The Clareverse

My battered 1970 paperback edition of Swords Against Death.

I just finished one of my semiannual readings of one of my beat-up old Fritz Leiber paperbacks. It’s time for some Fritz Leiber love!

Here’s the quiz:

1. What seminal fantasy short story, written in 1939, introduced the iconic characters of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser? (Hint: it’s the one that’s so wryly phrased and so perfectly entertaining that Clare giggles uncontrollably all the way through it.)

2. Who wrote the following: “All I ever try to write is a good story with a good measure of strangeness in it. The supreme goddess of the universe is Mystery, and being well entertained is the highest joy.”

3. Compare and contrast the works of Tolkien and Leiber. Which has
a. Elves?
b. Sex?
c. Noble heroes?
d. Amoral antiheroes?
e. Lots of poems?
f. Lots of humor?

4. Which is the best action scene:
a. Fafhrd storms a viking boat unarmed then saves it from capsizing in “The Sunken Land”.
b. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser fight geology cultists while sliding down a glacier in “The Seven Black Priests”.
c. Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser get separated while trying to escape from the thieves’ guild in “Thieves’ House”.

5. Which scene is creepiest:
a. Gray Mouser tells Fafhrd about the “black cloaks” at the end of “The Sunken Land”.
b. Fafhrd meets the undead master thieves in the crypts of the Thieves’ Guild.
c. Fafhrd and Gray Mouser discover the nature of the mysterious tower in “The Jewels in the Forest”.

Highlight for answers!

Learn more at Wikipedia: Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser

Watercolor #2 of court in Gandria, Ticino

I worked on this painting friday and saturday and finished it in time for my mom’s birthday today. I think this second version suffers from being overworked in some places. It’s hard to remember to be casual and spontaneous with watercolor when you’re also trying to do a good job.

I changed the buildings in the top right, moved around some plant pots in the middle, and made the foreground darker than in the first version. I think it ended up being a better painting than the first one.

I still hate that wall on the right. I need to learn how to paint stones.

Last night the BHE* and I visited my sister-in-law. It was the first night she was home alone with a newborn and a four-year-old, so we went over to help put the four-year-old niece, J, to bed while the new niece was being attended to.

One of the steps in J’s inflexible bedtime ritual is the telling of an original “Once-upon-a-time” story as she lies in bed. J was very weepy about not having her mom put her to bed, and when it was time for the story she melted down. “You don’t know how to tell stories!” she wailed. I assured her that I do, and I tell stories all the time, but she kept insisting that she needed a certain kind of special story that I wouldn’t be able to tell. Finally she yelled “I like special stories! You don’t know how to tell stories with special things like magic and unicorns and dragons!”.

I suppressed my impulse to demonstrate my knowledge of hit dice and special attacks, and explained to her that although she doesn’t know me very well, I really really do know a lot about magic, unicorns, and dragons, and I tell stories about them all the time. Eventually she calmed down, and after we’d had a few minutes of the story about her two stuffed unicorns (Uni and
Whitey) visiting a lady who lives in the woods and gives nuts to squirrels she said “I like your kind of story the best.”

I can’t believe a preschooler questioned my magical unicorn creds. Clearly I haven’t been spending enough time with her.

*Best Husband Ever. I asked him what he wanted to be called, and he said “Whatever I say is going to come back to haunt me.”

Take the Polygeek Quiz at Thudfactor.com

Last Thursday night I went with my husband and a couple friends to see The House Theatre’s new production, “The Sparrow”.

I’m not a big theatre-goer, but I see a few plays a year; usually one or two are at The House, since their ideas of what is entertaining seem to correspond almost exactly to mine. The House’s original shows - at least the ones I’ve seen - explore ideas of heroes and villains, the archetypes and basic plot elements found in genre entertainment like science fiction, comic books, and westerns. “Dave DaVinci Saves the Universe” was straight-up science fiction, with time travel and space opera parody, and the 2004 punk-rock musical “The Curse of the Crying Heart”, which was one of the most entertaining things I’ve seen in my life, mixed Kurosawa-style samurai drama with anime-style battles with demons, and added a few tragic romances for good measure. (It had swordfighting, guitar-playing, and wirefighting. I was giddy for hours.)

