I am off by various winding paths to the East, where I will serve as toastmaster at the upcoming Nebula Weekend.

See you there, I hope.  In the meantime, posting here may be on the spotty side.

It’s Mothers’ Day here in the States, and Fêtes des Méres in Canada.  Mexico had Dia de las Madres a few days ago.

Just like everybody’s got a Mom, it looks like every country has a Mothers’ Day.

Here’s a photo of my mom before I ever knew her, in the years just before the Second World War.   She is a newly-minted schoolteacher embarking on a career of teaching in one- and two-room schools in northern Minnesota.

(You can tell it’s Minnesota by the piles of snow in the corners.)

I have to say that I’m impressed by her style.  It was nothing I noticed at the time, but in all my pictures of her, she’s always the best-dressed person in the room.

She never had the money to buy swank clothes or expensive jewelry.  But she always knew how to wear what she had.

She’d worked hard to get this far.  Her father died when she was young, and the house in which she lived was never completed.  She was raised in a cult, which she always described as full of bigotry, superstition, and righteousness, but (along with her brothers and sisters) managed a successful escape.  (She hated religion all her life.)  Schools in her area only carried her through the eighth grade, but she found one of FDR’s educational programs that allowed her to board with another family so that she could go to high school.   She worked as a domestic in order to get through college.

School teachers were among the few positive influences she had when growing up, so of course she became one.  Some of the rural schools had a “teacherage,” where the teacher lived, but some didn’t, and my mom boarded with neighboring families and slept on straw mattresses.  At Toimi, one of the schools where she worked has been preserved as a museum.

She met my father after the Second World War and married him shortly thereafter.  Most teachers of that period were forced to resign if they married, but my mom was allowed to keep her job only because there were so very few qualified teachers willing to work in the area.   Years later, when she became pregnant, she was forced to resign.  Because schoolteachers weren’t supposed ever to have had sex, or something.

As a result of this policy, I was partly raised by a whole gang of schoolteachers, friends of my mother, who had no children of their own.  Where did I find the models for the intelligent, practical, independent women in my books?  I didn’t have to look very far.

My mother was a deeply practical person, which is why it was so surprising that she supported my eccentric choice of career (which I made when I was something like four or five).  Since my literary journey was so far outside her own experience, she had nothing to contribute by way of advice or counsel, except that she made me go to summer school in the sixth grade to learn typing.

My father was struck in his mid-fifties by an aneurism, and never fully recovered.  My mother devoted twenty-plus years of her life to looking after my semi-invalid father, and kept him happy and stress-free and in reasonable health.   After he died at the age of 78, my mom essentially retired from life.  She didn’t want to go anywhere, see anybody, engage in any activities.  It was a life that would have murdered me with boredom, but it suited her, and she lived just as she liked until she passed away a few years ago, at the age of 92.

I can’t send her a card today, or take her out for prime rib at her favorite restaurant.  Consider this post a thank-you to the ambitious schoolteacher who bore me, and who made me take typing in the sixth grade.

I made the mistake of eating popcorn, and broke a tooth on a popcorn hull.

An early-morning call on my dentist would seem to be in order.

UPDATE:  The call on my dentist proved to be mid-afternoon, but the results were pretty much what I’d expected.  Yes, I need a crown.  (Of course, I’ve always thought that . . . )

Since I’m out of town next week for the Nebula Weekend, I now have a temporary filling.  And my mouth feels weird.

I thought I’d bring to your attention the fact that my friend Daniel Abraham’s latest fantasy, The King’s Blood, is now available wherever fine books are sold.

This is the second book of Daniel’s excellent Dagger and Coin series, and continues the series’ tradition of luring you onto what seems to be familiar fantasy terrain, then drawing aside the curtain to show you that you’ve been in some freaking unexpected weird place all along.

After you’ve finished buying all my stuff, you should definitely buy this.

This is one of a series of essays written on recently republished works.  This one is about City on Fire (newly available in ebook form via Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords).  Since City on Fire is a sequel to Metropolitan, it might be best to start with the three big essays I wrote on that work.

Are we up to speed now?  Good.

City on Fire was, firstly, an accident.   Secondly, it was very difficult.  Thirdly, it led to catastrophe.

