Kicky Baby: Greg Bear’s Blog

One of our most innovative and creative voices passed away on Sunday April 19^th in London. I’ve been reading J.G. Ballard since I was a teenager, and found him compelling and rich–and often strange, not at all a pejorative for me either then or now.

 

The best obits of Mr. Ballard cover his history well enough, but may leave out a little context.

 

Many of Ballard’s early short stories were published in science fiction magazines and anthologies, and he followed them in 1961 and 1962 with THE WIND FROM NOWHERE and THE DROWNED WORLD, two notable efforts which hark back to the Wellsian disaster novel, being explored so successfully by John Wyndham at the time. Both were marketed as science fiction. A single-volume edition of both novels was published by Doubleday in the United States in 1965.

 

It doesn’t seem much of a stretch to point out that a young writer is likely to try to fit in to a market that is already familiar (and perhaps commercial), and a community that is known to be friendly–and so Ballard always moved easily in and out of science fiction, and to my knowledge, much like his contemporary, William Golding, never disowned his roots. Others, however, made serious efforts to distance Ballard from science fiction, even though most of his work was published in the genre.

 

Other prominent UK authors of that decade–Brian Aldiss, Robert Conquest, and Michael Moorcock among them–cut their teeth on science fiction, and published extensively in the field.

 

Kingsley Amis–a fellow traveler, sympathetic to sf and knowledgeable about its accomplishments and possibilities– made his big mark with an academic satire, LUCKY JIM, and it seemed there might be success to be found outside of genre.

 

William Golding stayed within genre, but barely–and produced one of the greatest successes of that period, LORD OF THE FLIES. He later went on to win the Nobel Price for Literature.

 

Anthony Burgess  unapologetically wrote science fiction, but seemed to hark back to Orwell and Huxley for overt inspiration. A CLOCKWORK ORANGE became a world-wide sensation, perhaps the biggest success for this generation after LORD OF THE FLIES–and  was made into a controversial film by Stanley Kubrick that Kubrick himself eventually pulled from the UK market.

 

In this milieu, Ballard continued to write stunning novels like THE CRYSTAL WORLD (1966), at once fantastic, rooted in apparent rational realism, yet surreal and dreamlike. In the United States, THE CRYSTAL WORLD’s publisher pulled away from any labels–reflecting a new literary reputation for Ballard.

 

VERMILION SANDS (1971) expanded this reputation.

 

He dived head first into the bizarre and avant garde with his 1968 quasi-story-essay, “Why I Want to Fuck Ronald Reagan,” followed by CRASH (1971),  and THE ATROCITY EXHIBITION (1974).

 

British visionaries have traditionally expressed a serious distaste for the culture and politics of the United States–witness Olaf Stapledon and John Brunner.

 

These stories and  novels were of critical interest, and attracted considerable attention and controversy, but were not very commercial. (Though CRASH was decades later filmed by David Cronenberg.) One has to make a living.

 

Like Anthony Burgess in the Malaysian Trilogy, Brian Aldiss recorded his youth and war experiences in A HAND-REARED BOY and A SOLDIER ERECT (and also placed his marker firmly in the experimental camp with BAREFOOT IN THE HEAD.)

 

Ballard had one story yet to record perhaps even more surreal than his fiction–and yet indisputably part of history. He followed Burgess’s and Aldiss’s path and launched into a novel about his boyhood in Singapore during World War 2.

 

In a real sense, EMPIRE OF THE SUN is both autobiographical, intensely wondrous, and horrible at once. A young lad gets tossed between the grinding wheels of a dying culture, a violently suicidal culture, and technology.

 

The adolescent Jim’s feverish interest in airpower leads to an epiphany under a new kind of sun–a moment perfectly Ballardian.

 

Here, Ballard’s success was substantial–the trappings and fame of a film, directed by Stephen Spielberg, was great fun for him, and its impact was at once dizzying and sobering–for it was unlikely to be replicated.

 

Other writers and directors were also intent on exploring their younger days in the war. In the United States, dozens of war novels were published in the fifties and sixties, pushing new boundaries in gritty realism.

 

Joseph Heller’s CATCH-22 stretched realism until it snapped. Kurt Vonnegut brilliantly mined his own experiences as a prisoner of war in the firebombing of Dresden and assembled the almost unclassifiable and brilliant  SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE, my candidate for one of the great American novels.

 

In EMPIRE OF THE SUN, Ballard did not overtly stretch the bizarre elements, letting them speak for themselves. The effect is at once startling yet more conventional–more like Wyndham and Wells, in a way. And in his later writing, he tended to stay within the continuing Kingsley Amis tradition of drawing from his own life.

 

I met Ballard at a signing in Seattle in the late eighties and wistfully asked if he was ever going to reach back to his wilder novels. “Oh, no,” he replied. “Those days are done, I’m afraid.”

