David D. LevineScience Fiction Author

“Titanium Mike Saves the Day” is now complete at just under 5000 words, and off to my critique group. It’ll be critted next Saturday and I hope to get it in the mail to Analog shortly thereafter. My first new story since March, and my first new solo story since… crikey, last September. Really need to get on the ball. Speaking of which… in response to the recent meme that’s been going around, here are the opening paragraphs of the just-completed “Titanium Mike” and a few other stories in progress (“in progress,” in this case, means that they were completed a year ago or more but are now high on the list to be revised next). Titanium Mike Saves the Day (Hard SF) “Gramma, I’m scared.” The poor girl wasn’t just scared, she was terrified — tense and shivering and speaking in a breathy whisper her helmet mike could barely pick up. Behind a faceplate fogged with rapid breaths, her skin was pale and clammy and her sapphire-blue eyes twitched like small frightened animals. Helen wasn’t exactly calm herself. “Don’t fret, Sophie,” she told the child, but her own voice trembled. She muted her mike and took a deep breath to settle herself, the sound echoing loud in her helmet until she felt under control. “We’ll be safe here.” For a while, anyway, she added silently. The shelter’s single dim light was already beginning to fade. Moonlight on the Carpet (Horror) “Vrrm, vrrm,” said Liam as he ran the little wooden car across the Persian carpet. It was summer, a hot humid Midwest summer, and there was nothing else to do. Daddy and Mommy were away again. The blue and gold pattern, a thing the shape of the big black card at the top of the poker deck, could be Laclede Island where they went every month at this time. Liam ran his car along the causeway — a long curve of blue and red and black, and through the stripe of bright white moonlight that crossed it. The little golden hairs on the back of his hand glinted in the light. Across the causeway and along the bay, the little car sped. Liam imagined himself in the back, leaning his chin on the back of the seat, peering out at the streetlights that flicked past one after the other. But above them all would loom the moon, the full moon, outshining them all. Mommy and Daddy never took him out to the island when the moon was full. Interview with the Photographer (Hard SF) We called ourselves the Trillion even then, though in those days it was a proud and overweening boast, not the vast understatement it is today. Those were heady days, early days, days of energy and promise when anything could, and did, happen on a daily basis. In those days a person could say something like “I think we ought to take Jupiter apart and build something useful out if it” and be greeted with cheers. How young we were! Let me tell you a thing to impress upon you how different those times were from these: I was given five names when I was born. It was a formality even then, of course; the UniTag was already two hundred years old, but my parents still held to the old ways and tried their best to give their child a unique spoken name. They were old-fashioned with my genome, too, which definitely explains my stodgily symmetrical appearance and probably explains why I have been too stubborn to change it. But I’m slave enough to fashion to go by just Jonquil now. Night Mail (Fantasy) Nate Richmond loved estate sales. The mundane thrill of searching for bargains, with the slight ironic tang of a second-hand encounter with death, had always been exactly what he needed to distract himself from his cares. Besides, they were cheap entertainment. So on a crisp sunny Friday afternoon in May, when Nate’s cares were particularly big and his wallet equally empty, he strolled down 43rd from his apartment on Belmont to see what he might find. Nate was a thin young man of 23, with white, white skin and black, black hair. His chunky shoes and his pants and his denim jacket were also black, as was his T-shirt, which bore the name and logo of the industrial band Bauhaus. The only article of clothing that wasn’t black was his socks, red cotton decorated with white skulls. Around his neck he wore a small silver ankh. The decedent at this particular estate sale had been a woman with size 8 feet and extremely practical taste in shoes and clothing. Emerging from her closet, Nate found his way blocked by two large, burly men, the proprietors of the sale, who were disassembling the mahogany sleigh bed that dominated the bedroom. As they levered the box spring out of the bed frame, Nate noticed a rectangle in the thick dust underneath. “What’s that?” he said. The older of the two men bent down and picked it up. “Looks like an old desk set.” It was a large flat rectangle of embossed leather with brass hinges and fittings, maybe twenty-four by sixteen inches, wrapped all around with yards of yellowed cellophane tape. In the Joy Business (Fantasy) “Joy is the serious business of Heaven.” — C. S. Lewis Monday. The angel Umiel was trying to finish writing a Customer Research Report when her screen beeped. Again. It was an e-pistle from Ganiel, her supervisor: would she please update her monthly budget figures? Today? By 11:00? Umiel looked at the clock in the corner of her Illuminated User Interface — the big hand was on the X and the little hand was on the IV — and sighed. She considered asking Ganiel if this budget thing were absolutely necessary, but she knew what the answer would be: all priorities are top priorities, it’s your job to manage your own time, et cetera, et cetera, et blah blah blah. Ganiel would probably quote at her from The One Second Manager, or whatever management book she was proselytizing today. She set the report aside and opened the icon for the budget. It took her ten minutes to find her department — they’d “rationalized” the budget spreadsheet again — and properly record her paltry expenditures for the month. Then, when she returned to her own report, she discovered she’d lost her train of thought. The morning was not going well. She decided to take an ambrosia break.

