Eleven Blue (or Red) Men

Because the book I'm currently reading isn't really capturing my attention, I pulled Berton Roueche's "Eleven Blue Men" off the shelf for a re-read.

Yes, it's an ironic book to read during a pandemic. For those unfamiliar with Roueche, he wrote a series called "The Annals of Medicine" for the New Yorker -- a series of short non-fiction pieces, set mostly in New York City, about various disease outbreaks over the years.

The one that caught my attention the most this time is called "A Man from Mexico." It tells the tale of an outbreak of smallpox in New York just at the close of World War II that was traced to an American who had been living in Mexico but was traveling through New York on the way to Maine with his wife to look at a farm she's just inherited.

While traveling, the man became ill, an in New York stopped at a dermatologic clinic at a city hospital. The outbreak sickened twelve people with a virulent form of smallpox. Two of them died.

What's striking about this story is the public health response: A mass immunization.

Officials estimated at the beginning of the outbreak, per Roueche, that only about 2 million of the 8 million people living in New York had any immunity to smallpox, due to vaccinations or exposure and recovery.

First, public health officials tracked down more than 3,000 people who might have come into contact with the man and wife -- a search that stretched into 29 states.

Then, a mass immunization program began, with the then-mayor of New York City going to the press to show himself getting immunized.

What was the public response, to an outbreak that was limited to 12 confirmed cases, including two victims? At least 6,350,000 people were immunized, including nearly 900,000 children who were immunized through the public school system.

So when, I wonder, a vaccine for the coronavirus becomes available, what will the public response be? I hesitate to say it will be as successful as this example from post-war New York.

Because the news and social media clearly tells me vaccines are political now. A mass vaccination program -- particularly one that might have been linked to getting injected with cow juice, as one could colloquially put with the bovine-generated smallpox vaccine -- would meet with some stiff resistance among the loonier fringes of society. That would probably include our current lieutenant governor, who is not a stable woman, if you forgive the pun.

You'd have the fringe saying vaccines cause autism. You'd have the fringe saying anything the government wants to do is baaaaad, baaaaaaad, folks. You'd have the even loonier fringe who'd suspect that government vaccine was really putting nanorobots or tracking chips in them. So noooooooooooooooooooooo way, sir. No way.

And you'd probably have people drinking it by the gallon too, because stupidiousness knows no political bounds.

Anyway, some good reading, if you've got the time.

Tom Holt: Absurdity of the Ordinary

Just finished reading Tom Holt’s “The Better Mousetrap.” Here’s what I see:

Lots of the ordinary. But juxtaposed enough with the extraordinary that we look at the absurdity of the ordinary in our own lives and say, “Yeah, if I could get rid of that, I could write my own novels (or slay dragons, or figure out why I keep getting dead).”



One of Holt’s great successes is to show how sometimes we let the ordinary and mundane fill up our lives when we could be having greater adventures, whether we have one of the three known Portable Doors or not.

Other writers do this too, of course. I think to Douglas Adams and Arthur Dent being the great maker of sandwiches, of course, among many other things Adams does. It’s a common fantasy or science fiction trope, and just about everyone from JRR Tolkien and JK Rowling and Ray Bradbury do it to some extent, some with more success than others.

My favorite example of this leans toward the conversation Mr. Halloway and Mr. Dark have in front of the cigar store in “Something Wicked This Way Comes,” where Dark is intent on finding Will and Jim but Halloway succeeds in throwing him off the trail by loudly bragging up the twenty-five cent cigar he’s just purchased at the cigar store. The cigar smoke is just the beginning of his methodic madness to blind the Dust Witch to the location of the boys, and it’s done not in a deliberate, sequential manner, but by chance and inspiration.

But Holt, I think does something a bit different with it. I’m still trying to pin down exactly what, but here are a few samples that stood out to me in “The Better Mousetrap”:

(I write a bit more about this scene in my previous Tom Holt post.)

