Dexter Palmer, author of Dream of Perpetual Motion (March 22-April 4)

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Dexter Palmer, author of Dream of Perpetual Motion (March 22-April 4)

1sonyagreen
Mar 22, 2010, 1:33 pm

Please welcome Dexter Palmer, author of Dream of Perpetual Motion. Dexter will be chatting with us until April 4th.

2gonzobrarian
Mar 23, 2010, 9:26 am

Hi Dexter,
I'm happy to say our library just received your book and after cataloging it personally, I am anxious to read it...without shelving it first.

I have a couple of questions for you...the first regarding your thoughts on the genre. I have read the word 'steampunk' associated with your work. What are your thoughts on what steampunk is, apart from general science fiction as well as 'weird lit', or simply literature in general? Are these terms/genres overly compartmentalized?

Also, you have the distinction of organizing "the first academic conference ever held at an Ivy League university on the subject of video games." First of all, what took them so long? Secondly, and I'm assuming you're a gamer, how do video games influence your writing (especially this work)? What do you play?

Thanks for your time and welcome to LT!

3reading_fox
Mar 23, 2010, 12:20 pm

From the title I'd assumed this was a non-fiction work looking at the various crank-products or misunderstandings of basic physics. But that doesn't seem to be the case!

Do you feel that SF writers shoudl stick to (potentially) achievable science - the hardSF as it's sometimes known?

4alaskabookworm
Mar 23, 2010, 4:00 pm

Hi Dexter,

I'm halfway through The Dream of Perpetual Motion and am enjoying it very much. As I read, it feels very much like I'm inside an adult fairy tale, and find the alternate reality of the book very interesting. Excellent imagery. And I appreciate that though you change perspectives and jump a bit through time, and there's a great deal of symbolic and repeated imagery, you masterfully keep the story cohesive and grounded. I also like the unexpected "guest appearance" at Astrid's art showing midway through the book. I'd be curious to know what motivated that particular inclusion; I liked it very much and found myself smiling over it.

In any case, I also noticed that you end your acknowledgements section with two dates: one from 1996 and the other from 2009. This suggests to me that you have been laboring over this story a long time. When did you start writing this book?

This is an amazing book.

5Jubercat
Mar 23, 2010, 8:40 pm

Welcome, Dexter,

I am pleased to be currently writing a review of your book (for a book recommendation/review website). Perpetual Motion is wonderfully complex, and I have been doing my own analysis of the themes in your book so that I can discuss them in the review. I have personally come to the conclusion that, even though you have included all kinds of allusions, themes and references, the book is, at heart, about the power of communication--esp. the dichotomy of language (storytelling), and silence. I found many references to these two ideas once I had tuned into them. So with some trepidation, I wanted to take this rare (and great) opportunity to ask you if you agree with my analysis, or if I am completely off-base and need to write a new review! Thank you!

6dexterpalmer
Mar 23, 2010, 9:02 pm

Hi—thanks for having me!

gonzobrian—it's a funny thing about "steampunk" as a label, in that its meaning seems to be expanding over time. In my memory, when you came across the term in the '90s it specifically referred to alternate histories set in Victorian England—Gibson and Sterling's *The Difference Engine* is an obvious example. But now that term seems to include anything set in a retrofuturistic world that has more gears than electronics--I've seen the film *Brazil* referred to as steampunk, as well as the novels of Jules Verne, even though they predate the invention of the term by quite a while. So maybe it's best to say that it's like science fiction in general—no one can agree on what it is, but you know it when you see it.

Personally, I don't worry that much about what genre people think a given work slots into, though—some of my favorite novels are the ones that lift bits from various genres and cast them in new contexts. (Some of my doctoral dissertation work was on Thomas Pynchon, who does this a lot—I've even seen *Against the Day* referred to as steampunk, come to think of it.) And the formerly hard line between SF and capital-L Literature seems to be vanishing, as some of the great SF writers of the 20th century start to be canonized outside SF—just today I was talking with a friend about the elegant editions of Philip K. Dick's novels that the Library of America recently published, and Knopf's Everyman's Library is publishing nice editions of *The Stories of Ray Bradbury* and Asimov's *Foundation Trilogy* this year. So that can only be for the better.

Now. Gaming. That was an interesting conference—I put it together with Roger Bellin, who was also in the Princeton English department. The New York Times ended up covering it. Here's a link to the article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/02/26/technology/the-ivy-covered-console.html?pagewa...

As for whether gaming influences my writing—I'm sure that, in some ways, it influences my plotting. Not to give anything away, but I didn't realize until I'd finished the first draft that the novel basically ends with the protagonist having to ascend a tower with a boss waiting for him at the top.

