Eugene Fischer

Author: Eugene Fischer

“Adrift” Now Online

Asimov's Science Fiction (April-May 2010)Eons ago in 2010 I had my first publication in Asimov’s, a near future SF short story about oceanic technology and global politics titled “Adrift.” I wrote the first draft as part of my Clarion application, and revised it through a haze of pain and drugs during the ten post-Clarion months I was bedridden with Crohn’s disease. I sent it out, got rejected, sent it out again, just going through the motions, the vast majority of my attention consumed by the slow struggle back towards health and the contemporaneous crumble of my long term relationship. September of 2009 found me living alone in an apartment, in a body warped beyond recognition by a long course of prednisone, wondering where the last year had gone. So when I heard from Sheila Williams that she wanted to buy this story for Asimov’s, the good news struck me as a sparkle from very far away. It was like being gifted a fragment from the life I’d thought I’d have, the one where I left Clarion with artistic momentum, wrote more stories, applied to graduate school, began to focus on having a writing career.

Now, half a decade later, I feel I’ve finally arrived at where I thought I’d be in 2009. I’m healthy, I’m writing, I have the momentum of an inspiring fiction program behind me. And in April I’ll have a new story in Asimov’s, my novella “The New Mother.” But being here inspired me to look back at where I was, to reread “Adrift.” To my eyes now–eyes that have been trained by years of graduate workshops and teaching fiction students–it is apparent how the circumstances of its creation influenced the writing. I see, in its mannered sentences, a young man struggling through pain and fear to focus on the version of himself that he hopes, in his best moments, he may still get the chance to be. I see the first examples of some themes and concerns that would recur in my writing through grad school. I see things that make me cringe, and things that make me proud of my own strength. I see the intersection of so many circumstances still echoing in my psyche that, to me, reading this story is like traveling through time. And now, five years after it was originally published, I’m offering it again to you.

Read “Adrift” online here.

The experience of being fictionalized can be like overhearing people talk about you when they don’t know you’re there. The temptation is to give what you overhear great credence, as if people would only say what they really think about you behind your back. But behind your back is also where people are most free to vent, to be peevish, unfair, sniping, and slanted; behind your back is where they are most apt to try out imprecations and outlandish opinions and, in general, to be far less generous or compassionate or accurate than they probably are. –Michelle Huneven, "You've Been Fictionalized"

Reading 2015: January

January books
Rather than record the books I read in groups of 20 as I did last year, I think this time I’m going to track my reading month by month.

