Almost a Hero

Did I ever tell you about the time I almost saved a baby in a carriage from rolling into rush-hour traffic? I was walking down the street when I noticed a father with a baby carriage less than a block away. The dad was distracted by something and was turned away from the street and the carriage. Slowly but surely the carriage began to roll towards the street.

I started running flat-out, but at that distance it was probably going to take me at least 20 or 30 seconds to get there. Before I’d covered half the distance the dad turned around, noticed his baby rolling away and quickly closed the distance and grabbed it. It had rolled onto the street but was still in the curbside lane where cars parked, when he managed to secure it.

At this point I realized I could have just shouted out to him some kind of warning, rather than trying to get there myself. After all, sound does move faster than a person on foot, even one who used to be a track star in high school. (Also, I was never a track star in high school.)

It’s not even necessarily true that there wasn’t time to think. I was running for five or 10 seconds when he noticed his rolling baby and moved to save it. That’s enough time to sit and think about the wisest response to the crisis.

But I guess the point is that I wasn’t sitting and thinking. My first instinct was to run for it, and I put all my energy and focus into continuing to run. Only when the baby was safe did my brain, now out of crisis mode, come up with the strategy of shouting a warning.

That’s the story of the time I was almost a hero. Feel free to almost congratulate me.

This and That

There are only three more full weeks before we return to Canada, and there’s lots to do. I’ve just finished the Murakami book, so I need to write up my review for that. That leaves me with four more review books to read this month.

Odds are I’ll still be working on the last one as our plane touches Canadian soil, but as I know I have fresh new review material waiting for me at home, I’m endeavouring to be as close to caught up on my Costa Rica reading as possible by the time we head back. I don’t want to arrive there with more than one unfinished book.

I’ll be doing my usual Care2 blogging throughout the week, and I’ll also be working on a piece I’m writing for a magazine, which I won’t name unless and until they actually decide they like what I came up with and are going to run it. I don’t want to count my chickens, after all.

I have been reasonably diligent with submitting other unsold articles, but don’t expect too much to happen with that, at least immediately. I’ve already mentioned a new blogging gig, but I don’t even know if it’s going to start this month, since the site itself has yet to be launched.

The last week we’re here will involve a lot of last-minute touristy stuff. A canopy tour, a trip to the zoo, a couple last treks to the ocean, and even just local stuff in our nearby towns. My writing output will probably be lower that week as a result (not to mention the need to clean house and pack). So I hope to be on the ball this week and next and keep to a good working schedule.

That’s all for now.

The Rest of the Big Three

I’ve already mentioned Asimov, whose most important works I’ve read, excepting his Robot series. He published over 500 books in his lifetime, however, so I’ll never really be done Asimov. When I see a second-hand copy of an out-of-print story or essay collection, I’ll always pick it up. But what about the other two writers comprising the “Big Three of Science Fiction”?

I think I can equally say I’ve read Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s most important stuff. The entire Rama series (the original works as a stand-alone but the later sequels are also minor gems, I think), the entire Space Odyssey series (which is solid enough, but of course the original, 2001, is the only must-read), one of his most well-known stand-alones, Childhood’s End.

Missing from that list is The City and the Stars, The Fountains of Paradise, and I’d like to read his last published book, co-written with Frederik Pohl, The Last Theorem. It started with Clarke’s outline but he got so sick that Pohl pretty much did all the heavy lifting himself. He finished a final draft, Clarke took a look and was happy with it, and died days later. So all three of those are on my list.

Robert A. Heinlein is possibly less prolific than Clarke, and certainly much less so than Asimov. But I have the most catching up to do with him. I’m definitely considering reading every single one of his novels, which is probably why I’m much further behind than the other two.

His work is generally broken into early-, middle-, and late-period Heinlein. Early Heinlein includes the Golden-Age short stories in Astounding and other magazines (a good chunk of which I’ve read), and his juvenile novels for Scribner (plus a few non-juveniles written under pen-names during the same period). I’ve read about half of the juveniles, leaving perhaps five or six to go. His last book of this period is Starship Troopers, and also the most influential, but there’s a lot of good stuff in this period and it’s worth reading almost all of it.

Middle-period Heinlein includes what are generally considered his greatest works: The Moon is a Harsh Mistress and Stranger in a Strange Land were both written during this period of the 1960s and early 1970s. I plan to read all of these (excepting possibly his fantasy novel, Glory Road), but having read his two most important works, Moon and Stranger, the ones I really need to read next are Farnham’s Freehold and Time Enough for Love.

After a period of ill health, Heinlein began writing again in the ’80s. These last few novels generally aren’t considered his best work, tending to meander and proselytize a bit on his political beliefs. That said, while his plotting was less tight, some of those flashes of brilliance that make Heinlein great still occurred, at least by some accounts.

