David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

Talking with Kate about what a character in a newspaper comic strip is likely to do next, based on our knowledge of his previous actions, I realized: we have circuits in our brains devoted to analyzing and predicting the behavior of other humans in our monkeysphere, and fiction exercises those circuits in a way we find entertaining. This is why characters are important.

I just finished and submitted the first draft of my story for Lowball, the 22nd volume in George R. R. Martin’s Wild Cards series. There will be much revising and head-scratching before it’s complete, but I’m pleased with this draft and thrilled to be participating in this long-running project.

Although you’ll have to wait until 2012 or 2013 to read Lowball, the audiobook of Wild Cards Volume I (the revised edition, including my story “Powers”) is now available from Brilliance Audio in audio CD, MP3 CD, and WMA download format wherever fine audiobooks are sold. The second volume of Wild Cards, Aces High, will be available as an audiobook on December 20 and is now available for pre-order. Here’s a very complimentary review of the Wild Cards Volume I audiobook.

If you’d rather read Wild Cards than listen to it, Tor is running a special holiday sale on the ebook editions of the first four Wild Cards books (Wild Cards, Inside Straight, Busted Flush, and Suicide Kings) — just $2.99 each from now through December 14. Here’s the announcement.

If you prefer dead tree format, you can buy the trade paperback of Wild Cards I now, or preorder the mass-market paperback which will be out on June 26 of next year.

And if you want something visual that’s not too abysmal, Wild Cards has been optioned as a movie. Of course, you might have to wait a while for it to be released…

The Drabblecast podcast is now offering a 10-episode “highlight reel” or “primer” to introduce themselves to new readers, and my stories “Charlie the Purple Giraffe” and “Babel Probe” are included. You can download it here: http://www.drabblecast.org/new/

My goodness, OryCon begins tomorrow! Here’s my programming schedule:

Friday:

3:00PM, Hamilton: Workshop: Story Outline in an hour. Bring something to write on and write with. You’ll have an outline (or a good start) to a story by the end of this panel. Bonus–this would be a great head start to that creative writing class homework you’re ignoring over the weekend. David D. Levine [M], Mary Robinette Kowal

Saturday:

12:00PM, Mult/Holl: Ask Dr. Genius: Ad-Lib Answers to Audience Questions. No, really, they’re real scientists, honest. Bring your science questions, and if they don’t have an answer they’ll make something up, and it might even be sort of right. Louise Owen [M], David D. Levine, Andrew S. Fuller, Daniel H. Wilson

3:00PM, Idaho: Mission to Mars: Is a 6 month journey really too long? Artificial gravity to prevent blood clots. Living on 3 gallons of water a day. We’re making advances, but can we realistically put men on Mars? What are the issues, and how close are we to solving them? David D. Levine [M], Dan Dubrick, G. David Nordley

4:30PM, Grant: David Levine Reading. David reads from his own work.

8:00PM, Hawthorne: Lionel Fanthorpe Presentation. OryCon Public Broadcasting’s homage to the legendary Lionel Fanthorpe. Debbie Cross [M], David D. Levine, Paul Wrigley, Brian Hunt

10:00PM, Jefferson/Adams: Whose Line Is It Anyway? Ya want funny? Louise Owen, Mary Robinette Kowal, David D. Levine, M.K. Hobson, Cindy Fangour

Sunday:

12:00PM, Hawthorne: Spaceships, Colonists, and Castaways. How Small Communities Function in isolated conditions with minimal resources. David D. Levine [M], Camille Alexa, G. David Nordley, Krista Wohlfeil

Also on Sunday (4:30-6:00PM) will be the Sci-Fi AuthorFest at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing. Two dozen authors, including Vonda McIntyre and Ursula K. Le Guin, will be there for you to meet and get autographs. Free and open to the public.