 

He seemed a friendly, accessible man.

 

(Not fitting smoothly into this essay–worthy of its own essay, probably–is the career of Michael Moorcock, who worked brilliantly in many genres, including bitterly harsh and satirical science fiction–THE BLACK CORRIDOR, BEHOLD THE MAN. Later, Moorcock would follow his contemporaries–though he was one of the younger set in the 1950s–and produce fine novels outside of science fiction and fantasy. In the UK, that still seems easier to do than in the United States–where the taint of writing science fiction (and admitting it) is often wisely avoided, if you desire a critically acclaimed career within the genre of mainstream literature.

 

Vonnegut avoided it, with a wink and a nod–despite his early connections and publications. Michael Crichton eschewed genre completely. Doris Lessing does not–and yet, like Golding, she now has a Nobel Prize–and in that triumph, has been dissed rather harshly by a certain fusty, aging literary critic.

 

More power to the UK chameleons and butterflies!)

(Apologies for not adding material here for a while… I’ve been finishing and revising MARIPOSA, the sequel to QUANTICO, and now it’s in production with a November pub date from Perseus/Vanguard… More time to blog!)

 

 

 

It’s no biggy in the grand scheme of things, but the little irritations and the small dishonesties can add up over time.

 

And so it is with a deep sense of proportionality that I bitch about cable television channels and their fake claims of broadcasting movies in high definition. Having just  Tivoed DEEP IMPACT on TNTHD, for the second time, trying to watch a decent high-def version of a pretty good movie, I am once again stuck with what appears to be a standard-def picture, and  not even a wide-screen picture, but a “stretched” version from a 4:3 aspect ratio copy.

 

This seems particularly common for films from Dreamworks, which has either not paid for hi-def transfers of many of its films, or doesn’t care that their pictures are being marketed under false pretenses.

 

All good movies, but—

 

The screen roll-bys announce these are hi-def, available on hi-def channels only, and they aren’t.

 

It matters in several ways, because cable companies are competing with each other for bragging rights over the most hours of hi-def shown. Fake hi-def showings are counted in those listings.

 

Notable exceptions: SAVING PRIVATE RYAN, in true hi-def on TNTHD from the beginning, and JURASSIC PARK, which debuted in the bad “stretched” format a year or so ago, and finally has been shown in decent hi-def on SCI-FI HD and elsewhere.

 

All of the Lord of the Rings films have been shown multiple times in true hi-def.

 

TWISTER has not—it’s stretched standard-def. STARSHIP TROOPERS–stretched.

 

USAHD has shown a fine HD version of CASANOVA, and yet has also deceived–too often–with other films to be trustworthy.

 

A beautifully colorful transfer  of JACKIE BROWN (probably my favorite Tarentino movie) suffers only from a  creative language edit that replaces the F-word with a fascinating variety of poetic euphemisms.

 

And that brings me to the second part of this rant. Up until a few months ago, the late and somewhat lamented MOJO network and the still-extant Universal HD showed their films in uncut hi-def, complete with full credits and minimal commercial interruptions. A lot of obscure movies (and quite a few very good movies, not always mutually exclusive) got shown multiple times on these networks, notably 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, uncut, unaltered, usually in their original aspect ratios; a movie fan’s dream.

 

No more.

 

MOJO is gone and Universal HD seems to have teamed up with USA HD to co-broadcast many of the same movies, now cut for time, language, and the irritating commercial aspirations of somebody who really no longer gives a damn about the movie audience.

 

I suppose it’s all about survival.

 

But it’s also about the diminishing of the basic cable dream these two networks were offering late-night and other viewers: that they wouldn’t have to pay for HBO to see movies as the filmmakers intended them to be seen.

 

And so–back to Netflix. When streaming internet video brings us full hi-def in a few years, then it’s bye-bye to the last few  inane deceptions and one-size fits all world of broadcast and cable TV.

 

(Of course, if it all works, we’ll be paying for those films individually–or perhaps as part of a non-cable package… And that might end up costing as much as HBO, but at least the selection will be bigger.)

 

Away from the broadcast world,  video tapes and Laserdiscs are essentially analog media (some eventually acquired digital soundtracks), which means it is was not technically feasible to hand over control of the viewing of such material to the studio lawyers.

 

As soon as DVDs came along, that changed.

 

DVDs are digital start to finish, and studios have forced player manufacturers to cater to them in oh so many ways to even be able to license DVDs of their films.

 

The result: we’ve all seen the FBI slide about piracy every single time we plug in a disc. We can’t avoid it. The lawyers want to grind it into your eyeballs, because they don’t trust you, even when they have your money. (To be fair, the public attitude toward piracy doesn’t engender much trust. If hamburgers were digital and could be hacked and copied, McDonald’s would long ago have gone out of business–because as we all know, hamburgers want to be free, just like information.)

