To begin with, I am terrible at avoiding the internet. I can manage an entire day without Twitter or blogs; but at night I always fall off the bandwagon. One of the reasons I am a teetotaller is that I never trusted myself not to be become a drunk. It's embarrassing that I need an internet fix. 

Of late I've not even bothered abstaining. I check several times a day. Sure, the anxiety about the unresolved election isn't helping. At his point I wish the execution would just happen. It is clear that the country is thick with corruption and cowardice. Let's be done with it all already. Hope is for chumps.

Oddly, a brief check of the internet, in between perfectly productive activities and recreations, genuinely alleviates a kind of tension inside. I don't like this about me. I really do have a touch of the drunk. But there it is.

So the next time I swear off the internet, know that I am deluding myself, and ignore me.

Luckily I have not been wallowing in ephemera. This past month I wrote another work of fiction. That brings to four the number of works that I have written in 2020. Hardly the speed of pulp, I know, but damn fast for me. My latest is a fictional review of a fictional book about a fictional disproof of the Reimann Hypothesis. It's math fiction! With a blush of the weird, of course. It might be barely suitable for Stupefying Stories, but to be honest I wrote it for myself. (I had intended to write my not-maple-syrup story "for myself," but then had an impulse to write this other one instead.)

I've written only one other fictional review (that one a theater review, available in my non-SF collection The Chicken Bone). The fictional review is not a literary form I often read. I wrote mine mostly under inspiration from Stanislaw Lem, whose examples (as in A Perfect Vacuum) I have read and enjoyed.

So what's next? Well, these first four years of my retirement have produced twelve new stories. (Only twelve, yes. Again, I am a tortoise.) The first seven make a perfect collection. The next five can make another, if I include a sixth. So I am going to write a one-off short, most likely what I have designated my "Bodyguard" or "Praetorian" story, about a Secret Service agent who loyally protects the alien "King" of the USA.

P.S. I will not make these SF collections available to the public until each of the stories has been published in some magazine (and, of course, released from exclusivity). Self-publishing on its own, as I have said before, is euthanasia for my stories.

P.P.S. I am still waiting on word from StoryHack about An Uncommon Day at the Lake. It's only been a couple of months, but I am getting antsy. Also, I still have no idea what's up with my two stories at Stupefying. I'm reluctant to nag them, so I just keep checking their blog for schedules, to get some sense of anything. They're overdue for Issue #23. I am discouraged. But we'll see.

Yes, I like The Expanse. But you know what's annoying me? Apparently the future is a gynarchy. Women dominate all positions, political or scientific. They are the majority of any team. Pay attention; you’ll see. True, that does not make The Expanse unrealistic. After all, current America is a gynarchy, not least in its emasculation. But it does make The Expanse a tad tedious.

It was especially annoying in season four, when a Belter ship could be saved only through the combined efforts of Naomi, a clever female terrorist, and the terrorist's clever daughter. They literally had a no-name male character in the background nodding his head with subservient pride at the brilliance of the young girl, who apparently has preternatural skills and is able to solve it all, despite lacking an actual engineering education.

And Lord God above, if I see one more distaff hacker-tech-nerd on TV, I am going to kill somebody. If the natural impulse is to place a man, you just know they’ll square-peg a woman into that round hole.

I'm not accusing The Expanse of political correctness, as such (although I did stop reading the books because of their wokeness). The rot in our minds is so great now, that were the story to allow men and women their proper balance, our heads would start hurting and our stomachs start churning, the pain unabating until every two men are replaced with two women, and the third man is made a subordinate. I'm glad that I still recognize this revolution for what it is; but it does make me an utter curmudgeon. I can't wholly enjoy anything new. Everything new just has a bad feminist taste.

P.S. Oh, I am aware that the primary characters are not all women. I submit that one of the reasons The Expanse seems so good is that, despite everything else in the show, men are actually playing the key roles in the narrative. That just feels right, does it not?

Earlier in this post I said that hope is for chumps. I am not hopeful about America. Nevertheless I am saying rosaries these days, not so much for Trump but for the Republic (although I do believe it is critical he prevails). I know that God is concerned with the salvation of souls and not, per se, the course of human events, and the successful theft of the election might be, over decades or centuries, better for populating Heaven; but I also know that Justice is not to be scorned, and it's a different kind of despair to say, “Why bother? God has His own plans.” America needs a Lepanto. Will God give us one? Probably not. I’m really not hopeful. Still... I pray.

