Florida

I am in Florida for both the University of Southern Florida's Conference on the Apocalypse and then, later in the week, the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts (ICFA). It will be a very full week, which I kicked off by flying from Buffalo to Florida at an insanely early hour of the morning. This was not helped by an overly cheerful sign in the Buffalo Airport: "Keep your smile in the upright and locked position!" Ugh.

Tampa, however, was lovely. I had lunch with Rick Wilber, who is organizing the conference, and Joe and Gay Haldeman. Next we toured the Lettuce Lake nature preserve, in which high boardwalks hold visitors safely above swamps, keeping tourists and alligators apart. Here are Gay, Rick, and Joe at the start of the nature walk:A lake filled with wildlife and an amazing number of birds, all of which Gay could identify. Also alligators (I saw two!), turtles, snakes, and perhaps a Swamp Monster (not seen, but a good candidate would be the Burmese python, which has lately infested Florida. It can grow to 30 feet long and has teeth):

Eventually we all had to get to work, visiting a classroom of Rick's students, followed by dinner. Tomorrow (Tuesday) are more classroom visits and readings. Wednesday comes a panel on various types of apocalypses, including fictional (Joe and me), environmental (a USF chemistry professor), and religious (a professor of religion). I'm looking forward to that. Any good apocalypse worth its name should first take out that sign in the airport.

New Words

All writers love words. Here are a batch of new ones, the winners in the WASHINGTON POST'S annual MENSA INVITATIONAL contest. The goal is to make a new word from one or more old ones. I actually like #14 the best!

1. Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period of time.

2. Ignoranus: A person who's both stupid and an asshole.

3. Intaxicaton: Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.

4. Reintarnation: Coming back to life as a hillbilly.

5. Bozone ( n.): The substance surrounding stupid people that stops bright ideas from penetrating. The bozone layer, unfortunately, shows little sign of breaking down in the near future.

6. Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid.

7. Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high

8. Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.

9. Inoculatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

10. Osteopornosis: A degenerate disease. (This one got extra credit.)

11. Karmageddon: It's like, when everybody is sending off all these really bad vibes, right? And then, like, the Earth explodes and it's like, a serious bummer.

12. Decafalon (n.): The grueling event of getting through the day consuming only things that are good for you.

13. Glibido: All talk and no action.

14. Dopeler Effect: The tendency of stupid ideas to seem smarter when they come at you rapidly.

15. Arachnoleptic Fit (n..): The frantic dance performed just after you've accidentally walked through a spider web.

16. Beelzebug (n.): Satan in the form of a mosquito, that gets into your bedroom at three in the morning and cannot be cast out.

17. Caterpallor ( n.): The color you turn after finding half a worm in the fruit you're eating.

Jane Austen and Gregor Mendel

Jane Austen obviously did not know about the work of monk-geneticist Gregor Mendel -- for one thing, she died a few year before he was born, and decades before he began quietly drawing charts of pea cross-breeding in the monastery garden. Nor do Jane's books show much interest in the scientific advancements of her day. Nonetheless, her characters, which (for the purpose of this post) conveniently come with siblings and parents, show a quite credible adherence to Mendellian gene patterns.Consider: in PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, Mrs. Bennet is silly and dumb, Mr. Bennet intelligent and sarcastic. Of the five daughters, two are silly and dumb (Lydia and Kitty), one silly and intelligent (Mary), one intelligent and sarcastic (Elizabeth), and one intelligent and calm (Jane), much like her mother's brother. If silliness is thus dominant and Mrs. Bennet is carrying an Ss combination (that brother got two ss from their parents), then this is a plausible genetic distribution among their overspring. The same for intelligence, with calmness and sarcasm recessive.

You can do the same with the three daughters in PERSUASION. And MANSFIELD PARK, with its four siblings, is a perfect Mendellian inheritance pattern for sensitivity as a recessive gene (only Edmond, 25% of the offspring, has it).

Of course, personality traits are not that easy accounted for by single genes. But that's not my point. It is, rather, this: Good novelists intuitively understand the composition of real families. And real characters -- rounded, believable, interesting -- do not exist in a vacuum. They have, or at least had, families, which they were partially shaped by.

Often, SF does not do this very well. Too many protagonists exist in a familial and genetic vacuum. True, if your hero is off exploring a new planet, he probably does not have the entire family along so we can observe them. But she does have memory (good or bad), and using it to create a wider past can help characters seem more believable. Better yet, root the character in a family -- there is no better way to evoke more aspects of your fictional society. When I first read Ursula LeGuin's THE DISPOSSESSED, it was a revelation to me how much she solidified her society by including families in it. As does China Mieville in the more recent EMBASSYLAND.

At some level, Jane Austen knew what she was doing. But, then, she always did.

Writers and Books

Journalist Malcom Gladwell's latest book is a collection of essays, WHAT THE DOG SAW. The title refers to an essay on the "Dog Whisperer," Cesar Millan, but of more interest to writers may be the article "Late Bloomers: Why Do We Equate Genius With Precocity?" Gladwell argues, to put it succinctly, that we shouldn't, because there are actually two types of gifted people and their brains are wired differently.

