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Space Westerns vs. SF Westerns vs. Weird Westerns

Mar 14th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

Back in 2002, when “Drumlin Boiler” appeared in IASFM, somebody in the comments on the IASFM Web site grumbled that the story was “a glorified western.” I hadn’t thought of it in those terms, but even though I’m sure the comment was intended to be dismissive, it was true: “Drumlin Boiler” was a story set on the frontier in a society roughly equivalent to 1870s America. The frontier was on another planet, and there were all these alien gadgets lying around causing trouble, but people were riding horses and packing six-guns.

Ever since then, I’ve used the term “space western” to describe the genre of the first several Drumlins stories. (Drumlin Circus is different for a number of reasons, but I’ll get to that in future entries.) The term was floating around in obscurity for years in the SF culture, but then Firefly happened, and abruptly what my Clarion ’73 compatriots once razzed as “cowboys on Mars” became legitimate and even hit the bigtime.

I learned not long ago that there’s a mirror image of the space western: the science fiction western. I hadn’t known that the literary classification knives were cutting that fine, but they are. Space westerns transplant themes and cultural elements of the American west onto other planets. Science fiction westerns transplant SF themes into the actual American West of an earlier time. Think of the difference as “cowboys on Mars” vs. “Martians in Texas.” (For a great example of the latter, see Howard Waldrop’s wry “Night of the Cooters.” I’m guessing, not having seen it nor read the graphic novel, that Cowboys and Aliens is much the same.)

And as if that weren’t enough, there are also weird westerns: supernatural themes transplanted onto the American West. This surprises some but doesn’t surprise me. The era of the American West was also the apex of Spiritualism, which originated near Rochester, New York in 1848 but by 1880 was everywhere in the country, including the western territories. The weird western subgenre goes way back: The mere handful of classic horror comics that I read in my cousin Ron’s basement in the late 1950s always had a few cowboy settings. These days, you can find things like Six-Guns Straight From Hell, which appears to include such genre cross-products as werewolf sheriffs, vampire bank-robbers, and “new-fangled electric zombies.” Many of the stories were first published in Science Fiction Trails, an annual anthology edited by David B. Riley. SFT goes broader and covers all three categories, sometimes with a steampunk flavor, as in Jim Strickland’s story “Brass and Steel” in the recent #6. “Brass and Steel” might well be said to include “new-fangled electric zombies,” a concept Jim pursues with a lot more rigor than the author of your average sparkly vampire yarn, ten-gallon hats or no.

I went a little cold on SF for quite awhile (I’m guessing almost 15 years) because it began to take itself a little too seriously and thereby ceased to be fun. Fun is what we do this for, after all, and sending things a little bit over-the-top is the very best way to puncture the stuffies and get the fun back front-and-center. The first three Drumlins stories were space westerns. Drumlin Circus is a steampunk western, with just a hint of weird, if a postulated sensitivity of quantum computers to human mental states counts as weird. (I stop well short of vampires.) Hell, I can wear lots of hats; hats are among the things I do best. Ask Carol. Or just look in my closet.

Odd Lots

Mar 13th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments
  • Finally, the epic review of the Motorola Xoom that we assumed we’d eventually see from Ars Technica. My only gripe is that somebody over there needs to learn how to take sharp, close-in photos of hardware.
  • While we’re talking Xoom, I learned that my Degunking collaborator Joli Ballew is doing a Xoom book for Wiley. According to Amazon, it will be out on June 7.
  • Ibuprofen (Advil etc.) may provide some protection against Parkinson’s. It may also tear up your stomach lining, as happened to me in 1999. Be careful.
  • And damn, I shoulda gone to Polish school when I was four, like my mom wanted. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Here’s a list of the ten most powerful earthquakes since 1900. (They have not yet included the Japanese quake, which has recently been promoted from 8.9 to 9.0.) I remember the stories in the papers about the 1964 Alaska quake. Man, that was ugly. Let’s be glad it wasn’t in the Cascades.
  • My assembly language book is now for sale on both the Kindle and the Nook stores. Kindle: $36.86. Nook: $52.00. Print: $65.00. (But nobody pays cover anymore.)
  • I’ve been called a crank for my position on this, but I don’t care: Sleep is more important than food. (If you won’t listen to me, maybe you’ll listen to Harvard.)
  • Here’s a nice page on magic eye tubes, which are remarkably little-known (especially among the young) given their off-the-charts coolness factor. And another photo page. Some of the miniature types were used well into the 1960s. We had a Grundig tape recorder from 1961 or so, and it incorporated a DM70, which I still have in a box somewhere, along with a 6AL7 and a couple of 6U5’s.
  • From the Ideas You Can Have For Free And Are Worth Every Nickel Department: Somebody should start a Wikipedia extension wiki that automatically grabs and posts anything deleted from Big Wiki for that peculiarly intense Wikipedia fetish, non-notability. In this era of pervasive broadband and $50 terabytes, why shouldn’t the 6U5 get its own page? It’s certainly notable to me.
  • From the Law of Unintended Consequences Department: Scrupulously green San Francisco is turning brown because government-mandated low-flow toilets aren’t moving solid waste through the system quickly enough to forestall clogging. Be glad you live in New Yawk, Ed. (Thanks again to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Although I’ve always known what hops are used for (beer, basically) I realized this morning that I had no idea what a hop looked like. Now I know.
  • Classmates.com has evidently been bought out by a nostalgia site called Memory Lane. I haven’t gotten any email pitches from them lately, so I’m quietly hoping that either Memory Lane has reformed their fraud-laced marketing practices (telling me of girls who supposedly attended my all-male high school back when I did) or that the whole mess will soon sink into bankruptcy and vanish.

