Fourth Planet from the Sun

Odysseus. Robinson Crusoe. Lemuel Gulliver. John Carter. All intrepid voyagers. All castaways. All stranded a long way from familiar shores. Add to that illustrious list Mark Watney, hero of the 2014 novel, The Martian.

Of the castaways listed, Watney, an astronaut marooned on Mars, shares the most with Robinson Crusoe. The other three spend their lost years dallying with other cultures and races; Crusoe and Watney have to endure total solitude with only their wits to keep them alive. Well, their wits plus boatloads of equipment they can salvage as they await either rescue or death. One thing that makes stories about castaways so fascinating, is that very question of whether they'll live to return home. Author Andy Weir's saga adds a new dimension to the ancient fascination: his rigorous use of cutting-edge science. Yes, the book is science fiction, but not in the same vein as Edgar Rice Burroughs' story of the Earthling-turned-Martian, John Carter, which relies much more on fantasy than it does on science. And Weir's science is solid as bedrock. No swooning Martian princesses here; no four-armed giant swordsmen; no eight-legged pets. Just an airless, desiccated planet where even a simple mistake might mean dying.

Andy's site describes him as a software engineer and lifelong space nerd. With the publication of The Martian, Weir's first book, he also adds the job description of best-selling author to his resume. His crisp writing snags the reader's attention from the first sentence: "I'm pretty much fucked." How can you not want to read the next sentence?

According to The Wall Street Journal, Weir first put his book on his Website in 2011 free of charge. Later, he began selling it on Amazon for 99 cents. In three months, it sold 35,000 copies, and agents, publishers, and movie studios perked up their ears. Crown Publishers bought the book for six figures. Twentieth Century Fox optioned the film rights.

One of the best things about the novel is that it celebrates not just the adventure story of one man's ingenuity and resourcefulness in the face of overwhelming odds, but, as Watney says, "the sheer number of people who pulled together just to save my sorry ass." The epiphany of the last page comes from Watney's realization that "every human being has a basic instinct to help every other out. ... Yes, there are assholes who just don't care, but they're massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?"

Yes. Way cool.

Rising Land of the Sun

A few days ago, I came across a TEDtalk by an author I had never heard of, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. (It constantly amazes me how many authors and books are out there -- a small indication of just how huge the world really is.) After listening to Ms. Adichie's discourse, I checked out her book, Half of a Yellow Sun, from our local library. With only the vaguest idea as to what the book was about, I began reading. (This goes back to my long-held belief that the best way to experience a book is without preconceived notions, with no inkling about the book itself, other than author and genre. Otherwise, the reader risks losing the rich glow of original response. I know this seems at tautological odds with the idea of book reviews, but I look at what I offer here as the beginning of a dialogue rather than a diatribe.)

Picture credit: Akintunde Akinleye

One of the dim memories I retain from my childhood during the last half of the 1960s is the phrase used by middle-class American mothers to prompt kids to finish their meals: "Think of all those starving children in Biafra" -- as if how many peas and carrots we left on our plates would make any difference in some country on the other side of the world which we couldn't even point to on a map. What I didn't realize at the time was that literally thousands of children and their parents were being starved, stabbed, shot down, blown up, or beaten to death in the Nigerian civil war which raged between the years 1967 and 1970.


While I was holed up in my bedroom, wolfing down anything science fiction, it turns out that I missed not only socialization with my peers, but significant news events, too. One of those events was the conflict in Nigeria, one of the largest West African countries. A cousin of mine and her husband were serving as Christian missionaries in Nigeria from 1963 to 1973, but that brought the place no closer to my everyday world. I was too absorbed in myself, too oblivious. I paid scant attention to history even as it was happening on the world stage.


So the further I read into Adichie's book last week, the more my sense of bewilderment grew. When I finally realized what the story was about, that realization stunned me. It was only then that I pieced together the name Biafra and those half-forgotten memories, and applied the results to the book I had in front of me.