The early bloomers do their best work... well, early. A painting done by Picasso in his twenties is now valued, on average, at four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. Orson Wells made his most valued film (CITIZEN KANE) at age twenty-five. Wordsworth famously wrote wonderful poetry when young, not-so-wonderful (all right, a lot of it is terrible, as I well remember from my days as a graduate student) when older.

In the other camp are the late bloomers, who struggle for years to attain mastery of their art. They seem to need to experiment, sometimes for decades, before they figure out what they want to express and how best to express it. Late bloomers include Cezanne, writer Ben Fountain (winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN award for BRIEF ENCOUNTERS WITH CHE GUEVARA), and Alfred Hitchcock, who made most of his most notable movies between ages fifty-four and sixty-two.

This should be very encouraging to those writers who stat late and struggle long. It doesn't mean you are not talented. It just means your talent needs a lot of time to mature -- an oak tree rather than a fast-growing poplar. If, of course, you don't give up.

On a more personal note, 2012 promises to be a good year for me. I have five books coming out! Three got backed up in the publishing pipeline -- more on these as they appear -- and two are reprint collections. The first, pictured below, is from the growing small press Arc Manor and is not quite a full-length book, not quite a chapbook. It includes six of my older stories on genetic engineering, the first one a winner of both a Nebula and a Sturgeon:
"The Flowers of Aulit Prison"
"First Rites"
"Trinity"
"Margin of Error"
"Dancing on Air"
"And No Such Things Grow Here"
Available in both print and ebook.

Miscellaneous News

This is a round-up of various miscellany:

Potlatch, a small Seattle con, was rumored to be great fun. Friday night was, when I attended, but after that I came down with some sort of flu-ey thing and missed the entire rest of the con. No fun.

The best news I got while sick is that TECH REVIEW, out of MIT, is taking my story "Pathways." Last year TECH REVIEW did an all-fiction issue that was such a success that they decided to repeat it, asking if I would write a story "centered on some emerging technology." I chose optogenetics, a combination of genetics and optics that involves injected genetically modified, light-sensitive cells into the brain and then controlling their expression via laser light sent down a fiber optic cable implanted in the brain. A new science, founded in 2005, this has been called by one MIT researcher "God's gift to neurology." So far it has (1) allowed neural pathways to be mapped in mice with far greater precision than previously, and (2) some mice motorways to be controlled, including Parkinson's staggers in afflicted mice. Human trials are decades away -- except in my story.

My interview with Mike Duran is live at his site: http://mikeduran.com/2012/02/interview-w-nancy-kress/

There are still a few places available at Taos Toolbox this year, taught by Walter Jon Williams and me (www.taostoolbox.com). Come work on your fiction in the gorgeous mountains of New Mexico for two weeks! Or, if the open sea is your thing, sign up for a four-day working cruise in the Bahamas, taught by Mike Resnick, Kevin J. Anderson, super-agent Eleanor Wood, me, and others: http://www.SailSuccess.com

What else? Oh -- don't get the flu. And I had a flu shot! The universe is not fair.

Stories and Amazon

It has been a very long time since I blogged; I'd be surprised if any of you are still checking this site. The reason is and is not a good one: I was slammed with work. This is my own fault, having agreed to too many anthology, teaching, and blurbing invitations. Must learn to say no!

At any rate, two pieces of story news, one good and one not. The good news: The story I posted about in the last few blogs is finished, and accepted (more details when the editor says I may). It includes two kinds of plausible, near-future science, space travel and neurology. The first was not hard for me since I read about it all the time; the second was more difficult. It involved a lot of rewriting. But I'm pleased with the result.

I am not, however, pleased with Amazon. And I have been such a faithful customer! Even use a Kindle! Buy a lot of books from them! But despite all this touching loyalty, Amazon has made another grab for market control, fighting with the distributor IPG. Amazon asked for a larger share of the price of books that IPG distributes. IPG said no. Amazon has thus pulled from its shelves the books IPG distributes. This may or may not end up being temporary, but among the affected publishers is Tachyon, which next month will bring out my stand-alone novella AFTER THE FALL, BEFORE THE FALL, DURING THE FALL. I am very fond of this story, and very disappointed in Amazon.

Moving On With the Story

My hard-SF story now has characters and a plot. It also has a voice, although not a particularly distinctive one.

Voice is the way the story is written: diction and sentence construction as much as content. It may be the voice of the character, especially in first person. It may be the habitual style of an author. I can always recognize work by Ursula LeGuin or Karen Fowler from just one paragraph -- sometimes one sentence. And I think I have sometimes achieved and sustained an individual voice, as in "Fountain of Age" or "Beggars in Spain."

But I find it hard to do in hard SF. There is so much technical information to be conveyed, and somehow I can't seem to do it except in straight-forward, serviceable prose. Clear, but neither individual nor lyrical. Furthermore, I think very few writers can. NEUROMANCER has a distinctive, jazzy, unmistakable style -- but Gibson's computer world is mostly fanciful, not realistic. Bruce Sterling, a lesser stylist, is a surer guide to what the future might actually look like.

So my story moves along in a useful but not captivating voice, and I hope that other fictional elements will make up for the lack.