The other day as I woke up, I became aware that before me was a city under a night sky. It was built on the end of a rugged peninsula that extended into a large a lake. It was compact like an ancient city. Its skyline was of towers, domed buildings, temples, spires, and palaces. A tower taller than the others rose from a hilltop near where the peninsula connected with the mainland.
A large, orange moon gave the city and the mountains around it a reddish color. Moonlight reflected off the golden roofs of some of the buildings. The surf breaking against the cliffs below the city shined in the light. A second moon, smaller and dimmer than the first, was silvery blue. It was higher in the sky.
On the opposite shore of the lake, perhaps thirty miles away from the city, mountains reached to the stars. In the distance, all around, were huge mountains, faintly visible in the distance. Then, I noticed something strange, and I looked at the larger moon again. It was not high, maybe 15 degrees altitude, and it was in front of twin mountain spires. That is a weird optical illusion.
If I study the scene long enough, I will remember it, and then I can try to draw it when I wake. If I relax, I can go deeper into dream sleep and merge into this world. That city and its inhabitants have a story, and I want to write it.
I relaxed. Ground solidified under where I lay. Around me, grass moved in a breeze. I heard surf breaking far away. The stars were bright despite the light of the two moons. Neither one was full. I know all of the constellations of the earth sky, but I did not recognise any star formations in this sky. Instead of the Milky Way being overhead, a dense, globular galaxy occupied a third of the sky.
Then my girlfriend, who had been sleeping beside me, touched me. I awoke fully, and the dream faded. It was 6 am, and she was getting up for work. I could stay in bed another hour while she spent that hour in the bathroom doing female things. Then I would have to get up for work too. She left, and I tried to go back to sleep and find the dream again. I could hear the shower followed by an electric hair dryer. It was too late. I got up to start my day in an ordinary world. I made coffee and started making breakfast for us.
I read the Hobbit in 5th grade. At that age, I half believed the author, a linguist who had translated Norse sagas, had discovered a manuscript and that it came from another world. It was the first book I read that made me want to write my own story, so I started writing a quasi-medieval fantasy novel. It had a plot outline, characters, and some scenes.
I didn’t know what I was doing. I felt like the world was against me. I lived in a TV household that believed creativity was queer. I didn’t have privacy. I wrote everything in code, like someone who is being watched. It was a 30 letter alphabet I had made up. It looked vaguely like Sanskrit. Some of the letters were from languages I had seen in books in dreams.
I stopped writing when I went to college. I had an engineering scholarship and needed to spend my time getting good grades to keep my funding. After college, I never went back to that fantasy novel. By then I had realised that, like 1000s of other novels inspired by that author, my story was a ripoff of Tolkien and Nordic mythology, and I was no longer enthusiastic about it.
In France, there is none of this 70-80_hours_a_week_in_the_lab/office_or_you’re_fired like in the US. The work-week is 35 hours. Since coming here, I’ve had time to have a more balanced life. I’m doing yoga every day again and running. I’ve also been doing things that interest me mentally including writing.
I’ve been working on a science fiction novel. I only get to spend a little time on it each day, but after a couple of years, I’ve made progress. So far, I have an outline, and most most chapters are filled in sketchy rough draft form. Some professional authors finish two or three novels a year, so I feel like I’m going too slow.
Good stories transport the reader to another world. The Hobbit did that. Sadly, most books fail to do that. The worst kind is the postmodernist novel which plagues bookstores today. These books are written in the form of the “disembodied voice.” They are dialogue only, and by definition, they reject the structure of the novel and do away with plot, setting, and everything that makes reading enjoyable. Postmodernist novels are unreadable. I’m thinking specifically of Gravity’s Rainbow, and I’m sorry I wasted four hours on it recently.