I haven’t read any late Heinlein, but plan on reading at least The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and we’ll see where I go from there. Job: A Comedy of Justice was, apparently, flawed, but also important, so we’ll see.

I should note, though, there have been far more than three important SF writers the last 70 years. I’m familiar with Pohl but not Bester, Silverberg and Haldeman but not Niven or Ellison, Bujold but not LeGuin. There’s still a lot of catching up to do.

Feliz Año Nuevo

. . .Let’s hope it’s a prosperous one. I didn’t get as much done in the last week as I wanted to. I was hoping to bang out four or five pieces. If you count book reviews, I ended up writing about three and a half. I’m going to keep at it, of course, but also try to enjoy the time we have left in Central America. We’ll be heading back next month (albeit, not until the very end of the month).

Holiday Work Schedule

Just a quick note that I did indeed make it back safely from Panama last week, but have had very little time for writing since then. It’s been a busy month, lots of touring around both in Panama and here in CR. I did manage to squeeze out a couple quick reviews, one of which I’ll post up here later (another hasn’t been placed yet), and I also finished up an author interview I’m polishing up today for a potentially-interested outlet.

I’m also pleased that I’m officially caught up on all my assigned reviews. I have a pile of books that I’ve requested myself, which means I am not beholden to any particular editor or publication to review them for.

But I do have to make up for lost time. Before New Year’s, with any luck, I’ll get through a good five or six of the features and reviews that I’ve been meaning to start, or have half-finished, as the case may be. I do wish I wrote faster — it takes me a solid two or three days for a decent feature article.

And of course there’s the ongoing chore of placing my finished work, which means pitching, pitching, and pitching. Anyway, I normally try for three updates a week on the site, but I’m giving myself permission to do less than that from now until the New Year. Let’s call it a holiday schedule.

Nebula Nominations Open

I’m scheduling this post to auto-publish in my absence, as by the time you read this I’ll already be in Panama. Gonna go see the canal and have some Panaman tacos or something, I guess. Back on Monday, meanwhile, here’s a quick write-up I’ve done on this year’s SF (certainly not exhaustive), in light of the Nebula Award being open for nominations.

Five Important (To Me) Non-Fiction Books

Books that were not only interesting, but taught me something new that I also happen to think was important. In no particular order:

1) The Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs: “It is easy to blame the decay of cities on traffic . . . or immigrants . . . or the whimsies of the middle class. The decay of cities goes deeper and is more complicated. It goes right down to what we think we want, and to our ignorance about how cities work. The forms in which money is used for city building — or withheld from use — are powerful instruments of city decline today. The forms in which money is used must be converted to instruments of regeneration — from instruments buying violent cataclysms to instruments buying continual, gradual, complex, and gentler change.”

2) Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond: “The history of interactions among disparate peoples is what shaped the modern world through conquest, epidemics and genocide. Those collisions created reverberations that have still not died down after many centuries, and that are actively continuing in some of the world’s most troubled areas.”

3) The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier:The left needs to move on from the West’s self-flagellation and idealized notions of developing countries. Poverty is not romantic.

“The countries of the bottom billion are not there to pioneer experiments in socialism. They need to be helped along the already-trodden path of building market economies. The international financial institutions are not part of a conspiracy against poor countries. Rather, they represent beleaguered efforts to help.

“The right needs to move on from the notion of aid as part of the problem — as welfare payments to scroungers and crooks. It has to disabuse itself of the belief that growth is something that is always there for the taking, if only societies would get themselves together.”

4) The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan: “’Eating is an agricultural act,’ as Wendell Berry famously said. It is also an ecological act, and a political act, too. Though much has been done to obscure this simple fact, how and what we eat determines to a great extent the use we make of the world — and what is to become of it. To eat with a fuller consciousness of all that is at stake might sound like a burden, but in practice few things in life can afford quite as much satisfaction. By comparison, the pleasures of eating industrially, which is to say eating in ignorance, are fleeting. Many people today seem perfectly content eating at the end of an industrial food chain, without a thought in the world; this book is probably not for them.”

5) The World Without Us by Alan Weisman: “When you examine societies just as self-confident as ours that unraveled and were eventually swallowed by the jungle…you see that the balance between ecology and society is exquisitely delicate. If something throws that off, it all can end.

“. . . Two thousand years later, someone will be squinting over the fragments, trying to find our what went wrong.”

Bonus) The Elements of Style by William Strunk Jr. and E.B. White: “To achieve style, begin by affecting none.”

At the Beach

V is with family in El Salvador, so I’m on my own for a week. I’ve been lax in my work lately, but put in a good six hours writing yesterday and am on par to match or beat that again today. I doubt I’ll take very good care of myself this next week. I’m thinking two meals a day: one smoothie and one package of ramen. Keeping things simple.

