Dreamer Easy

This is the last day of my "holiday" from writing - mostly spent writing - so I thought I'd take the time to share with you what must surely be the first science fiction I ever wrote, around age ten: "Kate Danube and the Mysterious Cloud". Painstakingly typed on our constantly jamming typewriter and corrected by hand. Don't ask me why my glaring authorial self-insertion picked the surname "Danube".



It opens:

"A cloud of floating dust & gas, that's all it was, now you come to think of it. Floating there in space harmlessly and peacefully, but concealing one of the most dangerous planets - Oth, the great waring (sic) planet!"

I don't know about you, but I was hooked at the word "Oth". All the names in this are great. (It's not a very mysterious cloud, is it, given they know exactly what's inside it?)

"The planet Oth had been moved - it doesn't seem possible, does it? - from its original movement around Regulus, the brightest star in the constellation Leo, by its evil head scientists a thousand million - maybe a million million - years ago. Nobody seems to know why they did such an amazing feat on such a monstrous scale."

Possibly it was because Regulus "exploded partially" or "had a spell of heatlessness". Anyway, the evil scientists "decided to get the heck out of there".

Oth declares war on Earth "for fun" and installs "an extra radar-proof cloud". Enter our heroes, Starperson Kate Danube and her "best buddy" Lindi White (my thinly disguised school friend). The cloud is evidently a Doctor Who special effect, "swirling, looping", making Kate see "tadpoles". But before we get to the action, our heroine is leaping from her "plastibed" aboard the good ship Centaur, so enthused by her Morse Code lessons that she doesn't even pause for breakfast.

"Down the corridor from us, however, trouble was brewing. Sparko, our technician, had reported seeing a strange planet on the large space visiscreen, but no-one had believed him." I have so many questions about that sentence that this posting cannot contain them. Sparko even identifies the planet: "Xerox of the Mongolduks!" I have crossed out "of the Mongolduks" in pencil. Perhaps I should have added a little Registered Trade Mark symbol.

Now a history lesson: "Xerox was the only remaining member of the 'Great waring (sic) planets of the leadership of Oth' as the others had quit when The Stellar Federation won the great war of Eros (Oth had attempted to take over an Earth-owned asteroid called Eros which could be turned into pure shool, a deadly poison) and was completely in league with the deadly planet."

Shool! I am tickled that there really is an asteroid called Eros. The influence of Patrick Moore's Atlas of the Universe is clear. So too my lifelong obsession with Ancient Egypt; the inhabitants of Xerox are "primitive in their mode of living and slightly Egyptian, but had supertechnogical weapons ready for enormous catastrophes such as their enemies in a war winning." You can't make this stuff up. Oh wait, I did.

Anyway, Starperson Kate just happens to glance out the window and clock "a huge spacecraft" heading "at enormous speeds" towards the Centaur. It traps the ship in a spacenet. The "juvenile emergency procedure" is surprising: abandon ship! Fortunately the spacesuits have "absolute years (literally!) air supply" as well as injectable food and "entertainment circuits". Kate and her class leave a "placard on the porthole" in case anyone comes looking for them.

"As far as we could see by the placard on the main porthole, everyone had escaped and were headed towards a nearby planet that circled around a star we had been passing when the spacenet hit. But none of us could see the planet, so we were stuck where to go. But just then a light of some sort, shining brightly against the dark eternity of space, zooomed (sic) around the corner of the spaceship and let out a spacenet about the size of a human. Spotting it before everyone else I leapt over (or as well as I could in the vacuum of space) and pushed Percy out of the way before it caught him in its lethal folds and dragged him in towards its evil users."

I wish to interrupt this thrilling moment to mention another of my childhood obsessions, symbols - I have evidently read up on proofreader's symbols, which are used throughout the ms. And also to point to a probable influence on the story, Trapped in Space by Jack Williamson:



Anyway, it's no use - the Xeroxans capture our heroes, thanks to the fake placard they left on the main porthole. "Oh, What klutzes we are!" cries Kate. Her class is imprisoned in a "polycaptive cell, built to hold a crew, or at least a lot of people." But then a twist! "Luckily, we were all members of the Stellar Fed. Secret Service and had good training". They use their "escape-magnets" to bend the bars of their cage and "'Bob's your uncle', as people would say in the 20th and 19th centuries."