As for what I'm playing recently? Right now I'm playing God of War (the first one, in the God of War Collection for PS3). And I just finished Metroid Prime for the Wii. On and off I've been working my way through Demon's Souls, which is a completely amazing game, but requires more concentration than I sometimes have to give it in the evenings—I don't find it as difficult as it has a reputation for being, but it will happily punish you if you're not sharp. And I just received a bunch of stuff in the mail today: Infinite Space and Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey for the DS, and Resonance of Fate for the PS3. No idea when I'll have the time to get to it all.

reading_fox: well, I'd consider my novel to be SF, or SF-ish at the least, but certainly not hard-SF. But I think that SF writers should use whatever tools they can lay their hands on that let them do what they want to do. As I said above, I think the lines between SF and the rest of contemporary fiction are becoming increasingly difficult to draw—it's exciting for both SF, and the rest of new fiction.

alaskabookworm: I'm glad you like the book! The dates in the acknowledgments are the day I started writing and the day I actually wrote the acknowledgments that were added to the final version (before it went to the typesetter). That doesn't count the time between typesetting and publication, so there's about fourteen years between the book's genesis and day it showed up on shelves.

As for the "guest appearance": much of that third section of the novel is concerned with the notion of authorship—that is, whether a text has a single best meaning that's imparted to it by the author, or whether a text is just an artifact that only has meaning when a reader lays eyes on it (in which case you could say that the author's identity doesn't really matter), or whether the truth is somewhere in between. That joke is just one of the ways I'm playing around with that idea.

7dexterpalmer
Mar 23, 2010, 9:14 pm

Jubercat—yes, those are some of the primary things I was thinking about when I started writing. That said—one of the nice things for me about choosing to write a novel instead of an essay is that a novel gives readers room to engage the text and come up with one of many meanings for it that are unexpected and surprising, but also interesting and valid.

I'll look forward to reading what you have to say!

8JulsOnMars
Edited: Mar 24, 2010, 11:59 am

Hi Dexter, I was just about to purchase your book thinking how wonderful it is for someone to realize that in this electronic overload world the art of good story telling and conversation is lost. But, then I noticed that you're on Twitter!
Why? My daughter says its to sell books. Your response is welcomed. Thanks. Jul-Mar

9gonzobrarian
Mar 25, 2010, 11:17 am

Dexter,
Thanks for your thoughts on genre. I've had a developing image of steampunk being something in a strange state of transition: oddly nostalgic, though not quite as futuristic as it seems. Retrofuturistic is a great word for it. I hope you're right with "capital-L Literature"; do you think Lem has had any part in that? I ask because I've heard very good things about his work.

I'm currently reading Light by M. John Harrison and agree with you, the little bits of differing styles make for something quite intriguing and not quite classifiable (as a librarian, that bothers me...in a good way).

As for gaming, I'm working my way through the Bioware catalog...particularly Mass Effect and Dragon Age. The amount of effort for writing the plot and dialogue in such thorough endeavors is starting to become staggering.

10dexterpalmer
Mar 25, 2010, 6:10 pm

Hi--back again.

JulsOnMars--ha! Your daughter's partly right--I opened up a Twitter account because you have to go to where people are, and people are on Twitter. That said, I don't tweet more than every day or two because I'm finding that I don't like being restrained to 140 characters. But I figured I'd give it a try. And a few people--Roger Ebert is the first who comes to mind--seem to have figured out how to use Twitter as a vehicle for self-expression, rather than just noting whatever thing they're doing at the moment.

gonzobrarian (sorry I messed that up last time)--never read Lem, which is a gap I want to rectify sometime. I have Tarkovsky's film of Solaris sitting on my shelf, waiting for some time when I'm ready to deal with Tarkovsky's style for a few hours, but I haven't gotten around to watching it yet.

I know what you mean about the size and scope of RPGs these days--I put over sixty hours into Fallout 3 when it came out, and I doubt I saw even half of it.

11Jubercat
Edited: Mar 27, 2010, 12:53 am

Hello again Dexter, and thanks for your response to my question. It really helped with my review of your novel, which is now finished and submitted to my editor. The review includes a "sidebar" about perpetual motion machines. I found it to be no easy task (as I am also an English Ph.D.) trying to figure out the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics! It makes me even more impressed at the way Perpetual Motion ran the gamut from feminist scholarship (the hilarious Charmaine St. Claire) to theoretical physics.

If you can, let me know where / how would you like to be sent a copy of the review. Your website apparently does not include an email address. They can send it through your publisher and ask that it be forwarded to you, if that's best. I am thrilled that you are going to read it, and thank you again for your input!

12dexterpalmer
Mar 28, 2010, 6:34 pm

Jubercat--just have it sent to my publicist at St. Martin's (Katy Hershberger) and it'll find its way to me. Thanks!

13yolana
Apr 5, 2010, 4:08 am

I know the chat is over but I had avoided it since I'm only about halfway through with the book. Just wanted to say that I'm loving so far, sci fi is not one of my usual genres but if it were all as well written as this novel is, it would be.

14JulsOnMars
Apr 9, 2010, 12:07 am

Hi Dexter
I'm a bit delayed in checking-in! Your book is in my basket for purchasing. I miss Octavia Butler's work and I'm certain though different your work will keep good company and give me something to share with my neighborhood coffee shop folks.

15dexterpalmer
Apr 11, 2010, 9:38 am

Hi, all--I'm a bit delayed in signing off, but it was nice to talk with all of you! And be sure to check out the book's online gallery at macmillan.com:

http://us.macmillan.com/BookCustomPage.aspx?isbn=9780312558154&m_type=4&...