According to Wikipedia, Nigeria is inhabited by over 500 distinct, sometimes warring ethnic groups, including the Hausa and Igbo peoples. The action of Adichie's novel ignites from a mass murder of Igbo by Hausa, leading up to the declaration on 30 May 1967 of the independence of a chunk of the southeast of Nigeria to be known as Biafra, and to serve primarily as a refuge for Igbo. The story centers on an Igbo woman, Olanna, and her family. They start off as well-to-do, middle-class, highly educated people; the narrative follows them as the war forces them out of one home after another, constantly leaving behind more and more possessions, sinking lower and lower on the economic scale, mirroring the effects of Nigeria's embargo on Biafra itself.

Adichie excoriates the white colonial mentality which drove exploration/exploitation from the 15th through 20th centuries. Early in the book, one of the characters rails about being "a Nigerian because a white man created Nigeria." At the Berlin Conference of 1884, the European powers divided up what they termed 'the Dark Continent.' In drawing what they thought should be national boundaries, Britain, Russian, and other colonial powers completely ignored the reality of tribes which had existed for thousands of years with their own histories, their own mandates of allies and enemies, with the results turning out not unlike trying to stuff a dozen cats into a broom closet.

By telling her tale through the eyes of characters intimately involved in the secession attempt itself, Adichie reveals in a more compelling way than any history book could, the multitudes of reasons the white man's plan would only produce resentment and exacerbate tribal conflicts. It was exactly the same story Europeans had tried/were trying with the indigenous peoples on the American continents. One of the most telling quotes comes from an old tribal man who says to a European,  the "people of Igboland do not know what a king is. ... It is because the white man gave us warrant chiefs that foolish men are calling themselves kings today."

Linx

One thing I've been remiss about is providing links to other writers' Websites. I apologize, and hereby rectify the matter:

Gary Colby


Who would have guessed history could be so much fun. Those wacky Greeks!

Jesse Goolsby


War is a terrible thing, and no one tells that truth better than a warrior.

David Abrams


First-person narratives of different authors on his or her first publication.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie


When I first stumbled across Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on TED, she instantly captured my attention.

This list vastly under-represents female writers; 1 out of 4 is not a good statistic. Many other sites exist out there; feel free to leave other suggestions in the comments section: female, male, or otherwise.

Redford

This past week I meandered up to the video section in the local library. (A shout-out to libraries and librarians!) As I browsed (not unlike a cow chewing daisies), I came across a Robert Redford movie which I had never heard of, All Is Lost, with a cover photo featuring a sailor standing at the helm of a yacht in a driving, drenching storm. Once, long ago and far away, when I was a different person, I owned a small not-a-yacht sailboat myself, so the movie intrigued me.

Before I walked away with my selection, though, another movie caught my eye: The Company You Keep, also starring Redford along with a list of other well-known celebrities. My interest piqued, I took both.

The Company You Keep (2012) is based on Neil Gordon's book by the same name which in turn is loosely based on the mid-1970's paramilitary group, the Weather Underground, which was an American left-wing revolutionary group trying to bring about "the destruction of U.S. imperialism and achieve a classless world: world communism." Though the plot of the movie doesn't follow all the twists of the real-life story, the parallel is obvious. In the fictional piece, years after a bank robbery gone sour, most members of the group have morphed their wild, anti-government protests into respectable, middle-class facades. A widowed lawyer, Jim Grant (Redford), with a young daughter (played by Jackie Evancho who, regrettably, does no singing in this movie) is exposed by a young reporter, and sets out to prove that he had nothing to do with the killing of a bank guard during the robbery for the simple fact that he didn't take part in the robbery. As the reporter and law officials close in, tension rises over whether or not the lawyer will be supported or sold-out by his former lover who still carries the torch of anti-establishment counter-culture warfare through her one-step-ahead-of-the-law drug dealing. The movie's focus on Grant's struggle to clear his name instead of on the moral ambiguity of his group's actions, forces viewers to make up their own minds about the rightness/justice/morality of his group's stance. The cast is full of stars of enhanced name-recognition power such as Shia LaBeouf, Julie Christie, and Susan Sarandon.



