Nonfiction – Words Deferred

Trouble! at Coal Creek — Read Report

Trouble! At Coal Creek is a historical fiction graphic novel that tells the story of the 1891 “Coal Creek War” through the eyes of a mining family. It follows in the tradition of books like Maus and They Called Us Enemy.

At this point, I would almost classify this style of book as its own sub-genre, fairly distinct from both mainstream graphic novels and traditional historical fiction, with its own style and tropes. Weirdly, after decades of comics being snubbed by the mainstream as childish, the books that managed to cross over have lent a patina of prestige to this particular combination of format and subject matter.

Trouble! was published with grants from no less than three art and education foundations and funds. The author, Austin Saurbrei’s bio describes him as a community organizer with strong union ties. My own political leanings are pretty pro-labor, but I think it’s fair to say that the book is happy to take sides and isn’t trying for a neutral viewpoint. On the other hand, the maltreatment of coal miners in the 1800s was so incredibly nasty that I hope most people with modern sensibilities would find it hard to side with the coal barons.

The story is told by an unnamed narrator whose parents emigrated from Wales to eastern Tennessee, hoping to use Pa’s experience as a miner to build a better life. Ma, Pa, narrator and Sis are sucked into the biscuits cycle of work and debt that mining towns and “the company store” have become synonymous with.

When Ma and a third child die in childbirth, Pa gives up hope of a better life, spending his paltry pocket money and free hours drinking. Sis escapes via marriage into another mining family. The narrator—forbidden from the mines by Pa—gets a job at a local general store. The store happens to be run by a local member of the Knights of Labor, one of the earliest precursors to modern labor unions in America.

The rest of the book chronicles the escalating dispute between coal miners and mine owners. A labor strike is countered by bringing in (largely black, questionably prosecuted) prisoner labor. Miners riot and force out prison labor, only for the Tennessee government to bring it back it through new laws and militia protection. The conflict is shown through the narrator’s family as he and his sister fight for the miners, while their father, oddly, stays loyal to the company.

The book ends on a positive note, the rebellious miners using dynamite to crack open the stockade and free the prisoner-laborers. But the page-long afterword makes it ring hollow, describing how the fights of 1891-1892 weren’t enough to stop convict labor, which continued in some form for another 75 years.

The black and white art is often moody, alternating white and black framing. Recreations of maps, telegrams, posters and newspapers are interspersed with the illustrations to lend verisimilitude. However, despite the often violent subject matter, the book shies away from grit and gore. I suspect it was kept in the PG range to make it an easier sell for classrooms and school libraries.

There is little dialogue in the book. Most of the story is told through voice-over narration, even when the narrator is in the illustrated scene. This, along with the minimal characterization (none of the family have names), gives the story a little too much distance from the fictional characters.

They are there to add some pathos and personal stakes to the historical story. However, that distance makes it hard to be too invested in their plight. Since the rebellion is largely successful in the time period covered, it never really feels like they are in life-threatening danger.

Still, the book is a very easy way into an interesting period of American history; events that I didn’t know in detail, and I expect most Americans aren’t familiar with. The topic is especially salient now, when wealth disparities and the rights of labor are once again a major issue in our politics.

Then again, maybe that could be said for every decade between the Coal Creek War and today.

A City on Mars — Read Report

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A City on Mars is the perfect kind of pop-science non-fiction for science fiction writers. It’s no surprise they got blurbs from the likes of Mary Robbinette Kowal and Andy Weir. It’s easy reading, comedic without being too jokey, and well-illustrated (Zach is author of Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal). It delves into a subject that’s core to science fiction, one we’re all familiar with, and makes it feel new and interesting.

This is a book about space colonization, but with a few unexpected twists. “Can we settle space, should we settle space, and have we really thought this through?” asks the subtitle. Those might seem like silly questions when so much engineering and money have gone into space exploration over the last 75 years. And yet, the authors make a fairly convincing case that in some really important ways, we’ve only scratched the surface.

The Weinersmiths note that we seem to be at the beginning of a new age of space exploration. Unlike the Apollo era, there are more countries in the space game. There are private companies managing flights. And there is an awful lot of supposedly serious talk about space colonization, or at least space capitalism.

A City on Mars explores space colonization on multiple axes: not only engineering and tech, but biology, law, economics, and politics.

The Technology of Colonization

We have rockets. We have space stations. Space suits and space toilets. All sorts of advanced space technology. Hundreds of people have been to space, including Katy Perry. How hard could it be?

Of course, simply going into space is fraught with danger and wildly expensive, and this is easy to forget after watching a blockbuster movie or two. Living in space (or on other planets) is more expensive, harder, and more dangerous than living at the bottom of the sea or Antarctica. Orders of magnitude worse. And yet, those harshest of terrestrial environments often seem more fraught in our imaginations than the cold, airless, heavily irradiated void of space.

