essays on life...by me

Tag: Science Fiction Page 1 of 3

The Lonely Sci-fi Life

I’ve been watching a lot of science fiction TV series lately. Always by myself, since my husband doesn’t like that sort of stuff.

I spent a night on my sofa, binge-watching the 6th season of the Amazon Sci-fi series The Expanse. I had just gotten access to it and was only going to watch the first episode but then I got caught up in it and continued on to the second episode and then the third and by 2am I had finished the entire season. It was only 6 episodes after all. I had been waiting till the season was finished so that I could get all the episodes at the same time – so why not just watch them all at once? It’s just like what happens when you find a great book and just can’t put it down at the end of a chapter but continue reading each chapter after the other until you discover you have either been up all night or the book is done. Which ever comes first.

I also finished watching the Apple TV+ series, Foundation, based on Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books. I watched the first two episodes before the entire series landed. After those 2 episodes, I had very little desire to watch the rest. I spent a large part of those initial episodes exclaiming out loud, in rather bad language, what I thought of them. But I couldn’t hold out, curiosity and hope got the better of me and a few weeks after the first season ended I binged the rest – with lots more bad words escaping from my agonized throat. I decided that Isaac Azimov would be turning in his grave with what they did to his great story. Oh well, that’s what happens when other people think they know better than the original author.

After recovering from Foundation, I watched Disney’s The Mandalorian, mainly because it was there and I had heard about it. I liked The Mandalorian.  Unlike very “woke” Foundation, it was old fashioned space opera sci-fi – with a gun-toting hero, space ships, lots of fast action, and lots of wild west style shootouts. But after the second season it started to get repetitive and boring and began to suffer from the Law of Success, which means producers keep a successful show going even though they have no new ideas for it. So I stopped watching.

In between all these shows, I also watched the second season of The Witcher, which technically isn’t sci-fi but I like looking at Henry Cavill. That’s enough reason for me. And I also like Fantasy…if it’s good fantasy and The Witcher is.

I have been a fan of Science Fiction since before my wisdom teeth came in. I read Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles when I was 11 and by the time I finished high school I had read everything by Bradbury, Asimov, and Heinlein that my dad had on his bookshelf.

Over social

I woke up Sunday morning with bright sun shining on the blackout shade. My eyes were all gravely, my voice felt hoarse and my body had absolutely no desire to move. I was totally drained. I looked over at the clock on the wall and saw it was already 10 am but I decided to lay there a while longer and put off getting up. I had time…no plans until the evening. I wasn’t hungry for breakfast yet. I picked up my phone and checked Facebook. After 15 minutes of scrolling through miscellaneous posts, I clicked on my email app. 

What!!

At the top of my inbox was an email from my friend containing the link to the meeting she had scheduled for a group of us to meet… today…at 11 am! I remembered helping to plan that meeting but I also thought that we were going to do it in the early evening. The meeting was with 2 girlfriends I used to do GNOs with before one of them left Stockholm. Now I had half an hour to get ready. So I threw on the clothes I had worn yesterday (and maybe the day before and the day before that). I hobbled over to the kitchen, made a cup of instant coffee, buttered a piece of toast and sat down at my computer still only half awake and barely mobile. My terminal glasses weren’t helping much to see the screen as I logged in. 

This pandemic that is sweeping the world right now is going to be the death of me.

While here in Sweden, we aren’t under an enforced lock-down, we are nevertheless expected to practice voluntary self-isolation and to stay-at-home as much as possible. This is not a hardship for me since I like staying at home. I don’t go out to movies. I don’t attend concerts or dance recitals. I have no interest to try out the latest new restaurant in the neighborhood either. Did I say how I like staying at home? I am not a complete hermit though. I do go out. And meet friends. Occasionally.

Before Covid 19, I would meet a group of writer pals every other week at a charming cafe; we would chat for a while, then write for an hour and then chat some more.