Recently I noted that I have, on occasion, attempted to make clever-funny comics. Prompted by that note I have finally finished a certain comic, the rough pencil sketch of which has been stashed near my desk for years.

Since there is a lot of talking in the comic, I didn't directly ink the text. The text and layout and so on were done on PC (in GIMP). I did draw the one character, in ink and water (using nib and brush). I then scanned the drawing and integrated it with the layout.

My scanner is so old — an Epson Perfection 1200U — that a driver hasn't been released since Windows XP. Luckily I can use one of the later Epson drivers, although there's a bit of jiggering to do so. I thought it was already installed on my PC but apparently my Windows 7 64-bit forgot it was there, and I had to reinstall. Bothersome.

To keep the comic legible I had to make it too big to fit in the normal column of this blog. The image will overlap to the right but should be fine on most browsers. If not so on yours, download the image (via right-click) and view it elsewise.

Enjoy!  

Somehow I became aware of The Sapphire Goddess: The Fantasies of Nictzin Dyalhis, a collection published by DMR Books in 2018. It collects all the fantasy stories of the unprolific Nictzin Dyalhis, who wrote primarily for Weird Tales between 1925 and 1940.

Two of Dyalhis's contributions to Weird Tales are science fiction: When the Green Star Waned (April 1925) and its sequel The Oath of Hul Jok (September 1928).I really liked both of these stories — so much so, that I have written a derivative work. Since Dyalhis's stories are in the public domain, I am free to have my story published, and I hope that Cirsova Magazine will accept it when submissions re-open later this year. 

There's an earnestness to Dyalhis's two stories. They are all superlatives, exclamation points, and outsized drama. The seven friends are the very best of their kind: the greatest scientist, the greatest diplomat, the greatest warrior, the greatest cultural scholar, the greatest biologist, the greatest reader of minds, and the greatest... well, the narrator is not presented as the "greatest" chronicler and poet, but he is part of the amazing circle.

The stories are clearly science fiction written before World War II. There isn't a lot of hard science. Nor is there magic; but there is an easy and intriguing occultism. Evil is as much a force as electricity. The technology has that alluring mechanical flavor, free of the atomic and the cybernetic.

The setting is the Planetary Chain, an alternative Solar System. Maybe it's the far future of our own but it seems much more a different place. The names of the planets are just a little off — Venhez for Venus, Jopitar for Jupiter, and so on. There are invocations of Our Lady of Venhez, a being who is not really Aphrodite. Venhez is a planet of love and its sign is the Looped Cross (i.e., ), but everything is sideways of our reality and mythology.

And that was my first handhold in creating my derivative work. Dyalhis doesn't develop things deeply. The world-building, though neat, is mostly suggestive.

My second handhold was the sketchiness of the characters. Hul Jok the warrior is vivid, Vir Dax the biologist has some color, Lan Apo the mind-reader is not a blank, and Hak Iri the poet, if only because he is our melodramatic narrator, is not one-dimensional, but by and large the characters are just carriers of superpowers. As you revel in Hul Jok you lament the general blandness of the others.

So there is a lot of foundation in the two stories but not a lot of definition. There's also an enjoyable spirit (and the touch of an outlook rather removed from 2020). The past century has not exactly produced a communal literary expansion of Hak Iri's Friends & the Planetary Chain. I may even be a pioneer. In any event, I had cause to continue Dyahlis's work; and therefore I did.

No, I did not write a gritty reboot. I'm not out to subvert expectations. Vir Dax does not have a gruesome past with a missing call-girl and Lan Apo is not struggling as a transgendered pansexual. My story is not a parody or even an affectionately comedic re-imagining. I simply wrote the third in a series.

Obviously I am not Dyalhis. Yet there is a manner to his writing that accords with my own and I don't need to mimic him wholly to evoke him. My goal was not, in any event, to don a Dyalhis mask. My work is truly derivative, neither identical nor separate. It follows well, I think.

Now I just need Cirsova to accept it — so that you can read it! Sadly, even in the best case, it won't be published for a year or more. But keep an eye out for The Impossible Footprint.

