Ah, the writer’s life: Last night I was working on the penultimate chapter of Cates #4, The Terminal State and I hit the line I’d seen in my head for months now, finally getting to the real climax, y’know? And of course the line kind of fell flat on the page and the beat is all wrong because it’s too early in the chapter and it all ended in tears. And booze. Booze and tears, and an exasperated wife pretending to be absorbed in a magazine. This happens a lot, at least for me: It’s like when you’re waiting on a movie to come out for a year, building it up in your head, and then it arrives and it’s. . .just a movie. Good, fine, but not exactly revelatory.

I cry then, too. That’s why I have so few friends.

So the best thing to do when you hit a moment like that is to just stop working, go pour yourself whatever it is that soothes you, and think on other things for a while. So I thought about my post from the other day discussing The Singularity and writing SF set in the future and all that, and I thought, well, things are getting a bit tight for SF, aren’t they? A lot of SF miracles are actually coming true – perhaps not as quickly as we’d like, and perhaps not quite there yet, but on the horizon. It’s not so easy these days to come up with something vaguely science-based to wow readers with. And some of the old stand-bys (time-travel, flying cars, pigs in space) are a bit shopworn; you don’t have to go see The Time Traveler’s wife to wonder when in hell frickin’ time travel became grist for a mopey mainstream drama. Se Lost, fer god’s sake – SF is bleeding into the mainstream, which means when you write your terrific time-travel story it might be good, but it won’t wow anybody. Not any more.

Maybe this is why we’re seeing the rise of vampires and werewolves and such. <BEGIN UNRESEARCHED HALFASSED OPINION>Because, vampires and werewolves and witches will never actually come true, so they will always remain pretty wowy-zowy if handled with talent and vision. Your cracklin’ warlock-in-real-life story is never going to be surpassed by the antics of real-life warlocks, after all. I think there’s appeal in that as we watch older SF works become quaint and goofy with their old-timey concepts of space/time, world politics, and population densities.</END UNRESEARCHED HALFASSED OPINION>

The other side of this “problem”, if you want to call it that, is the fact that the current trends in science are pretty vague and complex. I mean, rocket ships having battles in space is something we can all picture. String Theory, sadly, is beyond me. Maybe not you, but certainly me. As science digs deeper into the basic threads that make up the universe, applying those theories to an exciting story gets harder and harder, as eventually you have a group of people standing around doing nothing for 20 pages, and then the cosmos explodes.

Actually, I think I’ll write that story myself right now. . .

Of course, I’m a little dimwitted, so plenty of folks are probably racing along writing amazing SF with all the new hot science properly applied while I sit here weeping for the time when I could just take your standard western, set it IN SPACE, and sell a story. The obnoxiously talented Sean Ferrell*, in fact, drunkenly told me about an SF story idea of his a few months ago that was absolutely terrific. So it’s probably just me. As my incompetence is legendary, this surprises no one.

*I’ve decided this is his title from now on: The Obnoxiously Talented Sean Ferrell. I want to steal his ideas.

Recently, io9.com published an essay by Charlie Jane Anders which wondered outloud whether you can actually set Science Fiction in the future any more, an article I skimmed because any mention of The Singularity instantly makes me sleepy. The jist of it is, since The Singularity is going to be Teh Biggest Game-Changer Evah, there’s no point. To wit:

“since we can’t imagine life after the Singularity, it’s almost impossible to write about”

Now, that’s a fun thing to discuss at Con panels or over your sixth round at a bar, but of course it’s ridiculous. The Singularity itself is little more than a fun SF concept, at least right now. The fact is, we never know anything about the future, and yet we write about it all the time. Hell, smarter con men than me are creating entire careers out of making shit up about the future and selling it as being a “Futurist” (yay!). I could just as easily cobble together some half-assed scientific background and declare that the human race is on the verge of evolving into pure energy, so why bother writing any stories where corporeal folks do boring matter-based things.

The Singularity is comforting, of course. I’d certainly like to think that I’m going to be alive when Everything Changes – it’s the same mindset for people who are convinced The Rapture is coming, the assumption that they are important or lucky or whatever enough to be part of Ultimate History. It’s like, oh, you were there when the Berlin Wall came down? Pffft, I was here when JESUS CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN AND JUDGED THE WORLD! Or, oh, you witnessed the Moon Landing? Shucks, I was alive WHEN WE MERGED WITH TECHNOLOGY TO BECOME IMMORTAL DEMIGODS!

Heck, it’s a seductive concept, being that lucky and/or important. I’m not lucky or important. I woke up this morning to find cat shit all over the bathroom floor. The Singularity, frankly, can’t come fast enough, but I fear, in the words of Robert Zimmerman, that It Ain’t Me, Babe.

