Russians

Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore

Part Two of Five

The next morning Leo Fonseca was at the office.  He studied the CSU’s photos of Vlad Levitsky’s bedroom, an idea forming. That roommate, Mary Sue, had said it was always a mess, but was it messier than it should be?  The mattress on the single bed was crooked, but the bed was made.  Hiding the blood?  Or looking underneath?  A few drawers in the old desk were half-opened, and memory sticks were scattered on the top among the takeout cartons.  He picked up the phone.

“Mark, when you dusted the apartment, were there any prints in there beyond those of the three renters?”

Fonseca waited while Mark McNair, who worked in the crime lab, formed his thoughts.  The guy was sharp but irritatingly slow in his speech patterns, some of that due to his Georgia upbringing, but mostly due to his reflective nature.

“No, sergeant, but the blood type is neither Mary Sue’s nor Jan’s.  Don’t know about Levitsky’s, of course.  There’s just one type not accounted for, though.  We have DNA samples we’ll be checking, but that’s the same problem, unless we come up with four different people in that case.”

“Get to it then.  I’m developing this theory that the room was tossed.  I’ll be questioning Jan and Mary Sue, but Mary Sue already said they never went in there.  If you find her DNA in there, she’s lying.”

“We do the best we can.  This isn’t that old TV show, CSI, you know.”

“The Feds are involved.  Pass on some of the lab work to them if you need to.  ‘Course they’d probably take longer.  Shit, do what’s best.  I need results or this case will become just another cold one.”

“FYI: we have the shell and bullet.”

“What?  Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Because we didn’t get any useful data from them.  A bullet was found in a tree, likely the one that went through the victim’s arm.  Can’t get anything except caliber, but we had that from the shell.  I wanted to test the shell for fingerprints.  Found only a bit of dust.”

“Powder? So what?  Just give me the caliber.”

“Point twenty-two-long rim fire.  Would have been hard to get a full print.  The dust isn’t GSR, though.  It’s probably the stuff used on those medical rubber gloves to keep the latex from sticking.  Means the shooter was careful.  Maybe a pro?”

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It is an obscenity that we stigmatize so many young Americans with a criminal record for smoking marijuana, but not one major Wall Street executive has been prosecuted for causing the near collapse of our entire economy.—Bernie Sanders

In libris libertas!

Calling all readers. (This is a reaction to a short and probably inaccurate NY Times article.)  Nielsen and publishers’ reports indicate a declining American readership.  Only about 50% of those polled plan to read at least one book in the next year.  That’s a bit nebulous, but it confirms my suspicions: Americans are not reading much for pleasure anymore.

I don’t have accurate stats, but the reasons seem obvious: people are entertained or distracted by many other things now.  Reading a novel takes a bit more time than reading the latest tweet by Mr. Trump or a Hollywood celebrity, for example.  And a video game compensates for its lack of plot and creativity by offering striking visuals, visceral emotions, and even lewd experiences for many (all females in these games, whether good or bad, are so endowed that they set the fem lib movement back at least one hundred years).

Publishers are also reporting that ebook sales are declining.  That’s a lot easier to understand.  When a publisher charges almost as much for the ebook as the print version, readers feel a bit like those parents faced with that $ 600 bill for an Epipen pack—in other words, they feel like victims to price gouging.  An ebook doesn’t cost as much to produce and shipping and storage costs are close to zero, so that feeling is justified.  A reader who prefers ebooks will turn to indies and small presses that offer more reasonable prices.

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Readers don’t worry too much about this question, except when an author tries to scam them with a “novel” that’s 10 kwords (the other extreme is possible too: I’ve become annoyed when I want to just read a nice short story, and it turns out to be a 30-40 kword novella).  Readers only want to read a good story, period. Maybe they worry more about genre than plot (genres nowadays are just key words to describe a plot) and have reasonable criteria—for example, no porn and in English (I’ll read a story in French or Spanish, but many people wouldn’t).

Authors have to worry about two aspects of this question: First, should you set out to write one particular form? Second, no matter how you arrive at the finished product, how does the form change your attended audience?  Compared to more important writing challenges like plot, characterization, dialogue, settings, flashbacks v. back story, first or third person, point of view, and so forth, these two questions are less important, but the final form might reflect on how you handle those writing challenges.