Taking a Breath

Mar 12th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

This has been a helluva month. To finish Drumlin Circus I wrote 26,000 words in two weeks, and then by six days later had polished it, laid it out, proofed it, and combined it with a second short novel (by the formidable Jim Strickland) to make something book-sized, with a twist. (More on the twist in a later entry.) We’re now waiting for the cover art, and so for a day or two I’ve had a chance to pick up my office, read a little, run the dogs around, and ruminate on what I’d learned.

coincellgrab.jpgOh, and I bought a TV for downstairs. A TV. 55″ wide and 1.37″ thick (!!) by my digital calipers. Sure, I’d like a flying car. But this again reminds me that we really do live in the future.

The do-it list was getting long. I’ve needed to replace a couple of coin cells in the Dell USFFs we have here and at church for some time. In most PCs this isn’t difficult, but Dell put the coin cell holder in a bad spot, especially in the SX270. Pulling out the old cell, no sweat–that’s what God made needle-nose pliers for. Reinserting a new cell would be easier too, except that the pliers would short out the cell. So I put a short length of shrink tubing over one of the two jaws and held it over a match for a bit. Shazam! The cells survived the operation, and I broke no fingernails trying to coerce them in either direction. It’s a trick worth remembering if you can’t use your fingers to get coin cells into place behind that plumber’s nightmare of a heat sink you’ve got.

One of the things I had to do to write Drumlin Circus was adopt an older style for the first-person narrator, who is an educated city guy in an 1890s sort of culture, albeit one not on Earth. This isn’t normal diction for me and I had to train myself to do it, first by reading largish chunks of The Time Machine and Food of the Gods, and then by going back to Gene Wolfe’s boggling 5-volume New Sun saga, which I hadn’t been through in ten or fifteen years. Again, the complexity of the tale boggled me a little (as did more than a few of the words he repurposes but never invents) but this time I was ready: I had ordered Michael Andre-Driussi’s Lexicon Urthus and kept it at my elbow. It’s a 420-page index of terms, concepts, and proper names from the series, with not only their meanings in the story but also their derivation from myth, religion, and other languages. If you intend to read the Urth cycle closely, you’re gonna need this. Highly recommended.

Over the next few days here I’ll try to cover a few more noteworthy things associated with Drumlin Circus. Mostly I want to reassure you all that I’m back and looking forward to writing here a little more regularly than I’ve been.

The Long, Long Circus

Mar 3rd, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment

Whew. Drumlin Circus is done. Or at least complete and intact, if not finished. (Stories are a little like software to me: They’re never finished, not in a truly final sense of the word.) I had dared myself to get it all down by last night, and come four PM I found myself staring at the screen, thinking that I needed a short “resonance” scene to wrap it all up but couldn’t figure out what it might be. (Such scenes are not part of the outline.)

So I sat down this morning and started reading the whole thing through from the beginning. By the time I got through it about 11:00, I knew what I wanted, and fifteen minutes later the words were on the page.

The story came out a lot longer than I planned. 33% longer, in fact: I planned for 35,000 words and my subconscious handed me 53,000. The same thing happened to me in 1998 and 1999: I had intended The Cunning Blood to come in at 90,000 words, and by publication in 2005 was 145,000 words long. Several people have told me that that was a major reason none of the big houses would publish it.

Getting the flu in January slowed me down radically. To make our deadline of introducing it at AnomalyCon at the end of March, I set the completion deadline for March 2. That was a tough one, and in fact, I wrote 25,000 words in the last fourteen days alone. I don’t think I’ve ever written that much fiction in that little time, at least since I was in high school and did little else.