All Is Lost (2013), on the other hand, has one character. Well, three counting the boat and the ocean, but one human character. The movie follows a sailor alone on his sailboat who runs afoul of a wayward shipping container bobbing in the middle of the ocean like the thousands of pieces of trash that were washed out to sea by the tsunami in Japan in 2011. The sea-worthiness of his boat is compromised, and the rest of the movie progresses to ever smaller boats/rafts/floatation devices till he has nothing left. The movie begins with a voice-over by Redford/the sailor, and at one point, the sailor is so frustrated that he yells a profanity (though I can't remember exactly which one it is), and that is the total dialogue in the film.

I recommend watching both movies with as little time/clutter as possible between them so their stark differences are more apparent. Take this as an exercise to heighten discrimination, and as a chance to see just how much Redford has grown/matured as an artist since Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.

Memory and Truth

Although it has been close to fifty years, I can still remember the first episode of Star Trek I saw. It was called The Man Trap -- later titled by James Blish for his adaptation "The Unreal McCoy." Though I was an avid fan of the series for most of my high school years, as I grew older, I edged away from it. The movies especially made me pause. Most of the spin-offs have also fallen short of their potential for several reasons: flat writing; uninspired plots; mediocre acting. These things might be endemic to the genre of commercial television itself, but that's for some future diatribe; I have other fish to fry right now, specifically the latest movies.

Recently, I checked out of the library 2009's Star Trek (not to be confused with 1979's Star Trek: The Motion Picture). It is a reboot of the series, meaning the creative staff (producers, directors, writers, actors, and, though largely unacknowledged, viewers) can make what they will of the original story. And what they made of it would induce a Vulcan to weep. My peeves include:

Destruction of the planet Romulus -- the main problem with this thin plot device is that the planet absolutely exists throughout the original TV series (which, shudder-inducing though it may be, I hold as canon and unchangeable) as well as several of the subsequent movies;

Destruction of the planet Vulcan -- see above;

The death of Spock's mother, Amanda -- throughout the original series, much was made of Amanda's influence on her son. The fact that in the movie she was so cavalierly thrown off a cliff in mid-transport says much about the producers lack of understanding of Spock's character. He needs Amanda as a balance against his father. Spock simply would not be Spock without her;

Captain Pike -- in the original pilot for the TV series, Pike captained the Enterprise for several years with a sturdy female Number One as first officer and a laughing Spock as science officer. The accident which confined him to a wheelchair (however updated) happened much later in his career;

Parallel universes -- as an explanation of the discrepancies and of how the "original" Spock could interact with this abomination, the artifice is akin to using dreams to justify all manner of plot shortcomings, and is just as repugnant.

All in all, I felt the new version to be both unnecessary and out-of-touch with all the things that made the original even as moderately compelling as it was at the time. Such cavalier revisionism does, however, bring up a point: Though the past might seem immutable, history is only as solid as social perception and as lasting as the crowd's memory.

My Life as a Movie

Recently, I revisited a film I first saw around 30 years ago in Tucson, Arizona: My Life as a Dog (Swedish: Mitt Liv som Hund), directed by Lasse Hallstrom, a coming-of-age story which won several awards.

Laika the space dog

The movie juxtaposes the first animal to orbit the Earth, a Russian dog named Laika ("Barker"), with the main character, a young Swedish boy named Ingemar ("Ingemar"). In 1957, in order to beat the United States into space, the Soviet Union shot Laika into orbit with no intention of providing a safe re-entry. In the film, Ingemar, because of the terminal illness of his mother, is sent to live with his uncle and aunt in a small country village. The movie explores the themes of exile and survival by comparing the life of Laika with that of Ingemar: both are shipped away from their familiar worlds and left to fend for themselves with no expectation of return.

