Consideration of Works Past: The Year of the Angry Rabbit

I looked for this book forever.

 

(Picture from here.)

 

All of the past printings were way too expensive—in excess of a hundred dollars. I’m guessing for the longest time it was a collector’s item. Then, at some point, the cost of the book fell to a point where I merely screamed and I got a copy.

 

The Year of the Angry Rabbit was written by Russell Braddon in 1964. Braddon is Australian and this is a satirical novel so it comes as no surprise the armature around which the book is written is Australian politics. Braddon said he wrote it as a joke and it only took four weeks. It’s a pretty good joke both for and on the reader.

 

The premise is that a kingmaker constituent, Sir Alfred, responsible for the ascent of the Australian Prime Minister, Sir Kevin Fitzgerald brings Fitzgerald to task. Rabbits have been controlled by the introduction of myxomatosis. However, on Sir Alfred’s station, a resistant group of rabbits have taken over. Alfred demands Fitzgerald correct the situation. Fitzgerald tasks Professor Welch and his team to come up with an improved disease, “supermyx.” 

 

Welch does so with a bit of a caveat. The rabbits are immune to supermyx as well but it turns them into vicious rabid animals with an infective bite. Any animal the rabbits bite does of supermyx instantaneously—demonstrated on Sir Alfred early on.

 

This gives Fitzgerald an idea. After he nukes Sir Alfred’s station to make sure the supermyx rabbits don’t escape, he then commissions the military to secrete clandestine installations of supermyx bombs in every major city in the world with the control system in his study. Then, he blackmails the world into giving up nuclear arms and embracing peace. It doesn’t go all that smoothly. He has to wipe out a couple of countries that insist on continuing their war. But once that’s all over with, it’s smooth sailing. 

 

War is still economically necessary, however. So, Fitzgerald leases the outback in the middle of the country for scheduled wars promoted like the Olympics. Things go swimmingly. 

 

However, no good satire ends well. It turns out the rabbits have survived nuclear holocaust deep underground and have turned into dog-sized, intelligent, feral carnivores—all with a supermyx bite. They escape and start overrunning the country. Australia is abandoned and that would be all right except the keyboard used by Fitzgerald to trigger the supermyx bombs ends up in the path of the nightly running rabbits. Bombs go off all over the world and everybody dies.

 

It's a fun novel. It reminds me a lot of Paul Tabori’s The Green Rain in 1961. Both involve a technological event that changes the world and ends up ending humanity. There were other novels around the same time that felt similar: Brian Aldiss’ Earthworks (1965) and FROOMB! (1964) by John Lymington. They share a sense of inevitable doom mixed with an odd sense of humor. Tabori was Hungarian. Aldiss and Lymington were both English. Braddon was Australian. Maybe I was attracted to the unAmerican sensibility.

 

And I was attracted to this work and these other works. There’s a certain go-to-hell­ quality to them. A sense that they were saying I see what’s coming. Now you’ve got to see it, too.

 

I have read The Green Rain many times sense and it still holds up. FROOMB! has become a difficult read. I haven’t tried Earthworks again yet, though I will. 

 

I had high hopes for The Year of the Angry Rabbit. It didn’t exactly disappoint but it has aged and not in a good way. I think Braddon was initially going for the Leonard Wibberley tone such as in The Mouse That Roared. But the book got dark on him. Wibberley managed to keep that light tone throughout the book but it took effort and you can see different plot decisions he made that lightened the book at the cost of Mouse’s substance. Braddon didn’t do that and by the end, the “light” tone is forced. 

 

Tabori had the same problem in The Green Rain. When the book turned dark, he abandoned the light tone and switched to just saying what happened. There’s a short coda at the end of The Green Rain that really brings it home. I won’t mention it here in case you might read it.

 

Still, though it has not aged as well as I would have liked, it is still a fine book. It manages to go dark without going vicious—always a feat. 

 

State of the Farm, July 2024

I wasn’t able to participate much in the July garden due to health reasons. But I can report.

 

(No image. The router where I'm at can't handle the bandwidth.)

 

Everything seems late compared to yesterday. However, we had a hot June and July last year. So hot, in fact, that while the beans grew to cover the tunnel they were unable to set fruit until things cooled down in August. I’m from Missouri. The idea of cooling down in August still confuses me.

 

Anyway, not so this year. Our June was fairly cool so when the heat wave rolled around most of the garden was just getting going.

 

First, the beans.

 

We tried several varieties this year. Last year we ended up with two varieties that, for want of a better term, I will call white beans and brown beans. Both were pole beans. We planted the white and brown beans separately not expecting much of a difference—I had thought this was purely a cosmetic variation—but we did get a difference. The white beans grew up early and strongly while the brown beans only partially germinated. Go figure.

 

We also tried three “bush” beans from Baer’s Best Beans: Black Turtle, Pinto, and King of the Early. I put the bush in quotes because two of these beans, Black Turtle and Pinto, turned out to be either pole or half-pole beans. Half-pole means they climb a trellis but not that high. The Pinto turned out to be pole and the Black Turtle half-pole. KOTE didn’t do so well. It got some kind of yellow spot and seemed lethargic. We plan to save the Black Turtle and Pinto beans and plant them next year as pole beans.