What really offends me about the idea that writing SF set in the future is now impossible is the idea that our imaginations are so limited that we can’t imagineer our way around this. I mean, let’s stipulate for a second that The Singularity is not just a Futurist Fever Dream and might Actually Happen (and let’s ponder for a moment how many Capitalized Phrases Jeff can cram into this essay). Is the assumption here that our brains are not powerful enough without nanobot assistance to imagine what that might be like? Hell, I can imagine a lot of trippy things. Hot damn, I’m doing it right now.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the increasingly fast advance of science and technology isn’t making it damn hard to imagine the future, because things keep happening faster than we can imagine them. Just yesterday I had an idea that some characters in my books might wear contact lenses or similar that overlaid instant information on what they looked at, but goddammit if that isn’t already being worked on. By the time I work that into a published book people are already going to be wearing huge sunglasses with that technology; by the time we make it into mass market paperbacks they’ll have scaled it down to contacts. I mean, damn. Used to be you could imagine things and have a comfortable 50 year cushion before any chance of it actually happening. Today it’s like 50 weeks, at best.

Ah, but that’s just a challenge, isn’t it? Gird your loins and write some SF, dammit. If you write a good story with compelling characters, no one is going to care much if the actual science gets a little dated; Neuromancer‘s concept of cyberspace doesn’t reduce its glory, and if Frederick Pohl has had occasion to lament that the science in some of his HeeChee books is now deprecated, it doesn’t make them bad books. Go forth and imagine, and take your chances.

Friends, I don’t exactly live a life of suspense and international intrigue; I don’t think that shocks anyone. A little writing, some booze, some ambitious guitar playin’ – this is what passes for excitement around here. A fine example was this weekend: A nice dinner, renting Marley and Me with the wife (a movie which made me suicidal; I spent Saturday night alone in the dark in the bathroom with a bottle of rye) and a great deal of puttering. This is a good thing, because I’ve reached the Age of Honesty with Yourself, and I know I am no John McClane in secret. If I were to stumble into Die Hard, I’d be one of the extras who gets machine-gunned for no reason, probably standing by the buffet with a cheese puff halfway to my mouth.

Anyway, one of the other exciting things I did this weekend was try to watch the first episode of Syfy‘s* new show, Warehouse 13. I figure it’s a SF show, so I might as well take a gander, as you get few decent SF shows to watch. Also, Syfy’s offering it as a free on-demand show in my cable neighborhood, so why not? So one night while stalking cats through the house I put it on. For five minutes.

I can’t really say this show is bad, or good, or anything. All I can tell you is the first five minutes were so leaden and cliched I couldn’t go on. You know the old chestnut teachers pass on to writers in workshops and classes, “Grab the reader with the first line”? Well, it’s a good piece of advice (though, as with all advice, your mileage may vary and you should never hesitate to ignore it if you’re sure of yourself) and it applies to TV shows too. The first five minutes of Warehouse 13 were plain old boring.

Let’s see: Beautiful but cold and businesslike female agent? Check. Handsome and rakish male agent who breaks the rules but is a genius, and also too sleeps with more women than Hugh Hefner? Check. An adversarial relationship between them that includes sexual tension and grudging respect? Check. And you know immediately that they’ll be forced to work together despite their sincere pleas against it? Oh, I’m sure: Check.

I don’t know if the story itself was interesting, because I almost passed out at that point, contemplating the well-run rut of these character types. Sweet lord, I can even pinpoint season three, episode seven when they’re forced to share a hotel room on a rainy night and he sees her stripping out of her wet clothes and their eyes meet. I mean, really, is this the best they can do? If this were a book this is the equivalent of making the first line an instruction to go read other, more interesting books first.

Maybe the story was fascinating. Maybe it was the best SF concept in years, well-written and well-filmed. Who knows? I may never. Every time I even relive that opening scene in my head I start to feel sleepy.

There would have been six million better ways to open the show or draw the characters. Almost any other concept would have been better. Even simply switching the sex roles and making her the sexually irresistible playgirl and him the uptight perfectionist would have, if nothing else, made me give the show ten more minutes to at least find out what the premise of the episode was going to be. As it is this might as well have been sketched out by one of those script-writing programs, which it may well have been. And it reinforces my suspicion that the folks who run Syfy think that SF fans will watch anything as long as it a) has monsters, b) has aliens or ghosts, or c) has a passing resemblance to The X Files.

The lesson here is that you’ve got to put some effort into the opening of any story. You can’t expect folks to wade through a large amount of boring rubbish to discover a bit of genius on page 35, or after the first commercial break. Like I said: I don’t know if W13 is a good show or not. I may yet give it another chance, but right now I’m not inclined to do so, because why? I feel like I know exactly how the characters will behave, I feel like I could write the first twenty minutes of this show without a single note from the producers. Maybe there’s a shocking twist, maybe if I’d given it five more minutes I would have been rewarded with an interesting inversion or a great play on my cynical expectations. Maybe. And maybe I’m a boor for not having the intellectual fortitude to hang in there a few more minutes and see. Anything’s possible.

On the other hand, they could have simply made the beginning more interesting, and I wouldn’t have to wonder.

*Web site title: “Imagine Greater” WTF? Is everyone at that channel a moron?

DRM sucks, kids. Don’t buy it. (In deference to Damaso, I will stipulate here that I am singling out Digital Rights Management schemes and the bullshit they spawn, not necessarily eBooks in general or eBook devices in general).

Kids, DRM sucks. Don’t buy it.