The adversities faced by Laika included solitude and overheating (which killed her a few hours into the flight.) Ingemar endures separation from his mother and brother, and chilling ostracism by his new compatriots. He maneuvers through unfamiliar landscapes, survives off-kilter social interactions, and deals with personalities quirky and puzzling. By the end of the story, his salvation lies in his acceptance of and immersion in this bizarre world, so different from what he has been taught to consider normal. What allows him to survive is adaptability: the hallmark of evolution.

The difference between art and life lies in structure. What happened to Laika simply happened as one event led to another. What happens to Ingemar simply happens as one event leads to another. That's life. The movie, however, is a presentation of those events about both the dog and the boy structured into a plot, something life doesn't have.

Two films that rank among my favorites are Gallipoli and My Life as a Dog. Self-sacrifice and self-discovery. What is more valuable in life? What more is there to art?

Art Transcendent

I've been trying to finish Audrey Neffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife for quite a while now. It's taking me so long, not because it isn't an interesting book, but because there are so many pages to it. Which isn't meant to imply they aren't interesting pages -- I just don't understand why the author, editor, and publisher all thought some of the incidents were organic to the wholeness of the book. At any rate, that isn't what I want to consider right now.

Because I have such a faulty memory, whenever a reading presents me with something I don't want to forget, I have to write it down. One of the things I made note of in this novel was a character reminiscing about a famous singer, "... she could express her soul with that voice, whenever I listened to her I felt my life meant more than mere biology ..." Provoked by that thought, I scribbled a note to myself: "Art transcends mere biology. That's why pornography isn't art." To which I might add, "And why art isn't pornography" -- Michelangelo's David and Botticelli's Birth of Venus being prime examples which present nudity as inspiring emotions higher than lust.

Don't get me wrong. I like pornography. The mainstream of it, anyway, not bondage or mutilation or degradation; I mean the joy of biology. Which, in my opinion, is exactly the distinction Niffenegger is making. We live our lives in these cartons of flesh, so whatever raises our consciousness out of the rut of rutting, lifts us out of our animal selves. That transcendence is the object of art: not simply the depiction of a body which inspires lust, but the play of light, the beauty of color, the weight of composition. That is how art transcends biology.

Thrashing about

This post is not about stories except in the most rudimentary way. Maybe "foundational" would be a better word. This post is about language and the way it colors or distorts the world, that is, our view of the world. >sigh!< How can we talk about language when language itself is so divisive, disjointing, and unlike the physical/real/objective world? The problem with language is that one word at a time can never capture the full range of being. One may say, "The ball on the table," but to identify which ball on the table, one might be required to say, "The red ball on the table," or "The second red ball on the table," or "The second red ball to the right of the blue ball on the table." How do I know where to stop in order to communicate? And how do I know I'm not stopping too soon to get the point across? When can I be sure/really know that my audience actually understands which ball I mean? Is that what novels do? Take all that time/space/energy/pages/words to make sure the reader knows what the author intended? One test of the ball issue is to have the other person pick up the ball. If he/she picks up the second red ball to the right of the blue ball, then communication/understanding has been established/achieved. Or at least a functional communication/understanding. However, if "The ball on the table" means/points to the same thing as "The second red ball to the right of the blue ball on the table," does a novel tell a different story than a short story tells? Aren't they both telling one story? Does it just take more words to get a clearer picture across?

According to some sources, there are thousands of languages in use around the world today. Many people speak multiple languages. However, it might be possible/useful to look at the phenomena of language not as a collection of different languages/dialects/methods of communication, but as a pool/body/resource from which meaning can be drawn/extracted/ladled. In which case, all languages would ultimately be the same language, just different dialects/vocabularies/grammars. Just as it's merely arbitrary to say this is where Lake Michigan ends and Lake Superior begins, it might be just as arbitrary to say this is English and that is Russian. Just because English uses the word "cat" and Spanish "gato" to designate a feline (Latin feles) from a canine (Latin canis) doesn't mean that the cat they both point to is a different creature depending on how it's named/referred to/identified.