Well, on top of the F&SF rejection the other day I got my first review of “The Ecology of Faerie”, by Dave Truesdale in Tangent Online, and it could be summed up as “Eh.” Usually I can get at least one quotable phrase out of any review, but this one… not so much. Sigh. But! I did finish the first draft of “Titanium Mike Saves the Day.” Okay, I’m not at all sure this one works — in fact, I’m not certain it’s really a story. But it’s done, at about 5000 words, and I’ll send it to my crit group after a quick editing pass (probably Tuesday, since we have symphony tickets tomorrow). Then on to the next. I really need to build up my inventory, which has fallen to just a few stories. Writing is hard. But I persist.

Gordon Van Gelder didn’t buy the rewrite of the Bigfoot story. No “alas” in the rejection, but he also included his assistant editor JJA’s comments and they started with “Eh.” Which if you ask me is worse than an Alas. Oh well, it goes off to scifi.com tomorrow.

Took the train to work today, saving gas and getting a little time for writing. Added about 300 words to the space opera folk tale story and edited a bunch of the existing words. Also did some critiques. And as for that reopened bug? Turned out the submitter wanted to talk to me because the problem was really subtle. It’s a mental model problem — the user has a consistent mental model of what the software is doing, but it doesn’t match the software’s behavior. It would be easy to say that the user is wrong, but others also have the same incorrect mental model, which means that the software isn’t doing enough to educate the user about how the system actually works. I need to find a way to gently persuade the user to think about the problem in the right way. Not yet sure how to do this, but I’m accepting the reopened bug as an indication that something needs to be done. Tomorrow: off to Foolscap!

After a somewhat annoying day at work, when just before leaving I discovered that a UI bug I’d closed as “as designed” had just been reopened without any explanation as to why, I settled down for some writing. 750 new words on the space opera folklore story, and the second of four scenes is done. I don’t know if it’s really working as a story, but I’m happy with the amount of emotion I’m managing to pack into the plot part of each of those little scenes. I’m really relying the reader’s knowledge of one of the Standard SF Universes to build up the situation in each with just a few words — if they aren’t already familiar with Niven and Heinlein I’ll probably lose them. Well, I’ll just finish the story and let my crit group tell me whether or not it works. Still no word on the novel. I called my agent and asked him to nudge the editor for me. I fear that no news is bad news, but I strive to be patient and optimistic…

About 675 words tonight on the space opera folklore story. That’s most of the first real scene. Terribly old-fashioned, but the interleaved bits of future folklore will give it a postmodern twist. I’m sending it to Analog first, anyway. I am concerned that the story’s going to be too long… around 4000 words at this rate. I’d be happier if it were much shorter. Well, once it’s done I can try to cut it.

