FGC #14 - Spudis' Woes

My name is Paul Spiegel, but call me Spudis. Everyone here does.

Well, saying “everyone” is kind of a stretch, since there’s only one other person here, but run with me on this. Actually, no, don’t run, leap with me, because hey, we’re on the freaking moon!

Tycho – that’s my buddy Tyler Powe for you historians who will no doubt be poring over my immortal words for generations to come – thinks it’s dumb of me to sit here and record this, but sometimes it just seemed like his imagination got knocked clean out of him when we crash-landed here. Either that or he thinks I’m shirking.

Maybe he thinks I’m shirking.

This city isn’t working according to its original design, you have to understand. The architects and engineers who dreamed this up had it in their heads to create a whiz-bang sci-fi city with all the robot butlers and automagic everything we lazy apes could ever want at hand, then programmed a rocketful of drones to come up here and have it all built and ready before the first wave of highly trained and motivated settlers arrived. I’m sure it would have been cool.

Insert your own joke about making God laugh here, if you believe in God. Or Murphy’s Law. Or mice and men. Anyway, the construction phase went fine, and everything here really is pretty shiny and nifty, only those settlers never came. The Luna Project got scrapped. Not cost effective. Bigger problems to tackle. Irreligious. Everyone had a reason not to do it.

But so the settlers are both highly trained (the best training MIT’s Open CourseWare and the Edupunks had to offer) and motivated, but so far there’s just me and Tycho, and as for the robots? Well.

It’s a long story, and we’ve set it down elsewhere, but, well, our first scrambled transmission back to Nicola’s gang said it all, really: “We made it, but we had to fry the robots. Sorry!!”

So Tycho and I have been pretty busy, finding ways to get things done without those robots, or any of the computer systems that kept stuff going while Cives Tranquilitatis (we really don’t dig on that name, but it’s everywhere. We usually just call it Tranq) awaited its inhabitants. But really, it’s not turning out to be as hard as Tycho likes to say it is; there are mechanical backups for pretty much everything; the hardware just needed some TLC and re-routed power from the bigass solar array out in the mare. I mean, enough water was cracked out of the rocks to keep 5000 people in drinking water and toilet flushing, plants growing – oh my god plants growing – to provide oxygen and fresh veggies, though some of the veggies look pretty strange… as long as we have that, we have a good chance at making it, or at least holding it together until the next gang comes.

Well, a pretty good chance. Cuz, well, I know I sound pretty sanguine but we did have a bit of an adventure the other day. Could have potentially ruined the Park*, too.

It happened like this. Tycho and I were busy trying to hack through some overgrowth that had closed off a huge swath of the main spiral**. Better Boy tomatoes do very well in one-sixth gee. Very well. Anyway, we were doing our jungle thing, hacking away with machetes, when all of a sudden, Tycho started screaming bloody murder.

It took me a minute or two to get to him – I was pretty tangled up after climbing to try to get to the biggest fruit we’d found yet, bigger than my head, that thing. I’m sure you’re used to those by now, future Lunans, but at the time we just couldn’t get over those – but I finally made it to him and at first, well, at first I thought he’d just had a close encounter with a tomato, if you know what I mean. He had a bright red streak along his temple, and a lot of pulp on his ear.

Except it turned out the pulp was his ear. And it wasn’t tomato juice on his face at all.

He said something sharp and heavy had screamed down from above and ripped his head open. Something hot. Really hot.

I started dabbing at his face with a clean rag but he slapped me away and yelled at me to find what hit him. I’d been getting really good at not arguing over little stuff, so I just clammed up and did.

It wasn’t too hard to find the missile; it was smoking. A rock a little bigger than my fist was lying there red hot on the regolith.

“Holy balls, you got hit by a meteorite!” I remember screaming.

“A meteorite is a rock that falls to Earth, dummy,” he said.

“Yeah, and… Oh!” I said, or something like that. Look, I’m really, really smart, but Tycho was the language nerd of the pair of us.

“OK, a metoroon, then. Holy balls, you got hit by a meteoroon!”

“Meteoroon? Really?”

“Well, I don’t know what you’d call it.”

“Neither do I. But that sounds stupid.”

I could have glossed over this stuff, future Lunans, but you deserve to know what we were really like. And by this point, we hadn’t had anyone but each other to talk to for months.

Oh, and we weren’t a couple, okay? Let me just set that straight right there. Heh.

Anyway, so there we were, standing there with our teeth in our mouths, staring at this freaking rock from outer space that had just… come down on us… and we… were under a dome…

We both looked up at the dome high above us and said a very bad word at the same time, because sure enough, one of the big plexiglass panels that kept the air in and the cosmic rays and crap out was pretty well smashed. It wasn’t a huge hole or anything, but the danger was still pretty obvious.

Pruning Tomatosaurus rex was going to have to wait a spell.

Now, Tycho used to kind of make fun of me for my Batman obsession when we were little, but after this he never mocked me again, because one of the first things I ever designed for our DIY colonization mission was, you got it, utility belts***.  And yes, they had grappling guns, because, grappling guns.

I was already speeding toward the damaged panel when Tycho pointed out that I didn’t have anything to fix it with. Hey, we’re a team, all right? One’s a thinker and a planner and one is a doer. Otherwise, we’da never made it out here, amIrite?

I figured as long as I was up there, I’d assess the damage. There was a pretty good hole in the glass and, sure enough, air was rushing out at a good clip. There would still be plenty of air under this big ol’ dome for a long time to come, but if we didn’t do something about it, well, I wouldn’t be writing this now, and you wouldn’t be reading it, future Lunans.

