The Love Machine & Other Contraptions (14 page)

First, it is vitally important to have excellent knowledge of the Hebrew language. Nothing is so repulsive to our editors as the inferior use of language. After all, language is the writer’s tool of the trade, and there is simply no two ways about it.

Secondly, avoid clichéd and obsolete ideas. We’ve seen a fleet’s worth of flying saucers, and the same applies to laser guns and aliens which are human in every respect except for a few odd bumps on their faces. Be original!

Thirdly, we shall ask you to abstain from sending us story ideas. We publish good stories and will continue to do so, but mere ideas are (forgive the expression) a dime a dozen, and we do not employ full-time writers to convert ideas into stories. Therefore, if you fancy publishing a story in our magazine, please write it yourself, and let go of the idea that we will write it for you.

In this issue you will find some stories which will demonstrate how the science fiction giants do it. Read them, study them, learn their lessons. Let us hope that soon we shall receive for publication a story by one of you, which will not fall short of them.

Enjoy this issue,

N.K.

~

Anyone who thinks that you can make a living by writing science fiction must be living in a fantasy world. Not in Israel, anyway. Therefore, even before I went to work for Katzenberg in the evenings, I found a part time job in a software company, and that’s where I spent my mornings.

The job of a junior programmer is just the opposite of prose writing: there are strict rules which you cannot break, and the amount of creativity and imagination required is dangerously close to zero. You do what you’re told, and that’s it. That was exactly what I needed—a way to make money that wouldn’t interfere with the really important stuff. The ideas. The stories.

One of my ideas consisted of a story-writing software. The thought popped into my head while I was fixing a particularly stubborn bug in some piece of code written by someone else. I started by imagining a piece of software that could fix Bugs in Pieces of Code Written by Someone Else, but quickly decided it wasn’t interesting enough to serve as a base for a story. I moved on to consider a piece of code that could write pieces of code—or itself—but I knew that some people were already toying with such an idea in the real world, and also remembered a story or two which dealt with it, and which weren’t particularly good. And also, I didn’t feel like doing the research required in order to make the story seem believable, so I abandoned the idea and moved on.

A mind that writes itself, that programs itself—that looked promising, but I couldn’t figure out any plot that could fit it. That’s a common problem among beginning writers—many ideas, no idea what to do with them. Then I went on to consider a mind/program that could write stories, and while trying to think of a plot to fit this idea, I suddenly realized: the story-writing software isn’t a
story
idea—it’s an idea for the real world. And I can write it.

~

“I have a question,” Katzenberg said suddenly, turning to look at me over his own paper stack. It was the second week of us working together and I, imagining that the relative silence in which we worked was a sure sign that Katzenberg and I were slowly becoming colleagues—no need for unnecessary conversation between two professionals—almost fell out of my chair.

“Yes?” I said, and my hands tried, distractedly, to order the pages of the manuscript I had been reading up to that moment.

“Do you consider
all
of the stories that you’ve read so far to be of an insufficient quality?”

“I...” I said.

“Yes?”

“Most of them are terrible,” I said.

“But not all of them.”

“No.”

“Why, then,” he said, “haven’t you passed on to me even one story so far?”

Because I was afraid, and justly so, that he wouldn’t accept those stories. That my literary taste wouldn’t be good enough. That a quick dismissal would follow. I was also afraid to mention any of this. I hung there without an answer, staring dumbly at Katzenberg for some time.

At last Katzenberg, who probably understood this very well, took mercy on me. “Your duty here,” he said, “is to perform the initial filtering of the stories. I will not accept every story that you pass on to me, but I’m sure that every story that you
don’t
pass is indeed unfit for publication.”

I lowered my head and mumbled something.

“Having established that, is there any story you’ve read here lately that struck your fancy?”

I opened the single drawer that I had, on my side of the table, took out a bundle of pages and handed it over to him. Katzenberg pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose, cleared his throat, lifted the first page and started reading aloud.

