Category Archives: Classics

My Chessiecon 2021 Schedule

You’re invited to join me at a virtual science fiction and fantasy convention this weekend. Give me a second while I find out what they’re charging for admission to this thing…wait…ah, here. No, that can’t be right. It’s free?

I guess so. You can listen all weekend to my inciteful and inspiring ideas for nuttin’. Nada. Zero dollars and zero zero cents. (Well, you’re invited to make a donation.) Here’s the Chessiecon website where you can register to attend.

Anyway, I’ve listed my schedule below, which is subject to change. All times are Eastern time zone.

Date/TimeTitleDescription
Fri 4:30 PMHow to be a panelist / moderator / presenter at SF/F consNew to trying to herd cats? Not only does a moderator need to encourage panelists, stop one panelist from taking over the whole shebang, but also a moderator needs to be able to read the audience.
Fri 9:00 PMUnderwater Cities. Is there merit to this idea?What are the Engineering, Social, and Environmental limitations to expanding the areas of earth’s surface that people can inhabit?
Sat 10:00 AMWhy Read the Classics?Do they still have something to teach us, or are they just not something of interest to a 21st-Century audience?
Sat 2:30 PMWhy Aren’t They Writing Like They Used To?We all know the trope that s/ff has always has at least overtones of politics; but what other things have changed or not changed in the field?
Sat 4:00 PMPandemics Throughout History, and Their Effects on Literature2019-2021 is not the first regional, continental or even global pandemic in history.  How have these events affected literature, be it fantasy, speculative or science-fiction literature?
Sat 8:30 PMWorldbuilding in Your StoryPhysical characteristics, societies, geography, languages, and what else might fit. And how this affects your stories
Sat 10:30 PMWhat Did I Do to Survive the Great Pandemic? How our panelists muddled through, and yet, still somehow are not zombies. Note: may be slightly delayed if the chorus runs over slightly.

I’ll be moderating the Underwater Cities panel, the Classics panel, and the Worldbuilding panel. I’ll be a panelist for the rest.

Here’s that website one more time: www.chessiecon.org.

How many opportunities do you get to listen to me for free? Heck, I don’t even get that deal. I charge myself admission, and I pay up, ‘cause I’m worth it.

But you don’t have to pay a cent to listen to seven sensational sessions this Friday and Saturday when you’ll hear the portentous pontifications of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 25, 2021Permalink

Jules Verne’s Impact on Undersea Fiction

The publication of Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea led to a boom in books about undersea adventures. But the boom didn’t occur immediately and Verne wasn’t the sole cause.

Before explaining all that, I’ll mention an upcoming anthology of short stories titled 20,000 Leagues Remembered, scheduled for release on the 150th anniversary of Verne’s submarine novel. Until April 30, fellow editor Kelly A. Harmon and I are accepting short stories inspired by that novel. For more details and to submit your story, click here or on the cover image.

Verne wasn’t the first to venture into undersea fiction, though the predecessor works are fantasy, not science fiction. The list is brief. If I stretch the definition of undersea fiction, it includes the Biblical story of Jonah, Edgar Allan Poe’s 1831 poem “The City in the Sea,” and Theophile Gautier’s 1848 novel Les Deux Etoiles (The Two Stars). At least the latter included a submarine.

As shown by the graph, many books involving submarines appeared in the years following Verne’s undersea novel. The vast majority of these were intended for what we now call the Young Adult market, and included works by Harry Collingwood, Roy Rockwood, Luis Senarens, Victor G. Durham, Stanley R. Matthews, and Victor Appleton.

In a similar manner, Verne’s Journey to the Center of the Earth (1864) preceded an explosion of novels with subterranean settings. To a lesser extent, these also included many YA works.

But notice a curious thing about the two curves. The rise in subterranean fiction occurs earlier and starts its upward trend earlier than does the curve for undersea fiction.

I have three theories to explain this.