If, dear reader, I'm not making myself plain, and you would benefit from an example, look at Leslie Marmon Silko's 1977 novel, Ceremony. In that book, the author makes extensive use of actual tales of  the Kawiak ("Laguna Pueblo" to Euro-Americans) people. Interwoven in the story of the main character Tayo are numerous passages (in English) of tribal knowledge which exemplify/expand on/explain what the character is going through/experiencing. However, that does not mean the reader is actually utilizing/understanding the Kawaik references. Silko is, after all, still using English. She is translating/rendering the thoughts/actions/language into something her audience can understand/grasp/utilize. Which means she is writing for English-speakers, not Kawiak-speakers. If she were writing for Kawiak-speakers, she would have to present the entire book in Kawiak, interspersed with Kawiak tales, the novel then being an amplification of the tales, not the other way around. The point of this post is, of course, that Kawiak and English are merely different dialects of the same language. Some people have a very limited knowledge of English vocabulary, so word usage/messages to them have to be rendered/tailored very carefully. To a third-grade student, Ceremony would most likely make little sense, because the third-grade child would have little use/knowledge of/familiarity with the vocabulary/words of the novel. In like manner, in this case, the author uses different aspects of the same language/dialect/vocabulary to tell the whole/much more detailed/richer story of what it means to be Tayo. And presumably, to be Tayo is to be human, and to be human means to speak the same language, just using different words.

(On a totally different track, although the interview with Silko accessed by the link in the paragraph above is in general an insightful question-and-answer session, at one point the interviewer asks if Silko is the first Native American woman novelist, and she replies, "The reason I hesitate in my answer is that we in the United States have so much ignorance about our own history. There might have been some Native American woman long ago that we don't know about. But I suppose no, I am the first." In point of fact, in 1927 an Interior Salish woman named Christine Quintasket -- who wrote under the pen name "Mourning Dove" --published the novel Cogewea.)

Dissecting Fiction

A friend of mine freely bandies around the distinction between art as presented by media such as television and movies, and art as presented by the written word. In movies, this person argues, one can only watch the actions of the characters; just as in real life, one can never know what they're thinking--one can only surmise.

In writing, on the other hand, the reader may be told what the character is thinking. In Flannery O'Connor's story, "A Good Man is Hard to Find," the first sentence states flatly, "The grandmother didn't want to go to Florida." No guesswork for the reader there; no assumption about the grandmother's feelings need be drawn from her behavior.

For another example, in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novel, This Side of Paradise, Amory is talking to his best friend, Tom, about the girl he loves:

          "She's life and hope and happiness, my whole world now."
          He felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid.
          "Oh, Golly, Tom!"

The first sentence tells us nothing we can believe; it's simply Amory's report about his feelings, and we can only accept it until provided with evidence one way or the other. The difference between belief and acceptance is subtle, but important.

The author's report that Amory 'felt the quiver of a tear on his eyelid' gives us a report about the world, not about the character, odd as that may seem. The 'He felt' is a mere statement of fact. However, in choosing the noun 'quiver' to describe the tear, the author ascribes a certain response to the character: he doesn't have just a tear on his eyelid--he feels the quiver of that tear. In this case, I would submit that the author's word choice impels an emotional interpretation, not just of, but about the character, which in turns provokes a sympathetic response from the readers. We feel for the character because we feel what he feels. Whereas in the O'Connor example, the author blatantly tells us the grandmother didn't want to go to Florida, Fitzgerald leaves us to discover for ourselves Amory's feelings, which seems to me to make the experience much more personal.

Which brings us back to the difference between being shown feelings and being told about them. In the last sentence of the example from Fitzgerald, the author himself italicizes the second word, giving it much more emotional weight than the other words of the sentence, and follows the sentence by an exclamation point, giving the whole sentence much more emotional weight than the sentences preceding it. It says nothing about Amory's emotional state--but it leads us to infer much. In the same way, it seems to me that when we're presented with a scene from either the big screen or the small, we have to make an empathic leap of faith as to what the character is feeling, just as we must in life. The question is which method gives us a better understanding of the human condition.

