Surface thoughts

So, Wonder Wife and I are currently watching Surface, an unsuccessful 2005 science-fiction series pulled after one season. We operate at the whim of Netflix streaming and have found a surprising number of shortrun sci-fi series that we wish had had more episodes - Alphas, Outcasts, The Dresden Files, Nova, and Flash Forward among them - but this is not about the serendipity of tripping over a cancelled series that you like.

Surface centers on the interaction between a few people - a California oceanographer, a Lousiana good ol' boy, and North Carolina teen - and a new underwater species: some sort of large vertebrate with an electrical charge and an active lifestyle that involves eating dogs, sharks, whales, boats, and so on. With a bit of a Close Encounters vibe, these civilians come into conflict with shadowy government agents who have their own agenda regarding these creatures.

We're only halfway through the show's fifteen episodes, but we've been having a rollicking good time. There's technobabble science, high-seas adventure, conspiracy espionage, and interpersonal drama in pretty equal measure, with decent pacing and appealing characters. It's not a great show, but it certainly is solid entertainment.

What's noteworthy is that for me it puts lie to the idea that Aquaman is a hard character to write for.

This show is all about something coming up from the depths of the ocean; the core of the show is  a sea-monster, for cryin' out loud. And is sure has a lot of watery set pieces: among them, we've had a research submarine expedition, the carrier Ronald Reagan and a military sub in the Arctic, spear-fishers under an offshore rig in the Gulf of Mexico, a pickup-creature chase along a river, and a jerry-rigged bathysphere being lowered from an outlaw salvage ship. And those are just the scenes with the main cast: the sea-monster teasers have taken us all over the world.

And yet, much of the show plays out like any television thriller: scientists work in labs, senators meet in conference rooms, agents drive SUVs, children get dropped of with ex-spouses, cell phone calls are made and answered, pins are placed on large maps in cluttered situation rooms, and characters share beers while assessing their chances. While the plot is ocean-driven and the show ocean-centric, nothing ever feels ocean-bound.

So why is Aquaman seen to be so limited? Just because he is an ocean-based hero, that doesn't mean he can't ever function on land. Almost half the world's population lives within 100 miles of the ocean, and if you add the navigable rivers there's even more. Think about how many world-class cities are ports: New York, Boston, San Francisco, London,  Shanghai, Singapore, Rotterdam, Tokyo, and on and on. Granted, Aquaman's probably not going to be crossing the Sahara or parachuting into Siberia, but there's a lot of world that is still reasonably open to him from a plot perspective, and he doesn't have to stay submerged to be effective.

Aquaman is a marine mammal, not a fish - he can come up on shore, look for information, contact sources, visit an old friend, and yes, even engage the enemy on their own turf. The major action scenes in an Aquaman story, as in Surface, should certainly be on the water - getaway speedboats, island hideaways, cruisers remaining in international waters, and so forth - but nothing keeps Arthur Curry from being a force to be reckoned with on dry land. He still packs a punch like a ramming whale, right?

I gotta check Netflix again. Are we sure he didn't have a show for even one season?

Writing bookends

So, my regard and esteem for Lester Dent and his creation, pulp superman Doc Savage, goes without saying. He's right up there with Walter Gibson and The Shadow, and Paul Ernst and The Avenger as far as ripping yarns go. Besides being a superstar among pulp writers, Dent also left behind an instructional legacy, known variously as his Master Fiction Plot, Pulp Fiction Master Plot, or Master Plot Formula. In a compact 1400-word treatise, Dent explains "exactly where to put everything" in a 6,000 word pulp story and asserts that no story of his written to these specifications ever failed to sell. You can find the full formula online various places, such as here and here, but here's the gist:

What exquisite minimalism - what a sense of clarity and purpose.  If you were churning these out by the briefcaseful for a penny a word, that kind of focus must have helped, I am sure. In any case, it worked for Dent, and we have a great pile of adventure tales as a result.

At the other end of the scale from Dent (sideways, not upwards into literature) we find Harry Stephen Keeler, the Dickens to Dent's Hemingway.