It was an accident because I’d only intended to write a single book, but when I’d generated hundreds of pages and only got through the first few paragraphs of my outline, I decided to end the first book and write To Be Continued on it.

And then I had to hire a lawyer to threaten my publisher, and eventually got my book back and sold it to another publisher, and that all took time.   I spent part of the time writing the third Drake Maijstral book, which I still owed Tor on an old contract.  (I was paid so little for those books that I couldn’t afford to write the final book for what they would have paid me to finish it.  So Metropolitan and City on Fire ended up supporting me when I wrote Rock of Ages.)

City on Fire was hard because, well, it was.  It was just as hard as Metropolitan, only more so because it was much longer.  The book clocks in at 185,000 words, nearly 500 pages in the hardback edition, and was by far the longest book I’d written to that date.  I delivered it a year late, which must have had my editor wondering if it would ever arrive at all.

And worse, those 185,000 words only carried me about halfway through the original outline.  So at least one more book will be necessary in order to wrap up the story, and maybe more than one.

The first book in the series was about Making the Revolution.  That’s common in SF and fantasy.  In fiction, wicked rulers get overthrown all the time by pure-hearted revolutionaries.

City on Fire, though, was about Making the Revolution Work, and you almost never see that in our field.  In Lord of the Rings, you never actually get to see Aragorn running the kingdoms he’s inherited.  In The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, the Professor dies after the revolution, and Mannie and Wyoh retire to make babies or something.  Even Mike the computer retires.  Actual politics was beneath these people.  They might get their hands dirty.

Well, I thought there was a certain amount of cowardice in that.  Tell us what it’s like, I thought.  Show us what happens when idealism and/or ideology run up against reality.  Show us what kind of compromises have to be made in order to make at least some of your agenda possible.

Suppose you are, say, Nicaragua.  You’ve overthrown the tyrant, and you have an ambitious social agenda.   But there are counterrevolutionaries financed by foreign powers, and you get invaded, and in order to win the war you have to make alliances with unsavory characters, or impose a tyranny, or simply kill a lot of the people you’re trying to help.

So that’s the story of City on Fire.  It’s about how not to lose your soul when you exercise power.

I was probably halfway through writing the book when Metropolitan appeared, and I was able to see how the public was misreading my fantasy as science fiction, and why.  I saw that readers were obsessing about the Shield, which I had thought was completely trivial.

And so I did my best to fix it.  I rethought the whole project.  I adjusted the mythology.  I changed my original ending.  When the project is finally over, Book III or Book IV or Book V, the reader will find out about the Shield, about plasm, about the Ascended, all of the stuff I thought I didn’t have to explain because you don’t have to explain stuff in fantasy.

That’s not in City on Fire.  That isn’t what City on Fire is about.  But I could hint at what was going on.  There’s a reason plasm begins to sing when it hasn’t before.  Taikoen the Hanged Man has become part of a much bigger story.  And the Dreaming Sisters are going to be huge.

The Dreaming Sisters, I seem to remember, were a late addition, and got retconned into the story.  They’re an embodiment of the mystical, fantasy side of plasm, and their Imagoes— a kind of Metropolitan Tarot— are a way of reminding the reader who and where the story is.

The next book will be called Heaven in Flames.  For quite a while now I’ve thought of the book as a duty I owe to my readers for having led them this far into the story.  Now that I’ve re-read the first two for the first time ever, I’ve grown quite enthusiastic about returning to that world.  We’ll have to see when that can happen.

When I delivered City on Fire, I was exhausted.  I badly needed a break.  It was very hard working in this world, and after all I’d only intended to write a single book.  I never planned to Commit Trilogy, but now it looked as if I was going to have to.

But sales of the series were, pretty much, dismal.  Hardback sales held up, but paperback sales went into the toilet.

This wasn’t my fault.  This had to do with the wholesale catastrophe of the Consolidation of the IDs.

See, paper books have a distribution chain.  The publishers ship to distributors.  The distributors ship to retailers.  The retailers sell the books.

