20150916.0617

In trying to get through the backlog of reading I have let pile up in favor of doing paying work--and I have had another freelance job come in, and I have papers to mark, so that it will be a bit longer before I can get back to that backlog--I turned to the July/August 2015 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. I have subscribed to the magazine since 1999, and I feel I have benefited from reading it across those sixteen years (although I wonder where the new issue is, since I have paid forward for several years of subscriptions, I believe); taking the time to pore over the pulpy pages offers some comfort to me, which I appreciate greatly.

As I read the issue, I came to Richard Chwedyk's story, "Dixon's Road." In it, a terraforming engineer returns to an older project to visit the site of his former lover's home; the vagaries of space travel being what they are, he has aged in the process of doing his work, but his lover has passed on, and the home they had once shared has been turned into a museum in her honor, as she is a poet of some renown. The terraformer, Dixon, speaks at some length with one of the museum staff, Alice, whom he had encountered just as the facility opened; within the frame of that conversation and Alice's musings on events as she knows them, he recounts his experience on the particularly troublesome project that had called him away from his lover. It is a moving story, perhaps because the actions directly depicted are minimal, working through words to create a sense of loss that remains in the mind long after the cover of the magazine is closed.

Among the comments made in the text is one that stands out for me, largely because I have spent as much time teaching the students I have as I have. Alice, narrating, offers the statement that "Engineers are builders, but so are poets. They build with different materials, in different places. The engineer builds in the exterior world; the poet builds in the interior." The concept--that the work of the arts is equal to that of the "more practical" fields--is one with which those in the arts are familiar, and the tension between the writer and engineer evokes the yin/yang dichotomy, in which each partakes of the other despite having its own identity and expertise. Its voicing positions Dixon and his lover, Laura, as equals--although the text does not depict them as such. For while it expresses, through Alice, sympathy for both Laura and Dixon in their parting, noting that it was an expression of their inner beings, it is Laura whose home is the museum, Laura whose poetry pervades the text, Laura who has passed on--and Dixon has not.

Musing on the text suggests that there is more to say about it, more to note about how the work interrogates any number of standards while corresponding to several. But to my present purposes, it will suffice to say that such comments as Alice makes and that stand out to me are the kinds of comments that many budding engineers need to hear. The artist's work is of value no less than the engineer's; it is in some ways the same as the engineer's. It needs to be respected therefore.