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Worn Out in the Big City

Aug 30th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Just got downtown here in Chicago for the World Science Fiction Convention, Chicon 7. I have a nice room on an upper floor of a good hotel, and pointedly not at the Hyatt, the main convention location. That was deliberate. I like peace and quiet, especially when I try to sleep, and I’ve been to enough Worldcons to know that I’m peculiar in that regard.

Ok, sure, I’m peculiar in a lot of other regards too. But for the next couple of days, that’s the big one.

Crowds have always made me uneasy. This was true even 35-odd years ago when I worked downtown just a few blocks south of here. I was in and out of office buildings all day, fixing Xerox machines, so I was down there on the sidewalks flowing with the trudging masses more than most people do on any given day. After that there was the ride home on the El, packed like bits in a Zip file. I didn’t find it exhilarating. I found it exhausting. I never knew just how exhausting until I bought a very Cleaver-ish white house in a tidy, quiet Rochester NY picket-fence suburb. Carol and I could sit on our patio on temperate days and have supper without hearing anything but birds, lawnmowers, and the occasional truck on Monroe Avenue. Our biggest challenge was keeping Mr. Byte from raiding the strawberry patch when we weren’t looking.

As my friends know, I am not shy and retiring in the least. I’ve given many speeches and seminars to large-ish audiences, including one that must have been close to a thousand people. I even did standup comedy once, though I did have some help and a very workable crowd.

I’ve never been stepped on at a soccer riot, nor squeezed in front of a stage at a rock concert. I can only conclude that a preference for quiet living is genetic. I wonder if it’s maybe yet another survival-selected holdover from my cave-dwelling ancestors, who knew in their guts that when too many Neanderthals hung out in the same place, skulls got bashed and the hunting got thin.

So in a few minutes I’ll throw this thing in the room safe and thread my way down into the pandemonium that is a Worldcon. I have people to see that I don’t see very often, books to buy (and sign; I’ll be at the ISFiC Press table at some point) and a meeting with an editor who has expressed interest in Ten Gentle Opportunities. As always it will be a cortisol thrill-ride, and tonight I will gladly vanish back up here and leave the all-night partying to those better adapted than I.

More as it happens.

Posted in: Travelogs.
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Odd Lots

Aug 21st, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
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Harry Harrison, Gentleman Atheist, RIP

Aug 15th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

65,000 words. This is still hard. But I am damned well going to make it work.

One reason I will make it work is a man who left this world today for other worlds, not that he was any stranger to other worlds. Harry Harrison is one of those guys who isn’t appreciated as much as he deserves, for reasons that escape me. Most people know of him for Slippery Jim Di Griz and little else. We forget that his story Make Room! Make Room! inspired Soylent Green. Almost nobody knows that he wrote the Flash Gordon newspaper comic strip in the 50s and 60s. (I didn’t know it until I read his obituary.) And I’m amazed that more people haven’t read what I consider just about his best work, The Daleth Effect. And what I do consider his best work may not be everybody’s choice, but too bad: The Technicolor Time Machine beats all.

When I was fresh out of the Clarion SF workshop in 1973, I cleaned up a Clarion story of mine and sent it to him. He bought it for $195, and when it appeared in his anthology Nova 4 the next year, I was (finally!) a published SF writer.

The story was “Our Lady of the Endless Sky,” now in my collection Cold Hands and Other Stories. It’s about a slightly clueless Roman Catholic priest who manages to be sent as the Catholic chaplain to a church constructed on the Moon. When an industrial accident destroys one of the lunar base’s hydroponic gardens, a new garden is built under the transparent dome of the church. Father Bernberger is heartbroken. He’s lost his church…or has he?

It was a decent story for something written by a 21-year-old kid who was “young for his age.” But far more remarkable than that was the fact that Harry Harrison bought it at all. You see, Harry was an atheist, and said so as often as it took for people to get the message. So why would he buy a story about religion?

The one time I met him, at the SFWA reception at one of the late 70s Worldcons, I thanked him for buying the story, and asked him exactly that. (All the SMOFs had told me about him being hostile to religion.) He laughed and said, “It wasn’t about religion. It was about a man who had faith.”

He told me to keep writing. I did.

Now, I’ve taken a lot of kidding and scolding and eye-rolling down the years for being such a naif as to go to church every Sunday and even (egad) pray. I’ve seen a lot of desperately mean-spirited condemnation not only of religious nutters (as though there have never been atheist nutters) but also of the quietly religious people who tend the sick and feed the poor without making any attempt to convert them, nor saying anything more about it.