The Door opened again in the back wall of a Marks & Spencers in west London, and Frank stepped out, looking unusually grave. Putting out a fire, saving several lives and many millions of pounds: morceau de gateau. Now he was going to have to do something really difficult and scary. He was going to try and buy a shirt.

Holt goes on for more than a page as Frank attempts to buy a shirt, fretting he’ll end up looking like a waiter in whatever he picks out – something Emily confirms when next they meet, on their way into more mortal peril.

Then there’s this, where Emily faces the greatest of perils:

That’s, um, fascinating. Does the dream also record how Emily Spitzer manages to kill the greatest dragon of all time armed only with a mobile phone and a roll of peppermints?

Of course.

Well?

The dream also ordains: Don’t spoon-feed the lazy cow, make her figure it out for herself.

Ah. The dream sounds suspiciously like my mother.

Dealing with dragons, well, Bilbo can tell us how that works out. Maybe not the time to fret about feeling poorly treated by your mother. But there you are again, grounded in reality as the character talks to an actual dragon in the darkness.

We’re clearly in a fantasy world, but a world so anchored in our own we can almost imagine ourselves making these same Choose Your Own Adventure Choices, only getting muddled when things go badly and we find ourselves facing one of those “deadly” situations we encounter in real life and think are so terrible to behold.

Maybe that’s what Holt does right with the absurdity of the ordinary.

More ideas for my own novel. Chuck Jones is right. Fill your head with ideas, lest nothing ever come out of it, if I can paraphrase the man.

Just one funny thing on this book. A Goodreads reviewer commented on the number of grammatical errors in the novel. I didn’t see any, but I wasn’t looking for them. But I did note whomever wrote the blurb on the back probably wrote the blurb for other Tom Holt novels in rapid succession, as Jane, one of Holt’s other characters, shows up on the back cover but not in the book, where the role of Jane is adequately filled by Emily Spitzer.

Ethical Dilemma Case Study: Cliff Stoll

“We’re the good guys, Marty.”

Who, we might ask, are the good guys?

Cliff Stoll, an astronomer and early computer adopter, asks that question in his book “The Cuckoo’s Egg,” where he tells his tale of meandering through the offices and mentalities of the Central Intelligence Agency, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Security Agency, and other civilian and military entities tied to the federal government as he tries to figure out why there’s a 75 cent accounting error related to computer use at the Livermore Berkeley Lab in California.

All I have to do is say the name “Berkeley” and we conjure up a vision of hippies, anarchists, free spirits and free thinkers who would just as soon blow up puppies and kittens for sport than help the spies and soldiers in the federal government track down a computer hacker.

But he does help them and catches flack for it from his free-spirited compatriots in California.
Clearly an ethical dilemma. But here’s how he states it:

All my buddying up with spooks in suits and playing computer cop came from my appreciation for creative anarchy. To have the networks as our playground, we have to preserve our sense of trust; to do that, we have to take it seriously when people break that trust.

I’m saddened to find talented programmers devoting their time to breaking into computers. Instead of developing new ways to help each other, vandals make viruses and logic bombs. The result? People blame every software quirk on viruses, public-domain software lies underused, and our networks become sources of paranoia.

Fears for security really do louse up the free flow of information. Science and social progress only take place in the open. The paranoia that hackers leave in their wake only stifles our work . . . forcing administrators to disconnect our links to networked communities.

Stoll tells his story in “The Cuckoo’s Egg: Tracking A Spy through the Maze of Computer Espionage,” a book published in 1989, when the internet we know today didn’t exist and only universities, the government, and the military had networked computers. I’m old enough to remember the heady days of the early 1990s when as a student, I got my first email address and spent my first time perusing the internet. I even created a few websites, which, thanks to the Wayback Machine, can still be visited.

