The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

Oh, I’m very excited.  Nancy Etchemendy, the treasurer for the Clarion Foundation and an all-round wonderful person, is writing a sequel to her delightful novel, The Power of Un, as part of an upcoming trip to Antarctica.  A 1982 alum of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers’ Workshop, Nancy’s writing the novel and publishing it online at her web site, Unarctica, while she’s traveling through the region.  She’s already got the story started, beginning here, in the form of lead character Gib Finney’s blog of the planning and the voyage.  As described in Nancy’s About This Blog post, in her own voice:

… my official job is to write at least one children’s book about the expeditions. I wanted to make this book as interesting as possible for my favorite audience, kids 8-12 years old. I wanted to tell the story of the expedition in a way that might get my young readers as excited about Antarctica as I am, but I wasn’t sure what that way might be. While I was thinking all this over, I received a packet of letters from a class of fifth graders who had just finished reading my book, The Power of Un. All of them loved the book and wanted a sequel. The mental equivalent of an aurora australis went off in my head. Why not tell the story of my Antarctic expedition through The Power of Un’s adventurous protagonist, Gib Finney? And why not make it into a blog, so I could write a little piece each day as exciting things happened that I knew I would never be able to imagine ahead of time! And, hey, why not make it possible for kids to talk to me about the story (and the expedition) while I’m writing and living it?

I’m not sure how you write a novel on the fly — I never could figure out how Charles Dickens was able to keep all his characters in place in his mind, publishing as he wrote, and bring them all together in the final chapter.  It will be fun to watch Nancy doing the same thing — with the added excitement of having kids able to write Nancy (or is it Gib?) during the voyage to ask questions, something Dickens didn’t have to worry about.

I have this image in my head of crowds of people waiting on the New York docks for the latest issue of the magazine serializing Dickens’ The Old Curiosity Shop, crying out as the ship approached, “Is Little Nell dead?”  This time, though, they’ll be checking their laptops or cell phones every morning before heading to school, checking out Gib’s latest post.

By the way, as if that’s not enough, Nancy’s concurrently going to be writing a blog for teens and adults, Rime of the Ancient Mariner.  The goal of that one is “to provide interesting and informative reading for teens and adults, and classroom opportunities and science facts for teachers.”  Students can also pose questions for that site, via the Comments option. 

 The whole adventure (outlined in a press kit here)  is funded through the National Science Foundation, as part of the agency’s mission to promote science to kids and teens, along with some additional funding from the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute.   They’ll be sailing on the NSF’s icebreaker, the Nathaniel B. Parker.  I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out the two UC San Diego participants on the voyage: John Helly, Director of the Laboratory for Environmental and Earth Science at our San Diego Supercomputer Center; and Maria Vernet, who studies polar phytoplankton at our Scripps Institution of Oceanography (SIO).  A 2007 voyage of the researchers, sans Nancy, is detailed in this SIO press release.

It was just a couple of days ago that I mentioned the link between science fiction and science.  Now Newsweek has an interview with a UCSD Scripps Institution of Oceanography scientist about his research on California’s Lake Mead that includes the following:

It may sound like the plot of an apocalyptic sci-fi flick, but Tim Barnett, a research marine geophysicist and climate expert at Scripps, says there’s a 50 percent chance that the manmade lake, a reservoir created by Hoover Dam located on the Colorado River 30 miles southeast of Las Vegas, will be dry by 2021, or even sooner if climate changes continue as expected and water use is not curtailed.

This just a couple of weeks after Time had an article about the rash of apocalype movies hitting the market, “Apocalypse New,” including the following from Cloverfield’s J.J. Abrams:

One of the cultural aftershocks of the bombing of Hiroshima was the awakening of Godzilla and the Japanese monster movie as a way of reckoning with the nightmare of U.S. atomic weapons. “Stories in which the destruction of society occurs are explorations of social fears,” says J.J. Abrams, creator of Felicity, Alias and Lost and producer of Cloverfield. “When Godzilla came out, the idea of doing a movie about the destruction of a city because of a radioactive man-made thing must have had a similar feeling. On the one hand, it’s a silly man in a rubber suit. On the other hand, it’s a way to process these fears that are mostly bottled up.”

Our real-world tools are enough any more in our search for either meaning, or predictability.  Science fiction works so much better. 

Among the “new media” opportunities that help put sf and fantasy writers in front of new audiences — and make them more available for existing fans — are the increasing availability of downloadable videos of author events. One of the best is the Authors@Google series, which brings authors in during lunchtime for reading to assembled engineers. Examples from a quick YouTube search include Karen Joy Fowler and Kelly Link, April 2007; Joe Haldeman, Nov. 12, 2007, reading from The Accidental Time Machine; and Cory Doctorow on May 21, 2007, reading from Overclocked. (To see if a favored author has spoken there, check out the YouTube “@Google” channel site.)

A second stage of such programming (not counting the ubiquitous presence of Cory and other web pioneers among the authors, for whom being on the web is as central to their work as their writing) is starting to emerge. One example is Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dec. 21, 2007 TechTalk at Google.

Stan’s talk came following the announcement by Google that it would spend $100 million on climate change mitigation, and appears to be part of an effort by the company to put novel ideas in front of its engineers, to foster ideas from them in turn. In that vein, Stan’s speech is heavily focused on things Google could do to promote a better future.Here at UCSD we’re looking at the idea of organizing such writer events for companies that, unlike Google, aren’t of a scale and scope to pull in the authors on their own. Just as Stan’s Google talk was geared to what Google could do in response to climate change, what about talks at computing, digital media and printing companies imagining the digital environment five, ten, fifteen years out? Or at a cell phone manufacturer or service provider, imagining how new apps might maximize consumer uptake of technologies that allow immediate, localized responses to the world around us?

Spurring creativity — that’s really at the core of what Clarion is all about.