None of that from Harry Harrison, at least not that I’ve ever seen. He was a gentleman atheist who gave me a push by publishing my story about a church and a priest, even though it went against the grain of his personal philosophy. He shook my hand and told me to keep going. He wrote good, engaging yarns that made me gasp and made me laugh, yarns that I freely admit to imitating. He is one reason (though not the sole reason) that I will not condemn atheism as my species of Catholicism is sometimes condemned.

Godspeed, good friend, however you may understand the wish.

Posted in: Daybook, Memoir.
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Odd Lots

Aug 9th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
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Humor Is Hard

Aug 4th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
9 comments

Humor is hard. Way hard. Especially when you attempt to write 25,000 words of it at a rate of 1,000 words a day. As I mentioned recently, I have a significant press interested in my novel-in-progress, Ten Gentle Opportunities. I’m trying to have all 80,000 words of it not only written but polished by September 15th. As of this afternoon, I’m at 57,100. I’m on track. (Barely.)

But man, this is hard.

Now, I have a knack for humor. I was famous for opening with a humorous anecdote while doing the “Structured Programming” column in DDJ back in the ’90s. (I learned that from Isaac Asimov, glory unmeasurable be upon him.) Does anybody remember the Pizza Pride Girl? I got more fan mail on that one column than on some of my books, and for a couple of months afterward I’d get regular emails asking what the Pizza Pride Girl was wearing that day. I did standup for most of an hour at my 40th grade school reunion in 2006, to the extent that some of the girls who had ignored me in 1966 came up to me and said things like, “Jeff, I didn’t know you were funny.” (One added, “I don’t mean funny-looking. Not that you were ever funny-looking. Really, you weren’t.” Sorry. I was.)

I’ve written a number of well-regarded humorous SF shorts, including “Stormy Versus the Tornadoes” and “Sympathy on the Loss of One of Your Legs.” (Both are in my collection, Souls in Silicon .) In 1978 I wrote a (still unpublished) lighthearted 27,000-word action/adventure hard SF novella in the style of Keith Laumer’s Retief stories, which took me close to a year; in fact, by the time I submitted it to Asimov’s SF Adventure Magazine, the magazine had folded. Most of my longer SF items (including Drumlin Circus and The Cunning Blood ) contain a certain amount of comic relief. But never in my entire writing life have I tried to be funny for 80,000 words in a row.

The editor who wants to see the novel suggested at a recent writers’ conference that humorous SF is uncommon because Douglas Adams set the bar so high. If true, that’s unfortunate. I’m not trying to be Douglas Adams, just as I wasn’t trying to be Isaac Asimov at DDJ. I’m not going for some kind of world record. Genius does not invalidate competence. I just want to tell a good story that makes people laugh.

The problem lies in sustaining the mood. The premise is already loopy, in the way that the Harold Shea stories were loopy. Going in I had a lot of ideas that ran from whimsical to downright silly. One of my AIs discovers that she has an FPS-style Core Wars video game built into her kernel (complete with a cannon that shoots machine instructions) and uses it to fight back when she’s attacked by malware, right down to a Lara Croft-style skin. On another of my AIs’ bookshelves is a book called Sixty-Four Shades of Gray. Then, of course, are my already-famous dancing zombies. I’m attempting every type of humor I’ve ever heard of, with the single exception of puns. Will it work? I don’t know yet. Sooner or later (by this fall, with any luck) I will.

In the meantime, a sample from today’s output:

…If the gomog failed to return, he would not be leaving this universe soon, or perhaps ever. What Stypek thought about that changed from hour to hour. He had spent some wistful moments on the edge of sleep remembering the pleasures of Ttrynngbrokklynnygyggug: finding castoff spells in garbage heaps, eating stewed squykk, sleeping in drain pipes, studying ancient books until his eyes burned, dodging zombies, running away from angry magicians…

Yes, he supposed that there could be worse fates than being stranded in a universe like this. Here he had been given fine clothes and the best food he had ever eaten. Carolyn’s meals were sublime, especially those containing meat from an animal called a spam, which his own world was not fortunate enough to offer. She had gifted him with sacks of delicacies that any nobleman in Ttrynngbrokklynnygyggug would kill for: Doritos, Cheetos, Pringles, Ruffles, and sweets baked by elves.

