The Door Into Summer

At the moment I'm listening to Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, which I like, but at the same time I'm wondering if I shouldn't just put on Cavalleria Rusticana, which would be a demonstration of workmanlike competence followed by a work of genius. When you've put Turiddu and Santuzza and Lola and Alfio and Mama Lucia to music, what do you do for the rest of your life?

I re-read Heinlein's The Door into Summer yesterday evening and this morning -- it's a very quick read, obviously. It's one of my favorites and I haven't read it for a few years. It was written in 1956 and set in 1970 and 2000. The Del Ray edition had 304 pages, and I don't remember the type being extraordinarily large, so a 24-hour or less read means it's very smoothly written, which Heinlein's best is. It's of interest to see how Heinlein imagined the world a mere fourteen years ahead of him at the time. He saw a nuclear war or two ahead, for one thing. The capital's in Denver and Washington is no more.

Yet the society he sketches for 1970 is more the society of 1956 than it actually was in 1970, and much like it in 2000. I take that as a sign that we're all trapped in our own amber. The protagonist, Daniel Boone Davis, is a mechanical engineer who gets gypped out of his half of the company he founded by a dame (not a girl or a woman) named Belle and his Army buddy Miles. He's got a cat named Pete and he's fond of Miles' little girl, Ricky. Dan puts on a toot, decides to have himself frozen for thirty years, then changes his mind and and decides to go have it out with Miles and Belle. He ends up drugged and frozen anyway, at another company. That sets Dan up for a one-way trip to the year 2000. We eat bacon made from yeast and use fasteners instead of zippers and they can regrow teeth, but other than that it' still 1956.

As an engineer Dan designs Hired Girl, which we actually have today as Roomba, which hasn't had the impact Hired Girl was expected to have on society. That's the company he gets ejected from. He's got other things on the drawing board, to include a drawing board that sounds like approximately CAD. Thirty years later (after he's been frozen for thirty years) he gets a job with Hired Girl, which is now a company comparable to General Motors. He's "chief engineer emeritus" or some similar pompous title and they want to use him for advertising, at one point wanting to dress him in a derby and spats. He meets Belle plus thirty years, now fat, frowzy, and failed, which is fine revenge. Miles died two years after Dan got the freeze, likely murdered by Belle.

He's still got a grouch on about losing Pete, and he wants to find out whatever happened to Ricky. She'd be 41, which would make her ten years older than Dan. A few convolutions follow, with him finally put in touch with a professor who might, possibly, be able to send him back thirty years in time. Naturally it works. He gets the goods on Belle, forms a second company that competes with Hired Girl in the future, steals and destroys his working model of Flexible Frank the night of their coup, finds Pete, finds Ricky, and saves the stock. He -- and this time Pete -- go back to sleep for thirty years at the original company he contracted with. Ten years later Ricky does the sleep, is met by Dan in 2001, and Happily Ever After ensues.

It's a nice story, very sentimental. I get choked up in places. But boy, is the background off! First, Hired Girl and the other products Dan designed were all stand-alone. They didn't communicate. They did use "Thorson Memory Tubes," which kinda sorta implies computing power. But all of information technology is missing. I know Heinlein couldn't be expected to envision the internet in 1956, but the actuality overlays the story, a sort of alternate universe thing. Unix was first used the year before Dan's story is set. We could and in many cases are developing Dan's niftiest products. Here we are finishing up sixteen years on the other side of Dan's future.

It just doesn't feel like the future.

Not Quite Sabbatini

There has been the usual bustle of a household at Christmas and mine's been no exception. We live in a townhouse, with three finished levels, a son and his family -- two girls, one of them angelically beautiful -- temporarily occupying the lower level. My wife's been out shopping for multiple families, putting up a tree, decorating the front yard, and cooking.

We had dinner at my brother-in-law's on Christmas Eve. He and his wife, Faye, entertained on that evening by tradition. She would make lasagna and have an enormous salad that never quite got finished, and one or two other dishes. We ate at the table for years, then buffet style as their son married and their daughter-in-law's father and his girlfriend (he's a widow) would fly in from Buffalo. Faye was diagnosed with stage four pancreatic cancer in September, a couple years ago, and she died close to Christmas that same year -- maybe on Christmas Day. I can't remember precisely, either because I'm getting old or because I'm trying to forget. The point is that it was a very pleasant little party. My wife did the cooking, with two lasagnas made from scratch (the best she's ever made, in fact), and an enormous salad we threw together out of bagged grocery store salads and store-bought dressing. I was expecting it to be maudlin, but I think I could hear Faye's laugh more than a few times.

