Classic Science Fiction Podcast – March 2021 – Murray Leinster’s “Exploration Team”

I’m honored and thrilled to be part of an ongoing tribute to classic, Golden Age science fiction. Yifeng You advertised for interested folks and I regularly read Golden Age stories to learn storycrafting, so it seemed like a good match. Next we asked Robin Baskerville, a fellow scifi enthusiast and well-known editor, if she’d like to take part.

The rest is future history (this is scifi, after all).

Murray Leinster
From Wikipedia: Murray Leinster (June 16, 1896 – June 8, 1975) was a nom de plume of William Fitzgerald Jenkins, an American writer of science fiction. He wrote and published more than 1,500 short stories and articles, 14 movie scripts, and hundreds of radio scripts and television plays.

You can read Wikipedia’s overview of Exploration Team here. My suggestion is you read the actual story. It’s amazing. You can download a PDF copy from my site (not sure where I found it. Please let me know if I’m violating any laws and I’ll remove it).

Enjoy the podcast and let us know what you think.

 

This week’s installment of “Backyard with the Carrabises”

Coyote are clever.

Not to put down other Old Ones. The Wild doesn’t tolerate poor design. You think humans are grand engineers? Everything not manmade on this planet has gone through enumerable iterations, each one a minor improvement over the last.

Then how come things are going extinct, you ask?

Because humans are stupid.

We are evolution’s “big brain” experiment. It experimented with big muscle, big size, big this and that, none of them worked out.

Want the kicker?

We won’t, either.

But the coyote…if humans mind their own business and take out only themselves, the coyote – who were here before us – will be here after us.

Coyote have urbanized in many places. They’ve adapted to us. They’ll adapt to without-us.

The coyote near us have learned to listen to the raccoons. Do they hear the raccoons munching on peanuts and dog food?

That means Two-Legs have put food out, and easy treats are hard to come by in our world.

So they listen. They approach. They rustle to let the raccoons know they’re coming, time for the raccoons to leave, and they dine.

And so we’ll let them be.

 

“Owen and Jessica” now on The Yard: Crime Blog

Subscribers may remember Owen and Jessica from previous posts. It’s a flash piece and always got laughs and applause when I read it publicly. I shopped it around, got lots of excellent comments from editors (who always asked to see more of my work) and no bites until this week.

 
Owen and Jessica was a fun, quick write that required little editing.

Blood gathered in the whorls of his thumb. He stared at it and chuckled before licking it clean.

 
It came out pretty much fully formed.

That’s an author’s way of saying “It only took twelve rewrites.” Most of the rewrites were for timing and tension; change a word here or there. One major (and important, me thinks) edit came late to the game; I added the third and fourth paragraphs from the bottom, from “He stood over…” to “…didn’t fit.”

Let me know what you think.

You can follow The Yard: Crime Blog on Facebook and MeWe.

Enjoy!

31 Years to Publication

It took two months to write, thirty-one years to get published. And you know what? It was worth the wait.

I am so proud. I wrote The Augmented Man in April of 1990. Now I’m holding copies in my hands.

 
And the delay wasn’t because of slow mail.

I wrote the novel side-by-side with the novella, The Goatmen of Aguirra (to give you an idea of what my mind was working on at the time).

I’d workshopped The Augmented Man and received high praise. I shopped it around, no publisher was interested. I asked AJ Budrys, my mentor and an accomplished author and editor, if he’d be willing to read it and let me know if I was kidding myself, did it just need work, should I give up my dreams of being a published author…?

What you need to know is I was an accomplished trade technical author in the late 1980s through the early 1990s, at the height of the PC Boom (I discuss this in my interview) and my work was in high demand. I knew the publishing industry at that time.

AJ read it and was so blown away he offered to agent it for me. He’d published some of my short fiction in his Tomorrow magazine and he knew my work from workshops. He was familiar with my work, my style, my weaknesses, and my strengths. But The Augmented Man caught him by surprise.

I was flattered, honored. I almost fainted when I read his letter offering to represent the novel (1990, remember? We didn’t do lots of emailing back then).

For reasons that had nothing to do with the book, AJ couldn’t land it. We met at a con and he explained the situation to me. Someday, should we meet at a con, ask me and I’ll share the story.

AJ passed and I got another agent. She loved the book. Could I add 30,000 words to it?

Sure, why?

Because (at 85k words) it was too short (I reedited it to its present 97k words). Thirty-k words longer and she was sure she could land it. I added 30k words, edited, proofed, and sent the rewrite to her in under a month.

Didn’t hear from her. Called and got “Oh, on second thought, no, I don’t think this is a good enough novel. Besides, there’s too much out there already like it.”

Really? Did you read the novel?

Yeah, sure. It’s about a guy lost in a jungle, right?

On to agent #3. Who was a joke. I finally asked point blank, “How many projects have you placed?” and she responded that she couldn’t work with someone who asked such questions. This after the head of the agency phoned and talked with me for an hour to let me know how impressed he was by my work.

So I put it on the shelf. I went on with life.

Because I’m patient.

And now I’m holding the novel in my hands.

I’m so proud.

Would you like a personally autographed copy?

(and feel free to pass this on to every one)

Poetry Workshop 3

I continue sharing my attempts at poetry written during a workshop I took. You can read my efforts in classes 1 and 2.

The teacher again gave us one liners to build upon. Our first effort also had rhyming as a constraint, the second one was constrained only by a single word from our immediate surroundings.

As with my previous first efforts, this first effort is meh! but not as meh! as class 2‘s first effort. I read my second effort to the class and again received kudos from other students and the teacher.

First up, a rift on “I went to the rock to hide my face” and note, this is also a hymn lyric and can be found in popular song.

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Now, the poem which received kudos from teacher and fellow students. We were told to take a single thing from our surroundings and build on it. I look out over a woodland and a raven landed on our porch railing as we were given this task. I took Raven as my inspiration.

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Read the fourth class’ meanderings.