I’m not sure how many years it’s been since I last saw Brian Thomsen. I do know that it was more than five years ago, because Julius Schwartz was still alive. Julie, for those who didn’t know him, was THE DC editor in the 60s & 70s. Until his death in his 80s, he had an office at DC that he visited every week.

I always saw Julie when I was in New York. I was in his office when Brian arrived. Brian and Julie had a standing lunch date, and on the previous one, Julie mentioned that Dean and I were going to come visit him. So Brian stopped by too.

We had a lovely time. I always had a lovely time with Brian (and Julie too). We were never close, but our lives touched. He tried to buy my first novel many, many years ago. For a year, he kept taking it to committee, trying to get them to back the book. They’d refuse, and he’d send me a postcard, vowing to try again. He never did manage to buy it–someone else did–but he bought Dean’s first novel.

We had some lovely dinners with Brian when he was Dean’s editor. And we saw each other off and on over the years. When he moved to Wisconsin for an editing job with (I believe) TSR, he learned to drive. His friends described teaching him as one of the scariest experiences of their lives. I always imagined Brian negotiating the roads that I once drove in a similar situation when my then-husband taught me to drive a stick shift. Somehow Wisconsin drivers survived the both of us.

Brian died this week. According to Locus Magazine, he was 49–just a year older than I am. He had a heart attack. He leaves family, good friends, and those of us who didn’t know him well, but appreciated him.

It was always nice to know he was out there.

Now I hope he’s somewhere great, having lunch with Julius Schwartz and talking science fiction.

The news came across the lists this morning: Algis Budrys died.

On the one hand, his death was not a surprise. AJ had been sick for a long time. On the other hand, it’s quite a shock. It seems like I’ve known AJ all my life. When I met him, he wasn’t well, but he wasn’t horribly ill either. It just seemed that AJ would be around forever.

I met AJ in June of 1985, when I attended Clarion Writers Workshop in East Lansing, Michigan. In those days, I wasn’t a genre reader. Or at least, I didn’t know I was a genre reader. I read every book in my path. I also subscribed to fiction magazines, including F&SF. I had read AJ’s book columns, but I didn’t know he had written some of the classics in the field until April of 1985, when I got accepted to Clarion. At that point, I read everything I could find by the writers who were going to teach me. Since AJ was going to be the first instructor, I started with him.

I read Rogue Moon. I had no idea it was a classic. In fact, I had no idea that science fiction had classics. Okay, let’s be honest. I had no idea that science fiction existed. All I knew was that I liked stories with outer space in them. I liked time travel stories. I liked stories about robots.

And I loved Rogue Moon.

I expected its author to be a slender, blond-headed man who spoke in a cultured East Coast accent and who intimidated the hell out of me. I turned out to be right about the intimidation. As nice as he was, AJ was a formidable man.

I later discovered I was right about the slender, blond man who had written Rogue Moon. When he wrote the book in the late 1950s, AJ had been quite the looker. But the man who walked into my Clarion class on that night in June was heavyset, breathing so heavily we all thought he was going to have a heart attack right there, and he was angry. Michigan State, where Clarion was held in them there days, was remodeling the graduate dorms where Clarion was usually housed. We were in a freshman dorm with no phone service, crappy rooms, and a lounge instead of a meeting room.

He was used to the amenities. We weren’t. So we didn’t understand why he was so upset. He battled the administration that whole week as well as got us on our feet as young writers. He laid the ground rules, he told stories, and he enchanted us. By the end of the week, we were all Budrys fans.

He came back in the middle with his lovely wife Edna, and cooked us all a spaghetti dinner. By then, we were jaded students who knew everything. He just smiled and went back to Chicago for another two weeks. He returned for the final weekend, and critiqued stories alongside Damon Knight and Kate Wilhelm, teaching us by example that the professional writers (and editors and reviewers, which they all were) did not agree on what made a great story, although they all agreed on what made a bad story.

