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Some Things People Keep Asking About After Reading “To Dream of Stars: An Astronomer’s Lament”

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts July 24, 2017

Somewhere along the way, one of my stories got put on a HSC prep exam somewhere in Australia. On one hand, this is cool – I didn’t get into this gig to write things that do not get read.

On the other hand, it also means I have reached that point where I get semi-regular emails between June and September asking questions about what is a fairly obtuse story. Some of these emails ask very smart questions, which is great, but they’ve they’ve now become common enough that I rarely have time to deliver anything meaningful as an answer. To that end, I figure it will be useful to have a stock response I point people towards/show up if they Google the story, so I’m throwing some story notes up here on the blog that I can refer people to.

FIRST, SOME GENERAL CAVEATS

In general, when it comes to these sorts of questions, I am entirely the wrong person to talk to. I generally come from the same school of thought as Neil Gaiman in this matter, back when he regularly took questions on his blog:

I won’t do your homework for you. Just pretend I’m a dead author and in no position to answer your questions — I won’t mind.

Actually, I’m worse in some respects, ’cause I’m used to teaching undergraduates in universities, so I’m firmly in the camp that believes critiques in English and literature studies are rarely about the authors intentions, but rather the reader response.There’s is absolutely no guarantee that anything I think in regards to the story will actually be useful within the context of an English paper. I fully subscribe to the theories put forward by a guy named Roland Barthes which state that the author is dead, and what an author intends with the story is actually pretty useless, since a large portion of the meaning is brought by the reader (this is a pretty good overview of this whole idea inside of 5 minutes).

In addition, the gulf between what writer intends with a story and what actually exists on paper is frequently wider than any writer would prefer, and usually involves a lot more “this seems like a good idea” than the answers below would imply. Mostly, writers tend to absorb a whole bunch of theories and ideas, then let them influence the work subconsciously, trusting that things will mostly turn out okay. It’s why writers generally blink and look confused when they get asked questions by English teachers. Especially since first reason I write anything is pretty simple: I have bills to pay, and I figured someone would buy the story when I was done 🙂

All of which is basically the long way of saying: you had a response to the story, when you first read it. Your response to the story is 100% correct, regardless of what I say here. Use that as your starting point. Especially since your English teacher is unlikely to take a blog post on the internet as a credible source.

All clear? Good. Now we can move on and look at some of the things I’m routinely asked about.

WHAT’S UP WITH ALL THE MENTIONS OF “THE OTHER?” WHY IS IT SO IMPORTANT?

The Other is a term that gets used a lot in cultural theory, particularly when looking at issues of gender and colonialism. The basic theory is that in order to have a sense of “self,” there must also be a sense of “the other/not-self.” The wikipedia article on the theory is actually a pretty good overview of the theory, and the core ideas I was playing with in To Dream of Stars.

The bit I was really interested in related to this: in order for their to be a notion of what it means to be male/masculine, there’s a corresponding idea of a non-masculine Other, which has created all sorts of problematic ideas of masculinity in contemporary culture where the tradition notion of masculine was also associated with being in a dominant and privileged cultural position, but the culture is opening up to other narratives and re-positioning parts of the culture as Other (by virtue of race/gender/socio-economics).

SF has a long tradition of looking at metaphors and taking them literally within the text, so the metaphorical framing of The Other as alien became literal within the world, and from there became a way of looking at the way notions of masculinity and colonialism change when The Other becomes dominant and the colonizing culture.

The question of whether I did this well is entirely up in the air, especially considering I am a white, well-educated, middle-class bloke who is not traditionally regarded as Other by western culture. Plus, this story was written nearly a decade ago, where these discussions were not as widespread. Part of the joy of being on the internet over the last decade has been the rise of people talking about things that used to be tools of cultural critique and bringing them into the general conversation via tools like Facebook, tumblr, and twitter. Hell, it still blew my mind that I could read Facebook on my phone in 2007. And I still held a grudge against Facebook for taking over Livejournal’s section of the social media market.

