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Recalibrating the Future
Recalibrating theFuture is a major collection by Asimov's Readers' Award-winner Herb Kauderer, introduced by award-winning poet, and professor of genre, Timons Esais, and with art by Richard H. Fay. Recalibrating the Future contains 116 mostly science fictional poems including Rhysling Award nominees "Names," "Hard Copy," and "The First Battle of the Puffer War." The book also contains the Dwarf Star nominee"Restoration" and the winner of the Ewaipanoma Sonnet contest, "A Twisted Certainty." The book ends with a long humorous essay about poetry titled "Lucidity Grows and Around a Tree Trunk" and liner notes not unlike those from music albums of the 1970's. From the past into a recalibrated future,this book is about looking where you leap, and aiming accordingly.
172 pages, Paperback
Published July 14, 2018
6 people want to read
About the author
Herb Kauderer
52 books4 followersHerb Kauderer is an associate professor of English at Hilbert College and author of over a thousand poems including the book Flying Solo: The Lana Invasion [2017]. His writing has been nominated for many awards including the Pushcart, the Rhysling, the Elgin, the Dwarf Star, the Asimov's Readers, the Analog AnLab Readers, and more.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
September 9, 2018
I wrote the foreword to this book, so I'll let that stand as my review. However, I told Herb I'd written a foreword to the 2168 edition, so I'll post that here:
Looking back on the 21st Century, if you can bring yourself to do it, the poet Herb Kauderer stands out as a key prophetic voice. If only humanity could have gotten off their so-called "smartphones" and paid more attention.
Many see this collection as a clear warning to Mammalianity of the Dualitude to come. The causes of the impending catastrophe are carefully catalogued herein, mostly with ironic overtones. Every element of the Werbel Dynamic is on display, with at least ten poems illustrating each of the seven stages of discontinuity, laid out in logical order. ("History, Like Sedimentary Rock" is one obvious exception. Some attribute this to editorial error, but a case can be made that other aesthetic choices make its sequence appropriate. Werbel, after all, is not yet born when this collection first came out.) Kauderer does his best to imagine what would become of his kind, to inspect the futures that are rapidly closing in. He urges his readers to look on their tendencies, their creations, and despair.
Kauderer exhibited the knowledge of form, in this collection, while showing that his verse could also be free. He fibs, he cinquains, he shows us his haibun, but he is no wage-slave to these structural affectations. He embraces the grammatical sentence, while generally employing cummingsesque grammaraceous marking. He seems to have thought that clarity might be a virtue.
True, he uses metonymy and synecdoche as though they were morally defensible, but that was one of the ugly features of the age. Where he rises above such barbarisms is his choice of subject: individual characters facing choices about their own lives, often alone and isolated. He achieves an almost Icelandic precision in his portrayals, especially as contrasted to the background presumption that sentient protoplasm might benefit from community. This secures his position as a major precursor to the Neo-Faroese Movement, despite his cultural limitations.
We have jettisoned almost everything of the culture that came before, but the cult of Kauderer has kept his voice with us. Hemimystics plumb his Book of Answers for visions of what is yet unseen, but readers should not neglect this brave attempt to recalibrate the Future, while there was still time.
Looking back on the 21st Century, if you can bring yourself to do it, the poet Herb Kauderer stands out as a key prophetic voice. If only humanity could have gotten off their so-called "smartphones" and paid more attention.
Many see this collection as a clear warning to Mammalianity of the Dualitude to come. The causes of the impending catastrophe are carefully catalogued herein, mostly with ironic overtones. Every element of the Werbel Dynamic is on display, with at least ten poems illustrating each of the seven stages of discontinuity, laid out in logical order. ("History, Like Sedimentary Rock" is one obvious exception. Some attribute this to editorial error, but a case can be made that other aesthetic choices make its sequence appropriate. Werbel, after all, is not yet born when this collection first came out.) Kauderer does his best to imagine what would become of his kind, to inspect the futures that are rapidly closing in. He urges his readers to look on their tendencies, their creations, and despair.
Kauderer exhibited the knowledge of form, in this collection, while showing that his verse could also be free. He fibs, he cinquains, he shows us his haibun, but he is no wage-slave to these structural affectations. He embraces the grammatical sentence, while generally employing cummingsesque grammaraceous marking. He seems to have thought that clarity might be a virtue.
True, he uses metonymy and synecdoche as though they were morally defensible, but that was one of the ugly features of the age. Where he rises above such barbarisms is his choice of subject: individual characters facing choices about their own lives, often alone and isolated. He achieves an almost Icelandic precision in his portrayals, especially as contrasted to the background presumption that sentient protoplasm might benefit from community. This secures his position as a major precursor to the Neo-Faroese Movement, despite his cultural limitations.
We have jettisoned almost everything of the culture that came before, but the cult of Kauderer has kept his voice with us. Hemimystics plumb his Book of Answers for visions of what is yet unseen, but readers should not neglect this brave attempt to recalibrate the Future, while there was still time.