We’re winging off to San Diego this afternoon for the World Fantasy Convention. Hope to see some of you there! I’ll be hanging out in the bar, trying to remember to chat up agents and editors, helping out Tina Connolly with a dramatic reading on Thursday night, and appearing on one panel:

Friday 4:00 PM, Pacific 2/3: A Sea of Stars

Is the sea to fantasy what space is to science fiction? Are they both the uncharted territory that leads somewhere unexpected? Are they the habitat for unfamiliar aliens? Stories like Jeremiah Tolbert’s “The Godfall’s Chemsong” and Helen Keeble’s “A Journal of Certain Events…” seem parallel in many ways, even though the former is science fiction and the latter is fantasy. Why use one over the other — can your settings be interchangeable if the plot is good?

David Brin, Michael Cassutt, David Levine(M), Courtney Schafer, Rachel Swirsky

Yes, I am moderating David Brin. Hah! He don’t scare me.

I wonder if there will be a group viewing of the Grimm premiere at 9:00 Friday night? I have seen the pilot episode and it is good.

Just saw the pilot of Grimm, at the Portland Art Museum with a rowdy crowd and the producers and cast in attendance. Awesome! I think this show is going to be dynamite. Silas Weir Mitchell as Eddie Monroe — the “Spike” character — will be everyone’s favorite.

Grimm premieres Friday, October 28, but you can watch a 20-minute preview clip now.

I can’t say that Margin Call is exactly an enjoyable film, but it’s absolutely frickin’ brilliant.

This is a film where everything happens in the spaces between words, between lines, between scenes. It’s a… what’s holier than a Swiss cheese? A ciabatta of a film, but tasty nonetheless.

This is a film about the Wall Street collapse of 2008 that barely attempts to explain the insanely complex financial shenanigans that caused the crisis. It feels as though the filmmakers decided that the audience is never going to understand it anyway, so let’s go ahead without explaining it at all. Though there is some explanation late in the film, and as one critic said they play the “explain this to me in words of one syllable” card a bit too often, the key here is that you don’t need to understand the finances. All you need to understand is how important they are to the characters, and the top-notch cast makes that abundantly clear through a variety of understated techniques.

Another way in which this film takes place in the gaps between lines is that it depends a whole heck of a lot on the audience’s understanding of the characters’ world. If this film somehow fell through a time warp to the year 2000, no one would understand it. You need to have at least some understanding of the 2008 financial crisis to understand the plot. You need to know that when one character flips another character a small black object (which barely even appears on screen), and later that second character pulls the top off of something that looks like a lipstick, that it is a USB thumb drive… and what a thumb drive is, and how it is used, and what it can contain. When two characters are sitting at a bar, and you hear a buzz, and one of them glances down at his lap, and they both leave the bar without a word, you have to know what text messages look and sound like and what they can mean.

When I was in high school I took an acting class in which we memorized a very simple, meaningless dialogue¹ and then had to present a brief scene using that simple script to express a relationship between two characters (first date, estranged lovers, father and son who’s going off to college, etc.) — it’s all in the intonation, the body language, the pauses, the subtext. Practically this entire movie is like that. Much of the dialogue is banal, and the action restrained, yet the actors manage to convey the emotion and importance of the situation.

And the situation is important, dramatically important. There’s a lot of tension in this movie, even though we know how the 2008 financial crisis ended up.

I commented to Kate on the way home that “this is a science fiction movie, and the science is economics.” But, as she pointed out, that isn’t really true; it’s not SF because there’s nothing in it that didn’t actually happen. This is, nonetheless, a fabulous example of how you can take a plot that is made up of technobabble and mathematics and turn it into a story about people and emotions. I’d love to do something like this in SF, but as I mentioned above it depends so much on the audience’s understanding of the history and technology that you would have a real tough time writing an SF or fantasy story that still worked if you left out as much as Margin Call leaves out.

So, in summary: not a fun movie, but one that’s worth studying.

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¹ I still remember every word: “Hi.” “Hello.” “It’s been a long time.” “Yes it has.” “How’ve you been?” “Do you have to ask?” “No, I suppose not.” “Did you walk?” “No, I got a ride.” “Oh.”