P.S. "Nictzin Dyalhis," though nom-de-plumey, was the man's actual name, near as can be determined. And I do recommend the collection from DMR.

P.P.S. The Impossible Footprint was eventually published by Cirsova and is also available in my collection Stellar Stories Vol. 2.

The first part of this was posted on September 13th. I decided to combine the two parts into a single post. I also changed the title.My father and I didn't do a lot together. In part he was simply seldom around. He was in the restaurant business — as cook, as manager, as owner — and the hours were atrocious. He was also not given to fraternizing with his children.

In fairness to him, I was a difficult and solitary nerd. 

Once, in the late 1970s, he took me to a signing with several SF authors. He had no taste for SF. He did this for me. Anyhow, I didn't know who would be there. As it was, I had read none of them. I think one was Frederik Pohl. Another was Ben Bova. Somehow I (and my father) ended up hanging around Bova — probably because he was the only one I really knew, since he had been Editor of Analog, to which I subscribed.

I remember only one thing that Bova said. An attending nerd (not I) brought up Space: 1999. Bova recounted some conversation he'd had with Isaac Asimov about that very subject. Seems that neither Bova nor Asimov cared much for Space: 1999. Bova's contempt was rather clear.

I loved Space: 1999. I was just a teenage boy, self-conscious beyond measure; and already disappointed by the lack of my favorite authors at this little signing, I was... well, hurt. I didn't get indignant. I didn't get angry. I was stung. And it hurt as well because Bova wasn't wrong. Space: 1999, while not contemptible, is a little bad; and I knew so even then.

I think at that point my father was waiting in the car. I hung out a while longer. Then, having half-heartedly obtained an autograph from Bova, I left. I'm grateful my father took me. But it's a melancholy memory.

Today is the 20th anniversary of the day that the denizens of Moonbase Alpha were cast into the cosmos. On September 13th, 1999, concentrated nuclear explosions on the farside of the Moon propelled the Moon out of orbit. The Alphans, unable to return to Earth, found themselves adrift on an uncontrollable Moon. They left our Solar System far behind, on a path towards — adventure!

Well, of course it's preposterous. I'm not going to go over all the stupid that is required for Space: 1999 to work. It can't work. Science is ashamed of Space: 1999. And of course you know what I'm going to say.

Who cares.

You must recognize how simply magical the premise is. We're not dealing with the plausible. Yes, the creators thought they were writing Real Science Fiction. But they were hacks; a bunch of Ed Woods. They had a cool idea and they ran with it. Because it is a cool idea. An awesome idea. You know it is. The wonder of traveling to the stars on the Moon!

You must also recognize that Space: 1999 is not Star Trek or Star Wars or Stargate. It is not an adventure show.

It is a Nightmare.

This crystallized for me only tonight. I'm embarrassed that I never had this insight. All the pieces were already there; yet only tonight did the epiphany come. I was listening to a livestream hosted by Doomcock (whose nom de YouTube is Overlord DVD). Doomcock, in honor of the date, was chatting a bit about Space: 1999. He asserted that Space: 1999 is not SF but HORROR. He really didn't elaborate a lot. He didn't have to. I knew instantly what he meant; and instantly I understood why I like Space: 1999, why it isn't complete trash, and why, despite everything, it can kind of work.

Part II

In many ways I was a conventional boy. I climbed trees. I raced bikes. I played ball with neighborhood kids. I built models of trucks and airplanes. I walked daringly through spillways and foolishly across the weirs of nearby rivers.

But I was also subtly peculiar. My sense of human relations was misaligned. This only worsened as my family, moving house constantly, refused to stay rooted, and I was always starting over with knowing people. I didn't cease to be social, as such; but I began my lifelong loneliness.

The odd thing about being lonely is that it's not necessarily a feeling you try to flee. Things suffused with loneliness do not repel me. They allure me.

And so here you have a science fiction show set on the Moon — the grey and lifeless Moon, whose settlers are not vivaciously dispersed beneath the sky but are packed away, contained in rooms and corridors and bound by vacuum; fellows in a harsh solitude, made harsher by their catastrophic expulsion from the hearth of Earth.

Loneliness pervades the show.

