THIS SHOAL OF SPACE
Science-Horror

Scary Fun: A Summer Movie in a Book Classic dark SF in the tradition of Invasion of the Body Snatchers and other monstrous shapes that slither through the night. A complex, imaginative tale set in a small California coastal town where the every-day touches hauntingly on the fabric of far space. A young reporter looking for her big break investigates mysterious zoo murders and stumbles upon an intergalactic invader in a virtual netherworld. Two men hover at the periphery--sinister Det. Vic Lara and handsome curator George Chatfield, each with his own terrible mysteries. Dark, creepy, rich with deeply layered characters, this novel is for the non-linear and imaginatively hungry reader who wants a full, crunchy read instead of a fast blur of cardboard characters and flimsy ideas. Challenging to the literal-minded when it was first published (1990), this was one of the world's first VR (virtual reality) novels--before The Matrix, before Dark City, there was This Shoal of Space. This novel was also one of the first two proprietary digital novels ever released online in the world (Clocktower Books, 1996-1997, along with the suspense novel Neon Blue, both by John T. Cullen…

Article: (Special to Publishing Industry News.) Copyright @ 2011 by John T. Cullen. All Rights Reserved.

Style: Less is More. All successful authors are good to great story-tellers. Of these, a few are great stylists as well, many are competent writers, and some are simply awkward. There are certain fine distinctions to be made. Most, in their day, burst across the cosmos like comets, and vanish by the next generation. A very few remain among the immortals for generations, even centuries. A good candidate for the latter distinction is the British author W. Somerset Maugham (1874-1965). Maugham's 91 years of life spanned nearly a century, during which time the world's population at least tripled, and during which the Industrial Revolution took hold across the Eurocentric world—so much so that Maugham lived through the cresting and falling of the British Empire and all that that, socially and historically, entailed. One of his contemporaries was the German architect Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), with whom we associate international Modernism; geniuses like Walter Gropius, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Le Corbusier; and the expression Less Is More. The expression itself is attributed, actually, to an 1855 poem (Andrea del Sarto) by Robert Browning (1812-1889), a poet of an earlier (Victorian) age. The poem refers even further back in time, to the eponymous, real-life Renaissance painter (Florentine, 1486–1530), whom Browning resurrected from obscurity as rendering a dramatic monologue upon the sublime beauty of his dramatic, cold wife Lucrezia del Fede, a hat-maker's daughter. The appropriate line in Andrea del Sarto reads:

I do what many dream of, all their lives,
--Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
Who strive—you don't know how the others strive
To paint a little thing like that you smeared
Carelessly passing with your robes afloat,--
Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
(I know his name, no matter)--so much less!
Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged…

Form and Content Same Browning puts words into Andrea del Sarto's mouth: I have the opportunity, every day, to paint you, Lucrezia, yet none of us who so admire your perfection can capture it with our art. What we have learned through a lifetime of difficulty, you accomplish more by walking past (a smear, with your robes afloat). You do so little to accomplish this breath-taking effect…Less is more. This is an expression less of the High Renaissance than it is of the age of Robert Browning, the Neoclassicists, and the Romantics. Browning's age was that of a new Renaissance, the British support of the Greek war of independence (1820) from Ottoman Turkey, and the heist of such national Greek treasures as the Elgin Marbles. The Modernists (van der Rohe, Gropius, Wright, Le Corbusier, and, yes, Maugham and his era of writers) maintained the final trajectory of the neo-Classicisms while ramping up with the new age of Modernism. Ironically, the Renaissance itself was a neo-Classical era dedicated to clear light in architecture (St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, St. Paul's Cathedral in London, Andrea Palladio's Classicism, etc.) that in one theoretical sault celebrated a perceived ancient Classical clarity and also a post-Gothic (post-stained glass), pre-Enlightenment clarity of vision. In Maugham's lifetime, Western art moved from ornate undulation in the Art Nouveau era of Klimt and Mucha to the formal abstractions of Arts Décoratifs in the 1920s, affected by the global fever of the King Tut discovery and more. The point is, for our purposes here, W. Somerset Maugham was a man taking a giant stride in a sixty year literary career. His rear foot was firmly planted in the pre-Great War age of sinuous music (Debussy, Ravel) and ornately composed prose. His front foot was boldly and daringly going where no novelist of his stature had gone before: the incisive, naked Bauhaus simplicity of line, in which form and content are one and the same. It represented a new way of writing, growing devoid of external decoration, and increasingly anchored to Modernist architectural theory: form is function, function is form.

Paradigm Shift It was a shift noticeable in every aspect of culture. Writers of news shifted from the deceptive, lurid style of Hearst and other Yellow Press propagandists to a cooler, more intelligent, professional style known as Objective Reporting, which today is increasingly back out the window in the age of Rupert Murdoch and Fox News. Writers of fiction seemed to emerge from the industrial blood bath of World War I with a cleansed palate, and a bloodied mind free of Kaisers and Czars and all their supposed truisms, and gravitated toward a streamlined style tightly bound to a newly retooled discipline called Point of View. Very few statements on this new approach to fiction equal the drama and clarity inherent in W. Somerset Maugham's belated addition of a new foreword to his 1915 masterpiece Of Human Bondage. A sure sign of Maugham's greatness is that the world was not ready for him. Of course, many authors during that critical transition (essentially, the entire first half of the 20th Century) went through similar baptisms of ignorance. His 1915 novel was attacked as 'sordid realism' that could only come from 'a morbid personality.' Reading the works of D. H. Lawrence and James Joyce, among others, was forbidden by federal and state laws in the United States until an epic Supreme Court decision of 1959. You could be fined or even jailed for bringing a copy of their books into the U.S. in your luggage, which customs agents diligently searched, looking for forbidden books—a very Stalinist approach, especially while extolling the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, whose first item is freedom of speech. Why bring all this up? Because the paradigm shift from sexual repression, denied racism, and other psychological bifurcations was more than just a change of writing style. It represented a tectonic shift between an old world and a new world. Underlying it all, human nature does not change. But the cleaner, clearer style of writing, like the advent of sheetrock versus lath and plaster, is no doubt here to stay, and we are better for it. Coincidentally, there was a vogue on in the 1920s for the clean white room, a movement in which Maugham's then-wife Syrie Wellcome was a leading designer.

