Greg Bear on Politics in Writing

"To handle the issue [terrorist action in "The Wind from a Burning Woman"] honestly, I had to make the “Burning Woman” fight for a cause that I, myself, would cherish. One editor, reading the story for an anthology on space colonies, rejected it because it didn’t overtly support the cause. It would have been dishonest to force the story into such a mold; however pleasant or unpleasant the result, my stories must work themselves out within their own framework, not according to some market principle or philosophical bias. It may be remarkable that, with such views, I’ve come as far as I have in publishing."

--Greg Bear from the "Preface" to The Wind from a Burning Woman.

I invited Greg Bear to write for an anthology that proposed a fascinating new ethos. And he said, "Stay away from ethos." My point was an SF-nal one: So many interesting ways of seeing the world. Let's go for a swim. He could have played the game yet opposed the ethos, too. 

His perspective, I think, could be summed up by the above. Each story has it's own way of thinking. Even as I felt he'd misunderstood, I admired as his staunch position about the writer being outside any set of predisposed rules.

Harlan Ellison vs. Gene Roddenberry in the "City on the Edge of Forever" Arena: Which Was Star Trek Script Better? the Original or the Televised?

I'm a big Star Trek buff but also a Harlan Ellison fanatic where, as a lad, I'd read everything I could get my hands on--a mesmerizing voice that still energizes me to this day. 

This strange collection of essays and variant on a teleplay have been loitering in the to-be-read pile  for awhile--a kind of novelty item, I figured. But it's more interesting than one might suppose.

The first third is Harlan Ellison setting up this epic battle between the titans. Harlan Ellison's original version won the Writers Guild of America Award. Meanwhile, the televised version won a Hugo. It is consistently rated the best Star Trek episodes. I don't mean to suggest that Roddenberry's contribution matches Ellison's, but he at least oversaw the rewrite.

Does the play need a third of the book to explain itself? It is pure Ellison--always a plus. But it is too long.* If you love Ellison, you'll read it, anyway. Wikipedia may cover the gist, so I won't summarize.

Ellison takes his gloves off and goes after Roddenberry, but in Ellison's favor, he quotes his critics when possible. The last several pages are the responses of writers and actors who either worked in Star Trek or actually had an actual impact on the script. They yield substantive angles on the debate and, of course, weigh in on Ellison's side.

Shared plot setup without spoilers:

The Enterprise is heading to investigate a time anomaly. The crew beam down to a planet to find a "city" there. A time irregularity occurs. Spock and Kirk investigate to restore the timeline.

My perspective on this battle may differ from most. In part, I trust the spirit of what everyone mentioned in the book says, bearing in mind that Roddenberry wrote lyrics to the Star Trek theme song [never used], which allowed him to get a split the composer's royalties (the clip with Tenacious D is a bit crude but funny):

Discussion with Spoilers Galore:

So let's start with the aired script's opening: The usual bumpy spaceship bit. They pair this with a sick patient on the bridge. There's some sort of unnamed risk with using "cordrazine," but McCoy is the doctor. He knows what he is doing, yet he accidentally overdoses himself.

Let's leave aside the space "turbulence"--a bit corny and a bit too often used, but okay, maybe. Let's leave aside the madness. Also overused, but okay. 

The turbulence ends as soon as McCoy injects himself. Also, McCoy's madness ends when it's no longer needed either. Can it be so dangerous if you can just wait it out? Lock him in his quarters until the effects wear off. They were going to go back in time and catch him before him before he injects himself (maybe it happens and they just don't show that). We should probably leave aside the time paradox of stopping McCoy before injecting himself (then who stops him if he doesn't do it?).

Now the opening does seem like a logic mess when you pause to consider it, but maybe because the improbabilities are just the set-up, we buy them. We'll grant those.

One advantage to Ellison's version are the space pirates, which as is implied, some of the crew might have been made up of the same people. Not too many. It would be improbable that so many births would have been the same. But it would be a fascinating philosophical quandary that one could evolve a wholly different ethos if time had taken another path. This may have been an absurdity for Roddenberry: Either the perfect future lies ahead or it doesn't.

However, someone should decide how a pirate timeline fits in to this story. Perhaps that theme might be about how people decide what someone else's fate should be. Who gets to decide? Why?

