Adventure classics -- Bless the Bleekmen and children

The writer is on vacation. The following post is a reprint.

Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

***

Philip Kindred Dick’s novels of ideas are only science fiction in the same sense as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.  Neither Dick’s stories of  his late twentieth-century near future nor Gulliver’s travels to Lilliput could have happened.  But that wasn’t the point for either author. 

As biographer Lawrence Sutin reports in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, the writer’s long-time editor, Don Wollenheim of Ace Books, turned down one of his finest novels,  Martian Time-Slip, because the time frame of the 1960’s manuscript -- with a story set in the 1990’s -- offended his editorial sensibility.  “If he’d thrown it ahead a hundred years,” Wollenheim said later, “I would have liked it.“

However, the setting perfectly suited Dick’s satirical story of Earth’s political problems transferred to the red planet.  It also slotted presciently into the civil rights issue, with Bleekmen -- Dick’s version of aboriginal Martians -- standing in for Earth’s people of color.  And could any countercultural novelist of the 1960’s ignore the  looming drug culture?  Certainly not one with Dick’s obsessive interest in the nature of reality.

Hollywood discovered Dick shortly before his death.   And kept on discovering, movie after movie.  After this summer’s release of a Total Recall remake, based on another Dick novel, I’d love to see what filmmakers could do with Martian Time-Slip, with its multiple versions of reality.

Jack Bohlen, an “ex-schizophrenic,” keeps the Martian colony going by repairing everything from toasters to robots.  (It’s less expensive to repair than to import new gadgets.)  Jack thinks he’s got it bad enough when his father comes to visit and do some insider-trading in real estate, his wife develops a wandering eye, and he’s pulled into local union politics bearing a strong resemblance to the wrangling Dick detested at his Berkley, California, apartment complex.

But when Jack connects with the orphaned “anomalous“ (and apparently autistic) child Manfred Steiner and a wandering group of Martian aborigines called Bleekmen, his life truly comes apart, as Manfred triggers a series of parallel visions of events. 

Which visions are real, which aren’t?  Which kill and which save?  Don’t try to figure it out.  Just ride the magic carpet all the way to the surprising but inevitable final vision of Manfred and the Bleekmen.

As a writer, Dick had hoped to escape from the limited audience of the science fiction genre.  But with the failure of Martian Time-Slip and other novels to break into mainstream fiction, he put those dreams behind him.  In return, fans rewarded him with one of science fiction’s greatest honors, the Hugo Award.

In early 1974, he had a series of religious visions that would haunt him until his death in 1982, at age 53.  In addition to his prolific output of fiction (44 published novels, more than a hundred short stories), Dick wrote exhaustively in trying to explain his visions.  The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick has edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem from the more than 8,000 pages of Dick’s notes is available from Amazon.

(Next Friday, Adventure classics begins an August of adventures at sea, with James Calvert's Surface at the Pole.)

Wordcraft -- What editors know about fixing science fiction

As fascinating as the instruction Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden gave their writing workshop at last weekend’s FenCon in Dallas was their interaction -- agreeing and disagreeing, watching each other’s back, passionately and amiably interrupting and finishing each other’s sentences. The two are the editing team of Nielsen Hayden for Tor Books.

At this year’s WorldCon, Patrick won science fiction’s Hugo Award for Best Editor, Long Form (an award he’s won twice previously). A book he edited also won a Hugo this year (again, a repeat performance) as have books edited by Teresa. In addition, they teach writing, acquire fiction for Tor, and Patrick acquires and edits short fiction for Tor.com. I’ll stop with that brief summary and let you read the rest at their website, www.nielsenhayden.com/.

For this post, I’m cherry-picking some of their likes -- and how to match them. Since, as in all FenCon writing workshops, there’s too much information for one post, next week I’ll tell you what they don’t want -- what can drive otherwise mild-mannered editors to undergo psychotic breaks during slush pile forays. And yes, finally I’ll get around to telling you what they actually want to buy.