Do these lonely travelers come upon exotic wonders? Not exactly. Each planet they encounter is a chance to escape, not into diversion but into a home. And they are always frustrated. Sometimes the planet itself is hostile; sometimes the existing inhabitants are. In one episode aliens send terraforming equipment to the Moon precisely to dissuade the Alphans from attempting any contact. It seems the Moon could be home after all! Yet as soon as the Moon has spun beyond the alien world, the equipment is withdrawn and the Moon reverts.

Another time the Moon becomes a forward base for one side in an interplanetary war. Alpha is caught up in the fighting. Then the Moon passes on. Again the Alphans have been simply beset and returned to the void.

A couple of episodes (especially The Testament of Arkadia) hint that the journey of the Moon might be more than a mishap; that the Alphans may have an awful destiny and their trials may be other than pointless.

But no end is ever seen.

When the first child is born on Alpha — what greater hope is there than a child! — he is bodily hijacked by a violent being who seeks to end its own exile. And though the being is defeated and the child is restored, the lesson seems clear: The wandering Moon is no place for hope.

For even a child becomes a terror; a monster. The show does not deal in the merely alien. In its loneliness it proceeds, like a solitary sleeper, from nightmare to nightmare: The Troubled Spirit; Death's Other Dominion; End of Eternity; Guardian of Piri; Force of Life...

The epitome of this is Dragon's Domain, one of my favorite episodes.

Back in 1996, the crew of the Ultra Probe was killed by a monster. The commander, Tony Cellini, survived and returned to Earth. No one believed him, of course. He resumed service on Moonbase Alpha. And now, three years into the Moon's journey, Cellini starts to unravel. He senses the monster. Sure enough, the Moon has crossed paths with the graveyard of spaceships that includes the Ultra Probe.

The monster is not a guy in a rubber suit. True, it's obviously a practical effect; and one can discern the rubber in it. Space: 1999 was not a big-budget affair. And yet it's a proper monster, if not scary then surely creepy. It's a Cthulhu thing with an oven for a mouth. The show played it as horror. It came off as horror.

And that's kind of my point about Space: 1999. Another show would have played it for thrills or awe or heroic adventure. Instead we get moody, gloomy, creepy. They even use Albinoni's Adagio to set the tone.

Is Dragon's Domain a master class in television? Hardly. Like every other episode of Space: 1999, the stupid abounds. The acting embarrasses.

But. That tone. It's real. It's what elevates the show — at least enough. And you can know it is very real because the second season deliberately fled the gloom and sought excitement. And that second season, lacking nightmares and loneliness, is garbage. Even when I was thirteen I hated it.

That first season, though? In a culture that has managed to create Firefly and The Expanse, it is hard to praise, let alone recommend, a thing like Space: 1999. I will, however, defend it. It has an allure. Perhaps that's only the nostalgia talking; but for a lonely boy in 1975, Space: 1999 was amazing — and I can't disagree with that boy.

At least two people on the internet — let's call them Bob and Ted — have been dissuaded from reading Stanislaw Lem. That is a shame; not least because, as usually happens on the internet, they are reacting to something that isn't true. 

It began with a list of the best literary SF books. Lem's Solaris is on that list, and the listmaker — let's call him Harry — said this:

Lem's humans are some of the best in science fiction as well: they screw up, are late, fail to see the whole picture, act irrationally, and even the brightest of them can be swayed by vanity and pride.

To Bob, this quote is asserting that the best-written character is one who fails — indeed, that humanity itself equals failure; and who wants to read such misanthropy? To Ted, this quote is praising the irrational screw-up rather than the flawed yet ultimately competent character; and who wants to read about incompetent characters?

I'm not about to tell Bob and Ted that Lem is actually imbued with a cheerful vision or that his characters are badass heroes; because he isn't and they aren't. I suspect that Bob and Ted might dislike Lem even if they judged him by actually reading him. But it is unjust that Bob and Ted now have a distaste for Lem because of what Harry said.

You see, Harry is wrong. To say that Lem has the best humans in science fiction is to say that Frosted Flakes have the best jalapeños in breakfast cereals. There are no humans in Lem's books. There are barely any characters.

I've been reading Lem for over thirty years. I have read Solaris four or five times. I love Stanislaw Lem. But honestly, there is no denying the lack of characters in his work.