Ellison's opening brings up the interesting part. Roddenberry was apparently telling people that Ellison made Scotty a drug dealer, which isn't true. Ellison made up a crew member who dealt drugs--the ostensible baddie of the tale. This is an intriguing perspective. The Star Trek crew are flawed.

Roddenberry rejected the idea as apparently no one on the ship was bad. Now that's fascinating. It would help to know your idealistic future before sending writers off to write stories for you. It would be more realistic to have a crew member go rogue (although I'm not sure if they'd discussed the monetary system yet, which might make a black market system pointless). 

But the fascinating bit is how it pits the realistic against the utopian. The utopian aspect is part of the show's charm and unique draw. After all, this is politically correct before politically correct was a thing. It showed the universe as it should be--cooperation between races and alien species toward a common goal. 

But it is unexplored how they got here--not to mention improbable. Even if you start with everyone on the same page, one of the crew is bound to get bitter about any story's outcome and start poisoning the atmosphere of the work environment.

Now Roddenberry is from another generation. He was trained to go along with society, served in armed forces, and later in the police department, so his perspective had to be one of obedient cooperation. Their Federation does work under military conditions. Still, it seems probable that this would go awry. Even the military has need of the law and courts. So not everyone is perfect.

But that is part of Star Trek. So I get why Roddenberry used Scotty's name--to show how [to him] immediately ludicrous it was to consider having any upstanding member of the crew misbehave since they all were upstanding. You can probably locate episodes where crew stepped out of line, but at least we can see why Roddenberry used temporary madness instead.

One wonders if part of the secret sauce that made this episode the most popular show is this tension between realism and idealism. Maybe Ellison sensed this on some level and was putting it to the test.

My problem with the use of the new crew member is that the addiction or the character's personality isn't well utilized. Does he deserve his fate? Would the members of the Enterprise have allowed this? Shouldn't they have called for an end to this?

It may that a Guardian of Time sees the violation of time as a crime punishable by eternal death, but we'd need to understand that ahead of time. And how could the guy have known that his act of kindness was a greater cruelty? Maybe that's part of Ellison's intended theme. It does open a can of worms, but it would be interesting to dive into them.

One of the things I liked about the televised script better is the earlier appearance of Edith, granting more time to develop more of a relationship (did they maximize this?). The closer the connection between the Captain and Edith, the more we'll feel the pain.

Also, instead of being told what their goal is, to find a cryptic focal point in time, Spock works up an apparatus with early 20th century materials to find the focal point. The problem is what is Spock's apparatus? Is it a TV? Why is it seeing newspaper articles? Why is it seeing articles from the future? Does Spock already know how to see in the future? Why not do that in all episodes then with fancier equipment and solve problems before they occur?

The Guardian of Time might as well have just told them what the focal point is for that era.

There's one last problem for both scripts. Why kill Edith? Why couldn't they have taken her into the future with them? There has to be a better explanation for this. Why must she die instead of being transported into the future with them, especially if Kirk is in love with her. This has to be at least debated.

It'd be cool to see an updated version of this, combining the best of both scripts:

1) Harlan's opening, but with a story use of addiction or the use of somebody so irresponsible with his ethics: disposing of and manipulating people so easily, so cruelly. It needs to play a more vital role in the unraveling of the tale.

2) Since our baddie is a vital aspect of this version, his story/character should be developed a bit more. Does he deserve his fate? Should he be rescued? If no, why not? If so, what do you do with him afterwards?

3) Why does Edith have to die? This needs to be clearer. It would make more sense to get upset over the televised episode of Star Trek than Tom Godwin's "Cold Equations" because there's no reason for her death. Ellison's script seems to have taken Godwin's scenario to heart and has two men die for this one female, suggesting the cruelty of fate. They serve as foils or counterpoints to Edith's demise. At least her death had value. Maybe one can only go backwards into time. That would explain why Edith had to die.

4) Develop James and Edith's relationship so we believe the relationship is a bit more than a momentary attraction. His pain should be more palpably felt. 

5) Space pirates or not? How do they fit in with the new theme?

All of these changes would suggest a two episode or movie development. If it's a movie, one might think more deeply about the theme.

*Note:

A scan of Ellison's other new editions suggests this is a common issue--introductions growing too unwieldy in their length, like a lawn left to grow knee-high weeds. His essays can be fun, energetic, but maybe future editions should leave off the introduction to the introductions or, for the completists and for the curious, thrust it into a back appendix. For now, new readers should skip them.

