaceship leaders persuade Helen to submit to cloning. It isn't a dramatic thing; they create a embryo entirely of Helen's DNA, and place it in her womb, and she delivers it naturally.
What would it be like for a person to relate to his or her clone? There are five clones in the story (one of them a combination of two people), and they are all reasonable, plausible, interesting individuals, in some ways like their "Originals", for lack of a better word, and in other ways, unique.
What is the future of various endocrine diseases? Helen is diabetic, but cloning makes it possible to change the DNA in a minor way, to ensure that the clone does not inherit the disease.
What is it like to attempt to colonize a planet that is essentially an arid wasteland? This has been addressed countless times, for instance in Dune. But in those novels, the universe is so far removed from our own experience that the problems are solved in completely fantastic ways. In contrast, I had approached it more in line with what we saw in The Martian, which, if you remove a lot of the drama, could easily happen this year or the next. To my mind, that kind of low-tech extrapolation of our own experience has its own charm, quite different from the charm of the fantastic futures depicted in Star Trek, for instance. It seems to be clear that most authors are not really interested in arid planets, too different from Earth.
How would kids react to participating in space exploration? Unlike books in which little children are essentially background props, in Music, kids are front and center, mostly because I love kids and I'm a total pushover.
How will the process of hibernation interfere with and affect human relationships? This is a little difficult to explain: to be specific, what if Helen is put into hibernation, and brought out of hibernation in 20 years? Her friends would be 20 years older. How will that affect their relationship? In most science fiction stories, this sort of thing either does not happen, or the hibernation is for so long that it is not an issue, or there is no interest in the phenomenon.
It is not that I set out to address these issues. I just start the novel off, and then I allow the story to take the most natural course. This does make for stories where the plot is not intensely dramatic. But to my mind, everything that happens is far more plausible. Unfortunately, high plausibility is not a hallmark of great fiction, so I have to resign myself to the fact that what I write is not going to be choice reading for the vast majority of people!
The most humiliating thing of all is that when I read fiction, I internalize the idiom, in some cases, so completely, that I suspect my writing will be derivative. There are entire scenes that rolled off my fingers so effortlessly that I have the horrific feeling that I have read the entire episode somewhere. Well, there's nothing to be done, until and unless I recall where it came from, in which case I have to either change it, or confess that I have been heavily influenced by X, whatever X is.
The last few days, I have been reading Music of the Stars, and I was startled by the ending. Confessedly, the ending is weak; the story sort of ends a little abruptly. But what startled me most were the details. I was shocked to find that I did not recognize entire chapters; it was as if the thing had been written by someone else! I'm growing old, I suppose, and it is thoroughly disconcerting to read my own writing and be amazed that I could write so well (if you would forgive me; as someone once said: it is not that the dancing dog dances well, but that it dances at all).
Ultimately, both the strength and the weakness of the story are the lovable characters in it. I love each and every one of them (except a few of the older men, who literally are furniture and props! But even they are --given that they are guys, and so limited in their lovability-- lovable in their own pathetic way) are characters whom I find lovable. From Cass Hutchinson-Holt, the first character who appears, and who lives through most of the story, to Cass's little granddaughter, Summer Levin, the people are attractive to me. And that's why I invented them; these stories provide me with people whom I could care about.
Kay.