September 2, 2019
This collection of 116 poems, some metered, others free verse, all of them laser-sharp and plasteel-bright, is a gift from On High (in the secular sense). The dominant tone is hard SF: Kauderer gives us his variously wry, poignant, and rhapsodic speculations on space travel, planetary exploration, computer intelligence, cryonics, and mathematics—but we’re also treated to meditations on myth, metaphysics, politics, human connection, and romantic love.
In these pages you’ll meet an endearing cast of characters, including the Dadaist Philosopher, the Crocodilians, the Vampire Moon, the Goddess of the Space Colonists—plus a cowboy who lassos asteroids, a hapless human functionary who keeps failing an “inverted Turing test,” and a computer reciting its marriage vows (“I love you like the highest prime … that has ever dwelt within me”).
The imagery is vivid and precise. Among the many verses I circled: “the stars are static unmoving flames spattered across the dark” … “this boring job punctuated with wonder” … “innocent of an insect’s caress or a butterfly’s kiss” … “forever warm among loving suns” …“my heart was a mad ape hammering at my chest” … “Jupiter’s moons dance a slow pavane.” (Nota bene: for the sake of flow I omitted the line breaks in the above quotations.)
Be sure to peruse the final flourish, an amusing autobiographical essay titled “Lucidity Grows Around a Tree Trunk,” in which Kauderer articulates his impatience with aestheticians for whom obscurity equals profundity. (I immediately thought of film critic Pauline Kael’s acerbic assessment of “The Island,” a minimalist Japanese film that drove her batty: people will think it must be art, because it sure as hell isn’t entertainment.)
The poet’s endnotes are also worth reading. Before happening upon this volume, I’d never heard of the “fib,” a poem that somehow incorporates the Fibonacci sequence, most commonly by using it to generate the syllable count. I was also ignorant of the term “ekphrastic,” indicating a poem inspired by a work of visual art, likewise the “haibun” form—Kauderer gives us four of these—which consists of a prose or prose-poem paragraph followed by a formal minimalist verse, usually a haiku.
I shall close with one of my favorite pieces from “Recalibrating the Future.” Kauderer tells us, “While this poem had been reformatted for epublishing, in original format it's a Shakespearean sonnet.”
Young Danny lived on rice
and banked his pay
refusing all romance because
he had a twisted certainty
his true love’s day
had not come.
Friends called him mad.
He made the final payment
to Cold Can, the cryogenics institute,
and killed himself.
In ninety years he breathed again
to find himself
imprisoned in the stilled
and bland rooms
of a mental institution;
the only place for a suicide victim.
The doctors argue
over the solution,
assigning nurse Francine
to stay with him.
The doctors have no clue
that Danny will find love
that grows,
as he lays frozen still.
In these pages you’ll meet an endearing cast of characters, including the Dadaist Philosopher, the Crocodilians, the Vampire Moon, the Goddess of the Space Colonists—plus a cowboy who lassos asteroids, a hapless human functionary who keeps failing an “inverted Turing test,” and a computer reciting its marriage vows (“I love you like the highest prime … that has ever dwelt within me”).
The imagery is vivid and precise. Among the many verses I circled: “the stars are static unmoving flames spattered across the dark” … “this boring job punctuated with wonder” … “innocent of an insect’s caress or a butterfly’s kiss” … “forever warm among loving suns” …“my heart was a mad ape hammering at my chest” … “Jupiter’s moons dance a slow pavane.” (Nota bene: for the sake of flow I omitted the line breaks in the above quotations.)
Be sure to peruse the final flourish, an amusing autobiographical essay titled “Lucidity Grows Around a Tree Trunk,” in which Kauderer articulates his impatience with aestheticians for whom obscurity equals profundity. (I immediately thought of film critic Pauline Kael’s acerbic assessment of “The Island,” a minimalist Japanese film that drove her batty: people will think it must be art, because it sure as hell isn’t entertainment.)
The poet’s endnotes are also worth reading. Before happening upon this volume, I’d never heard of the “fib,” a poem that somehow incorporates the Fibonacci sequence, most commonly by using it to generate the syllable count. I was also ignorant of the term “ekphrastic,” indicating a poem inspired by a work of visual art, likewise the “haibun” form—Kauderer gives us four of these—which consists of a prose or prose-poem paragraph followed by a formal minimalist verse, usually a haiku.
I shall close with one of my favorite pieces from “Recalibrating the Future.” Kauderer tells us, “While this poem had been reformatted for epublishing, in original format it's a Shakespearean sonnet.”
Young Danny lived on rice
and banked his pay
refusing all romance because
he had a twisted certainty
his true love’s day
had not come.
Friends called him mad.
He made the final payment
to Cold Can, the cryogenics institute,
and killed himself.
In ninety years he breathed again
to find himself
imprisoned in the stilled
and bland rooms
of a mental institution;
the only place for a suicide victim.
The doctors argue
over the solution,
assigning nurse Francine
to stay with him.
The doctors have no clue
that Danny will find love
that grows,
as he lays frozen still.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews