The Annotated STATIONS OF THE TIDE (Part 3)

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the suppression of Whitemarsh: This and the related witch-cults were based on the Albigensian Crusades against the Cathars.

 

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the maggot in the skull: A maggot is not only a larval fly, but also a whimsical notion, derived from the folk belief that an irrational person literally had maggots in their brain.

 

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the Third Unification: Of this phase of the Prosperan System’s long and tangled history, I know nothing.

 

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barnacle flies: A dimorphic name: in Great Winter a barnacle and in Great Summer a fly.

Rose Hall: Rose Hall, Jamaica, is known for the legend of White Witch, Annie Palmer, a slave owner even crueler than most of her kind, who was purportedly trained in voodoo.

 

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sleeve job: A crude folk joke in which the sleeve job is described as a sex act of extreme perversity and effectiveness—yet whose specific workings are never described. The term has since been appropriated for various sexual acts of greater or lesser likelihood.

Caliban: Miranda’s larger moon, inhospitable to life and used primarily to house prisons and military training camps.

 

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TERMINAL HOTEL: This is an inside joke. There used to be a shabby hotel across from the Reading Terminal in Philadelphia. The sign over its door simply read TERMINAL. Gardner Dozois was once filmed crossing the street in front of the Terminal Hotel for an incidental scene in Brian de Palma’s movie, Blow Out. Unhappily, the footage ended up on the cutting room floor.

 

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Two television sets were wedged in the sand, one with the sound off, and the other turned away: When I first came to Center City in Philadelphia, I couldn’t afford to buy a television. So I went out on trash day and hauled every TV set I found back to my apartment. I yanked the vacuum tubes (this was before printed circuits) and took them to Radio Shack, which had a tube tester, and bought new tubes. This resulted in two sets, one of which had good sound and the other a good image. I stacked one on top of the other and the rest went back to the curb.

Sex, magic, and television are thematic in Stations of the Tide, as intangible technologies whose main effects are achieved inside the human brain.

 

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the System government: A small joke here. Prospero and its attendant planets make up the Prosperan System. But the government is the System.

 

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wands and orchids: Male and female genitalia.

 

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“All is pattern”: This is one of the major themes of Stations, along with the universality of change. I feel close to embarrassed for pointing out something so obvious.

 

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haunts: This is the first mention of the aboriginal people who possessed Miranda before the coming of humans and the guilt for whose possible extinction haunts Mirandan society. The name is derived from the “haints” of African-American folklore.

 

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Ariel: Miranda’s lesser moon.

Ararat: The resting-place of Noah’s Ark. Also the first human city on Miranda, long since abandoned and lost.

 

 

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BONES OF THE EARTH E-Book Sale! One Day Only!!!

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Open Road Media, my e-book publisher, has just informed me that tomorrow, Thursday, April 25, 2024, my dinosaurs-and-time-travel novel, Bones of the Earth will be on sale for $1.99 in Canada and the US. 

When I finished writing Bones of the Earth, it was the most accurate dino novel ever written. When I finished a chapter, I'd run it past renowned dinosaur reconstruction artist Robert Walters. Who would return it to me with an insultingly long list of mistakes I'd made that needed to be corrected. Then I'd send it to the late Ralph Chapman, at the Smithsonian. Who would, again, return it to me with an insultingly long list of mistakes I needed to correct. The result was a factually pristine science fiction novel. Not one misstatement of fact.

By the time it was published, one of the corrections I'd made--having attacking teeth-birds fly up from the ground rather than down from a tree--was out of date. Paleontologists had discovered that, against prior assumptions, the early birds were capable of perching after all.

Since then, I assume, my book has drifted further away from what is currently known about the Maastrichtian. But it's still pretty good, factually.

Also, entertaining. Did I mention that it's lots of fun? It really is.

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A Cautionary Tale For New Writers

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John Barth died recently and I very much wanted to do an appreciation of his work.

But there was a problem.

Giles Goat-Boy was the first Big Fat Literary Book I ever tackled. This was back when it first came out, and I was fourteen. So it was an important book for me. Unfortunately, it contained a black character, an apish, indiscriminate rapist so unpleasantly drawn that it took me aback. Even then, when I knew nothing about race and sex and people, this portrayal seemed... strange? ...cruelly caricaturish? ...offensive? Ultimately, I shoved it aside, figuring I'd understand it better when I knew something about race and sex and people.

Now that I know, perhaps, something about race and sex and people, I recognize the character as a failed attempt at satire and irony. But that doesn't make it any less loathsome.

Barth was in his day considered a major writer and definitely, at a minimum, Canon track. The Sot-Weed Factor, whose young protagonist, Ebenezer Cooke, signs himself "poet and virgin" and becomes the Poet Laureate of colonial Maryland, was a wonderful creation. But I didn't have the time to reread that discursive treasure chest of prose, so I determined instead to write about "The Dunyazadiad," one of three novellas in Chimera.

I loved the premise, which was that Sheherazade of the Thousand Nights and a Night was, with the help of her sister Dunyazade, anachronistically trying to solve, with yellow pads and sharpened pencils, the problem of Sharyar raping and killing a virgin a night when a Genie appears who knows the solution because he's John Barth himself. Who has for most of his life loved the book which she will be the heroine of.

Much of what ensued consisted of Sheherazade and Barth wonking about writing fiction. Catnip for a gonnabe writer like me. At one point Barth and Scherazade talked about framing a story and speculated that it might be possible to frame a story from inside. Which is, extraordinarily, what The Dunyazadiad accomplished.

But right in the middle of this fantasia of rowdy sex and literature is the following sentence fragment: ...and found my sister-in-law cuckolding my brother with the blackamoor Sa'ad al-din Saood, who swung from trees, slavered and gibbered, and sported a yard that made mine look like your little finger.

Eek.

I couldn't exactly present this story to you, saying, "Drink deep of this lovely story. It's only got one racist turd in it." So I gave up on writing a memorial until I could come up with something a little more nuanced. This post, I hope.

There is a lesson here for gonnabe writers: Don't punch down. Be wild, be free, be daring, don't hesitate to lambaste those in power. But don't punch down. Satire is a tool to be used against those with power and pretension. Don't employ it against those who have neither. John Barth did, and as a result we all think the less of him--and, more importantly, his work--because of it.

End of sermon. Go thou and sin no more.

And speaking of John Barth . . .

I met him. My senior year at William & Mary, he entranced a crowded auditorium with a reading from The Dunyazadiad. His voice soft with love, he read, "'All those nights at the foot of that bed, Dunyazade!' he exclaimed. 'You've had the whole literary tradition transmitted to you--'" Here, he paused to let a smutty laugh pass through the audience before continuing, "'and the whole erotic tradition too!'" He knew how to read a story, and how to play the audience as well. Like a trout at the end of a line.

Afterward, the English Department had a gathering (seniors only) in his honor. I stood by, awestruck and silent, as he and Dr. David Clay Jenkins discussed colonial governor Francis Nicholson. "What a mean man!" Dr. Jenkins exclaimed.

"Yes," Barth agreed, "but he had something."

And that simple exchange epitomized for me why it was I had sunk four years into obtaining a liberal arts education. So that someday I could talk as knowledgeably about esoteric matters with intelligent strangers.

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The Annotated STATIONS OF THE TIDE (Part 2)

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the Outer Circle:  The far regions of the Prosperan System. All the most dangerous research is conducted as far from population centers as possible.

 

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Continent: There being only one continent, it needs no other name.

 

sparrowfish: The Great Winter morph of what is, in the Great Summer, a rainbird.

 

 

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Witch Cults of Whitemarsh: The chapter heading was inspired by Margaret Murray’s The Witch-Cult in Western Europe and was meant to suggest that the witch cults of the Tidewater are matriarchal in structure.

 

[the magic trick explained]: This is a change on the original Vanishing Bird Cage trick, which relied on the audience not knowing that the dove inside the cage had been squashed when it collapsed.

 

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Laserfield Academy: Like many private academies, Laserfield is named after its location. Since the original technology of the field, whether for communications or planetary defense, is long obsolete, it can be assumed that this is a very old name, from the early days of Miranda’s colonization.

 

elfinbone: Ivory, derived from the German word “Elfinbein.” I had thought it an archaic word but recently I have seen it claimed that Jorge Luis Borges credited James Joyce with its creation for Finnegans Wake. Either way, it is a charming word.