But I digress. In short, the way we talked about notions of the Other and othering is different here in 2017, which often means the conversation needs to be more nuanced than it is here. Stories, in many ways, are a product of their time.

DISCONTINUOUS/POST-MODERN NARRATIVE

The narrative of To Dream of Stars is not particularly linear, largely because I tend to enjoy stories that are not particularly linear. I like the idea of treating story as a jigsaw puzzle, leaving gaps where the reader can make connections of their own. Within the context of this particular story, I was also interested in the idea that one of the key aspects of Othering is the idea that there is only a single story to be told about the Othered. Spreading the narrative across multiple points in the timeline is an attempt to create a sense that there are multiple stories instead of a singular one.

It’s also the reason why there are multiple aliens presented within the story, rather than a single alien species.

One of the things that fascinated me in 2007 – and continues to fascinate me today – is what a theorist named Jean-François Lyotard called the Collapse of Grand Narratives and the turn to small, local narratives as part of the post-modern condition. The stories we tell each other – the things that give our life meaning – have become increasingly broad and diverse instead of singular. There is not one truth, but many truths.

At the same time, we’re still fighting against a host of grand narratives that still govern our lives, especially the narratives that have built up around religion and statehood and government. As the internet is fond of saying, we “don’t know how to adult,” because adulting used to be a far easier concept to wrap your head around when there was only one way to do it.

WHAT GENRE IS THE STORY?

I get asked – quite a bit – if I’d call this story magic realism or surrealism, which largely makes me happy because I got fuck-all kind of discussion along those lines in high school and it wasn’t until university that I finally got exposed to the really good stuff.

For the record: I definitely wouldn’t this story magic realism, but it’s not quite surrealism either. There’s a branch of SF called Slipstream, which is probably the best fit – it’s basically focused on the strange and interested in the effects of post-modernism, and work that sits in weird spaces between genres.

Here’s the thing about genre though: they’re very, very flexible. They’re based on your ability to see connections between the work you’re reading, and other works you’re aware of. Slipstream is a useful term for people deeply enmeshed in science fiction, who occasionally want a way of distinguishing the weird stuff from the space-stuff from the near-future cyberpunk stuff from the honest-to-god-alternate-history-where-people-do-a-lot-of-research-instead-of-inserting-aliens-to-cover-their-arse.

WHY DOES “X” or “Y” HAPPEN IN THE STORY?

It probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Which, incidentally, was way back in 2007 according to my notes, and I barely remember why I made certain narrative choices in things I wrote in 2016. I’m afraid I can’t get give you any specific answers for this one.

WHAT ABOUT <<INSERT QUERY THAT IS NOT ON THIS LIST>>?

Well, then, we’re out of the bounds of the broad scope answers I’ve got prepared and into specifics I probably don’t have time to answer. Feel free to try your luck asking in the comments, but be aware that my ability to respond will largely depend on how busy I am and how many deadlines I’m chasing at any given time.

Writing Series Works in the Age of the Internet

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts April 6, 2017PhD notes

I picked up the first book in C.S. Friedman’s Coldfire trilogy from a remainder table when I was fourteen, part of a five-books-for-ten-bucks deal where I deployed my limited teenage resources. Over the years that remainder table introduced me to many books I wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, but Black Sun Rising was one of the few that I still hold onto. Tattered and torn after twenty-seven years of ownership, largely unread after the age of eighteen, but still tucked away on my bookshelf alongside Forgotten Realms novels as a reminder of where my reading tastes used to live and breathe.

I picked up the second book of the Coldfire trilogy three years later, recognizing it by the cover art and the familiar, embossed-gold font. The repeated motif’s are a distinctly nineties approach to fantasy: dark, twisted trees; a blonde warrior with a magic sword and improbably styled hair that suggests fantasy worlds have access to good conditioner; keywords on the cover blurb like Adept, Sorcerer, Devouring, and Darkness.

