I see the light and it's made of lasers!

Book: The Ascent of Wonder: The Evolution of Hard SF

Authors: Lots (edited by David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer)

Published: 1994 (collection; Tor)

Pages: 988

Holy shit was this book ever difficult to get through, guys.

Let me clarify right now that I don’t mean because of the quality; it was purely a size thing. Almost 1000 pages crammed with tiny type about physics and biogenetics and astronomy and advanced mathematics and, weirdly enough, more than one whirlpool. Plus dragons.

I’ve been chipping away at this collection since the beginning of July, and it really helped to take two, several-smaller-books-sized breaks. Even then, finishing it still gives my brain that way-too-full sensation of going to a museum and reading every single plaque next to every single exhibit. Ow.

And that is what this gi-fucking-normous book functions best as: a very complete history of sci fi. (Well, up to a point. The youngest story in here is older than I am.) I read it because I want to learn more about the genre, and it gave a really thorough tour through a lot of different trope origins, teaching by showing off examples. Which was the best way to learn, because here you get all the lasers and moon colonies where people have already gotten cynical about the wonders of space and deep-sea aliens and sentient monkeys who escape wearing orange Bermuda shorts and carrying their typewriters and children’s games that lead into another dimension and Asimov computers compiling information about life’s biggest question until the end of time.

It’s all blended together, in case you can’t tell. I think partly because I read all the intros to the stories, too, which each boiled down to “This guy is awesome and [chose one] severely under-appreciated” OR “recognized as one of the leading writers of the genre and a bunch of people still copy him.”

(Regarding that last adjective, there are a relatively decent number of female authors represented here, which is to say two more beyond Anne McCaffery [dragons!] and Ursula K. Le Guin. The collection was also co-edited and compiled by a lady.)

I thought the one they chose for Poe was weaksauce because it’s a sailor describing how he got out of a whirlpool, which, while still affecting, was the most conventional Poe story I’ve ever read. Also, maybe I’m just not appreciating historical nuance, but H.G. Wells’s “Hey, Tanks!” (actual title: “The Land Ironclads”) was also not nearly as good a representation of that author as they could’ve picked. And I can’t really get over McCaffery’s dragons getting put into a collection dedicated to hard sci fi when the definition of the subgenre specifically eliminates magic as a reason for anything.

But once I got into the rhythm and let my eyes skim the passages with incomprehensible engineering equations in them, I had a great time. I’m struggling with the decision about what to do with this physical book now, though. To the pros and cons list!

It throws my spine out of whack whenever I try to lug it around in my shoulder bag, and I automatically deduct major points from any reading material I can’t carry with me at all times.

As a city girl whose pedestrian ways has grown a healthy wariness of potential muggers, I appreciate having a blunt object that will stun but not kill and look completely innocent while doing so.

I can’t see myself ever plowing through the whole thing again, like, ever.

But it’d be great to have to spot-check and keep as a future readings list for authors I would never come across again.

Oh, hell, I’ll just keep the damn thing so I’ll have an excuse to either weed my crowded fiction bookshelf or build another one that looks like the TARDIS. 

Wasted potential

Book: Petropolis

Author: Anya Ulinich

Publication: 2007 (Viking)

Pages: 324

There are two ways to make me instantly hand over book-buying money without asking any further questions.

1.  Write a coming-of-age novel about an immigrant child with a flair for sticking out even in her hometown and a habit of sprinkling her native language overseas and a tired, single mother who doesn’t understand her daughter or their new world but does what she can to keep both alive.
2. Write a novel about a dysfunctional family that never talks about how dysfunctional it is.

If either synopsis is on your book flap (ideally next to your author photo in which you prove you can wear a fedora and not look stupid), I’m yours. At least until I get home, settle into my reading chair, and gradually discover how you can ruin my favorite two storylines in the whole world of literature.

1.      

1. Make your immigrant child stick out for superficial purposes, like a skin color that betrays an unaccepted cultural background—actually, you’re still okay at this point. But don’t give her an ounce of fight against what she can’t help. St. Francis de Sales* forbid you might actually make this a source of her spunkiness instead of turning her boring and having most people ignore what you say is a big deal until your protagonist makes it to Brooklyn and has to deal with racist old people who can’t tell she’s black anyway. </sarcasm> I like Petropolis’s story about Sasha, who grows up in Russia under a strict mother, has a lovechild, then goes to America as a mail-order fiancé and runs away from that to find her long-lost dad. Sasha herself bores me to tears.
2. Have an excellent first half exploring the idiosyncrasies of a Yale research psychologist and his rich female college discovering a medication for depression from a tropical plant, how this affects his career and how his career trajectory affects him and his intelligent-but-stuck-at-home wife and their kids. Add a depressed genius freshman who gets much more suave, then deranged, on his dose of the trial medication. Add a bushfull of escaped parrots. And then, in the second half, change to first person but get less personal (how does that even work?) and devolve into a very generic “We all fuck each other up” family mess. I’m looking at you, Pharmakon.

Gah. Dull books are for freshmen English classes, and even that’s cruel. 

*Patron saint of writers and editors. I’m sort of far from Catholic, but I want someone specific to swear to.

Doing it for money

Book: The First Time I Got Paid For It… Writer’s Tales from the Hollywood Trenches


Author: various (edited by Peter Lefcourt and Laura J. Shapiro)


Publication: 2000 (PublicAffairs)


Number of pages: 253


I bought this book for three reasons.

Except touch typing is even sexier.

1. I love the cover.
2. It was $5 at the 2011 Columbia BookFest. 
3. I thought it’d be about prose writers who went to write in Hollywood for money to support their authorial East Coast drinking and typing habits, like Hemingway and Fitzgerald did.

And it is, sort of, but not really. It’s a collection of essays by screenwriters talking about the first time they felt like they really made it in the movie/TV business. Okay. Still an interesting premise.


I have very vague ideas about how screenwriting and Hollywood work, culled from books like these and a screenwriting friend. My friend’s been a much more informative source so far. Most of these essays are short, a good chunk are light, and so very, very many make jokes about how publicists aren’t actual human beings.


This might sound snobby but I promise it’s just ignorant: I don’t know how famous these people are. William Goldman wrote The Princess Bride, I found out from the foreword, so he’s cool with me. And they caught Cameron Crowe right before Almost Famous; his bio at the end of his essay says, “Crowe is currently in postproduction on a DreamWorks feature film due out in 2000, which was not yet titled at press time.” Totally Almost Famous. Alan Alda is of course from M*A*S*H, but he managed to confuse me in his first two paragraphs.

“I was writing my first episode of M*A*S*H in a hotel room…I came back to town for the second season of M*A*S*H, whose first season had paid for the house in the first place.”

It took me a second to realize he said he was writing HIS first episode. OH. RIGHT. There were other people writing for the show before him. Thus the two seasons he mentioned. Gotcha.


I didn’t get as much insight into the screenwriting mind as I wanted. I feel like prose writers and script writers have such different processes in the same general creative field that it’d be great to read them explain themselves to each other. Funny anecdotes are charming reads and mentions of odd day jobs gave me a couple possibilities, but dammit, I wanted to go deeper.


Ah well. I guess I can just watch Adaptation again and put a few more pieces together.