Whatever

When we know something, it’s not just what we know but how we came to know it that determines how useful it is to us: How did we learn it? Is it from a trusted source? How will we save and store that knowledge? How will we pass it on? In a world where we can store entire encyclopedias on flash drives the size of a fingernail, this doesn’t seem like much of an issue. But it’s not that difficult to imagine a world where it might be.

Such a world exists in The Dead-Tossed Waves, author Carrie Ryan’s follow-up to her bestselling debut, The Forest of Hands and Teeth. In these books, the world of the living is small, poor, and clearly demarcated. In that world, what we know and how we know it has implications not only for how people live day to day, but also how they see the world… and how they imagine how the world can be.

CARRIE RYAN:

In my first book, The Forest of Hands and Teeth (released last year) Mary, my protagonist, lives in an amazingly circumscribed world — a small village in the middle of a forest full of zombies where everyone’s told there’s nothing left of humanity past the fences. Mary lives about 150 years after the zombie apocalypse and her village has nothing left from the before time — no books (other than one religious text), electricity, maps and the like. Every bit of information and knowledge they have is passed down through several generations.

I think of it a bit like playing a game of telephone — you know where one person whispers a phrase to the person sitting next to them and it gets passed around the room such that “I had eggs for breakfast” somehow becomes “bacon taped on cats is yummy”?

The idea of memory and the corruption of information over time fascinates me. We’re so reliant on outside sources of information today that if the apocalypse hit… what stories would we remember to pass down?

Because here’s the thing… once, about a decade ago, I sat with my ill grandmother while she told me stories from her life. In one of them, she described going to a dance at Amherst with her mother as a chaperone and wearing lavender stockings (during a time when such a color stocking was rare). One of the matrons at the dance asked my Nana to leave because of her shameless attire (re: lavender stockings). Her mother, my great-grandmother, straightened her back and gave one of the best retorts I’d ever herd — so perfect and cutting and yet also so poised. I remember listening to that story and thinking “this is where the strength of the women in my family comes from — this is how I am who I am.”

And yet I can’t remember what my great-grandmother’s oh-so-perfect retort was and no one else in my large family ever heard the story. It’s lost to time. This is the corrosion of memory.

Now imagine that on a larger scale: how to build things and cure things and repair things. How many miles in a light year or which clouds are cumulus and which are cirrus. All the things we turn to Wikipedia and books for — just slowly eroding away.

This is Mary’s world in the forest: the only information the villagers have is what’s passed down year after year with no influence from the outside world. So when I decided to write a sequel/companion book set beyond the forest, I suddenly had to figure out what would we retain and remember given slightly more resources?

My answer: not much more. In my second book, The Dead-Tossed Waves, Mary’s daughter, Gabry, grows up in a dead-end town at the edge of the ocean. There’s little communication between enclaves of survivors (no electricity because resources for things like wires is rare and travel is dangerous because roads are still rife with zombies). But even more disturbing is that there’s a pervasive feeling among the survivors of “what’s the use?”

What’s the point of caring or learning about art or physics or calculus in the face of everyday issues like keeping the town safe, farming fields, feeding mouths? Knowledge and learning becomes a luxury pretty quickly. At one point in the book a teacher comes to town and talks about the universe and gravity and most of the families pull their kids from school because to them, such information is useless.

Sometimes I think of these characters in my books — these random survivors — as living their lives with their heads down, sometimes glancing over their shoulders to ensure no zombies have breached their carefully structured safety. And then I imagine my protagonists standing, head raised, looking to the horizon and wondering what’s out there.

In the first book, this is Mary, staring at the forest and wondering if there’s a life on the other side. In the second book this is Gabry, growing up in a lighthouse by the ocean wondering if there’s an easier and safer life out there. And then the real question becomes: what causes someone to raise their head from the ground, to not just stare at the horizon but to go out after it?

Zombies can embody all sorts of themes: the slow crawl of death, fear of science/religion/technology/ourselves, inescapable nihilism. But to me, they often represent a life not fully lived. They are nothing more than pure existence shuffling through time with no dreams, hopes, desires or memories. This drives me to wonder what separates the character living life staring at the ground and the zombie straining at the fence?