 

We are still having germination problems. NONE of the Morning Glory seeds I planted came up strong. Most didn’t come up at all. The lack of germination has to be from the seeds. I’m thinking we’re still having COVID issues in the supply chain. I plan to take some left over Morning Glory seeds and try to germinate them in pots to see if that is, in fact, the answer. Because...

 

...we have a real rodent problem. Much, much worse than I thought it would be in the beginning of the season.

 

In June we had something come through and preferentially eat basil. That has never happened. We went through two cats that were indoor/outdoor but they disappeared. This could have been theft—one of the cats looked like a Russian Blue but the other, Marty, looked more like a weeping sore. So, I don’t know. Since then we’ve had no outdoor cat and each year the rodents have gotten worse.

 

We have caught chipmunks, vole, and one rat in our traps. In the section of the brown beans that didn’t germinate, I planted white beans and they came up beautifully. Then, one day, they were gone. We’re thinking of getting a barn cat.

 

In the rest of the garden, we have been trying goldenberries. They’re sort of like tomatillos. They seem to be determinate—that is, put up a number of fruit and stop. At least, that’s how they are behaving. I’ve been watching for more flowers. The problem is when they’re ripe, they drop to the ground. Remember the rodents?

 

We’re having a bit of the bug problem with the cabbage varieties such as bok choy, Brussel sprouts and the like. It’s not so unexpected with the Brussel sprouts but usually the bok choy works just fine. We have to figure out how to spray for the bugs without hurting the necessary beneficial and pollinating bugs. No success so far.

 

We lost the dill and some of the cucumber but were able to replant. Good luck with the daikons. Whole collections of squash did not germinate but we were able to recover with a different breed—more germination problems, I suspect.

 

In the raised beds we had a potato bug infestation but still got potatoes. Looks like we got peanuts and some sugar beets. We used coconut fiber pots for the beets with the idea they were cheaper than peat pots. Mistake. The coconut fiber pots seemed to inhibit root growth and only a few beets have thrived. We may try again next year.

 

In my continuing quest of sugar, we’re also trying sorghum. It’s a grass family member that has good seeds and has sugar in the stems. We think we planted in a section that didn’t get enough sun. Next year.

 

This year we had a bumper crop of blossoms and early potential fruit. We lost all of the peach family—almond, peach, apricot—to the rodents. The apples are doing well. Even the Granny Smith. I had threatened that this year I was going to cut it down and it produced. Maybe it listened. But, rodents again: many of the pears have been eaten. This time I think by squirrels or, perhaps, a wood chuck.

 

We’re also having a nitrogen issue in the main garden so we’re planning on getting a couple of tons of horse manure this fall. Horse doesn’t have the nitrogen that cow manure does but it has serious fiber in the apples. That helps the soil, too. Also, there’s a weird law in Massachusetts that makes it a crime to sell horse manure. This means the horse farms need to get rid of it. On the down note, the number of horse farms in the area has drastically reduced in recent years.

 

The grapes took well to the new arbors. We do have a fungus problem that I need to spray for but the plants are in good shape.

 

On the Great Experiment I spoke of last time, we didn’t have all that much luck protecting blue berries with protective tape. We tried it on two blueberries and the strawberry patch. It did not keep the birds away from the berries so we ended up netting one of the two blueberries. No birds could get through our netting. But, of course, that didn’t stop the rodents. No blueberries this year.

 

I won’t say this was a discouraging year but it is certainly looking like a lesser season compared to last year.

 

You have to look forward in this process.

Boy Meets Girl

Back in college I saw a 1935 stage place called Boy Meets Girl. 

 

(Picture from here.)

 

It was what we would call these days a rom-com. It takes place in 1930s Hollywood with a failing leading man, a film producer, an unmarried, pregnant waitress, two script-writers, and the illegitimate baby the writers turn into a star.

 

It’s fun. I have not seen the Cagney film but the Wikipedia synopsis is pretty much what I remember. I’ll look for it.

 

Under the plot is the idea of a style of story: Boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl. 

 

This has intrigued me ever since. I rewrote it as protagonist discovers target of desire, protagonist loses target of desire, protagonist attains target of desire.

 

Reframed in this way, it is a common story structure as either the main structure or as a thread within the main structure. For example, in the Netflix Wednesday show, a strong theme is Wednesday discovers friends, Wednesday loses friends, Wednesday gets friends. (For those familiar with the show, “friends” can be replaced with “Enid.”) This is the emotional arc of the show. 

 

In my own work, Jackie’s Boy is the story of Michael finding Jackie, Michael losing Jackie, and Michael getting Jackie. The rest of the book is wrapped around this armature. 

 

I think this is different from the Aristotelean Plot. According to Big A, there are two kinds of good plots: simple and complex. Simple plots involve a change in fortune and the characters response to this. There is usually an incentive moment—what we called at Clarion, an event— that triggers the cause-and-effect sequence of the plot. Complex plots involve a reversal of fortune and insight into one’s fate. The protagonist has more agency to change the plot.