A contemporary of Dent, Keeler was mainly a mystery writer; although he did cut his eye teeth in the pulps as a writer and editor, his novels were published by mainstream houses. But what novels they were, routinely running to 500 or more pages, with complicated, surreal plots and scores of characters, and... well, here, take a look at a sample for yourself (courtesy of the Harry Stephen Keeler Society):

For it must be remembered that at the time I knew quite nothing, naturally, concerning Milo Payne, the mysterious Cockney-talking Englishman with the checkered long-beaked Sherlockholmsian cap; nor of the latter's "Barr-Bag" which was as like my own bag as one Milwaukee wienerwurst is like another; nor of Legga, the Human Spider, with her four legs and her six arms; nor of Ichabod Chang, ex-convict, and son of Dong Chang; nor of the elusive poetess, Abigail Sprigge; nor of the Great Simon, with his 2163 pearl buttons; nor of--in short, I then knew quite nothing about anything or anybody involved in the affair of which I had now become a part, unless perchance it were my Nemesis, Sophie Kratzenschneiderwümpel--or Suing Sophie!

I first encountered Keeler in Bill Prinzini's 1982 Gun in Cheek, a commentary on "alternative" mystery writers, and was captivated. His books are almost impossible to get: I can remember requesting one through interlibrary loan after I found it in the catalog of the University of Chicago library - one of my first legitimate uses of the internet ever - although web resources like the Keelerite Society are making it a bit easier. Each book is an investment, however - in time, effort, and maybe a little bit of your sanity.

Keeler called his technique of plotting webwork and like Dent, he left us the formula. Unlike Dent, his treatise The Mechanics (and Kinematics) of Web-Work Plot Construction runs to about 23,000 words. You can read the whole thing here, but let me summarize it with just the first five figures, showing the development of a simple webwork plot:

And some explanation:

Now we may, thanks to the removal of the rigid space yardstick from the vertical extent of our diagram, picture our last diagram, which showed how Dr. Phineas Tanneyday bought a $10,000 Vindelinus for a nickel, a little more completely yet, thus [Figure 5] which shows the old incident n which is vitally turning off the careers of both the Vindelinus (A) and Dr. Tanneyday (B), being itself the resultant of two incidents, n-1 in the life of the Vindelinus and n-2 in the career of the Doctor. Let us say, in fact, that n-1 was where an auctioneer, ordered to dispose, at the best price, of the books in the library of an old ex-brewer, sold the Vindelinus (with several hundred other valueless volumes) to a second-hand dealer; had he not done so, the book might have continued to A'; i. e., to have gathered dust in his mansion or even to have been taken to Europe by the old man's widow who decided to go back to Germany to live.

As for incident n-2, Dr. Tanneyday may have been told that afternoon by a friend that some Greek or Italian nickel show in the polyglot district of Halsted near Madison needed an old man to take tickets in the afternoon, for which they would pay $7 a week, and he may have been hurrying over there to get-the position instead of drowsing (B-B'), as was his wont in the afternoons, in the reading room of the Public Library.

See? It's just that simple!

One of my goals this summer is to pull off a couple of those 6,000 word stories for practice - maybe one each in the "adventure, detective, western and war-air" genres that Dent himself lists. Perhaps after warming up with those, I could tackle a web-work novel, but that might be better left for NaNoWriMo.

It should be a piece of cake: I have the recipe.

More on scribbling

So, I made some hopefully-not-too-snarky remarks on the Other Blog on some public writing in my neighborhood. That response concerned an A-frame sign on a sidewalk, but there is a growing and nigh-ubiquitous (at least on Facebook) idiom: the occasionally-clever and frequently-flat e-card aphorism. Any number of DIY sites allow you to create these; here's the example at hand today:

This showed up in some stream or other of mine, probably Facebook. It's mildly clever, in that ain't-I-naughty kind of way. But a lack of parallel structure throws it off.

