“With stark, pessimistic science fictions, Nebula winner ... - Denver Post” plus 2 more |
- With stark, pessimistic science fictions, Nebula winner ... - Denver Post
- Excerpt: ‘Inseparable’ - New York Times
- National Writers Series to host Thomas Lynch - Traverse City Record-Eagle
| With stark, pessimistic science fictions, Nebula winner ... - Denver Post Posted: 29 May 2010 11:54 PM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. Recently anointed with his field's highest honor, the Nebula Award, science-fiction writer Paolo Bacigalupi asks you to consider the humble iPad. "If you look at the iPad and extrapolate, we say the future is shiny. It looks pretty nifty, actually," says the rising science-fiction superstar from tiny Paonia. That's more or less the perspective of Bacigalupi critics, who say his future visions are too dark and pessimistic. "If that is your dominant data point, then all the stuff I'm writing is bull," Bacigalupi says cheerily. The stuff he's writing? Well, yeah, it's pretty grim. In his 2009 debut novel, "The Windup Girl," a future Bangkok huddles in a post- oil world hammered by global warming, heartless corporations and pollution. But that's nothing compared with his story "The People of Sand and Slag," in which humans bioengineered to survive a blasted Earth — i.e., they can eat sand — come to accept their fading humanity. His work features no exciting frontiers in space, no magical sources of nonpolluting energy. But, Bacigalupi says, to write otherwise would be dishonest. Again, take the iPad. "Where did you get the materials for the batteries? What people were hurt in the manufacturing and shipping process? When you ask about using oil that's running out. . . . If those are your data points, the iPad is just window dressing on something very ugly," he says. Bacigalupi (pronounced BATCH-uh-guh-LOO-pee), born in 1973 in Colorado Springs, grew up reading classic science fiction by Robert Heinlein, Arthur C. Clarke and others. He forgives SF writers of the '50s and '60s, "who came by their optimism honestly," but isn't impressed by contemporaries who offer shiny, happy futures. "They are actively ignoring the (messed)-up (stuff) that's going down," he says. Bacigalupi won't cite "influences." But he does cop to "internalizing" lessons from past masters — intensity from William Gibson, storytelling from Heinlein, environmentally compromised futures from John Brunner, and from Ursula K. Le Guin the notion that "you can actually say something with your story, and it's OK." Like any sane science-fiction writer, he doesn't claim to predict the future. But, he says, his worlds sprout organically, like mushrooms from manure, out of current trends. "Every time you read the news and look at the data, they don't lead anywhere good," he says. "None of it says this is going to be better, there will be more energy and more species. . . . I'm not going to write something to console the reader and say everything's all right. . . . We aren't doing anything that's even remotely sustainable." Today's adults, he says, are waging "generational warfare" through resource depletion, global warming and pollution. "We're enjoying all the benefits of our highly industrialized society and passing all the costs along to our children. It's a giant extended middle finger to the next generation," says the married father of a 6-year-old boy. Bacigalupi, who rides a bike to work and frets over the size of his 1,500-square-foot home, says he lies awake at night worrying about the world his son will live in. That's one reason he decided to write his new novel, "Ship Breaker," for a young-adult audience. "Adult readers nod their heads like a Chihuahua (bobble head) on a dashboard and say, 'Wow, that's really deep.' Then they get in their car and drive to work again," he says. "But with young people, they actually still have a chance to make better decisions than we made." The massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico has, sadly, provided some real-world publicity for the new novel, which takes place along the Gulf Coast and "definitely leads to the kind of world I've created," he says. But Bacigalupi also sees the new novel as less grim than his other work. Taking his cue from "Citizen of the Galaxy" and other Heinlein juveniles, he says he was trying to write a "ripping good yarn" that would attract younger readers, especially boys. But "Ship Breaker" isn't exactly cheery. It features teenage protagonists living in a brutal, socially stratified future where they perform dangerous ship salvage for a pittance, violence is a part of daily life, and bioengineered animal-human hybrids serve as muscle for distant, rapacious corporations. Pollution has despoiled land and water. Nailer, the protagonist, is constantly on the run from his drug-addled, savage father. Yet it's a fast-paced, absorbing story that offers a somewhat hopeful message: You can choose your "family," and those who stand by you put blood ties to shame. And the novel is "age-appropriate" for adults. "Too much of young-adult writing is precious, and there are a number of very odd strictures," he says, noting that adult "gatekeepers" of young- adult literature — parents, librarians, teachers — like to pretend kids don't curse or have sex. Bacigalupi was asked to remove curse words that are used daily by many teens (well, specifically one word, which begins with "f"), but "they didn't blink when I said I'm going to grind up (a character) in gears." He hopes the sheer adventure of the story, coupled with exciting technology (such as his future sailing ships, which travel up to 50 knots using high-altitude sails) will awaken a sense of wonder in readers. And just maybe, he says, he'll inspire some kid playing video games in a bland, soul-sucking, suburb to engage with his world. "I'm delivering a short, sharp shock," he says. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| Excerpt: ‘Inseparable’ - New York Times Posted: 28 May 2010 09:58 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. When I was a small child I read fairy tales. I carried straining plastic bags of them home from the library every Saturday: Grimm, Perrault, Hans Christian Andersen, Arabian Nights, Br'er Rabbit, Celtic myths, Polish folktales, Italian ones, Japanese, Greek . . . Soon I started spotting repetitions. It thrilled me to detect the same basic shape (for instance, the motif of the selkie, or wife from the sea) under many different, exotic costumes. When I announced my discovery to my father, he broke it to me gently that others had got there first: a Russian called Vladimir Propp, and before him a Finn called Antti Aarne, who published his system of classifying folk motifs back in 1910. Ah well. This disappointment taught me, even more than the fairy tales had, that there is nothing new under the sun. I remained a greedy reader, and when I found myself falling for a girl, at fourteen, I began seeking out stories of desire between women. The first such title I spent my hoarded pocket money on was a truly grim Dutch novel first published in 1975, Harry Mulisch's Twee Vrouwen (in English, Two Women). Sylvia leaves Laura for Laura's ex-husband, Alfred — but, it turns out, only to get pregnant. The two women are blissfully reunited for a single evening of planning the nursery decor before Alfred turns up and shoots Sylvia dead, leaving Laura to jump out a window. Shaken but not dissuaded, I read on, for the next twenty years and counting. You would be forgiven for thinking that my book list must have been rather short. But the paradox is that writers in English and other Western languages have been speaking about this so-called unspeakable subject for the best part of a millennium. What I am offering now in Inseparable is a sort of map. It charts a territory of literature that, like all undiscovered countries, has been there all along. This territory is made up of a bewildering variety of landscapes, but I will be following half a dozen distinct paths through it. Despite a suggestion in the New York Times in 1941 that the subject of desire between women should be classified as "a minor subsidiary of tragedy," in fact it turns up across the whole range of genres. Reading my way from medieval romance to Restoration comedy to the modern novel, mostly in English (but often in French, and sometimes in translations from Latin, Italian, Spanish, or German), I uncover the most perennially popular plot motifs of attraction between women. Here they are, in a nutshell.
