Home again

Home again, after a much needed holiday down on the Surfcoast (and, thanks to Ruchir Joshi and Paulo Coelho, in Calcutta, Paris and Kazakhstan). Long walks along the sea, being with family, watching Liem play on the beach for the first time. No internet, little television, good coffee, and, for the first time in ages, rest.

Ruchir Joshi - The Last Jet Engine Laugh

It says on the back cover of this back that Joshi has a talent for digressions. Personally, I think it's more than than - it's a talent for illuminating a question or a subject by presenting other apparently unrelated things that bracket the real target. To best appreciate the present, we need to be aware of the past and the possible future.

When he describes the British colonial plumbing system in Calcutta and the somewhat implausible future where people buy hydration tablets instead of water shortages, he is really focusing in on what lies in the middle - our time and our selves, and the clean water running down the bathroom basin as we wash our hands.

There is a very interesting scene in which one of the characters faces a survival crisis on a space station, interesting because of the different ways it could have been handled. The same plot would have made a passable SF short (and may even have been used as one), or the cliffhanger of a technothriller. But, although it features them, this story isn't actually about space stations or politics, it's about a family and their changing country and this is what all the events reflect back on. Right at the point where the technothriller version would be building to a climax, this version cuts away, because the real questions have already been answered. The questions never were about which country was responsible for the crisis or how the future politics will play out. They were about the three generations of the family and how they relate to each other and how the present day India relates to its past and future.

It's also interesting to observe how effectively Ruchir Joshi builds up an emotional background for the scenes that are about to happen. Despite the pacy, jump-cut style, there's a clever patience there that I really should learn from. Apparently unrelated scenes add up to give crucial background for the scenes after them. The final scenes work so well because we now know a huge amount of information about each of the characters, information that would have been very hard to convey if those scenes had to stand on their own.

Update: an interview with Ruchir Joshi here.

Where on Earth...

... could you set a story?

Suppose you wanted to write a story with a strong sense of place, set somewhere in the real world, in our time. It doesn't have to be flawless, but it should at least be accurate enough to make visitors to that place nod their heads and feel like they've been there before. Assume you had to write one now, using only the resources you can access around you (i.e. so you could google on the internet, but you couldn't take a month off and go and live there). Where could you set it? And where could you set a story that would make even the locals nod their heads?