Tag Archives: classics

Chessiecon 2021 in Review

Had a frantic, but fun-filled weekend at Chessiecon 2021. Chessiecon, named for the sea monster lurking in the Chesapeake Bay, is a science fiction and fantasy convention held each year during the Thanksgiving weekend. For the second year, they made it a virtual conference. And free!

I find it energizing to be in the company of other authors. Their different perspectives on the activity we love always inspires new story ideas. I’ll summarize the seven panels for you.

How to be a panelist / moderator / presenter at SF/F cons

Author DH Aire did a fine job moderating this panel, consisting of Yakira Heistand and me. We shared our experiences, good and bad, and some valuable tips for serving as a panelist, moderator, or presenter at Chessiecon or other cons.

Underwater Cities. Is there merit to this idea?

I moderated this panel, with help from Linda Adams and John Monahan as panelists. Together we held a wide-ranging, informative discussion of the implications and likelihoods of underwater cities of the future. I’m ready to move to one now!

Why Read the Classics?

A rather heavy topic for a Saturday morning, but we did our best to keep it light and fun. Though I moderated the topic, Melissa Scott and Thomas Atkinson needed little help or direction from me as they spoke about classic literature they enjoyed, its impact on their lives and writing, and the lasting importance of the classics.

Why Aren’t They Writing Like They Used To?

Yakira Heistand moderated this panel, with Linda Adams and me as panelists. Science Fiction has certainly changed over the decades, and we explored the differences between stories then and now, and the reasons for them.

Pandemics Throughout History, and Their Effects on Literature

If we’d done this panel two years ago, nobody would have showed up. Suddenly everyone’s interested in pandemics. I served as a moderator for this panel, with Melissa Scott and John Monahan as expert panelists. If you take the list of pandemics in history, and the list of stories about pandemics, you can match them up pretty well. Moreover, there’s an evolution of the types of stories, from straight reporting of actual plagues as facts of life, to stories of made-up diseases, to tales focusing on the race for cures and vaccines, to viruses from space, to man-caused pandemics, and, most recently, to diseases with bizarre symptoms.

Worldbuilding in Your Story

Basically, we taught attendees how to play God for fun and profit. Once again, I moderated, with Cathy Hird (who posts a weekly column in the Owen Sound Hub), Melissa Scott, and John Monahan as my esteemed panelists. They did a great job conveying the fun of building your own fictional world, with instructions and warnings about the pitfalls.

What Did I Do to Survive the Great Pandemic?

Held late on Saturday night, this panel surprised me. I thought nobody would show up. Worse, Chessiecon hadn’t designated a moderator. There I was, along with Yakira Heistand and John Monahan, scheduled to talk about surviving a pandemic. Not only did people show up, but we invited them into the discussion and they contributed fascinating stories of how the pandemic changed their lives.

All in all, a wonderful time. It’s not every weekend that I can enjoy the company of authors, fans, and a sea monster, without once leaving the home of—

Poseidon’s Scribe

November 28, 2021Permalink

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

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

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

Metaphors Are Icing; Similes Are Like Spice

Looking back over some of my blog entries, I see I sometimes sound like quite the expert, a know-it-all who has decided to bestow some of his vast expertise on new writers.  I should make it clear my expertise is really not vast—it’s half vast.

On the subject of metaphors and similes, I have to say I’m not even a novice yet.  I have to force myself to use more of them in my stories.  So this blog entry is written as a set of reminders for me.  You’re welcome to read along if you like.

First of all, Steve, metaphors and similes are very much alike; they’re both methods of comparing one thing to another, it’s just that similes signal their presence with the words “like” or “as.”  Those words announce to the reader a comparison is coming.  Metaphors can sneak up on a reader such that he or she doesn’t realize the comparison has happened until after reading it.  Similes lack that stealth.

Remember, Steve, that readers, nearly all of them being human, possess brains naturally equipped to recognize patterns–the similarities between two things.  They store their memories in interesting places within the brain but always near other analogous things.  Consider the concept of “soft.”  Just thinking about soft conjures up images of feather beds, pillows, baby’s cheeks, puffy dandelions, etc.  All those images and more are stored within the brain, filed with the word “soft.”

So when you’re writing a story, Steve, and you want to describe how soft something is, you can compare it to something else filed under that heading.  Chances are readers will share the same mental picture you’ve conveyed, thus saving, as the saying goes, a thousand words.

It can work as well with concepts less concrete than “soft.”  A person can be described as being “as loving as…” or “as loyal as…” where you can compare these qualities to the standards in your mind filed under those headings.

Two common pitfalls to avoid, Steve, are clichés and mixed metaphors.  Clichés indicate the writer’s laziness, and often fail to convey the image intended due to overuse.  Mixed metaphors are at best jarring to the reader, and at worst, funny (and the reader’s not laughing with you), like the ones listed on this site.

There are some great writers you can learn from, Steve, about similes and metaphors.  There are sites out there like this one where you can read through some of the classic similes.  Be on the lookout for clever comparisons in all the books you read.  Take a moment to analyze each one and figure out why it works—why the author chose those words.  Poetry is often teeming with metaphors due to the compact nature of the medium and the need for each word to pull more of a load than is required in prose.

Steve, you’ve got to strive to use metaphors and similes more in your writing.  They help the reader picture your scenes and characters better.  Metaphors are icing; similes are like spice.  You must make better use of them if you wish to continue being known as–

Poseidon’s Scribe

May 24, 2011Permalink