Back in 1990, there were over 200 Independent Distributors in this country, the people who put the books and magazines in the racks at your local supermarkets, drugstores, and stationery stores.  For various complicated reasons these distributors became “in play” in the early 1990s, and they began to merge or subject one another to takeover attempts.  I’m not sure how many IDs there are now, but I think it’s less than five.

Because they were “in play,” the IDs ended up being owned by speculators and raiders, not book people.  In fact, most of the book people got fired.

There was a certain folk wisdom in the IDs.  The “rack jobbers”— the guys who actually put the books in the racks at the store— knew to put more science fiction in the drugstore near the university.  They knew to put more romance titles in the supermarkets in the middle-class neighborhoods. They knew where the audience for each kind of book was, because they saw what was selling in each location.

The IDs’ new owners, because they didn’t know the business at all, decided to discard all this arcane folk-wisdom crap as unscientific, and to operate their businesses through centralized data management.   (Yeah.  They did.  And I can hear you rolling your eyes,  as it were.  And that’s because you are smarter than they ever were.  You know exactly where this is going, don’t you?)

Before the consolidation, you’d see a fair amount of variety in the paperback racks at the local store.   There’d be some bestsellers, and then there’d be westerns, and romance, and SF, and action-adventure, and so on.  After the consolidation, what you’d see mainly were bestsellers.   For instance the top row would be Nora Roberts’ latest, and the row below would be Nora Roberts’ other books.  Next to Nora would be Stephen King.  And next to King would be Robert Ludlum, or whoever.  There might be a few midlist paperbacks over in one corner, or there might not.

Most midlist authors, which I definitely was, were cut out of half the U.S. domestic market represented by the IDs.  Paperback sales went into the sub-basement, and pretty much stayed there.   And I don’t think the emphasis on bestsellers helped the bestsellers much, either, though I could be wrong.

(Actually those sales figures from 1996, disastrous at the time, now look pretty good, here in 2012.  I could make a career on those.)

The advent of the big book superstore ended up saving the midlist, because Borders and Barnes & Noble could stock all the fiction that the IDs were refusing to put on the racks.  But the huge bottleneck in distribution continued for years, when ebooks finally managed an end-run around all the distributors by going straight to the reader without having to go through an intermediary.

And while all this horrible stuff was happening in the US,  over in Britain I was being completely destroyed

I had been published all along in Britain, and while I broke no sales records, I sold profitably enough so that they kept buying the books as they came along.  And then I got a break with Metropolitan— it was going to be the first book published by Harper Voyager, a brand-new science fiction line!  Marketing muscle and massive worldwide attention would (finally) be mine!

The Voyager launch party was going to be held at the 1995 Glasgow Worldcon, and thence I traveled to be present at the event.  Along the way I stopped in London, where my editor took me out to lunch, and where I pitched City on Fire, which seemed well received.

Then I turned up at the launch party, which was held on this huge crystal-walled party barge on the River Clyde.  There was lots of food and drink and excitement.  There were fireworks.  There were great big pyramids of books.

But none of the books were mine.  Metropolitan just wasn’t there.  Instead there was the second title to be published by Harper Voyager.

I went up to my editor.  “Where’s my book?” I asked.

“Isn’t it there?” she chirped.  “I’ll have to look into this!”

The lying, deceitful little #$&()_(%.

My agent caught up with me a day or two later and told me what had happened.  “Walter,” Ralph said, “we’re in trouble.”  (He seemed to be saying that a lot during this period.)

Turned out that shortly after my meeting with my editor in London, she called Ralph and told him she wouldn’t be buying City on Fire.

Maybe I had brought a bad case of halitosis to the meeting or something.  Or I was too jet-lagged to be coherent.  But I was fucked.  Fucked.  Fucked fucked fucked fucked fucked.

I was destroyed in Britain.  It was the end of my career there.  Nobody was going to buy City on Fire or the next book, not when Voyager had the first book in print.

And of course Metropolitan never got the push that the first book of a new imprint should have got.  The book was shitcanned.  Shitcanned shitcanned shitcanned shitcanned.

It was worse than if Metropolitan hadn’t sold at all.  If Voyager hadn’t bought Metropolitan, the whole series could have been sold to another publisher, and my career in Britain could have continued.

I wasn’t published in Britain for another seven or eight years.  Which ended up being another catastrophe, but I can save that for another time.