Gotta give Tycho credit. He made sure we brought lots and lots and lots of JB Weld. Oh, that stuff is amazing. So while I messed around trying to rewind my grappler (after a really fun trip down. Whee!), he grabbed a piece out of an unassembled greenhouse kit, broke it into a manageable size with a hammer, and threw together an emergency patch kit. We’ve since made up a whole bunch of these and are never without them! Anyway, he bounded over – I gotta tell ya, that never gets old! – with it and this time I let him do the honors. And don’t let him tell you otherwise, if he ever does tell anyone about this, he whooped and hollered just as much as I did on the way up.

So anyway, that’s why the dome above Tomatosaurus rex**** looks like a sloppy kluge job. Maybe someday it’ll get fixed up proper but right now, we’ve got other things to do. Like building dynamos to charge up our stuff, because I’ll be damned if I’m going to spend another six months without being able to get my Rebo and Zooty on.

*Spudis is referring to Tranquility Park in the center of Cives Tranquilitatis, which was housed in its own separate unpressurized dome within the city’s larger dome for many decades to preserve the Eagle, Neil Armstrong’s historic footprint and other historical artifacts, up until just a few months ago, when an incident very like that which Spudis describes in this story finally occurred. – ed.

**The spiral of which Spudis speaks is, of course, Armstrong Circle. – ed.

***The design for these is virtually identical to those all citizens of Tranq wear to this very day – ed.

****The same location as the vertical farm of the same name today, where Armstrong Circle and Cernan Spoke intersect. – ed.

********************************************

This week's Form and Genre challenge is a 1500 word short story written in the first person. I've had requests for sequels to pretty much all of my entries in this challenge to date, but as my personal favorite of these (for reasons that will become spectacularly clear in time) is "Settler's Woes", so yes, this is a sequel to that wacky little tale.

100 Books #41 - Peter V. Brett's THE DESERT SPEAR

I really enjoyed Peter V. Brett's debut novel, The Warded Man, a book that pretty much marked my cautious return to reading epic fantasy after long years of avoiding the genre like the plague. Indeed, I didn't take it up for the genre; I heard about it from a professional fiction editor, my friend Annetta Ribken, who shared in some detail the story of how Brett had first composed it, on his iPhone, on the subway, during his commute each day.

How could I not be curious? And my curiosity was richly rewarded with a solidly enjoyable book. Yes, its setting was largely pseudo-European and yes, there was a bog-standard obscure-boy-comes-of-age-as-the-greatest-hero plot*, but the world was unusual for all its pseudo-medieviality, which quality had a more than usually logical explanation for being part of said world. It's hard to advance as a culture when every single night huge destructive demons materialize out of nothing and destroy everything built and everyone they can get at. One might wonder, indeed, how these people made it to building frame houses and smelting steel (about which, see note *** below).

The characters, too, were good. In addition to the kid-who-would-be-hero there was a girl who grew up to be a great healer and another kid who grew up to be a great bard who can charm demons with his fiddle-playing, all well-developed and likable.

So of course when Brett published a sequel, I snapped it up immediately. And I tore into it immediately.

Over two years ago.

What happened? Well, The Desert Spear doesn't just pick up where The Warded Man left off, it goes more or less back to the beginning and tells someone else's story. And that someone else happens to be a bit of a villain in that first story, the leader of a fierce, lean ubertribe of desert warriors whose entire culture has been warped and shaped by the need to continually battle demons that are, on the whole, much fiercer, much more numerous and much more able to just run completely wild out there in the desert than the demons do in the thickly settled and forested lands in which most of The Warded Man took place. And while I could definitely see where all of this could and would be interesting, I wasn't really feeling it in the spring of 2010. And I had other delights crammed into my Kindle. Kindles, as I have discussed before, cause some of the worst manifestations of Shiny Object Syndrome, maybe ever. Plus, I was still frantically composing and posting brand new sonnets every single day over at that other blog of mine.

Always though, The Desert Spear has been waiting for me, patiently. It knew I'd get to it someday. And so I did.

And how glad am I? Very!

As I said above, the first third of The Desert Spear concerns one Jardir, whom readers of The Warded Man will recognize as someone who first befriended and then betrayed The Warded Man. So as the reader starts up with this second book, the point of view character is someone we've basically been trained to hate -- meaning that Brett has his work cut out for him in terms of engaging his readers as he tells the story of Jardir's upbringing, training, marriage and ascent to glory. Brett succeeds brilliantly with this, not because he tries, but because he doesn't; Jardir's story is simply offered up: a little boy is torn from his family and thrown into a brutal warrior culture and makes spectacularly good.

What sells it for me is the culture of this desert tribe itself, sort of fantasy world take on Islam the way Frank Herbert's Dune novels have, in the Fremen culture, a science fictional take on Islam. As the latter is warped by the extreme lack of water and the presence of a powerful psychedelic and life-extending drug, the former is warped by the constant need to destroy demons, which Jardir's people regard as a religious obligation. And as we know from the first book, it is from these people that The Warded Man gets most of his most important training in demon-fighting, and in warding, the intricate system of magical symbols that keep demons at bay, keep the mind free of their influence, keep weapons sharp and allow ordinary weapons to act as demon bunker busters by virtue of being inscribed with them.

And yes, the friendship between the Warded Man and Jardir is retold from Jardir's perspective, but it still** feels like a fresh tale; by the time Jardir meets the Warded Man, Jardir is a character in whom the reader's interest and yes, sympathies are invested just as fully as they were in the Warded Man in the first book. This time, we see the pivotal scene coming, but that foreknowledge only multiplies its power.