Before Covid 19, I would attend board meetings once a month or so, at the home of the chair of a small Jewish organization whose board I am a member of. I can see her apartment from my apartment window and it only takes 10 minutes to walk to the meetings. I have been on this board so long that all the other members have become my friends and the chair makes great soup for us to eat before the meeting. 

And before Covid 19, a friend would sometimes manage to talk me into going out to have dinner with them as long as it wasn’t too far from my home. And sometimes I got tempted into seeing a movie (as long as it was sci-fi) with a group of other like-minded friends.

But now…because of this pandemic, no one is going anywhere or at least not anywhere outside of their house, unless it’s to the grocery store to try to stock up on toilet paper. All my board meetings were cancelled.  My writers group…cancelled. The few organized activities that I had planned on attending have been cancelled. I cancelled both a doctor’s checkup and my dentist appointment. My google calendar which is never really all that filled up anyway is now totally empty. Instead of going to a restaurant for dinner, going on a walk with a friend in the fresh air is the new way to hang out…as long as you keep your distance from everyone. 

In spite of all this anti-socializing, I’ve been meeting old friends and even making new ones more now than I usually did in pre-Corona times. I was never this social before Covid19 arrived and I am not sure how well I am going to survive this sudden social upswing even though I’ve been able to do it without needing to travel further than to my living room. I don’t have to put on my shoes because I can walk barefoot to my computer screen. Most of the time I don’t bother with putting on my face. I do try to remember to put on pants. Once I was wearing my nightgown but from the shoulders up it looks like an ordinary knit shirt with stripes so no big deal. My new frenzied social life is all the fault of this app called Zoom.

My recent stress started on Thursday evening in a zoom meeting with 2 of my writer pals who I haven’t seen for awhile because all our writing evenings were cancelled. We spent over an hour discussing plans for virtual writing workshops and we got to meet a very cute cat. Then a few days later on Saturday afternoon I had a zoom meeting with a couple of old co-workers. We used to get together a couple of times a year for dinner but this time we just sat around in our homes and caught up on how things are Coronating in different parts of the world. Later that same night or rather morning, I attended a Zoom party held by a friend in New York City. It started at 7pm NYC time which is 1am my time. She was a friend to both me and my husband. He dropped into the party long enough to say hello and then goodbye. I stayed for the next 2 and a half hours! There was one other person at the “party” that I knew but all the rest were strangers. When I signed off at 3.30 am, I saw on Facebook that one of them had asked to be my new Facebook friend. It took me a while to finally wind down and fall asleep. After a few hours I woke up to discover the unexpectedly early new Zoom meeting that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. By Sunday afternoon my introvert self had had enough.. This was just too much talking and socializing for me. I found that I couldn’t remember what I had said to who and who had said what to me. I hadn’t had enough time between conversations to process everything. I felt like I had gotten hit in the face with a ping pong racket. Five virtual social events in 4 days – I needed to look for a dark room somewhere.

All this virtual viewing reminded me of a book by Isaac Asimov that I had read way-back-when as a teenager – The Naked Sun.  It was the second in his sci-fi detective trilogy staring Elijah Baley and R. Daneel Olivaw, a human-looking robot. While the first book in the trilogy takes place on an overcrowded Earth, most of the action in this book happens on a planet named Solaria that has a small human population and a huge robot one. People live isolated on huge estates that are hundreds of miles from each other and are taught from birth to avoid personal contact. They almost never meet in person. Even married couples who live on the same estate have their own parts of the home so they also rarely meet in person. Face-to-face interaction, referred to as “seeing” is considered dirty and the idea of being in the same room as another and breathing the same air makes them almost physically nauseous. But the inhabitants of Solaria are not hermits.  They socialize by “viewing”, a kind of 3D two-way teleconferencing that was so advanced that you can go out for a walk on your property, contact a friend and view/talk with them as they are walking on their own estate and barely notice the difference in backgrounds. 