Even the protective charms were delicious. Carolyn had offered him a sack of edible talismans called gummies that would ward off bears. They did seem effective; after three days he had yet to see a bear. A small jar of similar talismans were either made from flint stones or deflected them away. (He would learn when he finally worked out the secret of opening the jar.) No matter. With the protective spells he had carried with him mapped to inexplicable or useless things, Stypek would gladly arm himself against local hazards however he could.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
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Odd Lots

Aug 2nd, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Posted in: Odd Lots.
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Daywander

Jul 29th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
12 comments

Aeros Birthday.jpg

Today is Aero’s sixth birthday. We’ve given the Pack (and their forebears, Mr. Byte and Chewy) cake and lemon bars on their various birthdays down through the years, with good results. Dash, however, is peculiar in that he simply doesn’t like sweet things. So this time we took a quarter pound of good burger and divided it four ways. (L-R: Jack, Aero, QBit, and Dash.) We were out of birthday candles, so I took a plumber’s candle and stuck it in Aero’s portion.

It’s a testament to the quality of Carol’s training that even after she placed the plates of burger in front of them, saying “Leave it!” was enough to keep them seated patiently on the bench behind the table. Once the photos were taken, saying “Take it!” ensured that the burger was gone in two heartbeats. Maybe one. (Carol yanked the candle first.)

It’s also been two weeks since I last posted here, which is well beyond my usual threshold of pain. Insiders know what’s going on: I have a novel to finish. And I’m not trying to finish it just to get it off my do-it list. No sirree: An editor at a significant press has asked for the full manuscript.

Boy. Nothing like a little request like that to light a fire under a guy.

I have a pair of hard deadlines now: Finished manuscript by 8/31. Polished manuscript ready to ship by 9/15. Today was a milestone: I hurtled past 53,700 words, which was the finished length of Drumlin Circus. That means that Ten Gentle Opportunities is the longest piece of fiction I’ve written since The Cunning Blood crossed the finish line on Good Friday 1999.

It is also the strangest. At my Clarion workshop in 1973, Lloyd Biggle, Jr said during a guest lecture that you can’t mix SF and fantasy. I’ve had it in my head ever since then that when Biggle’s words reached my ears, it was like swearing on the Runestaff: I knew I would damned well do it someday.

Sorry, Lloyd. I offer you: Dancing zombies. Well-dressed AIs. Object-oriented magic. Virtual universes, virtual doughnuts, virtual Frisbees, virtual stomach acid. Romance. A cannon that fires machine instructions. Heavily networked kitchen appliances. Total war waged inside a robotic copier factory. (Did I miss anything? I’ve heard there’s a sink shortage locally.)

I admit it. The romance has been hard. Reading romance novels to see how the pros do it was not especially helpful. Worse, I have no real-world experience engaging in screaming matches with significant others, of whom there have been exactly four, anyway. The romance may thus seem less real than the magic, which might be described as Supernatural Pascal.

What’s been harder than the romance has been maintaining the mood for 53,000 words. Humor is just, well, hard, which is a topic worthy of one or more entries all by itself. I think it works, but it’s hard to know until the whole thing’s done. I suspect my beta testers will tell me. If they don’t, my editor will.

53,800 words down. 26,200 words to go. Three weeks. Watch me.

Posted in: None Of The Above.
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Odd Lots

Jul 15th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
7 comments
  • I didn’t know this until the other day: The instrumental riff in ELP’s “Touch and Go” is not ultimately from Ralph Vaughan Williams’s “Variations on Greensleeves.” It’s a far older folk melody called “Lovely Joan,” and the song is about a girl who, when asked by some aristocratic lout to hand over her virginity in exchange for a ring and a roll in the hay, keeps her virginity and steals his horse instead. Much better deal.
  • Here’s a tool to see if your email was on one of the 400,000 accounts recently leaked from Yahoo.
  • One of the big downsides of the ASUS Transformer Prime is that the micro SD card pops out of its slot very easily. I found mine on the cushion of my reading chair the other day, and have no least clue how I managed that, apart from sitting there and looking at some weather maps. I’m evidently not the only one with this problem.
  • I haven’t been over to The Consumerist in some time, but when I tried to go there the other day, Google marked it as an attack site. There’s not much to go by in Google’s details page, but it looks like an ad vector. This is why I use AdBlock Plus. (I went there from Linux and nothing bad happened.) UPDATE: They fixed the problem. Lesson: Nobody’s immune. Use AdBlock Plus.
  • Be sure to watch for auroras tonight, as far south as (I hope!) Colorado. Look east just before dawn and you’ll catch Jupiter, Venus, and maybe the crescent Moon.
  • A ride-em Iron Trilobyte! Yee-hah!
  • From the Utterly Obscure But Brilliant Music Department: Hunt down “The Last Farewell” by the New Christy Minstrels, from their ambum Ramblin’ (1964.) Bone-chilling harmony on the ancient melody “O Waly, Waly.”
  • From the Found Quotes Department: “It is all but impossible to sit quietly by while someone is throwing salad plates.” –James Thurber

Posted in: Odd Lots.
Tagged: · · ·

How Not to Fight Ebook Piracy

Jul 14th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet

The estimable Janet Perlman recently posted a link to an article suggesting a “new” concept in ebook piracy protection that doesn’t involve any sort of encryption or tying of files to a particular device. The gist of it is to embed a purchaser’s personal information in the file purchased. If the purchaser knows his/her name or address are somewhere in the file, well, they’re less likely to post it on Pirate Bay, no?