The action does, eventually, return to the pseudo-European north of this demon-infested world***, mostly because Jardir's messiah complex (which is what led him to betray the Warded Man, because his friend also showed signs of possible messiah-hood and There Can Be Only One) has been carefully nurtured by his wife and his tribes. The prophecies declare that the messiah will bring all humanity under one demon-fighting rule, and that nore or less means jihad (I say more or less because as far as Jardir and most of his people are concerned, it's a war between peoples only during the day; at night, when the demons come up from underground, all men are brothers united in demon-killing). Once up there, Jardir learns what the reader has long known: that the Warded Man yet lives, and that there are still two Mu'ad Dibs. Mu'ads Dib? And mayhem and big drama ensue as the two other main characters from The Warded Man are drawn into weird double orbits around the Warded Man and Jardir.

Little to none of this tension is resolved at the end of The Desert Spear; one convention Brett is uninterested in tampering with is Thou Shalt Write Series****. I don't think I'll let two post-publication years go by before I take up the third book, The Daylight War, though.

*However, unlike a lot of the stuff that drove me away from the genre, the titular Warded Man becomes a hero through his own efforts and choices. While there is a prophecy that he seems to be on the way to fulfilling in the first book, Brett takes great pains to make his seeming fulfillment of bits of it a case of coincidence rather than DESTINY, which I appreciated. And in the second book, the Warded Man spends a lot of time screaming at people that he is not the Deliverer, that even if he were he wouldn't tell them because as soon as people convince themselves that a messianic hero is in their midst they stop making any effort to help or save themselves. This, this I applaud.

**Though perhaps this is a function of the relatively long period of time between my personal readings of The Warded Man and The Desert Spear.

***Hints that I only barely noticed in the first book are a bit stronger in the second, hints that suggest what we're getting here is weird post-apocalyptic science fiction rather than or in addition to fantasy; a past in which humanity numbered in the billions and had all sorts of big science at its disposal is alluded to, which brings up all sorts of interesting questions for this reader. Are the demons some kind of product of big science gone wrong? Are they a religious punishment for the arrogance of that science (as the predominant northern religion of The Warded Man/The Desert Spear likes to claim)? Are the demons aliens from another world or dimension? Or were they there all along, just waiting for humanity to screw up, just enough?

****Brett says when the series is done it will be a quintet. With a sixth stand-alone book "with some shared characters." So, not a sextet, because...? Just kidding, Peat.

100 Books #40 - Thich Nhat Hinh's THE MIRACLE OF MINDFULNESS

Books like this one come to me as gifts from people who love me and wish me well, and this fills me with gratitude. I read them thinking of the person or persons who made the effort to bring them to my attention, and treasure that moment of connection, that transit of a spark from mind to mind, that brought me to read these lovely and loving words.

Last year, several months after my friend Gregory Wright presented me with a copy, I took up Sakyong Mipham's Turning Your Mind into an Ally; decades ago, my mother brought Marcus Aurelius to my attention, and his Meditations have become regular reading for me (though perhaps not as regular as I'd like). While The Miracle of Mindfulness (title aside*) reminds me a bit of both of these, it's very much its own thing, and a wonderful, graceful, restful thing it is.

Originally written in the form of a long letter, this book could easily just be regarded as an artifact of its time and circumstance: written by a Vietnamese Buddhist monk to another in 1974, while war still ravaged their country and was tearing our own apart as well -- it could be, but that would require a tremendous kind of effort that simply absorbing this book does not demand. Because this book is really just a love letter, in somewhat the same way Ted Sturgeon's Godbody** is a love letter. I may not believe in a god or non-material spirit that loves, me, but I believe that Thich Nhat Hanh loves me, not because he's met or befriended me personally in any way, but because I am part of the universe in which he dwells and he wishes that universe well, wishes it and us peace, and wants to share with us how he achieves that.

The Miracle of Mindfulness is also a meditation manual in a much more practical way than Turning Your Mind into an Ally is. There is instruction to be had here, for newcomers to the practice and for people who have been trying for a long time; for them it may serve as much as a fresh and refreshing reminder of what we've been told before but hasn't sunk in as well as we might have thought.

For me the miracle has simply been having this book at my disposal these last weeks. They've been deeply difficult ones, full of grief and loss and funerals and failure. During such times it's all too easy to lose sight of goals and perspective, to dwell on suffering and exclude any possibility of joy. I have done so. But, because I have learned from Mipham and again from Hanh to notice when I'm doing so and make myself stop, to turn my focus and my energies elsewhere, I am, I hope, coming through these times with more grace and, I hope, too, ability to help others through it (especially my family), or at least not to make it worse. Mostly.

It's a work in progress. It always is. But it's good to take up something like The Miracle of Mindfulness, to engage it and do the work it asks of one, or at least try some of it (myself, I've been washing a lot of dishes as mindfully as possible, noticing the miracles of water heated by the burning of gas that was once prehistoric plants and animals, watching the action of plant-based surfactants on grease, thinking of the person who crocheted the dishcloth [I know her personally, watched her making it with a half-smile on her face in quiet moments], feeling the water on my hands and arms, setting the dishes gently in the drainer) every once in a while and help that progress along a little bit.

Thank you Greg, thank you Mipham, thank you Hanh, thank you Christopher.

*I have a lot of dear friends who push a lot of books on me that have the word "miracle" in the title, and most of them are full of pseudoscience and marketing talk, and so I have a conditioned raise-one-eyebrow response to any such titles now.