Just a couple of minor bits that I should have posted earlier… One is that we had a successful yard sale last Saturday. It did start raining at about 11:00, but I had bought some tarps at the last minute and we quickly got everything covered. By 12:00 it became apparent that the rain (never more than a light drizzle, but still more than you’d want on your books) wasn’t going to let up, so we moved everything onto the porch. The amazing thing is that we sold enough between 9:00 and 11:00 that we could fit all the rest on the porch! By the time we were done, we’d gotten rid of between 2/3 and 3/4 of the stuff we’d started with (by volume) and taken in about $220 — a lot better than I’d been anticipating, frankly. It was work, but fun. The best part was seeing people happy to walk away with our unwanted stuff — a boon to both parties. Now we have about eight boxes of unsold stuff to donate to various charities. The other is that on Tuesday I was the guest of honor at the SF book group that meets at Powell’s in Beaverton. The book under discussion was Hartwell and Cramer’s Year’s Best Fantasy 5, including my story “Charlie the Purple Giraffe” among other fine stories. We talked about the craft and practice of writing as well as about the book itself, and I got to talk with the SF buyer, who invited me to contact him when and if I have a novel and want to do a signing. Also, I see that I now have 181 people reading my LiveJournal. Goodness. Hello, people!

Sweet Kate made me sit down and write tonight. It’s been some months since I did so with any regularity (basically, since I sent off the novel), but I have been picking away at a space opera folklore piece in odd hours here and there. I didn’t get a lot of new words down but I think the piece is starting to take concrete shape. It’s currently about 1500 words, all in the folklore part and none of the actual plot. The plot should come together around the folklore pretty easily, I think, though. It’s going to cover over 100 years, five generations with about ten characters, in under 4000 words… maybe as little as 3000 if I can rein in my tendency to repeat myself.

Gordon Van Gelder at The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction usually sends very terse rejections — one or two sentences on a half-sheet of paper. But on my last submission I got a two-page letter, identifying the problems he had with the story and saying he would consider it again if I could come up with a way to address them. I’m honored to receive so much attention. I know that few editors these days have the time and energy to help new writers with their craft the way John W. Campbell did back in the day. However, I know that GVG is trying to provide more feedback in general, so it’s probably not just me. But it’s still keen that he took the time. Anyway, I did rewrite the story to address his concerns, and I’ll put it in the mail tomorrow. The rewritten story is more aggressive, nastier, and more science-fictional. It’s also not quite the story I had in mind when I started (the original major theme has gotten somewhat lost, although the plot, main character, and especially the climax are stronger), so if GVG rejects the rewrite (as he has in the past, alas) I’m not sure which version I’ll send to the next market. Whatever. I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it. Onward and upward.

Tuesday morning the convention ended as it had begun, with us running into Paul and Maureen at breakfast. We had a lovely time gossiping about Charlie Stross and others before heading out to obtain train reservations and change our Scottish money for English (nominally it’s legal tender but it had been direly hinted that it would be less and less likely to be accepted as you head south). The first bank we tried wouldn’t exchange money for non-customers, and recommended the post office. The post office wouldn’t do it at all, and recommended a bank — specifically an English rather than Scottish bank. We found one, but for no visible reason as soon as we got to the front of the queue all transactions suddenly became tremendously involved and we waited, and waited, and waited… meanwhile Kate went to sit down, because she felt a migraine coming on. Eventually I did get the money exchanged and we went back to the hotel, where Kate lay down for a bit while I checked out. As warned by the convention daily zine, the hotel charged my card in US dollars, at an exchange rate north of $1.80, so I asked them to do it again in pounds. By the time I got back upstairs Kate had thrown up, which usually helps but did tend to slow her down as we lugged all our worldly goods to the station. I was getting pretty worried about making the train, but we did make it in time… and then Kate threw up again, and again a little while later. There was nothing I could do for her (she hates