We aren’t there yet. The quality of the Zoom app experience depends to a great deal on the quality of your WiFi and the state of your computer or smart phone. Mostly people just sit there in front of their video camera and hopefully you see their whole face and not just the top of their head. One friend did take me on a tour of her new house and neighborhood but as soon as she got out of reach of her WiFi the picture started to break up. 

I have been video Skyping with my best friend Roz, from college, for many years now. Our Skype calls have become as humdrum as a phone call. The fact that it was free made it even better. However the use of Skype just never seemed to catch on with anyone else I knew in the States. Zoom on the other hand, with a kick from Corona, seems to suddenly be everywhere and used by everyone. Timing is everything, I guess. 

I admit that the appeal of being able to sit in my pajamas and meet a friend without leaving my home has its charm. Just being able to see everyone while Zooming with a group of friends who all live scattered around the world is really fantastic. But what happens when all this virtual socializing runs its course? Humans are touchy-feely. We need to breathe each other’s air, pat a back, give a hug. When these Corona times let go of us and we can go out once again a Zoom call will pale in the face of a real face-to face date. And even this introvert will put on her face and some clean clothes and go out into the world again. Occasionally. 

Books and writing and reading

Somewhere on my Facebook wall, someone posted a link asking people to list which books they had read that got them to start writing. This got me to thinking about books and writing and reading…especially in the aftermath of this year’s Stockholm Writers Festival.  For me, I don’t think any books I’ve read inspired me to start writing. Probably most of the reason behind my writing is just that it’s the overflow of the stuff that is littering up my brain – ideas, opinions, emotions that I can’t figure out how to handle any other way. But the question did get me to think about the kind of books that I read and why is it I read them.

The majority of the books I have read have been science fiction; ever since I discovered The Martian Chronicles amongst my dads paperbacks when I was 11. I admit that I haven’t been reading many other books since I discovered the Outlander books in 2014. Definitely not much Science Fiction has been read even though I have at least 5 or 6 unread Iain M. Banks novels on my Kindle just waiting for me to look at them.  I don’t buy many real paper books anymore. Last year I gave away almost all of my books from the 70s and 80s that I carted over here and then never unpacked. I don’t want to start cluttering up my limited bookshelf space again. Downsizing is the stage of life where I am trying to be these days. But I did buy 2 new books at the Stockholm Writers Festival. Neither were the sort of book that I would normally buy or read. One of the books was The Good Son by Paul McVeigh. I met the author at the mingle the day before the festival started and we had a great chat. He was interesting and funny and serious at the same time. His book was about a time and a place I knew almost nothing about and I was curious about what he had written. The other book was Falling by Julie Cohen. I sat in one of her seminars at the festival and she had a lot to say about writing. She has written a lot of books. So I was curious. What kind of books does someone write, who writes a lot of books.

I read both books very soon after the festival was over and all the hysteria of it had calmed down. I liked them both. I couldn’t put them down once I started. I kept thinking to myself that I really shouldn’t read new books because once I start a book I have trouble doing other things. All I want to do is lie on the sofa and read the book. I need to find out what happens to these people. It’s an effort to get up, put the book on the coffee table and start to make dinner for my family. It made it hard to go to sleep because I kept wanting to  continue reading. I enjoyed both of them. But the truth is – I will probably never read them again. As soon as I finished them, I started to think about to whom I could recommend the book and give it away to. I have friends who borrow books out of the library. They read the book once and that is enough for them. But I am a re-reader. I like to own my books. I like to be able to pick up a previously-read book and read it again. But not these books and not the 2 books I bought last year either. And the question I ask myself is why. I liked the characters in both books. I could relate to the characters in Falling more than in A Good Son. But I very much enjoyed the story about both sets of characters – what happened to them – the changes they went through.

So…why do I read the books I do and why do I read them over and over again; like I did with Tolkien and Azimov and Le Guin and Zimmer Bradley and Niven and Zelazny and Cherryh and so many other authors… and now with Gabaldon? Science fiction is often criticized for having flat one-dimensional characters. But some of the most fascinating characters I have ever met, I found between the covers of Science Fiction – characters I have never forgotten.