Maugham's Foreword Should Be Read By Every Writer. In this paragraph, I draw entirely on the Barnes & Noble (2007). As far as I can tell, this foreword was added by Maugham during the 1930s, at a time when Of Human Bondage had been public for a good twenty years. Maugham begins with two statements: (1) This is a very long novel and I am ashamed to make it longer by writing a preface to it; (2) An author is probably the last person who can write fitly about his own work. He goes on to talk about how authors are never satisfied with their work, and constantly seek to improve it. (I am summarizing rather quickly here.) He goes on to describe how he nearly quit writing fiction, to devote himself to writing stage plays. In doing so, he learned the virtues of 'being succinct' and not wasting words. Gradually, at age 37, he resumed his fiction writing. "For long after I became a writer by profession [1897, Liza of Lambeth, same year WSM comletes medical school, but does not enter the profession, instead becoming a writer], I spent much time on learning how to write, and subjected myself to a very tiresome training…to improve my style. But these efforts I abandoned when my plays began to be produced, and when I started to write again it was with a different aim. I no longer sought a jewelled prose and a rich texture, on unavailing attempts to achieve which I had wasted so much labour; I sought on the contrarey plainness and simplicity. With so much that I wanted to say…I could not waste words, and I set out now with the notion of using only such as were necessary to make my meaning clear. I had no space for ornament#133;

Less, Again, Is More. Every writer must wrestle on his or her own with style and other indispensible elements of writing. From Maugham, an experienced novelist and playwright at the top of his form, we learn that, to successfully tell a story, we must go straight for content. There is a saying among nonfiction writers in particular: the best writing is like a clean pane of window glass—you look through it, gain a perfectly clear view of what lies beyond, and at the same time, you never notice the glass. That maxim is just as well applied to writing fiction. Here is a difference: Poetry, by its very nature, calls attention to itself as writing; prose, on the other hand, seeks to make itself invisible. I started writing as a poet, and would often rewrite a paragraph of fiction dozens and dozens of times to get every word and image just so. Like many lyric poets, I turned away from the art in my late 20s (half a lifetime ago) but I still imbue my fiction with a fair amount of poetic rhythm at appropriate moments. It is a bit like being a trumpeter in an orchestra (a great instrument to be sure), but also playing French Horn at certain moments (an exquisite instrument when handled right). I simply have to remain mindful not to stop the flow of the story. And I do not go out of my way to flaunt that added gift or dimension in such a way that it becomes a drag on the story's momentum. What I would suggest, above all, is that if your story has legitimate depth and content, then simply telling the story, without extraneous embellishment, will nicely get the job done, and help you develop that fine voice every writer longs for.

Sator Enigma: Ancient Roman Mystery Solved

The so-called Sator Square (also Sator Rebus, Puzzle) refers to a mysterious ancient text found on walls throughout ruins of the Roman Empire. Archeologists have found exemplars in such diverse ancient Roman locations as a government hall (aula) in Cirencester, Britannia; twice in Pompeii, pre-dating the city's volcanic destruction by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE; and in the distant frontier fortress of Dura Europos on Rome's Mesopotamian border with Parthia. Something about this strange, cryptic writing must have been so important that the Romans would post it in their government halls, public squares, and top military headquarters.

It is one of the most perfect palindromes ever created. A simple palindrome is a text that reads the same, backwards or forwards; e.g., "Madam I'm Adam" and ".madA m'I madaM". The Sator Square is a perfect four-way palindrome that reads the same left-right, right-left, up-down, and down-up. Nobody had a clue how to translate it, despite thousands of hours of research, hundreds of learned books and articles, and at least one Ph.D. thesis in Classics at Yale University.

John T. Cullen solved the puzzle in the summer of 2007, almost coincidentally, while continuing eight years of scholarly research for his nonfiction/Ancient History virtual tour guide A Walk in Ancient Rome, Revised 2nd Edition (Clocktower Books, Summer 2011). He had been aware of this baffling cryptogram from long ago, which has since become an object of superstitious reverence in certain Christian and Neo-Pagan settings. Suddenly, while taking a break from his Rome research, he looked at the Sator Square in a new way—and was able, within a few weeks, to both translate it and explain it plausibly. A production company for the History Channel has flown him to Yale University, from his home in San Diego, for an interview next to the exemplar from Dura Europos in modern Syria. The episode, in which he is capstone speaker, is to be aired across the USA and Canada by the History Channel.

Ironically, at the annual convention of International Thriller Writers, of which he is an Active Member, in New York City in July 2009, he was the only author present who had actually deciphered and explained a cryptic, ancient epigram of world importance—and lived to tell about it.