The prose couplet starts off with two distinct singulars being made equivalent: childhood punishment and adult pleasure. Nice opposition there, on two levels. But these two singular concepts are modified by the same plural possessive: our. I guess I can go with that, perhaps, if we conceive of each of these as representing a universal or an ideal; but this universal is then given two plural manifestations - naps and spankings - and the introductory phrase for example leads us to believe there are even more. This is not a case of a Platonic ideal, then.  So let's revise to get some parallelism:

It's funny how our childhood punishments are now our adult pleasures. For example, taking naps and spankings.

Okay, but I think we can polish even more. "To be" - in the original is and in the revision are - as the main verb can almost always be improved upon. How about we take are now and make it become, a slightly more active verb, adding a nuance of process to the meaning at the same time:

It's funny how our childhood punishments become our adult pleasures. For example, taking naps and spankings.

Okay, one more thing: the gerunds (the -ing verb form acting as a noun) in the short list of examples are mismatched. In the first, the person doing the taking is the one getting punished or experiencing pleasure; in the second, the person doing the spanking is an outside agent - not the experiencing party we are most concerned with. If we modify the last element, we can clear this up and get another nice two-word opposition to close with:

It's funny how our childhood punishments become our adult pleasures. For example, taking naps and getting spanked.

The taking-getting opposition is not just a fillip; it clears up the concept and creates a more consistent rhythm as well: two anapests with a beat between.

Demonstrably better.

With that, it's time for this pest to take a nap.

Funny, animals

My mind rolled around today to a somewhat geeky subject that I have been pondering on and off for some time, and that is the question of how to anthropomorphize animals in fiction. I'm not talking about literary style or descriptive language but of rules of internal logic.

This isn't a fully-formed idea yet, but it seems to me that like, say, time-travel, you need to have your system down before you build your little furry cultures and the stories that happen in them. I mean, you can approach time travel in a couple of different ways: that the past already happened and any attempt to change it is doomed to failure, or that when you change the past you create a new time-stream and a new reality. There are different variations and nuances, of course, but these two schemes seems to comprise the main divisions of that trope.

So, for anthropomorphic animals, it seems to me that we are also faced with a choice between two main categories. In one, prey animals are the human-like protagonists and predators are more like monsters; in the other, predators are the human-like protagonists and prey animals are, well, still animals.

In a story about a brave and noble band of deer making their way through the forest to a new grazing area under the guidance of a stalwart leader and a sage elder, the wolves might be demonic pursuers providing a constant threat. In a story about a bold and heroic pack of wolves on a quest under the guidance of a courageous leader and a scarred elder, the deer would be... deer?  I guess it's just hard for me to see how to make both the deer and the wolves people, since the one group routinely gets eaten by the other in a totally amoral, course-of-nature way. How could our wolf-warriors meet deer, negotiate with them, ask directions from them, and then eat them, without destroying the anthropomorphism?

It seems much the same in a household situation. If the mice are my characters, with little mice families and mice mayors and mice police and whatnot, the cat must be like a beast that lurks outside of town. But if my character is a philosopher-cat commenting on life from his windowsill lyceum, I don't know how to make mice the students that she just happens to occasionally devour.

Of course, this might be more about my limitations as a writer than the demands of logic. Aesop and Rudyard Kipling, of course, had talking animals that were still animals, but those stories were deliberately fabulous. If I recall correctly, in The Secret of NIMH, the owl is both a source of ancient wisdom and a predator; but Mrs. Brisby's interactions with him echo more to me the typical interactions between a hero and a dragon than a conversation between two people. And Brian Vaughn has lions and monkeys and deer all talking to each other even as some are eating the others in the great Pride of Baghdad, but that wasn't so much about anthropomorphizing animals as it was about animamorphizing the reader, I think.

So maybe what I am really talking about is a restriction I see on the construction of conventional genre stories using animal protagonists - when heroic fantasy or science fiction or picaresque adventure happens to feature people-like critters instead of people. The sort of rules-making that preoccupies me would certainly make it easier to write those stories, although it wouldn't necessarily make the stories any better. But I guess it wouldnt becessarily make them worse, either.

Remember, the Fantastic Mr. Fox ate chickens.