  1. The most obvious reason is that Journey to the Center was published six years before Twenty Thousand Leagues. That six-year gap doesn’t explain it all, however.
  2. I believe other authors, after reading Twenty Thousand Leagues, were daunted by the prospect of imitating that novel. To write credibly about submarines required knowledge most writers lacked. However, subterranean fiction required no geological expertise and no vehicle. Moreover, the writer’s underground setting could include any fantasy elements imaginable.
  3. I think the later peak in submarine novels had less to do with Verne than it did with the introduction of real submarines into the world’s navies. With actual submarines becoming familiar to readers, authors could pattern their fictional vehicles after real ones.

Neither of these mountain-shaped curves is due solely to Verne’s works. They both coincide with a boom in publishing adventure fiction of all kinds, not just undersea and subterranean. A drop in publishing costs, a rise in disposable income, a recognition that young people craved to read—all these factors attracted writers and publishers to new opportunities.

Still, I don’t want to understate Verne’s impact on undersea fiction either. Prior to Twenty Thousand Leagues, such works were fantasies. Afterward, they were either science fiction or real-life adventure stories.

After the publication of Twenty Thousand Leagues, it became the standard to which later submarine novels got compared. Even today, 150 years later, if you ask people to name a submarine novel, most likely they will either answer with The Hunt for Red October, or Verne’s book.

I just can’t help this fascination with stories of the sea. After all, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

February 23, 2020Permalink

A Few Leagues Short of 20,000

My favorite novel is Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. Still, the book is not free of literary flaws. Let’s examine them.

Before diving into those, allow me to remind you I’ll be co-editing an anthology paying tribute to Verne’s novel. Along with award-winning author and editor Kelly A. Harmon, I’ll be launching Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered on June 20, 2020, the sesquicentennial of the classic submarine tale. Click here for details on when and how you can contribute a short story to this anthology.

Regarding the weaknesses of 20,000 Leagues, I know it’s unfair to judge a Nineteenth Century French novel by the standards of Twenty First Century America. Still, it is a classic, and therefore it must explore universal and enduring facets of the human condition. It does so, as I discussed here, but some aspects of the work have not stood up well by modern standards.

Submarine

Verne devotes two whole chapters to a tour of the Nautilus and a discussion of its features and capabilities. No modern writer would risk boring readers that way. In truth, some of us like these chapters, and I credit them with inspiring me to major in Naval Architecture at college, but for most readers these tedious details are unnecessary.

Women

No significant female characters appear in the work, a glaring defect by modern standards. The only mentions of women are a brief reference to Ned Land’s former fiancée, Kate Tender (Really? Kate Tender?) and a moment when Pierre Aronnax spies Captain Nemo kneeling and crying before a portrait of a woman—presumably Nemo’s former wife—and two children. Few of Verne’s novels feature female characters, and he might have found it difficult to write one into this story, had he been so inclined. Film versions of the novel often include women, though.

Protagonist

Any well-written novel has a clear protagonist. Who is the protagonist in 20,000 Leagues? Before you answer, recall a protagonist is at the center of a story, propels the plot forward, makes key decisions, faces the obstacles, and endures the consequences.

You could make a case that Captain Nemo is the protagonist, making all the novel’s key decisions and driving the plot along. The consequence of his mounting hatred against oppressive nations is that he goes mad at the end.

However, most reviewers consider Pierre Aronnax the protagonist. He’s the narrator through whose eyes we see all the action. He faces a significant conflict—whether to stay aboard with Nemo the Ultimate Marine Biologist, or escape from Nemo the Insane Pirate. Still, Aronnax is a weak protagonist, more of an observer of events, a scientist studying Nemo’s decisions.

Motivation

In modern literature, no antagonist can be purely evil without a reason. In our post-Freud world, we must know the backstory behind the ‘bad guy.’ As an antagonist (if he is one), Captain Nemo seems driven by forces kept obscure and never revealed. We’re left to wonder why someone would gather a crew, construct a submarine, shun all inhabited land, and sail around the world attacking ships from certain nations. In this novel, readers see a few vague hints about Nemo’s motives and background. Only in Verne’s later novel, The Mysterious Island, do we come to understand what made Nemo tick.

