to the Moon, Alice!

Alright, as you've probably noticed, I don't link a lot of stuff here. I like my blog tidy if I can manage it. That, and I'm a writer, so I feel obligated to create my own material instead of pawning off other folk's stuff.

I am going to make an exception.

If I were teaching right now (in a classroom...since I guess we're all teachers in a way), I would make my students watch this.

I love it not just because it targets conspiracy theorists, the bane of every historian. I love it because it is an example of how our perceptions can be manipulated. Even people who know we went to moon probably never thought about the fact that in 1969, going to the moon was actually easier than faking it.

Of Pirate Pasts and Starry Futures

One of my favorite toys growing up was a Playmobil pirate ship. That ship was so well built that one time when a repairman came to the house, it so captured his imagination that he got down on his hands and knees on the floor next to me to better examine it. My father often speculates that that ship may have sparked my later interest in history, which in turn led me to an MA, several years of teaching, and above all, a desire to write fiction inspired by history.

One thing's for sure: I played the hell out of it. A young child is a devastating force, harder on a ship than rounding the Horn. My hands were like a tiny Scylla and Charybdis, eventually knocking away the beautiful canvas sails and losing a goodly number of parts.

With the sails gone, my older brother suggested that the ship might be powered by some kind of water-jet action, pulling water in the front and shooting it out the back. We were an imaginative bunch even then.

The water-propulsion idea appealed to my little mind because then the ship could go where it wanted, not worrying about how the wind was blowing. This, I think, encapsulates the difference between how a child thinks and how an adult thinks.

A child wants to get somewhere fast and in a world of automobiles and instant gratification (or, since this was the '80s, near-instant gratification), they see life as a Point A to Point B kind of deal. Anything else is a detour and a distraction.

Life isn't so simple, though. We often have to tack in life, to go one direction when our goal is in another, hoping that when we drop anchor we'll be where we want to be.

As a writer, I especially appreciate wind as a motive power. It creates an inherent challenge for the characters to overcome. Challenges are crucial to fiction. I realized this after I started reading Patrick O'Brian's work. The wind or 'weather gauge' is a topic of much discussion, a potent force in the novels. The novels become exciting precisely because the heroes can't just aim their ship, hit a button, and arrive where they want to go.

This same principle is what makes the Dread Empire's Fall series by Walter Jon Williams so awesome. Dread Empire's Fall has a lot in common with Patrick O'Brian's work, even though it's science fiction.

Walter Jon Williams decided not to introduce any technology that wasn't backed by scientific theories of today. This meant no warp drives, no hyper space, and above all, no 'grav plating' that magically creates gravity without disrupting the ship's course.

What Williams did instead was use basic physics to explain his starships. Instead of grav plating, the characters rely on the ship's acceleration to provide gravity, This meant the ships were designed so that the nose or front of the ship was at the characters' heads and the engines were below their feet. It also meant that any time the ship made a hard course change or acceleration, the characters had to run to belt in or be thrown around like clothes in a dryer. On a wider scale, ships without warp engines have to  follow narrow courses that utilize the slingshot effect of planetary and solar orbits. This created an inherent limitation to the battlefield, just as the weather gauge effected ships.

Rather than shying away from physics, Williams used them to make a riveting story.

I often credit Williams and O'Brian with growing me as both a writer and a person. Wind and gravity aren't impediments, they are challenges that can be overcome and utilized. This attitude goes far beyond writing. I strive, whenever I encounter something frustrating, to tell myself:

This, too, is a challenge.

Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. And when it doesn't, well...that's a challenge, too, isn't it?

Past Guilt

One of the things about living in Florida is a breathless anticipation of autumn. In February I start noticing on Facebook all my northern friends (‘Tundra-dwellers’ to us Floridians) asking when spring will arrive. Here, starting in late July, we start wondering when fall will get here. Well, she’s finally getting here and we can’t wait. Less humidity, less burning sun, less sweaty backs when we get out of the car.

 

                On a totally unrelated note, I’ve been tinkering with an online game after watching my wife play a console game. Both were fantasy. Both irritated me. The irritation stemmed from their choice of aesthetic. Both games were trying, I suspect, to avoid this formula:

Fantasy = Medieval Earth + Elves.

                I should laud them. I mean, I’m all about creativity. Make your own path. Make the genre yours.

                Only I don’t like it. I couldn’t put my finger on it but those vaguely contemporary-looking clothes and weird architecture kind of bothered me.

I only realized recently why I don’t like it. It bothers me because deep down, the reason I like fantasy is because of my strong, almost fetishistic obsession with the medieval ages. The truth is, I’ve always sought out fantasy because high quality games and books and movies about the middle ages are so rare.

                This would also explain why I went and got a couple of history degrees. In the end, my thesis may not have been about the middle ages, but it was medieval history which got me interested in history to begin with. (I also suspect I didn’t write a medieval thesis because I knew I’d be sick of my thesis topic by the end. And I was.)

                Which brings us to my third and final tangent. As I reread Le Morte D’Arthur, I thought a lot about my obsession with the medieval ages, which goes back to when I was ten or so. As a child, I more or less ignored the plight of women, peasants, and ethnic minorities such as Jews.

                Now that I’m older, I have to quiet the historian in me to enjoy these books. I have to rekindle that romantic fool, the antiquarian. Antiquarians are often ridiculed by historians, but fact is, nostalgia for the past was a driving feature behind men like Tennyson and Lovecraft, so it can’t be all bad.

                It’s funny because there’s a certain shame in liking a brutal period in history. Once when I told an older (white) woman about my interest in history, she got excited and told me about her interest in the Antebellum South. She loved those southern belles and their dresses.

                Then pain flashed across her face.

                “But slavery was awful.”

                This immediately put me in mind of my obsession with knights—and my childhood blindness to the peasants.

                I smiled. “Of course it was. But you can still like the dresses.”

                Years later, I encountered a strange sort of epilogue to this story. I was teaching American History I (1492-1866). It was a night class full of professionals who’d came back for a degree. There were a lot of African American students in the class.

                I was on my antebellum lecture, which usually engages students of both races but reverberates with black students especially. My powerpoint reached a slide about the gross disparity between how the planter class lived versus everyone else. Naturally, I had a picture of a woman in a bright, voluminous dress with more ruffles than woman.

                An older black woman looked up from her notes. She’d made it clear from previous discussions that her ancestors were slaves. Her husband, a much older fellow, was born a sharecropper. Here was someone whose family were victims of those same southern belles, someone fully aware of how unfair the South was, antebellum or postbellum.

After staring at the picture, she heaved a sigh. “I love those dresses. They’re so beautiful.”

                “They really are,” I agreed with a smile.