For what it’s worth, we have moved into a more secure and more paranoid internet, much as Stoll predicted. I work for a government contractor and am told our network undergoes thousands of break-in attempts a day. We’re regularly tested on our ability to recognize and ignore attempts to phish for personal information and for ways to break into that network, and we’re just involved in the cleanup of nuclear waste. We are the good guys.

But we see how far we’ve come, and sometimes wonder at what we’ve given up.

I built those foolish websites of my own by hand, learning HTML by looking at how other web pages built their stuff. I don’t do that anymore – I rely on others to do that work for me for free, at Facebook and at Google (owner of Blogger.com, where my personal blog resides). But what have I given up for the low-cost, little-work entry into the internet? Privacy. I’m a commodity. People other than me make money off the silly stuff I put on the web.

I’ve had my credit card information stolen three times (thanks, in all three cases, to iTunes, thank you very much Apple). I’ve been banned from Facebook for the space of 24 hours for using the term “white trash” in a joking manner. A fellow I know in Arizona, a former LDS bishop who writes an inspiring weekly blog, cannot post links to his blog on Facebook anymore because those hostile to the church ganged up and got Facebook to give him the boot, saying his stuff doesn’t meet Facebook’s “community standards.”

Maybe we’re more secure. But we’re giving up a lot. Associate with the wrong person, and you’re unpersonned, to borrow a word from George Orwell. Today, we call it “cancelled,” or “cancel culture.” Orwell predicted it. And it’s happening.

Ethical Dilemma Case Study: Christopher Thomas Knight

Ironically the week we look at ethical dilemmas in the English 301 class I'm teaching this semester, I start reading Michael Finkel’s book “The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit,” which focuses on the life of Christopher Thomas Knight, a man who lived for more than 25 years on his own, in the woods, using food and supplies he stole from nearby cabins and a summer camp for disabled children.

(If you haven’t read the book but want to, warning: Spoilers ahead.)

Finkel opens his book with the story of Knight’s last burglary at Pine Tree Camp, the night he’s caught by fish and game officer Terry Hughes, thus:

The hermit zigzags across the camp and stops at a specific rock, turns it over, brags the key hidden beneath, and pockets it for later use. Then he climbs a slope to the parking lot and tests each vehicle’s doors. A Ford pickup opens. He clicks on his pen-light and peeks inside.

Candy! Always good. Ten rolls of Smarties, tossed in the cup holders. He stuffs them in another pocket. He also takes a rain poncho, unopened in its packaging, and a silver-colored Armitron analog watch. It’s not an expensive watch – if it looks valuable, the hermit will not steal it. He has a moral code. But extra watches are important; when you live outside with rain and snow, breakage is inevitable.

The hermit has a moral code. He steals, but nothing valuable. His thefts – he estimates he committed more than a thousand burglaries in the time he spent living in a clearing in the tangled woods not far from his boyhood home in Albion, Maine – small things for the most part, things people would be embarrassed to contact the police about: D-cell batteries. Packaged food. Used books. The occasional pair of jeans or a sleeping bag. He stole mattresses and propane tanks and portable radios. He stole hand-held gaming systems, but never anything that looked new – he didn’t want to steal any kid’s new birthday or Christmas toy – and figured he’d steal them in a few years when the newness was worn off a bit.

He admits, Finkel writes, that with every theft, he felt a burning shame.

But he stole to live.

Thus the dilemma.

Victor Hugo, famously, wrote an entire book about such a dilemma: A man sent to prison for the crime of stealing bread to feed his family.

What to do?

I’m still reading the book. When I finish, I’ll share any ethical discussion that comes of it. But my preliminary conclusion: It’s hard to be good.

Also this:

Up the Down Staircase, Finally

I’ve read Bel Kaufman’s “Up the Down Staircase” a number of times, and this time, this finally hit me:

And Ferone – where is he and what is to become of him?

I wonder how he himself will tell it, or recall it. “I had this teacher, see, and once, on a winter afternoon . . .”

I keep remembering what he had said to me. “What makes you think you’re so special? Just because you’re a teacher?” What he was really saying was: You are so special. You are my teacher. Then teach me, help me. Hey, teach, I’m lost – which way do I go? I’m tired of going up the down staircase.

So am I.

This comes near the end of the novel, where student Joseph Ferone, reprobate, deadbeat student, but intellectually on par with the best, tries to kiss his English teacher.

Was he looking for love?

In a confused way, confused by the image of love brought on by pop culture, even then a dire influence, moreso now, yes. Yes he was looking for love, and asked for it in the way he’d been taught how.

Yet again, going up the down staircase.

Much earlier in the novel, a student is disciplined for just that – the physical act of going up a staircase that was designated only for students going down – a crowd control measure. But Kaufman uses the phrase and concept as a metaphor to see how helpless – and possibly not helpless – she and her fellow teachers could be to help those students caught going the wrong direction.

Romanticized? Probably. But Kaufman is no fool. There is no happy ending here. Joseph Ferone disappears, likely never to return, going up the same down staircase he tried to escape in his confusion.

So what does this mean for me? I teach, both at home with my kids, at Scouts with others, and at the college level in English. Have I done anything in the past several years to help anyone going up the down staircase?

Maybe.

And this doesn’t mean blind conformity – it means finding positive direction in their lives, whether they conform to what I think is positive or not. There are many up or down staircases that arrive at many different locations. That they are making progress in the right direction is the thing.

And again, this is why I re-read books. You never know how long it’s going to take before the main point smacks you in the head with its delicate little hammer.

Read Everything. Write Everything, Part 2

Today I stumbled across this.

The topic immediately caught my attention – I’m kind of a fan of aviation, aviation disasters in particular. And then I saw the author – William Langewiesche. I’ve read him before and know him to be knowledgeable on technical issues and an excellent writer to boot.

So I read.

And read.

And read.

I don’t pretend to understand everything, but I read enough to get curious about a few other things he mentions. Such as “Cockroach Corner.” That’s an appellation, as far as I can tell, given to a collection of cut-rate passenger and freight airlines airplane leasing agents, and airplane parts distributors that call a little corner of Miami International Airport home. It’s also called “Collision Corner.” There’s not a lot about either on the Internet, but I read a few things by the deeper aviation enthusiasts to know it’s a place where you can go see the history of aviation still trying to hold together and make people money.

I can find a United Press International article from 1980 that uses the term.

There’s also a blog about “Corrosion Corner,” but it appears to be pretty shiny about the place. Lots of McDonnell Douglas aircraft.

This one is a bit more, ahem, honest.

What does this have to do with me?

Well, I’m writing this book about a guy who makes his own spaceship, flies to Saturn’s moon Iapetus, and settles there. I’ve dodged the question thusfar about how he got there.

Now I see a way, or at least a starting place. A space exploration equivalent to Cockroach Corner. Sounds like it’s got a lot of potential. Potential for humor as well as drama.

So it’s important, boys and girls, for wannabe writers to read a lot. You never know where your inspiration is going to come from.

On John Steinbeck

I don’t remember reading John Steinbeck.

Oh, I’ve read most of his books (I’m pretty sure only the lengthy East of Eden is unread by me). What I mean to say is that I don’t remember sitting in a classroom or library or whatever and thinking, “I’m going to read John Steinbeck.”

My reading of Steinbeck likely started with an excerpt from The Red Pony, as I clearly remember thinking it was particularly gruesome that the poor pony died and was being eaten by buzzards when the boy who owned him found him.

Moralistically, I’m certain I know why this book was included in the anthologies we read in elementary school: Take care of what you own and listen to those wiser than you. And maybe that was Steinbeck’s intention when he wrote that particular tale.

Now that I’ve read what is likely my first bit of Steinbeck commentary and criticism, in the form of Stephen George’s “John Steinbeck: A Centennial Tribute,” I understand a bit more of why Steinbeck wrote as he did.