**This might just be a function of when and how I came across it, but Godbody is quite possibly the most important book in my life.

100 Books #39 - Hugh Howey's FIRST SHIFT - LEGACY (Wool #6)

I can only start this write-up with a crie de cour that can in no way matches that which this book represents; it's the very likely most anguished thing I've ever read. ARGH! Even so, I tore through it hungrily, just as I did with Howey's earlier Wool work, stunned at its artistry, its elegance, its near-perfection, and yes its anguish. And while it breaks the reader's heart, it hits all the beats that Jorge Luis Borges named as the principles for writing great literature:the work within the work, the contamination of reality by dream, the voyage in time and the double.

First Shift - Legacy is a prequel to the Wool stories, but really shouldn't be read before them, for a good bit of the enjoyment to be had from First Shift is the explanation for how the confined and close silo-dwelling world of the Wool stories came to be; interesting in itself, sure (for reasons I'll get into below), but so much richer for knowing what's coming and having devoted thought and imagination to wondering about the much-later outcomes and consequences one has seen in those stories.

Once again, Howey has taken up some excellent guiding metaphors and ideas: the politician who performs the ribbon cutting who symbolically takes credit (and responsibility) for a project he had little to do with creating or completing is compelling enough, the exploration of the Ozian fraud behind the curtain as a portrait of the true nature of leadership even more so, but even better is the notion that some outcomes may be completely predictable but not even remotely preventable; all one can do is grit the teeth, accept the truth, and prepare. This is true for the story -- we already know some kind of apocalypse has occurred to create the world of Wool, for instance, and so we know as we take up First Shift that its characters are as doomed as their cities and their civilization. We're ready for a tale of disaster, and we get it, but there's so much more to it than that.

First Shift is a novel with a lot of subtext, and a lot of secrets, but it isn't particularly interested in keeping them. The clues are not hidden, and, as I said, the outcome is already known and inevitable. But even the smaller, subtler mysteries are not posed as puzzles; the outcome of the reader sussing out the truth about the two main characters is predictable but not even remotely preventable; Howey just gritted his teeth, accepted the truth, and prepared, by making their stories so compelling, so emotionally resonant, so completely captivating that the reader doesn't care that the novel's secrets aren't really secrets at all.

I find this utterly masterful.

Instead of secrets, the novel concerns itself with its status as a message in the bottle, a horribly felt apology from the past to the future, a plea for forgiveness for all of the mistakes of history, made to people who will live with their consequences but will never understand them. This is an eerie and heartbreaking thing to be reading in mid-2012 when apocalyptic fears stink up the very air we're breathing and the future looks Idiocratically grim to so many of us.

So this should be a horrible read that I would not recommend to anyone; I should ban it as harmful to the mental health of my readers. But instead, I urge you to take up the Wool stories first, and then have a look at this and see what Howey has managed to do despite the horror and bleakness, because his characters' humanity, compassion, strength, weakness and, yes, humility are very much the kinds of things we need constantly to be reminded of.

It's the bleakest message of hope, and the most hopeful message of doom you could ever, ever find in the bewildering market of fiction that is out there crying for your attention. Because above all, this book is alive.

FGC #13 - Disturbance

The makeshift saloon in "downtown" Blacksand had seen better days -- and it was only a few months old. Already three chairs and two tables were smashed to firewood, if not to kindling, the one remaining hand-turned leg among them now serving as a club in the hands of the man who most, but not all, would later agree had started the fight.

"I said I don't know nothing about it," the man, bellowed. The chair leg made an audible whooshing sound as he missed his target. His opponent had seen the blow coming and taken an easy step back, even taking the time to spit to one side as the wood missed his jaw.

"I would never go so far as to accuse you of knowing anything," the spitting man, a drifter who claimed to have come through the settlement seeking employment,  said.

This insouciance just made the man with the club even angrier.

"Clinton Ellison Wayne, don't you bust up this place," a woman anxiously watching the developing brawl called out, reaching with one hand to grope blindly behind her for a whiskey bottle before it toppled over the cards the two men had so hastily abandoned.

"Who let that woman in here?" someone demanded over the sound of a punch finally connecting. “Is nowhere sacred?”

"Who let you in here?" The woman sipped daintily from her rescued prize.

"Get out of here before someone gets hurt!"

"I would say the same to you," the woman said, spinning around to fix the speaker with a severe and unfriendly squint. Her voice was very soft and very calm, which, had the object of her attention thought about it at all, would have signaled to him that he was in trouble.

"Donald, if you please," she said.

Without further ado, Donald and another dirty, muscled old-timer seized the loudmouth by the arms and hustled him out of the saloon.

"Mr. Johnston is going to hear about this, be assured," the woman called out after them. “Won’t he, boys?”

"Shore thing, Miss Louise," came a voice from the other side of the swinging doors.

"Oh, and clear out of the..."

The fight spilled abruptly out of doors on the heels of the ejection.

"Way..." the woman -- Miss Louise -- murmured. She sighed, set the bottle back down on the card table, and picked her way around the wreckage of the room's other furniture.

"I told grandpa he was a fool to open this place up like this," Louise said, dusting herself off and smiling at the man tending bar. "I suppose we'd best fetch him."

The bartender touched his hat and headed out the door, through which the sounds of fighting could still be heard.

Louise sighed, cast a long-suffering glance at the shambles left in the fight’s wake, and followed everyone else out of the building.