While it is true that one can point to Ijon Tichy, Pirx the Pilot, or the robots Trurl and Klapauscius, and one could say that each is distinctive, ultimately each is just a character type meant to sustain the type of story he appears in: SF comedy, SF adventure, or robot fable. Indeed, when someone like Tichy ends up in a non-comic tale, it becomes even clearer how merely flexible each character is: an appropriate Protagonist with, at most, a pinch of flavor.

This is especially true in Lem's serious novels. Not one of his characters is memorable as a person. I admit this has always disappointed me. Notably I consider Solaris so good because, rarely among his works, it utilizes actual human emotions. Another of his very best stories — The Mask, about a robot assassin who falls in love with her target — is best precisely because it engages one's sympathy (and has one of the best final sentences ever). But most of the time Lem doesn't care about people, nor emotions qua emotions. His concerns are philosophical; cosmic. His interest is in the man as an atom of mankind, not in the man as a fellow soul.

So does that make his work deficient? Dry? Dull? Not often. He writes wonderfully and sets your mind a-thinking. His robot fables are damn delightful. But, contra Harry, you will never find irrational screw-ups nor the proud and the vain in Lem's dramatis personae. Harry's statement asserts too much. What you will find in Lem is irrationality, screwing-up, pride, and vanity: that is, human weaknesses all but disembodied. A character in Lem is playing a fairy-tale role, at best demonstrating an aspect of human behavior, contributing to Lem's exposition of the cruel mysteries of the universe. Lem's characters are vessels with nametags.

You will find a Snow White in Lem, but never a Falstaff.

In the end I agree with Bob and Ted that Harry is wrong about the "best" humans. It is a pernicious lie that humans are most human when they fail. That is the self-serving excuse for sin, after all. But as I have tried to point out, Harry is wrong about Lem as well. In no sense does Lem contain the best "humans" in science fiction. So ignore Harry.

But read Lem. Yes, you may have to be selective, since at times he can get so philosophical the fiction disappears. Seek anything with Tichy, Pirx, or robots; read the novels Solaris, Eden, Fiasco, Peace on Earth, and above all His Master's Voice; and just be ready to focus on those nametags, because the characters won't really stand out otherwise.

P.S. Lem also wrote excellent reviews of, and introductions to, non-existent books and treatises; but of course these are even more removed from character-rich fiction.

Of course I like Star Trek. I was only three when it first aired, so I didn't see it until it was in syndication and I was nearly ten; but from early on I was a genuine fan. I knew all the episodes. I built models of the ships. I read (and still possess) the paperback adaptations by James Blish. I even bought fold-out technical plans of the Enterprise.

I was never a Trekkie, however; never deep in the lore. 

My first and truest passion was for Space: 1999. But even when I was twelve I recognized how dumb that show could be. Then I loved Star Wars. What nerd could do otherwise! But I was never drawn into its universe — and by the time of Empire I really didn't care.

Space: 1999 is that first crush you never disavow, much as it embarrasses you; Star Wars is that heady fling that quickly leaves you cold.

And Star Trek is that steady friend you eventually disregard. Back in the day I even looked forward to watching Voyager; only with Enterprise did my interest fade.

In recent years I have tried to re-watch the various Star Trek series. I am surprised by how much I don't care for TNG and DS9, even if I target the "best" episodes. I tried to finally finish that Xindi arc in Enterprise — and sputtered out again. I'm not even inclined to bother with Voyager.

The Original Series, on the other hand...

During an evisceration of the latest atrocity from Star Trek: Discovery, the eviscerating YouTuber made a passionate contrast to the TOS episode Journey to Babel. I hadn't seen that episode in eons, so I went to Netflix and watched it.

I enjoyed it.

And it's not one I've seen very often. I was reminded of my sporadic desire to binge TOS, to just start at the start and watch them all. Since TOS became streamable I've watched some of my favorites — like Errand of Mercy; Mirror, Mirror; and A Taste of Armageddon — but I guess I was put off by slogging through the likes of The Way to Eden. But seeing Journey to Babel suggested I might find more good than bad among the less-remembered episodes; and rather than bias my choices I might just go for the binge.