We have surprisingly little understanding of living in space—really living for years, or lifetimes—not just visiting and doing a little science. Practically everyone in space has been a well-trained, psychologically stable adult, in the prime of life and in incredible physical shape. The longest contiguous period ever spent in space is 437 days. Nobody has built anything approaching a self-sustaining environment in space. Nobody (that we know of) has ever conceived, been pregnant, or given birth in space. No children have grown up, way up there.

Despite all these unknowns, all these open questions and possible things that could go wrong, there are plenty of high-profile calls for “space colonization.” We could solve Earth’s population crisis. We could make trillions of dollars mining asteroids. We could make humanity a multi-planetary species, robust against catastrophe.

Don’t get me wrong, there have long been space nerds with dreams like this. I’m one of them, and so are the Weinersmiths. But now, space nerdery has been infected by the same Silicon Valley ethos that captured tech, finance, a lot of government, and seems to be rapidly becoming the villain of modern life. Its core tenet says that if we understand computer programming we can understand and solve any problems, probably very easily. It’s good to remember that is often not the case.

A City on Mars is in many ways a litany of all the problems that need to be solved to make space colonization a reality. It’s a long list, but also an interesting one.

More than Tech

The intersection of tech and law is rarely something that catches the zeitgeist. Where Silicon Valley interacts with the law, it often seems to be working under the famous adage of “move fast and break things.” And by pretty much any measure, it turns out that space colonization would be breaking our current space laws.

International space law is unsurprisingly limited. A handful of documents from 50+ years ago comprise all of it. That hasn’t been much of an issue while you can count all the space-faring governments on one accident-prone sawmill worker’s hand. It might become more of a problem when a dozen space programs and an equal number of private corporations are racing into space. Especially if they’re led by libertarian billionaires with certain ideas about manifest destiny.

The Weinersmiths look at the existing laws, where they are likely to be inadequate, and some international frameworks that might make good templates for new laws, including those that govern the deep sea and Antarctica.

They also look at the economic drivers for space exploration and colonization, or the lack thereof. Even with drastic improvements to the tech, the likelihood of making money in space seems slim. It’s so hard and expensive and slow to do anything in space that the payoffs would have to be outright astronomical to develop any kind of self-sustaining industry.

Space Livin’ Ain’t Easy

If there’s a broad takeaway from A City on Mars, it’s that space colonization is still a lot harder than it’s often assumed to be, and that it would be a good idea to take it slow and act thoughtfully rather than jumping in with half a plan and dealing with the consequences. It’s not a sexy position for a book aimed at space nerds to take, and the Weinersmiths are keenly aware of this.

They make their case well, and it’s hard to argue against it. This doesn’t mean space colonization is doomed, but it does probably mean that it’s a very long-term project, and one whose parameters may not jive with a lot of the current discourse. It means there are a lot of problems still to solve, and that throwing money at them won’t be enough.

Science has proven pretty good at solving some of these problems, given enough public support. That’s half the battle. The other half is purely social: can we work together and get along, as individuals and nations? The technology may be the easier lift.

Pessimism for Writers?

So why would a book that catalogues all the barriers to space colonization be good for science fiction writers? Simple: we need tension and conflict in our stories.

Practically every page of A City on Mars is a story waiting to happen. Every challenge, every difficulty or unsolved problem is just another seed for an interesting new plot.

Sci-fi can get bogged down in the land of technobabble solutions to technobabble problems. It’s not always satisfying when your dilithium crystals break and you solve it by reversing the polarity on the tractor beam to push your ship out of the neutral zone. A City on Mars offers a wealth of potentially fun challenges for characters to overcome: problems of technology and biology, but also of politics, law, and economics. If you want to write about near-future space colonization, it’s a fantastic place to start.

Great Writing — Can You Say Hero?

Sometimes a piece of writing just punches me in the gut. Tom Junod’s 1998 article for Esquire Magazine, a sort of biography of Fred Rogers titled “Can You Say Hero,” is one of those pieces.

Go read it.

(Or you can go here if you’d prefer to pay Esquire for the privilege.)

I think it’s probably my favorite bit of non-fiction writing, and it’s written in a way that fiction writers can still learn plenty from. While it has the advantage of profiling a wholly remarkable man, it’s not really about Mr. Rogers. Sneakily, it’s about Tom himself, and the profound impact that spending time with Mr. Rogers had on him.

Junod is a craftsman writer. A lot of the magic of this story lies in the technical execution — the structure and the choice of words — at least as much as the actual content they’re conveying.