I read Robert Neilson Stephens' Philip Winwood. It was the first book of Stephen's I've read, and I doubt it'll be the last. The setting is New York just prior to the time of the Revolutionary War. The plot's fairly simple: Philip the stray boy, taken in by Margaret, a little girl of his own age; her younger brother Tom; her sweet sister Fanny; and her older, ne'er do well brother Ned, all narrated by Bert, the boy next door. Margaret's stern patriot father takes the boy in, raises and educates him. Margaret's thing is that she wants to go to see the sights of England. She and Phil get married and at that point the Revolutionary War starts. She's a spoiled little creature and when Phil goes to join the rebels instead of sailing for England she turns on him. Little brother and boy next door join the Loyalists, so 'tis a tale told from both sides, with understanding and sympathy for both. The villain in the whole piece is Ned, not even actually Captain Falconer, who sullies Margaret's reputation, fights a duel with Tom -- the younger brother -- and kills him.

I can see where Sabatini picked up the mantle of writing adventure stories from Stephens. Much of the feel is the same. The main characters are nicely drawn. You can see their motivations, you can feel the friendship among them, you can feel sympathy for them. When Philip first appears he's carrying two suitcases and a kitten in a sack slung over his shoulder. Fanny could be a lot more developed -- Bert ends up marrying her, so you'd think he'd give her a bit more attention. I can see where Ned has to be a nasty fellow. The plot as constructed wouldn't work without him being the way he was, and God knows there are enough people in the world who follow the path of least resistance, whose empathy with others, even close family, stops at the inside of their own epidermis. Most aren't quite as overtly unpleasant as Ned.

Stephens presents both sides of the story of the Revolution, Philip and Mr. Fairingfield, Margaret's father, adhering to the rebels, Bert and Tom to the Loyalists. They don't hate each other and they remain friends. All do their duty as they see it. That keeps it interesting. Having all murderous villains on one side and all cleft-chinned, muscular heroes on the other would have made it boring. Even though the reader know how it's going to turn out (SPOILER: The rebels won) the reader wants to see how this particular drama plays out, feeling sympathy with all the characters but Ned and sometimes Margaret.

I believe reading Philip Winwood and Sabatini's The Carolinian back to back would present little difference in the quality of the writing. Philip is no Captain Blood, or Scaramouch, but he's of the same quality as The Lion's Skin or Bardelys the Magnificent, which is saying a lot.

As for my own productivity, I finished the chapter I was working on and  wrote a part of the next on Del of Kerao, but the ideas are tangled and my thoughts have been on other things, including the holidays and my health. I wrote the first chapter and most of a second on a new book, featuring a heroine with only one arm and one leg. I had to fight the temptation to simply write a romance based on Mary Dague.  I've made her a helicopter pilot, but that could change -- it's irrelevant to the rest of the story. She could be Quartermaster or Signal Corps, could even be a Personnel Officer. Quartermaster would probably be best, in fact. I've named her Cornelia Catherine Moriarty and her love interest will be named (probably) Quincy Holmes, just so I can make jokes about that and eventually have them start Moriarty & Holmes, Inc.

In the first chapter, which might just be a prologue, C. Catherine (she hates her first name) tells her husband she's getting a divorce after his fourth affair. The same thing happened to Mary, and she doesn't blame her husband; she was a burden, and their relationship had become more of a nurse-patient. A burden that's light when you assume it weighs more after a couple miles. If you've assumed it for a lifetime it can be really heavy. C. Catherine, single and at large, is trying hard not to any burden to anyone, to include her family. I look at what life is like for people with disabilities, following her through the abominable processes of taking a bath and going to the gym. With half the number of limbs she's got to be twice as strong and capable. I think one of the themes will be reliance and trust in others. C. Catherine (Quincy names her Nellie) is something of a hard ass, unwilling after her divorce to admit that sometimes she does need help. That's a problem lots of military people have, despite the emphasis on teamwork. "Suck it up" is the usual phrase, and it becomes a way of life. In the event of major problems, like loss of limb, it can lead to depression, so there's something for me to write about.