The action was nearly impossible to see, lost in clouds of dark dust that stung the eyes and coated the skin. The settlement of Blacksand had been founded to exploit a seam of coal near the surface that a degree promised prosperity as soon as the railroad came through this part of the territory. The handful of workers harvesting this bounty had come out on promises of minerals more lucrative than coal, but made do with what they found after no gold or silver turned up, gladly accepting Louise's grandfather's offers of employment when their own, often pitiful, resources ran out.

It was usually a peaceful town, the miners too tired after long shifts to cause much trouble and, Louise had to admit, too poorly paid to have much to cause trouble with.

Which was why Louise was making no great effort to break up the fight between Clinton and the newcomer whom even she suspected of having cheated at cards.

"You big dummies," she screamed into the dust. "You’re all in big, big trouble!"

"No you're not," a bystander told her.

"Is that a threat?"

"No, just... ain't you heard?"

"Heard what?"

"The Blacksand's on fire, ma'am."

***

"Oh god, it's true," Louise said, hat twisted up in her hands as she watched enormous clouds of black smoke billow forth from the air shaft where dozens of her grandfather's employees were gathered. "Does Grandpa know yet?"

"Oh, he knows," a miner said. He took a quick look at his hand, decided it was too filthy to put on Miss Louise's shoulder and ruin her pretty new blouse. She may wear britches, the miners said to each other, but she's still a lady.

Louise kept looking at the smoke. "He's down in it, isn't he?" she said. No emotion showed on her face or in her voice, but her hat was nearing irreparably crumpled, would have been torn to pieces if it were the kind of lacy bonnet most of her contemporaries favored.

"'Fraid so, miss."

"Trying to rescue his men."

"Weren't too many down there, at least."

"Thank god for that," she said, but she didn't sound especially thankful. "And what are we doing about it up here?"

"What can you do, miss? Wait for it to burn out, I reckon."

"That could take years, you fool! Do you know how much coal is down there? " Her laughter was brittle. She moved to approach the mine. This time the man standing next to her did reach out, filthy hands and all, to stop her. The shock of it brought her momentarily to her senses, but he held on to her as she surveyed the scene.

"They're not too deep down, are they? I've never... I've never been," she said.

"Naw, that seam's up purty close. Hundert feet or so, maybe two."

"We need a head count as soon as possible. We have to find out how many people are down there."

"Yer grandpaw said there was eight."

"Eight plus him makes nine," she corrected.

“Here come some!” someone shouted, and it was true. First one man, then another, and then what might be the rest stumbled out of the mine entrance, coughing, clutching their chests, tripping over sage brush. Then at last came two more.

Louise tore herself out of the miner's restraining arms and ran toward the shaft, from which the last man had just emerged. Louise flung her arms about him and all but lifted him off the ground.

“Let me go, girl!” Thomas Johnston was not a demonstrative man.

“You’re all right?”

“Of course I am.”

Louise was unwilling to let go of her grandfather completely, and escorted him from the mineshaft with a loving arm over his shoulders. Around her, the rest of the men who had nearly been trapped fell to the ground. One struggled mightily to breathe, coughing up huge gouts of sooty phlegm. Another seemed unconscious.

“How bad is it?”

“Bad. Whole damn mine is burning up.”

“Oh god, what are we going to do?”

“What can we do. Pray and plan and pack up.”

“What?” Louise stopped walking, stunned. It was not like him to give up.

“No, there has to be something. Suffocate it somehow…”

“We dug seven big ventilation shafts, girl,” her grandfather waved her off. “No. We’re done.”

They resumed walking away

“How did…?”

“It was that fool Sutton. Drunker’n a two-peckered billy goat and knocked over a lantern. Stupid ass can’t hold his firewater.”

Louise stopped short again, casting her eyes over the landscape. She tugged at her grandfather’s sleeve. “What did you say?”

“Can’t hold his firewater.”

“That’s it!” she let go and took several strides to the south on her own. Unktehi Creek was running bankful, swollen with spring runoff. Louise snapped her fingers. “That’s it! Hey, you guys, grab all the shovels you can. Pickaxes too.” She ran toward the water’s edge.

“The hell you on about?” her grandfather shouted.

“We’re going to put out the fire, grandpa. Come on, you bastards! Get over here.”

Her grandfather, still spry, ran coughing to her side.

“Just what the hell are you planning, young lady?”

“Look at all this water,” Louise said.

“Yeah, and?” there was a warning edge to her grandfather’s voice. He knew what she was thinking, just wanted her to say it.

“All we have to do is divert it.”

“And drown the mine? How will that make things better?”

“It will put the fire out, for starters. It will save all that coal.”

“By submerging it completely?”

“Well, yes, in the short run.”

“And the long. You think all that water will just go away once the fire’s out?”

“Shh. I’m thinking about that.”

“This is tomfoolery.”

“Walk with me, grandpa.”

Louise surveyed the banks, looking for a lower point, looking for a path. “We just have to dig a trench and divert some,” she said softly, distracted by her thoughts. “We don’t have to re-route the whole creek.”

“You dig a channel deep enough to let the water run, you’re getting the whole creek. Forever.”

“Not if it’s shallow enough. We just want a little of the extra runoff.”

“Louise, I love that you’re trying.”

“Don’t you patronize me.”

“I’m not. But it’s my mine and I’ll make the decisions. Where’s Powe? Powe! Get over here!” Obie Powe was the mining engineer Thomas had hired out of West Virginia the year before.”

“He’s still out cold, sir!” a man shouted from where the rest of the rescued were still gathered.

“Wake ‘im up and get ‘im over here!”