His wife Elaine summed it up nicely for me:

John believed in man. That’s what his Nobel Prize speech says. He said, “You believe in the perfectibility of man. Man will never be perfect, but he has to strive for it.” That’s the whole point. That was religious. He didn’t believe in any church creeds, but he said to me when he was dying,” Don’t you let a bunch of people get together and tell yarns about me. Make sure it’s the Episcopal burial service.” And I said to him, “Do you believe?” And he said “I’m like Socrates before he drank the hemlock: I don’t know if there are gods or not, but in case there are . . . “

The more I reflect on what I’ve read of Steinbeck, the more I agree what Elaine Steinbeck says here is true. He wrote about Man with the capital M, while concentrating on the little stories that, to mankind, to government, to the media, to man’s neighbors, mean little or nothing. And by that he pointed out the imperfectability of Man.

I believe Steinbeck stands with two other authors – Mark Twain and Sinclair Lewis – and to a lesser extent, humorist James Thurber, as the authors who best capture America. I won’t say at its best or at its worst, because all of these writers focus on the good and bad, but whether it’s best or worts I don’t care to comment. What all have in common is their ability to look at the man vs Man, and see how the man – George Babbitt, Tom Sawyer, Tom Joad, or Walter Mitty – fit into the mold of an American man, or into a mold of America itself. Some of these men are treated poorly by America. Some of them treat America poorly. Some are wise. Some are innocent. Some are selfish. But all are Man in the big sense of the world, trying to figure out how to fit into it or make it fit them, for better or for worse. That’s where I can use that phrase.

If you’re curious about Steinbeck, or already know him, I can’t recommend George’s book enough. It’s got touching tributes, and scholarship – even criticism, all in about 190 pages.

And there's also this:

Why I Mark Books

I’d like to talk for just a moment about Mortimer Adler and the act of marking books.

As I read your responses to Adler’s article, I noted opinion typically fell into two camps, with some variation in each.

Camp One marks some books like their scriptures and see how marking up other books or reading material might be helpful.

Camp Two decidedly does not mark up reading material at all.

Adler’s pretty adamant in insisting that marking up a book is the only way to “own it,” or to internalize what is being said in it. A few of you took objection to that.

I’m here to say that for me, marking up what I read works – but I don’t mark up everything I read in the same way.

Why do I mark things?

Firstly, I tend to be a fast reader. Too fast, in that I miss a lot of things so I have to read a book several times for it to sink in. When I take notes, however, I slow down and retain more, and I don’t have to read and re-read the entire book to get the salient points I noted earlier.

Take, for example, this.

This is the triple combination I used through four years of seminary, while I was at college, and during my mission.

I’ve marked it to pieces, as you can see. Each color represents a different time I read the book over those long years.

I don’t necessarily remember everything I marked. However, when I do pull this book off the shelf and re-read it, the markings and notes – particularly the notes – help me remember times from my mission when I was struggling, and other times when I was riding high. Seeing the marks and notes triggers those memories. If I try to remember something specific – like right now – my memory fails me. But seeing those notes helps my brain make the connection from the words on the page to the memories stored in my head.

The marks, the memories, and the connections in my head remind me of this scene from “Groundhog Day,” where Bill Murray’s character tells Andie MacDowell maybe God knows what he does because he’s been around for a long time. One of these days, I hope to know more about the scriptures, just like God.



Here’s another book I’ve marked up – Terry Pratchett’s “Going Postal.” Not the kind of book you think a person would normally mark up. But I have.

This one is different, though. In this one, I’ve used sticky tabs to mark passages I felt were particularly funny, or had meaning to me in another way. I rarely mark this kind of book with a pen, and if I do I write on the sticky note, so I don’t leave a mark in the book.

Just as in the scriptures, I can look at a mark, read the passage, and immediately remember why I marked this part of the book.