Fish

Among the major turn-offs for modern readers are the long, tiresome descriptions of fish. To give his work credibility, Verne wrote on and on about the fish seen by his characters. Long paragraphs with lists and details litter the work. While acceptable, and even standard for novels of his time, these extensive descriptive paragraphs would be recommended for deletion by any editor today. As if knowing he might bore some readers, Verne structured these descriptions such that a reader could skip to the next paragraph without missing anything.

Please forgive me for taking these unfair swipes against a literary classic. If I point out the tiny blemishes making this novel less than perfect for modern readers, I do so out of love, and with full recognition of the glorious masterpiece it is. Writing a novel half as good as 20,000 Leagues remains a dream cherished by—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 24, 2019Permalink

What Makes 20,000 Leagues a Classic?

Literary scholars consider Jules Verne’s novel 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea to be a classic. Why? Let’s dive deep into that subject.

First, as a reminder, I have teamed up with the talented writer and editor Kelly A. Harmon of Pole to Pole Publishing with the intent of producing Twenty Thousand Leagues Remembered, an anthology of stories paying tribute to Verne’s submarine novel. Our antho will open for submissions soon, as detailed here, and will launch on June 20, 2020, the sesquicentennial of 20,000 Leagues.

What makes a classic book, and why include 20,000 Leagues in that category? I like the definition put forward by Esther Lombardi in this post. She says a classic: (1) expresses artistic quality, (2) stands the test of time, (3) has universal appeal, (4) makes connections, and (5) is relevant to multiple generations.

Let’s find out if Verne’s work meets these standards.

Artistic Quality

This attribute concerns whether the book was well written by the standards of its time and whether it expresses life, truth, and beauty with artistic excellence. Although much of Verne’s prose seems stilted today, and the book’s over-long descriptions of the submarine and various fish tend to bore today’s readers, the artistic merit of the work certainly met the literary standards of its era. No mere adventure novel, it explored deep themes through its complex anti-hero, Captain Nemo. As the first fictional book to feature a submarine, written in a style imbued with scientific credibility, it stood out from all previous works.

Test of Time

A century and a half after its first publication, 20,000 Leagues is still widely read, with new editions appearing frequently. The novel inspired several films, comic books, video games, and a theme park ride. In 2018, Chicago’s Lookingglass Theatre Company produced a play based on the novel. There’s a Wikipedia entry devoted entirely to adaptations of the work.

Universal Appeal

Everyone can relate to some aspect of the novel. We all admire the unshakable loyalty of Conseil for his master, understand the impulsive and restless Ned Land, sympathize with the dilemma forced on the scientist Pierre Aronnax, and marvel at the unfathomable engineer/pirate Captain Nemo. What reader could remain unmoved while riding along in a fantastic submarine, the Nautilus—part warship, part exploration vessel, and part private yacht—as it cruises from one undersea adventure to the next?

Connections

Verne’s novel contains plenty of allusions to prior works. Captain Nemo’s name (Latin for ‘nobody’) recalled the pseudonym Odysseus used as a ruse with the Cyclops in Homer’s Odyssey. In naming his submarine Nautilus, Verne paid tribute to the American inventor Robert Fulton, who gave that name to his submarine in 1800. The encounter with the giant squid was reminiscent of an octopus scene in Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea. The maelstrom at the end of Verne’s novel honored A Descent into the Maelstrom by Edgar Allan Poe, a writer Verne admired. As already mentioned, this web of connections continued into a vast number of later works, all inspired by 20,000 Leagues.

Relevance

To be relevant, the work must resonate with multiple age groups throughout time. Young people can certainly connect with the adventurous aspects of 20,000 Leagues—the visit to Atlantis, the escape from the ice, the attack on the warship, and the battle with the squid. More mature readers can appreciate Aronnax’s internal struggle between staying aboard for scientific discovery and leaving to escape a madman, as well as the twisted genius of Nemo as he descends into insanity. Even in our age, when nuclear submarines prowl the seas, nothing compares to the Nautilus’ museum, library, and pipe organ. No modern submarine can travel both as deep and as fast as Nemo’s, and the oceans remain almost as mysterious to us as in Verne’s day. Thus, the Nautilus retains its singular fascination for us.

By this standard, 20,000 Leagues has earned its designation as a classic work of fiction. You can check with any literary scholar; you don’t have to take the word of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 7, 2019Permalink

Happy Bicentennial, Frankenstein

Two hundred years ago, author Mary Shelley wrote a remarkable novel— Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus—which endures in popularity and bears an increasingly meaningful warning for us today.

Title page from the original 1818 edition

(Yes, I know I’m a few months late. Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor, & Jones published the novel on January 1, 1818. Amazing that a publisher was working on New Years Day!)

Today, we know Shelley’s novel mainly from its numerous movie incarnations and from the term “Frankenstein monster” itself, which has become shorthand for creating something with unintended negative consequences. I’ll be commenting on the original story, though, not its later derivative works.

Boris Karloff depiction of the monster, from the 1931 movie

In my own stories, I explore the relationships between people and new technology. That is a key aspect of Frankenstein. In fact, that novel is one of the first ever to consider that theme.

Inventors typically create new technology to improve human life, to meet a need. However, the introduction of new technology can also bring about undesirable changes, including fear, active opposition, unforeseen faults in the tech (bugs), and inventor’s regret.

Not only does Shelley show us all of these aspects in Frankenstein, she turns the table on the whole technology impact concept; her sentient technology reacts to its own existence in a world of people.

To us, her novel seems well ahead of its time. Two hundred years ago, the Industrial Revolution had just begun. Electricity was a new and exciting phenomenon, not yet harnessed for effective use. Scientists were discovering elements and chemicals at a rapid pace.

Up to that time, fiction authors had written of golems and homunculi, humanoids created from magic. No stories yet existed of creating human-like life through science.

Perhaps, to readers of Frankenstein in 1818, then witnessing an explosion of scientific discovery, it might have seemed as if the animation of dead human tissue might well be next week’s news. Two centuries later, we have a better idea of how difficult the feat is. We can manipulate DNA to some extent. We’ve achieved remarkable results in extending human lifespans. We can revive the recently dead through mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and other techniques.

Mary W. Shelley

Still, we can’t do what Dr. Frankenstein did…yet. Nonetheless, when I said Shelley’s novel contains a particularly relevant warning for us today, I was referring to science’s quest to create artificially intelligent, sentient, self-aware “life.” This achievement may be decades, or only years, away. The ability for humans to create thinking, human-like life by means other than reproduction will be a breakthrough of far greater impact than any previous scientific development in human history.

We now find ourselves in the role of Dr. Frankenstein before he created the monster. We can consider the ethics of our actions in advance. We can ask if we’re insane even to pursue the enterprise. We can examine and plan for as many possible consequences as we can imagine.

Mary Shelley gave us a novel full of these consequences to consider. From twenty decades in the past, her visage warns us to be careful. She’s cautioning us with a worst-case scenario. If we fail to prepare for these consequences, we’ll have only ourselves to blame.

Thank you, Mary, for your wise counsel. On Frankenstein’s bicentennial, we’re still recklessly curious beings who discover how to do things before thinking whether we should, and before taking appropriate precautions. Maybe things will turn out fine, and much credit will go to you, for your prescient advance notice. Conveying my belated gratitude back through two centuries to you, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

August 19, 2018Permalink

Are Your Stories Antifragile?

That’s no typo in this post’s title. Antifragility is a thing, and today I’m discussing the concept as it applies to fictional stories.

In his book Antifragile, Things That Gain From Disorder, Nassim Nicholas Taleb asks if there is an antonym of the word “fragile.” If there were such an adjective, he’d say it describes things that become stronger when stressed.

He doesn’t mean words like ‘robust,’ ‘tough,’ or ‘resilient.’ Those words describe things that sustain shocks without damage. He wants to describe things that improve their resistance to stress by being stressed. Lacking a ready word, he coined the term ‘antifragile.’

Can a story be antifragile? To answer that, we should consider the things that impose stresses on stories. These include criticism in negative reviews and mocking satire.

