March 30, 2009
Vandana Singh, Suchitra Mathur and I are teaching a three-week speculative-fiction workshop at IIT-Kanpur in June/July this year. The application form is here, and the announcement is here. IIT-K doesn’t have a web link yet.
There have been other SF workshops in India of course, but they’ve been sporadic affairs designed to teach beginners. Our focus is a bit different. We’re aiming to help the semipro writer get to the next level. We also intend to make this an annual affair. The long-term goal is to create a network of desi spec-fic writers. Right now, there’s a lot of talent, but they mostly work in isolation. We hope to change that.The instructors may be different year to year, but the overall goals of the workshop will remain the same. Sustainability is important here, because it’s probably going to take a couple of decades of effort to make a real difference. But I try not to dwell on that part.
Suchitra Mathur at IITK had to do most of the hard work in setting up the workshop, and now we’ll reap the benefits of her hard work. I know. It is unfair. I know. But look yaar, I didn’t design the Matrix.
p>But this blog is not about the workshop. It’s about putting together a list of spec-fic stories for the workshop. One problem with writing workshops is that the participants are all working off different stories. It helps to have a common pool of stories for discussions about voice, point of view, dialog handling and so on. Making the list is a lot of fun, but it’s also turning out to be a lot harder than I thought. It reminds me of the scene in High Fidelity where John Cusack talks about the art of making a compilation tape:
“A good compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to hold the attention. Then you have to take it up a notch, but not blow your wad, so maybe cool it off a notch, and you can’t put the same artist twice on the tape, except if some subtle point or lesson or theme involved, and even then not the two of them in a row, and you can’t woo somebody with Joni Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxi” and then bash their head off with something like GBH’s “City Baby Attacked by Rats,” and… oh, there are a lot of rules…”
Exactly. So what would be the killer first story?
(more…)
September 17, 2006
Like many current science fiction authors, Jules Verne would’ve been surprised to learn he was one. His ambitions were somewhat different. As he told Alexander Dumas, pere:
"Just as you are the great chronicler of history, I shall be the chronicler of geography."
And he proceeded to do just that. There are four recurring characters in a Jules Verne novel: air, fire, earth and water. The womb’s domain, so to speak. Verne liked to place his human characters in enclosed, self-contained, unique spaces of one kind or the other– heavier-than-air flying machines, isolated islands, floating cities, villages on tree-tops, the earth’s core, cannon-balls to the moon, steel submarines 20,000 leagues under the sea– and send them out for a spin. For the most part, his people are two-dimensional cross-hairs; their main role is keep track of places in the reader’s mind.
But there is one marvelous exception. In 1912, some forty odd years after the publication of 20,000 leagues Under The Sea, Sir Earnest Shackleton wrote in The Future of Exploration:
"…all the work of our modern oceanographers– of Sir John Murray of Challenger fame, Dr. Hjort of the Michael Sars, Prince Albert of Monaco, and of the various marine biological stations– has won less of public attention and interest than did a single one of Jules Verne’s heroes, Captain Nemo of the Nautilus. Thus does a good tale overshadow the romance of real life…."
How did Captain Nemo ever become something more than one of Verne’s story pegs? F. P. Walter provides one answer:
"…much of the novel’s brooding power comes from Captain Nemo. Inventor, musician, Renaissance genius, he’s a trail-blazing creation, the prototype not only for countless renegade scientists in popular fiction, but even for such varied figures as Sherlock Holmes or Wolf Larsen. However, Verne gives his hero’s brilliance and benevolence a dark underside–the man’s obsessive hate for his old enemy. This compulsion leads Nemo into ugly contradictions: he’s a fighter for freedom, yet all who board his ship are imprisoned there for good; he works to save lives, both human and animal, yet he himself creates a holocaust; he detests imperialism, yet he lays personal claim to the South Pole….Hate swallows him whole."
It is a plausible explanation. As Captain Nemo readies to destroy an enemy ship– of unspecified nationality– he rages at the tale’s protesting narrator in an Ahab-type outburst:
"I’m the law, I’m the tribunal! I’m the oppressed, and there are my oppressors! Thanks to them, I’ve witnessed the destruction of everything I loved, cherished, and venerated–homeland, wife, children, father, and mother! There lies everything I hate! Not another word out of you!"
But who destroyed everything Nemo loved? Which homeland? 20,000 leagues was deliberately silent on these issues. Verne had wanted Nemo to be a Polish rebel who’d participated in the January Uprising and whose family had been murdered by Tsarist Russia for that reason. But Russia happened to be a pal of France at the moment, and Verne’s editor, Pierre-Jules Hetzel, "persuaded" him to omit crucial details.
(more…)
February 11, 2006
I’ve decided to take up flogging.
A flog is a blog entry that’s less than 500 words. A flog is a flash blog. The world craves to be flogged and good floggers are always in short supply.
Now, ‘flog’ does have another meaning; it’s how the British transmitted seat-of-the-pants know-how. The battle of Waterloo was supposedly won on the schooldesks at Rugby. Possibly. But I am not talking about that kind of flogging.