Kate, Lindi, and Mike hide in "a large, unused closet". On arrival at Xerox (which has "a double quasar sun") they disguise themselves in some convenient guards' outfits. Their classmates are taken to the "imperial palace". Needing a crack to see what's going on inside, they use "a device in our S.S. (Secret Service) kit". The "small, green pencil-shaped rod" sends out "supersonic waves". (They refrain from vibrating the entire palace to pieces as their friends are inside.)

"'Oh queen Neptuna of Xerox, imperial ruler and demigoddess, we of your humble imperial guard have secured thirty prisoners of the planet Terra.'

'Oh Head Guard Excelpiusen, I am pleased with your work. Go now with your men to your mess chambers.'

Neptuna had spoken and her blindly loyal - nay, hypnotised, for that was how the queen evilly ruled the planet - attendant guards left the prisoners with the queen."

This surprising development is explained by a forcefield surrounding Neptuna. The influence of Terry Nation on my young mind is soon revealed: "You will become slaves on this planet in the radioactive mines of our mountain, so do not expect comfortable living quarters!" I was laughing so much I could hardly type out that last phrase.)

Our heroes follow their classmates to the mines and alert them to imminent rescue using Morse. Setting their lasers on "stun", the three eleven-year olds knock out all the guards and share a tearful reunion with their pals. They pinch their spaceship back and vamoose with the help of an anti-radar screen: "Literally, we got away scot-free."

"As we left the planet, I said, 'It's too cruel that those poor Xeroxans are so cruelly ruled over!'" This cruel situation is quickly resolved with the help of an autohypnotyser attached to an amplifier and beamed at Xerox. "... the whole planet was freed from its hypnotic slavery. Xerox was Xerox again - peaceful and helpful, after maybe as long as 45,000 years of cruel enslavement. And all by the adjusting of a knob to 'un'."

Having completed this little side quest, our heroes continue their voyage to planet Oth, which has just announced its new weapon, the "giant carboniser ray" which, the Othans boast, will "return the people on Terra to dust, from whence they came". There follows a complex chemical explanation of the ray, which involves "dehydrating or 'un-waterising'" its victims.

"Still, the mission made you terribly afraid. You might not come back alive; you might come back alive but harshly wounded, an invalid with so much life to live; but for four billion people on Terra who would die as dust if you didn't face up to your duty, you couldn't refuse that very element - your duty. Four million (sic) people pleading for you to save them - to do your civil duty and save them. I stopped thinking about it, straightened my wavering path and, with a stiff upper lip, reported to Pauline for Judo lessons."

For you see, our heroes are learning every form of fighting to take on the Othans:

"'Next lesson up - jex guns - going to jex a few Othans?'

Despite the fears that we both had, Lindi grinned. 'Plan on jexin' the lot, Kate. And you?'"

(Pauline turns out have a backstory which makes her rather more interesting than our heros: "Pauline's a Chinese spy agent for the S.F. - used to use her Judo and Karate talents in Tokyo, where, in that country of Japan opposite her own, she had been watching other spies for a planet called Oopng." Nobody ever does get jexed, alas.)

At last they're inside the "unorthodox mist" of the Mysterious Cloud.

"'You can't see the dust for the dust-cloud, eh, Kate?'

'Nor the gas for the dust. Cee-rumbs!'"

Alas, "After a while the awe left us". Kate and Lindi go for a swim, enjoy a surprise party in their honour ('Oh my gawrsh no-ooo-ooo'), receive the gold lion of bravery medal, and at long last are dispatched on their mission to plant the "cloud-bomb" which will destroy the "central-clouding machine". You see: "Most of the cloud was optically banning, that is, you couldn't see through it, but the central cloud around the actual planet stopped even radar signals so that no matter what, you couldn't find Oth." (Think about this, folks.)