Metropolitan and City on Fire had proved to be horrific nightmares from which I desperately needed to wake.  I needed to make an end-run around the whole system.  I needed to get my ass out of the midlist and onto the best-seller lists, because it was the only way to secure everything I’d worked for for the last twenty years, including Metropolitan.

I made my bid for the big time.  It was called The Rift.  And once again, publishers reached out to destroy me.

But more of that later.

So I finally did see the Avengers movie.  And hey, there really was a Hulk v. Loki scene of which I could totally approve.  Not as awesome as mine, but still pretty good.

If you like superhero movies, you’ll like this one.  If you don’t like superhero movies, don’t see this, because it’s like all the superhero movies you didn’t like, only more so.

But the real reason to see this movie is . . . beefcake.  There is more testosterone-packed manflesh in this film than in an NFL shower scene.  (Not that I would know about that.)  And while beefcake doesn’t zing my personal strings, if The Avengers doesn’t make the average 13-year-old schoolgirl forget all about that mopy Edward Cullen guy, I’ll eat my jockstrap.

Not that Joss Whedon didn’t forget entirely about the dudes, because there is Scarlett Johansson in a black spandex catsuit, and Mr. Whedon put aside his feminist credentials just long enough to give us many lovingly-constructed shots of Ms. Johansson’s butt.  Much appreciated by yours truly.

The plot?  It makes no sense in the same way that all superhero plots make no sense.  So just go with it.

It was surprising how many character moments found their way into such an action-packed movie.   Each character had a scene or two that established his personality before they all met and started bouncing each other.  (Except for Thor, who just sort of shows up with no explanation for what he’s doing away from Asgard.  I thought the script rather shortchanged him.)  And the scenes of the Avengers interacting provided just enough contrast and conflict to keep the scenes from being dull or predictable.

Who was my favorite Avenger?  Agent Phil Coulson, as played by Clark Gregg.  Who has been in Thor and both Iron Man films and a bunch of other Marvel stuff just being the most reasonable, supportive, intelligent non-super human being amid all the insanity, bloodshed, and chaos.   And who also shows that he knows what to do with a BFG 9000 when he’s got an evil demigod in his sights.

The film had the usual issue of balance that you see in team superhero stories, where some people are just a lot more super than others.  Hawkeye and Black Widow are so outclassed by the other members of the team that the story strains to find important things for them to do, like “turning evil” and “running away from the Hulk.”  I don’t know why they couldn’t have been replaced by, say, Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch, who come prepackaged with an interesting backstory and have much more useful powers than, oh, shooting a bow or wearing black spandex.  (And though I have appreciated Scarlett Johansson’s talents in other films, I couldn’t help but think that she wasn’t very comfortable in the role of superheroine.  And the spandex catsuit only reminded me of how much she really isn’t Diana Rigg, and how much I wanted her to be.)

Unexpected moments?  Giant flying space whales.  Never saw that coming.   Nor did I expect Iron Man to give an endoscopy to a giant flying space whale.  But wow— better him than me.

And stealing the climactic scene from The Phantom Menace?  TOTALLY UNEXPECTED.

The scenes of New York getting trashed by alien invaders?  They were just as good as the last movie you saw in which New York was trashed by alien invaders.

But to me, the most interesting thing about the movie is that Joss Whedon now has unimaginable power— more power than the Hulk, more power than Odin.  Anything he wants to do is going to get greenlighted, provided he agrees to make Avengers 2.

What will it be?  A small, personal film?  A Buffy spinoff?  Another big comic-book extravaganza?  A deeply creepy sexual fantasy crawling from out of the same disturbing midnight monster closet as Dollhouse?

Will it be the next Inception, or the next Heaven’s Gate?  It’s all in Mr. Whedon’s hands.

I haven’t seen the Avengers movie yet.  But I know how I want it to end.

How I want it to end is not with the 35-minute action scene that I know is actually there, the kind where CGI goes toe-to-toe with CGI, and CGI wins.  I’ve seen enough of those for a lifetime.  Those sorts of scenes just make me long for the days when Bogie would just shoot Major Strasser, and Major Strasser would slump to the floor, and that would be that.