A flog is a brief, terse, precis of a summary. The 0.5K limit is necessary. Tolstoy’s idea of an epilogue resulted in a 28 chapter addendum to War and Peace. The arm neither aches nor does the sweat drip, but the satisfaction, I assure you, is still exquisitely pink and equally addictive.
A lot can be said in 500 words. The Gettysburg Address is under 300 words. My favorite example of a perfect tale is a mere 412 words. And obviously, my favorite language, English, was designed by floggers; the larger the concept, the smaller the tag. Consider: Life. God. Good. Evil. Die. YHWH. TAO. Yet. No. Text.
Sex. And oh yeah, Fuck.
Shakespeare — not exactly a flogger — posed one of the deepest questions ever with small words: "To Be Or Not
To Be?" John Steinbeck wrote a 350,000 word answer which boiled down to this one word: timshel. Roughly, Hebrew for: may be.
So: no more 6,000 word masterpieces on the smells listed in Kalidasa’s Kumarasambhava or the smells not listed in Jayarasi’s Tattvopaplavasimha. No more moody Borgesian reveries on the Tantric significance of the loincloth or on the origin of laughter amongst the Parsis. No more pedantic 10K expositions on the market for merkins or on equal rights for mammose women.
I think it was Bruce Sterling who said–
See! I would’ve finished that quote in the past. Not now. Who cares what Sterling said? A flogger
doesn’t have the luxury of considering what Sterling said or didn’t say. Floggers have to watch their keystrokes.
So here are some ground rules for a legit flog. Under 0.5K words of course. Use small words rather than big sesquipedalian ones. A picture may be worth ten thousand words Larkin,
Jill H. and Herbert A. Simon. 1987. "Why a Diagram is (Sometimes) Worth
Ten Thousand Words." Cognitive Science 11(1):65-99.† but we’ll ignore them. Words in footnotes count. Comments, however, will not be included in the flog count. Plastic cups will be provided.
Seriously, who has the time to read the 365 chapters of War And Peace? The Bible and the Vedas haven’t been read for centuries; had readers been flogged, who knows? The future belongs to floggers.
Flog it, I say.
August 28, 2005
Here is a perfect tale, orginally in Kannada. Kannada is one of the state languages of India; as the Wikipedia advises, it should not be confused with Canada.
A Story And A Song
A housewife knew a story. She also knew a song. But she kept them to herself, never told anyone the story nor sang the song.
Imprisoned within her, the story and the song wanted release, wanted to run away. One day, when she was sleeping with her mouth open, the story escaped, fell out of her, took the shape of shoes and sat outside the house. The song also escaped, took the shape of something like a man’s coat and hung on a peg.
The woman’s husband came home, looked at the coat and shoes, and asked her, "Who is visiting?"
"No one," she said.
"But whose coat and shoes are these?"
"I don’t know," she replied. He wasn’t satisfied with her answer. He was suspicious. Their conversation was unpleasant. The unpleasantness led to a quarrel. The husband flew into a rage, picked up his blanket, and went to the Monkey God’s temple to sleep.
The woman didn’t understand what was happening. She lay down alone that night. She asked the same question over and over: "Whose coat and shoes are these?" Baffled and unhappy, she put out the lamp and went to sleep.
All the flames of the town, once they were out, used to come to the Monkey God’s temple and spend the night there, gossipping. On this night, all the lamps of all the houses were represented there– all except one, which came late. The others asked the latecomer, "Why are you so late tonight?"
"At our house, the couple quarreled late into the night," said the flame.
"Why did they quarrel?"
"When the husband wasn’t home, a pair of shoes came into the veranda, and a coat somehow got onto a peg. The husband asked her whose they were. The wife said she didn’t know. So they quarrelled."
"Where did the coat and shoes come from?"
"The lady of our house knows a story and a song. She never tells the story, and has never sung the song to anyone. The story and the song got suffocated inside; so they got out and have turned into a coat and a pair of shoes. They took revenge. The woman doesn’t even know."
The husband, lying under his blanket in the temple, heard the lamp’s explanation. His suspicions were cleared. When he went home, it was dawn. He asked his wife about her story and her song. But she had forgotten both of them.
"What story? What song?" she said.
Source: A. K. Ramanujan, Collected Essays, ed. Vinay Dharwadkar, Oxford India. 1999. pp. 438-439
August 12, 2005
Eight hundred years ago, the Kashmiri pundit
Kshemendra described a poet’s education in the Kavikanthabharana (verses 10-11). Here’s a loose translation.
With his eyes
a poet should learn
the form of leaves.
Know how to make
people laugh.
Study the nature of each living thing.
The features of ocean and mountain,
the motion of sun, moon, and stars.
His mind should enter into the seasons.
Go among
different peoples,
different landscapes,
learning their languages.
It’s not a bad prescription for science fiction. The Pandit tells us to keep the imagination real, so to speak. The mundane SF movement, if it does not devolve into quakebottom literature, might produce the kind of writing Pandit Kshemendra had in mind. Stories rooted in this world, and yet.
We’ll see.
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