being fussed over when she’s sick) so I just sat next to her and tried to read. Kate slept most of the way through to Chester, by which time she felt somewhat better. We piled our worldly goods on our backs again and headed out toward our B&B, for which we discovered we had an address but not an exact location. The address was #10 Hoole Road, and we found #7, 9, and 11, but across the street was a park. Behind the park maybe? No, that was a different road. I asked at a pub and was told it was just a little way further along, and indeed it was, about two blocks later. Addresses here are just plain meaningless (and often not posted at all, anyway). Our B&B was a large and tasteful house, painted inside all in bright orange and yellow. Once checked in, we went out and found the nearby shopping street, in search of something for Kate to eat (for she hadn’t kept a thing down all day). We found a bakery that still had a few things left and got her a “fudge donut” (no chocolate to it that I could see, the gooey topping was more caramel colored and it wasn’t filled) and me a “flake cake” (chocolate cake with chocolate frosting and a piece of Cadbury Flake on top), which we devoured while exploring the rest of the street — including butcher, fruit & veg shop, fishmonger, natural foods emporium, Chinese takeaway, delightful-looking old pub, Internet café, stereo shop, laundromat, and laundry. We considered the latter two options and decided to pay a bit more to have our laundry done for us tomorrow rather than hanging around the laundromat. From there we headed into town, and by happenstance caught a free bus from the train station to the city walls. The town of Chester is a delightful melange of half-timbered, classical, and modern buildings, some dating back to the 1200’s, with an intact city wall completely surrounding the old city center, a canal, and the ruins of a Roman amphitheatre. One of the town’s most notable features is the “rows”, a second level of sidewalks above the street-level shops, delightfully cool after a hot day dragging luggage hither and yon. After familiarizing ourselves with the city we set out in search of dinner, but had poor luck finding anything, complicated by the fact that Kate desperately needed a bathroom. And once that was accomplished she determined that she really wasn’t hungry — she needed to lie down, now. Tried calling a cab, but was told it would be 20 or 30 minutes. So I asked around for a cab stand and was directed to the cab company office, where there was a queue waiting outside. Kate sat down in the office and I talked with one of the boiler room phone operators (probably the same one I’d just phoned), who took my name and promised a cab would be along shortly. We waited there for what seemed like not shortly, watching cabs arrive and pick people off the queue, and finally when a cab arrived and there was no one who’d been waiting longer than us I just bundled Kate into it. “If we ever need to call a cab again in this town we’ll give your name,” I told her, and got her back into the room, where she threw up again. Poor thing! But these migraines usually last only one day. I pulled the blinds and left Kate to sleep while I slipped out to call Tom Brennan from a nearby pay phone. I left a message with his wife, and when I got back to the B&B and told the girl on duty to expect a call for me she told me she’d just gotten one and thought it was a wrong number. She let me use her phone to return the call, and I got Tom’s wife again, who relayed the call to Tom at work, who called me back at the B&B, and this is the lunch date that Jack made. Kate was still asleep, so I went out and had dinner at a nerarby place that I thought was a coffee house but turned out to be a pleasant very modern pub (well, the sign out front did brag about cappucinos, lattes, and mochas and say nothing about beer). I had a Thai beef salad which turned out to be a very nice grilled steak, sliced and served with a spicy dressing on top of “assorted leaves” (what we’d call “greens”) and “sauteed potatoes” (what we’d call “French fries”). Good, though. I also got a bread roll to take home for Kate to gnaw on, which she was glad to have. And we went to sleep early, and that was Tuesday. Wednesday morning Kate was feeling better. Breakfast at the B&B was a bit more complex than at our hotel in Glasgow, with a huge variety of cereals as well as the full cooked breakfast (this time with baked beans instead of the black pudding). After the first day we got selective and ordered only a subset of the breakfast — our host seemed a bit taken aback but managed to cope. After breakfast we lugged a couple of bags of dirty clothes to the laundry and gave them over to be professionally cleaned — which consisted of them being dumped in a washer before we left the establishment (but we didn’t have