  1. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon – I read Last and First Men several years ago, and quite liked it. Star Maker is a companion work, and references Last and First Men (which I think I enjoyed a bit more) several times. They aren’t novels in the traditional sense; these are philosophical fabulations of different ways human life, nonhuman life, and the universe itself could exist, stitched together with thin threads of narrative. One particularly interesting thing about Star Maker is how much time Stapledon devotes to explaining in detail concepts that have become very familiar in the last 100 years. For example, he devotes many pages of imagistic text to the changing appearance of stars as one travels closer and closer to the speed of light. The writing clearly expects a readership that’s never seen such things visually depicted. It’s rare to read cosmologically rigorous science fiction from before the space age, when these things began to be tropified, then commonly visualized. (While I own the physical copy of this book pictured above, I actually read this on my phone as an ebook, using the excellent app Marvin.)
  2. Off Course by Michelle Huneven – I read this on the strength of her previous novel Blame, which was among my favorites I read last year. Off Course is a novel of much narrower scope, following a woman with mildly fraught family relationships and an incomplete dissertation who lets a few years of her life disappear into a rural affair with a married man. An enjoyable read, but it didn’t blow me away like Blame did.
  3. Saga vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples – I could easily just repeat what I said for volume 3. I don’t follow comics the way I used to, but Saga awakens my old fervor. Like science fiction or fantasy or gorgeous artwork? Read it.
  4. On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch – The third novel by Disch I’ve read, and longer than the other two combined. This is a 1979 Bildungsroman set in a fairly recognizable satire of the future United States dominated by ecological disaster, urban economic collapse, and rural religious fundamentalism. Also, in this world, some people who sing while hooked up to a particular device can leave their bodies and psychically fly around. I find Disch’s writing fascinating, though I haven’t  been able yet to exactly articulate why. Part of it just the manifest confidence and intelligence shining through the pages; Disch doesn’t apologize, doesn’t waste any time on bashfulness, and even his expository devices operate at a sprint. He was clearly among the most technically and verbally gifted writers of his era of science fiction, and yet his fall from the modern conversation is starting to make a kind of sense to me. Not because he isn’t worth being talked about, but because so far each of his novels have come to rest in my mind as somehow amorphous. Most books I’ve read sit in my memory as a sort of solid aesthetic crystal whose facets encompass the shape of my reading experience even as the textual details fade. Disch’s books, though, have blurry borders. The moments that sparkle in the mist are dazzling, but the formlessness is somehow mildly, naggingly dissatisfying. As is this description, even to me, because I nonetheless find his books fully compelling and intend to read more.
  5. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce – Merritt left Iowa just before I arrived, and while we have many friends in common and were once both in the same reading, I don’t think we’ve ever actually met. But I thought the piece she read at our joint event was memorably great, and only ever heard good things said of her and her work during my years in Iowa City, so was excited to read her first novel. I consumed it in one go, mostly while sitting at a bar, which ended up feeling appropriate as this is a novel of sex and search for self definition set against a constant backdrop of the food service industry. This is a book that resists tidiness, moralizing, or resolution, and if you enter it expecting the glimmer of redemption to ever arc toward the horizon you will be disappointed. What’s on offer here instead is a sort of fierce snowfall, a four year blizzard of cutting fragments, each slice an attempt to figure out how to manage existing in the world.
  6. The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter – In my last year at Trinity University my attention began to swing away from physics and back toward fiction, and so I signed up for the undergraduate fiction writing workshop. My professor was Andrew Porter, a soft spoken and knowledgeable Iowa alumn who explained on the first day that he discouraged writing genre fiction in his classes, as genre fiction lacked the attention to character which he wished to cultivate. When I inevitably chose to try to prove him wrong, writing what would eventually turn into “Husbandry,” his enthusiastic reception of what I’d done completely won me over. Years later, when I wrote to let him know that one of his students had been accepted to Iowa, he could not have been more excited for me. Which is all to say: Andrew played a big role in shaping the path of my life, and I have been meaning to read this book for years. I’m kind of glad I didn’t get to it until now, though. These are quiet, unadorned stories of ordinary and largely suburban life, the conflicts mostly struggles of self definition. It is exactly the sort of writing I would have been least able to appreciate back in 2006, when I was indignantly launching zombies across the workshop table. Now though, post-MFA, I have a much greater understanding of space this kind of fiction occupies.
  7. Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill – About halfway through reading this book I realized that I had unconsciously decided, without ever previously articulating it to myself, that I would read everything Mary Gaitskill has ever published. To borrow a phrase, her writing is like an exposed nerve. Her stories are twitching and lucid and sharply felt, unsanitized and unsentimental, full of analytical language and twisting images that knot around emotions I find achingly familiar but wouldn’t have known how to begin capturing with words. This collection is an unflinching look at how impossibly, fractally complex sex and relationships are, even in circumstances where we tell ourselves they are straightforward. I think my favorites from this volume were the four part novella “The Wrong Thing” and the short story “Blanket,” which seems to me almost like an opposite direction companion piece to “A Romantic Weekend,” my favorite story from her first collection.
  8. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – I was feelingly weirdly intimidated by long novels, as though, having decided I wanted to try to read 100 books this year, I feared I would only manage it by sticking to shorter works. That seemed like the kind of avoidant psychology which can spill from its container and paralyze you, so I decided the thing to do was commit to a giant brick of a novel. Wolf Hall turned out to be the perfect choice. It’s a historical novel focusing on Thomas Cromwell, a man who became a chief aide of King Henry VIII, but in my mind it’s Game of Thrones except all the people are real and instead of blood magic there’s clever banter. It’s easy to see why this won the Man Booker prize. I couldn’t put it down, and read it nearly straight through, stopping only to sleep, and that less than I should have. I was so absorbed, when I finished it I went immediately out and bought…
  9. Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel – The sequel to Wolf Hall, which also won the Man Booker award. This book picks up right where the previous one ends, and I continued my three day Mantel binge straight through to the end. Her writing is poised, layered, funny. I feel gluttonous reading these books, and moved to stay up until sunrise finishing them, which I discover my body doesn’t handle nearly as well at 31 as it used to. So thanks for making me feel old and busted, Hilary Mantel. Jerk.

I Was Wrong: Klay Thompson Edition

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This is Klay Thompson. It turns out that he’s a really good basketball player.