How did it turn out? Reasonably well. It was an experiment on a number of fronts. I’ve never written anything in that length class before. I have a completed but unpublished novella that came in at 27,000 words, and nothing else much past 12,000. It was also a conscious effort to bend the work in a steampunk direction. How that worked I’m not sure yet, though sooner or later people will probably tell me. I wedged in almost every steampunk trope there is, even if briefly: airships, goggles, steam locomotives, strong women dressed provocatively, long-barrelled pistols, and as much brass as I could mention on a planet more or less flooded with intelligent nanocolonies of alien metal. I even tipped the hat to zombies, if only in a metaphor. (Calm down. There are no actual zombies in the story. None.)

I read some Verne and Wells before getting down to business, so that my first-person viewpoint character would sound like an educated city man from 1890, and not like the cowboys and farmers who have dominated the drumlins canon so far. Again, I’m not sure yet how well that worked out. We’ll see.

The story needs some cleaning up, some continuity checking, and as much peer review as I can gather in the next couple of days. Cover art is in progress, and if all the streams collide into the same river, we’ll see Drumlin Circus in book form on or before March 27.

Odd Lots

Feb 17th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
5 comments
  • Okay, I promised more about circuses and steampunk today, but odd lots are piling up.
  • From the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday Department: spudger, a small tool like a miniature putty knife that helps you pry the backs off of watches and electronics, like the monitor I repaired last month. (Thanks to Tom Roderick for alerting me to its existence.)
  • Also from the Words I Didn’t Know Until Yesterday (ok, last month) Department: algophilist , a person who takes sexual pleasure in pain. Broader and more ancient term than “masochist” or “sadist.” (One such appears in Drumlin Circus.) And to think I first thought it was a guy who liked algorithms…
  • Given that Amazon buries the cost of Kindle’s 3G connection in publisher content fees, the lack of graphics (big) within text (small) makes sense. I always thought it was about the crappy low-res e-ink display. It’s not. Here’s how it works.
  • Alas, this may be too late for me. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • From Bill Higgins comes a link to a list (alas, not searchable) of the 200 Borders bookstores that will be disappeared shortly. (PDF) Bogglingly, neither of the Colorado Springs stores are on the list, even the small, always empty, and mostly pointless one at Southgate. I will miss the one in Crystal Lake, though.
  • Guys who come up with schemes like this talk about avoiding government censorship and such, but what will actually drive adoption (if it ever happens) is anonymous file sharing. And nertz, I outlined a novel a couple of years ago describing a technology very much like it. The late George Ewing called this The Weaselrats Effect.
  • Years ago I remember reading somewhere that steam calliopes are hard to keep tuned because the metal whistles expand as steam passes through them, throwing their notes off enough to easily hear. Can’t find a reference now. Running a calliope on compressed air from a tank might be problematic as well, because air stored under pressure gets cold when it’s released. Surprisingly (perhaps unsurprisingly) good technical information on calliopes is hard to come by.
  • Whoa! If you’re interested in solar astronomy, do not miss this video of new monster sunspot 1158 forming out of nothing. It will give you a very crisp feeling for the tubulent nature of the photosphere. Those aren’t spots: They’re solar hurricanes!
  • If you’re reasonably high-latitude (45+ degrees) look north after dark for the next few days. That giant sunspot 1158 is spitting a great deal of energetic chaos in our direction, and the sky could light up as a result.
  • Samsung has announced a new, larger 10.1″ Galaxy Tab, running Android Honeycomb. Details are sparse, but I’m wondering if we’re not ultimately going to see the slate market divide into 7″ and 10″ form factors.
  • Beating cancer may mean we’ll have to be three and a half feet tall, like these mutant Ecuadorians. I’d be good with that–as long as everyone else was three and a half feet tall as well.
  • Gawker Media has a new Web UI that I find so annoying that I’ve mostly stopped reading their sites, which include Io9 and Gizmodo. I could do without sites like Jalopnik and Jezebel, but damn, I’m gonna miss those other two.
  • I have yet to find a good popular history of refrigeration. Somehow I doubt people are going to feel sorry for me about that.

Odd Lots

Feb 11th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
3 comments

The Importance of Sideloading

Jan 11th, 2011
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

You haven’t seen much of me here since the first of the year because I set myself a target for writing fiction, and, micracles of miracles, I’m sticking to it. Blogging is second priority, and if I spend my creative hours working on stories, I’m likely to post a lot less in this space. (What posts I do write I hope to make longer.)