What I’m getting at here is this:

1. If I mark up a book – no matter how I do it – I’m leaving myself a physical reminder in the physical thing of what my brain was thinking when I read the book. Even if the “why” of the mark is stored only in my head, the physical act of marking the book helps trigger those memories.

2. Triggering memories is the prime reason to mark a book. We read a lot of different things in our lives – and when I say read, I also mean watch, because this works with what we take in visually through television shows and such. When we have something trigger our memory, our brain physically makes connections between neurons to help us strengthen those memories. And as we strengthen memories, neurons that hold different memories will suddenly make new connections between themselves as we suddenly realize there’s a connection between something we already know and something we’re currently reading or witnessing. The more physical connections we have in our brains, the more we are able to connect those dots. The more intelligence we grow.

So I’m going to offer a challenge. Think of a way you can mark your books that satisfies your need to remember with your reverence for books or your reluctance to mark in the first place. Start building those connections. As you so this, I guarantee you’ll see your ability to think critically grow by leaps and bounds.

I testify that God created our brains to help us learn and remember and grow. As we use our brains, we will see growth.

[Summons Gnarly Powers]

I have, of late, been reading fantasy novels.

Now this might be due to the overload, but this is how I’m feeling about books featuring people with those gnarly powers right about now.

It could very well be I’m just reading books in which the magic systems are too pedestrian, or books in which the plot is just a romance novel under a thin veneer of fantasy.

It could also very well be that the “person with gnarly powers uses said powers to fight other people with gnarly powers” trope is just worn a bit thin on me.

Not that I don’t love a good fantasy. I look to the likes of Lord of the Rings and The Book of the Dun Cow/The Book of Sorrows and see stories coming from a worlds filled with magic. But y’see, while magic may exist in these books, it’s the little characters relying on their own inner magic of faith, grit, hope when all is hopeless, that keeps me coming back. That’s real magic, not any of this elemental-bending stuff.

That’s easy ju-ju, no matter the training the little wusses have to go through to master the act.

But watching Cano Mundi stab Wyrm in the eye with the horn of the dun cow and die in the act to save the world (for the five minutes it remains saved), now that’s magic.

Watching Samwise Gamgee go back up the stairs of Cirith Ungol after Frodo screams at him to go home, now that’s magic. (Recall: Most of the magic seen in LOTR is used for evil.)

Not that I don’t like magical novels. Magic, done well – even if it’s done as parlor tricks, as in Terry Pratchett’s novels – is a fun thing to read. And try telling me the magic in Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell isn’t fun to witness, especially when mice are involved. Maybe I’ve just read a string of mediocre, magic-filled novels, and am ready for something else.

Read. It. Again.

Here is why you read books over and over and over again, especially if you’re a writer: You notice the hooptedoodle and how it adds, or detracts, from the story.

First, a reminder of what hooptedoodle is. From Steinbeck:

”I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks. . . . figure out what the guy’s thinking from what he says. I like some description but not too much of that. . . . Sometimes I want a book to break loose with a bunch of hooptedoodle. . . . Spin up some pretty words maybe or sing a little song with language. That’s nice. But I wish it was set aside so I don’t have to read it. I don’t want hooptedoodle to get mixed up with the story.”

This gem comes from the prologue to “Sweet Thursday.”

I’m re-reading Arthur C. Clarke’s “Rendezvous with Rama” (don’t get me started on the Gentry Lee collaborations in later Rama books) and the hooptedoodle really stands out in this one. Not that he’s got much there, but it is there, and when I mention it, those who have read Rama through the eyes of a writer will know immeidately what I’m talking about: The simps. Superchimps. Mentioned in one chapter, then only fleetingly in the book. Not essential to the story or plot at all. Even the simps’ caretaker disappears from the book. So the simps are hooptedoodle. And the book would be just fine without them. Yes, they are a bit of good science fiction (explaining the monkeys are there for cooking, housecleaning, etc., able to do the work of 2.75 men per simp), but it’s science fiction hooptedoodle nonetheless.

