On Matters Of Style

[VeeJay]

In the past, in some or other, very quotidian thread, various peeps had been obsequiously observed to pop pell-mell out of the cyber-wordwork and were reported to have thereby allegedly said...
Read your initial question. My response is simple: Don't lose your style or voice. It's all you've got. Don't become a drone that sounds exactly like everyone else. It will KILL your writing career dead. --DA

VeeJay:
Hmm...my voice, I think, is just a *little* too maximalist. Very wordy, almost unpublishably so, IMHO. This verbosity of mine, and the problems with it therein, is something I've been recently giving a lot of thought to. If I showed you bits of the novel I'm currently working on, I'd love to see the expression on your face when you read them. So at least, I may have to tone it down just a *tad*.

Also, i think I do need at least bow somewhat to convention and consensus when publishing my 1st short stories. After pubbing a few, then perhaps i'd have the wherewithal to go more patently verbosely nutzo...

I've since made a remarkable discovery!

Ever hear of a skiffian author named John Brunner? He wrote a book called 'Stand on Zanzibar' in 1968, and in the year after (the year I was born!), it won the Hugo. I was referred to this book by a dear RL friend of mine.

I took one look at the first page of the book...and I was completely astounded. The guy writes just like I do....literaturationally, fictionally, prose-stylistically speaking, we could be close cousins! Members of the same semantomantic family! He even sometimes spells out letters of the alphabet in say, an abbreviation, just like I do (i.e. Ay Ess Ay Pea, Ess Eff, VeeJayEss <my initials, VJS>) I practically begged the librarian for 50 cents so I could photocopy the 1st page of the book for my own records since I was so astounded, I couldnt believe it. So now I'm much more confident in my style, as idiosynctatic as it may be. I'm so freekin happy over this I'm bouncing all over the walls. Here I thought I was the only Science Metafictional Miscreant. And, in additon, all these different metafictional devices I've been wanting to employ...I'm finding out that many of them are already accepted and have been done even by writers like Heinlein. My personal prob is, I'm not as well read in the zhawnrah as I need to be!

[erazmus]

VeeJay,
You need to take a bit of time and catch up, if you are just discovering J. Brunner now. Most of us are only beggining to forget him. I'd take a look at Fredric Pohl, Walter Miller, Philip Jose Farmer, Ben Bova, Robert Silverberg, Issac Asimov and Poul Anderson as well.
Mike

Michael D. Turner
'Psyched Up' in _Turn the other Chick_-ed. E. Friesner-Baen books
www.baen.com
'Two Ravens' in Amazing Journeys Magazine #9 Sept. 05
'An Incident at Black Tongue Tavern' in _Bash Down the Door and Slice Open the Badguy_ from Fantasist Enterprises

[Stranger]

VeeJay,
I have to agree with erazmus. They may seem old, but if you look at the stuff Alfred Bester, and Theodore Sturgeon were doing way back when, you'll be amazed they were doing it way back when. Sturgeon inspired characters like swamp creatures, and mutant kids decades before there were Swamp Things and X-men. Bester presented mental telepathy on the page as no one had before, or since.

[VeeJay]

BC Bell, eraz...yes indeedy. I definitely need to read more...