I figured that was all AJ would do to influence my life. We were sent away from Clarion to start our professional writing careers. I already had a professional writing career, but it was in non-fiction. Clarion made me decide that fiction writers could actually earn some money, and I was going to try.

I was in the process of trying the following April when AJ called me. He invited me to an experimental workshop in Taos, New Mexico, sponsored by Writers of the Future. I was not a winner of Writers of the Future. I never even made the finals. In my entire beginning writer career (even after this workshop), the best I did was an honorable mention.

Yet AJ was clear: he wanted me to be one of the 12 because, he said, I had a bright future. Little did we know how much he would influence that.

I managed to scrap together $1000 for plane flight, hotel, and food. That money should have gone to my divorce and the very expensive attorney I had just hired. Instead, it covered expenses (Writers of the Future covered the cost of the workshop).

I showed up in Albuquerque, spent a few days with my Clarion classmate, Sally Gwylan, and got another phone call from AJ. He said he’d arranged for another student to give me and Martha Soukup (yet another Clarion classmate) a ride to Taos.

The driver, along with two more writers, Lori Ann White and Jon Gustafson, showed up that Sunday morning. And cynical me, the woman who thought love at first sight was something made up for the movies, fell in love the moment the driver got out of the car.

That was Dean Wesley Smith. We’ve been together ever since.

AJ used to joke that he told Dean to pick me up–and Dean did. AJ encouraged the relationship when a lot of people were warning us away from each other. I don’t know if he saw what a combination we’d be or if he was just a romantic. But Dean and I owe him everything.

After Taos, we were on the guest list for many WoTF events. We went to the U.N. as speakers for a WoTF event; we got flown to LA several times for events. I went all over the country because AJ believed in us. Oddly the only piece I ever sold to WoTF was a non-fiction article I wrote in collaboration with Dean for one of the volumes. I was a guest instructor in Malibu one year. Me, AJ, and Orson Scott Card. They were the ones in charge; I was the gopher. I think this was 1988. And even though I heard AJ’s stories yet again, I learned a lot from them.

To me, he was a mentor, a teacher, and a great writer.

And then he became one of my writers. I think that was the strangest part of our relationship. I became editor of F&SF and inherited Algis Budrys, the respected book reviewer. He asked for editorial feedback, but there wasn’t much I could give him. He already knew so much more about writing/reviewing/fiction than I could imagine at that point.

We also worked together at Pulphouse. And when he took over Tomorrow Magazine, he resigned as F&SF’s book reviewer. I think letting him do that was the biggest mistake I made as an editor. I missed him, but more importantly, the readers missed him. And while F&SF has great columnists, no one has ever been able to replace him.

He put his imprint on the field in so many ways–as a writer of classics, as a teacher, as an editor, and as a reviewer. He encouraged young writers. I think most of the influential writers in the field, as well as the influential editors, from 1970 or so on to about the year 2000, had AJ as a teacher or a mentor or a friend. Some pushed against him. Some embraced him.

But he influenced all of us.

Hard to believe he’s gone.

I realized somewhere around May 17 or 18, when I discovered that our local theater was going to have a midnight show of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull on Wednesday, May 21 (actually May 22 at 12:01 a.m.), that I am a true fan.

Of Indy.

I became obsessed. I needed tickets. I needed them immediately.

Let me explain. I hate spoilers. And these days, the culture is full of spoilers. Everyone wants to be the first to tell me the secrets of the movie or the current hot show.

Even when you try to avoid spoilers, they attack you. For example, when the first major character died on Lost, I wasn’t able to watch the episode in real time. So I planned to wait until the next evening to watch with my husband. I avoided all coverage of Lost. I averted my eyes, shushed my friends, didn’t look at headlines.

Then–then!–I was channel surfing, and I saw a Lost actress on Entertainment Tonight. That wouldn’t have been enough to tip me, except the stupid interviewer said as my remote landed me on the channel, “When you found out your character was going to be the one killed off, how did you feel?”