Elijah nagged us the whole way.

Throughout the flight from Earth he yammered and chattered and gabbled and nattered about his VegeScan, about how it was an unbelievable bargain at the Duty Free, about how he won’t be fooled again, about how he was now prepared for the whole shebang otherwise known as Life.

“Yes?” I said.

“An invention of some sort, I assume,” he said, “which distinguishes between vegetarian and non-vegetarian foodstuffs. This, I suppose, is incorporated into a Jerome-K-Jerome-like story about three Israeli explorers, one of whom is a vegetarian, and who probably ends up doing something really silly.”

“Oh? So you’ve read it already?”

“No,” Katzenberg said. “I said ‘I assume’ and ‘I suppose’ and ‘probably.’ Had I read the story, I should not have...”

“But that’s exactly what’s happening there!” I said.

“So I assumed.”

“But how did you know?”

Katzenberg didn’t answer, he just smiled. After a moment another question occurred to me. “So, are you going to read it anyway?”

“For you, this time only, I shall read it. Usually there’s no need for such drastic measures.”

He read it, incredibly fast.

He didn’t accept it, of course.

~

To write a piece of software that performs a certain action, you have to understand exactly what this action is and what separates it from other actions, and which sub-actions it’s made of and what separates these from other actions, and which sub-sub-actions every sub-action is made of, etc., etc. But how do you define a story? It’s made of paragraphs which are made of words which are made of letters, but so are non-fiction articles, essays and the phone directory. It is made of a beginning, a middle and an end, but what does a beginning consist of, what are the sub-parts of the middle and what separates the end from other actions? The action of adding imagery is relatively easy for a computer, but a metaphor is as complex as it can get. So what was I to do?

Two weeks of condensed effort didn’t result in any progress on the computerized writing project. The only result was an automatic curse generator. It was very simple. It included an internal dictionary of several dozen words, ordered by their roles—verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs—and also several sentence templates, e.g., “Your [relative] is a [insulting adjective] [silly noun]”. After several days, during which I flooded my friends’ email inboxes with complex and subtle messages such as “Your mother is a smoked camel” and “Everybody knows that you’re a horny llama” —for some reason the dictionary included many animal names—I had had enough. Such a mechanism can’t write a true story. I know because I’ve tried.

Menachem woke up in the morning. It was a nice day. Paths glowed in the distance. An aircraft carrier landed upon him at lunchtime. The sky was red.

“You are a duck on a stick,” his mother said. Then he drank a beer. Then he drove a baby.

Et cetera
. I must admit that I fancied the idea of the aircraft carrier and saved it for a future story, but except for that, it was an absolute waste of time and printer paper.

~

During the first month of my employment with Katzenberg I passed him four stories out of the thirty-something which had been submitted to the magazine. The first story began thus:

The End of Everything

By Kfira Tidhar

Abandoned and empty, such were the days at the trailing end of the last war. The sun, blood-red and bloated, never to return to its glory of days past, feebly illuminated the wilderness in which no one would recognize the green grass of its youth. Not even an insect moved on the slopes of the mountains, now reduced to mere hills, or in the new valleys, coin-round, coin-shiny. And over all that great big beaten earth ruled only the sound of the wind, like the last breath of...

Et cetera.

~

“Why did you pass me this story, in particular?” asked Katzenberg after several seconds of reading.

“Because it’s obvious that whoever wrote it knows how to write.”

“I cannot say that I’m as sure as you,” Katzenberg said. “The first paragraph, for instance, covers most of the first page.”

“Is that a problem?”

“How much interesting information can you find in that paragraph?”

“Well, she mentions a war right on the start,” I said. When I was in second grade I received my first encyclopedia, a children’s edition which nevertheless consisted of about twenty books, and, since no one told me that I wasn’t supposed to do it, I read them all, beginning to end. My favorite was the W volume: it had all the Wars in it.

“Indeed,” Katzenberg said, “but all the rest of it deals with the scenery.”

