Some ideas are their own

My idea, up on the screen. It should swell my heart like the Grinch’s on Christmas day, but no. It’s . . . I’m not going to write ‘bittersweet’, because I like bittersweet. That never struck me as exactly the right metaphor. Beet pie is more like it – lovely to look at, quite good for you, and tastes like a fraud.

The new Disney show, Star Wars Skeleton Crew opens in a delightful suburb on the planet At Attin. The cars, trucks, and trams move through the neighborhood like slot cars, tillers in tracks. I use the same idea in my novel The Tongue Trade. In my future, the troughs supply vehicles with power, so they don’t have to cart stored energy around. They also help manage traffic, preventing accidents and ameliorating congestion. Slots are also a metaphor for the kind of ruts in which people become stuck, language being the deepest one in my book.

But that’s writerly stuff and not nearly as cool as seeing what I envisioned, from gifted artists, on my television. I was thrilled my concept looked amazing and sad that it was not at all MY personal concept. No one at Disney got the idea from my novel. They probably got it the same way I did, by growing up playing with toys.

It’s not the first time this has happened to me. In a way, I hope it’s not the last. It’s lovely knowing someone else liked the same idea you liked, it’s good for a writer to know your ideas have value, and it leaves a pasty taste in your mouth.

Review, from Paul Di Filippo at Locus

This review of The Tongue Trade is extra special, me being a Di Filippo fan since Ribofunk in 1996. I like great reviews - who doesn't - but it is touching when someone appreicates the more subtle aspects of a novel. Di Filippo quotes one of my favorite passages in the book, smiling along with me and my hopes that someone else would get it. There is no higher compliment.

Publishers Week Review (and it's good)

The Tongue Trade By Martineck, Michael J.

Interpreter William Kirst is trapped between a word and a hard place in Martineck’s unique and inventive science-fiction thriller. For William, language is his livelihood: as an Interpreter, he bridges the gap between parties whose languages have splintered into unique and often inscrutable dialects, based on their trade specializations. However, when William’s newest client, businessman Arthur Loam, admits to murdering a man after lying to the police, he’s held to a professional silence that would destroy his career if broken. Desperate, William finds himself spiraling down a dangerous rabbit hole as he searches for a way to bring the truth to light without landing himself in the unemployment line—or worse, at the wrong end of a gun.

Martineck’s construction and investigation of a world where language and its barriers are paramount results in a poignant, well-conceived slab of science fiction. From the witty prose, the individual argots and how they shape the dialogue (and characters), even down to William’s love of 50 Cent and other hip-hop acts—each nugget of detail is carefully considered and artfully executed. William is endlessly entertaining as a sunny inverse of the noir archetype: he stumbles through each escalating situation in a terribly vulnerable, human, and relatable way that harmonizes, rather than disrupts, the gravity driving the narrative.

Martineck (author of The Link Boy) flexes his experience in actualizing the high-concept world of The Tongue Trade, smartly written with crisp pacing, creative twists, and energetic characterizations backdropped against a sweltering semi-futuristic New York, where even those with William’s specialized training can be tripped up by semantics: “Interpreters who spend too much time with the same clients, conversing in the same language, can develop expectations” he acknowledges. Martineck has crafted a sunny noir, a charming spin on a storied genre that makes for an ecstatic journey readers will struggle to put down.

Takeaway: Words speak louder than actions in this sunny-noir sci-fi thriller.

Comparable Titles: Richard K. Morgan’s Thin Air, Matthew Farrer’s Enforcer.

Review: Limited Verse, David Martin

Would you rather be loved or respected? David Martin’s new book, Limited Verse, made me ask the question as I read. It is a series of well known poems written in New English, which has only 850 root words. There is a thoughtful story explaining the transportation of words from the old, big group to limited new group, written by a man going to prison. He will no longer have Old English. He will no longer have words that are not roots.

