Sunday, March 14, 2004
We pretty much finished up with The Dry Salvages yesterday afternoon. It really is an expansive story. It's present, the year that the ms. is being written by its narrator, is 2303, and that's about half the narrative, Paris after the beginning of a new ice age. But the events that she's writing about, and that are the other matter of the story, occurred in 2250, when she was young, and there are references going back as far as 2123. Accounting for all that unhappened history (not unhappened, so much as invisible from this vantage point), without actually accounting for all that history, was certainly one of the most daunting tasks I've undertaken as a fiction author. This isn't the first time that I've done futuristic sf (see also "Persephone," "Between the Flatirons and the Deep Green Sea," "Hoar Isis," and "Riding the White Bull"), but is the first time I've attempted this sort of story on this scale. It is, I suppose, what a lot of critics and authors would call dystopian (as are all my other sf stories), but, personally, I suspect that "utopian" and "dystopian" are much abused phrases, overused by people who think that the world will always be pretty much the same as it is now, not particularly better or worse. And it seems to me these people have not paid much attention to history or science. The past is always a Golden Age, or a Dark Age, and the future always leads to one or the other. Or haven't you noticed?
If I'm raving, forgive me. I slept five hours last night, with one nightmare after the other. It's been like that for weeks, I think. Half the time, I feel as if Sobe Adrenaline, multivitamins, and a few other less respectable substances are all that's keeping me moving. Spooky and I fell asleep on the sofa last night, right after I put It Came from Beneath the Sea in the VCR. Sometimes, old Harryhausen films are the best lullabies I know (other times, it's Dr. Seuss).
I don't feel presentable, or decent, or something enough for blogging. So that's all for now.
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