“Yes sir!”

“If he agrees with me, we’re doing this. Right?” Louise insisted.

“If he agrees with you, I’ll dig the damn trench myself. But!”

“But what? Your fortune’s going up in smoke.”

“It’s yours too, my dear, don’t forget that.”

“Grandfather!”

“Don’t you ‘grandfather’ me, girlie.”

“Sorry. But what’s your ‘but’?”

“But… you still haven’t told me how we’re gonna rescue the mine after we flood it.”

“I’m still thinking on that. And maybe Obie will have an idea too.”

From the chaos near the mine entrance came two men, one supporting the other’s weight. They were as filthy as Grandfather, coughing and covered in soot.

“You wanted me, sir?” Powe said, leaning heavily on his friend.

“Yes. You feeling better, boy?”

“I’ll live. Thanks for getting us out, sir. You saved all our lives. Still got a fine set of lungs on ya.”

“Well, look. My granddaughter here has an idea about putting the fire out.”

Powe cast a sour look at Louise. New to the operation, he’d still not learned to respect her or her opinions.

“Hear me out, Obie,” she said. “Look at the creek here.”

“Uh huh.”

“What if we dug a shallow trench, right about there,” she began, pointing, “And –“

“And what, flood the pit? Wait…” All the scorn had left Obie. “Wait, yes. If we keep it shallow and just get the overflow, yes, that could work.”

His look was one of awe.

“That’s our girl,” his partner, young Andrew Gardner, said proudly. “Almost as smart as her pappy.”

“Almost too smart for her own good,” her grandfather said. “And as crazy as her damn father.”

“Why would you say that?” Louise said. Her father had blown himself up excavating the very mine they were now trying to save.

“I apologize. But tell me, Powe. This damn idea of hers – any good?”

“Actually, yes, Mr. Johnston. Been did before.”

“Done,” Louise whispered.

“What was that?” her grandfather asked.

“Nothing.”

“But so, what do we do after?”

“Grandpa, I think I know…” Louise said. “You still got that Montgomery Wards catalog we got last month?”

“Some of it, yeah. What we haven’t wiped with yet.”

Louise made a face at this.

“Well, I think there was an ad in it…”

“It’s all ads, my girl. That’s what it’s for.”

“…For steam-driven pumps.”

Her grandfather began to laugh, quickly, nervously joined by Powe and Gardner.

“What? I’m serious.”

“Ho ho ho, I know you are, m’girl,” Thomas said, hugging her. “You’re brilliant. Isn’t she brilliant, Obie? Brilliant!”

“Was what I were fixin’ to suggest,” Obie said, spitting up a gob sooty phlegm.

“Well, what the hell are we standing around for?” Thomas demanded. “You lot, get your asses over her and get to diggin’. We’re burning daylight. And coal.”

*

They dug until dusk, starting from the edge of the nearest ventilation shaft and working toward the edge of the creek. The men who had been rescued were excused from this labor, all except for Sutton, who had been told he could either dig or find other employment.

The Johnston mine was the only employment – the only settlement of any kind – for a good hundred miles in either direction.

Louise stayed up far into the night, poring over the remains of the last Montgomery Wards catalog anyone had received with Obie Powe, figuring out how many pumps they would need and penning a letter to place the order.

“These should do us a treat,” Powe said. “And, to be honest, we should have had some on hand anyway. Vital equipment, for a mine like this, back east.”

“Back east, the water table is a few inches underground,” Thomas snapped from his bed at them. “I don’t know how you people get anything out of there.”

“Which is why you hired me,” Powe said.

“True.”

“Miss Louise, you’d make a fine engineer, if you was…”

“If I was a man?”

“Well, yes.”

“Times change, Mr. Powe. Times change.”

At dawn the next morning, Thomas Johnston roused his entire crew except for one badly injured man whom all suspected of having irrevocably singed his lungs – Thomas said later Shane Quenzer had been the last man out, had stayed behind to make sure there were no stragglers – and, true to his word, had grabbed a shovel himself.

No one protested when Louise, tall as a man and nearly as strong as some, joined in the effort.

By midday, the crew broke through the last crust of earth separating their trench from the creek. The last strokes of the pick were difficult and muddy, as the water gushed forth on its way to the mine.

By sundown, the thick black smoke that had poured nonstop from the mine entrance and its ventilation shafts had mostly changed to steam.

They had done it.

“Now we’ve just gotta wait for the Pony Express to send off our order, I reckon,” Powe said, standing with Thomas and Louise and admiring their handiwork.

“The hell we do. Sutton! Sutton!”

The woebedraggled miner had stayed close to his employer since the trouble had started.

“Sir?”

“Rest good, boy. You’re a-riding east in the morning.”

“Sir?”

“You’re not in Deadwood and mailing Miss Louise’s letter in three days time, you in a whole heap o’trouble, boy.”

“Yes sir. I’m sorry, sir.”

“You’ve said that about a thousand times already. Time to prove it.”

Sutton said nothing more and retired to the shack he shared with a dozen others.