The Hook

We’ve looked before at great hooks and how they can pull the reader inexorably into a story. This one is phenomenal.

Once upon a time, a little boy loved a stuffed animal whose name was Old Rabbit. It was so old, in fact, that it was really an unstuffed animal; so old that even back then, with the little boy’s brain still nice and fresh, he had no memory of it as “Young Rabbit,” or even “Rabbit”; so old that Old Rabbit was barely a rabbit at all but rather a greasy hunk of skin without eyes and ears, with a single red stitch where its tongue used to be. The little boy didn’t know why he loved Old Rabbit; he just did, and the night he threw it out the car window was the night he learned how to pray.

It starts with the classic storybook opening, and a simple declaration: there’s a little boy, and he loves Old Rabbit.

That leads to the vast, meandering second sentence, eight commas- and semicolons-worth of evocative description of Old Rabbit through the boy’s eyes. In that sentence, I know what Old Rabbit looks like. I know how it would feel, held close; how it would smell.

The last sentence of the opening paragraph introduces the conflict and the tension of the story. It’s a tension that won’t be resolved until the final paragraph.

Once Upon A Time

The story is littered with the trappings of children’s stories. Junod uses the phrase “once upon a time” liberally, to the point where he gives it a bit of a nod and a wink with “ON DECEMBER 1, 1997—oh, heck, once upon a time.”

He gives the impression of a breathless child’s rambling story by starting sentences with conjunctions and piling clauses upon clauses. Like Lemony Snicket, Junod helpfully defines words for his audience, doing it as much as an excuse for poetic emphasis as for actual definition.

Thunderstruck means that you can’t talk, because something has happened that’s as sudden and as miraculous and maybe as scary as a bolt of lightning, and all you can do is listen to the rumble.

These little things are responsible for a lot of the voice, but they’re surface ornamentation. The deep structure of the story is that of puzzle pieces, slowly fitted together to form a larger picture.

The story is a sequence of short vignettes – some from Tom’s time with Mr. Rogers, some from his past, some from stories about Mr. Rogers, picked up along the way. But these strands weave together, one referencing another, referencing another; building up in layers.

When we get to the end, it makes perfect sense. It fits. Every part of the story fed into that moment, in the same way it feels like all of Tom’s time with Mr. Rogers led to that moment in his own life.

The Frame

The story doesn’t begin with Mr. Rogers. It begins with a boy who has lost his stuffed rabbit, and prays that it will return to him. The first time, the rabbit is found. The second time, it is not. A microcosm, perhaps, for how people fall out of faith.

It’s only when Mr. Rogers asks Tom if he ever had a puppet or toy or stuffed animal that we learn (or confirm our suspicion) that the boy at the start of the story is Tom himself. The rabbit becomes the through-line of the story.

We’re reminded of it a third time, when Mr. Rogers talks to a little girl with a stuffed Rabbit. Junod makes sure it’s front-of-mind. It’s the same reason he leaves the question unanswered, “What kind of prayer has only three words?”

We don’t find out until the very end; the end of the story that started with the boy and the rabbit.

The Words

While I appreciate the structure of the story, it would be negligent to not mention the joy to be found in Junod’s delightful little turns of phrase.

The place was drab and dim, with the smell of stalled air and a stain of daguerreotype sunlight on its closed, slatted blinds…

And then, in the dark room, there was a wallop of white light, and Mister Rogers disappeared behind it.

…this skinny old man dressed in a gray suit and a bow tie, with his hands on his hips and his arms akimbo, like a dance instructor—there was some kind of wiggly jazz in his legs, and he went flying all around the outside of the house…

…in front of all the soap-opera stars and talk-show sinceratrons, in front of all the jutting man-tanned jaws and jutting saltwater bosoms, he made his small bow and said into the microphone, “All of us have special ones who have loved us into being. Would you just take, along with me, ten seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are….Ten seconds of silence.” And then he lifted his wrist, and looked at the audience, and looked at his watch, and said softly, “I’ll watch the time,” and there was, at first, a small whoop from the crowd, a giddy, strangled hiccup of laughter, as people realized that he wasn’t kidding, that Mister Rogers was not some convenient eunuch but rather a man, an authority figure who actually expected them to do what he asked…and so they did. One second, two seconds, three seconds…and now the jaws clenched, and the bosoms heaved, and the mascara ran, and the tears fell upon the beglittered gathering like rain leaking down a crystal chandelier, and Mister Rogers finally looked up from his watch and said, “May God be with you” to all his vanquished children.

What is grace? I’m not certain; all I know is that my heart felt like a spike, and then, in that room, it opened and felt like an umbrella.