My last comment is an argument for determining the form before you start on your writing journey. In fact, there are situations where doing that is an absolute constraint. If an ezine or traditional magazine requires a short story between 3 and 5 kwords, you have to be within those limits; you can’t even send a short story of 8 kwords!  That might imply cutting back on dialogue and characterization, for example—that kind of brief short story has few characters and those few aren’t going to be talking a lot.  There’s something to be said for this kind of constrained writing because it teaches you to be a minimalist writer.  That means you have to learn not to be a verbose storyteller and to let readers participate in the creative process by, for example, giving them only enough hints about characters to develop their own mental images and behavioral perceptions.

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[This story originates from a relatively new what-if that came to me when the events mentioned in the story surrounding the Russian agents in my home town played out—yes, that really happened!  I finally got around to telling a similar story based on my what-if.  It has a setting more in tune with many college students starting their classes this month.  Enjoy.]

Russians

Copyright 2016, Steven M. Moore

Part One of Five

Professor Boris Vashchenko left his desk chair and walked over to his office window, waiting to see Janet Connors as she left the building and entered the quad.  Beautiful and smart.  She’ll be successful in whatever career she chooses.  His student reminded him of Natasha, a musician he had dated in Moscow for a time.  I wonder what’s become of her.  He was surprised he still cared.

Boris jerked when the shot rang out.  Connors stumbled and fell.  He rushed out of the office and downstairs, taking the steps two at a time.

On the way down, he thought about America’s gun culture.  Shootings had occurred at other universities.  Is Janet Connors a fanatic’s victim?

His afternoon office hours had come too soon.  He heard the knock, looked at his watch, and sighed.  He opened his office door.

“Hello, Ms. Connors. Please come in and take a seat.”

Connors was the case of one calculus student where he could say his role as professor was largely superfluous but still made him feel that his efforts as a teacher of the next generation weren’t wasted.  Why is it the best students come to my office hours more than those who really need help?  Talking to other professors, he had concluded that was a common phenomenon…and complaint.

“The bad ones don’t give a rat’s ass,” his friend and colleague Gerry Grimes had told him.  “You’ll get used to it.”

“What can I do for you today?” he said to his student.

“I’m having problems with Stokes’ theorem,” she said.

Boris smiled, recalling his problems with that same theorem so long ago.  He had finally developed a gut feel for it in an applied physics course on fluid flow, and now appreciated its beauty through its generalizations to manifold theory.

“It’s a tough one,” he said.  “You’re familiar with the fundamental theorem of calculus: the integral of the derivative of a function over an interval is the difference in the values of the function at the endpoints of the interval?”  She nodded.  “Think of the endpoints as the boundary of the interval.  Stokes’ theorem just generalizes that to where we have a vector field and its curl, the 3D-cousin 3D of the derivative.”

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You can love peace. Or you can have freedom. Don’t ever count on having both at once.—Robert Heinlein

In libris libertas!

President Obama and First Lady Michelle will each write one after he leaves the presidency—maybe the ex-President’s title will be How I Learned to Love Hillary? Bill O’Reilly will probably come out with another Killing… book (he’s already killed Jesus). Elizabeth Vargas will probably have a sequel to her new book called An Alcoholic’s Secret Recipes for Cocktails. I’m also waiting for Roger Ailes’s manual for how to get away with sexual harassment for so long—I’ll put it next to my Win 10 manuals in a plain brown wrapper. (Note how PC I am—both ABC News and Fox News incur my wrath equally.)

What do these past, ready-to-release, or future books have in common? They are all written by celebrity “authors,” for whom I have no respect, in order to rake in millions in advances and royalties at the expense of readers hooked on such books. Most of these readers haven’t read a good book in their life—they’re the types who read Hamlet in Cliff Notes in college English (if they went to college). The Big Five’s business model in this case is clear and channels P. T. Barnum—there’s a sucker born every minute, and a good number of them read books by celebrities.

Sour grapes? In a way, I suppose that’s true. In their defense, these readers are exploited by the Big Five. So are the celebrities for the most part—the common denominator being publishers’ greed—but the exploitation of the celebrities is mitigated by the fat paychecks. But greed isn’t their only sin either. Most of these people can’t even write. Bill O’Reilly at least gives credit where it’s due—the ghostwriter Martin Dugard appears as a coauthor, but after Bill’s name, of course. While even real authors pull these stunts (James Patterson is one of the worst), it’s sad when the celebrity author hasn’t done much of the work. I’d wager that 99% of books by celebrities are written by ghostwriters—maybe that puts some food on the table for the ghostwriters, but the celebrities take home the lion’s share of royalties when they’re just parasitic hyenas.