So it’s not the characters that kept me coming back to read and re-read and re-read again and again. It was the worlds that I entered in those books. In the real world, the world I live in, I truly hate traveling. I hate packing suitcases, always afraid I will forget something. I hate getting through airports, afraid I might miss my flight. I also hate sitting on an airplane whose seats are not designed for long legs. I don’t really want to travel to foreign places on this planet. I feel uncomfortable being a privileged first-worlder visiting third world countries and cluttering up their fabulous beaches or mountains. Yet within the covers of my books, I can experience a world built on a revolving ring, I can live in Middle-earth, or the world-encompassing city on the planet Trantor. I can be with wizards saying words of magic. Or hang out with aliens covered in fur like CJ Cherryh’s heroines who travel in space ships or humans living in a space station circling an alien world.

I come back to these books because of the world-building their authors do and the characters they people those worlds with and the fates that await those characters. I keep coming back because I once again want to live in those worlds. Falling and Son were interesting slices of life but they didn’t take me anywhere I want to revisit.

Writer friends say I should try writing science fiction, since that is what I read. But I am not a world-builder. I am only a visitor. The things I am interested in writing about are the things already in my world – the world I try to know and live in. So I write, trying to make sense of my world. But I love to visit other worlds – to disappear there for a while. As long as I don’t have to leave my sofa.

Ursula Le Guin

Ursula Le Guin died recently. There was lots of information about her death in the news and social media. The general consensus on Twitter and Facebook was that it was so terribly sad that she had died. For her family and close friends, yes of course, it must have been very sad. But I didn’t know her personally. I only knew her through her books. And as far as I’m concerned, she is still alive because of those books.

I first started reading Science Fiction when I was 11 years old; The Martian Chronicles was the novel that got me hooked. By the time I was 14 I had gone through all my Dad’s collection of the classics; Heinlein, Asimov, Bradbury, Clark. I was a freshman in High School when I discovered Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings;  it had just been published in paperback in the US and it was on the list of books my English teacher let us order from some book club. For the next 7 to 10 years, Tolkien’s fantasy world of Middle-earth was what occupied much of my reading time and shifted me from Science Fiction to Fantasy. During that time, I kept searching for other fantasy novels whose worlds were equal to Tolkien’s. I bought a lot of books that mostly left me feeling very disappointed. My bookshelf was filled with stories about elves and dwarfs and magic that I judged harshly and barely got through without lots of internal complaining. Tolkien remained king. Then sometime in the very early 70s I picked up a paperback copy of A Wizard of Earthsea. I don’t remember how I heard about it. Maybe I just liked the cover illustration. The inside content was even better. I went on to buy each subsequent book in the series. I bought The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore as soon as their paperback versions were released.

Also in the early 70s, I discovered The Science Fiction Shop. It was a tiny crowded bookstore in Greenwich Village that only sold Fantasy and Science Fiction. It was crowded with books, not people. It was the first and only one of its kind in NYC – Science Fiction hadn’t gotten as popular as it would become after the success of Star Wars. I still remember how it felt that first time I walked through its doors and looked around. You could see the entire store from the door. There were a few geeky looking guys amongst the racks and me! I was in heaven!

My method of choosing a new book was simple. If I found an author whose book I liked, I went to the shelf where their name was and bought another of their books. I kept buying their books till I ran out of new ones and then I went on to find another author. After Earthsea, I spent the rest of the 70s and 80s reading all of Le Guin’s books – none of which were fantasy but real Science Fiction, set in the far distant future. I read all of the Hainish novels and all her miscellaneous stuff too. She became one of my favorite authors of that time.

Books can be read for different reasons. In some books, the plot is the most important aspect and that is what you remember it for; in other books, you remember very vivid characters and not so much what they did and in some very rare books, you remember the ideas. Le Guin’s books left me with remembered ideas. Before writing this post, I had to go to Wikipedia to remind myself of the plots and the names of characters but the ideas I didn’t need help with. There have been three strong ideas from her books that have stayed with me ever since I first read them so long ago.