 

But the lawyers aren’t solely  to blame for losing control of your viewing life.

 

Plug in a DVD, and as often as not, it will go straight to trailers–or other warnings about piracy–while deactivating your skip or chapter controls. The display on the screen, when these useless buttons are pressed, should read, “Sorry, schmuck. The ad department says if we don’t force you to watch these things, you’ll just skip them. So here goes. But wait–you say you bought this disc of Pinocchio twenty years ago, and those movies in the trailers have long since come and gone…? Well, that means you didn’t buy the latest digitally enhanced transfer on Super Triple Def DVD, available for a limited time only…”

 

Pfaah.

 

As for production credits–real flesh and blood people labor long and hard on movies and TV shows. They are frequently well paid, but credit is part of their pay, as well. When those credits are truncated, sped up, shrunk to a crawl, and supered over with commercials or promos…

 

That’s a crime.

 

I’ve probably spent six or eight months of my life being warned by the FBI not to steal this disc that I’ve already rented or purchased. I think the lawyers can assume that every human being on the planet who watches movies knows the text of their warning by heart.

 

Interpol may have expressed interest, but I do not.

 

Give it a rest. And get the technical details right. And give control of our viewing experience back to the audience that pays your way.

 

Coming soon to Kicky Baby: The Great Nipple and F-word shortage of 1940.

The Seattle Times on February 21 brought news of the unexpected death of Gary Greaves. He was 57. Gary was living in Marrekesh, Morocco, with his wife, writer Frances McCue–there on a Fullbright scholarship–and their daughter Maddy, and died playing basketball–which somehow fits.

Gary was tall, athletic, energetic, and devoted to helping human beings in need.

In the summer of 2001, Gary invited me to go with him and a priest to visit the inmates at Monroe Correctional Facility, not far from where we live. Gary brought community writers into Monroe to meet with “lifers,” inmates serving twenty years or more, as part of a prison book group.

The experience was a true life lesson.

Entering Monroe requires being stripped of your formal identity–wallet, driver’s license, valuables, all are taken and stored for the duration of your visit. Searches are reasonably thorough. The guards are sober and not inclined to chitchat. You are not their friend.

Gary informed me that there were protocols to follow with the prisoners, for our own safety and for theirs. It was best not to ask what they were serving time for (you don’t want to know). If by chance you get invited to the cafeteria, and dessert is being served, if you don’t want yours, do not offer it to another prisoner. Divide it up precisely among all those at the table. Grievances and resentments can be petty. They can also be deadly.

The prison itself, once we were inside, reminded me of an older, somewhat run-down high school–but with bars, gates, and very strict routines.

The room where we met with the inmates was spacious and spare, no windows, with tables arranged in a square open in the middle. About twenty inmates attended the meeting. Inmates could freely mingle and shake hands, introduce themselves.

Getting down to the session, I quickly realized that the inmates were going to be the most focused, welcoming, and enthusiastically attentive audience I had experienced in a long time–perhaps ever. The programs and the speakers that Gary brought to this prison book group might form a substantial part of their intellectual existence. This was their break from prison routine for the day–perhaps for the week or the month.

I did not immediately realize it, but I was becoming unnerved. I was totally unprepared, emotionally, for their hard reality, and so my discussion with the Monroe lifers was wide-ranging; looking back, perhaps too wide-ranging, getting into matters of writer and character psychology, and then the limits of our personal behaviors, including anger management–not entirely appropriate.

I had never done this before. 

Their questions were focused and intelligent. They were hungry for knowledge about all sorts of things–but especially about the life of a writer.

They were hungry for the outside world.

During our meeting, one young man–a Russian with longish dark blond hair, little more than a boy–put his head on his arms, flat on the table. He could not imagine ever getting outside again–perhaps he never would. His despair was palpable.

The discussion continued. The lifers were used to that.

I was not.

I liked these people. There were grizzled older men, handsome and fit young men, blacks and whites, a real mix. After the meeting ended, I signed books and offered to answer questions through email.

That was not going to happen, Gary told me later. These prisoners are not allowed to contact the outside world. The officials at Monroe are reluctant to give them much in the way of relief. Punishment is a real goal. Monroe is not the hardest of hard time–in our state, that might be Walla Walla–but there was definitely an atmosphere of disciplined and perhaps even righteous misery.

Observing guard behavior–male and female guards–I learned as much about the psychologically degrading aspects of prison as I did observing the inmates. It is not easy and it is not good to be placed in almost absolute charge of another human being. And yet, it is essential. A well-run prison must be grimly serious and predictable, for the safety of both the guards and the prisoners.