This concept is not new; I remember talking it as long as ten years ago, when ebooks were still exotica. It’s as wrongheaded as it is obvious, for the following reason: The fastest-growing source of files shared on Bit Torrent is material taken from stolen readers, tablets, and smartphones. If somebody swipes my tablet and the files stored on it are somehow traceable to me, then once the files appear on the file sharing networks, publishers might assume that I was the one who uploaded the files–which in most cases is a felony.

This is true whether or not my name is actually embedded in the files. A serial number or database key pointing to my sales record in the publisher’s store would be enough.

I’ve written before about massive ebook collections available on pirate sites. The file I mentioned in that entry was an old one, and crude. Newer and even bigger ones are available now. (No, I won’t tell you where they are.) Specialized collections are turning up as well, as specific as books on programming for Android.

Driving the trend is the appearance of specialized private Bit Torrent trackers catering to ebooks. If you’ve never studied up on the torrent scene it’s a little hard to explain, but Big Media pressure is driving a lot of torrent traffic into a darknet of members-only trackers that keep their members on very short leashes. To avoid getting kicked out you have to upload as much as or more than you download. Of course, if nobody wants to download what you upload (because it’s of poor quality or they already have it) your ratio goes down and the admins show you the door. This creates pressure to find new material to upload, especially in private trackers with few members who very quickly grab everything of even minor interest to them.

The torrent scene is a numbers game, and ebooks are small files compared to movies or TV shows. So collection editors are grabbing files anywhere they can to spin out new collections. If your device is stolen, your files will find their way to the pirate sites. If your name (or some other identifiable traceable to you) is in those files, you’re the one in trouble, and not the pirates themselves.

File piracy may be an unsolvable problem. The last thing we want to do is propose solutions that might turn completely honest purchasers into criminals–thus providing a perverse incentive to stop buying, and pirate other people’s files instead.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
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Kids as Parametric Oscillators

Jul 11th, 2012
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Back in June, when Carol and I were in Chicago, we took our nieces to the school playground across the big field behind my sister’s house. We pushed them on the swings, as usual, and I considered that both girls are tall and muscular for their ages. So I asked, “Katie, do you know how to pump?”

“What’s pump?”

“It’s pushing yourself on a swing so nobody else has to push you!”

She looked at me funny. She does that a lot; it’s part of the Uncle Jeff job description. So while pushing her I prepared to answer the obvious question: How do I do that, Uncle Jeff?

I stood there for a second before I realized that I had not pumped a swing for, well, decades. I wasn’t entirely sure I remembered how to do it. I gave Katie an extra big push and jumped onto the swing next to hers.

Shazam! The mind may forget…the body remembers! In thirty seconds I was going way high, and was devising my tutorial for the scarily bright little girl three feet to my left:

As you go forward, pull back on the chains and stretch your feet out. When you start to go back, stop pulling on the chains and pull your feet underneath you.

Wait a minute. Wait one damned minute! How does that work? I mean, I’m not pushing against the ground or anything else, and not hurling reaction mass. I realized that while the body remembered clearly how to pump a swing, the mind could not explain it.

I vaguely and anciently recalled reading something about a swing with a kid on it acting as a parametric oscillator, but the details were just gone. My guess at the time was a good one: When you pump a swing, you’re raising and lowering your center of mass a little by “bending” the pendulum, synchronized to the timing of the swing’s motion. That adds energy during the forward motion of the swing. There are explanations all over the Web, but the one I found by Dr. William Case at Grinnell College was the best, including several short video clips.

It’s an amazingly subtle business.

I’m kicking myself now for not thinking to try the obvious enhancement, which is pushing forward on the chains at the rear extreme of motion. Next time.

Katie didn’t quite get it but she gave it a good shot (heck, I was at least six before my cousin Diane taught me circa 1958) and with a little practice she’ll remember it well past her sixtieth birthday in 2066, and possibly even into the 22nd Century.

Some things are just timeless.

Posted in: Ideas & Analysis.
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