When True Night Falls is in better shape, its pages a little yellowed with age. Plus, I’m not actually sure I’ve read it. I remember the first book clearly, with its mix of Fantasy and SF tropes, magic derived from an alien energy running through a colonized planet, but I have no recollection about what happens in the second book or how it sets up the third. I think I was waiting to track down the third book before I engaged with the series again.

This sounds perfectly reasonable, here in 2017. Back in 1994, when the internet was still fascinated with getting Coke machines online and Amazon was in its first year of existence, waiting for the third book of a series twice-remaindered in Australia was an act of deranged optimism.

But I was young. I knew nothing about the way publishing worked, or how books found their way to bookstores. I thought my decision to wait for the third book was perfectly sane and reasonable, because the first two books of a trilogy meant the third would show up, eventually.

They were telling a story. The third book was the end of it. That was how things worked.

I’m spending a lot of time thinking about trilogies and serials and series at the moment, courtesy of my PhD. I went in explicitly looking to better understand the craft side of things. The initial germ of the idea came when I was kicking around a few series ideas, and friends were kicking me volumes of ongoing trilogies or series to critique, and I figured that understanding how series works would allow me to write and critique in a more useful way.

It’s taken about six weeks of reading to realise that it’s virtually impossible to divorce the writing of series from the publishing realities that surround them. I’m not exactly blind to the effects digital technologies have had on the publishing industry – a large part of my gig at the Writers Centre involved talking about the impact and advantages of ebooks – but it’s at its most interesting when we consider the impact that a shifting publishing landscape has on the decisions writers make.

At its simplest, publishing is a system of exchange between three stakeholders. A writer produces intellectual property in the form of a book. A publisher provides the financial capital to produce the book, along with the human resources to handle the the refinement and production of the book. They also leverage a network of promotion and distribution arms that the writer, by themselves, doesn’t have, in order to get the book into the hands of readers craving a particular reading experience that they’re willing to pay money for. When everything goes well, the writer, the publisher, and the reader all feel like they’ve made an even exchange, and everyone goes home with something they want.

The reality was almost never that simple. Economies of scale become part of the equation, because it costs money to store books and it costs money to ship books and it was impossible for any bookstore to carry a copy of every book ever written. Books that didn’t sell enough to justify those costs had a very short shelf-life. Books that weren’t ordered in sufficient qualities to justify keeping them in a warehouse would end up pulped or remaindered, which is how they found their way to a five-for-ten-dollar bin at my local store.

None of this is news, if you’ve got a working idea of publishing, but what’s been interesting me this week is an essay from 1999, Tracing the Adult Series, which appeared in the TechNicalities journal. The author, Maureen Nimmo, talks about the difficulties of tracking series works for adults in library catalogue. There’s one bit that leapt out at me in particular:

Catalogers aren’t the only ones at fault here. Book publishers don’t always give sufficient information within individual books to help. Series information in the books themselves, based on personal observations, is scanty and inconstant…Standard series title pages are rare in this sort of literature. Instead, catalogers are left to glean what series information is available from flyleaves (assuming it isn’t discarded before the book gets to the cataloger) or blurbs printed on the back of the book. There may be nothing on the cover or the title page of the book to alert the readers that the book is part of a series.

This intrigued me to the point where I dragged Friedman’s books off the shelves and looked for the things that overtly identified it as a trilogy. Once you discarded the trade dress, there were only two: all three grouped the books together “The Coldfire Trilogy” in the section up front devoted to the time-honored Also by C.S. Friedman, and the bears The stunning conclusion of the Coldfire trilogy” on the cover. The second book does identify itself as a sequel to the first, but doesn’t actually mention the word Trilogy anywhere else.