So here’s my ending for The Avengers.

(LOKI and THE AVENGERS meet for their final confrontation on, I dunno, the Empire State Building or someplace.)

LOKI

You may have defeated my extradimensional alien army, but you can’t defeat me!  I’m a god!  I’m immortal!  I can’t be killed!

THOR

Actually, I talked to Odin about that . . . and that’s not exactly true.

LOKI

What do you mean, brother?

THOR

That would be foster brother.  Because you’re adopted— you’re not a god, you’re an orphaned fire giant on whom Odin took pity.

[Note clever use of actual Norse mythology.]

IRON MAN

So fire giants can be killed?

THOR

(hefting hammer)

Pretty much.

(Captain America raises his shield.  Hawkeye raises his bow.  Thor is about to kneecap Loki with Mjollnir when the Hulk charges onto the scene.)

HULK

Hulk . . . pissed off!

(The Hulk rips Loki’s head off and stomps it into the approximate size and shape of a Swedish pancake.)

BLACK WIDOW

Wow.  Righteous kill.

(The Hulk begins to morph back into Bruce Banner.)

HAWKEYE

I totally could have done that!

BRUCE BANNER

I’m so ashamed . . .

HAWKEYE

I could be the star of this movie!  Really!  All you have to do is give me a chance!

IRON MAN

(activates suit radio)

Pepper?  Break out the disco ball and put champagne on ice.  It’s Party Night at the Stark Mansion!

THOR

(to Iron Man)

You got bimboes on speed dial?

IRON MAN

Oh, dude.  You have no idea.

(The Avengers walk off into the sunset of a new day, or something like that.  We hear Hawkeye’s voice trailing away.)

HAWKEYE

Really!  I could totally be the star of this picture!  Just let me take down the supervillain next time!  I can do it!

CAPTAIN AMERICA

Yeah, maybe next time we’re facing the Sheriff of Nottingham and Prince John.

(all LAUGH at the wimpy archer’s expense)

HAWKEYE

Aww, guys . . .

THE END

It’s Choose Your Own Caption Day!

Being at the Secret Site last week, along with some remarks from friend of the blog Ralf, have set me thinking about life on the margins.

Those folks on that mesa-top pueblo lived there for several generations at least, and got by.  They planted crops with a digging stick, and they had to irrigate them with water carried in clay pots from a spring, but they got by.  They made tools, looked after their domestic turkeys and dogs, caught game— there were elk tracks all around, and back in bygone days there would have been buffalo— made tools, made pots, made babies.

Life wasn’t impossible.  Life was just hard.

Resources were limited.  That’s why you had small family or clan groups living on rocky outcrops, because people had to disperse in order not to use up all their resources.

At some point the whole culture dried up and went away.  Resource depletion?  Drought?  Civil war?  Nobody knows.

Certainly the climate got drier.  We can all imagine what a 50-year drought might do to, say, Los Angeles.

Near the spring that fed the Chacoans and their crops were the remains of a homesteader’s house from the 1920s.  Homesteaders got 160 acres free of charge, provided they hung around for five years and “improved” the property, generally by building a house on it.  Because I was in the company of one of the homesteader’s descendants, I knew that the homesteader ran 2500 sheep in the area.

The house was made of the same material used by the Chacoans, local stone.   A huge boulder conveniently formed one wall, with a slot carved in it for a beam to hold up the roof.  Other big rocks had been moved into formation, and the spaces between them filled in with small rocks.

Like the Chacoans, the homesteaders made some effort to control the water on their property.  Chacoans would have built check dams and other features, the homesteader put in a big water tank used by the livestock.

Aside from the livestock and maybe an automobile, the homesteaders had another big advantage: they didn’t have to worry so much about armies of their neighbors attacking them.  But their day-to-day lives weren’t that different from their predecessors.  They worked, they tended their animals, they hunted game.  Life wasn’t impossible.  Life was just hard.

I don’t think the homesteaders lasted the five years— at any rate, the property isn’t in the family now.  It wasn’t that their life was impossible, it’s that there were other opportunities for them, and they left to take advantage of them.

