Lem and the Library

My home town in England had a public library. It was built in 1903 at a time when the British Empire bestrode the world like a coal powered brass and iron colossus of mercantilism. It was a fine red brick building with a typically late Victorian Neo-Gothic rejection of symmetry. Inside it was magnificently appointed with mahogany shelves and balustrades that had doubtless been felled by hand in a steaming forest on the Bay of Bengal.

The interior of the library had a gallery that looked down into a central atrium. Such a thing would be unthinkable now, I assume, as the polyester clad underclass would regularly hurl each to their deaths from it. The library’s contemporary replacement is a concrete, steel and glass confection that was obviously constructed to the lowest possible cost and with the least possible amount of architectural imagination. From the pavement it resembles an abandoned car dealership of one the less prestigious brands.

It was in the original library that I discovered the works of Stanisław Lem. Lem was a Polish science fiction writer who was actively writing and publishing from the 1950s to 1980s. He never shirked from a deep investigation into philosophical and futurological matters yet remained eminently readable. In the English translations, at least. I am regrettably unable to comment of the accessibility of the original Polish.

Lem’s work was so profound and sagacious that Philip K. Dick theorised that the books had to be the combined effort of an expert panel of Polish scientists, philosophers and writers. Although Dick was, at the time, feeling antipathetical toward Poland as a result of some disagreement over royalties on his Polish sales.

The first Lem book that I discovered and the one that I would commend to new readers is Return from the Stars. It tells the story of an astronaut who returns from a voyage spanning centuries to discover that population of Earth have voluntarily submitted themselves to pacification in order to build a tranquil utopia. Not only is this book a penetrating meditation on what it means to be human and the nature of identity but it has also proved to be extremely prescient about the nature of technological development. Even though it was published in 1961 it predicts with eerie accuracy the ubiquity of electronic publication and distribution that is only just being realised now. Access to media, such as books and newspapers, is depicted as being instantly accessible by a tablet device known as an ‘Opton’. 

Stanisław Lem died four years before the launch of the iPad.

An Interview With K.C. Shaw

Kate Shaw is a fantasy author who was born in Atlanta, Georgia and grew up in East Tennessee, where she lives today. For her day job, she is a test proctor at a state community college. You can find details of her literary work here.

Kate and Jekyll

Tell us about the town in which you grew up.

I grew up in a tiny rural town in East Tennessee, which is in the southeastern part of the United States near the Smoky Mountains. Even today the town only has about 1,500 residents. It's half an hour's drive from anywhere really interesting--like a movie theater or even a supermarket--so I was eager to get out of there as a kid. I moved to the giant (by comparison) city of Knoxville, Tennessee after I graduated from college. Then about five years ago, after a lot of moves to different cities and states, I missed my quiet hometown. I moved back and actually bought a house.

When I was growing up, all the kids in town told spooky stories about Sawmill Road. We were all convinced it was haunted by the ghost of a bank robber who had wrecked his motorcycle and died during a getaway. A few years ago I was talking to my aunt--who also grew up in the same town--and mentioned the story. She laughed and said, "Your dad made that up when we were kids. I can't believe people are still telling it." I included the setting in one of my earliest published short stories, "Sawmill Road," published in Every Day Fiction in 2007, and used the ghost story itself in another story published in an anthology of Halloween fiction. Thanks, Dad. 

Sawmill Road

What character written by another author do you admire the most?

I greatly admire the character of Gen in Meghan Whalen Turner's book The Thief. It's told from first person and Gen is not an unreliable narrator, but the author still manages to keep secrets from the reader about him. I've read the book at least a dozen times, both because I love it and because I wanted to figure out how she manages to unfold those secrets as the book progresses.

As for admiring a character on a personal level, that would definitely be Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz books. I grew up reading the series--my mom read them to me and my brother when we were little, and I read them to myself as I got older. In the books (as opposed to the movie), Dorothy takes everything in stride and is always positive. When presented with a weird situation she examines her options practically. I see a lot of her in my own personality. I still love the books.

When did you start writing your first novel and when did you finish it?

I wrote my first book in eighth grade, although since it fit in a single spiral notebook it was more of a long short story. I don't remember much about it but I'm sure it was awful. I wrote a no doubt equally awful (and short) book when I was about twenty, and a much longer but definitely a terrible book in my late twenties. I didn't start getting serious about writing until I was in my mid-thirties. The first books I wrote then were still pretty bad, but I've gotten better and better with every one I write.

I'm a fairly fast writer and typically complete a draft within a few months.

What are you working on right now?

Right now I'm between projects, but I think I know what I'm doing next. Remember that terrible book I wrote in my late twenties? It was an epic fantasy with a horse as the main character, and for some reason it popped back into my brain recently. The basic story idea was good and would make a great YA fantasy. I'm still in the early phase of worldbuilding and making decisions on where I want the plot to go, but this time I think I can do it justice.

Infant Mortality

I started my third novel, Weft, in late January 2016 and, by early March I was 29,000 words in. I'd set myself some lofty goals for this book. Specifically, I want to write something longer, slower paced and more character driven than my previous two works. I believe that I was on my way to achieving these goals and, what I have to come to think of as, Weft 1.0 would have been a fine book.

So why have I stopped? There was a lot to like about Weft 1.0; I like the protagonist, the settings and the revealed use of technology. Granted, it had a few structural problems. Two of the main characters were dead by the end of chapter 2 and chapter 3 just seemed to be an extended love letter to the Middle East.

The process of writing it has exposed to me the book I should  have been writing. It's now apparent to me the that settings and power dynamics were exactly the reverse of what they should have been for the book to reach its full potential. 29,000 words is obviously not nothing. It's probably several hundred hours work that I do not discard lightly. However, I'd rather do that than expend several thousand hours more work into a book that would have been, perhaps even only slightly, less than it could have been.

There will be more planning, more character and location sketches then I'll be ready to start on Weft 2.0. I don't know exactly when but it will be the second half of this year.