I am familiar with Fred Pohl's Heechee stuff (and I get inspiration from him especially, since both he and I didnt finish college), Asimov's I, Robot (and I like the idea of Foundation's 'psychohistory', but I found the book clunky and archaic to read), Poul Anderson (can't remember if I've read any of him or not, but I do recognize the name), and I did crack open the spine on Bester's Golem 100 (love the description of the 'bee ladies', although my RL skiffy mentor <I'm basically Wort to his Merlin> says 'Golem' isn't Bester's best)...although Sturgeon, Walter Miller, and Philip Jose Farmer I haven't heard of. There are many skiffians in good standing I've yet to be exposed to. As far as straight SF goes, my faves by far are Alistair Reynolds (whom I believe is one of the best space opera peeps writing today), Greg Egan ('Diaspora' and 'Schild's Ladder' especially, although his 'Permutation City' threw me for something of a loop), Neal Stephenson (who's 'Snow Crash' is very idiosyncratic and a bestseller to boot, and I loved 'Cryptonomicon'...not sure what to think of his Baroque Cycle books yet, I typically don't go for stories set in the past), lessee who else....read Arthur C Clarke's 'Childhood's End' and '2001' (who hasn't), and actually it was a single sentence in '2001' that hit me like a diamond bullet in the middle of my forehead to paraphrase Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now, where Clarke talks briefly about the monolith builders evolving to the point where they turned themselves into spaceships. I read that line while riding the school bus home in like 3rd grade and I was bowled over (that's when I knew I was an extropian/transhumanist, though of course there *was* no transhumanist movement back then <1978 or so this would be; of course, Drexler and Moravec may have been spinning their memes back then, but there would have been no way for me to know. I was too busy watching Six Million Dollar Man>). I've read almost all of William Gibson, except perhaps Mona Lisa Overdrive and Count Zero. Peter F. Hamilton is close to my heart as well (Reality Dysfunction, Nano Flower, Fallen Dragon)...and I *adore* with a huge passion Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy, as well as 'Antarctica'. I must have read his Mars books like six times each, easy.

And who else, what other skiffians have I read....hmm....A. A. Attansio's(sp?) 'Radix' I started but didn't finish, 'Dune' of course (fell in love with the movie so much that I would actually skip school so I could stay home and watch it, and read the book first long after. To show you how jaded I was, I was actually mad since Herbert makes no mention of the Weirding modules that were in the movie, yanno, those black handheld things that amplified your mind energy and you yelled <hhaaaaaa-SHAH> and down peeps would go? It embarrases me now to realize that I felt the movie was superior)...John Varley's 'Titan' and 'Millenium', Julian May's 'Many Colored Land'...Greg Bear's 'Eon' and 'Anvil of Stars', though I couldn't get into 'Infinity'; Norman Spinrad's 'Deus Ex'. I'm currently reading several SF titles at once, including Stross' 'Accelerando' and 'Iron Sunrise', 'Neuromancer' again, a Brunner offering called 'Now Then!' featuring the first piece he ever pubbed, a few others I can't remember since I just picked them up. I had started a Jeffrey Carver, 'Infinity's End' I believe, but it's slow going since I have a bit of a problem with his writing style.

And that pretty much serves it up. So, arguably I'm not very well read in SF at all. Particularly if I'm going to denote myself an SF writer. And it is embarrasing, and I feel that it may bite me in the ass. This is why I'm glad I have you guys, and my RL friend who's my Merlin in good standing. My literary background mostly comes from what you could conceivably call 'slipstream'...this would include peeps such as David Foster Wallace's 'Infinite Jest' <I'm a huge fan>, Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' <one of my all time faves>, and contemporary lit fiction like Eco's 'Foucault's Pendulum', Norman Rush's 'Mating', Salman Rushdie's 'The Ground Beneath Her Feet', some Updike, Nabokov, Douglas Coupland, Nicholson Baker, A. S. Byatt...

So, it can be argued that my tastes in SF relate to my affection for idiosyncratic writing styles. In point of fact, I don't believe most SF is written very well at all.

As an example: I'm browsing away at the local library, in the SF/F section. I pick up a paperback at random, and turn to the first page and read something like:

Captain Anthony Johnson looked down at his screen at the control console, and became extremely angry. Apparently, the enemy fleet had outflanked them yet again. He tensely ran fingers through his hair, thinking about what he should do. If the Imperial Space Navy lost the battle for Procyon-4, all would be lost. He knew this; everything was riding on this battle. And an enemy victory in this sector would serve to block all civilian and military shipping through to Procyon-4, and then everything would disintegrate into chaos. Quickly he jabbed a finger on the button of his comm, 'Lieutenant, I need to see you on the bridge immediately,' he said.