A Wizard of Earthsea taught me that names are very important and they have power; that everyone has their own “secret” name that only their closet friends can know. To know someone’s real name gives them power over you. I loved this idea when I first read it. Ever since I was a child, I hated my name – Hilarie. It was so odd. No one was named that! And it was spelled weird too. I wished I was named something normal like Mary or Sue or Carol. My mother used to console me by saying that when I grew up I could use just my middle name, Ruth, which at that time seemed a more normal name, to my way of thinking. And then I grew up! And couldn’t imagine using Ruth as my name. Hilarie was my true name – my name of power – that no one else had. And now in the world of social media and the internet I have discovered the wonderful reality of having an unusual name. There is no one else named like me. Even though it’s not a secret it nevertheless belongs only to me. And I find that wonderful.

I love when a writer of speculative fiction creates an entire cosmology with many stories and worlds to fill it. Isaac Asimov did this in all his Galactic Empire stories, Iain M. Banks did it with his novels set in The Culture. My favorite authors have been those who do a really believable job at world-building. You can see and feel and smell the worlds they create. Le Guin built her worlds with a deft hand in her novels and stories about the planets that belonged to the Ekumen, a loosely connected league of worlds which had once been seeded and colonised by a long-gone civilisation from a planet called Hain.

My biggest take-away from the Hainish novels was the idea that the Ekumen, in their attempt to reunite the Hainish worlds, sends only one person at a time, a single envoy, to a newly rediscovered planet; a planet that had long since forgotten their Hainish heritage. In the Hainish cosmology, faster-than-light space travel doesn’t exist, travel through the galaxy takes time. If you travel to another solar system, you say goodbye to everyone you once knew. The job of envoy must have been a very lonely assignment; one that often ended in death for many of them. I liked the idea that the best way to convince a race (or a whole world) to join you was not by sending a huge military force but to send one person who speaks for you, to whoever will listen and if the first person fails, you send another. The Left Hand of Darkness was the most important novel in this series and a book I often recommend to friends who “don’t read science fiction”.

Published in 1969, Left Hand is also a fantastic examination about gender, and how it affects the way we relate to the people we know. Geffen is the name of the planet in the book; a world undergoing a planet-wide ice age at the same time as its industrial revolution. Among the Hainish worlds, Geffen was different. Its people, while from the same original human stock, had mutated from having 2 distinct sexes to a race of beings who were “sexless” except for about 6 days each month when they went into “kemmer” becoming either male or female. Each individual had no way of knowing in advance which they would become. The same individual could both father a child and give birth to a child. All other days of the month, they were just human, neither male nor female, yet at the same time both. To this odd world comes an envoy from The Ekumen, a human male originally born on Earth. Through the eyes and emotions of Genly Ai, Le Guin examines the various ways gender affects our lives.  Genly eventually learns to understand and even love a person who seems on the surface totally different from everything he had come to assume about being human.

In these #metoo days discussing gender discrimination and all the talk about the small percentage of women working in many diverse fields, this book should be required reading by anyone who thinks about the importance gender plays in our lives.

Click to see larger image of these other Leguin books I also have.

Click to see larger image of these other Le Guin books I also have.

When I moved permanently to Sweden, I packed up all my New York books in boxes and that is where they have been for over 20 years. I never had enough room to unpack them or shelf space to display them. But my storage room where the boxes have been patiently awaiting my return will soon have to be given up – the lease has been cancelled. I still don’t have enough book shelves for my weathered, yellow-paged paperbacks. So I am in the process now of revisiting them again for a short time; not rereading but reminding myself of the stories that helped to make me who I am. Some of those books I can say goodbye to without a second thought. But some of them I will thumb though softly, revisiting them with love. Le Guin’s stories are among those and like with any old love, I will fondly remember them forever.

 

 

 

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