Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
If George pulled a gun from under his coat and I was the one watching, I
_might_ be able to notice whether it was a revolver or an automatic, but
that would be about it.  Anyway I'd be too busy hitting the dirt!
  

    
A valid point, Martha!  It's like drawing a picture of a face in
shadow -- you draw what you can actually _see,_ not what you know is
there.  In a fast, action scene from the point-of-view of a character
urgently involved, verisimilitude would be blown by giving details that
the character wouldn't have had the liesure to note.  I find that
action scenes are often best described as they probably would really be
perceived -- noise, scrambling, looking the wrong way, and only later
learning what actually happened.

Still, as the writer, I do want to convey as much as possible! 
Therefore it wouldn't be out of place to notice ejected shells spinning
away, for example, or gunfire too rapid to be coming from a revolver. 
And at night revolvers flare differently than automatics.  (I had a
night scene like this in a recent book, so it's fresh in my mind!)  

And even in a crashing crisis, I'd still try to let our character
catch some fleeting clues about what people are drinking.  We do need
to know, if at all possible, whether Character X is the sort that
drinks Pink Gins or the sort that drinks boilermakers.  
  

    
I pass the time on my 2-3 hour daily commute by listening to Books on
Tape.  Today's selection is _Virtual Light_ by William Gibson.  I was
quite taken by the description of a fractal knife belonging to one of
the characters, in which the edge of the knife blade, being a fractal,
was longer than the length of the blade itself.

This is what I think of as "future technology" (although for all I
know about knives there may actually be such a thing), and it got me
thinking about the technology that you create in your books.

Now, I know that you have described yourself as a fantasy writer as
opposed to a science fiction writer, but you do indeed create new
technology, but yours tends to be of the battered hubcap and string
variety, not what I think of as future technology at all.

But it fascinates and *functions* regardless of what we call it.  I'm
thinking of the device in the current Powers book I'm reading that is
comprised of an old rotary dial telephone, the eye of a dead Fisher
king, a manual pencil sharpener, a piece of chalk, and speakers and
tuners of some sort.  Its purpose is to reach the dead - you use the
person's name and birthdate and other info to calculate the number to
call, and, it works, too, although it doesn't always call the exact
person you're trying to reach, and in the book, they get a wrong number
- the wrong ghost - and have a heck of a time getting her off the
line.

At any rate, reading it, it sounds so plausible I'm about ready to
jump off the couch and hunt down the parts.  Would you tell us about
what research led you to that particular technological creation?  And
also, please say whatever you would about other technological creations
you've dreamed up...
  

    
Actually, I think the edge of any serrated knife is longer than the
knife!  This stuff is fascinating -- I remember comprehending, while
reading Gleick's _Chaos,_ that if you measure the coastline of, say,
California with too small a length-unit -- like walking through every
inlet with a 12-inch ruler -- you just get a uselessly big number, like
indicating that California's coastline is way longer than the equator.

Anyway, the Edison telephone -- well, as they're discussing over in
the Edison topic, it _was_ one of Edison's last plans to build
something like that.  And luckily I had a couple of friends, "Natural
Philosophers" in the Marine Corps, who undertook to build the thing. 
(They had to design it from scratch; Edison left no plans that I was
able to learn about.)  These guys were uniquely suited to deal with
this kind of thing -- they had already somehow hooked a Ouija board up
to a gigantic Tesla coil (it was as big as a stood-on-end VW), and
claimed to have talked to lots of ghosts with it.  (When I asked them
what ghosts talked _about,_ they told me that ghosts always want to
give you winning lottery numbers; and when I said I hoped they wrote
the numbers down, I was told, "They're just lyin'!  Ghosts don't know
what numbers are gonna win!")

Anyway, it involved, I recall, an electron brush-discharge inside a
Langmuir-gauge -- and a certain type of rectifying lens -- I don't
remember, but it's all in _Expiration Date._  (The chalk speaker was a
real invention of Edison's, cooked up to get around somebody's patent
on something more practical.)  My friends never got anybody on the
phone, I believe, but the whole thing did sound beautifully plausible! 

