The Critics’ Corner
Danielle L. Parker and...
Jörn Grote’s “Meme Race Unbound”
I sat down and read “Meme Race Unbound” (all of it) in one sitting last night, and first let me say, Jörn, that although I struggled with parts of your story, you have gained a new reader who will be looking for your by-line in the future. There’s good, there’s bad, and there’s a bit of ugly in this story, but for sure, it’s not the “See Spot Run” style of writing.
I commend you on your originality and guts in writing something difficult. Your story fits into the best traditions of science fiction: it’s a story of cosmic scope, which addresses the nature of what it is to be human in the future. It’s a story that requires the reader to think. For that reason I suspect not all readers finished it — and not all of those who did read it from start to finish fully understood it — which, I suspect, includes me, to a certain extent, in the latter category. So I’ve got some questions for you!
Following are my thoughts and speculations on your story, in no particular order:
Vocabulary
First off: I had to look up several words, and in a few cases, I still am not sure what you meant by your choices. Here are the ones I hiccupped on, and what I took to be their meaning:
Gestalt: 1. (Psychol.) A unified whole; a configuration, pattern, or organized field having specified properties that cannot be derived from the summation of its component parts. 2. An instance or example of such a unified whole. OK – I think I got that one.
Meme: Lost me. I took it as a derivative of “member” at first sight, but the meaning/usage in the story did not fit, obviously. Is it another psychological term? Or an invention?
Arcology: I took this as a derivative of “arc,” but I think some explanation would help.
Yottabytes: Um... big, right? I presume this is another invented word (as Humpty-Dumpty would point out, they all had to be invented sometime!)
Icon: OK, we all know what an icon is, so this time I’m questioning a specific usage. An icon is, simply put, a symbol. In your section “Mars Complex: Arrival in the Anarchy,” you write “Floating as an icon inside...” Would she describe herself as an icon? Would it not be as, say, an avatar, or, to use your term, a gestalt (entity)? That is, the thing itself, and not the symbol? Just a thought.
Dry nanotech: Explain the “dry” business? (FYI: see my review of Gibson’s All Tomorrow’s Parties, coming up in the Reading Room, which deals with nanotechnology).
Agents, however, which you use later, is a nice generic term understandable by non-techie readers: though I’ve heard “spiders,” etc... but this is not the Web, which has been done to death by Gibson and Stephenson et al, thank goodness.
Story Structure
Your story structure – the little titled segments – was very original, and though I thought at first I would not like it, I ended up appreciating what it allowed you to do. You were able cover a LOT of ground in a highly summarized fashion via this “snippet” approach. This approach, while it does, in many ways, distance the reader from a gripping “I’m there” empathy with the narrator, fits with what is in many ways a philosophical discussion as much as a story. Which is, I’m afraid, both the good and the bad of your story, of course...
But again, kudos on the fresh approach you took to structuring your story.
Prose Nuts and Bolts
First of all, I stand dazzled by your command of English as a second language. (My high school German is... perfectly pitiful by this time). But I have to measure you on the same standard I would hold any English-language writer to, which means, you have some cleanup to do in the story. There’s some rough prose out there. I won’t hit it all, but here are a few:
Use of comma when a full stop or other punctuation (semi-colon or hyphen) would be better: I see this in the very first paragraph. “Never in my life had I seen such sight, around me was only death and destruction.” This would be better as “Never in my life had I seen such a sight. Around me was only death and destruction.” I mention this because I saw this writing tic quite a lot, and you need to work on correcting it as you go forward.
I hit on the rough prose here because I see originality and talent in your writing, and if you don’t clean up the text like a new dime, you might get thrown out of the professional market for that reason alone. Editors are a lazy lot (Don and Jerry: ahem, of course I don’t mean you!!!). So give your story the chance I sincerely feel it deserves by cleaning up the nuts and bolts of the prose. This may require native assistance at first. One good way to get that, of course - other than to marry a native English-speaking schoolteacher or one of those typically charming, intelligent, gorgeous librarians of which I am a fine example - is to use an on-line critique group. I recommend both Imaginaries (www.imaginaries.org) and Critique Circle (www.critiquecircle.com), both of which I use to try out my own “in-work” stories.
The Start
There’s good and bad in how you start your story. We get the picture right away: major bad stuff! Only, we’ve spent so little time with the narrator so far, her pain doesn’t really sink in. It’s much like those distant famine faces on the television: we can feel a remote sympathy but don’t know those persons. So maybe it’s worth expanding this section, so we feel her pain more than just having you tell us, wham. I hate to say, expand it when it’s so neatly summarized and covers so much ground... but maybe a little more scene setting to make us feel her emotions....
Or you can try tricks to “show” and not “tell”: some poetic prose, something symbolic, I don’t know. All I’m saying is: a lot of emotion can be conveyed in even a simple sonnet (example: Gerard Manley Hopkins, “I wake and feel the fell of dark”...) and you have to accomplish the same trick. And no, this will not be easy. I mean, it really isn’t easy at all. But it’s critical to your story.