For starters, writers have heard the advice a thousand of times -- “show, don’t tell.” But face it, sometimes we’ve got to convey chunks of information to our readers. “The trick is,” Teresa says, “you want to look for natural occasions for expositions, the natural places people talk to each other. We (only) understand information in a book because it’s attached to story. If you start telling people things before the story starts, they won’t remember it because there’s no place to attach it.”

One of their suggestions for how to orient readers to our fictional worlds is to follow the example of historical writer Patrick O’Brian -- having a knowledgeable character describe the fictional world to a character who knows nothing about it. Being careful, of course, to attach the explanations to interesting and sympathetic characters.

What about another admonition writers hear repeatedly, to start a story with action? “It’s a general statement that’s a couple of occasions away from being true,” Patrick says.

“You can start a story with having somebody set fire to their yard,” Teresa says, “but the next thing that happens better be related to the yard burning.” Otherwise, readers simply become baffled by why they are being giving information without context or attribution. And if readers, like all of us, don’t care, they won’t remember.

What about those strange alien names in our science fiction and fantasy? “Don’t,” Teresa says. In fact, “Don’t try to throw in many strange words of any sort.”

“These are all rules you can break --” Patrick says, before Teresa cuts him off with, “Here’s the ultimate writing rule -- if it works, it’s right.”

And what another perennial problem of science fiction -- explaining how technology that doesn’t yet exist works? “A general rule for writing about how something works,” Teresa says, “is, do not explain. That just invites the reader to argue with you.”

Instead, “explain how it feels,” Patrick says. (Although both Nielsen Haydens keep
a sharp lookout for the illogical, which they’ll discuss in a later post.) Their suggestion is to use what they call a “hand wave” to avoid dwelling on more detail too soon than readers need. Instead of explaining how a worm hole, for instance, works, just say it works and concentrate on side issues such as how long it takes, how it feels, how much freight it can handle.

“Reading is a light trance state,” Teresa says. “Which is why excessive detail doesn’t work,” Patrick adds.

So how much detail is enough? “If your readers are nitpicking the scenery, the train isn’t going fast enough,” Teresa says. Or, instead of showing the details themselves, show the character’s reactions to them. Or, “If you’re having trouble describing something, crop down and describe only part of it. If that doesn’t work, crop down further. And stop short of the inevitable conclusion.”

“The reader will be so invested in it,” Patrick says.

(Next Monday, Team Nielsen Hayden’s dislikes, including people who don’t understand that they both have the same surname, Nielsen Hayden, spelled without a hyphen.)

Adventure classics -- Sex, mice & Charlie Gordon

Flowers for Algernon

by Daniel Keyes

#

Oh, man, I was all set in this July of science fiction adventures to peg the tale of Charlie Gordon, with his IQ of 68, as an example of human hubris in the face of nature, a la last Wednesday’s Island of Dr. Moreau.

I underestimated the sex.

Because Charlie’s artificially enhanced intelligence doesn’t just make him smarter than the average lab mouse. It pushes him through decades of social and emotional growth in a few months. His experience is as heady and terrifying as any teenager’s -- moving from a barely expressible crush on his favorite teacher, to adolescent awkwardness to rather mild sexual experimentation to mature love -- and back down the scale. Little wonder that Cheryl Hill’s 2004 study, “A History of Daniel Keyes’ Flowers for Algernon,” cited its “especially striking ability to appeal to adolescent readers.”

But its those strikingly inexplicit sex scenes that have made Flowers for Algernon #43 on the American Library Association’s list of most frequently banned books. And that’s for the decade 1990-1999, not from the bad old days when respectable book reviewers could use the word “moron” with impunity to refer to Charlie’s original intellectual level.

As I was reading that statistic, I remembered a young woman with Downs’ syndrome at a therapy center where I do volunteer work discussing her wedding plans. Remembered editor Judith Kleinfeld’s study Fantastic Antone Grows Up, which considered the benefit of a supportive spouse or partner for adults with fetal alcoholism. And, remembered, less happily, periodic news reports of horrific sexual abuse of the disabled.

The short story version of Flowers for Algernon was published in 1959 in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, after author Daniel Keyes refused the request of another magazine to give the tale a happy ending.