What makes us raise our heads and go after something more? What makes us care about lives apart from our own? What’s the difference between the person who stands at the edge of the ocean day after day wondering what’s past the waves and the person who gets in a boat and paddles off to find the answer?

Often, it’s my own fear of not taking advantage of this life — of forgetting my grandmother’s stories, of not bothering to read poetry or look at art or remember what kind of flower grows on my front porch or caring about a dispute between two warring tribes on the other side of the world — that causes me to write about people who do take advantage of what they’re given and constantly grasp for more. I hope their drive and determination will bolster my own.

—-

The Dead-Tossed Waves: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. See the book trailer. Visit Carrie Ryan’s blog. Follow her on Twitter.

As noted earlier, for my office I am currently waiting on a desk and bookshelves, and while I wait, rather than reintroduce the previous massive and now esthetically incompatible desk (which sits, in pieces, in the basement), I went the other direction and got a laptop stand. As it happens, the laptop stand is the perfect height for typing while standing, and for when I want to sit, I got myself a nice little stool. And the laptop stand is finished in cherry wood, so it matches the flooring. Truly, the best of all possible worlds. So I’ve gone from maximum clutter to minimum necessary materials. We’ll see how long that lasts. But for now it’s nice.

It’s in, and I think it looks very nice. We’re still a ways off from having the office totally completed — we still have shelves and a desk to go — but now at least I can have my own space back, which is as it turns out a fairly important thing for my mental well being. Who would have guessed.

I’ve got about ten minutes before the contractors arrive to put down my new office floor (and in doing so likely knock me offline for most of the day) so before that happens: Here, look at my TempOffice, which is my laptop on top of a portable filing cabinet, with my daughter’s desk chair (I don’t generally favor pink), in my bedroom. Behind the TempOffice is the master bathroom, with Kodi valiantly holding down the floor, which considering what the contractors are here to do, is not necessarily a bad thing.

Now, you may ask, why don’t I just work downstairs? The short answer is that in addition to putting down my flooring, they also tearing up flooring, downstairs. Basically anywhere but my bedroom, I’ll be in the way today. Also, yon large dog gets antsy when people she doesn’t know are stomping about the house, so I’ll be keeping her in the bedroom with me (I’ve already put a gate on the door) to keep her from eating any contractors. Because apparently the don’t like being eaten. I don’t know why that is, but there you go.

So there you have it: My life, on the Ides of March, 2010.

Also and again: My Internet presence is likely to be iffy today because of all the house work. I have my cell phone to access e-mail, Twitter, etc., but in general don’t expect immediate responses to anything today. Thanks.

When the contractors arrive tomorrow I am likely to be knocked offline for most of the day. I know. I’m scared too. Expect delays in e-mail responses and such.

The folks handling the Hugos this year asked me to remind all y’all that you have until midnight Pacific time tonight to get in your Hugo nominations (that’ll be 4 am Eastern, because of the time switch), so if you haven’t done your Hugo nominating yet, jeez people, get to it already. I swear, this is the last time I’m telling you. This year.

It’s raining and the ground is saturated with water and so the earthworms have erupted from the very soil and headed to our garage, which is not saturated with water, but is now saturated with earthworms. The cats are very happy. I’m vaguely concerned I’ll be picking up earthworm-flavored cat vomit for the next couple of days. Life at The Scalzi Compound is not all flooring and painting, you know.

Apparently, before you can lay down new flooring you have to let it acclimate to the house environment for 24 to 48 hours, so last night my new office floor arrived to get cozy and comfortable before it actually gets laid down. Yes, we believe in ethical treatment of flooring. As should you all.

Pretty. AND I KNOW EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS NEXT. Yes I do. Wait until you see the episode with hand puppets!

For those of you who wanted to know what “Scotland Road” and “Traditional Brown” looked like:

The picture was taken with my cell phone, so it’s not the best representation, but it’s close enough so you can see how the colors coordinate together. It’s very mint chocolate. Next up: flooring, followed by custom bookshelves. Followed by LASERS. Because you can’t have a home office without LASERS.