 

As I understand it, in both of these plot types the change of fortune is outside of the protagonist’s control. In the boy-meets-girl paradigm, the chance element is only represented by the encounter to the target of desire. From then on, all agency relies on the protagonist, be they one or many. 

 

Hitchcock referred to a macguffin, an object of desire that has no intrinsic importance but is the attractant to the characters. The Holy Grail, Golden Fleece, and Maltese Falcon, all demonstrate a macguffin: the mystery and importance of these things reside only in the mind of the characters. Others believe that the macguffin must have importance to the audience (or reader) as well: the One Ring of LOTR, or the Lost Ark in the Spielberg film. In both of these cases, the macguffin has intrinsic importance especially when in the wrong hands.

 

LOTR and Raiders of the Lost Ark are both example of what I call big stories. Big stories involve the end of the world, good versus evil, light against dark. Small stories, on the other hands, are stories where the stakes are limited to the characters involved. I’ve written very few big stories—the closest I’ve come have been stories where the big events happen but as an afterthought consequence of the small stories. For good or ill, small stories are where I tend to live.

 

Boy-meets-girl is essentially a small story paradigm. It can reside within a big story—see Wednesday, above—but the stakes are local. Wednesday’s acquiring of friends has little bearing on the larger issues. The fact of her having friends by the end has an effect on the larger arc but the big story could have been told without it. 

 

These days, big stories are written with little stories embedded within them. That’s the current style—in Raiders the story of Indiana and Marian is important to Indiana and Marian but not to the Lost Ark itself. The best big stories are built that way. Heist films—Avengers’ Endgame and Ocean’s Eleven have big stories flowing right along without much in the way of small story support. (In the case of Endgame, the small story of loss motivates the big story but is ultimately left to one side when the heist gets going. It then returns at the end.)

 

Boy-meets-girl (so much less wieldy than protagonist-encounters-target-of-desire) is really built for the small story. It can be contorted to fit over a big story but it’s not often a comfortable fit. It’s not a coincidence that the small stories inside Raiders and LOTR are not boy-meets-girl but of a different style. In Wednesday, the BMG story is pushed to the background and emerges as needed to re-energize the characters and to introduce teenage angst as needed. (It is a story of high school, after all. What’s high school without teen drama?) The writers were careful to keep a little distance between the BMG elements and the big story of monsters, mayhem, and death.

 

I keep discovering the BMG paradigm in my own work and in the wild all the time. When you look at LOTR from the point of view of the One Ring, it’s BMG all the time. It’s either done straight—Gollum meets ring. Gollum loses ring. Gollum gets ring—or it’s inverted. As in Frodo gets ring, Frodo rejects ring, Frodo embraces ring. BMG is the small wheel that drives the ponderous architecture of both the novels and the film. 

 

Of course, it’s possible I’m projecting my own touchstone imagination onto works that don’t actually have it. Many times, we have phrases or magic words that mean worlds to us but have no real meaning to anyone else. 

 

That’s okay. Inspiration is not transferable. What inspires me might leave you cold. Your most important life affirming moment might be something I find trivial. 

 

It’s like the elephant dancing. The magic is not how clumsy or inept the inspiration is, but that it occurs at all.

 

 

Vicious Psychopath vs Senile Grandpa

(Picture from Dall-E.)

 

This is not the best presidential lineup. 

 

On the one hand, we have Trump who promises revenge for insults and slights he invented and can only stop lying when he stops breathing. On the other, we have Biden who has trouble putting together a coherent sentence.

 

As I said before, vicious psychopath vs. senile grandpa.

 

A friend of mine texted me when the debate was over: Biden told the truth and looked weak. Trump lied and looked strong.

 

It’s at times like this I really don’t like the winner take all process we have in this country. Ranked voting might well still get the same result but at least there would be a slim possibility of actual choice.

 

I can’t vote for someone who has tried to overthrow the government, condoned violence, and lied about everything from COVID to global warming. At least with Senile Grandpa, I can rely on people he has picked. It’s picking a lesser mistake to avoid a catastrophe. 

 

Make no mistake: Trump is a catastrophe.

 

This is not the of times and the best of a presidential lineup. But I’ll put my country’s fate into the hands of dementia rather than rest it with psychosis.

 

Convention News: Readercon 2024

 I will be at readercon this year. Readercon runs 7/11-7/14 at the Boston Quincy Marriott in Quincy, MA.

I’ll be on two panels:

• Mosaic Novels: Sunday, 7/14, 10:00 AM, Salon B: Mosaic novels (or sometimes called braided novels) are collections of associated stories that together have a continuing narrative. My contribution was to the Future Boston series where I contributed several stories and a novel. We were telling the future history of the city of Boston.
• Defining and Appreciating Cozy SFF, Sunday 7/14, 11:00 AM, Salon 4. Cozy SFF involves usually has small stakes rather than shaking the world. This describes most of my work.

Come one. Come all. Come often.