to hang around and wait). Then we walked down to the train station to catch one of the frequent trains to Liverpool. While waiting for the train we bought some Liverpool maps, an issue of Private Eye, and the Time Out guide to London for future reference. The train itself was small and cute — just two cars — but unlike Portland’s light rail it was a real actual train. I begin to see the attraction of trainspotting. With so many different kinds of trains, and so much concrete difference between the various types in terms of comfort, features, and noise, it would be easy to start caring about which type of train you were getting on. Add a dollop of obsessive-compulsion and/or Asperger’s and you’d have a classic sad anorak trainspotting git. On the train, when I finished Private Eye (like The Onion only classier and British) the fellow in the next seat offered me his Sun. The Sun is truly appalling — like the Weekly World News except that it seems to take itself seriously. It also has a large picture of a topless woman on page 3. It was from the page 3 girl that I learned the space shuttle Discovery had landed safely. Swear to God. We arrived at the Lime Street station (picked up some more maps) and wandered out into a rather gray day, full of bustle and traffic and modern buildings and the huge St. George’s Hall (rather like the Parthenon only not nearly as ruined). We read a few of the tourist information signs, then wandered off in search of something interesting to do in the hour or so before our lunch date with Tom. One area that looked on the map like old and interesting streets turned out to be a place where the old and interesting streets had been torn down for a modern shopping center, but we also found the tourist information office (more maps!) and were interviewed about our experience in Liverpool so far by someone from the local ministry of culture. From there we headed to the Cavern Quarter, AKA the Let’s Cash In On the Beatles Quarter. The original Cavern Club was torn down, but has since been reconstructed brick-by-brick and is now surrounded by various tacky clubs and shops. But there was also some interesting Beatles-related public art, including a bizarre shrine showing the Virgin Mary (?) holding three of the four lads (portrayed as infants) and a life-size bronze of John leaning against a wall. We paused for a scone and something to drink before continuing on to St. John’s Garden, in the shadow of St. George’s Hall where we’d started. There we met Tom and his wife Sylvia (just as charming and shy as Tom himself — they were high school sweethearts, aww) and went for lunch at the café in the Conservation Centre, a museum about the art of preservation and care of old and fragile objects. After lunch Tom walked with us down to the waterfront, where he pointed out the amazing art deco ziggurat that is the offices and air shaft for a tunnel under the Mersey, and the three huge office buildings of the Port of Liverpool, Cunard Lines, and Royal Liver (pronounced with a long i) Insurance. These three beautiful buildings are known as the Three Graces and are significant to Liverpool’s maritime heritage. Over nine million people and untold tons of goods passed through this port in its heyday. The Royal Liver building is still the headquarters of Royal Liver Insurance and is topped with two enormous sculptures of the mythical Liver Bird from which the city gets its name (the bird’s name, in turn, is related to laver, a kind of seaweed). We said goodbye to Tom and walked out on the docks. There we toured the portmaster’s house, which is currently furnished as it was during WWII, complete with a working victory garden. Liverpool, being one of England’s key ports, was bombed nearly as heavily as London. Then we visited the Maritime Museum, where we learned all about the great age of ocean liners, including the mystery of the Lusitania and, of course, the Titanic. One room was filled with artifacts related to these two famous disasters, including a deck chair from the Lusitania and the twenty-foot-long builder’s model of the Titanic (later revised into the Britannic and finally the Olympic). Other exhibits included the emigrant experience, the slave trade, and the modern customs and excise service. Despite the museum’s best efforts, they couldn’t make customs and excise exciting, but the rest of it was fascinating. The exhibits on the slave trade made it plain that these people had cultures of their own — they weren’t just products. As the museum closed we wandered off, past the memorial to the Titanic, in search of dinner. We wound up at a Portugese restaurant — one cuisine we don’t have at home — before catching the cute little train back to Chester and our B&B. Thursday was our day for touristing in Chester itself. We walked down to the train station and caught the free bus