I have no idea how many times I’ve read this book (I enjoy it immensely for its speculative story). This is the first time I’ve noticed the hoopetedoodle, though. I don’t know why it stood out this time. Perhaps because I’m editing a book of my own and noticing it’s riddled with hooptedoodle.

Recognize hooptedoodle in others’ writing so you can find it and kill it, when necessary, in your own.

The Long -- Boring -- Earth

Authors strive for that signature style: That voice that helps them stand out from the crowd and that screams out “THIS IS ME” to their readers.

So should it concern me that I got to page 128 of “The Long Earth” by Stephen Baxter and Terry Pratchett before I encountered the first real thing I thought was Terry Pratchettesque?

Maybe not concern me. But it should concern Terry Pratchett.

Now, I don’t know how involved Baxter and Pratchett were in their collaboration on this book (part of a series, I understand). Maybe Pratchett was more of a consultant? That’s certainly what it feels like, because there’s little of the Pratchett wit or style in this rather dull tome. Round about page 128, we run into an old war veteran who wounds vaguely like Sergeant Jackrum from Pratchett’s “Monstrous Regiment,” and there for a moment I had hope about this novel. But I’ve read on and the hope has faded quite a bit.

Again, I don’t know how this collaboration worked. But given that Pratchett has top billing on the book’s cover, I was hopeful. Maybe my warning should have been that the book came from the bargain bin at Wal-Mart. The only more telling spot this book could have come from would have been Dollar Tree (though to be fair I have found some well-written books there, so location isn’t everything).

But here’s a more important question: Is an author with a voice as unique as Pratchett’s doomed to having to inject that voice into everything he writes? Perhaps it’s too much for a fanboy like me to ask that everything with the Pratchett name have that same Pratchett signature. Maybe Sir Terry decided he wanted to take his writing down a different road – The Long Earth is science fiction, not fantasy, after all. Perhaps he decided the genre and the idea contained in sci-fi called for a different writing style?

Yet I wonder.

John Steinbeck, another favorite author, kept his voice consistent throughout his major works. Even in my least-favorite Steinbeck book – Travels with Charly – it’s clear as you read that the book, a travelogue, is written by Steinbeck. Anyone familiar with Steinbeck’s style could pick up a copy of Travels, read it, and without glancing at the cover, know it was Steinbeck. The same can be said for the likes of Hemingway.

So it’s a bit of a letdown, even allowing for a writer’s freedom, that The Long Earth feels so unpratchettesque. And that’s a problem. Many people picking up this book with Pratchett’s name displayed on the cover so prominently are bound to be disappointed – particularly as, contrary to what the SFReader reviewer says – the story is particularly dull and far, far away from the vividness of Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, to which the reviewer compares this novel.

I think where the greatest disappointment lies is in the characters themselves. They’re dull, interchangeable, and rather forgettable. There is ample room to make the main characters – the artificial intelligence Lobsang – a reincarnation of a Tibetian motorcycle mechanic; and Joshua, a natural “Stepper” able to visit the parallel earths without aid of technology, potato-powered or not – far more interesting than they are. As it is, they’re set aside and left rather one-dimensional in favor of the idea of having unlimited Earths to explore. Even the magnificent airship Lobsang creates to accomplish the journey is dull where in Pratchett’s hands alone it would have been more magnificent. And we’d have a memorable explanation as to why the ship is called The Mark Twain.

Pratchett’s strength as an author is what he shares with Charles Dickens: An inexhaustible capacity for creating characters that compel the story. There is a reason, for example, that every Watch novel in Pratchett’s Discworld series becomes a Sam Vimes novel – because it’s the character of Sir Samuel that makes up the Watch and everything about the watch, with lots of interesting characters along for the ride. Each subplot of a Watch novel is character-driven, but driven in a way that keeps the overall story going.

There is no such thing in The Long Earth. And it’s clear I’m not the only one bothered by that.