We spent this past Monday at the beach on Puntarenas, which was mostly deserted due to the slightly grey weather. Yet with December just around the corner, the water was warm. Much warmer than a Manitoba lake in the high heat of August.

(Photo by V.)

I said that day that this had been only my second time dipping a toe into the ocean, the first being some ankle-deep wading at South Padre Island, Texas, 14 years ago (it was probably early November). I was wrong, however. I remembered today that I’d spent a day at the beach (with, again, some ankle-wading) when I lived in Xiamen, China, almost exactly four years ago (it was December). It was a class trip, one of the fonder memories of my time there.

This was, however, the first time I actually swam, though I didn’t venture very deep. It took us a long time to get around to making the trip, considering how close it turns out to be. I’m eager to go back soon.

Getting Through Asimov

Isaac Asimov published nearly 500 books in his lifetime. An oft repeated (but incorrect) claim is that Asimov has published at least one book for every category of the Dewey Decimal system. In reality he missed one, the 100 category, philosophy and psychology. Still, it’s an impressive body of work.

I have no intention of devoting that much reading time to a single author, but I’ve been hitting his major works over the last several years. His Empire series, his Foundation series (the original trilogy, but not the later books of the ’80s), two of his most critically successful novels, The Gods Themselves and, just yesterday, I read The End of Eternity (pretty good, an epic tale of time travel).

The only real “must-read” left on my Asimov list is his Robots stories (on which the film I, Robot, starring Will Smith was based). This is a bit funny, because years before I’d actually read anything by him, back in high school, I did know the name Isaac Asimov, and the one thing I knew about him is that he had written some science fiction wherein he laid out the “Three Laws of Robotics”:

1) A robot may not harm a human or, through inaction, allow a human to come to harm.

2) A robot must obey human beings, unless this would conflict with the first law.

3) A robot must protect itself, so long as this does not come in conflict with the first two laws.

That’s from memory. I’m sure just about everyone has heard of those before, even previous to the Will Smith movie. Part of the delay in reading the works in question that I’ve been trying to make sure I got the right collection. It’s not as easy as a book series; I don’t want a “best of” collection that randomly picks robot stories. I’m looking to get the complete set of stories in publication order, and it’s not always clear on product descriptions what collections include which stories. I did get the I, Robot collection to start, and will read it when I’m back in Canada.

That’s not to say I’ll be “done” with Asimov after that. But when it comes to the classics, including sci-fi classics, I try to hit the most important stuff first. I may eventually read everything Heinlein’s written, for example, but when I decided to check him out for the first time, I started with Stranger in a Strange Land, then Starship Troopers and The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. I didn’t stop there, but if I hadn’t happened to like him, I would at least have wanted to see what the fuss was about with those particular novels.

Friend Reading Lists

As a rule, I’m willing to take at least one “you must read this” recommendation from each friend and acquaintance, more in the case of someone I’m closer to or have reason to think has similar tastes to my own. Sometimes they don’t even realize they’ve given me a recommendation. The advantage of this is a greater variety in reading material and education than I might come to on my own. Those lacking such recommendations can always look into literature classes via this course finding site.

An old friend that I’ve mostly lost touch with mentioned The Death and Life of Great American Cities years ago. At the time he was thinking about studying architecture, but he still has the book listed on his Facebook profile even today, so that seems as good an endorsement as any.

The book is 50 years old now, and its influence on the field is obvious even to me. I recognize her ideas from the little bit of previous reading I’ve done on city planning/urban development, and now I get to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.

Tthere’s an obvious comparison tomake between healthy neighbourhoods and healthy ecosystems. The different aspects of a neighbourhood, different businesses, residences, and public areas all feed off of and depend on each other. Thus, mixed-use land that develops organically tends to beat out hierarchical, planned and zoned neighbourhoods. Just as biodiversity is required for a healthy ecosystem.

It makes sense when you think about it. No one wants to live in downtown Winnipeg because there’s very little parking, limited options for grocery stores or other amenities. There’s a giant arena, but that just means people who can afford to migrate in for an event and then leave when it’s over. They come downtown for a single event but don’t stick around; of course they live elsewhere.

The idea of publicly building a major designed cultural centre to renew an area is 50 years out of date. Jacobs explained in 1961 why this fails to work, time and again. Why don’t our own politicians know better?

Compare our downtown to a vibrant area like Osborne Village, where the sheer amount of diversity, and the combination of business and residential use keep the place busy all night. Everything feeds on everything else. It’s symbiosis. Downtown is most active during the day, when the nine-to-five crowd migrates in for work, but dies at night.

This might be oversimplifying, but isn’t it astounding how cities can spend massive amounts of public money on initiatives that do not reach their goals? Shouldn’t the people making the decisions have more training and education before being called on to make or approve such proposals?