again; upon alighting we immediately found several charity shops, where we picked up some cheap CDs. After picking up a walking map at the tourist info office, we wandered upstairs to learn about the Roman amphitheatre across the street. Turns out it was not discovered until the 1920s, and is currently being actively excavated; the archaeologists were working right there in plain sight and we could have asked questions if we’d been of a mind to. The exhibit was fascinating — a great mix of information about Roman amphitheatres in Britain (the practice of beast fighting as an entertainment was responsible for the near extinction of fierce beasts in Europe; over here, post holes from small booths are accompanied by chicken wing bones and beef ribs, indicating fast-food stands) with honest exposure of the messiness and open questions of real-world archaeology (many stones are missing here, probably taken away for other uses during the middle ages, but this wall was apparently untouched and we don’t know why; elsewhere, the amphitheatre is disrupted by a medieval road, which is in turn interrupted by a 20th century garage foundation). Following the walking map, we proceeded around the amphitheatre itself, down the riverfront, and up some stairs to a marvelous ruined church. I love these ruins, and thanks to Henry VIII England is full of them; I took gobs of pictures. Then we headed up onto the city walls, walking under Chester’s famous clock and spending several happy hours in the various book and antique stores which are apparently only reachable from the pedestrian walkway on top of the wall. From the wall we had a nice view of the canal that skirts the city and into people’s back gardens. Everything in these old towns is infill — houses, shops, and services wedged into the spaces between other things, and not a right angle anywhere. By now we were getting hungry and stupid, and set off in search of Chez Jules, a French restaurant Kate had read about in some guidebook. But, once again, the street numbers were irregularly assigned and rarely displayed, and we were just about to give up when we blundered into the place by chance. I’m really glad we persevered, because the food was delightful. From there we made our way to the local cathedral. I’m always astonished by the enormous churches one can find in small European towns, and I wonder what they were like in their heyday. Today Chester’s cathedral offers a digital audio guide to its art (ranging from the 1500s to the 20th century, including some spectacular Victorian mosaics and a tiny “cobweb painting” done on tent caterpillar webbing), tombs (including the alcove behind the organ where at least five organists are memorialized), and the amusingly quirky carved figures in the “quire.” Not too far from the cathedral was the local market, a cavernous building filled with stalls selling fresh vegetables, CDs, clothing, jewelry, and everything in between. Nothing touristy here — this was where the locals did their shopping. We had an interesting conversation with one of the locals about American turns of phrase — she had trouble with the expression “to meet with” someone, feeling that the “with” was unnecessary. I thought about it a moment and tried to explain that, in American at least, “to meet” someone is to encounter them for the first time or briefly, while “to meet with” someone is to engage in a more protracted encounter, typically a business meeting. We also sampled, and purchased, some truly spectacular cheeses. Some of the local cheddars explode with flavor. By then we were flagging a bit again, so we stumbled into Katie’s Tea Room for a bit of a sit-down and an afternoon snack: pastries, and tea served in antique silver (which transmits the heat very well — ouch!). The proprietor looked a lot more like an Ahmed than a Katie, but the tea and crumpets hit the spot and building was quite impressive — dating back to the 1300s, with some of the original wattle-and-daub construction still visible in spots. Afternoon tea gave us sufficient energy for a trip to the local Waterstone’s, where we picked up many of the books we hadn’t managed to find in the convention dealer’s room, such as a paperback of The Iron Council by China Miéville (it was only one of this year’s Hugo nominees, for pity’s sake!). But the energy didn’t last very long, so we dragged ourselves back to our room and fell over. Later we roused ourselves sufficiently to put together ham and cheese sandwiches from our market finds for dinner, but otherwise spent the rest of the evening watching local TV (including something that gave every impression of being CSI: Glasgow), listening to newly-acquired CDs, and reading newly-acquired books. Touristing is hard work, and sometimes you need a rest. Especially since the next morning we would be heading for London. To be continued…