“Now, grandfather,” Louise said sweetly. “About that stupid saloon of yours…”

100 Books #38 - Edward L. Glaeser's TRIUMPH OF THE CITY

I have a lot of ill-contained rage against car culture, and it all came simmering to the surface as I read Chapter 7 of Edward L. Glaeser's incredibly thought-provoking Triumph of the City: How Our Greatest Invention Makes Us Richer, Smarter, Greener, Healthier and Happier. This is partly, of course, because I have city envy, though it's largely my own fault.*

 I like a walkable city with an interesting downtown area. My love for Toronto, for instance, is extraordinarily well-documented. A place like that has everything I look for -- dining (especially foreign food), people with whom to play games, people doing interesting things on the street, neat graffiti and other artistry, and sidewalks by which I may easily access all of this and more without burning an ounce of gasoline in either my own or anyone else's vehicle (yes, sometimes this involves a lot of walking and very sore feet, but I consider that a more than reasonable exchange, and it's exceedingly enjoyable exercise; I'm the only one in my workplace who actually loses weight on vacation), or in any way increasing my or the city I'm visiting's carbon footprint. All of these things, Glaeser argues, are products of urban density -- for density brings about proximity of one artist or inventor to another, brings about economies of scale that allow ordinary people to enjoy what only the very wealthy could before the rise of the modern city, brings about opportunity (which is why cities attract the poor; they have a better chance of not staying poor if they come to a city and try).

And yes, density can also bring about crowding, slums, crime, poor sanitation and other public health concerns, but these urban ills can be self-remedying ones because they're occurring in cities, where concentrations of economic power, talent, labor and creativity can be harnessed to solve them, as happened in, e.g. 19th Century New York, London, and Paris, three fine examples of cities that thought their way out of these problems and are now, for the most part, very pleasant -- but very expensive -- places to pass some time.**

And the expense is where my real rage comes in. Because most of North America's and Europe's historically walkable cities have artificially depressed the supply of housing in those downtown areas by legislating against height and density, only the very rich can now afford to live there at all comfortably; they are become, in a phrase I encountered again and again in this book (which, sad to say, is something of a repetitive book at times), "boutique cities."

I am a middle class person; moreover, I am a single woman of a "certain" age which means that I am likely to remain a middle class person (unless I backslide, which is entirely likely in the current economic climate, especially if I choose at this stage in life to move away from the town in which I find myself living -- to, in effect, start all over again). I am unlikely to suddenly manifest skills that are in such high demand that I can command six or seven figures a year***, nor am I at a stage in my life where I am likely to choose (or be welcomed in choosing) to cram myself into a tiny apartment with six or seven twentysomethings.So, as things stand now, I'm starting to fear that I am stuck out in the suburbs, exurbs or pretend cities that have grown up around the car.

So yeah, I have city envy.

But so, I didn't realize how much city envy I had until I read this book, because even when Glaeser talks about the crime and poverty and disease and crappy housing that make so many of the cities in the developing world hells on earth circa 2012, he also points out how New York and London and Paris were once like that, and how Kinshasa and Mumbai and Rio can do it, too, and may even do it better with the examples of those cities before them (i.e., maybe they won't make the same mistakes that turned these into boutique cities along the way).

Of course, that's where Glaeser may lose some people, because, as he points out, New York and London and Paris would still be hell-holes without the deliberate and somewhat heavy-handed use of state power. New York, for instance, tried a private water service first, and got boondoggles and very little utility from guys who were more interested in empire building than in public service. And Paris owes most of its charm to Napoleon III's indulgence of one man's dreams (that one man being Baron Georges Eugene Haussman).

I must add, lest I mislead people, that my rage is mostly self-directed and is only tangential to the reading of this book, which is, after all, an optimistic one. Perhaps, indeed, it's overly so: Glaeser's vision for a possible American future requires, among other things, the embrace of congestion charges and higher gasoline taxes to discourage car use, the reduction if not elimination for the home mortgage interest deduction (that encourages suburban sprawl by encouraging not only home ownership but the accrual of ever-greater debt to buy ever more expensive houses that, let's face it, do not increase an iota in quality commensurate with increases in price, do they? Which means this extremely popular and entrenched bit of tax law helps drive home prices higher), and, least likely of all, an end to the endemic syndrome of NIMBYism.

Even more controversially, Glaeser calls out a lot of environmental and historic preservation legislation as bad policy that gets bad results. In Glaeser's world, the popular slogan of "think globally, act locally" gets it all wrong: focusing on saving one wetlands (or, for that matter, one block full of mediocre but old buildings) doesn't really help the planet or the locality, because it just sends the builders and their money somewhere else. And often, in the case of those opposing newer, taller buildings in old established cities as of those opposing new development in attractive areas like coastal California, where it gets sent is to place like Houston, or more specifically, to exurban Houston, where sprawl is keenly encouraged by a lack of restrictions on development and the people who wind up living there have to drive to work, to school, to shop, to eat out -- and have to use amazing amounts of electricity to keep their homes livable because Houston in the summer is a sweltering  nightmare without air conditioning. So whether you believe in climate change or not, whether you believe in peak oil or not, whether you believe in suburb as bland conformist hell or not... there is probably something regrettable in the greater scheme of things that offsets, if not worsens, the impact of your saving a pond or three-story apartment building.

As he ponders all this, though, his glasses get a little too rosy. One of his arguments about America, for instance, involves coastal California, climatically ideal for 21st century human habitation, becoming a lot more densely populated than it is -- compact and tall rather than more sprawl, naturally -- which raised my eyebrows because he seemed to be glossing over the problem of how thirsty such cities can't help but be: lots of people need lots of water. Oh, he says at one point, but they could have enough water if all of that irrigated agriculture going on in California were put to a stop and that water diverted to urban/municipal use. This only sounds reasonable, I suspect, to people who haven't paid attention to the realities of western water; the rivers that currently supply all that agricultural and municipal water in California and the rest of the arid southwestern half of the sun belt are grossly over-allocated and no longer even reach the ocean; there might not be enough even if all that agriculture were suddenly to stop. And by the way, how likely is that, anyway?