Right then I'd put the book down, muttering something about 'cookie-cutter corporate Good Ghettokeeping Seal erythrobate regurgitated up for the teenage SF baby-bird consensus bullsh*t'. Here we have a captain with a WASP name, in a 'Navy' (<shudder> a Navy is boats on an ocean. I think Navy, and I think happy sailors in whites, dungarees and neckerchiefs lined up along the gunwhale on the USS Ticonderoga) looking at a console yadda yadda yawn dry textbook...captain do A, lieutenant do B, he said Yadda, written at fifth grade level. And I feel that a surprising amount of SF is written that way. I just can't stand it. I cracked the spine of an Arthur C. Clarke yesterday, and then put it down in annoyance due to this same issue of style. There is definitely a movement in SF, as well as other genres, that professes the wisdom of a writer's prose having little or no 'footprint', to be imbued with little or preferable no idiosyncracy, so that the common reader (the target demographic pandered to by major publishers in my opinion) isn't somehow 'tripped up' by the writer insisting on employing a Voice that 'gets in the way of the audience's full immersion in the virtual millieu of the prose, so that the audience can better live out the raw story itself in its headspace'. But then I read something like Charles Stross' 'Accelerando', or 'Snow Crash', and especially Brunner's works, and I say to myself, 'Huh, I guess a few baroque, twisted and writhing barracuda got thru the editorial net somehow. Good for them! Now I have some hope.' And my theory is, nowadays in this age of smaller publishers getting osmotically absorbed by the larger sharks thru merger, hostile takeover or out-and-out buyout, publishing editors are even more conservative than ever before as to what they'll condescend to 'green-light' and let thru the net to incarnation into Barnes & Noble dead-tree land. Because the dollar is the unbreakable Ionian pillar, and experimentation is unprofitable. What, praytell, happened to the notion of subversive elements incorporated in SF?

Lately, I've been spending a lot of time on online presences devoted to analysis, critique and discussion of speculative fiction, and SFReader so far is my uncontested fave. On others, many have no earthly idea what I'm so on about. I'll post a long, convoluted semantomantic post here, and get peeps laughing; on others, they just shake their head and denote me the 'resident confusing lunatic'. I wonder what they would have thought of the barracudas like Brunner and Stephenson; they would have cut them to thin scissory ribbons of garish flesh. A flensing.

And as far as my attitudes towards SF is concerned, about it becoming in a major way a vapid ghetto...there are others that agree with me, other pubbed SF writers even!

Take this, from Bruce Sterling, from www2.cddc.vt.edu/www.eff.org/pub/Misc/Publications/Bruce_Sterling/Catscan_columns/catscan.05

Bruce Sterling
bruces@well.sf.ca.us
CATSCAN 5 'Slipstream'

