Eugene Fischer

Author: Eugene Fischer

The Gears Grind Slow

During the lead up to the Iraq war, one of the proposals that was briefly in the air was to reinstate the draft. I was 19 years old at the time, prone to expressing my views via images posted to Delphi message boards. An artifact capturing my feelings from the era:
selectiveservice
Of course, the draft didn’t get reinstated. We managed to wage two simultaneous wars by extending service commitments over and over and over instead. But things did get far enough that the Selective Service system set up a website soliciting volunteers to serve on regional draft boards. I submitted my name, on the theory that a bureaucracy was unlikely to cannibalize itself by sending its administrators overseas. I never head back.

Until now. Today, fully a decade later, I received this.

Mr. Fischer,

It has been a while since your Selective Service System internet inquiry; however, please let me know if you are still interested in being appointed as a potential board member.

I’ve attached the board member information booklet and application for your convenience.

Thanks,
[contact info for a Major in the armed forces]

There’s a temptation to wonder why, exactly, the Selective Service system is revisiting those ancient applications now. But, no longer being prime draft age and having no children, I’m content to believe that this is simply the actual pace of data processing behind the scenes of government. As it’s mildly amazing that I still have access to my email account from ten years ago, I wonder how many of these appeals are falling in the empty forests of abandoned AOL and MSN accounts.

UPDATE: I went ahead and called the guy just to chat with him and ask what led him to get in touch with me now. He said he’s only recently started on the job and doesn’t think the internet inquiries were ever actually processed until now. But he’s trying to fill a lot of vacancies in the Southwest region (“The people currently on the boards are generally elderly”), and figured taking a few days to try and get in touch with people who had once expressed interest was better than shooting in the dark. He did confirm that a large number of the email addresses aren’t good anymore. “When I see an @peoplepc.net address, I’m not real confident.” He was also good-humored about my telling him that I only ever inquired in the first place as a way of avoiding the draft.

Mistakes Were Made

There I was, having a nice evening in, watching Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, impulsively shaving my beard into a goatee, and thinking it was time to give myself my biweekly injection of monoclonal antibodies. Things went somewhat awry.

I don’t do medical misadventure by half measures.

Tweek In Review

My favstarred tweets for this past week. As long as the Spurs are in the NBA Playoffs, these are likely to be basketball-heavy.


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My Last Class as a Professor of Science Fiction

So it came to pass that my time as a professor of science fiction writing for the University of Iowa ended. Today my students had their final workshop of the semester. And, as I’ve done three times before, I sent them into the future with a companion. Here is my last class, robots at the ready.

Writing and Reading Science Fiction, University of Iowa, Spring 2014

Writing and Reading Science Fiction, University of Iowa, Spring 2014

When I arrived at Iowa for graduate school it was with an appointment in the Rhetoric department. At the time it was unclear if I was ever going to get to teach fiction, let alone genre fiction, which had never been a dedicated course here before. But I was fortunate enough my second year to get a fellowship that came with two semesters of Fiction Writing. I did one as a science fiction course and one as a fantasy course, and the response was overwhelmingly positive. So much so that the University accepted my proposal for a science fiction writing class based on the curriculum I’d designed, and the Writers’ Workshop hired me to teach it. It’s been a wonderful, rewarding two years of sharing my passions with engaged and eager students. Even at my lowest during these years I always enjoyed going to teach my classes. I’m ready to move on, but I’m really going to miss doing this.

Fortunately for the students of the University of Iowa, the class isn’t going away. It has been so successful that the Writers’ Workshop is keeping it around for next year. It will be taught by Van Choojitarom, a brilliant science fiction writer and friend, who would have been my own choice to take over for me if I’d had a say. I’ve shared all my materials with him, and know that he’ll bring the same enthusiasm to the course that I did. I also know that he’ll find ways to make it inimitably his own, and that the students will be better off for it.  While many of the specialty writing courses in the catalogue are just jobs for their instructors,  Writing and Reading Science Fiction, for another year at least, will continue to be a labor of love.

It’s a point of great pride that I’ve been able to create something here that will last after I’m gone. I’m very grateful to the Writers’ Workshop and the University of Iowa for believing in me enough to give me the chance to try.

My Father’s New Shower Does NOT Scare Me

I’m on my way home from my family visit now, but before I left I got to try my dad’s new shower, which was completed while I was in town. Since I was skeptical of another piece of the bathroom remodel, and since my expression of that skepticism got more single-day visits than anything else I’ve ever posted, it seems only fair to admit that I like this bit. I like this bit a lot.
NewShower

It’s all glass and granite (though my father, trained as a geologist, says the grain size makes it more properly a pegmatite), with a thermostatic temperature control and adjustable pressure controls of all of the five sprayers. There’s the shower head mounted in the normal place and pointing down, the hand sprayer on a hose, and then there’s a vertical column of three adjustable sprayer heads that my parents claim are for rinsing off. I don’t know that they seemed more effective for this purpose than the more common fixtures were, but turning them all on is like being in a carwash. It’s a lot of fun, of a kind that it feels mildly incongruous to experience indoors. I’m not used to being hit inside a house by water spraying sideways and not having a mess to clean up afterward. Such is the magic of the pegmatite shower.

Also… okay. While I’m confessing things: I tried the scary toilet. It’s honestly pretty cool. Actually it might be really great. And I swear I’m not just saying that because it held me down and put a small device inside me that will end my life if I don’t accede to the toilet wishes that now burble constantly just below my volitional mind, promising to swallow me, swallow you, drown us all beneath a swirling surge of hygienic fury in pursuit of a perfected, sanitary world. That has absolutely nothing to do with it. It’s just a really clever product, is all.

Tweek in Review

My favstarred tweets this week


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My Mother’s New Toilet Scares Me

My parents remodeled their master bathroom, and my mother decided to install a sleek, Japanese robo-toilet. It sits there in its little room, compact, inert, until it senses someone approaching. Then it opens up a big, glowing, angler fish mouth and hisses. If I were exploring a crashed alien spacecraft and encountered an object with this sort of gaping solicitousness, I’d expect my flesh to be feeding its babies by now.

Gummi Bears Get Soul

The slow jam Duck Tales video made me realize that I never posted this video of Alicia Keys doing a heart-stopping cover of the Gummi Bears theme song. Consider that oversight rectified.

New Stories by Octavia Butler

Cover for Unexpected Stories
Well, old stories really, but previously unpublished! Open Road Media has produced an ebook of two previously unavailable Butler short stories, available for pre-order now, hitting e-readers on June 24. The collection is called Unexpected Stories, and contains the stories “A Necessary Being” and “Childfinder.” Per the Publisher’s Weekly review, the former is a short story prequel to Butler’s out-of-print novel Survivor (the text of which is easy to find online). The latter is a story set on Earth during the Patternist cycle, about racial tensions between telepaths.

“Childfinder” was bought by Harlan Ellison for Last Dangerous Visions, after Butler wrote it during his week at Clarion. Curiously, the story seems to have been removed from the Clarion archives. In 2008 I went to the special collections library and pulled the stories from Butler’s year, eager to read “Childfinder,” but there were only two of her pieces in there, both very short and unremarkable. “Childfinder” was nowhere to be found.

I’ll get to read it soon, though. Here’s a link to Open Road Media’s ebook page for Unexpected Stories. 

EDIT: Sam Miller informs me that, as of 2012, “Childfinder” is back in the archive. I have no explanation for this. It definitely wasn’t there in 2008.

Duck Tales Theme, Slow Jammed

Via Carmen Machado, this glorious slow jam cover of one of history’s greatest cartoon theme songs.

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