This lack of information makes perfect sense in a publishing environment defined by scarcity and limited space. If books have a small sales window and shelf-life, then you absolutely want to have your cake and eat it too. Slapping “Book Two” on the cover is a red flag to anyone picking it up that they’ve missed what’s come before. While you want existing readers to find it, you don’t want to be limited to existing readers when it comes to sales.

If you planned on writing fantasy in the eighties and nineties, you planned on writing a three-book trilogy. It’s like the structure of Lord of the Rings passed into the genre’s DNA, becoming part of the conventional wisdom shared by writers and readers alike. I didn’t need to be told Friedman’s work was a trilogy when I stumbled across it at the age of fourteen, because I simply assumed that most fantasy stories were told in three parts (It will still be another year before I encountered David Eddings, and my mind was peeled open by the fact you could tell a story in five parts).

And with that knowledge came the patience required to search out parts of the series. The assumption that if I missed the boat on first release, I’d be spending quality time searching for the missing instalments over the new few years. Friedman’s trilogy was one of the few that eluded me in that time. I couldn’t find the third book new, lurking on the bottom shelf of a bookstore I’d never visited before. Nor could I find it second hand, or tucked away in a remainder bin like the first two instalments had been. After a while, it ceased being something I looked for at all, just an unfinished trilogy sitting on my bookshelf, waiting for the day when serendipity finally finished my collection.

In the end, it wasn’t luck that brought the third book to me. It was stumbling over the first two books tucked away in my own bookshelf, then spending sixty seconds ordering a copy of book three on Amazon.

There’s a really useful idea in John B. Thompson’s study of the publishing industry, Merchants of Culture, where he takes Pierre Bourdieu’s idea of The Field and applies it to the publishing industry. The Field is…well, lets go with Thompson’s description:

A field is a structured space of social positions which ca be occupied by agents and organisations, and in which the position of any agent or organisation depends on the type and quantity of resources or ‘capital’ they have at their disposal. Any social arena – a business sector, a sphere of education, a domain of sport – can be treated as a field in which agents and organisations are linked together in relations of cooperation, competition, and interdependency. Markets are an important part of some fields, but fields are always more than markets.

Which is really just sociologist for publishing is an enormously complicated network of stakeholders, all of which are linked together in a web of interconnected business relationships. What’s useful about Thompson’s book is the way he takes the concept of the field and breaks down the five kinds of capital at work in publishing.

More importantly, it provides a framework for understanding how the field of publishing has shifted as a result of technology, which makes the study of series considerably more nuanced than I’d first expected.

I keep circling back to the Coldfire Trilogy when I think about this, and in particular that decade plus period where I couldn’t find the third book. For two books I contributed very little economic capital to the publishers behind the series, picking volumes up second-hand or in remainder. By the time I did actually purchase the third book through Amazon, it was via a sales chain that would have seemed unthinkable when the first volume when to print.

On the other hand, they were a series of books I thought to finish purchasing over a decade after the first two volumes were acquired. It was on the list of things I meant to read one day, if only I could find all the books.

I’d started my thesis with a pretty clear idea that the advent of Amazon and ebooks had led to a big jump in series works, particularly among the indie publishing crowd who talk about series works a kind of default strategy. The Field has its own logic, which affects the way people consciously and subconsciously apply their capital to gain desired effects, and the capacity to have a single bookstore that stocks everything cleans up a lot of issues with series works.

But it’s not just having everything available that’s shifted the field. Trilogies and ongoing series works have always held a kind of value, but it wasn’t until the advent of Amazon and widespread ebook use that the kind of capital they accumulate with readers valuable enough to overcome the costs of keeping the book available. Series works always accumulated social and cultural capital – and publishing has often capitalised upon that capital – it’s just that they weren’t positioned in a marketplace capable of translating that capital into financial gain in a cost-effective way. The limitations of printing, storage, and distribution worked against the form.

But once the problem of availability is solved, labelling series works as part of a series becomes infinitely more attractive. The search algorithms of Google and Amazon are considerably more nuanced than old library systems. More importantly, the internet opens up the conversation that surrounds books.