In a recent remarkable interview in _New
Pathways_ #11, Carter Scholz alludes with pained
resignation to the ongoing brain-death of science
fiction. In the 60s and 70s, Scholz opines, SF had a
chance to become a worthy literature; now that chance
has passed. Why? Because other writers have now
learned to adapt SF's best techniques to their own
ends.
'And,' says Scholz, 'They make us look sick.
When I think of the best `speculative fiction' of the
past few years, I sure don't think of any Hugo or
Nebula winners. I think of Margaret Atwood's _The
Handmaid's Tale_, and of Don DeLillo's _White Noise_,
and of Batchelor's _The Birth of the People's Republic
of Antarctica_, and of Gaddis' _JR_ and _Carpenter's
Gothic_, and of Coetzee's _Life and Times of Michael
K_ . . . I have no hope at all that genre science
fiction can ever again have any literary significance.
But that's okay, because now there are other people
doing our job.'
It's hard to stop quoting this interview. All
interviews should be this good. There's some great
campy guff about the agonizing pain it takes to write
short stories; and a lecture on the unspeakable horror
of writer's block; and some nifty fusillades of
forthright personal abuse; and a lot of other stuff
that is making _New Pathways_ one of the most
interesting zines of the Eighties. Scholz even reveals
his use of the Fibonacci Sequence in setting the
length and number of the chapters in his novel
_Palimpsests_, and wonders how come nobody caught on
to this groundbreaking technique of his.
Maybe some of this peripheral stuff kinda dulls
the lucid gleam of his argument. But you don't have to
be a medieval Italian mathematician to smell the reek
of decay in modern SF. Scholz is right. The job isn't
being done here.
'Science Fiction' today is a lot like the
contemporary Soviet Union; the sprawling possessor of
a dream that failed. Science fiction's official dogma,
which almost everybody ignores, is based on attitudes
toward science and technology which are bankrupt and
increasingly divorced from any kind of reality. 'Hard-
SF,' the genre's ideological core, is a joke today; in
terms of the social realities of high-tech post-
industrialism, it's about as relevant as hard-
Leninism.
Many of the best new SF writers seem openly
ashamed of their backward Skiffy nationality. 'Ask not
what you can do for science fiction--ask how you can
edge away from it and still get paid there.'
A blithely stateless cosmopolitanism is the
order of the day, even for an accredited Clarion grad
like Pat Murphy: 'I'm not going to bother what camp
things fall into,' she declares in a recent _Locus_
interview. 'I'm going to write the book I want and see
what happens . . . If the markets run together, I
leave it to the critics.' For Murphy, genre is a dead
issue, and she serenely wills the trash-mountain to
come to Mohammed.
And one has to sympathize. At one time, in its
clumsy way, Science Fiction offered some kind of
coherent social vision. SF may have been gaudy and
naive, and possessed by half-baked fantasies of power
and wish-fulfillment, but at least SF spoke a
contemporary language. Science Fiction did the job of
describing, in some eldritch way, what was actually
*happening*, at least in the popular imagination.
Maybe it wasn't for everybody, but if you were a
bright, unfastidious sort, you could read SF and feel,
in some satisfying and deeply unconscious way, that
you'd been given a real grip on the chrome-plated
handles of the Atomic Age.
But *now* look at it. Consider the repulsive
ghastliness of the SF category's Lovecraftian
inbreeding. People retched in the 60s when De Camp and
Carter skinned the corpse of Robert E. Howard for its
hide and tallow, but nowadays necrophilia is run on an
industrial basis. Shared-world anthologies. Braided
meganovels. Role-playing tie-ins. Sharecropping books
written by pip-squeaks under the blazoned name of
established authors. Sequels of sequels, trilogy
sequels of yet-earlier trilogies, themselves cut-and-
pasted from yet-earlier trilogies. What's the common
thread here? The belittlement of individual
creativity, and the triumph of anonymous product. It's
like some Barthesian nightmare of the Death of the
Author and his replacement by 'text.'
Science Fiction--much like that other former
Vanguard of Progressive Mankind, the Communist Party--
has lost touch with its cultural reasons for being.
Instead, SF has become a self-perpetuating commercial
power-structure, which happens to be in possession of
a traditional national territory: a portion of
bookstore rackspace.
Science fiction habitually ignores any challenge
from outside. It is protected by the Iron Curtain of
category marketing. It does not even have to improve
'on its own terms,' because its own terms no longer
mean anything; they are rarely even seriously
discussed. It is enough merely to point at the
rackspace and say 'SF.'
Some people think it's great to have a genre
which has no inner identity, merely a locale where
it's sold. In theory, this grants vast authorial
freedom, but the longterm practical effect has been
heavily debilitating. When 'anything is possible in
SF' then 'anything' seems good enough to pass muster.
Why innovate? Innovate in what direction? Nothing is
moving, the compass is dead. Everything is becalmed;
toss a chip overboard to test the current, and it sits
there till it sinks without a trace.

Now, a veddy veddy interesting thing here is...I myself had been planning to work with the length of chapters and sections to play around with hidden numerological codes, and that was before I read this article. It's something that can be conceivably employed 'seamlessly', discoverable only if you knew what to look for; I thought about giving hints of these things in the text somehow, as well as divulging certain things on my website, perhaps, after a particular novel is pubbed. But it seems here too that Streling is razzing on series, sequels and trilogies, whereas I am actually planning a nine-novel series. A nonalogy, I suppose (is that a word?).

I have a lot more to say on this matter, but I see this post is getting rather long so maybe I'll save it for later. I just don't want to promulgate a vapid ghetto. I want to revitalize it. And if I'm kidding myself, and I gain only one singularly satisfied reader ('Yo, dood, you're stuff is so out there! Were you trying to pastiche John Brunner or what here? I laughed my arse off!') then I've accomplished my sacred mission. Someone has to breathe life into this sorry corpsicle, even if only piecemeal.

[B. C. Bell]

VeeJay,
I've seen this blurb before about Carter Scholz (whilst reading some Sterling), but I've never been able to find the article. I've actually never read anything by Scholz. Any Ideas?

[VeeJay]

Ah, I'm sorry stranger, but I'm afraid you lost me on that one...any ideas about what? About what SF should 'say'? About Scholz? I only read a blurb or two of Scholz and that's with Amazon's 'browse excerpt' function. He kinda reminds me of Don DeLillo in some parts, although others may disagree. But he's certainly more experimental then other mainline ghetto-dwellers, IMANSVHO (in my arguably not so very humble onion).


What ideas are you asking me for? (lol)...clarify and I shalt answer thee.

[BarbT]

[quote]

VeeJay said...
As an example: I'm browsing away at the local library, in the SF/F section. I pick up a paperback at random, and turn to the first page and read something like:

Captain Anthony Johnson looked down at his screen at the control console, and became extremely angry. Apparently, the enemy fleet had outflanked them yet again. He tensely ran fingers through his hair, thinking about what he should do. If the Imperial Space Navy lost the battle for Procyon-4, all would be lost. He knew this; everything was riding on this battle. And an enemy victory in this sector would serve to block all civilian and military shipping through to Procyon-4, and then everything would disintegrate into chaos. Quickly he jabbed a finger on the button of his comm, "Lieutenant, I need to see you on the bridge immediately," he said.

A little trite? Okay. But it's READABLE. Guess I'm just an old-codger-in-training (female division), but when I read for entertainment, I want Characterization, Plot and Action - with deep psycho/social significance appreciated but optional. I do not want paragraph after paragraph of "Observe how clever I am." prose.

There's a place for everywriting style in the universe, but commercial fiction is the modern version of the ancient campfire story. If you don'tmake it easy for theaudience to follow you, they'll fall asleep over their gnawed Mastodon bones.

~Barb

[VeeJay]

Okay BarbT, I'm with you, in theory...so then I propose: howsabout something of a compromise?

My idea of good SF would have, at minimum:

1) Good story, action, character development, very thorough world-building (campfire storytelling elements)...arguably the most important principle. If a good story can't be coherently told, then the story fails.

2) A writing style that doesn't seem too cookie-cutter, but in keeping with principle #1 (i.e., not too baroque or maximalist).

3) Incorporation of Idea. This can be either sociological/political (transhumanism vs. crypto-Ludditism vs. StatusQuoniks, etc.), straight philosophical (logical positivism vs. nihilism, etc.) or technoscientific (nanotechnology vs. all others, mind-machine interfaces <with sociological connotations>)...and even addressing the tensions/relationships introduced and posited by these Idea(s), yet executed in a way/style that doesn't interfere with #1.

4) Subtext. Inseminal 'codes' incorporated by writer that address the relationship between author and writer, yet again, done in a seamless 'heinleined' way that doesn't interfere with principle #1. Charles Scholz would be an example of this, and to some degree John Brunner, although many would argue that his literary style and presentation overall is in some violation of principle #1.

---> And personally, as far as personal writing style goes...my style *does* admittedly tend to veer away from cookie-cutterism (i.e., I certainly don't sound like Piers Anthony or Alan Dean Foster) by its own very nature. I don't start from bare, minimalist prose and then consciously *maximalize* it; but rather, my Voice comes naturally of its own volition, and I would then need to forcefully edit, boil and tailor it down to make it seem 'percfectly invisible' with *no* discernable 'footprint'. Feel free to case my other posts on SFR where I tend to go off on prose-babblings for examples.

For example: In that little space opera paragraph I gave, here's how I might possibly write it, in my Voice:

Captain Piers Akscele shot a long, pained look down at his screen coursing with fluid alfanums and emission signatures. His fate branded itself in by the raw numbers: offense-strength stats streaming in from the hull arrays from the oncoming marauders. There were at least four...no, five dreadnaughts and their attending macrofrigates, riding on pillars of angry ion-plasma, their combined firepower able to vaporize a large planetesimal if they wished. This enemy strike group from Eridani had outwitted them yet again, for third time in the past few local star-cycles. He combed rasping fingers across his scalp, trying to mentally calc options, yet his neurons refused to even cough. He shook in place despite himself, an iron taste welling on his tongue. If the Procyonists lost the battle for Procyon-4 to these Eridanians, all would be lost. Destitution, starvation. Settlements failing, riots. Dystopia.

[BarbT]

Okay, VeeJay, compromise accepted


I think your principle #1 can carry the weight of almost anything you want to express in fiction, as long as it remains dominant.


Nothing wrong with "Voice", a lot of writers spend years trying to find theirs, and your re-write works fine for me.If the author's "footprint"doesn't stomp out our ancient campfire, all is well.


~Barb

[VeeJay]

When we last tuned in to this program, BarbT had said...

Okay, VeeJay, compromise accepted
I think your principle #1 can carry the weight of almost anything you want to express in fiction, as long as it remains dominant.
Nothing wrong with 'Voice', a lot of writers spend years trying to find theirs, and your re-write works fine for me. If the author's 'footprint' doesn't stomp out our ancient campfire, all is well.

Yes! BarbT! I will perforce name one or more of my kids after you!

(<imagining the future, 2026 AD, when precocious teenaged daughter BarbT bounds annoyedly into our automated kitchen, nearly bowling over the servitor with its tray of synthed milkdrinks making its way to the dinner table, shrieking: 'Dad! The kids in my class are all making fun of my name again! They follow me around in clumps, pester me for hours: 'Migh' Tee Barb Tee Golf Tee, fit ya to a T!' Why did you name me BarbT anyway! And what the freakkin hail does that dangling, useless capital T at the end mean anyway! It's so stupid! It'll be my ultimate demise, this useless T!'

I look at her with a weary face. 'Well, I'm afraid it's a long story, Princess. Y'see, I was on this forum called--'

'Not the damn forum story again!' BarbT yelped.

'BarbT! Your language is appalling, you realize that?'

'The hell with it...no more school for me. From now own, I take my classes in virtuality. Or sleep-train them. OR, better yet, you just apply to the Nomenclature Board and get me a new name!'

I study my hands resting in my lap. 'BarbT, lissen sweetie....you know it costs more than three months of my salary at the bioware implant co-op to afford to rename you, we already had this discussion---'

BarbT approached for the onslaught: 'How about I go around calling you Van Q! Or XYZ PDQ! ICUP!'

'ICUP? What does that mean, I never heard of--'

'Bullsh*te! It means 'I see you pee', you taught it to me yourself!'

'Hmm. I'm not sure you going around referring to me in this context of urinary voyeurism would be all that appropriate, in theory. People hear that, and they'll snatch you away from me. You want to spend the rest of your adolescence in some state-operated youth enculturation camp on Mars, then you go right ahead.'

''Kay then...how about I only call you ICUP when we're alone, in the demense. And also, you call me Queen Victoria from now on. That should solve this whole niggling issue with names and such. And at school, I give myself the nickname 'Girl Traumatized By Father With A Cruel Name'. Like that idea?'

'BarbT, seriously. You're not going to get anyone at school to call you that. It's too long, for one. At the very least, you'll have to make it into some kind of acronym.'

'Okay. Let's see now....girl traumat-...G-T-B...gimme a sec...'

'You're not good at this acronymizing thing at all. Write it all out first for one thing, that's a good start.'

'Shh! You're interfering with my word parsing here.....okay, got it. Gitbiff-wackin'.'

I winced in confusion, my brain seizing up like an old lawn mower. 'Git-Biff-Whackin? What in the world--'

'Write that phrase I said before, all out, then make a word of it, putting in vowels where necessary.'

'It sounds like....okay that's just too weird. It's like the onomatopoetic sounds made when someone is being beat up, or something...Git! Whack! Biff! Thwack-pow! See? It doesn't really work..'

She threw up her hands: 'It's infinitely better than BarbT!'

<sigh>'Okay, fine, Bar...I mean, ah, uh, Queen Elizab--'

'Victoria! Queen Victoria!'

'Sorry, but Queen Victoria is out. Right out. Reminds me of Victoria's Secret.'

'Huh? Dad...um, sorry, I mean ICUP...you just lost me with that one.'