It's not Sherlock

I spent an overnight in the hospital the other day, then had unrelated appointments the day after they let me out. Lots of reading time is to be found in two days and a night in the hospital, especially when combined with a drive from Baltimore to Bethesda.

So I read Arthur Conan Doyle's The White Company. Coincidentally, I read Bernard Cornwell's 1356 recently as well, so I've been vicariously living in the 14th century off and on. I'd recommend either book, and, if you have the time, both of them back to back.

Neither book is perfect, both are very good, and it's interesting how both make the period come alive with different world views. The Conan Doyle book has what I think is a romanticized view of the period, where Cornwell's goes a bit, I think, in the other direction.

The White Company tells the story of part of Prince Edward's campaign to reinstall Pedro of Castile on his throne. The protagonist is squire to Sir Nigel Loring, whose daughter Maude provides the (minimal) love interest. The main characters are nicely drawn and sympathetically treated. Historical characters abound, so thickly that it's hard to keep track of them -- many are mere walk-ons, with no development.

The amount of chivalry depicted is slightly overwhelming. Clearly Froissart was a major source. Sir Nigel spends much of his time looking for someone to cross swords or break lances with him, a kind of romanticized bully boy who would be outlandish if he was the only one. You wonder: Can human nature be bent to that extent?

It's not bent in the Cornwell book, which is an account of the battle of Poitiers, eleven years before the battle of Najera, the climax of the Conan Doyle book. Thomas of Hookton leads a company of archers similar to the White Company. (Was Conan Doyle one of the inspirations?) The characters are more human to 21st century readers. The cities are stinky; at one point Thomas escapes hidden in a shit cart. The concept of chivalry is treated condescendingly -- one of the main characters is a virginal knight, because he was visited in a dream by the Virgin Mary. Naturally he's smitten by a beauty who ran away from her (disgusting) husband. 

I like Cornwell. I've read all his Sharpe stories, the Viking series, the Grail series, and a few stand-alones. His heroes are impervious to pain; in one book a character cuts off the protagonist's little finger. He's at work in the trenches a few days later. Thomas, prior to 1356, was tortured, his hand maimed by an evil Dominican. He's using the hand to pull his bow in 1356. Having once maimed my right hand with a table saw, I can tell Cornwell hasn't actually had a similar injury.

Visited by the Muse

I woke up yesterday morning with the current chapter in Del of Kerao finished in my head. All I had to do was sit down and type it out. I'm hoping the muse hangs around for the last half dozen chapters.

I also started reading, this time Sabatini's King in Prussia, which isn't his best, but is at least interesting -- the youthful Frederick the Great and his brutal father, Frederick Wilhelm. This is the first time I've read it, and there are a lot of characters to keep straight, but I've been to Berlin and Potsdam, Wittemburg, and many of the other locations. I can only imagine traveling to them on horseback or in a carriage.

King in Prussia is my nitey-nite reading, so it's going slower. I read a chapter or two before I go to sleep. In my waking hours I've also re-read Dolly of Palo Pinto. It's been long enough since I published it that I can read it with a bit of objectivity (I think).

I like Dolly. She's a genuine person, a girl I knew as a child, many years ago. The story is fiction, but the Dolly in the book is real, or at least the way I remember her personality.

It hasn't been quite as many years since I was last in Mineral Wells, but it's been a long time -- the year I went to Vietnam. It's probably changed since I was there, but I liked it. There's an actual YK ranch, that I think is near there, but the Y bar K is a product of imagination, partly populated by people I've known. I invented the place, making up the name at random and then not Googling it to see if it was in existence. Probably ranching has changed since I saw it up close, too. It's really a lot of interpolation.

I grew up with the inhabitants of Water Street: I ate Minnie's cooking, heard her holler at a few people, knew Old Sadie and Uncle Ivo and Cindy and Sandy and Randy. I even kissed Yvonne once; we were drunk at the time. The episode with Bella is true. It happened to someone else, under different circumstances. but I'll never forget it. I'll always grieve. I was Nate in that little story.

I don't have Sabatini's gift for description, but I think Dolly is pretty solid as far as characters. If I was to rewrite it from scratch I think I'd develop Elvis more fully. He's approximately a couple men I knew long ago as well, but on rereading he comes across as kind of a straw man, there merely to torment Dolly. That's probably because I knew him too well. I've known enough women who had leech husbands or boyfriends. I've never known anyone who went complete Elvis, but I've known enough people (male and female) who were starring in their own private movie.