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Sully. Clint Eastwood, dir. I went into this flick with foreboding, the kind you get when an editor tells you your short story must be between 4000 and 5000 words long, and you have 2500, or your old high school civics teachers tells you that you have to write a paper on the entire industrial revolution in five pages or less. How can anyone possibly make a two-hour film about an event that took only 200+ seconds to unfold? I was expecting long flashbacks about the main character’s past.

There was some of that. I learned that Sully’s stupid flight instructor left him, an immature kid, alone to fly a plane anytime he wanted while the instructor went back to his crop-dusting business (flight instructors aren’t the brightest people on the planet, of course, when you consider they trained the 9/11 terrorists—people running the flight schools aren’t either). I learned that Sully was some kind of military aviator too, landing a fighter that was clearly in trouble—an attempt by Eastwood to show Sully was well-prepared to ditch an Airbus on the Hudson? No doubt the man was qualified—no one flies for forty years, much of it with commercial airliners, including the Airbus—without being qualified, but the flashbacks were just unimportant fillers.

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Some excitement was caused recently by the announcement of an E-type exoplanet, Proxima b, a planet orbiting the red dwarf Proxima Centauri in the Alpha Centauri triple-star system (Alpha A is a G-type star like the sun, while B is a K-type star, but both are much brighter than Proxima). That system is about 4.3 light-years from Earth, or 40.14 trillion kilometers. (Conversion lesson: convert to statute miles.) The size of the Milky Way is about 100, 000 light-years, so Proxima is right around the corner. Right? Wrong! Even distances in our galaxy are “huuuuge,” to borrow a word abused by two recent presidential candidates and the SNL comics.

More excitement was caused by the report from scientists at the RATAN-600 radio telescope at Zelenchukskaya in Russia. They detected a strong signal apparently originating in the direction of the G-type star HD 1611595, known to have one warm Neptune-like planet (40-day orbit). This star is 94 light-years away. The Russian report to the SETI committee was made without many details.  The star might have rocky E-type planets too, so many UFO-ET enthusiasts and sci-fi addicts are in a frenzy, spurred on by the meaning of the acronym—“Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence.” While some other Russian scientists wrote the whole thing off as terrestrial interference (covering their butts?), the scientific jury is still out (comments updating this are welcome).  95 light-years is many times 4, of course, but still small in comparison relative to galactic distance markers—4 is a walk to your neighborhood convenience store; 95 is a short car ride to the nearby Dunkin’ Donuts.

Let’s counter some knee-jerk reactions to these reports first. Coincidentally, SETI has a new focus on red dwarf stars. They can live billions of years longer than G-type stars, where SETI’s emphasis has traditionally been, because we know at least one G-type star, ours, has an intelligent civilization (although “intelligent” might be a questionable word to use sometimes). That extra stellar lifespan might allow a red dwarf like Proxima Centauri to be home to an ancient civilization far advanced beyond ours (and actually be intelligent?). The hurdles are enormous, though, for any kind of life in such a system, because livable E-type planets would have to orbit the parent star so closely that they would be tidally locked, one face always turned toward the star. That means life as we know it could only exist in that transition zone between eternal day and eternal night.

The second report is a bit more difficult to put down in this way: an E-type planet could exist farther out from HD 1611595 and have life. Without knowing the details of the signal (I only know it’s strong), one can’t use it to mark the source as being intelligent. If it were narrowband, seemingly coded, and beamed directly at us (how could they know to do that when radio had just been invented on Earth 90 years ago?), you might have something. But consider this: one scientist estimates that ten-to-the-thirtieth (one followed by thirty zeroes) watts would be needed to broadcast this signal if omnidirectional (i.e. not specifically aimed at us), and ten-to-the-fifteenth watts if beamed directly. The first corresponds to a Kardashev Type II civilization, one that harnesses all energy emitted by its sun (Dyson sphere?—that’s physicist Freeman Dyson, not my author-friend Scott Dyson); the second to Type I, a civilization that “only” harnesses all the energy falling on its planet.

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Vladimir Putin is a strong leader in the same way arsenic is a strong drink.–Gary Kasparov

In libris libertas!