This transportation of words from the old group to the new group has value. It’s also a pain in the ass, and I can’t do it anymore. I don’t now how Martin did it for a whole book – even a short one. I couldn’t do it for much more than a paragraph. It’s maddening. Trying to limit your ideas to the confines of 850 base words cramps your ideas. If you can’t express something, you drop it. Your ideas stay inside you and eventually die. Heart wrenching, frustrating, frightening.

Which makes Limited Verse challenging to love, but demanding of respect.

At first, I read this book the way one watches figure skating. Wow. That’s cool. The trick of writing within a highly limited lexicon is impressive. Martin translates, amongst others, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg, or William Shakespear (who made words up ‘cuz there weren’t enough for him) with aplomb. Maintaining meanings, even as the rich imagery fades (to no fault of his own) billows out the breadth of the book. As the level of difficulty increases, and the greats begin to slip on the ice, you realize this silly, ill-mannered, hodgepodge, potluck old English language is a deep and wonderful gift.

We can think a lot and freely. I love this book for reminding me of that fact. Respect.

Give a hoot, this review is cute.

Special thanks to my friend Arlene Marks, who read my novel The Tongue Trade and really got it. I certainly love when people enjoy the book, but it is so terribly gratifying when someone like Arlene understands its lighter charms. Check out her thoughts here.

Big Ideas, Best Books

I love Shephard.com, a site devoted to discovering books. They do it like one of your friends might, but they are not using an algorithm, they're using real people, with original opinions. So you can get recommendations that might be a off-center, a bit of a stretch, things never dreamt of by math or machine.

Check out my first post, on books with big ideas.

Harris and Walz: A rich, gooey middle

Cusp babies are a little different. I’m a Cancer sign, but only a couple of hours from being a Leo. At a party several years ago, an astrologer refused to do my chart. Beliefs aside, it made me feel special. Odd but special. In a good way. I have felt that way all my life. On the edge, leaning on the door jamb. Living in liminal space.

By birthyear exacerbates the effect. 1965 is the shadowy year between the baby boomers and generation x. A transition period. I feel – as I bet many of my graduating class does – affiliations to both groups. I am as likely to listen to Simon and Garfunkel as I am to Jay Z. Liminal time.

While I don’t think about it all the time, I can’t say it’s infrequent either. Dwelling in misty time/space gives you a different angle from which to view the other, fixed time/spaces. I have always felt more like an umpire than a player. An observer. It could be just me, but I don’t think so. Working with others in my cohort, I’ve noticed the subtle differences in values and temperaments. A small, alien effect. Mork reporting to Orsen. Alf calling Melmac. Trevor Noah or John Oliver commenting on what we too are seeing, but from farther back. It’s not that we tweeners are not invested, were just a little careful.

Kamala Harris was born within six months of me, Tim Walz a little more. They do not share my particular cuspiness, but they are from Sesame Street. Regardless of how you feel they feel about variety of issues, I am quite certain they bring measured perspective with them wherever they go. They are of the middle and that is a great place to start.

The Downloaded. A review.

All story is rooted conflict. By that measure, there is more story per page in Robert J. Sawyer’s The Downloaded than just about anything else I’ve read. At first, the novel presents a clever fictionalization of science – a mechanism for preserving a whole person, mind and body. The solution is separation, with, of course, the promise of recombination. You can probably see, in that sentence, the tendrils of conflict already sprouting from the tap root of the book. Sawyer follows more shoots that I would have thought possible, and the result is incessantly thought-provoking, sometimes moving, and often super fun. More fun than a book with this much conflict should allow.

Sawyer brings several sciences together to create an entirely plausible future. Quantum physics, astrophysics, computer architecture, biology – the usual. The real gift of the book, however, is slow titration of soft sciences into the hard: sociology, phycology, political science (the one that pulls so far from the others we put ‘science’ in the name as a kind of dog chain.) This will not surprise long-time Sawyer fans. What might is the literary composition all this chemistry concocts. The Downloaded covers so much ground it grows into something full and rich. Sawyer attempts to show so many of the directions the main story’s roots can take that he succeeds in creating a very real world.