Which is where the 20th Century took us, from a society where 60 percent of the population lived in rural areas to where 21 percent lives today.  (And just because you live in the country doesn’t mean you live an agrarian lifestyle— I live in the country,and I don’t farm or ranch.)  39 percent lived on farms in 1900, now it’s 1 percent. And the number of commodities produced by any individual farm dropped by 75 percent— where in 1900 farms produced nearly everything the farm family needed in the way of foodstuffs, now they just produce a single crop, and sell it to corporations.

The government engineered a lot of that change, in the years after World War II.  As I pointed out in The Rift, the government (in alliance with what is now called agribusiness) made it easy to move from the farm to the cities.  They didn’t do anything as destructive as force people off the land: they just created opportunities elsewhere.  For instance, they provided college scholarships to farm youth, knowing perfectly well that college-educated young people are unlikely to move back on the farm.  Agribusiness offered its own inducements.

Rural society was more or less destroyed.  38 farmers moved away for every one who stayed.  As I also mentioned in The Rift, rural societies tend to favor apocalyptic religions because the apocalypse has already happened to them.  Those who live there now witnessed their entire culture and way of life destroyed.

When I drive to the Jack Williamson Lecture every year, I see proof of that: little ghost towns and near-ghost towns, shuttered stores and gas stations, closed post offices.  Tolar, Yeso, Ricardo, St. Vrain . . . places with more abandoned houses than there are human beings.

Yet people left those towns voluntarily, for a life that wasn’t so hard as the one they were born to.  They weren’t attracted merely by a better material lifestyle, but also educational opportunities for their children, access to medical care and elder care, contact with the wider world.

I’m glad I don’t have to make the choices the Chacoans did, or the homesteaders, or even my parents.  (My mother grew up in a farmhouse that was never actually finished, because her father died and everyone else had too much work to complete the structure.   It had a roof and a stove, and everyone made do with that.)

I’m happy for my opportunities, but seeing the Chaco Culture ruins and the old homestead makes me all too aware of how fragile it is.  I’m living now in a drought that’s been going on for 20 years, more or less, with a few wet years in the middle.  I’ve seen the changes that it’s inflicted on the landscape.  (Last year featured the biggest forest fires ever for New Mexico, Arizona, and a single wildfire in Texas consumed more land than can be found in the state of Delaware.)  And evidence suggests that climate change is only going to get worse.

I sure am tired of spending my summers breathing smoke.

And the huge boom in post-apocalyptic novels suggests there’s something in the zeitgeist that mirrors all that.  I’m old enough to remember the boom in Bomb novels, but now it’s either climate collapse or the Dictatorship of the One Percent.

So what are the odds of us, or our descendants, moving back into those homesteaders’ rock huts?  Not very high.  We’re the First World, thank God.

But straightened circumstances, high energy prices, high food prices?  Oh yeah.  Some of that will be mitigated by our increased efficiency, and by the effects of the Third Industrial Revolution.  Watching on television as billions die of starvation, disease, war, and famine?  Hey, that’s already started!  (You think last year’s revolts in the Middle East weren’t a response to higher energy and food prices for people already living in the margin?  And what’s going to happen when the new governments don’t deliver cheaper food, hmmm?  Jordan is already bankrupting itself subsidizing food and fuel.)

So yep, we all get to move closer to the margin, and some might topple off.

One thing we can be sure of, out politicians won’t be talking about any of this.  Too depressing, too real.  They’ll find something else to occupy the public’s attention, like whether illegal immigrants should be electrocuted or whether Obama eats dogs.

Sorta feels like we’re being fed canine ourselves, doesn’t it?

City on Fire has gone live on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Smashwords.

Congratulations to B&N, which actually made the book available before Amazon did.  Good work, O brick-and-mortar dinosaur!

And though you can buy the book from Smashwords, it won’t be sent to any of the Smashwords affiliates (like Kobo and iBooks) for some time.  My last four ebooks are still awaiting approval over there, and currently it’s running 3-4 weeks.  If any of you Bay Area residents would like a job proofreading for Smashwords, I’m sure they’ll set you right up.

And as you can see, I took some of y’all’s advice and created a somewhat less eye-searing cover.

I’ll post an essay about the book in the next day or two, but right now I’m kinda burned out.

Next up is The Rift, God help me.