These days, I write whenever I want to – or when I’m not busy exploring the world with my wife or kids or grandkids. I write and read constantly. Then I discovered that I was writing longer and longer pieces. My new focus is to write shorter; and to write HUMOR. On purpose. Maybe I can still irritate people while being funny. It works pretty well for John Scalzi! We’ll see what happens.
I have a deep history dealing (or NOT dealing, as the case may be) with reconciliation. I’ve written on it several times, most recently “Spiderman 3” (here’s a link to the whole thing: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2024/01/possibly-irritating-essay-spiderman-3.html); but even though “The Lego Movie”, and “Mary Poppins”, and “Star Trek: Wrath of Khan” are all father-son reconciliation scripts, I’ve never once tried to WRITE a reconciliation story, in particular a FATHER-SON reconciliation story…
Christopher Brown wrote, “one writer half-jokingly called [it] reconciliationpunk”…in the sense that, to be able to imagine authentically better futures in our stories, we need to do a better job of understanding the past. Science fiction’s joy in freeing itself from the gravity of the real world gives it an intrinsic tendency to be ahistorical.”
I said I’d return to “Interstellar”, and I will, but here I only want to point you to my essay (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2014/11/possibly-irritating-essays-interstellar.html) and say that I’m not ready to continue it yet…(I DID however pull it up and will read it (sooner, rather than later)…)
In my own, published work (see the links to the right), I don’t even see an attempt to deal with my issue…so, maybe I haven’t even tried? Maybe my limited number of publications have depended more on meeting a need or “clever story-telling” rather than writing about something important to me.
I’ll be looking into this idea of “reconciliationpunk”. He concludes the article with the following: “…utopian aspirations…are not easy to find in our science fictions…even as we populate them with more diverse and liberated communities….Reconciliation commissions in imaginary worlds are a weird way to find our way to better futures in the real one. But in a world ‘ruled by fictions of every kind,’ it takes the tools of make-believe to expose the real-world truth.” (Author of of Tropic of Kansas, co-editor of Three Messages and a Warning: Contemporary Mexican Short Stories of the Fantastic. His new novel Rule of Capture.)
I have one final thought/observation that will be (most likely) dislikable at best and cause brutal accusations at worst. Brown writes in conclusion of the article, “…a lot of these broken America stories [exhibit a] desire for a kind of truth and reconciliation commission that would finally deliver justice for the crimes committed in our names by the nation-states of which we are each a constituent part, and to hold accountable the individual perpetrators of institutional wrongs.” I find this terrifying…who, precisely decides what an “institutional wrong” is? The obvious answer that comes across in this essay is that the ones who commit the “institutional wrongs” are the ones who we disagree with and who have what WE judge to be “wrong thought” or “crazy beliefs” or even “don’t have any idea what ‘they’ are talking about.” Which group of people decide what an “institutional wrong” is? The clearest answer that most people would ejaculate instantly, is “Anyone who voted for Trump and anyone who pretends to believe that Trump and his government should NOT be summarily executed without trial or consideration!”
This is…well. I’m just going to stop there because if someone who thinks my fears are ridiculous “because NORMAL people obviously want Trump and anyone who didn’t violently object to anything his government did OUT OF THERE NOW, and the Other Party will fix everything because they’re sane, unlike Trumpites.”
Short of a-Trumpers taking over completely and shutting down any dissent whatsoever, I don’t see anything even approaching “reconciliation” in our future…
So, that leads me to write about my own personal reconciliation, which is, of course where I started this essay. I can’t handle any of this…so, what makes me think I can write about characters with interpersonal reconciliation issues and how they link with the LARGER issues of societal reconciliation.
I watch the news and I live in a northern suburb of Minneapolis. (Lest you think to “tut-tut” my thoughts and worries, follow this link (Minneapolis Metro Area population = 3,757,952 residents; Minneapolis PROPER = 430,162; Brooklyn Center’s population is 31,846”. Current number of crimes in Minneapolis proper: 65.4 total crimes per 1,000 residents (roughly a 1 in 15 chance of becoming a victim of either property or violent crime); Current number of crimes in Brooklyn Center: 33.70 incidents per 1,000 to see what I am talking about: feel free to peruse this link: https://www.neighborhoodscout.com/mn/brooklyn-center/crime)
We have many friends here and while we KNOW we need to be cautious, we don’t live in fear. We shop local, schooled local, (I taught in a school where 65% of students were non-white – both of my kids graduated from the school)…
So, what am I talking about reconciliation for?
It’s hard work. And maybe…just MAYBE…I can start to write about reconciliation BOTH societally and personally. Then maybe, just maybe, my fiction can begin to make a difference…
LINK: “Christopher Brown Guest Post–‘Truth and Reconciliation and Science Fiction’”; https://locusmag.com/feature/christopher-brown-guest-post-truth-and-reconciliation-and-science-fiction/
Inspiration: https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2019/02/possibly-irritating-essays.html Image: https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/14/61/31/10/240_F_1461311036_MViWj3gBpw4LNjp4h0mdikU2gho7a51c.jpg
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