At fourteen, I talked about the fantasy novels I loved with a half-dozen friends with similar reading tastes. At forty, I share my reading with blog readers, facebook friends, GoodRead followers, Instagram followers, and a dozen other places. The social capital surrounding a trilogy or series is considerably higher today than it was back in the early nineties. My suspicion is that this shift is one of the reasons why the fast roll-out of a series became a thing in recent years, attempting to capitalise on the conversation and keep the book visible.

Friedman’s trilogy has been sitting on my couch for two weeks now, ever since I started thinking about all this. At some point, I need to read it. I just don’t know whether that’s going to be during the PhD or after it.

A post shared by Peter M Ball (@petermball) on Mar 22, 2017 at 6:51pm PDT

Poem

PETERMBALL Big Thoughts September 16, 201652 Words

It’s 1994 and I’m sitting in a cinema with tears on my cheeks. Gareth has just died and Matthew is at the pulpit, reading W.H. Auden’s Funeral Blues as the eulogy for his friend. It wrecks me as few things have wrecked me, in my young life. John Hannah delivers a performance that makes me a fan for life. A fan that will follow him through the third Mummy film and Sliding Doors, professing an affection for both.

Three years later I see Auden’s poem on the page. I’m twenty years old, studying poetry, getting ready to spend two years writing an honours thesis about poetics and space and the city I live in. I’ve been published, as a poet. Performed my work at festivals. I wander the streets with notebooks in my backpack, writing draft after draft, hundreds of poems every year. I embrace the idea of quantity as a means of learning craft. It turns out, that’s not a bad way to learn.

I write some okay poems in those two years. I write a lot of bad ones. They were about girls, mostly. That’s why I started with poetry, why I kept at it for years afterwards. I was young and awkward and funny-looking. I didn’t know how to talk to people at all, let alone the opposite sex.

And I was foolish enough to believe that writing poetry would be my way of forging connection with the world around me. And foolish enough to happy, when that finally worked.

My favourite poem begins from a place of heartbreak and sorrow. Pablo Neruda doesn’t bother trying to hide it; everything is right there in the opening: Tonight I can write the saddest lines. He sets the parameters and everything progresses from there: the night is shattered; the immensity of loss grows larger; the inevitability of change is both a hurt and a solace.

I read Neruda as younger man, long before my heart was even bruised, let alone properly broken. I admired the exquisite longing of his words, back then. I craved the intensity of the feeling.

Years later, after my heart had been properly broken, re-reading Neruda’s poem wasn’t the same. I didn’t crave intensity anymore, could barely handle the feelings that roiled inside me. All I wanted was a release, the promise that the hurt would stop.

I read it again, very recently. It’s brilliance is dimmed, after all these years, but there is no doubt that it still shines.

In his book, Making Your Own Days, Kenneth Koch outlines a theory that explains poetry better than anyone else I’ve read. Poetry is the language inside language, he says, his analogy inherited from Paul Valery. It’s the language we turn to when words themselves are inadequate to the task.

It’s the language we turn to when I hurt is not enough. When I love, or I grieve, or I feel will not get the job done.

Poetry is the place we turn when words can no longer contain our sentiment, and we need the other elements of language to pick up the slack.

You can tell a good poet from a bad one by their ability to recognise more than this. To acknowledge that poetry conquers the immensity of feeling through more than the recognition of feelings.

A good poet see through the emotions and looks to the feelings, searches for ways to wring more meaning from words through tone and rhythm and language. They create structures, edifices that bolster the words and hold the weight of meaning upright.

A good poet works magic with all the diligence of a stage magician, utterly aware of how they’re directing the audience’s attention in order to pull off their trick.

And when they’re done, you don’t see the training. You don’t see the smoke or the mirrors or anything but the trick they want you to see.

It takes effort to love poetry. Books are hard to track down, and skew towards the classics. You spend more time reading the poets of yesterday than you do the poets of tomorrow. You trawl second-hand stores, breathing in the smell of dust and cellulous and lignin.