Speaking of Edison, that book was largely sparked by my reading (in
one of Cecil Adams's priceless _Straight Dope_ books) that Edison's
last breath is preserved in a test tube at the Ford Museum in Dearborn
(I think?) Michigan -- we've actually seen the thing.  And so I cooked
up the procedure (nitrous oxide inhalers &c.) for inhaling "live"
ghosts.

I do like that kind of garage-sorcerous-tech.  In _Last Call,_ I had
our characters outfit a '72 Suburban as a magical "stealth" vehicle,
with playing cards glued to the hub-caps and plastic deer-repelling
whistles glued in conflicting patterns all over the roof.  It sounded
good to _me._  

I think this kind of thing makes it all seem more plausible.  After
all, if there were these subterranean magical factions, they _would_
have come up with these odd makeshifts!  And of course you would have
to construct such things yourself, in your garage -- you might be able
to get components at a Home Depot, but they wouldn't have a ready-made
Witch-Repeller spray, or Acme Ghost Walkie-Talkie.
  

    
The electron discharge wasn't in the Langmuir gauge.  It was in some
kind of special "light bulb" type of thing.  Some kind of vibrating
filament was in the Langmuir gauge. (Just so I don't get scornful
messages from ghost-tech experts!)
  

    
However, if there are any ghost-tech experts out there, we would
welcome other messages!

Powers, what is your position on having characters die?  Are you
reluctant to have that happen?  Do you create your stories to keep it
from happening?  I haven't really done any statistical analysis on the
subject, but to my recollection it doesn't happen very often in your
books.
  

    
Good question!

I guess my main characters _don't_ die, in the stories, now that you
mention it.  I don't think it's anything deliberate -- I just always
picture them walking away at the end.  (Getting into a boat and sailing
away, actually, I noticed once.)  The main couple in _Stress of Her
Regard_ die at the end, but it's in a years-later Epilogue when they're
real old, so it doesn't really count.

I have peripheral characters die -- at the end of _Earthquake Weather_
I had a major supporting character die -- and I gotta admit, I was
reluctant to do it!  And the same thing happened on a much lesser scale
in this new spy book.  Hell, I had a _dog_ die in _Expiration Date,_
and I felt bad about it, tried to find a way around it in the math. 
Maybe it seems too _abrupt,_ intrusive, almost _mors ex machina_ (or
whatever it would be), like a violation of some conservation law.  Too
easy?  Too hard?  I'm not sure, actually.

I do tend to chop my protagonists up, during a story.  They often wind
up missing ears & eyes & fingers.  Maybe this is a _placatory gesture_
toward mortality.  Token offerings.

Maybe I don't picture the action of the book as the _end_ of my
protagonist's story; like, the action of the book is in effect some
kind of stressful tempering or correcting or equipping, and of course
once that's done it's only symmetrical that the protagonist be turned
loose at the end to go _do_ whatever sort of thing it might be that
he's been thus enabled to do.

That sounds good!  I have no idea right now whether it's true, or if
that's just the old English-major reflexes twitching.
  

    
        Just wanted to mention that the occult symbolism and secret
supernatural undergrounds in your novels are well-realized and interesting
enough that I've tried to rip them off in my own writing at least once.
They have a feel of functioning magical strangeness to them that seems
intuitively workable, as though they're tapping into a kind of logic below
the rational mind.  One good example of this is the "Stealth Suburban" in
_Last Call_ - the cloaking measures included deer whistles that made the air
currents around the car move funny, which had the effect of making the car
appear other than it was to psychic senses.  Now, I've never heard,
anywhere, that any kind of psychic or mystic operates by magically tracking
air currents, but reading it, it seems perfectly natural.  One just accepts
that the car's "identity" is affected, and it works.
        This kind of loose definition of identity, possession, and so on
appears throughout most of your work, is fairly consistent, and always
works.  Is it a general sense of occult definitions you've gleaned from your
research, do you know what will seem intuitively "right" from long practice,
or are you just insane and it happens to work for you? :-)
  

    
Well thanks, Noah! -- I ripped this sort of thing off from Leiber &
Lovecraft ... and even from my friend Blaylock.  He's always got a
character building mechanical dragons or something in the garage.  Some
of these things do have a kind of sub-rational plausibility, I like to
think.  It's like those net dream-catchers you see hanging on
rear-view mirrors -- my first thought is, Yeah, that'd work all right.