My background is neuroscience, and I mix that into my story, giving it some hard science and psychology. For atmosphere, I write while I sit in scenic and visually stimulating places, and I try to verbally sketch what I see into the story. I listen to conversations, trying to capture the flow of speech without bogging down the story with chatter. I don’t fill it with 500 pages of fart jokes or boast about the sexual prowess of the main character. I’m thinking of Gravity Rainbow again.
Plot is the hardest part. I’m not sitting here writing some L. Ron Hubbard (invented Scientology) Space Opera (science fiction version of television Soap Opera). He got rich, but one should not stoop so low for money.
Science fiction is about made-up events and has no basis in reality, otherwise it would be called general fiction. At the same time, it has to be realistic enough for the reader to visualise it and to be transported into its world.
Hemingway gave the famous advice, “write what you know,” meaning write only what you have experienced. That advice creates a problem for science fiction authors. One of my characters is an alien sex fiend. I’m trying a different approach to try to follow Hemingway’s advice.
One approach is to dream each scene in realistic detail and then write about it when I wake up. That’s what I was trying to do last night, and it only started before it was time to get up. Morphine drastically increases dream time and adds elements of realism such as depth, complexity, and detail.
Since my story is based on events that occurred in dreams and out of body experiences, the plot depends on phenomena that occurs in those states: hallucinations, teleportation, people who are not who they appear to be, telepathy, artificial universes, mind control, shifting realities. Futuristic technology produces some of those phenomena in the lives of the characters, and capitalists have figured out how to exploit these technologies and wreak havoc on the lives of the populace.
It is set it in a futuristic version of California based on the present where everything is for sale and disposable, life is cheap, people are fake, the president is a former game show host (I wrote it two years before it came true), and most people have to sell their organs for cheap plastic replacements in order to survive.
I believe I will be able to finish a novel by the end of the year and hopefully have it published. I want to get out of science. I’m not happy with my work situation.
I met my girlfriend at Invalides the other day. We went to the Rodin museum. I sketched a few of the sculptures in the sculpture garden. Rodin’s later art is not representational. It lacks surface detail. It’s coarse. The museum was full of these lumpy, molten golems frozen in theatrical poses. Despite its crudeness, it provokes a reaction and captures things through its gestures, expressions, and movement. Like modern art and postmodernist literature, I don’t find it to be beautiful. It does not elevate the soul. So, yes, it communicates something, but it is ugly, and I would not want it hanging on my wall where I’d have to look at it every day.
Afterwards, we walked through the Arrondissement Saint-Germain, and I took photos of some of historic buildings. Later we stopped at a line at a boulangerie (bakery) on rue Mouffetard to buy snacks. Of all the bakeries I’ve tried, this bakery makes the best pastries. Their bread, croissants, desserts, flan, tarts - everything is better than that of all the others. I go there almost every day. The smell of baking bread made my mouth water.
Ahead of us in line was a French couple, and the father was holding a baby. They were dressed relatively elegant the way Parisians often dress. They chatted and entertained the baby. I ignored them and observed buildings and other people without focusing on anybody or anything in particular. The line advanced slowly. I was surprised to see that Laetitia was practically drooling. I realized that she had been gazing at the little kid the whole time.
Women can stare at little kids and nobody thinks anything about it, but if a man stares at a small child, he can cause a panic and risks arrest.
Laetitia said, “isn’t he cute?”
I said, “yeah, sure.”
Kittens and puppies are cute. Human babies have hungry lamprey mouths, squinty eyes, big bald heads, and grasping hands make them look like vampiric aliens.
Since prehistoric times until WWII, everyone had as many babies as they could. Broods of 10 - 15 were the norm. The Baby Boomers all had babies too, except they had an average of 2.5 or so. The world has moved on, and Gen X and Millennials are the first American generations to question the expectation that one would have any children at all.
Less than half of our generation is having children, and as a whole, we are not having enough to sustain the population. Politicians and economists don’t like that, but as an environmentalist who likes vast, uninhabited natural areas, I love the idea population decline and the elbow room it promises. The population still grows because of immigration.