The Sparrow uses elements of classic superhero stories: the midwest small town setting of Superman’s early years and a superpowered heroine with the awkward bookishness of Peter Parker. The play tells a story of the aftermath of tragedy, of alienation and acceptance and high school angst. There’s no supervillian and no combat, but there’s a lot of action in the form of dancing: the bustle of a high school hallway, a fetal pig dissection, and a basketball game are all choreographed, and there are some balletic sequences that represent flying.

The original score and the dancing are both well-integrated into the story, and make The Sparrow a coherent, thoughtful play full of melancholy and grace. Just the way I like my superhero stories.

Watercolor of court in Gandria, Ticino

This is my first attempt at what I’d originally planned to be a fairly challenging painting, taking the best parts of a few photographs and working them into a new imaginary composition. Doing multiple sketches was tedious, and dulled my enthusiasm for the image, so I gave up trying to draw a good layout of the elements I liked and just traced a 5×7 printout of a photograph. I would normally consider this cheating.

With the tiresome drawing out of the way, the painting went pretty well. I think the sunlit areas all look good, but the shadowy parts in the foreground need more detail and deeper color. And that orange triangle above the red awning is just wrong. But considering that I haven’t been practicing much lately, I’m happy with how it turned out.

Here’s some books I’ve read recently and don’t have a lot to say about. About which I don’t have a lot to say. Whatever.

Blindsight, Peter Watts, 2006

This concept of Earth “wuv” confuses and infuriates us!

This is the first hard SF book I’ve read in a while, and it was thoroughly enjoyable. A lot of the ideas were familiar from my previous SF and non-fiction reading, but they were put together in a very coherent story with a strong narrative and a minumim of tedious exposition. Watts takes few central ideas and builds plot, character, and setting out from them, so the tone of the first-person narrator matches the tone of the story itself and the themes of the book: rational, cold, dark, no warm fuzzy feelings. There is no warm fuzziness of any kind in this story.

General plot: A ship with a small crew is sent to make first contact with an alien something that’s camped out past the Kuiper belt and has sent probes to scan Earth. The crew is composed of five humans, but this being 2082 humans aren’t so human anymore. What with the genetically engineered vampire, the linguist with her brain partitioned into multiple personalities, and the tactical and science specialists with their nervous systems hooked up to machines, the humaniest human on board is the half-brained narrator who’s had his social skills and empathy surgically removed.

Well, he’s physically the most human, but mentally the least human. Which is pretty much the theme of the book: If you can chop off and change parts of a body, replace them with something more perceptive, intelligent, and efficient, and still have “you” inside there looking out, then would you be even more competent if you cut out the part that’s “you”?

Familiar sci-fi themes:
1. First contact, when the creepy aliens do something creepy and alien that freaks out humanity as a whole.
2. Traveling in a cool spaceship to a weird alien place, lots of entertaining (and well-researched, judging from the bibliography) science-babble as characters explore the place. It’s so creepy and alien!
3. Attempting to understand unknowable aliens. Those aliens sure are different from us humans. And yet, in understanding them, can we not better understand ourselves?
4. The characters are bioengineered humans augmented to be smarter, more perceptive, and more efficient. Those humans sure are different from us humans. And yet, in reading about them, can I not better understand myself?
5. In order to survive/adapt/compete, human civilization must transfigure/destroy itself. Being human just isn’t going to cut it anymore.