Getting an e-mail from a site saying that’s given my site an award for being famous, and that the site was “has been selected and evaluated by a network of subject specialists,” and then going over to see the site and noticing that I’m referred to there as “Joe Scalzi.”

That’s some excellent evaluation there, site specialists.

I do occasionally see myself referred to online as “Joe Scalzi” or “Jeff Scalzi,” both of which make at least a little bit of sense because of the “J” connection, but I’ve also seen me referred to as “Dave Scalzi” or “Richard Scalzi,” which are a little more puzzling to me. But all of them are a little weird; it’s not as if “John” is that difficult a name, you know. And it’s all over the Web site and the covers of my books. Maybe all somewhat-common first names blend together in people’s brains. This is where it’s nice to have a last name like “Scalzi.”

Until my office gets reconstituted into recognizable shape (which should be a few days), I may be a little slow responding to mail, etc. Please be patient. Thanks.

Over at AMC, I do the Oscar post-mortem and explain how the most financially successful film of all time (unless you account for inflation, in which case it’s the 14th most successful film of all time) got skunked at the Academy Awards by a film that took in 1% of its box office. You know you want to know! And I want to tell you. And I will. So there. As always, feel free to leave comments over on AMC.

Last weekend Paul Sabourin of the comedy music duo Paul and Storm had his 40th birthday, and to celebrate Paul’s steep and unstoppable slide into middle-aged decrepitude, his musical partner Storm asked a few pals (including me, Neil Gaiman and a few others you might know if you know your geeks) to talk about Paul in video form. Here it is (parts not necessarily safe for work because of language).

IT’S ALL TRUE. Just remember that.

I noted yesterday that I was spending the day tearing down my office; well, it took longer than I thought and we only finished doing it about an hour ago. This is what it looks like without that massive desk in it; you can see, incidentally, why we’re so keen to get rid of the carpeting in there. It’s over a decade old, and it’s over a decade old in a service of an unbelievable slob.

Krissy is up in the office at the moment with an industrial-strength ShopVac, sucking out the mess and grime, mostly so she won’t feel personally humiliated when the contractors get here on Monday to put down the new flooring. By that time we’ll have painted the walls as well, from their current dingy white to a pale green called “Scotland Road” with the contrasting walls being “Traditional Brown.” Hey, I don’t name the colors. I just put them on my walls.

Until we’re done rebuilding the office, the primary computer is offline; I’ll be on one of the laptops or the other. And then the contractors will be all over the house for the next couple of weeks. I may not have picked the best time to start a new novel. Fortunately I have other, less intensive work to keep me occupied as well; I may focus on that instead.

How are you?

Angels and demons and neuroscientists, oh my! Skyler White’s got ‘em in her novel and Falling, Fly, and she’s not afraid to use them. She’s also not afraid to go deeper and look at what those angels and demons mean – not just in the literal sense of being angels and demons, but what these creatures might represent in the zeitgeist… and to her as an author. And now she’s here to lay it all out for you.

SKYLER WHITE:

Through a weird quirk of timing, the collective unconscious has bubbled up several fallen angel books recently. With one much, much bigger than my debut novel released in the same week, it’s tempting to poke the fallen angel blister here, and hypothesize on tumbled ideals as my ‘big idea’. But to the extent I’ve had any success as a writer, it’s come from writing the things that scare me, so I want to go a little bigger with The Big Idea, because mine is something I’ve been worried about.

My big idea is a bit of a dirty word. It’s archaic and medieval and I’ve spent the last two years concerned some editor or critic will paste it to my work, and I’ll be branded with it. The word is “allegory.” And, shamefully, I love it. I love mythology and Aesop and Orwell and Dante and god help me, I love Pilgrim’s Progress. I love it more than 80’s power ballads and musical theater and every other unsubtle, un-ironic guilty pleasure I’ve got. And I know it’s wrong. I know writers’ ideas must serve their stories. I know story arc and psychological realism are paramount. Nothing may be allowed to interfere with the pleasure a reader takes in a good story well told. The writer’s prose needs to step aside. The writer’s ideas need to move on back.