TRAVESTIES: Cross-dressing (whether by a woman or a man) causes the "accident" of same-sex desire.
INSEPARABLES: Two passionate friends defy the forces trying to part them.
RIVALS: A man and a woman compete for a woman's heart.
MONSTERS: A wicked woman tries to seduce and destroy an innocent one.
DETECTION: The discovery of a crime turns out to be the discovery of same-sex desire.
OUT: A woman's life is changed by the realization that she loves her own sex. At this point you may wonder, are the women in these plays, poems, and fictions lesbians? Not necessarily, is how I would begin to answer. But perhaps we are better off postponing that question until we have asked more interesting ones. In the first five of my six chapters, I will be looking at relations between women, rather than the more historically recent issue of self-conscious sexual orientation. Although I occasionally say lesbian as shorthand, the twenty-first-century use of that word as a handy identity label does not begin to do justice to the variety of women's bonds in literature from the 1100s to the 2000s. The past is a wild party; check your preconceptions at the door. In writing Inseparable, I have had to be very selective. A hint or a glimpse does not constitute a plot motif: I include only texts in which the attraction between women is undeniably there. It must also be more than a moment; it must have consequences for the story. The emotion can range from playful flirtation to serious heartbreak, from the exaltedly platonic to the sadistically lewd, but in every case it has to make things happen. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
| National Writers Series to host Thomas Lynch - Traverse City Record-Eagle Posted: 28 May 2010 04:50 AM PDT Message from Five Filters: If you can, please donate to the full-text RSS service so we can continue developing it. May 28, 2010 National Writers Series to host Thomas LynchTRAVERSE CITY — In poems and essays, with wit and elegant words, author Thomas Lynch lays bare some of death's mysteries. Lynch gently guides readers into descriptions of a grieving daughter who wants to know why her father died, the details of running a funeral home in Milford and his glee at rhyming "treacheries" with "upholsteries." "Apparition & Late Fictions: A Novella and Stories" is his latest book and first work of fictional short stories. Lynch will appear at the City Opera House as a guest of the Traverse City National Writers Series at 7 p.m. Wednesday, June 2. Traverse City's Jerry Dennis, author of "The Living Great Lakes: Searching for the Heart of the Inland Seas," will introduce Lynch and lead a discussion with him. Lynch began writing more fiction as his work scheduled allowed him more time. "Fiction (is) so based with character and narrative you sort of had to stay with it on a day-to-day basis," Lynch said. "Hanging around with other writers, I was disabused of the notion that you had to know the end of the story before you started writing." Many of the stories in his new book are set in Michigan, where Lynch has lived all his life. He also keeps a family home in Ireland and spends time at Mullett Lake. The characters are familiar, too. Lynch's son is a fishing guide, as is a main character in the new book, a man tasked with spreading his father's ashes. In those pages there also appear an embalmer, a casket salesman, a clergyman and an academic. "It's nice to have an infrastructure of a story so well-known that the rest you can just make up," Lynch said. He makes it a daily practice to read or write a poem. Poetry "is a way to tune your ear," he said. Among fiction writers, he "never got over" Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. And his advice to young writers, whom the Writers Series supports through a scholarship fund, is simple: Read. "Reading, I think, is the predicate for all writing," he said. "Read the phone book. Recite it to yourself...; listen to the language out loud." Lynch's books include "Still Life in Milford," "The Undertaking: Life Studies from the Dismal Trade," a finalist for the National Book Award, and "Booking Passage: We Irish and Americans." Another book of poetry is to be published this year. He also finished a play which he hopes to see produced in Ireland soon. The author may be known to local audiences as the subject of the film "Learning Gravity," shown at last year's Traverse City Film Festival. Lynch and Dennis met as instructors at the Bear River Writers' Conference near Boyne City. Dennis praised Lynch for "the clarity of his vision" and "the originality of his use of the language." Dennis, who is working on a new book and a television series based on his work, is impressed by "the sheer output" of Lynch's writing. "I'm also in awe of his industriousness," Dennis said. "The schedule he keeps up of travel..., and he continues to serve, at least intermittently, as the funeral director in Milford. That puts most of us to shame." Advance tickets to the Opera House event are $15 for adults and $5 for students. They may be purchased at www.cityoperahouse.org or at the Opera House box office. Five Filters featured article: Into the Abyss. Available tools: PDF Newspaper, Full Text RSS, Term Extraction. |
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