Our heroes must cross the desert plains of Oth.

"'GREAT GRAVY!!!!!!'

A tribe of giant prairie dogs was heading towards us!"

Fortunately their camo allows them to dodge the dogs - the products of radioactive pollution. "...we plodded on in silence towards our largening target". Robots attack but are lasered; Kate's friend Marz climbs inside one and pretends to be bringing prisoners to the city, where they discover the king of the Othans is a froglike creature only twenty centimetres tall. "Heehohu", he laughs.

Our heroes hide in the dunes outside the city and disassemble the robot, which runs on a "sand drive", sucking in sand, passing it through a turbine to generate electricity, and then pumping it out again. They re-enter the city inside the robot, and after "ditching the robot in a ditch (a quite logical thing to do)", they use Twentieth Century slang ("GET LOST! GO ON, VAMOOSE!") to cause the guard robots to "konk out". They set their bomb, but are trapped by the recovered robots. Kate improvises a heat-ray from a torch and a magnifying glass, turning sand to glass and trapping the robots - this is stolen directly from an episode of Rod Rocket, IIRC.

In a final scene lifted very nearly word for word in places from Robot, our heroes are offered positions on the High Juvenile Council of Terra, but instead take off in their previously unsuspected time machine.



Well I defy Kim Stanley Robinson to top that.

Put all 23 chapters into a single file. Over 109,000 words. I may be becoming slightly emotional.

"If you’re someone that really doesn’t like people, don’t go where the people are. Everyone will be able to tell you’re unhappy. Stay home and post pictures of your cats. We’ll be much cooler with that. Don’t make yourself miserable because you have to do something. There is no one person who holds the key to your career. There’s no single technique that gets you that super mega ultra bestseller... You have to live the way you want to live, and if that’s in isolation, just make sure you keep reading, stay abreast of genre and what’s going on, and you’ll do fine." Seanan McGuire, interviewed in Locus, December 2017.

I'm so aware of a vast and vigorous community of writers, editors, publishers, and fans, of which I'm not a part, due to chronic illness and social anxiety - so these words were greatly encouraging.

I Will Not Read Your Fucking Script (Village Voice, 9 September 2009)

White Men Playing With Sticks: Iron Fist, Martial Arts and Respect (The Learned Fangirl, 28 February 2017). Starts with a smashing anecdote about Miyamoto Musashi.

Steven Moffat offers his top tips for writing Doctor Who and storytelling in general (BBC, 14 January 2016 )

Writing The Perfect Scene (Advanced Fiction Writing, n.d.). I forget who said of Strunk and White's Elements of Style that you don't follow its rules, you just re-read them every now and then as a reminder. Advice like this essay is comparable - it's always helpful to think very concretely about the words going onto the page. I found stuff that applied to the scene I'm currently writing.

Describing characters of color in writing (N.K. Jemisin, 11 April 2009).

Novelist error messages. If you only have time to follow one of these links, this is the one.

4300 words. Putting it in the drawer to marinate. Next: back to Strange Flesh!

Reading other people's flaccid SF is always encouraging. Hell, I can do better than that. Or I'll be able to once the Allegron starts working.

I've read a chapter and a short story recently with Japanese settings (one modern, one mediaeval), both written by Westerners, both of which struck me having a stiff and artificial style which I want to avoid in my own fiction. I don't know Japanese culture well enough to nitpick the research, but in the case of the modern one in particular the details seemed intrusive and anachronistic. I've just realised now, typing this, the possible problem with both narratives: they're told by non-Japanese writers from the POV of Japanese characters. I have read enough to know that an actual mediaeval story in translation, or a chapter written by a modern Japanese writer, would sound quite different. It's another reason to stick to (for example) non-Korean characters' POVs in stories where I use Korean characters or setting: as a monoglot with a very limited experience of the world, I cannot write authentically from inside another living culture. (I may eventually be able to get across the flavour of a historical Korean narrative, but I have an awful lot of reading to do first.)