What would it mean for a story to become stronger? If it meant that the story became more widely read, more popular, with increased sales, then an antifragile story would be one that suffers negative reviews or even satire and yet its sales increase.

Are there any such stories? If I recall correctly, Nassim Taleb offered the more popular plays of William Shakespeare as examples. For four centuries, those plays have endured bad reviews and been mocked, but they are performed far more often and in more languages and formats than they were in Shakespeare’s time.

From an author’s point of view, antifragility seems like a wonderful property for a story to have, especially the increasing sales part, right? If you wanted to write an antifragile story, and perhaps lacked the skill of Shakespeare, how would you go about it? Are there tangible attributes of such stories? Is there a checklist to follow?

I hate to disappoint you, but there’s no checklist. Further, the only authors who really understand what it takes to make a story antifragile…well, they’re dead. That’s because stories don’t really demonstrate that property to the greatest extent while the author is alive.

Still, being me, I’ll take a crack at it, because I like a challenge. Here is my proposed checklist for making your stories antifragile:

  1. Create complex and compelling characters. They need to seem real, with strong emotions and motivations, with goals to attain, with difficult inner problems to surmount, and with bedeviling decisions to make.
  2. Appeal to every reader. That may be impossible to achieve in a single story, but in your body of work you should include characters of many types, in diverse settings. Include rich and poor, young and old, introvert and extrovert, city and country, etc.
  3. Explore the eternal truths about the human condition. You know many of these eternal truths—we’re born, we grow up, we have parents, we learn to relate to others and even fall in love, we have disagreements and conflicts with others, we become curious about the nature of our world, we deteriorate with age, and we die. When I say to ‘explore’ these truths, I don’t mean to write a philosophy book. Write a fictional story that entertains, but causes readers to ponder those deeper truths after reading it.
  4. Execute your story with style, flair, and creativity. Yeah, right. Simply do that. This one is hard to implement, but I’ll suggest some thoughts. Look for ways to turn a phrase well. Create a new word that English lacks but needs. Write in a manner that stands out, such that readers could identify your unique voice from a couple of paragraphs chosen randomly from your stories.

Okay, it’s not really a checklist where you mark off each item in turn: done, done, done. It’s more of a guideline with concepts to aim for. Who knows if it’s even accurate? After all, I’m not dead yet (as I write this), so I can’t possibly know.

Still, it’s intriguing to think that one day, readers may consider your stories to be antifragile, and when scholars trace it back, they’ll discover you learned how to do it from—

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 7, 2017Permalink

The Trick Is…

Remember the TV show ‘Cosmos?’ No, not the new one starring Neil deGrasse Tyson (though I enjoyed that too). I mean the original Cosmos, starring Carl Sagan. There’s a brief part of one episode that’s stuck in my mind for all the decades since that show first aired.

CosmosTCYou can see the episode here and the part I recalled is from time 41:45 to 42:30.

In the clip, Carl Sagan is standing in a library. He says, if you read one book a week, over a normal human lifespan you can read only a few thousand books. (50 books per year times 70 years would be 3500 books.) He then paces off a distance across some library shelves to indicate that many books.

After remarking on how that’s only a tenth of a percent of the content of a library, he then says, “The trick is to know which books to read.”

That’s it. No follow-up. He goes on to discuss other things.220px-Sagan_planetary_orbits2

Thanks, Dr. Sagan, for clearing up that mystery of the universe.

How about telling us which books? Is there a list somewhere? Don’t just leave us with “the trick is…” without solving it for us!

Okay, okay. I do really like Carl Sagan, and loved the show. And I get what he was saying. His main message is that our lives are too short to permit soaking up all of human knowledge. As you choose books to read, go in with the understanding that you ain’t gonna read ‘em all.

Moreover, there can’t be one right answer to the question of which books to read. There are billions and billions of answers. (Yes, I had to say that.)

