Evil Empires

A good thriller requires an infinitely superior enemy bent on world domination or some other nefarious goal.

Usually, that role is filled by the prevailing Evil Empire. During the 1930s and ’40s, that slot was amply filled by the Nazis and the Imperial Japanese. After WWII, the Soviet Union stepped up to the plate, offering Cold War and surrogates like North Vietnam and Angola.

As the Red Star began to fade, authors and economists began casting around for a new enemy. With only one superpower, the field was severely depleted. For a while, the Japanese played the role as an excellent candidate. Their rising economic power, built on automobiles, consumer electronics and heavy machinery, drove a boom.  They bought US government debt and companies with undervalued yen. Their real estate purchases included the Rockefeller Plaza, half the golf courses on the West coast and most of Hawaii.

I’m reading an old Clive Cussler book, written in the late 1980s. His evil Japanese Industrialists were bent of nuclear extortion, using atomic bombs planted in ugly brown imported cars. The plot was believable at the time. Many Americans were already convinced that we would fall into a new Greater East Asian co-Prosperity Sphere.

Then the bubble burst.

Japan fell into an economic slump that has lasted most of the last twenty years. If they can’t get their own financial house in order, how can they manage world domination?

More recently, the Chinese have poked their heads behind the curtain. They own most of America’s public debt. Our country is awash in Chinese goods. They are actively engaged in industrial and military espionage, and are hacking into every computer in America, including mine. Besides, they are a repressive society, with a vast network of internet gatekeepers who to keep every Chinese person from Googling about Tiananmen Square. As if they don’t already know. They’ve got the bomb, for God’s sake! It’s time to teach our kids to duck and cover all over again.

Behind the bamboo curtain, China has its own set of troubles. They are growing too quickly. Factory workers want human rights and air conditioning. Two-thirds of the population still lives in abject poverty. They’d have trouble projecting military force across the straits into Taiwan.

But the novelists aren’t worried. Korea is waiting in the wings, the Russian oligarchs enjoy brutality as much as their obscene wealth, and Jihad is alive and well despite the demise of Osama bin Laden.

There will always be an evil empire. We just have to pick the right one for the week our next thriller comes out. They may be gone tomorrow.

Science Fiction

The first thing that comes to mind is cowboys and aliens, like V, but Sci Fi has a tradition of addressing the moral and ethical dilemmas of the day without raising the hackles of readers.

I am a great fan of Frank Herbert’s Dune series. Frank wrote six books through the late sixties and early seventies. The books span a timeframe of several thousand years, following the unintended consequences of genetic and religious manipulation of a widely scattered human society. His scathing look at the callous use of religion to foment unrest was particularly prescient in light of the Jihad that emerged long after his death.

His son Brian and a co-author expanded the series to document the back story about the battle between robots and humans, the Butlerian Jihad, the political framework of the Imperium, and the ultimate consequences of the events in the original series.

Many contemporary topics enter the story. The Ixians press the boundaries of humanity with cyborg technology. Ray Kurzweil argues that we are less than a generation away from facing this dilemma in reality. Herbert’s Tlielaxu push the limits of cloning with their gholas, genetically modified food and body parts on demand. Again, we are on the precipice of these issues.  Religious manipulation of the public discourse fills the headlines every day.

Science Fiction becomes a forum for discussing these issues by taking the topics out of the headlines and putting them in an alien context. By stripping away the current hot-button language and knee-jerk reactions, authors can explore the consequences of these dilemmas minus the preconceived conclusions that cloud people's thinking.

Consider one example: Philip K. Dick wrote The Minority Report, a short story about the ability to predict when a crime would be committed and prevent it. We can all agree that preventing crime is a worthy goal, but we are less in accord over potential criminals be detained to prevent crimes. Long sentences for major crimes are as much about prevention as punishment. Sex offenders are being detained after serving their sentences because they are likely to offend again.

But do we have the right to imprison someone who was GOING to be a sex offender, before they’ve hurt anybody at all? We can’t predict who will commit a crime, but what if we could? Do we have the moral authority to act on that knowledge? What if we’re wrong? How would we know?

THOSE are the kinds of questions good science fiction delves into, Star Wars notwithstanding.

Closed Borders

The world of books has come to a sad milestone. Borders is liquidating.

For those of you unfamiliar with the intricacies of bankruptcy law, a Chapter 11 bankruptcy involves reorganizing and eliminating debt while continuing to do business. Chapter 7, or liquidation, means all the assets are sold off. The company ceases to exist.

The world of cloth and paper books has suddenly shrunk. Mom-and-pop bookstores have been suffering for years under the onslaught of giant retailers like Barns and Noble and Borders. Amazon originally exacerbated the trend by unifying retail into a single, online distributor.

This is different.

Borders was a bellwether of paper books versus eBooks. Some pundits fear its demise means that paper books have entered an inevitable death spiral. Perhaps this is true, but I’m not sure how dire the situation actually is.