And the Ideas Come Pouring In

A few days ago I was stuck for story ideas. That was probably because I'd poured the contents of my head into Merry-Go-Round. Given a few days' rest, some reading, and some thinking out loud, it's starting to fill back up again.

1. My wife wants me to write a non-fiction book on the War on Terror. I think what she has in mind is a "beginner's guide." My thoughts are more along the lines of "Best of Rantburg," which would boil down to the most ridiculous incidents, clustered around the high points. 


2. I have the title for my Great American Novel. I'm going to call it Love Among the Nudibranches. I just don't know what it's going to be about.


3. An idea I had years ago and never developed was Attack of the Baloneyoids, which featured an invasion of the earth by cannibalistic extraterrestrials who look and smell like 200-pounds of mortadella with feet. The idea is to make all the major characters maintain their illusions about each other, even past the blowoff.
   
   Sweet Cynthia retains her illusion that her dipsy doodle Professor father is a genius. Jack, the barrel-chested, cleft-chinned, ebullient hero maintains the illusion that Cynthia's not a slut who'll do most anybody of male gender and many who aren't; she's not particular about species, either, since she shows up smelling strongly of garlic a time or two. ("You like bockwurst, baby?" "How big a bockwurst?") That was just someone who resembles her you saw naked on the internet with a half dozen guys. Cynthia, for her part, maintains the illusion that Jack's leading the resistance to the invaders, rather than actually being a dolt who spends his time designing ever more garish uniforms for the resistance fighters to wear and writing plans for enormous counteroffensives that are logistically impossible.
   
   Cynthia, Jack, and the Professor all take seriously the Noam Chomsky rewrite who's convinced it's all our fault and that we should be negotiating and offering concessions to the Baloneyoids. People should be getting on those transport ships, trusting to the baloneyoids' good will. I might have him eaten after showing up at the flying saucer parking lot with a white flag and a bunch of protesters.  I'll probably have the protesters get eaten, too.
   
   The guy nobody likes and nobody trusts but Sweet Nell will be Nick, the skinny Italianate ex-con. He and Nellie are the only ones among them with the sense to blow his or her nose when his or her lip gets wet. He's the one who actually kills baloneyoids (Noam refers to it as murder), who organizes the resistance, sets up a liaison corps of similarly nondescript people, searches for the baloneyoid weaknesses, and ultimately wins the war -- for which Jack gets the credit. Nick and Nell sneak off in the end while Jack, Cynthia, and the Professor are being feted, to find a nice cottage in the Poconos and live happily ever after.


4. The other idea came to me the other evening. I wrote (and I quote): I made the heroine prettier than average (though a heroine, of course, should be prettier than average, if not gorgeous.) That set me thinking last night  on the fact that heroines might swoon, they might become dangerously ill, they may even pass away at the end of the book, though rarely, but they don't get scarred.  Their milk white skin remains unperforated except for Mina Harker, and those holes grew shut. And they never lose body parts, much less break a nail. Okay, so maybe they'll break a nail.

And then there are those pictures of the very lovely 1st Lieutenant Melissa Stockwell. There's also Kirstie Ennis. Sarah Reinertsen. And Mary Dague posing as the Venus de Milo. Spend an hour searching and you'll find a dozen more, at least. If you're ever down in the dumps watch Mary's video.

There are some inspiring stories about Wounded Warriors and the support they receive from their families and the military. There aren't enough about the support they receive from the bureaucracy-ridden VA, but most VA facilities work at it. But I also know (from hard experience) that there isn't always a "happily ever after." Lots of men can't quite accept the idea of damaged women. That's not to say that there aren't some who can, but I think an honest statement would be that most can't. Add in PTSD: She can be pretty hard to live with and divorce is probably pretty common. I've already got a stub for the story with Martin and Annie Carver from Merry-Go-Round. So I've got a hat full of characters and a locale. Now all I have to figure is what's going to happen.


5. Then there's Del of Kerao to finish. It's a science fiction tale of a man with the worst case of PTSD ever, a remnant of a defeated invasion force with no prospect of ever going home again. It's set in the same story line as Karl Redhand.
   