As an off-shoot, he also creates a hybrid rose of a novel. Fragrant, pretty, and robust. All the various literary conflicts are here: Person vs. others, person vs. environment, person vs. self. My students would be so happy if I assigned this book, because it would take the place of three. And they would enjoy the read, which in the end, is what we really want from whatever novel we pick from the big garden of books.

The Divine Donald Trump

Trump has led me to doubt monotheism. Hopping over every obstacle like a blondish Mario, Donald Trump missed Viet Nam, legal prosecution, death by COVID-19 and a bullet. He reminds me  of Odysseus or Perseus. Pawns in the disagreements of the gods. It is easier to believe in a spat between deities than the reality I have watched. It starts with his name. Trump. Same root as trumpet, as in heralding, celebrating, and the sound that raises above all else. That’s why they used trumpets in battle and why the trump card comes to defeat all other cards in your game. The brash name – which the family took on once they landed in the brashy brash America – tells us this is all mythic.

A new myth. The kind in which we’ve been so lacking that the gods need to poke us again. Perhaps Hera decided Trump took his gifts for granted and had to be punished. Zeus thinks Trump is doing a fine job of carrying on Zeus-like traditions. He waves his hand to counter each of Hera’s wars, laws, viruses, and projectiles. They will continue their spat until, per the legends, there is a moral for us. No idea what that could possibly look like.

The only thing I know for certainly is that the gods always win. 

I'm already starting to miss my old God, inscrutability and all.

More than 30 years in the making

The Tongue Trade is out. 

As one might imagine, I'm quite proud of the novel. It's science fiction, but not the ray gun and robot type. This book speculates a world in which language adds thickness to the walls of our personal silos. Individual preferences have become entrenching tools. So much so that one needs an interpreter to talk to someone outside of their profession. In the space between those walls lies plenty of room for mischief and murder. 

I got the idea in the last century, while helping to write a manual - making engineers understandable - and now, finally, it's a book.

And it's only a buck. That's less than you should tip your ice cream server but for more than 30 years of work. The best deal of your life. 

The Tongue Trade

In a future so divided you need an interpreter to talk to people outside your profession there is plenty of room for murder. I am pretty proud of this book - a little science-fiction, a little neo-noir, lots of wordy, wordy words.

Watch this space

 This is going to be the best book of the last three and a half years.

My sense of style

Choosing exactly the right art for the right space is all about balance. Color and light. Presence and magnitude. I’m reworking this room, and really trying to be the Nik Wallenda of bathroom décor. Did I nail it? Or nail it perfectly?

Punch a Groundhog Day

Buffalo Bert was wrong. Like malfeasance wrong. He should be disbarred or defrocked or whatever it is we do to the furrier of the meteorologists. He said six more weeks of winter, and today, nine weeks later, I’m looking at snow. Sticky, slopy snow. His dereliction of duty is so severe I want to punch him in that smug little nose.

Though I’m not sure it’s all his fault. This year’s ceremony was held at Flying Bison Brewery. They woke this creature, offered him some beer, and asked him to predict the weather. He’s a groundhog from Buffalo! What’s he going to do, NOT slug down a larger at nine in the morning and tell us what we want to hear?

He’s only 25 pounds. Next year, I hope Paula’s Donuts is the sponsor.

My yard, April 5, 2024. 

En Suite Mystery of Life

This is a current photo from my bathroom. Two people use this bathroom. Two. Do you see anything wrong here? Why is no one talking about this? Toothbrushes breed, people. Left alone, in damp conditions, they multiply like relatives at the reading of a will. If you believe that the Rothschild’s ordered the Illuminati to keep Trump out of office during their great virus test, that’s fine.

But I’ve heard that one. How secret is a conspiracy that I know all about? Out here on Grand Island. No, it’s the conspiracies that we haven’t heard about that are shaping our society.

One of them involves getting extra toothbrushes into your house. YOUR HOUSE. Look for them.

Ah! Sweet mystery of life
At last I've found thee.