New (to me) sci-fi ideas:
1. Genetically engineered vampires! Homo sapiens whedonum. Ha!
2. “Technology implies belligerence”. One of the Watts’s themes is that all technology is an attempt to change the natural state of things, so cultures evolve technology to the level they need to survive, and then a culture that’s developed in a harsher environment comes along and destroys them with more highly evolved machinery and/or bodies. Guns, Germs, and Steel, but with post-humans, AI, and aliens.
3. Sentience is not an adaptive trait. Losing our humanity through augmentation, genetic engineering, or uploading ourselves into virtual reality is not enough. To compete on an interstellar level we need to lose consciousness itself. All this navel-gazing self-awareness is just slowing us down.

I liked the narrator. I imagine that many of the geeks in the book’s intended audience can identify with not really “getting” human interaction, and needing to get by socially on a lot of observation and learned behavior. I’m only slightly socially impaired (I like to think), but a lot of it was familiar to me, especially the funny and sad scenes of the narrator trying to manage his relationship with his irrational sentimental girlfriend. And I liked the fact that the narrator trying to constantly figure everything out from observation both underscored the rationalist theme of the book and gave the author an excuse to explain things in first person that might have otherwise been cryptic or explained in exposition.

Now that I think about it, this book is antisocial geek propaganda. You know, in the future, when humans must compete on an insterstellar level, all that shmoopy social interaction is going to be useless, so we might as well start atrophying it now.

Note: if you want to read the opposite of this story, read Up the Walls of the World

I’m reading Fahrenheit 451 for book club. It’s been years since I last read it - all I remembered from my previous reading was the general premise and the protagonist Montag trying to cross a road ten lanes wide. A lot of the detail of the book slipped my mind, including the bizarre anti-Caesarean section rants in Part 2:

Mrs Bowles:

“I’ve had two children by cesarean section. No use going through all that agony for a baby. The world must reproduce you know, the race must go on…Two Caesarians turned the trick, yes sir. Oh, my doctor said, Caesarians aren’t necessary; you’ve got the hips for it, everything’s normal, but I insisted.”

Montag to Mrs Bowles:

“Go home and think of your first husband divorced and your second husband killed in a jet and your third husband blowing his brains out, go home and think of the dozen abortions you’ve had, go home and think of that and your damn Caesarian sections, too, and your children who hate your guts! Go home and think how it all happened and what did you ever do to stop it?”

So, the reader is informed that in Bradbury’s anti-intellectual dystopia, women are prey to such evils as divorce, suicide, abortion and Caesarian sections.

I get that the book was written in 1953, well before the sexual revolution and women’s lib. Gender-role stereotyping is to be expected. And I get that he is trying to show that his female characters are divorced from a natural life in that they don’t sleep and they spend all their time talking to televisions. Bradbury is known to be anti-technology. By not having natural childbirth, his women are in essence not being female and by extension not living normal human lives.

But, come on. Caesarians? Even if you accept as given that childbearing is the fulfillment of female life, and that C-sections are a perversion of that, he’s still implying that the women got knocked up the old-fashioned way and gestated for nine months before delivery. If he wanted to have women being separated from their supposed reproductive purpose, he should have had the fetuses gestating in glass tubes on a conveyor belt, like Aldous Huxley did 20 years earlier.

I think it’s a pretty striking failure of imagination. I know that criticizing mid-century SF authors for not thinking deeply about women’s issues is like…uh…criticizing Harlequin romances for not having enough rocketry …. but, if Bradbury would have thought for 2 minutes about the impact of technology on women’s reproductive health, he would have handled the matter of childbirth differently. I think it’s pretty obvious that he didn’t put any thought into it at all beyond “caesarians are unnatural, therefore they prove my point about the corrosive effects of technology on society”. And, ok, the book’s not about childbirth, but all the other symbols and motifs in the book make sense, so this one sticks out.

I almost prefer the approach of some of Bradbury’s less socially-minded contemporaries, like Eric Frank Russell or Hal Clement. They just ignore women completely, which pisses me off a lot less than Bradbury’s hamhanded women-as-metaphor.