But allow me to take up Dr. Sagan’s challenge, and to set up some criteria for selecting books to read, given that you can’t read ‘em all. Here’s my answer to “which books to read:”

  1. Read books you think you’ll enjoy. This is the most important criteria, since if you don’t like reading, you’ll stop. You’ll never come close to reading a book a week for life.
  1. Read some classics, on occasion. They represent the greatest wisdom of the ages, and they have persisted because their value and relevance is timeless.
  1. Read way outside your interest area, on occasion. This helps broaden your knowledge, and you never know when one such book might spark a new passion for you. Try to eventually cover the whole Dewey Decimal System, and all fiction genres.
  1. Read both fiction and non-fiction. You can choose the percentage of each according to your preferences, but I think there’s value in both.
  1. Read books by authors you enjoy, and also give different authors a chance. There’s a strong temptation to keep reading books by the same author. After all, you liked the previous one; chances are you’ll like the next one. That’s fine, but it’s okay to read books by authors who are new to you, every once in a while.
  1. Give each book you select a chance, but don’t be afraid to abandon it. Read past page one; often the value of a book won’t become apparent until later. However, if you’re well into the book and getting nothing out of it, stop and get another. Your lifespan is too limited and there are too many better books for you to slog through reading a bad one.

That’s it, my attempt to respond to Dr. Sagan’s challenge to all of us, to figure out which books to read.   They may not be the best criteria in the cosmos, but they’re good enough for—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 9, 2014Permalink

That’s Classic!

Today’s lesson is: how to write a book that becomes known as a classic. Good news—we can identify some attributes of classic literature. Bad news—no book becomes a classic in the author’s lifetime, so you won’t find out if your book made the list until after you’ve been dead awhile.

ClassicsI’ve blogged before about the attributes of good, quality short stories, but today’s question is about the few books that attain true classic status. These must pass a more stringent test.

Easy, but Unsatisfying Definition

Many people say that a classic is that which endures, stands the test of time, and which people still read long, long after the author is dead. In his book Antifragile, Hassim Taleb states that you can make a rough prediction about how long a book will remain in print. The average time a book will remain in print from this point on is equal to the time it has been in print so far.

To me, this definition of a classic, though true, doesn’t really settle anything. It begs the question, why do readers today still want to read this book? Let’s accept that a classic must endure, but I want to explore why this is so.

Other Folks’ Definitions

I’m not the first to knock on the door to this party; in fact I’m way past fashionably late. Many people before me have come up with great definitions of what makes a classic.

  • Italo Calvino says you can’t feel indifferent to a classic. That definition makes it a personal connection between book and reader. However, that’s not so useful to an author trying to write a classic.
  • Blogger Chris Cox builds on Mark Twain’s definition. There are two kinds of classics, those we’re embarrassed not to have read yet, and those we nag others to read. Funny, but again it concentrates on the reader-to-book connection.
  • The French literary critic Charles Augustin Sainte-Beuve said the author of a classic “….has enriched the human mind…caused it to advance a step; who has discovered some moral and not equivocal truth, or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered…who has spoken to all in his own peculiar style, a style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new without neologism, new and old, easily contemporary with all time.” This is closer to what I’m looking for—let’s hold those thoughts.
  • Goethe said it’s not a classic because it’s old, but because it’s forever new. I like that one.
  • Some blog commenters have said a classic had some impact or effect on the age in which it’s written. That may be true for most classics, but not all such books endure.
  • Others say a classic is that which is new or innovative in its time. But, again, it’s not clear to me why such books would necessarily stand the test of time.
  • Jonathan Jones, a writer for The Guardian, says a classic must be elastic. That is, it endures despite plagiarism, satire, criticism, etc. Hassim Taleb would hasten to add that such pummeling of a classic makes it stronger, more enduring, and to use his word, antifragile. I like this attribute too, but it’s more about the reaction to a book rather than the writing of it.

My Definition

Borrowing the attributes I like and rejecting the rest, here are my rules. A classic for the ages must:

  • capture its time
  • be well written
  • say something profound and permanent about the human condition

There you have it. Write your book that way, and it might become a classic someday. Something for your great-grandchildren to enjoy. Currently at work on a classic, I’m—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 2, 2014Permalink