Anyway. CES 2011 is now history, and I followed it more closely than I might have in past years because I’m actively shopping for an Android slate. (I hate to call them “tablets;” we’ve had tablet PCs for almost ten years and there’s one on my desk.) I played a little with a Samsung Galaxy Tab at a Verizon store in Tampa in late November and was much impressed, even though the demo unit did not have any kind of ebook reader installed. (Wireless carriers are pushing video hard, because video will use up a lot of deliciously profitable minutes.) I’ve played with Apple’s iPad as well and have been just as impressed, but there’s a huge worm in it for me: Apple wants to absolutely control its content ecosystem, and sideloading of apps is a gnarly business. Sideloading an iPad is easier with books and music, but I’d like to try my hand at slate apps, and I’m not going to work in a playground with barbed wire around it. The open-source Android just suits my temperament better. I have some faint hope of programming Android apps in FreePascal, but Android is really a Java-like platform (apps run on the Dalvik VM, which has its own specific register-based bytecode set) and a Pascal-to-Dalvik compiler is unlikely, as much as it has precedent in the ancient UCSD P-system.

Sideloading is important in a number of ways. (The term as I use it simply means the ability to get apps and content onto a device locally through a cable or a plug-in memory unit, rather than from a tightly-controlled online store or cloud locker of some kind.) I don’t have a lot of ebooks yet, primarily because the e-ink display on my Sony Reader makes my head hurt. Furthermore, the ones I do have are a very mixed bag, from many different sources and in many different formats. I have novels, but I also have tech books, many of which have intricate art and layouts that don’t reflow. A lot of things I’ve picked off Usenet are image scans of transformer catalogs and ancient manuals for Fifties Heathkits, none of which are legible on low-res e-ink screens. I need a good high-res color display, but more significantly, I need the ability to install arbitrary apps to render any arbitrary content format, including minority formats like DjVu, which I don’t favor but must deal with occasionally. I could readily sideload the files on an iPad, but the apps to render them are another matter.

Sideloading of ebooks is still a geek thing, primarily because the ebook business is so damned young. If you can get everything you want from Amazon or Apple, cool–and almost everybody is starting from scratch, with little or no existing ebook library to deal with. In years to come, people will be jumping from device to device and reader to reader and store to store, and at each jump must face the question of how to pack along the books they’ve already paid for. DRM makes this hugely more difficult, but even in a world without DRM, different kinds of content would require local storage transfer and different rendering apps, not all of which will be readily available from the current vendor’s store, especially for new devices incorporating new OSes.

Sideloading also allows local scanning for malware, which will become increasingly important in coming years, certainly for apps but probably for compromised content files as well.

AdamCropped.jpg

Any slate I buy will have to support sideloading of both apps and content. Android seems to be the OS for that, and I’m now watching the Motorola Xoom, a dual-core 10″ Android slate running the Honeycomb version of Android. There’s some weirdness involving the SD slot (the CES prototypes didn’t have it) but without that, there’s no sale. More intriguing for many reasons is the Notion Ink Adam, (above) which does have a MicroSD slot and 2 USB ports, and the intriguing PixelQi display. Its Android OS is a custom version that anticipates some of the Honeycomb features but is technically V2.2 Froyo with a proprietary UI. (Their blog is worth following if you’re interested in slate technology.) I just hope they don’t do a FusionGarage thing, but if they can hang in there they’ll be a contender.

I must emphasize that I’m being careful and I’m not in any particular hurry. Much of my personal Jedi self-training in recent years could be summarized as Stop wanting stuff. Buy, or buy not. There is no “want.” When jump I, know you will!

Odd Lots

Dec 29th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
No comments yet
  • I was pleased to see this writeup on the XB-70 Valkyrie, which I consider the coolest and most intimidating aircraft ever created by any nation, anywhere, even though the article is lightweight and the author is unsure what a “ballistic missile” is. Click to it for the photos and videos.
  • Runner-up, of course, is the A-10 Warthog, which is a lot more intimidating if you happen to be in its gunsights, in which case your ace (our ace, actually) kisses you goodbye.
  • There are iceberg cowboys, and every now and then they rope a really odd one. (Thanks to Pete Albrecht for the link.)
  • Pertinent to yesterday’s post, Pete also sends a link to a toy Triceratops that apparently comes pre-shredded.
  • This list of the most-pirated ebooks of 2009 is now 18 months old, but it may still say something about your average ebook pirate: sex trumps almost eveything else, except possibly Photoshop.
  • On a whim, I went up to the Pirate Bay just now, and discovered that, 18 months later, sex and Photoshop still trump everything else, at least in terms of pirated ebooks. (And Photoshop is, by a factor of 2.5, the most popular Windows app on Pirate Bay.)
  • The magazine guy in me mourns, but the magazine guy in me whispered that this was going to happen before it even started: Magazines sold in iPad versions started out strong but went into steep decline after a few months. Read the comments: The electronic Wired is 5X more expensive than the paper one, which just maybe possibly might (d’ya think?) have a little tiny bit of something to do with it.
  • As a book lover of long standing (read ’em, write ’em, publish ’em) I declare this little invention freaking brilliant.

Odd Lots

Dec 11th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

Odd Lots

Nov 20th, 2010
by Jeff Duntemann.
1 comment
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