'At least call me Mister ICUP. I'm your elder, and you allegedly are the repository of fifty percent or better of my genome, so at least some respect is due. And, Victoria's Secret, FYI, was an early 21st century megacartel specializing in sultry female undergarments. Mostly purple. And thin. I'd....much rather not think of you in that particular context, if that's okay.'

'Why not? What's wrong with female undergarments?'

'Do I have to spell it out for you?'

She spent sometime looking down at herself, innocently wondering what was amiss. 'I wear female undergarments to school all the time! What are you talking about!'

'Yeah, yeah, don't remind me. That happens to be all you wear to school.'

'It's what kids wear! You just don't understand, you were never a freakkin' kid!' Now she wore a look of solid anger. Her face developed into the color of tomato bisque.

I stepped up to the challenge. I was waiting for this subject to get breached for some time. 'I'll never understand it. When I was your age, we actually wore actual, verifiable clothes over our underthings. We didn't just only wear underwear. This just verifies what I thought all along...youth fads are engineered only for the shock value they incur out of the previous generation. Aren't you afraid of catching a damn cold? Or, I dunno...boys snapping your bra strap when you're not looking? Since it's all like, yanno, exposed and everything?'

'Blah blah blase bullsh*ite.' She continued, rolling her eyes in her patented parody of me, deepening her voice for this next bit: ''When I was your age, we only had Atari! Only 8-bit, and the graphics were so bad, the original game designers would use only 12 red squares to make a whole 2-D tank! Or a bird! Everything looked like it was made out of clunky Legos! We had no Internet! And when we finally did, it took you like four hours to download an entire pop synthtune, and that's if your terminal doesn't bite it from some virus in an email beforehand.' Yah yah, Miss-terr-rr 'ICUP all over the floor like some retard', I've heard all this before. The Twentieth Century Sad Song. I'm sorry your childhood was so damn traumatic from all the ancient tech. All those Cock Shuttles blowing up--'

'Space Shuttles! Oh God in heaven, don't say....what you just said again. Not around the neighbors.'

'And the Y2K Ladybug Viral Enhancement, and the reign of King Dubya II, the Cold Gulf War, the Second Cold Gulf War...'

'Oh for chrissa---...see? With all this, you're demonstrating how much you actually listen to me. This is all very eye-opening to me, here...'

'And the Hillary Clinton cigar scandal, with what's his name...Fidel Castralto. From Haiti. Who was deposed. In favor of....don't tell me!....'

'...Queen Vic, don't continue, please, I'm getting angina here--'

She stamped a foot as if killing a particularly ugly roach scuttling on the floor. 'Shhh! You're spamming my firewall! Castralto was then ousted in a coup d'laire in favor of...Enrique Inglesias! Am I right?'

'<elongated, painful sigh> Right, Princess. You nailed it on the head.'

'Thought so. You see? I'm smarter than you give me credit for. Now hand over the wireless fob to the hoverdyne, if you please...I told my friend Christi I'd pick her up by 2300.'

'Now where are you off to? On a school night, no less?' I asked, an eyebrow suspiciously raised.

'Hah! I told you, I'm not going to school anymore! Not with a name like BarbT!'

'But you just renamed yourself, I thought you said! So you're safe!'

'No! Don't you remember? The name didn't work, it sounds too much like...ICU-matt-oh-pea-uh! Someone getting beat up! You're just stalling now, ICUP. The fob, please. Hand it.'

'Okay, wait, first of all...number one, you're not going out until you put something decent on over your bra and panties. Two, I thought we agreed that you weren't to borrow the dyne until you logged more hours in the simulator first.'

She sneered, 'I happen to drive totally fine in the sim.'

'That's a subject for speculation, I think. When I replayed your last session, I discovered you ran over no less than five holologos, ignored a traffic LED and rammed into a smart-dumpster. Hardly makes for safe driving, IMHO.'

'Don't spam my headpace with these archaic web expressions--'

'I think they're quite quaint...how about you call me IMHO instead of ICUP. You'd make your old man feel much better.'

