127: sf, slavery and sleepily

So how do I get published?  First surely I must write something worth publishing.  I’ve been reading a lot of science fiction recently and it’s definitely a literary genre with a mass of potential.  Fantasy and reality complement each other to create a unique exciting o scary world that should be routed in what might scientifically be possible (or if it’s impossible it must be internally consistent).  And in the course of my feverish childlike research I’ve discovered that sci-fi is a derogatory term for science fiction pulp trash literature.  The respectful term for science fiction literature literature is sf.  SF is where the good stuff is to be found.  Luckily for novices like me some bright spark has had the idea of putting together the sf masterworks series of books.  I recon I could make a bloody good shot at writing and getting published a sf novel.

The best science fiction is set in the future but is really about the time we live in today; it uses its future setting as a kind of reductio ad absurdum.  My favourite film of the moment is Wall-E; everything about this film is perfect, but I won’t go on about it right now.  However it is clearly showing a possible future extrapolated from caricatured aspects of contemporary life (waste, pollution, selfishness, self-absorption) and uses science fiction trappings to tell a moving story (robots reminding humans how to live and love).  In my opinion Wall-E is successful as animation, sound art, drama, literature and science fiction.  It also, like Red Dwarf, has no aliens and a massive ship drifting in space but I digress.

Ideas are formulating and have been for some time, and they are just starting to bear fruit (genetically modified future fruit).  Two of my favourite non-science fiction books are slave narratives written by freed or escaped American slaves.  These wonderful, awful books are Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass.  The format provides me with a historical template to use in my slowly forming sf universe.  One of slavery, oppression, suppression, trade, genocide, abolition, Universal Declaration of Rights, and continued modern slavery under different forms, names and in faraway lands... in space.  It gives me the scope to address vitally important issues such as communities recovering from past enslavement, child soldiers in Africa, enslaved women in the Islamic world, debt slaves in Asia and human trafficking (especially into the West where slavery is supposed to have been eradicated).  The wide range of subjects also allows a framework to build a wide setting of space and time in which events happen.  If treated sensitively, and if I am successful in writing a story of the quality I think I can manage, I may even do some good for the world (raise a bit of money for charity...).  Also the sf setting means I can let my imagination run away and keep the story entertaining instead of preachy.  And if I feel like it I could forge ahead into a future utopia free from slavery.

Meanwhile a running theme returns:  I’m too tired to do write anymore.  I literally have forgotten the start of a sentence by the time I am half way through.  That last paragraph about science fiction and slavery was probably an embarrassingly illiterate babble, but even if I haven’t communicated it properly the idea is solid.  I have written what could either be a stand-alone prologue, or the start of an opening chapter.  It’s been redrafted, pored over and read multiple times (all by me), and the verdict is in: the idea holds promise and what I have written so far is excellent.  The odd sentence needs a tweak, but all in all it is fluid prose, mature, establishes a literary style, and provides a hook.

Pass me Foundation by Isaac Asimov, or my notebook, and I’ll get reading or writing as sleep draws in.  Stop.

Block chop 92: dreaming

I am asleep now.  I am dreaming about lots of pairs of small shoes going into white numbered compartments, over and over and over again for all eternity.  I am dreaming about the rubbery jelly on the top of decent pâté.  I’m dreaming about top hats and sunshine and peacocks and aortic ventricles and semolina and topological mapological diagrammatical landscapes.  I am dreaming about dust and fluff and lint and hair balls.  I am dreaming about sausage dogs and hamsters and Ginster’s and the Borrowers.  I am dreaming about train wrecks and injuns and cattle rustlers and the clap doctor.  I am dreaming about protein and entropy and opposites and diverticulitis.  I am dreaming about stopping at the red light and going on the green.  I am dreaming about Saturday night and second cousins and neon lights.  I am dreaming about discothèques and bibliothèques and j'ai mal à la tête.  I am dream about bottle tops and tank tops and bottle rockets and top trumps.  I am dreaming about hostility and pregnancy and turpentine and turgidity and complexity.  I am dreaming about book signings and sewing machines and doing a sexy little dance in exchange for scraps of food.  I am dreaming about driving a minibus up the side of a building to drop off Krazy Kat and Ignatz at the do re mi factory in the top branch of Dolly Parton’s elbow scrag.  I am dreaming about rearranging the pages of books to make new and exciting works of fiction in a way that could never really work.  I am dreaming about feet with holes in them and crunchy twiglet sticks where the toes should be.  I am dreaming about protruding hairs from foreheads, palms and nose tips catching fire and illuminating Pluto brighter than it has ever known, allowing the first small flourish of microscopic life to gasp into existence from agitated non-biological chemical reactions, before the hair flames extinguish themselves and the a frozen death returns to the minor planet.  I am dreaming about a smallholding of pomegranate mice doctors devouring forceps by the pound instead of storing them carefully in the drawer, as they have been told to do, repeatedly.  I am dreaming about stacking a car battery on a teetering tower of slightly soggy digestive biscuits in order that I may stand upon it and change the light bulb in the tertiary landmass adjacent to my grandfather’s commode.  I am dreaming about dealing crack on the stoop from the corner of 51^st and 4^th in the hood of Keighley, West Yorkshire where the mome raths outgrabe and spend too much time fiddling with a letter opener instead of using the thumb and forefinger in a simple yet wholly ineffective method of opening a tin of beans.  I am dream about Winston Churchill massaging my buttocks, with the tusk of a narwhal and the trotter of a suckling pig, as an ingenious method of distracting attention from the growing crisis at the Suez Canal.  I am dreaming that I have woken up and put tissue boxes on my hands and feet to protect me from the important downstairs tumble I must complete before the 17:10 deadline.  I am dreaming about seductive photography illustrating sights I will never see except through visual Braille as a blind Saudi thief who no longer feels the need to collect pretty coloured seashells.  I am dreaming about sitting in a tree, well it’s more of a squat really, and I am dreaming about it and squatting in a sort of sitting position in a tree.  I am dreaming about forty-eight and score twenty-two to nil at the challenge rodeo radio coverage.  I am dreaming about ever deceasing circles of water torture instigated in order to extract vital information about the formation of Vittel ice crystals and there reductive cure of baldness, cronery and apathy of the first degree.  I anmdoi cdernmam abouiuts an arrskngemetn of as oj anterfermian tompomopomop tom pomo po mop. AM deemin abnut top yut ronton nut.

Beep beep beep beep.