Still, it's nice to read a book like this and dream, just as it's nice to wonder what the American west would be like if those who drew its state and county  boundaries had listened to John Wesley Powell instead of to the Union Pacific Railroad and the cattle barons. Or to imagine what Rust Belt cities like Detroit might have been right now if their leaders had focused on developing human capital (a favorite argument of Glaeser's: cities are made of people, not buildings) instead of adding more infrastructure to an area that already had too much.****

At bottom, this book, more than anything I've read this year and probably last year, too, made me think, about my own choices, about public policy, about consequences, intended and un-, about, overall, if it's time  to move. Because even though I commute by bike as much as possible and walk to the grocery store (which, mercifully, is just across the street but how much does it suck that it's a five-lane street so poorly patrolled that cars routinely roar by at 50-60 mph) and never eat out or go downtown, sitting around alone in my little house, however attractive and roomy it may be, is no way to spend the rest of my life. I need people.

Preferably, people who have an idea of a good time that does not begin and end with a bar fight.

 *I spent about ten years living on the U.S.'s east coast, most of it in lushly green rural areas that weren't much more densely populated than I was used to, but a few in Boston (with lots of vacations to New York). I finally got homesick at 27, though, and wanted to see what living in Wyoming was like as an adult, so moved back, and then never managed to plan my way back out of here. Eventually I had to leave the tiny town where I grew up and later served as a member of the city council and the water and sewer boards but had no gainful employment and move to Cheyenne, which is Wyoming's state capital but is basically a big suburb with no urban area of which to be sub. Which means I own a car and have to drive pretty much everywhere and I'm  as many hours' driving from the idyllic mountain/river scenes of my rural childhood as I am from the amenities of the nearest real city (Denver).YUCK.

**They are also the three cities focused on in a most entertaining (unless one is very squeamish) documentary series produced last year by the BBC called Filthy Cities. And hurrah for the BBC, for you can watch them on YouTube for free. Here's London, Paris and New York. Enjoy!

***And  yes, a lot of this is because I am unwilling to go back to college and get yet another bachelor's degree. I already have one, in the liberal arts, which is supposed to make me ready for anything but really makes me employable only in diminishing fields which do not allow me to make an actual living, which is why I currently hold a job for which only a high school diploma is required (although a lot of other specific and mostly innate talents are also required). And no, my unwillingness to get another degree is not because of the work or time involved (I acquire and hone new skills all the time, though free resources like MIT Open Courseware, but I have not yet heard of an employer who will treat that as a credential. When one does, I'm stylin'), but because of the expense. College cost enough the first time, even with scholarships, back in the late 80s/early 90s. Now? I'd be paying back student loans for the rest of my life, all on a gamble that whatever "employment ready" field I chose would still be one with a decent job market that would let me earn income to pay back those loans. Stank!

****I wonder what Glaeser would think of the crazy optimistic art/development/whatever project that is Detroit's Loveland.

100 Books #37 - Alan Baxter's WRITE THE FIGHT RIGHT

I have never been in a fight.* Until just very recently (and I mean very recently, like last week), I had never even seen a fight. I hope never to see one again, and I really hope I never have to be in one.

Unless I want my fiction to be unrelievedly dull and full of talking heads, though, at some point I'll probably have to write a fight scene or two in my career. Indeed, I have already had to at least once, but luckily for me it was for a graphic novel script, which means the illustrator gets to do most of the heavy lifting on that one.

Enter my good pal Alan Baxter, urban fantasy novelist and martial artist extraordinare, who has been teaching workshops on writing fight scenes at various conventions in his adopted home of Australia for quite some time, and finally allowed his fans to prevail on him to publish the wisdom he has been sharing that way in book form.

The resulting work is informative as hell (at least from this non-fighter's perspective), short and vivid, just like a good fight scene should be. Baxter reminds us that the fights we see in film and television are not accurate depictions of real fights: nobody takes turns, blocking only works for a little while, size matters, so does footwork, and you only ever really see someone taking punch after punch and staying in the fight on bad TV.

Baxter illustrates his principles with examples of good (quick, lively, exciting, accurate) and bad (wordy, clinical, slow, wrong) fight-writing and a gentle sense of humor that somewhat belies his subject. Nor does he just focus on the mechanics of fighting itself; he devotes a decent amount of copy to the sights, sounds and smells of fighting as well.

All of which are things I'm perfectly happy to take his word on, thank  you. Because while I might get off my lazy butt and take a self-defense class someday (my recent experience has left me a bit shaken), I don't ever, ever want to have first-hand knowledge of this stuff.

This is seriously the best how-to-write-combat book I've found since J. Daniel Sawyer's Throwing Lead: A Writer's Guide to Firearms (and the People Who Use Them). And since it covers rather a different aspect of combat, it's a most welcome addition to my reference library. I think a few would-bes and wannabes on my  list are absolutely getting this one for Christmas, if not sooner.

*Obviously not counting the odd schoolyard scuffle. And even those, I can't really count as fights, because fighting implies more than one participant and my level of participation amounted to my pulling a Samwell Tarly (i.e. taking a few hits and crying like the little girl that I was, running  home, and then telling my parents I'd fallen off the monkey bars because I didn't want to cause any more trouble than there had already been).

Blogger's note: this is another short one, but I promise you, I'm making up for the short length of these last two by also tackling (and enjoying) some longer stuff that it's just taking me, duh, a longer time to get finished and blogged. The Recognitions, for instance. It's 956 pages long.