Greg Bear on Why He Writes, and Why He Writes Science Fiction

I have friends who believe the world will come to an end in twenty or thirty years.... Serve everybody right, they seem to say. 

What they are actually saying is that within the next few decades—certainly within the next sixty or seventy years—they will come to an end.... The future does not really exist, certainly not the far and unknowable future. Why talk about it? 

They are still my friends, but they are... wrong.... The future will come, and it will be different, unimaginably so. Then why do I bother to try imagining it...?

I’m willing to bet, in our deepest hearts, that we all hope one of our more optimistic imagined futures, or some aspect of a literary time to come, will closely parallel reality. Then we will be admired for our perspicacity....

Perhaps. But it will be accident, not prophecy.

Like my pessimistic friends, I'm not going to live forever....

But when I write, I not only live to see one future, I experience dozens...

When I write, I’m immortal.

--Greg Bear from The "Preface" to The Wind from a Burning Woman

Notes:

A perfect quote for his passing. I also like his willingness to forge friendships with those he disagrees with.

"Webster" by Greg Bear

 

This first appeared in David Gerrold's Alternities.

A lonely, middle-aged woman, whose reproductive years are coming to a close, uses a dictionary, using the words the make a man of her desire, her design. But it doesn't go as planned.

Discussion (with Spoilers):

I wanted to read his stories in a roughly chronological order, but I don't presently have his earliest, which he apparently considered too immature (written when he was fifteen).

This is his earliest story Bear collected for Complete Short Fiction of Greg Bear series (clearly a misnomer), which appears in volume one, Just Over the Horizon.

He rewrote the fantasy for this new volume. He economized in some places, expanded in others, reshuffled the order a bit on occasion. Some choices seemed sage, but some less essential. A very few of his early stylistic and sound choices I wanted back in the text. Towards the end, the rewrite improved the text.

The imagination and wonder are relatively rich for his sophomore publication outing. It flips the genders on the old Pygmalion tale, albeit following George Bernard Shaw's version, more than Ovid's. 

What makes it work is how he makes us care. We want her to succeed, which makes the tragedy sting.

Deepfakes or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and [Insert Your Verb] the Ai in Art

 

I'm interested in chatter about AI than the product itself. The primary problem is that there's no mind behind it. The mind behind the work is part of why I read, why I watch, why I take in any kind of media. I want to know how others think. The mind behind the writing is what makes a work powerful.

Experimental writing is vibrant if people put thought into it. If not, it's a tome/tomb of half-legible graffiti. Dear writer, please don't waste people's time pondering something you didn't time to ponder yourself. AI? Uh, no thanks.

One person did almost get me to buy into their thinking, and I was instantly riveted because, wow, this is actually a new thought, unblindered by cult politics, but it usually breaks down within a few paragraphs.

An example of non-AI that knocked me out immediately: A kid was supposedly falling off the cliff, but there was an obvious place to put your foot. Put your foot there! Good god, man, put your foot there and climb out!

Imagine a string of such incidents, idiocies--minor or major. Does AI discriminate, choose what might work well in this instance? Or will be as likely to select the problematic as the brilliant? The accidental juxtapositions might create fascinating, but will the parts connect? If what you do can be replaced by AI, then you will be replaced.

Here's the paradox. I don't oppose repurposing words. Good art could be produced by planting a mind behind the AI. However, the people who would want to use AI are not the people who can make good art. They want short cuts. Rather, to make good art out of AI, you'd have to oppose it. You'd have to be willing to put in the same amount of time to sculpt words as if you spent the time writing them yourself. It is only by critical thinking that the work of AI can have any value.

I discussed John Hughes's work here,which has relevance here. He, however, did his own selecting, so seems a better choice than leaving it to something else, but so long as a mind orders the material it might, in theory, be worthy of the term "art."

It's hard enough to order one's own words, let alone someone else's. I don't oppose art made through AI, but it will be hard to make it yours.

This is interesting, but way too long. Yet they come up with some interesting uses of AI in media, but it remains in a grey area (the interesting stuff was name-dropping famous older actors whose looks may be rewound to earlier version):

Ursula K. Le Guin on Novels and Good Novels

 "In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it. Finally, when we’re done with it, we may find—if it’s a good novel—that we’re a bit different from what we were before we read it, that we have been changed a little, as if by having met a new face."

--Ursula K. Le Guin, "Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness"