Reading some of my posts the other night, I noticed a frequent use of the word just. "I had just washed that dish," made-up example. Just, as in very recently, in immediate past, an adverb when used like that. As adjective, "just cause." Latin, justus, "law, right."
The present experience of just is seen in the expression, "Right now." Later, describing this right now I say, "That just happened."
Just seems an all right word to use, but it looks too like a crutch, a linking word overused because I can't think of alternatives. Writers giving good advice have said simplification for the sake of clarity in writing is a good rule to follow. Having done that writing style for many years, I find it more necessary now to introduce quirks. A.E. Van Vogt, good example. The Canadian science fiction writer had a habit of interrupting narratives to let the reader know about the positioning of some kitchen appliance on a counter, its angle in relation to a doorframe. There's a passage like this in his novel, Children of Tomorrow. It made no sense to me but I found it pleasurable reading. It's an objective presentation of an interior location, of a real (in the sense of the realness of the novel's telling) kitchen in a real house in a real neighborhood, in a real city. He shows a moment of high strength third person narrative: objective narrative, writer getting into every little thing, the toaster but also the person operating it. Van Vogt's quirk identifies his writing style.
Mack Reynolds, another science fiction author, has a quirk consisting of his frequent use of the word, Obviously, as in "Obviously, Mackendrick had no intention of following through with the insane proposal." Reynolds' quirk, his obviouslys on every other page of his numerous novels, sparks the reader's inner ears, becomes funny, like the story is being narrated by a wiseass.
Reynolds, let it be known, was a writer of sociological science fiction. He dealt with secret agencies, spies, self-sufficient communes, future police, utopia sort-of achieved, the year 2000, a date in the titles of about a dozen of his novels, writing in much of his work of a near and different future, with strange political undercurrents and a population made apathetic by lack of want through the "negative income tax," something similar to Andrew Yang's proposal to give Americans a thousand bucks a month. I'd prefer ten-thousand per month, Andrew, but okay.
Do I agree with Mack Reynolds' conclusions? Obviously.
Yet, not.
My thoughts on writing a science fiction novel have been affected by my having written one, Cryptopraxis (2002-2009). I'm not careful about getting the technological aspects of a future society right, except in general terms. I make up gadgets, branches of science, according to need. A novel needs a backdrop, so fill in the backdrop and make it an interesting and intriguing to contemplate backdrop. The world enfolding the characters. Where a lot of the budget goes.
I wrote that book four times. For an entire year, most of 2004 and some of 2005, a period when my father was dying, I didn't write in the novel. I wrote instead a journal of my thoughts on the War on Terror, Iraq, the Bush administration. Begun March 6, 2003, I express my condemnation of the upcoming Iraq War. I made the last entry in The War File on March 6, 2005. The book is dated, but fun and informative to read, an historical book since it covers news events from that period, writing about them in that period. How does it stand up to present day world situations? America in 2003 was a scary mofo capable of great long-lasting damage towards other countries in a region messed with by the State Department and CIA for five decades. America, even scarier today, with an ascendant liberal class voicing their eager support for espionage and mass murder as they applaud American exceptionalism's goals.
Obviously, the same malefactor inhabits both timeframes. A power complex insidiously woven through high tech, low tech, military, security industries, with American communities in every state dependent on the jobs provided and revenue generated by these corporate interests that deal in sucking up wealth and killing people.
Obviously, this behemoth isn't moral in the ordinary sense, not looking out for "Mom and Pop" capitalists or the middle class, poor, or illegal immigrants. Foreign brown-skinned people don't merit lives free of armed conflict, bombs, missiles, drones flying overhead day after day, waiting for targets that might be misidentified, waiting to rip apart the innocent.
Obviously, Donald Trump doesn't rate as a decent person, but is it just to boot from office the legitimately elected president of the United States? The Intelligence Community, with their hairsprayed tools in politics and in entertainment news media, seek to replace Trump with a politician more in line with the belief set of that subset of the Ruling Class in charge of running (badly) things on this planet.
Obviously, the impeachment of Donald Trump saps the energy of the executive branch, absorbs Baby Boomers in a new TV show with Trump as a contestant in a game managed by scumbag politician Adam Schiff. Shifty Schiff! Trump calls him, not one of his stronger plays with words, but Schiff is a devious climber.
Before Russiagate, nobody outside Southern California knew of Schiff. He now sits in the middle of the Intelligence Committee, head inquisitor of the Impeachment Process, 2019. Andrew Johnson, Lincoln's Vice President, hasn't got this much attention on TV since 1998! Is it possible to build a career on a lie? Yes.
Obviously, I don't know how to end this one because the subjects written about here don't yet have endings.
Vic Neptune