The problem is, paper books are essential to publicity for new titles. How can you have a book signing for an eBook? What possible justification can you have for an author appearance if there’s nothing to buy?

People have suggested putting in an appearance on YouTube, in hopes that it will go viral, thereby building name recognition. My first idea might’ve brought me to the attention of the FBI, who are not known for their humor. I thought reading a passage would be too boring for words. My third idea is frightening, but I just might do it, anyway.

I could do it with a commercial in the form of cover art in the background, or a screen shot at the end, but the whole thing smacks of blatant self-promotion, which, of course, this blog is not. Did I mention that my titles are available on Amazon?

One enterprising eBook romance author got around the dilemma by offering her first book for free as an enticement to buy the others in the series. She was wildly successful. Maybe I’ll try that when the contract runs out with my current publisher.

Illiterary

I don’t know what great literature is.

I’ve just finished rereading Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. For those of you who’ve had the good sense or disdain to stay away, the story is about an American expatriate newspaper reporter living in Paris who goes down to Pamplona for the running of the bulls. He is accompanied by a crew of bankrupt, dissipated upper class friends. The principal features of the story are explicit anti-Semitism and extreme drinking bouts, with a few guy adventures sprinkled in.

While Hemingway includes some vivid description and the prose is rich with short, declarative sentences, he often repeats himself. The dialog is repetitive to the point of boredom. While this may be an accurate depiction of the way drunk (or upper class) people talk, it does not make for snappy repartee. His characters seem well drawn, and the plot about the bad end of an affair between two of the characters is easy enough to follow, but it is not the kind of writing that fills me with pleasure to read.

Hemingway’s writing is much better than James Joyce’s, but that is not saying much.

A friend of mine says that you need to work to understand (and enjoy) great music. Perhaps the same thing could be said about great literature.

I don’t believe it.

Great music, art and literature should resonate with their audience. A bond should form between author and reader that communicates all the emotion, imagery and nuance. That process of transmission is what great writing is all about. When I read, I expect images to form before my mind’s eye that place me in the scene with the characters. I want to be there, to see what they see, to feel what they feel. When I don’t I feel cheated, like I’ve missed something.

Hemingway can do that, but at times I feel like wandering off to find another group of people who are more interesting to be around. The book was published in 1926, so it is one of his earlier efforts. Islands in the Stream, written at the end of his career, is much better, although the drunks are still carousing.

I’m obviously not in the same league with Hemingway, but I try to do the same thing with my own writing. I want to put my readers into the minds of my characters. If they are there, they may get caught up in the events of the story and be swept along with the events.

If the pace of events is not quick enough, if my characters are too cold and distant to interest readers, it is my fault. The story fails.

I would never do that intentionally.

Coffee Been

I recently suffered through a culinary crisis.

My local Meijer, which is undergoing extensive renovations, ran out of the forty ounce bags of Starbucks House Blend Coffee Beans. For a week!

This may not seem like more than a blip on the radar to you, but it was a major meltdown for me. Starbucks is available in a variety of forms, with different blends and roasts in various size bags. I ought to have found a satisfactory substitute in three seconds without taking a step.

Not so.

For starters, the only other choices came in ten ounce bags, a quarter the size of our usual purchase. Okay, grab a bag. But we drink a lot of coffee. Ten ounces might last ten minutes. Second, the only small bags of House Blend were ground. We ALWAYS grind our own beans. Ground beans are definitely unacceptable.

I looked at the other choices. Growing up in Boston, I started off with Dunkin Donuts coffee, but had a bad experience, once. Once burned, twice wary. I wasn’t going to buy a giant bag of unknown beans. I settled for the Meijer House Blend beans which were nothing like Starbucks. Before the twelve ounce bag was finished, I was down at Sam’s Club hunting for another big Starbucks bag. The first cup tasted like heaven. What’s next for me, cocaine?

What does coffee have to do with writing?

Coffee, like alcohol is a ubiquitous social lubricant. Offices everywhere are fueled with the stuff. Many people require major infusions just to get their heart started in the morning. Any work of fiction needs coffee references to anchor it in reality.

Coffee is also a time marker. Over the last hundred years, it has undergone an evolution that marks the transformation of American society from a rural backwater to a sophisticated urbane consumer icon.

Originally, we went to the A&P for Eight O’clock. The grinding machine sat next to the cash register, filling the store with that pungent ambrosia. Then Maxwell House and Chock Full O’ Nuts came along with big cans of coarsely ground beans. Then Folgers.

In the mid-1980s, I tasted Kona on a trip to Hawaii and suddenly realized that coffee was more than a generic drug. Our countertop grinder saw a succession of blends including Jamaican Blue Mountain before Starbucks swept over the scene, fomenting revolution. We have not been the same, since.

Other writers seem coffee obsessed, too. Stieg Larsson couldn’t cover a page without spilling two or three cups. Maybe it’s a Scandinavian thing.

Enough. My first cup waits. My hands are starting to shake.