(I've just been reading a dirty manga to which I decline to link you, but it comes with wonderful notes by a fan translator, who explains the extra meanings conveyed by the author's choice of kanji. It made me think of sign language, which can pack in so much more information in the same amount of time it takes to speak the equivalent sentence in English. I suppose the only way English can compete at all is with its gargantuan vocabulary.)

Sitting on a plane a couple of hours out from Sydney. I've just finished reading "My English Name" by R.S. Benedict (Fantasy and Science Fiction May/June 2017), and wanted to rave about it a bit. The little note at the start of the story explains that it's drawn from the author's three years of working as an English teacher in China. It has that particularity that gives a fictional setting its power - the details that tell you the author really knows this place, these people. Benedict draws on both the interaction between Western culture and Chinese culture and between Westerners and Chinese people in a story that's about passing - as human, as straight, as gay, as white. I think the title may be drawn from the adoption of an English name by Asian immigrants, as English-speakers, typically monoglots, can't get our mouths around Asian phonemes; but the story's main character and narrator isn't even human, and works hard to pass as an Englishman. This mimicry is reflected all around the narrator in the Chinese culture he negotiates, from the designer knock-off scarf which helps hide his true self, to the use of bribery to gain fake qualifications, to the "rent-a-whitey gigs" he takes that reminded me uncomfortably of accounts that the only qualification you really need to teach English in Korea is whiteness.

The bribery in particular reminded me of the relentless corruption in Ha Jin's short stories, of the pressure on gay men and lesbians in China to marry (described in Benjamin Law's Gaysia) and of the obligation to "pass" as a Chinese citizen with the correct political opinions (I was struck by this in watching the reality show "Takes a Real Man" - the would-be soldiers must pass political tests as well as tests of their actual military skill). Now that brings me to something that's been preying on my mind since it happened. I have a side Tumblr, aegyopoisoned, in which I stash images of my favourite Kpop idols. It's an unremarkable blog with few followers - there must be tens of thousands like it. However, last April, I made a rather oddly written posting (I'll just bet I was hypomanic at the time) in which I confessed my worries about fetishing Korean and/or Asian people and culture as a result of Kpop's sex appeal. I was bewildered by yesterday morning's hate mail ("kill urself" is not as clear a message as it may seem) until we got home from the airport and I was able to locate a series of outraged responses.* In writing a much clearer response this morning I've worked through those concerns to some extent. (Now I just have to worry about the fact that my boys are half my age :).

Almost the first word of Korean I ever learned was 막내 maknae - the youngest person in a family or group. Taemin, my bias - that is, the Kpop idol I most swingeingly desire - is the maknae of the boy band SHINee, and this was the first fact I learned about him. It was also my first glimpse of Korean culture - specifically, the strict hierarchy by age, gender, and position which modern Koreans have inherited from their neo-Confucian forebears. When I learned the word maknae, I literally couldn't find Korea on a map. Now I have some grasp of the language and a rough idea of Korea's two thousand year-plus history, ancient and modern. I knew nothing of the Korean War, or the Opium Wars, or anything about the Suez Canal. I have a shelf overflowing with unread books on the Koreas and China. Sex was the starting point, not the be-all and end-all of my interest.

In recent years I've been reading SF by Chinese authors in translation - short stories, and of course Liu Cixin's mind-snapping, Hugo-winning Three-Body Problem trilogy. (I'm extremely keen to read Korean SF, but haven't found much.) R.S. Benedict's story is told by a Westerner, about being a Westerner in China - an outsider's POV, but an intimate engagement with the culture: her portrait of China is a matter-of-fact, sometimes unflattering one, but it's authentic. In adding Korean settings and characters to my own SF, I'm acutely aware that I'm a 외국인 waegukin, a foreigner, whose contact with Korea is mediated through, erm, the media - I don't have Benedict's first-hand experience. What's more culture (the West in general and Australia in particular) has a history with Asian peoples - colonialism, racism against immigrants, yellowface - which gives me complex responsibilities. My viewpoint characters, therefore, must also be waegukin, and my research as careful and accurate as I can make it.**


* "Why are you so proud of fetishization"?"asked a young white woman whose Tumblr proudly proclaims "Jonghyun is my dad", which may indicate I haven't absolutely cornered the fetish market. (She's also a fellow Lay fan. I'll bet she saw that awful Jackie Chan film too, just because he was in it.)