But there were stories of odd, tiny cruelties–family visitors bringing in snacks and having sealed potato chip bags crushed by guards. Necessary? Mandated by past experience? Or expressive of the wearing down of one’s own grip on humanity, year in and year out? Dealing with the unpredictable, the violent, the frustrated, the insane–some of the worst of the worst…

Corrections is an extraordinarily tough career. Prison guards–like most cops–have high rates of early heart attack. Stress is constant. Danger is real and ever-present.

Support groups and union groups had posted signs and banners outside Monroe, on the wire fences approaching the prison. The community of corrections officers and their families is tight-knit, largely blue-collar. There are newsletters and journals. Some are available online. A good prison guard–stern, predictable, even-handed, sympathetic but not a sap, slow to anger and immune to thoughts of vengeance–is a godsend to a prisoner, but how many of us would be up to that sort of challenge and responsibility?

Leaving the prison was like taking a gulp of fresh air after holding my breath. I got back my identity. I became real again. Or I left the hard reality behind, and returned to my illusions.

That night, late into the morning, I sat listening to music in my basement. I was haunted by faces. Many of the faces were not known to me. But they all seemed to silently beseech; they wanted their stories told. It was a creepy experience, like being haunted by people still alive–people I had never met.

Around one a.m., I cried like a baby.

I felt I had completely screwed up. Looking back on that experience, to this day I feel guilt. I would conduct another visit in a very different manner.

In the long run, my time at Monroe benefited me far more than it did the lifers in the prison book group.

Thanks to Gary Greaves for giving me that experience, and my condolences to his friends and loved ones–and the prisoners at Monroe, who will have to find another sympathetic soul to crack open their steel and concrete box and let in light from the outer world.

I’m starting this weekly (I hope) blog with a scientific mystery.

 

As guys get older, we unexpectedly find ourselves up in the middle of the night, rummaging for needful things–like socks to warm the feet. (Reference: old Prince Bolkonsky in Tolstoy’s WAR AND PEACE.)

 

The middle of the night–early morning–hours before dawn–utter quiet. No moon.

 

Eyes adjusted by sleep and dark to extreme levels of sensitivity.

 

I wander across the bedroom into a completely black closet. I can’t see, but I know where to find my drawer full of socks. My hand reaches unerringly for just the right pair, united by tucking their little tops together into a cozy mushroom. And suddenly, from the back of the drawer, three vague explosions of light make me jump.

 

Has someone hidden a cell phone or Gameboy in my sock drawer? Sleepy, disoriented, I wait a few seconds, then reach in and rummage some more–and it happens again. I’m not just seeing things and I’m not experiencing a detached retina. Moving my socks around causes luminescent outbursts, just the color one would expect from ghosts–grayish white, more subdued and sad than pretty–and so dim as to be unnoticed in daytime.

 

My sock drawer is haunted.

 

After a tentative grab for a pair of my favorite toe-covers, I discover that the culprits are:

 

White cotton tube socks. Each one, when handled, emits grayish-white puffs of light, like lightning seen through clouds from high up in space. Opening up the two-sock mushroom bundle causes more diffuse flashes. Spreading the neck of a sock gives access to a narrowing tunnel of spreading glows. Stretching them–same reaction. The glows do not subside after vigorous tugging and squeezing. Plucking tube socks from the laundry basket–socks worn for a day–I discover that these are still capable of producing light.

 

Stretching produces the brightest glows.

 

It’s very late or very early. I’m tired. I could be a true scientist and spend hours rummaging through everything and testing it. My energy level just barely allows me to try out  colored socks, underwear. White things in general.

 

No glow. So far, white cotton tube socks are it. They probably come from China–but I’ve had them for years.

 

Discussing this the next morning with Astrid, two theories dominate.

 

One: static. In my experience, static appears smaller and much brighter, but I suppose hundreds of little static discharges, clustering around rubbing fibers, particularly coiled strands of elastic (Astrid’s guess), might explain what I’m seeing.  But static usually subsides quickly. And no other garments or socks exhibit the glow.

 

Two: Phosphates. Phosphorus can make a Giant Hound glow in the dark, so perhaps phosphates in the detergent could stick with socks and make a similar glow. But we use green laundry soap. Likely no phosphates. (I’d better check just to make sure.)  And no other laundered items glow.

 

Nix static and phosphates.

 

This sort of science pushes along in its own good time. I’m going to give it a few more tries. 

 

Perhaps what we are about to discover is a new source of energy. Ghost fusion! Tube Sock Hyperlight Drive! An explanation for why socks disappear…

 

Or perhaps just enough of this mysterious force to warm my feet.

 

Alternate theories, similar experiences? Let’s see how long it takes for the web to solve this mystery to my satisfaction.