Dating your prose…
[For authors mainly, but also for readers who want to understand authors better….]
I bought another one of those megapacks—genre: sci-fi; subgenre: space opera. It’s a collection of short stories, novellas, and novels covering many years of sci-fi writing. You sort of feel like you’re reading some of Chesterton’s Father Brown tales, though. Long sentences and dialogue, but also long narrative, and quite orthogonal to anything you might call minimalist (hard-boiled for mystery lovers). There are delicious turns of phrase, though, one reason I recommend that even the most fervent atheist take a course about the Bible as literature. If the latter in its best King James Version reads like Shakespeare, you shouldn’t be surprised—they were contemporaries, and I suspect each plagiarized the other.
One thing you see right away with those old space operas, though, is how dated the science is. E. E. “Doc” Smith, who wrote many good tales and is often called the “father of space opera,” entertained me a lot as a kid with his Lensman and Skylark series. They were dog-eared and coke-marked in our local public library even back when I read them, and that goes pretty far back. Skylark #1 is in the metapack. The protagonist is a brilliant Rambo-like romantic scientist who was maybe the model for Stan Lee’s Ironman (Tony Stark). The prose has many of the characteristics I indicated above and, in retrospect, I wonder how I got through it in junior high (I’d read all the sci-fi books in the public library by the time I finished and all of my brother’s sci-fi book club editions too).
Besides passing on my OD experiences with nostalgia, hardly worth doing nowadays for all the non-readers of all ages out there who have trouble reading anything beyond 140 characters, let me take this opportunity to give warning to authors: dating your prose is another reason for minimalist writing. Doc Smith, a food engineer, not a scientist, strove to make his Skylark character appear to be a brilliant scientist by describing his inventions in excruciating detail. It’s all techno-babble of the times. In his defense, he was writing at a time when many of the advances in science and technology we now take for granted didn’t exist. The story’s not a bad one, especially if you like Tony Stark. Like Ironman, it’s not even an extrapolation into the far future.
This megapack is full of this stuff. I guess the authors back then were paying more attention to Clancy’s observation that fiction has to seem real. Science fiction is no exception, although we tend to give some leeway to space operas like Star Trek and Star Wars, the first with “science” that’s just plain wrong (“Full stop, Scotty!” just can’t work in space—hasn’t someone wrote a book about Star Trek’s bad science?) and the second pure fantasy in comparison to Star Trek (Lucas can be excused, I suppose, because he lifted a lot of things from Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Martian tales—Burroughs was a contemporary of Doc Smith). But all that techno-babble is now so dated you’ll find yourself chuckling (although some of it sounds like super conductivity and MRIs running amok when someone enters one wearing metal). Another story in the megapack has jungles on the asteroid Vesta (google it to see recent pics) and Jovian pirates. Yet another story has a dude landing on Jupiter!
I discovered some misconceptions on my part, though. I always thought Asimov was the first to combine mystery/crime stories with sci-fi (e.g. Caves of Steel and Naked Sun). This megapack has a first-rate sci-fi mystery that predates Asimov. It avoids the trap of extended techno-babble and gets on with the story. I’d even call it minimalist although there are clear bows to Christie. The story is about a small group of people on a way station after murders were committed on their small passenger rocket. Hercules Poirot’s role is assumed by an interstellar assassin who obviously knows a lot about crime—his mother was a spy who pimped him out as a young man to any rich capitalist who needed the competition.
World Steel is Doc Smith’s evil corporation in his first Skylark tale. I can’t remember if any exist in the other stories. Maybe they will turn up in other megapacks (there are several containing space operas). That trend is a common theme in sci-fi: the classic movies Blade Runner and Alien featured it; so did the more recent Avatar—kind of ironic when you remember that Hollywood is filled with big, greedy corporations. Even that defunct series about time travel and dinos from Fox TV (can’t remember the name) had one, which is more than ironic (and maybe why Fox canned the series?). My own “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy” has extreme versions of the theme in the first and third novels (Survivors of the Chaos and Come Dance a Cumbia…with Stars in Your Hand!). For some reason, sci-fi readers love the theme.
But the extended techno-babble narrative is taboo nowadays. Readers have no patience for it; authors date their prose by including it. Benford and Niven’s Bowl of Heaven is a recent example where the story (is there one?) is lost in the pages and pages of techno-babble. The earlier Baxter novels suffer from the same problem. Minimalist writing, hard-boiled storytelling, works in sci-fi adventures too. And too much techno-babble will date your prose. There might not be any readers reading us a century from now as in the case of my rereading those Doc Smith stories, but you the author can maintain their interest even then if you’re a minimalist writer. Sure some world-building is necessary in sci-fi, and that’s narrative, but the techno-babble about how your heroine or hero travels from star to star or creates a time machine should come in very small doses so that the story isn’t lost. Of course, there might not be any readers of novels a century from now, and this whole discussion will become irrelevant!
***
The “Mary Jo Melendez Mysteries” are on sale. Mary Jo is inviting you to celebrate with her for leaving Amazon exclusivity and appearing on Smashwords too. She’s an ex-USN Master-at-Arms who manages to get into a lot of trouble as a civilian; she also manages to beat the odds and survive, though. Muddlin’ Through (Smashwords coupon code KY27A) is an international thriller where she works to clear her name and pay back the group that framed her. In the process, she discovers the MECHs, Mechanically Enhanced Cybernetic Humans, and romance as she runs around the U.S., South American, and Europe. Silicon Slummin’…and Just Gettin’ By (Smashwords coupon code VT64E) takes place almost exclusively in the Silicon Valley where she has two government groups pursuing her, one U.S., the other Russian. She also has a stalker on a revenge mission. Both books, normally $2.99, are $0.99 on Smashwords, using the coupon codes, until August 1—lots of entertaining summer reading for $2!
In libris libertas!
