About five years in the making, I'm finally tackling In the Leviathan.
This is the book based on my grandfather's life. I've been working on research for it, and if I were a different writer, that's exactly what I would still be doing now, but one of the things I've realized over the past twenty years is that I am not a different writer, and I've been developing a style and viewpoint that I've grown comfortable utilizing.
Most of what I've written has fallen into sci-fi/space opera, or some other subgenre. I've tackled literary fiction (notably the Americana Trilogy, otherwise known as the Miss Simon books, which will still be revisited once I have the courage to tackle an even more ambitious book I've been developing for the same twenty-year span, which has gone by a number of titles, but the one listed as a label on this blog is Miss Simon's Doom, which seems to still work for me), but never like this, never so personally.
I pushed past the first six of twenty-one chapters last month, and now we'll just have to see how the rest goes. With any luck I will write another one (or two!) later today. The holdup is that this is a crucial chapter, the crux on which the narrative pivots, in which a full understanding of the main character, Montague, stands revealed, which is particularly important since this is also why I wanted to write this in the first place.
No pressure!
Good luck in your latest project.
ReplyDeleteIn reference to your movie blog entry, I've like Wes Anderson for a while. I'm not sure which one I saw first, whether it was Steve Zissou or Royal Tannenbaums or Rushmore but I think it was something in that era. Grand Budapest is my favorite but there really aren't any bad ones.
Your Star Trek entry was interesting. Generally I think Bashir, Dal, and Number One are allowed to stay in (or in Dal's case around) Starfleet because of what you might call the useful freak corollary. Like in Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (song and various film/TV adaptations) or the X-Men where if the freak does good then it's OK for them to be different and they're accepted, though in the X-Men never fully accepted. If they do bad things then they're labeled a freak and killed or put away somewhere. With "augments" in Star Trek they're not freaks by mutation or a birth defect but by experimentation. The attitude still winds up being the same. Khan did bad things so he's sent away. Bashir did good things so he's not sent away.
A while back on a History Channel special called "Comic Book Heroes Unmasked" I think it was actually Picard showrunner Michael Chabon who points out the irony that Captain America is essentially created through the kind of mad science we called the Nazis monsters for. Steve Rogers is essentially the Nazi ideal and yet because he fights for the American side, we have no problem seeing him as a good guy.
As far as genetic manipulation goes, I think it's good in some cases. A lot of birth defects and conditions could be eliminated. Which it's easy for people to say you shouldn't try to eliminate those, if you're a person who has such a condition, like me for instance, your perspective might be a little different. I've lived mostly a "Normal" life but it could have been better if they could have fixed it before I was born. So I'm all for using genetic manipulation and such to do that. But of course there are always going to be those who take it too far, so there would need to be limits put on it.