I do get a lot of it from research -- voodoo, Greek mystery-religion
rituals, European witchcraft -- but I generally find I've got to
systematize them a bit more than they actually are; and of course if
they're going to be working in the 1990s I've got to adapt them to
things like cars and TVs and duct tape (though voodoo and santeria have
already pretty much done that, I find).  I always picture them working
along a sort of Newtonian mechanics pattern -- action & reaction,
entropy, things like that; though in _Stress of Her Regard_ I had some
fun giving Quantum effects to a penny tossed around by a
fortune-teller. 

-- I'll continue this in an hour or so -- I've got to go get some new
tires on the '72 Suburban, as a matter of fact!  (It does still have
deer-whistles on the roof, by the way, but they're not actually there
to deflect psychic radar.)  I'm told the treads are "separating," and
that this is something I should worry about.  Detroit should issue a
standardized weekly newsletter -- "What to worry about in regards to
your vehicle!  Have you even thought about the ... _voltage
regulator?!_"  I always imagine that the engine is going to simply fall
out on the freeway some night, in a bad area of L.A., and bits of us
will be found decorating lampposts, on obscure secret holy-days, for
years to come.
  

    
In fact, the same friend who designed the Edison ghost-telephone for
me also made a ghost-inhaler -- all ready to go, as soon as you've got
a vial that contains a ghost!  A lot of the fun of this kind of story,
and an area in which I think it differs from magical realism (which I
don't claim to write), is just this kind of applied technology.  The
way I describe it, it's all screwy old junk made out of things out of
boxes at thrift stores, but my characters take it seriously -- and I
try to make it seem "logical", given the special rules of the story.

I do have to watch out, though, that I don't trivialize the _magic,_
with all this chicken-wire & car-batteries stuff!  I still want the
actual magic to be affecting and awesome and sometimes scary.  And not
just scary in the sense that you might get killed, but scary in the
sense that you might lose your soul.  In _Earthquake Weather_ I had
Dionysus descend on the poor old Suburban, and I wanted it to be
tangible and palpable enough so that the characters would worry about
the tires and the suspension -- but I wanted them to worry about those
things _afterward,_ after first being shocked and awed and diminished
by the abrupt presence of the god.
  

    
Well, you have me needing to read one of your books...   do you have a
suggestion for the best one for someone who doesn't know your style to start
with, or is any as good a place to get hooked as any other?
  

    
Thanks for asking that, Gail! Tim has me needing to read ALL of his books.
It's like going to a Grateful Dead show for the first time and needing
to know what tapes to listen to first.

Um, no offense, Tim.
  

    
Actually that's a flattering parallel, Reva!  I think I'd recommend
_Last Call._  If not that, _The Anubis Gates._
  

    
Glad  _The Anubis Gates_ got your nod as a good place to start.  I picked it
up this very evening, inspired to get started on your work by this topic.

Now I may even become a semi-informed reader of the topic.
  

    
All right Shaun!  I owe you a drink. 
  

    
A very apropos comment from a reader on the Web:

From: Karen Meisner [mailto:velvet@alyx.com]
> Sent: Saturday, September 18, 1999 4:38 PM
> To: inkwell-hosts@well.com
> Subject: please post this in the Tim Powers discussion
>
>
> My opinion as a reader and fan: I recommend you start with _The Anubis
> Gates_ and then just read everything else; that worked for me.  (Except
> I read _Earthquake Weather_ without realising it was the third in a
> loose trilogy -- yikes.  Powers plots are complex enough without coming
> into them in the middle!)
>
> But whatever you do, definitely read _Last Call_.
  