BarbT suddenly grew serious, with ominous air. 'Tell you what, ICUP...I'm going to count five. If I don't get the dyne fob by the time I say 'five', I'll massmail everyone on my expanded gridlist and tell them you write robot sex stories and publish them online under a pseudonym for fun. Ready? One.....'

'Listen, I forbid this. You hear me?'

'...two...'

'This is what's happening with our culture today! Underwear! Synthmusic that sounds like H-bombs arrhythmically sampled in among sounds of garbage can lids being thrown into Mount St. Helens!'

'....three!....'

'And on top of that, a complete disrespect for parental authority! The only reason I exist is to financially underwrite your ongoing absorbtion into dystopian meme-systems!'

'.....FOUR!....'

'Okay! Okay! You win, Queen of Galactica! Take the damn fob before I throw it out an airlock---'

'Hey wow! It worked! Thanks, ICU...I mean, Mister Dad. I mean Dad. <kiss>'

'Get out of here. I mean it. Be back by 0200. That's firm.'

'0500!'

'Jeez. Here we go with the arms reductions talks. 0300.'

'0400!'

'Fine! Fine! Sometimes I become very spastically confused over which one of us is the parent and which the progeny in our ongoing exchanges--'

'You still think I'm adorable anyway, tho. Doncha?'

'Sure. I do. What will be especially adorable, I believe, is the look on your face when you see I put a Star Wars decal on the rear collision-guard of the dyne.'

It took a min or so for it to sink in. She was incredulous. 'What! WHAT!'

'Heh heh--'

'Omigod omigod EWWWW!'

'Yes. I concur. Look at you, now. Completely adorable.'

'How could you put that on our dyne! There's no way I'll be seen in that thing now! You did that on purpose!'

I fought back a look of smugness. Triumph. 'Ancient, unhip, over-hyped iconography. The razor strap of the New World Order. Fear it.'

.....END TEMPORAL SCENARIO: Time Index 00:75:96: | reset > replay > choose parallel universe > main menu | </font> </font>

[BarbT]

Just tell the little brat to be grateful you only hung that useless T on her, and not my entire quaintly English last name.If she had to drag that around, she'd find some way to pay the Nomenclature Board fees herself (and a teenage girl dressed in underwear looking for a way to earn money is a parental scenario I'll leave to your free-flowing imagination). [img]/emoticons/devil.gif[/img]


~Barb

[VeeJay]

As long as you thought my little ditty was funny. I was laughing uproariously the whole time i was writing it, but then I thought about it a while, and felt that maybe you'd interpret the whole thing as me making fun of your name. It came out of this weird, surreal, funny idea I had a long, long time ago, of making a remake of the Jetsons (I was picturing Tim Allen as George Jetson and Annette Benning as Jane, and Judy as maybe, hmm, Gwynneth Paltrow's too old...and maybe that Sixth Sense kid who was in Spielberg's AI as Elroy...and Walter Matthau as Henry the janitor. I had no idea who I'd have for the voice of Rosie the Cybermaid...perhaps Barbara Walters? Joan Plowright? Glenn Close?...and Danny DeVito as an obvious Mr. Spacely, George's boss, and Jack Nicholson in a super-cameo as Cogswell Cogs, CEO of Spacely Sprockets' main archrival in future commerce world)....and I was going to portray a teenage fad revolving around kids wearing only underwear as an absurdist extrapolation of that current skater's vogue of wearing one's baggy pants so low off the waist as to make the boxers visible. My Jetson's remake would have minimal cuteness and maximum pomo surreality, like David Lynch (Blue Velvet?) meets Peter Greenaway (director of Drowning By Numbers, A Zed And Two Naughts, Pillow Book) meets Gus van Zant (My Own Private Idaho, Even Cowgirls Get The Blues). I would feature things such as George getting seduced by an android escort service girl hired for corporate espionage, Jane suspects George is having an affair and fantasizes about going off herself with a virtuality engineer.....Judy wins a contest in which she gets to go out on a date with a megagoth synthmusic celeb, only to find out he's a suicidal, drug-addled sociopath who dreams of starting his own sex cult involving UFOs...and Elroy's quantum physics experiments in his bedroom result in certain universal mathematical constants getting over-tweaked (like Pi) with zany results.