So this is a good cautionary tale for me as a writer – again, clear evidence why writers who want to be good ought to be voracious and observant readers, ready to deconstruct what they like and don’t like about what they read. As I re-read my own work, I have to take into consideration: Where am I failing my own potential audience? And where am I failing myself as a writer as I analyze the writing of others?

This Doesn't Bode Well. But it Tropes Nicely.

I’m eight pages into “The Long Earth” by Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter, and can already tick the following off the long list of science fiction clichés:

Displaced protragonists.

Socially-anachronistic displaced protagonists.

Multi-dimensional planetismals.

Technobabble meant to explain the multi-dimensional planetismals.

The absent-minded professor spouting the technobabble and other little tid-bits meant to advertise hey, Absent-Minded Professor.

Comically disguised superintelligence.

A shadowy pseudo-corporation bent on taking advantage of the multi-dimensional planetismals.

I will continue to read, because TERRY PRATCHETT. Who wouldn’t continue reading? But I’m leery. Co-authoring. That typically doesn’t bode well. Sure, Stephen Baxter also brags in the liner notes that he co-write a book with Arthur C. Clarke. But so has Gentry Lee. Remember Rama II? If you like turning down the volume on Clarke’s typical with wondering awe jaws-agape science fiction with a Michael Crichton let’s-inch-up-the-terror killfest, then you probably do remember Rama II.

You have to expect a certain amount of trope and cliché from any novel, but sci-fi is a genre that unfortunately lends to them more readily (second only to fantasy). Some of the tropes and clichés are handled quite well, while others, well, are there because they’re expected, not because they’re artfully done.

I suspect, unfortunately, that this book will be much of the latter.

Good sci-fi is about the IDEA – Clarke’s 2001 was about extraterrestrial intelligence forming, and then re-contacting, life on Earth; Azimov’s Bicentennial Man was about artificial intelligence becoming self-aware; Chevalier’s Cyborg Harpies trilogies was apparently about an android that discovers feelings. And I love the IDEA behind sci-fi. Character is secondary to the IDEA – note the complete interchangeability of the characters in Rendezvous with Rama, totally overshadowed by the IDEA.

Sci-fi doesn’t need quirky characters – or if it does it’s for window-dressing. But the curtains shouldn’t conceal the IDEA. We’ll see what happens with the IDEA here.

Watch for that Asterisk

"Students Reading E-Books Are Losing Out, Study Suggests."

That’s the headline in the New York Times, at least. And, like many headlines, it doesn’t tell the whole story.

Yes, a small and admittedly limited study at West Chester University in Pennsylvania found that children remembered less from reading ebooks than they remembered reading traditionally printed books. But there appears to be a lot more meaning embedded in the study than the headline and lede suppose.

What appears to be most revealing in this study (and I have to say appears since the NYT coverage is skint and the research and presentation themselves are behind a paywall) is that it’s the type of ebook that is damaging comprehension, not necessarily ebooks themselves, so watch it if you see this paper or this NYT link presented with the trumpeted headline without that ever-important asterisk.

Here’s what the NYT says:

They advise parents and teachers to look for e-books that enhance and extend interactions with the text, rather than those that offer only distractions; that promote interactions that are relatively brief rather than time-consuming; that provide supports for making text-based inferences or understanding difficult vocabulary; and that locate interactions on the same page as the text display, rather than on a separate screen.

They found that e-books which incorporated in-book games and other “rich” media elements were distracting students from reading, not that ebooks themselves were damaging to reading comprehension. The authors of the study cite another in which “children spent 43 percent of their e-book engagement time playing games embedded in the e-books rather than reading the text.

Other studies haven’t found a significant comprehension gap between ebooks and traditional books. In “Tablet vs. Paper: The Effect on Learners’ Reading Performance,” a study performed in Turkey in 2011, researchers discovered “there was no significant difference between the groups in reading speed or the level of reading comprehension.”