I don’t know how she felt, but I felt cheated.

I did not want this to happen to me and Indy. Indy and I have a special relationship.

You see, I also realized around May 17 or 18, that I could remember where I was when I saw all three previous Indiana Jones movies. If you asked me where I was and who I was with when I saw, say, Spider Man, I could make an educated guess, but I couldn’t tell you for sure.

But the Indy movies…yep. I can remember all of them.

Raiders of the Lost Ark is the easiest. I was in a multiplex (in those days, called simply a cinema with three [or was it four?] theaters) in Madison, Wisconsin, with my then-husband Randy and my friend Mindy. We decided to see Raiders on a limited budget because of a review.

A review, I must note, that had no spoilers at all.

Mike Wilmington who, these days, writes about movies for the Chicago Tribune and other famous publications, used to write for an influential local Madison newspaper called Isthmus. Everyone talked about what Wilmington said. He was spot-on. He was brilliant.

And he saw a little movie called Raiders of the Lost Ark. I haven’t looked up the review, but what I remember of it (after 27 years) was this…I can’t tell you anything about this movie, except that it was the most enjoyable movie I’ve seen in years. To tell you anything else would spoil the film for you. Go. Set down this paper and go now.

So we went. My friend Mindy was visiting from Minneapolis. We went to the theater, bought the last three tickets, and couldn’t even sit together. Randy (my ex) let me sit next to Mindy who was talking as that boulder headed for Indy. She stopped making sound, but she never closed her mouth. She gaped at the movie for the full two hours.

Just like I did.

I loved that movie. I still love that movie. I watch it every single time I stumble over the badly edited version on cable.

The second movie (which I call Indiana Jones and the Temple of Dumb) came out while I was still married to Randy. Opening night, we headed to the Orpheum Theater in Madison’s downtown with the kids in fedoras, carrying whips. We sat in a balcony seat and enjoyed the ride, although I do remember how much I hated the loss of Marian. I loved the strong heroine of the first movie and despised the screaming of the second (hence the nickname for the film). (Of course, I still watch that thing on cable too.)

That disappointment didn’t stop me from seeing the third movie on its opening weekend. I missed the spoilers because I was suffering from food poisoning. By then, I lived in Oregon. Dean Wesley Smith and I had just started Pulphouse with Debra Gray Cook. The two of them dragged my sorry sick butt to the movie. I couldn’t eat popcorn, I couldn’t drink pop, but I could sit and enjoy.

And enjoy I did.

I loved that movie. Not as much as Raiders, but enough.

So much in fact, that I scrambled for those midnight tickets for the Crystal Skull. I was a little disappointed when we arrived at the theater that no one wore a fedora or carried a whip. But I was pleased that the audience ranged in age from about 70 to 8. Half of the audience hadn’t even been born when the last movie was in the theaters. That was cool. (And what cool parents, letting their kids stay up until 3 a.m. on a school night to see a movie!)

I’m not going to give you spoilers. I’m not that kinda girl. But I will say…I liked this sequel the best of all the sequels. Nothing can equal Raiders, of course. But we’ll never be that surprised again by Indy. But it’s still great to see him and experience his truly pulp fiction life.

I missed him. And I’m glad he’s back.

I promised myself when I started this website that I would put a new essay on the site every month. I also promised myself that I wouldn’t start flamewars or write about politics (no matter how much I’m tempted). So this week, when I sat down to write my monthly essay, I stepped right in the middle of an on-going flamewar. I put that essay aside (maybe it’ll be relevant in six months and the flamewar will be over), and started another essay—about politics—which I abandoned.

This one’s previously unpublished, and once you finish it, you can probably see what set me off in the first place.