“And that’s done very well!” I said, defensively.

“It isn’t bad,” he said, “but not on the scenery alone shall the reader live. Not to mention the fact that this takes most of the first page of a three-page story.”

“But the rest of the story—”

“Nothing new there,” he said. “New creatures appear out of the remains of the war, wondering who their predecessors were. For a much better treatment of the same theme, read
City
by Clifford Simak.”

“I’ve read it,” I said. “But hey, when did you manage to read the whole story?”

“What’s more, a story—every story, whether it’s short or whether it takes a whole book—must have this quality: it must make the reader want to continue reading. If it fails in that respect, it’s a bad story.”

“But when did you manage to—”

“I haven’t read the story,” Katzenberg said. “Are you saying that there’s a good reason to read it?”

“I... yes... no... just a moment. If you haven’t read the rest, how did you know what’s going on there?”

Katzenberg smiled. I didn’t get any other answer.

~

The second story dealt with bacteria developing a life of their own, making use of physical attributes which are peculiar to life forms of their size in order to survive, multiply and eventually take over the human civilization.

“The science is a bit shaky,” Katzenberg said after reading a few sentences. “The author must have heard of several of the concepts of modern particle physics, but unfortunately he fails to grasp their actual meaning.”

“Like, which?”

“The strong force and the weak force, for instance, cannot be directly manipulated in the scale of a single cell. And anyway, the strong force applies only to quarks and anti-quarks, and definitely cannot be used to draw nerve-cells toward each other.”

That, alas, was the part of the story which impressed me the most, which is why I distinctly remembered that it appeared only in the fourth and last page, which—like the two previous pages and most of the one before them—Katzenberg hadn’t bothered to read.

“Come on, you must explain to me how you’re doing it,” I said.

A smile, nothing more.

~

The third story was a bold choice and, in retrospect, horrible from beginning to end. Katzenberg’s silence, after reading the opening paragraph, was horrible as well.

“So, eh, you didn’t like it?” I said when the silence became unbearable.

“Have you ever heard the word ‘Stalag’?” Katzenberg said.

“No.”

“It’s a form of pulp fiction which deals with the sexual activities of female guards in Nazi prison camps or concentration camps.”

“I...”

“I assume you thought this was a funny story,” he said. “A Stalag on the moon. I dare say it isn’t. Please spare me such specimens in the future.”

His angry eyebrows made it clear that questions, at that moment, weren’t an option. So I couldn’t ask him how he knew all of that after reading only the opening paragraph, which merely described two characters walking on the dark side of the moon, with no hint of what’s about to happen to them in the prison under the crater’s floor.

~

The fourth story described a future Israel which had given up all of the occupied territories and gained nothing by it. The protagonist lived in a ruined neighborhood on the western edge of a bombed-out Jerusalem, and was trying to find a way to travel to Tel Aviv, which had become a closed-off and protected area in which only the rich were allowed to live. Katzenberg read it in its entirety, and then accepted it for publication.

“Why did you accept it?” I said. I was astonished.

“It’s somewhat less predictable than the others, the point of view is relatively original, despite the familiar ideas, but mostly—it’s easy to read and is not too bad.”

“
Not too bad?
” I said. “We’re supposed to publish the best of the best! How can you...”

“Out of all the stories that you’ve read so far, is this not the best one?”

“Well, yeah, but that doesn’t mean that—”

“It means that the magazine needs stories. Without the stories there’s no magazine. Had we had enough truly brilliant stories, there would be no problem. But you know that there aren’t too many of those to be found. That is why, alas, we have to accept stories which are just plain good.”

That almost broke my heart. Until then I had believed—quite fiercely—in making difficult decisions, in keeping the quality high at all cost, even if it meant closing the magazine. I found Katzenberg’s attitude very hard to accept.

“I suggest that you buy a subscription to an American magazine,” he said. “Maybe
Asimov’s
or
Analog
. You’ll soon find out that even their editors sometimes have to make such decisions.”