Him being a really good basketball player is somewhat surprising, as–statistically speaking–he didn’t used to be. His WP48 his first three seasons were .003, .033, and .061, which are all below average. When the Warriors passed up the chance this summer to trade him for Kevin Love, I said we were going to be laughing at the team for years. But so far this season, under new head coach Steve Kerr, he’s putting up a WP48 of .221, which makes him the 25th most productive player in the entire NBA. It’s also significantly better than Kevin Love, who has somewhat struggled on his new team, the Cavaliers. Also notable, Thompson just broke the NBA record for most points in a quarter, with 37 against the Kings. No, really. He scored 37 points in a quarter.

The previous record for a quarter was 33, recorded by George Gervin of the Spurs, who did it without the benefit of a three-point line. But still. Klay Thompson is balling, and the Splash Brothers are now the best backcourt in the NBA.

So that’s me shown. At least we can all still laugh at the Thunder for the James Harden trade. He’s putting up MVP type numbers this season.

Reading 2014: Final Roundup

FullMosaic2014

My New Year’s resolution for 2014 was to read at least one book per week. I counted as a “book” any bound volume of a complete work, or digital version of the same. So books included things like novels, omnibuses of several novels, novellas published as slim volumes, graphic novels, anthologies, ebooks, or audiobooks. Things that didn’t count were single comic book issues, or individual short stories or articles. My in-progress roundups are here: 1, 2, 3, 4.

For much of the year I was on pace to double my resolved amount, but then I moved from Iowa City to Austin, and my reading rate never really recovered. Looking through my journal I see averaged over 9 books per months before my move, and only a little over 4 per month after. Moving, unpacking, buying furniture, dating, breaking up, traveling; these all replaced the predictability of my Iowa routine after I reached Texas. Here are the stats:

  • 73 total books read
  • 50 prose books
  • 22 graphic novels
  • 1 audiobook
  • 60 male authors (writers & artists)
  • 22 female authors (writers & artists)
  • Best month: March (14 books – 6 GNs, 8 prose)
  • Worst month: October (1 book – prose)

Looking back over my list, there are 12 books (not counting rereads) that stand out as my favorites. Here they are, ranked in order of how much they’ve stayed with me over the last 12 months. That isn’t quite the same thing as how much I liked them, but it’s close.

  1. Bel Canto by Ann Patchett
  2. Blame by Michelle Huneven
  3. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
  4. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis
  5. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill
  6. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne
  7. Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke1
  8. The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
  9. The Genocides by Thomas Disch
  10. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch
  11. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck
  12. A Monster Calls by Patrick Ness

Some things I notice about this is that, while my list for the year doesn’t have gender parity, my list of favorites does: five men (one twice), six women. Also notable is that the top five most-thought-about books are all works of realist fiction, almost certainly the first year of my life when that has been true. I don’t think this is indicative of a shift in my taste so much as an expansion of it. While at Iowa, reading and critiquing the work of my peers, I developed an appreciation for realism that I didn’t have before. My enjoyment of speculative fiction hasn’t lessened, but the appeal of realism is something new and exciting. I think that’s why the top five novels have been so much in my thoughts; I have thorough understanding of how SF works, but I’m still learning the nuances of mimetic realism.

For next year I hope to improve on my 2014 performance. I’d like to hit 100 books read in 2015, and to have at least 50% of them authored by women. I’d also like to read more classic or public domain fiction. At the time of this writing, I’m on my 6th book of the year, and have maintained gender parity thus far.

  1. Technically a reread, but since the first time was when I was under ten years old, I’m counting it. ↩

President Obama Honors the San Antonio Spurs

The President, an NBA fan, gets a few good jokes in as he celebrates the Spurs’ NBA championship.

My Friends Write Things

Fiction

  • “I Can See Right Through You” – Stop whatever you’re doing now, because Kelly Link has a new story out in McSweeeny’s. This one’s about celebrity, old relationships, and ghost stories. But you didn’t need to know that. All you needed to know is that there’s a new story to read by Kelly Link. That’s all anyone ever needs to know.

Nonfiction

  • “The Abyss” – More from Rebekah Frumkin, this time writing for Granta about her experience working as seasonal labor in a haunted house. Also, have you been keeping up with her column in McSweeney’s? You should be! The latest installment, “I Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” is about her stint in a psychiatric ward in 2013.
  • “Double Dare: Point Horror” – A new column from Meghan McCarron and Alice Sola Kim, in which they assign each other reading to review. In this first column they revisit a couple volumes of a classic tweenage horror series.
  • “Checklist” – Genevieve Valentine with a caustic and heartbreaking and infuriating piece about the pressures brought to bear on rape victims.
  • “Going Aboard” – Ben Shattuck took a trip on a recreation of a ship much like the one in Moby-Dick, and wrote about how time has altered the experience.
  • “Tasers, Drones, and Cold Chicken: Inside the Multibillion-Dollar Business of Keeping Me Out of America” – Jose Orduna visits a border security expo and writes about it with powerful, deserved rage.

Poetry

The Last Books of 2014

BookMosaic4

 

I didn’t get a lot of reading done since my last roundup. Life has gotten in the way, I’m afraid. I have a few books in progress, but soon I’m going to be in Central America and won’t be returning until early next year, so I’m going to go ahead and call my year’s reading here. I’ll do a roundup of all my reading for 2014 later, but for now, the last thirteen capsule reviews.

  1. The Brief and Frightening Reign of Phil by George Saunders – Political allegory and social satire, but perpetrated with far less subtlety than Saunders’ short stories. Which isn’t to say it’s bad, but it only works because Saunders’ sense of humor lands far more often than it misses. Reads like he felt he hadn’t said enough when he wrote “The Braindead Megaphone,” and so did a fictional version as well.
  2. Dataclysm by Christian Rudder – Rudder is a cofounder of OKCupid and was the author of the OKTrends blog. This book is a recapitulation and expansion of the kinds of analysis he did there. I think many of the articles are of general interest, but the OKCupid analysis in particular fascinated me as a user of the site. For example, he publishes lists of words that are most likely to be used in profiles by only a single ethnicity. Four of the ones on the list for white people are in my profile.
  3. What If? by Randall Munroe – Mostly articles from the What If? blog. My favorite part was the intermittent samples of the weirdest or most upsetting questions people had submitted. My copy, though, had typesetting issues; in several places there were empty rectangles where there should have been mathematical symbols.
  4. Annihilation by Jeff VanderMeer – Jeff’s Southern Reach trilogy has been much talked about this year, and well liked by many of my friends. I waited until all three books were available to start it. This book I found mildly entertaining and pleasantly paced, but little more.
  5. Authority by Jeff VanderMeer – I did not enjoy this book. I found it one-note and overlong. I will not be finishing the trilogy.
  6. Einstein’s Dreams by Alan Lightman – Very fun. A collection of fabulations with an occasional physicsy bent.
  7. The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis – What a gorgeous jewel of a book this is. A tender account of the life of an orphan chess prodigy and addict, who grows to adulthood and must learn to navigate both her talent and her dependencies. A much more optimistic book than The Man Who Fell To Earth, which I think it matches in accomplishment.
  8. More Than This by Patrick Ness – A story of young refugees in a confusing world, an Earth that they only discover after their own deaths. Something I like about all of Ness’s fiction is that there is a palpable sense of menace. He doesn’t have a George R. R. Martin-esque bodycount, but he doesn’t need it. The threats in a Ness novel always feel real.
  9. I Die at Midnight by Kyle Baker – I’d been meaning to read this since I was a teenager. A delightful, stylish noir romp.
  10. The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino – This is Kevin Brockmeier’s favorite book by his favorite author, and Carmen Machado loves it too, so I was glad to finally read it. It’s a lovely book, clever, funny, frequently surprising. I don’t think it hit me as hard as it does Kevin and Carmen, though. While I liked it, I occasionally found it overly twee.
  11. Man v. Nature by Diane Cook –An impressive debut collection. I read it in an airport and on airplanes, and barely noticed the travel, except during the stories with explicit sexual content. Her sex writing is legitimately sexy, which made it feel weird to be reading in close contact with strangers in narrow aircraft seats.
  12. Veronica by Mary Gaitskill – I was already a fan of her short stories, and now I know she’s excellent in the long form as well. Veronica is full of tangled, tricky insight. I’ve quoted it previously on the blog, and expect I’ll be writing about it more in the future.
  13. Megalex by Alejandro Jodorowsky and Fred Beltran – Not worth it. There’s nothing in here that wasn’t done first and better in the earlier Jodoverse graphic novels, and the ending is too rushed to have any power. For Jodorowsky completists only.

New Sketch by Tom Siddell

JonesWithTrilobite

Thanks to Amal El-Mohtar, the newest thing on my wall is this sketch by Tom Siddell, author of Gunnerkrigg Court. Amal asked what I wanted him to draw, and I requested a picture of his character Jones with a trilobite (canonically, she’s seen them). If you haven’t read Gunnerkrigg Court, I recommend fixing that. It’s one of the best comics I’ve ever read, and as you can see from this sketch, his art is gorgeous. He’s still finding his feet in the early chapters, but read through “The Fangs of Summertime” and you should be hooked.