Babysitting the Cable Guy
by
Kristine Kathryn Rusch

The cable guy showed up early today. That’s one of the benefits of living in a small town. The cable guy not only arrives the day the cable company says he will, but early.

Two hours early.

That was a little annoying. I had just come back from my morning walk — in fact, I was striding up the driveway to our house as he was driving down. I was hot, sweaty, and looking forward to my shower. A shower, a few pages on the current short story, and lunch.

Instead, I spent three hours — my most productive writing hours — munching an energy bar, pricing jewelry to sell in our antique store booth, and calming the freaked-out cat. Occasionally, I had to run downstairs to confirm that yes, I did want the cable box beneath the TV, or no, I didn’t want an additional 8,000 movie channels.

All of which could’ve been taken care of on the phone. The company could’ve sent us paperwork by mail, and we could’ve signed it and sent it back before the cable guy showed up. Then, on the assigned day, someone could’ve simply let the guy in. The freaked-out cat would’ve hidden, and the cable guy — who is bonded and insured — would have been able to work in peace.

I know I shouldn’t complain. He got the job done.

But I’m the one who always gets to handle the cable guy. Which is ironic because, until I married, I didn’t have cable. For years, I didn’t even have a TV.

When I moved to Oregon, I was the one who babysat friends’ houses for the cable guy because my friends had “real jobs.”

That ended when the cable company changed their policy: the renter/owner had to be home to sign away their firstborn. No one informed me of the changed policy. I learned about it at the end of a particularly long installation at a friend’s house—an installation that would have had to be taken out if I wasn’t the person who lived in the house. An entire day wasted.

So I did what any good friend would do. I lied. I said I was the new roommate. I signed away my firstborn for cable I wouldn’t even enjoy, filled in the wrong address, and gave the cable guy a brief glimpse of my driver’s license, and hoped no one would check any of the information.

Apparently no one did. My friend paid her bill on time (always good, since my name was on it), and she kept that cable for nearly a decade, until she moved in with an ex-cop.

From then on, I ceased being the cable babysitter — except for my own cable adventures. My husband and I moved a lot in the early years, and each move required new cable. My husband can’t live without HBO — he channel-surfs from 1 to 2 a.m., never watching entire movies, just “looking for something interesting.” He draws the line at plastic surgery shows, having once made the mistake of watching a man draw all over a woman only to cut her open.

My cable adventures include the time the guy had to leave and come back with an entire road crew to backhoe a hole in my yard (regulations, ma’am: no visible wires in this neighborhood); the guy who finished the wiring — correctly — in less than fifteen minutes and then offered to recarpet my entire house using six inch carpet samples; and the cable woman who climbed a dying tree to remove a wire someone had placed in the upper branches (I stood below, praying, hoping the tree would hold so our insurance wouldn’t have to).

Today, the cable guy wanted to leave work early, so what does he discover? The house we want wired hasn’t had cable for more than ten years. Everything is outdated and worse, because we live in a coastal community, the interior of the wires is rusted.

He had to replace the entire system, from the house to the street. He walked around my house leaving a trail of stale cigarette smoke behind him, mumbling, dripping pliers and wire cutters and black cable.

The totally freaked out cat had vanished, only to resurface from under the couch when the cable guy used a drill to make a hole in our ancient concrete wall. The poor cat screamed, ran in circles, and then decided to retreat. He scuttled out of the room on his stomach, never to be seen again—at least by the cable guy.

Finally the job was done and that’s when cable guy got chatty. He said the same thing everyone else who doesn’t read says when they visit our house. The pithy, insightful, “Sure do have a lot of books.”

How’s a person supposed to respond to that? Embarrass the guy with a “Not really”? Show that we’re weird by saying “Yep, sure have a lot of books”? Or try for self-deprecating with an “I don’t read them; I just like the way they look on the walls”?

I opted for agreement, going for weird because I wanted him out of my house. After he double-tested everything, starting with HBO (what is it with guys?), and hefted a few books to make sure that they really had words in them, he finally left.

I decided to make lunch. The totally freaked out cat couldn’t hide from the smell of tunafish so he eventually emerged, but refused to go into the television room.

And then my husband came home just in time for the cable guy. Or so he thought. Being only an hour late from the original appointment time (cable guys are never on time, my husband said in self defense — which, come to think of it, is true. They’re not usually early either), he couldn’t believe that the guy had come and gone. I had to prove it by turning on both televisions, and letting him surf through the channels.

I went back to my tunafish. Then I got my shower. And now I’m here, trying to remember what the heck my story’s about. I’m finally beginning to understand why someone made a nasty movie about cable guys.
They’re annoying — and oddly necessary.

Even when they show up early and wonder why anyone with a house full of books would like a television with 200 channels.

I used to wonder that too, until I married. Then I found out that it doesn’t matter that the programming stinks so long as there’s something interesting to watch and no one’s trying to cut anything open.

But I have to wonder: Was it worth the loss of my afternoon? I don’t surf. I read, even when the television’s on.

My husband says baby-sitting the cable guy is just my karma.

And, karmically speaking, there are worse things in life.

Like service people who never show up at all.

Copyright © 2008 by Kristine Kathryn Rusch

When did Americans become so angry? That’s the question of the morning.

I’m writing this at six a.m. in the Orlando airport after watching several outrageous incidents.
First, a man carrying a cup of gourmet coffee screamed at a security checker when she wouldn’t let him into security screening with his precious brew.

“I’ll finish it before I get to x-ray,” he said.

“No beverages, no liquids past this point, period,” she said, pointing to a nearby sign.

This exchange went on for several minutes, getting louder and louder until the man realized he wouldn’t win. He called the woman several choice names, then stalked off, drank his coffee, and was back in less time than it took to fight about it.

I would have forgotten the incident if it were the only one.

But it wasn’t.

A man tried to jump ahead of the line (all two of us) at the Alaska Airlines ticket counter because he was flying first class. We had already been called to the desk, and removing our paperwork.
No choice names this time, but lots of shoving, eye rolling, and finally, an in-vain attempt to use the touch-screen check-in.

The Alaska employee was Not Amused. She seemed to be taunting him as we left, closing her window and letting him continue his fruitless efforts to check in on a computer system that wasn’t functioning properly.
This morning, several other people yelled at employees or at customers, throwing things in frustration or snapping at their children.

It put me in mind of a sign I saw at Heathrow Airport in London one very frustrating morning last fall. The sign said, in essence, that anyone who spoke sharply or rudely to airline personnel or airport employees would be arrested and detained.

At the time, I thought it a bit extreme. Its net result was a lot of red-faced passengers with bite marks in their lower lips, and very surly airline employees who could sense the tension.

But the sign did prevent the kind of scenes—angry, nasty scenes—that I saw not just this morning in Orlandor, but all through my recent trip to Europe.

And sadly only the European trip, every single person who behaved badly—outrageously even—was an American.

It got so bad that my travel companion and I could spot an ugly American—an American behaving like the world owed them and no one else—from half an airport away.

I know Americans have always had a well deserved reputation for behaving poorly overseas. But when I traveled to Europe thirty years ago—heck, seven years ago—Americans didn’t scream at people. Yes, Americans refused to learn the local language and the local customs, but we weren’t furious all the time.

We are now.

And not just when we visit an unfamiliar place like Europe. We’re behaving badly at home too.

What’s wrong with us? What makes us feel so entitled that we can skip ahead in a line or feel that the rules (as stupid as they can be) don’t apply to us?

My theory of travel—especially air travel—is that we make an agreement with the transportation company when we buy a ticket. We agree to abide by their rules.

If we don’t want to play by the rules, we should find another way to get to our destination.

Everyone who travels these days is uncomfortable, harried, and stressed. There’s no need to make it worse—

Unless you’re American.