You find other poets and talk to them, because they talk about poetry in ways that other people do not.

My second favourite poem begins from a place of warning. Alice Walker states it clearly:

Do not give you heart
to someone who eats hearts
who finds heartmeat
delicious.

I read that poem for the first time just before the end of a relationship. Right before my heart was properly wrecked, like a car driven over the edge of a cliff and left to burn in the chasm below.

That opening sucked my breath away, left me trembling as it dawned on me that things in my life were not good. The rest of the poem barely mattered, although I found myself reading it again and again as the years went by. Slowly, I saw the other verses, building to more than heartbreak.

Years later, it occurred to me that I had more in common with the carnivore in Walker’s poem than I ever had with the victim.

At twenty, I would have told you that I wrote poetry to meet women, and it would have been true enough that I would not feel like I liar. It’s easier to retreat behind true statements, even if they aren’t the whole of the story.

At thirty, I would have told you I didn’t write poetry anymore, and that people are reluctant to let you stop. For years after I gave up writing verse, people would introduce me using poetry alongside my name: this is Peter; he’s a poet. Poetry stained my life the way ink stains the fingers, and it proved even harder to scrub free.

Today, I sit on my couch and gather books around me. I re-read Auden, and Neruda, and Walker, and other poems I loved almost as much as those three. I think about the years I devoted to writing verse, pursing poetry with a dogged persistence I’ve never truly brought to any other form of writing.

Not because I wanted to meet women, or because I loved the poetry itself. Not because of the attention, although I craved that for a while. Not because I thrilled at the magic of poetry, or enjoyed the diligent study of form and structure that came with it.

Our motivations for doing anything are far more complex than any of that. I wrote poetry for all those reasons. I wrote poetry for none of them.

I wrote because I wanted to be heard and the discovery that I could be was heady as drinking my first glass of wine. I wrote poetry because I craved connection, and was not good at establishing it in any other way. I wrote poetry because it presented me with opportunities, gave me a way of navigating a writing degree that wasn’t quite sure how to handle my proclivity for writing fantasy, connected me with other writers I could not connect with any other way.

I wrote poetry, drew what I needed from it.

Then, I stopped. Acknowledged that I wasn’t a poet, not in any way that counted.

I regret nothing about that decision.

It’s one of the few I can say that about, with any degree of surety.

What I love about Neruda’s poem is this: there is nothing special about heartbreak and longing. We all want. We are all denied. Even before your heart is wrecked, you know what is coming. There is nothing interesting in the longing.

But we want it to be special. We want our pain to be unlike any other. We want to be unique. For the world to acknowledge that we hurt like no-one has ever hurt before.

That feeling is there, in Neruda’s work. For years, I adored that recognition, blind to the obvious irony.

It’s 2016 and I’m sitting on my couch, watching youtube. I’ve searched for John Hannah and Funeral Blues, revisiting the moment I first truly fell for poetry. I’m not crying, this time. The room is brightly lit. Hannah is still magnificent, and so are Auden’s words, but they don’t feel the same at thirty-nine as they did at seventeen.

What gets me, this time, are the words before the poem, the acknowledgement of poetry’s necessity. Matthew describes his friend through other people’s eyes, then turns to his own feelings: Unfortunately, he says, there, I run out of words.

There, I run out of words.

For nineteen years now, the words have been there. I make my living articulating things, making them pretty and comprehensible, arranging things so words do what I want them to do.

And I know that it will not last. It cannot last. Words have been adequate for the situations I find myself in, but there are situations coming where they will fail me. I have both parents. I’ve lost no-one close to me. The day will come when those are no longer true. A day when I need words to be there, and they will not bend to my will.

When that happens, it’s comforting to think that poetry will be waiting for me, ready to fill the gaps. And John Hannah, reading Auden, will no doubt make me weep again.