However, the drawback to being shown emotional states instead of experiencing them is that human beings are so complicated that we can be in multiple states of emotions at one and the same time. Conflicting emotions happen often: I want that second piece of pie, but I want to lose another pound. A scene must show us a character not eating a piece of pie, but it must also make sure we know the reasons why.

(A final thought on subtlety: in O'Connor's story, the grandmother is never named, and so could be anyone's grandmother; in Fitzgerald's story, the main character is named for the Latin word for 'love.' Which is the more evocative?)

Cloud 8+1

An open letter to David Mitchell

Mr. Mitchell:

Last night, I finished reading your novel, Cloud Atlas. What impressed me most about the book was the way you managed to convey your theme even though the device you used was somewhat clumsy. It seems to me that a novel which sets itself apart by employing an unfamiliar method of presentation on the part of the author and the necessarily different method of reception on the part of the reader, is simply making the reader work that much harder for the same reward. And unless the pay-off is higher, such an expenditure of reading capital/energy/investment is rarely justified. First of all, to have so many different storylines running in the same body of work taxes the reader's interest/attention -- at least I found it to be so. If I care about one set of characters, it jars to be snatched into the story of another set, even though a subtle link connects the two. For instance, I found it hard to care about Somni's gradual self-awakening when I was distracted by wondering how Luisa was going to survive her plunge off the bridge. One of the remarkable things about the human brain is its ability to do two (or more) things at once; that said, however, a case can be made that each process will suffer for the divided attention.

I understand, though, how the book had to be written the way you wrote it, and for the most part, it works -- my nit-picking notwithstanding. The novel has the feeling of an organic whole, for the most part. (The story of Timothy Cavendish I found tiresome, adding nothing substantial to Luisa's tale except to point out that it was a story-within-a-story-within-a-story.) And despite my caterwauling about the purity of the narrative, the arc of the plot kept me reading, and satisfied my expectations rather nicely. So, all in all, the book was an enjoyable read after all.

However, I wonder if you ever saw the movie which was allegedly based on your book. Movies, by their nature, can seldom reach the intellectual depth of a book. Because a movie by definition can only be viewed, most subtlety and nuance will be hacked out of a screenplay. Movies are actually closer to life and our perceptions of reality than books are -- we can never, for instance, know what someone else is thinking -- but it is the fact that books are able to transcend our human limitations that makes them so much more valuable than mere movies. Plus, books are targeted to individuals; movies are meant for mass consumption -- and therein lies the difference: Movies entertain; books enlighten.

Just before I read Cloud, I watched the movie again, and the difference astounded me. Where the book showed the human condition as fallible and flawed, and ultimately without meaning, the movie promised redemption and merit. In the movie, Somni-451's rebellion paves the way for a revolution whereas in the book, it is merely another tool of the corrupt powers-that-be. The whole point of "Sloosha's Crossing" -- the pivot of the manuscript -- is simply not the same in the movie. In the book, that chapter ends in an existential despair, with no hope for humanity except more of the same barbarism, whereas the movie turns it into a beacon of hope and the ultimate salvation of humanity. What tripe. What balderdash. The point of the book is that humanity is flawed and that, in the face of cold, dark eternity, the only value each human life has is in and of itself. There is no bright and shining future; we all will die, and whatever value we achieve either individually or collectively, will die with us. Adam Ewing's hopefulness, which depends on the individual, wheels around Zachry's despair at the inevitable cycle of mankind's folly and self-destruction as a mob. Both are different sides of the same coin, but where one succumbs to the freezing night of infinity and despair, the other realizes its worth in the epiphany of each life lived to its fullest potential. Zachry, with each generation forgetting the lessons of the previous, is the embodiment of T. S. Eliot's Hollow Men (This is the way the world ends/Not with a bang but with a whimper), but Ewing finds value in the brief beauty of each life.