   All the science fiction I've ever read has assumed a future that's evolved from North America or Europe (maybe Russia). I'm postulating space colonization involving the people the earth wants to get rid of, which would be irritating pockets of non-conformity. All those little pockets would have an equal chance at growth. I've built a dominant culture that grows out of a resurgent Vedic movement in Laos, after a couple thousand years of development: Polytheistic, multicultural without the virtue-signaling smarm -- maybe I should think of it as polycultural. They speak a single Imperial language that's derived from English, but rather than using Greek and Latin roots -- no memory of Greek and Latin -- they use "Old Dai," which is Thai-Lao, their religious language. With 125 different worlds in their empire, they've got at least 125 dialects x however many major locales on each planet. Some of the dialects are mutually incomprehensible.
   
   Del tries to retire to a farm in the country after doing his service to the Loyalist regime that regrew two legs and an arm for him after he was the single survivor of an artillery strike. He meets a nice girl and her sister, and captures two bad guys who rob the ville. He saves his fiancee and her sister, and then gets blown up along with his fiancee. He survives, she doesn't.
   
   From there he's offered a job by the regime to help track down the guys who blew them up. He finds himself working as a criminal investigator with the hated, but reforming, Security Police, which was taken over by Karl Redhand in the last book. He and his partner become famous criminal investigators because Del's carrying around 250 extra minds in his head. When last seen he was in Novy Kruz. They had a lead on the revanchist assassination ring. He had been speculating on what happens to the animus or soul when people die. He and his wife, his fiancee's sister, are expecting. Contact was just being reestablished with the decadent Empire.
   
   At this point (around 65,000 words) I'm kind of stuck. I have the remaining chapter titles, I know approximately what's going to happen in each, but the words won't come together.

The Duke of Chimney Butte

I mentioned that one of the books I had read in the past few days was The Duke of Chimney Butte. I think the publication date was 1920.

It's a cowboy story that starts with Lambert, the protagonist, as a salesman peddling kitchen gadgets out in the middle of nowhere (or maybe it was North Dakota), pushing his bike with a flat tire. He comes upon a cow camp. One guy, Spence, especially befriends him, tagging him with the name "Duke of Chimney Butte" based on the trademark of his combination potato peeler-nail puller-apple corer-can opener. Another guy, Jim Wilder, tries to set him up with Whetstone, a man-killer horse; if Lambert can ride him he can have him. Lambert rides the killer horse, mentioning in passing that he used to work breaking horses back home. Jim tries to renege, Lambert trounces the fellow, who whips out a knife in the usual kind of dirty pool. One of the cowboys kicks the knife out of Jim's hand after he's slashed Lambert a couple times.

At that point, Jim and Spence shoot it out. The motivation is merely because they don't like each other. Jim blows a hole through Spence, killing him.

That's it. There's no further exposition of Spence's character, nor of Wilder's. There's not any further mention of Spence, who gave his all, for the rest of the book. Lambert returns from the chase leading Jim's horse with blood on the saddle. The author doesn't even say if the buried the villain. Lambert goes on to become famous as a cowboy for a hundred miles around, which is fine, but there's a paucity to that introduction that weakens what's a pretty entertaining novel:. If I'm ever lacking ideas, I could take the setup and write an entirely different book.

The rest of the book (that Ogden wrote, not what I'd write):

Lambert one day races the train through Misery on Whetstone and wins. A pretty young maiden flutters her hankie out the window at him and he falls in love. He quits his job and goes off in search of her, with his friend Taterleg as Sancho Panza, to fetch up in Glendora. They end up working for Vesta Philbrook, who's having trouble with rustlers. She's is a comely young maiden, pretty enough to "gladden a man's heart." She's a nice lady, too. 

One of the rustlers is father to Grace Kerr. She's the girl from the train, with whom Lambert is smitten enough to set out looking for in the general direction the train went. Grace is pretty gorgeous. She also turns out to be not a nice lady, though Lambert won't admit it to himself. Can she lure him from his duty as a hand on Vesta's ranch? 

Now, to me that's not a bad plot device. Grace isn't described as evil, except by Vesta. She's pretty well drawn, in fact probably better than Vesta, who kind of hovers in the background being good while Grace has the fun, until Lambert finally falls for her (Vesta) in the last chapter. Both girls are better drawn than, for example, most Louis L'Amour or Max Brand heroines. Both of them draw the reader's sympathy, Vesta for standing up to the rustlers and Grace for supporting her father's endeavors, right or wrong, legal or illegal, drunk or sober.