** I'd love to write something set in historical times, which would make including a Western character more difficult - but I have years of reading to do before I'll know enough to pull that off.

Disturbed by Kelly Robson's column in the April issue of Clarkesworld, "Another World: Being James Tiptree Jr". She discusses the letter which Dr. Alice B. Sheldon left to be released in case of her death, in which she outed the science fiction writer Tiptree as being a woman writing under a male pseudonym. Robson quotes a key passage from the letter: "Everything sounded so much more interesting coming from a man. (Didn't it. Didn't it, just a little? Be honest.)" She remarks, "Writing as Tiptree, Alice Sheldon didn’t just avoid gender discrimination; she supercharged everything she wrote with gravitas and authority... Writing as a man gave her freedom that was missing when she wrote as herself... Being Tiptree certainly allowed her to avoid gender discrimination, but more importantly, it allowed her to overcome the barriers in her own mind."

My contribution to Chicks Dig Time Lords, "If I can't Squee I Don't Want to Be Part of your Revolution"*, contains a puzzled self-examination: what makes women's writing different from men's, and thus made my Doctor Who novels different from the others, which were overwhelmingly written by men? I consulted a couple of books on the subject of women's writing: one pointed out that women generally have different experiences to men; the other seemed to warn against lumping all women together. My problem was, and is, my slightly loose connection to the category "woman". Though I am a ciswoman, and share many experiences with other ciswomen, I am also sufficiently gender non-conforming to be occasionally mistaken for a man.

In the Chicks chapter, I pointed out that the style of all of the Doctor Who novel writers was somewhat constrained by the fact that we were writing science fiction adventure stories, with the main characters already provided. Although we drew on our own lives, like any writer in any genre, the books are still fairly homogenous, and that may have overwhelmed any gender differences.

Robson recounts meeting a male SF fan who proudly proclaims that he never reads books by women. I seem to recall that, as a teen, I eschewed female SF authors because they didn't seem to be writing the kind of SF I enjoyed (Asimov, Niven, a Heinlein phase). Perhaps they were drawing on interests or experiences I didn't share; perhaps there were fewer female authors available, so I was less likely to hit on one that I liked**; or perhaps it was simple prejudice. I am frustrated by not yet having found women who write the sort of SF I've recently enjoyed, by Charles Stross, Neal Stephenson, and Liu Cixin.

As well as being disturbed by my freakish gender, it troubles me that I insist on reading and writing SF, even though fantasy seems like it would be my more natural home. Perhaps the reason I write science fiction is to grab some of the "gravitas and authority" that Tiptree's assumed gender provided. Some part of me insists that SF = srs bizness, fantasy = mucking around (the same part that insists that YA is also mucking around). I worry that this prejudice is also somehow grounded in gender. I guess that's why Robson's column troubles me. (OTOH, maybe I don't want to write fantasy because I'm far less interested in reading it?)


* Neither my best title nor my greatest piece of prose ever, but I am still desperately proud of having been part of this landmark book, particularly its role in triggering the Sad Puppies. I'm also chuffed to see it being quoted in academic books, which must mean I got something right. :)

** The two most significant anthologies in my youth were Tomorrow's Children, edited by Isaac Asimov, and The Penguin Science Fiction Omnibus. The former contains 18 stories, three by women, but they seem to have made no impression on me, compared to Damon Knight's "Cabin Boy", Fritz Leiber's "A Pail of Air", Mark Clifton's "Star Bright", Asimov's own "The Ugly Little Boy", and, gods help us all, Jerome Bixby's "It's a Good Life". The Omnibus contains just one story by a woman - "The Snowball Effect" by Katherine MacLean, which I do remember, but it's a bit of fluff, damnit, surrounded by more memorable stuff.