Immediately, however, on surveying the first episodes of season one, I was not enticed. The Cage, maybe, although I prefer that embedded in The Menagerie; and sure, Where No Man Has Gone Before; but The Man Trap, Charlie X, The Naked Time... I dunno. It already felt like a slog.

Then something occurred to me: Is this the proper order of the episodes? Something felt imbalanced, like the dregs were above the froth. I might not be a Trekkie but my gut was saying: This isn't right. So I went to the handy-dandy internet to investigate the proper ordering of TOS episodes.

I soon found a list that went not by original airdate but by stardate. And dang if that order isn't better. I suppose some deep part of me recognizes the correctness of this order; a sounder narrative flow, such as there was. Stardate, it seems, is a better indication of an episode's time of production. Or maybe this order just seems balanced better between the surely good and the surely bad. Anyhow, I like it.

I'll let you know how the bingeing goes.

---

STAR TREK TOS SEASON 1
× AIRDATE		✔ STARDATE
1	the cage	1	the cage
2	the man trap	4	where no man has gone before
3	charlie x	7	mudd's women
4	where no man has gone before	11	the corbomite maneuver
5	the naked time	2	the man trap
6	the enemy within	3	charlie x
7	mudd's women	6	the enemy within
8	what are little girls made of?	5	the naked time
9	miri	14	balance of terror
10	dagger of the mind	17	the squire of gothos
11	the corbomite maneuver	8	what are little girls made of?
12	the menagerie 1 & 2	9	miri
13	the conscience of the king	10	dagger of the mind
14	balance of terror	13	the conscience of the king
15	shore leave	16	the galileo seven
16	the galileo seven	20	court martial
17	the squire of gothos	12	the menagerie 1 & 2
18	arena	15	shore leave
19	tomorrow is yesterday	18	arena
20	court martial	27	the alternative factor
21	the return of the archons	19	tomorrow is yesterday
22	space seed	22	space seed
23	a taste of armageddon	21	the return of the archons
24	this side of paradise	23	a taste of armageddon
25	the devil in the dark	25	the devil in the dark
26	errand of mercy	26	errand of mercy
27	the alternative factor	28	the city on the edge of forever
28	the city on the edge of forever	29	operation: annihilate!
29	operation: annihilate!	24	this side of paradise

Rocketships are romance. However grounded they were in speculative engineering, rocketships were ultimately acts of art. They were unreal transports to a heaven closer than God’s. They were graceful. Hopeful. Evocative.

A Lunar Excursion Module is not a rocketship.  A LEM is a quasimodoan apple pegged on a foil-wrapped, four-legged cardboard box. I agree there is a kind of beauty to it. There is no grace, however. Even its name is graceless.

And when the lunar astronauts returned, they did not gracefully descend — but fell; in a practical, man-packaging cone, wingless, powerless, splashing into the sea.

Even when astronauts acquired wings, those wings were stubby. The Shuttle was a train-car with ailerons, a brutish airplane without the slick menace of an SR-71, the aloof magnificence of a B-52, or the subtle panache of a DC-3. Whatever else, the Shuttle was surely no rocketship.

Now, I didn’t grow up with a romantic anticipation of the Space Age. I and the Space Age are siblings. I was six when we landed on the Moon. The rocketships I encountered were already passé, simplistic and dreamlike, images in outdated storybooks and encyclopedias. And yet, even then, those images were not so very old to me; and somehow they retain a nostalgic weight.

So one day recently, in this year of 2019, when I am fifty six and Apollo 11 is fifty years past, I was surfing through dumb videos on YouTube — not even cyberspace is quite the wild thing it was once romantically expected to be — and I came upon a recording of SpaceX ships returning to Earth. I knew about these SpaceX successes, but since I get my news from video-free blog posts, I had not seen such a recording before.

I watched. I saw spacecraft descending from the clouds, landing with flames, vertically and grandly like... rocketships. Oh, yes, the SpaceX ships are only tubes with brackets. They moved so perfectly, though. Even without portholes and silver fins, they stirred me. Real rocketships, at last!

---

P.S. I really do agree that the LEM has its own beauty. In fact one of my favorite SF spacecraft is the Eagle from Space: 1999 — a ship clearly using a LEM aesthetic. My mother once wondered why I liked the Eagle. "It's so clunky," she said. Yeah, Mom; but it's cool.