The story tracks the progress and regress in his own words of Charlie Gordon, a young man who undergoes an experimental procedure to enhance his intelligence, with the encouragement of his teacher, Alice Kinnian. A similar procedure has given a laboratory mouse named Algernon mental abilities superior to Charlie’s, who is understandably embarrassed to by out thought by a rodent. But as Charlie’s intellect develops, he soon surpasses the scientists who look upon him as their own creation. Unfortunately, neither Algernon’s nor Charlie’s improvements are permanent. After Algernon’s death, Charlie, realizing he will suffer the same fate, steels himself for a return to his previous life. At the end, he asks Alice to place memorial flowers on the mouse’s grave.

The initial story won a Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1960. In spite of its popularity, the expanded novel version was initially refused by several publishers who wanted a happy ending for Charlie, before seeing publication in 1966. It has never been out of print since.

For more about Keyes, see
www.danielkeysauthor.com/.

The American Association on Intellectual and Developmental Disabilities has a discussion of sexuality and intellectual disability, available at www.aamr.org/. 

And check out which of favorite books are most frequently challenged at
www.ala.org/advocacy/banned/frequentlychallenged/.

(Next Wednesday -- Adventure classics continues a July of science fiction with The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.  Who knew the destruction of our planet could be so much fun?)

Adventure classics -- Bless the Bleekmen & children

Martian Time-Slip

by Philip K. Dick

#

Philip Kindred Dick’s novels of ideas are only science fiction in the same sense as Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Neither Dick’s stories of his late twentieth-century near future nor Gulliver’s travels to Lilliput could have happened. But that wasn’t the point for either author.

As biographer Lawrence Sutin reports in Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick, the writer’s long-time editor, Don Wollenheim of Ace Books, turned down one of his finest novels, Martian Time-Slip, because the time frame of the 1960’s manuscript -- with a story set in the 1990’s -- offended his editorial sensibility. “If he’d thrown it ahead a hundred years,” Wollenheim said later, “I would have liked it.“

However, the setting perfectly suited Dick’s satirical story of Earth’s political problems transferred to the red planet. It also slotted presciently into the civil rights issue, with Bleekmen -- Dick’s version of aboriginal Martians -- standing in for Earth’s people of color. And could any countercultural novelist of the 1960’s ignore the looming drug culture? Certainly not one with Dick’s obsessive interest in the nature of reality.

Hollywood discovered Dick shortly before his death. And kept on discovering, movie after movie. After this summer’s release of a Total Recall remake, based on another Dick novel, I’d love to see what filmmakers could do with Martian Time-Slip, with its multiple versions of reality.

Jack Bohlen, an “ex-schizophrenic,” keeps the Martian colony going by repairing everything from toasters to robots. (It’s less expensive to repair than to import new gadgets.) Jack thinks he’s got it bad enough when his father comes to visit and do some insider-trading in real estate, his wife develops a wandering eye, and he’s pulled into local union politics bearing a strong resemblance to the wrangling Dick detested at his Berkley, California, apartment complex.

But when Jack connects with the orphaned “anomalous“ (and apparently autistic) child Manfred Steiner and a wandering group of Martian aborigines called Bleekmen, his life truly comes apart, as Manfred triggers a series of parallel visions of events.

Which visions are real, which aren’t? Which kill and which save? Don’t try to figure it out. Just ride the magic carpet all the way to the surprising but inevitable final vision of Manfred and the Bleekmen.

As a writer, Dick had hoped to escape from the limited audience of the science fiction genre. But with the failure of Martian Time-Slip and other novels to break into mainstream fiction, he put those dreams behind him. In return, fans rewarded him with one of science fiction’s greatest honors, the Hugo Award.

In early 1974, he had a series of religious visions that would haunt him until his death in 1982, at age 53. In addition to his prolific output of fiction (44 published novels, more than a hundred short stories), Dick wrote exhaustively in trying to explain his visions. This year, the thirtieth anniversary of his death, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick has
finally been published, edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem from the more than 8,000 pages of Dick’s notes. Available from
www.amazon.com/.

(Next Wednesday -- As NASA rover Curiosity nears its destination on Mars, Adventure classics turns from the skies to a month of adventuring on earthly seas, beginning with Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki:  across the Pacific by raft.)