Novel Research: Important Excerpts from WHAT TERRORISTS WANT

I’m still working my way through Dr. Louise Richardson’s book What Terrorists Want, going quite slowly and thinking about how these principles manifest in the lives of the terrorists in my book. Here are some excerpts I want to collect in one place. The underlining for emphasis is my own.

The extraordinary brutality of the Sicarii/Zealots can be attributed in part to their religious conviction but also to the fact that there were several different groups of Zealots and Sicarii operating simultaneously in pursuit of the same ends. These groups competed with one another to demonstrate the superiority of their commitment and to claim leadership of the movement.

This is the first known instance of a pattern that was to become quite common a century later: members of diaspora communities, feeling out of place in their new homes, develop a powerful affinity for their homeland and finance movements for radical change back home. Simplicity of interpretation tends to increase with distance from the conflict. The Fenian campaign was unsuccessful not least due to a reluctance to cause civilian casualties, and without deaths they couldn’t garner attention.

Curiously enough, Vladimir Lenin, who was to prove such an inspiration for the social revolutionary terrorist movements of the late twentieth century, was critical of the Russian anarchists, whom he considered misguided zealots. […] He believed that he had a more efficacious way of overthrowing the system. Rather than throwing bombs at ministers, Lenin advocated the creation of a revolutionary elite dedicated to one simple goal, the seizure of power. Far from being isolated from those around them, Lenin’s cadre of revolutionaries exploited popular grievances as a means of consolidating their support. It did not matter to Lenin that the complaints might be from nationalists, aspiring landowners, or others unsympathetic to his cause. What did matter to the ultimate pragmatist was that animosity toward authorities made them potentially sympathetic to subversives, whose political powerlessness left them free to make empty promises. Lenin’s key contribution to terrorist strategy, therefore, was the importance of exploiting every fragment of local alienation for its own ends. It is very clear from reading bin Laden’s public statements that he has taken this lesson to heart. He criticizes the United States for everything from support for Israel to the deployment of troops in Saudi Arabia to its refusal to sign on to the international criminal court to profiteering by the Halliburton Company.

The emergence of terrorism requires a lethal cocktail with three ingredients: a disaffected individual, an enabling group, and a legitimizing ideology.

From the vast literature on psychology, three points stand out. Terrorists see the world in Manichean, black-and-white terms; they identify with others; and they desire revenge. They have a highly oversimplified view of the world in which good is pitted against evil and in which their adversaries are to blame for all their woes. They tend to act not out of desire for personal gratification but on behalf of a group with which they identify (though the two motives can coexist).

The leaders of terrorist movements tend to be older and more highly educated than their followers, no matter what part of the world they come from. […] Marc Sageman studied the biographies of 172 members of al-Qaeda and found that two thirds were middle or upper class and that 60 percent had gone to college, several had doctorates. Their average age was twenty-six.

The idea that democracy is the best antidote to terrorism has enjoyed widespread acceptance recently. This is too simplistic. Terrorism has occurred in democracies the world over. Terrorism is employed by minorities. (If they were not in the minority, they would not need to resort to terrorism.) To be a permanent minority within a democracy can be a frustrating position, and unless democracies can demonstrate that they provide not only a nonviolent means of expressing dissent but also a nonviolent means of redressing grievances of minorities, they are unlikely to be an acceptable substitute. […] Terrorist movements have often emerged in democracies when those trying to change the system realize they do not have the required numbers to prevail in a democracy. What’s more, many of the hallmarks of democracies, such as freedom of movement and freedom of association as well as protections of privacy and personal rights, have made them convenient operating grounds for terrorism.

These rates also raise another risk factor for terrorism, the existence of large numbers of unemployed young men.

Examining economic causes of terrorism leads one back to the same conclusion: it’s complicated. Terrorism has occurred in both rich and poor countries but most often in developing countries and in societies characterized by rapid modernization. Rapid socioeconomic changes are conducive to instability and tend to erode traditional forms of social control. These situations are then open to exploitation by militants offering to make sense of these changes, to blame others for the dislocations and humiliations involved, and to offer a means of redress. Only a tiny percentage of the population needs to be persuaded. Whether this small group remains small and isolated or grows will depend on a range of factors, from the response of the authorities to the extent of the social dislocation being experienced, as well as the success of the militant leadership in integrating their message with historical, cultural, or religious traditions.

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