 

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Captain Bergier: This “scrawny-bearded poet,” edging into senility, is an avatar of Ezra Pound. This was inspired the following lines from Bob Dylan’s “Destination Row:”

 

            And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot

            Fighting in the captain’s tower

            While calypso singers laugh at them

            And fishermen hold flowers

 

Like Pound, Captain Bergier has been driven to the edge of madness by his economic theoretics.

 

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Lightfoot: A small town in the Virginia Tidewater, not far from Williamsburg.

 

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fleur-de-vie: “Flower of life,” the vagina.

 

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COMICOSMICS! Coming Soon!!!

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Set your alarm clocks! Marianne has announced the sell-date for Dragonstairs Press' latest chapbook. As usual, it will sell out in a matter of minutes. I'm not exaggerating here. As Will Sonnet used to say, "No brag, just fact."

Here's the announcement letter as Marianne sent it out:

Saturday the 20th of April, noon, EDT, Dragonstairs Press will be launching Comicosmics at dragonstairs.com.

Comicosmics is Michael Swanwick's homage to Italo Calvino, cleverly inverted from the original.  Henry Wessells said of it, "[this] book is an entire intergalactic philosophical novel within the compass of near infinity, and six printed pages. It is one of the several things that Michael Swanwick does best."

Comicosmics was launched at the 2024 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts in Orlando, Florida.  It was issued in an edition of 50, of which 47 were available for sale.  35 remain.  The chapbook is 8 ½” by 5 ½” and is hand-stitched and bound in black lokta paper, silk-screened with metallic images.  All are numbered and signed by the author.

--

Marianne Porter (she/her)

editor, publisher

Dragonstairs Press

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The Shockwave Rider!

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Look what came in the mail! The Shockwave Rider by John Brunner. Brunner was one of the biggest names in science fiction when he wrote this novel, and in many ways this was a high-water mark in his career. It is also the book wherein Brunner contributed a new word to the English language when he named the computer "worm." (For those unfamiliar with the term, a computer virus is downloaded into a computer via attachments, where a worm is an independent agent that finds its own way in.)

This beautifully-made edition comes from Subterranean Press, and I had the honor of writing its introduction.

While working on the introduction, I realized that because Brunner was writing a near-future novel, its hour arrived not long ago and it is now an alternate-history novel. Where much of its pleasure originally came from wondering how many of its predictions would come true, today that pleasure consists of seeing which predictions came true (a surprising number) and which did not. Meanwhile, the plot is still involving.

John Brunner had the sad distinction of being the first science fiction writer to die while attending the World Science Fiction Convention. I was there, in Glasgow, when the rumor ran like wildfire through the convention: John Brunner collapsed and was taken to the hospital! Followed shortly by: He's dead.

There was a hastily-created memorial to Brunner at the convention and, again, I was there. Robert Silverberg, obviously heartbroken by the death of a friend, spoke movingly of the man, his life, his career, and his works. Then, brilliantly, he said that since a writer was a form of entertainer, rather than a minute of silence he was going to request a minute of applause.

The response was thunderous.

And it's anticlimactic to mention this but . . .

If you want to buy a copy, you can order it here.  Or, you know, just go to centipedepress.com and wander about, occasionally lusting after the books there.

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O. J. Now O. J. Then O. J. Forevermore

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O. J. Simpson has died and all the frogs in the pond are croaking. The narrative they push is, mostly, that white America saw his trial as a rich man getting away with murder and Black America seeing the trial as a racist police department framing another Black man. Which is true enough but not enlightening.

I confess that I fell into the first camp. But then Marianne and I were at a friend's party where, as it chanced, we were the only white people. The conversation, all about the trial, was nuanced and thoughtful and definitely not on the side of the LAPD. And then Stanley (our host) came up with a formula that made sense of it all.

Guilty, he said. AND framed.

Stan's insight not only explained why the famous glove didn't fit but reconciled me to the verdict. When a guilty man gets away with murder, that's injustice. When the police plant evidence to convict somebody just because they don't like him, a conviction is an assault against the very concept of justice.

Freeing O. J. was the right thing to do. 

It is entirely my own personal opinion, not backed up by any information that was not available to all the world already when I add the word "alas."

Above: Photo taken from Politico's take on O. J.'s life. You can find it here.

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