I’d like to say it was courage or rebellion that put me in opposition to the prevailing wisdom that allegory is naïve, primitive, and inherently didactic, but it was a less noble, more selfish impulse. I had a question I needed to explore, and fiction was the safest battleground to test myself against it. So I’m outing myself here: and Falling, Fly has an agenda. I have an ulterior motive. It’s not a political or moral agenda, and I didn’t have a lesson I was trying to impart, or an answer I wanted to teach. What I had was a question.

The question came out of a game I was playing with a group of friends who had all read Lynda Barry’s wonderful One! Hundred! Demons! and were experimenting together with naming our own personal ones. I was working on a portrait of a capitalist/addict demon who’s haunted me for years, called “Too Much is Not Enough,” and wound up with a single, simple question: what is desire? But it’s a simple question with a fractal edge. Why do we want what we can’t have? Is feminine desire different from men’s? What takes wanting away from a healthy, motivating need for nourishment or experience, and makes it an addiction or craving that cannot be sated? Can sexual hunger be translated to ice cream? What happens if the standard of living or parenting style delays practice or even experience with being denied? What does it mean if the sexiest thing a woman can hear is “I want you,” and she becomes what is desired rather than who desires? The only way I could think of tackling such a complex-but-simple question, short of continuing to muddle through my life-as-experiment, was through story.

Stories allow us to model different realities, to step into different skins, to try-before-you-buy different ways of being in or looking at the world. Some writers make models nearly identical to the world I see out my window. Through close observation and astute description, they offer a nearly photo-realistic experience of someone else’s life. Allegory sits on an opposite ledge. In allegory, what we see every day may still show up on the page, but it’s standing in for something we can never photograph. Even with the best CGI. Allegory isn’t about how acutely you can render the impossible in fantasy or the frightening into horror. It’s about what the magic and the monsters mean.

Allegory allowed me to look at the nature of desire from multiple angles and explore not only its different manifestations, but how they interact with one another. It let me introduce Olivia, the fallen angel of desire – the platonic ideal of desire in its corrupted, corporeal form – to Dominic, a neuroscientist to whom desire is reducible to neurochemical signals, and make them fall in love. With allegory, the son of a wealthy philanthropist can be a bit of comic relief and also a study in money-as-creative-force and privilege as a stultifying or even decaying state. But allegory also let me go ‘meta’ and create parallel story-worlds. In one, my symbolism is overt. A character can “mainline the memestream,” and what he creates in that parallel manifests in the other, more familiar one. I had a tremendous amount of fun playing across these worlds and with the ‘third rail’ of actual reality outside the story. I also found it an incredibly rich framework upon which to structure a plot.

But if an exploration of desire was the magical idea, allegory was the monster. I wanted to use the power of symbolism, but keep it obedient to the characters and their story. I wanted to invoke layers of meaning, but not burden my words. I don’t know if I pulled it off. But I know I want to.

—-

And Falling, Fly: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Indiebound|Powell’s

Read an excerpt. Watch the book trailer. Follow White on Twitter.

As noted earlier, I’m busy moving boxes and tearing down furniture all day long, so today’s Just Arrived bit will be even shorter than usual. Nevertheless, here’s what’s in the in door today:

* 2010 Nebula Awards Showcase, edited by Bill Fawcett (Roc): Nebula winning fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, John Kessel, Nina Kiriki Hoffman and others, plus poetry (including from my pal Cat Valente) and essays by Robert Silverberg, David Drake, Mike Resnick and more. Lots of cool stuff in here. Out on April 6.

* WWW: Watch, by Robert J. Sawyer (Ace): The follow-up to Sawyer’s WWW:Wake, in which a woman who discovers a consciousness inside the Internet tries to keep it safe from those who are hunting it. This will be out May 18.

* Directive 51, by John Barnes (Ace): The end of the world is (probably) nigh! Is there a government protocol for that? Oh, you bet there is. You’ll find out more what it is on April 6.

* Ark, by Stephen Baxter (Roc): The follow up to Baxter very moist thriller Flood. This time around humans are looking to save themselves from watery inundation by traveling to a new planet… but our book’s heroine be one of the few who will be chosen to go? Out May 4.