And the “black hole” business: I didn’t buy it, since she takes a monstrous step – loss of body! – for revenge, and obviously doesn’t have those emotions locked away. And in terms of reality, what does this mean? People lock stuff away – traumatic memories – by repression... by drug or alcohol or other escape... by acting it out... etc. In terms of a real living human being, this didn’t connect. I’d say kill the black hole stuff, myself. You’re not adding to your story. We want a real living bleeding human being anyway, not a zombie (kill that reference too: too cliché).
Nevertheless, I like where you started: right with the crux of the story. We know where we are and why the narrator takes her actions right off.
The Middle
The narrator has a somewhat distant tone at times, which fits, I suppose, an electronic being. Have you ever read that story by C. L. Moore, which describes the ballerina who was translated into a metal body more agile than her fleshly one, and the chilling changes that crept into her soul as a result? Your discursions into the nameless narrator’s new life — “The Hut of Solitude” etc. — reminded me of that: and if it was your intent to hint at the chilling changes such a wrench in their corporal existence might make in a human being, I think you could work on that a little more.
But I really think, instead, that your approach was to show the durability of what is human, of the human spirit, even into a new form. The fact that I’m arguing with myself here on your intent means that maybe you could think about this a bit more, and decide how to express it in this middle section. You’re the impresario, and you have to plan every one of your summarized nuggets for maximum effect...
Now we get into the part I liked best of your story: the wonderful sweep of time and change; the inventive self-destructive mind weapon; the philosophical arguments (“how do you control people,” etc.), the whole theory of memes... what seems to be a sort of entity of its own, intent, like any definition of life, on reproducing itself by whatever means possible... even the human brain.
Just an aside here, Jörn: are you familiar with the theory of dynamic cellular automata, which has been proposed as a model for biological life? Am I messing with your head right now? Yes I am, of course. But there’s a sneaky challenge worked in here too... for your next story. I suspect you are one of the few writers who could take such a challenge and produce a story that’ll have me arguing with you - and myself - in some future BwS issue.
Back to business again: I also had trouble with the logic of the Hardwired scene: though “he” doesn’t “believe” our narrator, he still tells her just how to go about destroying a Dataworld. The Hardwired states: “If what you’re telling me is true, and I don’t think it is...” Is this logical – to give out what may be deadly information? Maybe another way of finding this out would be more logical...
The End
Well, good and bad here. First, the climax was a little cerebral. Again, I understand this story as a metaphysical and philosophical journey; it’s not a shoot-’em-up-bang-bang climax. I had trouble understanding exactly why Our Villain was mad (more exact: I had trouble BELIEVING how he was mad), and how the Good Gals (thank you: Girl Power Lives!) won. So I think this needs work.
I did like the “striving for humanity” wrap-up. It brings up the philosophical question of whether, I suppose, the Leopard Can Change Its Spots (or humanity, its memes).
All in all, Jörn, what an original story! I liked it. I had trouble with it too, of course. It’s cerebral, it’s difficult... I just think it needs more story, somehow, to make the reader feel it more. The fact that your narrator never even has a name is symbolic, to me, of its weak point. But I love the ideas and the cosmic scope of it. Kudos for writing something really original, and don’t ever try what I call the “See Spot Run” style of writing.
Your new fan signs off... and I hope this was of some help. Looking forward to your next story.
Copyright © 2005 by Danielle L. Parker
The discussion may be continued and is open to all.
Please feel free to join in!
Copy Editor’s note: Taking my own cue here, thank you for explicitly excluding us from the ranks of “lazy editors,” Danielle. Only Jerry, our editors and authors — individually — can have an idea of the work involved in preparing manuscripts for an issue of Bewildering Stories. And the authors do only if they read their own stories on line.
I spent three hours cleaning up the punctuation in two of the stories in this issue (I won’t say which ones). Most of our contributors know what’s what, but as I sometimes say, a few can’t punctuate their way out of a paper bag. Suspension points, in particular, are used one way in the conversational style of e-mail and in quite another way in formal prose. And they do not take the place of any and all other punctuation! We even have a style manual about that, suitable for framing or for taping to bathroom mirrors.
Our contributors writing in English as a second language usually appreciate the help I give them, as I think Jörn does. Punctuation is the least of his worries. A comma is not used the same way in German and English, and English rules are much more complex. In German, the comma is a little stronger than in English and sometimes appears where English might use a semicolon. Now, the semicolon is extinct in French punctuation and may also be obsolete in German; I don’t recall ever having seen any, but I don’t know. Jörn can fill us in on that.
English became something of a lingua franca in the 20th century by historical accident. It’s also been helped by its very nature. The learning curve in English is low at the beginning but high at the end. It’s easy to achieve intermediate proficiency in English, which is all most people need, but advanced (native or near-native) proficiency is very difficult. In French, by contrast, the initial learning curve is steep, but once you’ve reached the intermediate stage, advanced proficiency is a piece of cake. As I recall, German is officially rated as “just plain hard.” But I would add that it can be very pretty once you get to know it. Anyway, that puts Jörn way ahead of the game.
I think Jörn is well on his way to high-intermediate proficiency in English. He already has a sure feel for word order, and that’s a big accomplishment. The biggest test for anyone is the verbs. Aside from the past participles, they look simple: only one personal ending and two tenses. But English verbs can be very subtle: the modal auxiliaries give them more permutations than even in ancient Greek, which held the record for a long time.
Don Webb
Copy Editor, Bewildering Stories