    
I always trust what Karen Meisner says.  Incidentally, the order of
that trilogy is _Last Call, Expiration Date,_ and finally _Earthquake
Weather._
  

    
Happy to see that I inadvertently read them in the correct order. 
Although now I have to wait and see who's gonna die in _Earthquake
Weather_.  I'm gonna guess it's Dr. Armentrout _ i'm rooting for that
sucker to encounter some weird psychic shotgun blast.

So, Powers, what about sex?  In this book it's clear that Cochran has
the hots for Plumtree (but only when she's Janis, and not when she's
Cody) are they gonna get it together here at all?  Has any of your
characters really ever gone into a clinch, or, gopod forbid, actually
had an orgasm on the pages of a Powers book?
  

    <scribbled by pdil Thu 30 Mar 00 12:37>
  

    <scribbled by pdil Thu 30 Mar 00 12:37>
  

    
And I was gonna say, what a great question, pdil, can't wait to see
the answer to that one!
  

    
I don't want to give away any of the stuff in _Earthquake Weather_
that you haven't read yet, Linda -- but several of the characters do
have sex in the course of the book.  And I remember the two main
characters in _Stress of Her Regard_ making love on the beach near (not
_very_ near) Shelley's house in Italy.  But I let the orgasms remain
implicit.  It always seems to me that when a writer goes into an
explicit sex-scene, with heaving bits and quivering whatnots, that the
prose has ... undergone a gear-shift without benefit of clutch; unless
the book has largely been about sex all along, of course.  And detailed
sex scenes written by _older guys_ always seem creepy -- your
attention is distracted from the Wizard to the guy feverishly working
the levers behind the curtain, and you want to say, "Oh, you _wish._" 
(You filthy old pig you.)

I haven't mentored anybody, except to the diluted extent teaching
Clarion might constitute that.  And my total failure to be up-to-date
with current fiction keeps me from noticing anybody who might be
influenced by my stuff!  I do remember seeing that movie _Stargate_
(right?  Kurt Russell, pyramids?) and wondering if the writers of it
had read _The Anubis Gates_ ... and I remember reading about an
in-production movie that sounded very like _Dinner At Deviant's
Palace,_ but it appears to have evaporated ... altogether I really am
not aware of anybody who seems to have been influenced by my stuff.  It
would be flattering to see!  I imagine Hemingway got a kick out of
seeing all the subsequent writers dutifully going through their
Hemingway Periods.

The new King got a good review in the L.A. Times.  I do want to read
it.  And I'd be thrilled to see evidence that he's read my stuff! --
though I've got to admit that the hopscotch thing was probably derived
from where I noticed it myself -- where else? -- in Pynchon's _Crying
of Lot 49._

(I admire your recommended Powers-reading schedule, Pdil!  When I've
completely forgotten the plots of 'em, I may do it myself one day.)
  

    
I am almost certain I read that book - _Crying of Lot 49_ that is, -
but I am unable to summon up a single thing about it.  Can you kind of
summarize it without giving it away?
  

    

The secret history of Western culture centers on the delivery of mail,
Linda. Plus, the harder you look at things, the more they look like the
things you're looking for.

Hope that helps.
  

    
And there's a very old alternate mail system for fugitive &
disenfranchised people -- the Trystero system, lethally secret -- and
Pynchon does a beautiful job of tracing its secret history, all the way
back to the Renaissance, showing how it spiralled in hiding around all
the overt, known mail systems.  And there's a Jacobean play that deals
with it obliquely, with a supressed couplet which may be a dangerously
indiscreet pun ... and when our heroine quotes the suppressed couplet
to an underground play-director, he stares at her and then says, "And
how did you get into the restricted vaults of the Vatican?"

Oh, great stuff!  But Pynchon, like magical realists, feels no
obligation to _tie things up_ at all -- as Mike notes, the harder you
look at things, the more deceptive they get ... until for our heroine
it all fragments away into terminal uncertainty.  As a reader -- and
ergo as a writer -- I want there to be some assurance that it was
_really there._  Pynchon also does this in _V_ -- which is another
wonderfully intriguing book -- I can pinpoint the exact point in that
book where the lead-up to the explanation shifts to the lead-away from
the explanation -- but the explanation itself is omitted!