* Destroyermen: Distant Thunders, by Taylor Anderson (Roc): The fourth book in the Destroyerman series, which features an alternate universe World War II. Out June 1.

* Shine, edited by Jetse de Vries: An anthology of optimistic science fiction. Because all your dystopias are just bringin’ us down, man! Editor de Vries will be doing a Big Idea to tell us more on the book at the beginning of April; the book itself will be out March 30.

* Imaginary Jesus, by Matt Mikalatos (Barna): In which our narrator (who has the same name as the author) goes on a quest to find the real Jesus, and meets a whole bunch of other Jesuses (Jesi?) along the way. Written by someone who is both a former missionary and a former comic book clerk, which is an interesting combination, I think. Out now.

Well, some of it, anyway. There are some more plastic containers to the left of the picture edge which contain more books, and then up in my office there are another 20 or so boxes to shuttle down to the basement from the office, which I will do after lunchtime today, which incidentally I will be spending at Lowe’s, picking out paint for the walls. And then this evening Krissy and I will be breaking down the shelves and the desk and the loveseat, and pulling the art off the walls. So by the time we go to bed tonight my office will be almost totally bare.

What I really think when I see all these boxes is how the hell did I fit all this crap into my office in the first place? The topmost box there is at head height; there are a whole bunch of boxes you’re not seeing seeing here; I still have more stuff to bring down to the basement. My office is not that big. There may be some violations of physical laws here.

One thing which will be true is that much of the stuff that was in my office will not be making the return trip when the office is finished. The vast majority of the books will stay in the basement, not just for storage but also because we’re planning to make a more formal library there (someday…). The office furniture is going entirely; I’ve made the executive decision to graduate from particleboard shelving to something slightly more elegant, and I’ve also realized that having two massive wings on my desk just gives me an excuse to pile lots of crap on them, and I really shouldn’t give myself that excuse.

Beyond this, in a general sense I’ll be looking at everything and asking what it really adds to the feng shui. The fact of the matter is — and I know this will sound weird considering all the pictures you’ve seen of my office — at this point in time too much clutter starts being distracting for me when I write, and I am (alas) all too easily distractable. In one sense it would be lovely to have my office be a desk, a computer, a chair and then not a whole lot else. I don’t think I’ll actually make it that spartan in the end — I’m not that spartan a dude — but my office will be sporting a “less is more” philosophy moving forward. So, lots of stuff in the basement, on a more or less permanent basis. Well, that’s what basements are for.

Seriously, I thought you’d never ask.

The picture itself is slightly distressed, a product of being a wallet-sized photo trapped in a wallet for a number of years, and then in box for all the years after that (it’s now being placed in another, smaller box). And I subtracted the color because let’s just say prom pictures are not known for being color stable. But, yup, that’s me, and my prom date Joy, whom I had a huge crush on all through high school in that “I’m a nerd and have no chance but will adore you anyway” manner that I suspect at least a few of you may remember. So naturally I was happy when she let me take her to the prom. We had a nice time, if I recall correctly. So if you are one of those people bitter about the prom, sorry, man. Not in your camp.

And now, back to clearing out the office.

I’m currently deconstructing my office, because we’re literally about to redo it from the floor up (no, really; we’re tearing up the carpet and putting down a wood floor, and by “we” I mean “actual professionals because I would screw it up”). In the process of going through various drawers full of 10-year-old operating system recovery discs and newspaper clippings, I came across this: An engraved pen my wife gave me on the occasion of my very first book tour for my very first book, in 2000. This would have been the book tour for a book on online finance that came out as the Internet bubble was collapsing, taking place the week after the 2000 election, so most of my appearances on news shows were canceled because the fight between Bush and Gore was kind of more newsworthy, and after two stops my tour was cut short because, honestly, what was the point. And then the book flopped. And then the CHUDs came at me.

So, basically, the one good thing out of that entire tour was this pen, from my wife, who loved me and was proud of me for having written my first book. And you know what: Looking back, that’s enough. This pen’s spent the last several years at the bottom of a drawer, but I think in the new office it will have a somewhat more prominent position. It’s nice to have a reminder of just who it is who has been cheering for me from the start of it all.