About Zepp Jamieson
As the URL indicates, my name is Zepp Jamieson, and I am a fiction.
No, wait. That’s not right. My name is Zepp Jamieson, and I write fiction.
As if existence wasn’t precarious enough…
I’ve been writing fiction since I was 12. I like to tell myself I’ve gotten better at it since then.
I also write a political column since 1997, over a thousand of them. Some people would characterize that as a type of fiction as well, and because I often got bored with politics, sometimes wrote fiction then, as well. A lot of it was satire, which is usually easy to write and fun.
Humor is a lot harder. It’s incredibly difficult because unlike most stories where the readers are forgiving of minor errors, in humor one misstep can throw your readers right out of the story. I have fantastic amounts of respect for Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams and Kurt Vonnegut, who made it look so effortless. We’ll never know, nor fully appreciate how hard they worked to cast that magic.
Many writers can write humorous short stories. I can write humorous short stories. Whole novels are an incredible climb. I read “Martians, Go Home!” by Frederick Brown when I was 12 years old, and tried to emulate him for several years, with predictably horrible results. I reread “Martians” when I was about 40, and discovered that what was falling down funny to a 12-year-old didn’t do well with humans who had to shave.
Isaac Asimov and David Brin both use puns. Brin is much better at it than Asimov was. Puns are funnier in the narrative voice than they are in dialogue, where they always seemed forced. And Asimov, for all his brilliance, often sucked at humor.
There’s a school of thought that Science Fiction and Fantasy must be ponderous, grim, and think Big Thoughts in order to be taken seriously. The second trilogy of Star Wars; the movie version of “Watchmen”; most of GRRM’s books. Nobody dare crack a smile, least of all the audience. The humor is conspicuous by its absence. In fact, you want to check at the Post Office to see if it left a forwarding address so you can move there.
But Science Fiction, done right, can take a preposterous world and run with it, technically not as a humor book, but very funny. “Kiln People” is endearingly ridiculous and would still be a massively entertaining read without the puns. Neal Stephenson’s “Snow Crash” falls into that category. Both authors populate both light and serious works with hilarious vignettes. Heinlein got to be very good at it: even in his most terrible late novels, the vignettes were often delightful, and funny as hell.
So: not being a Pratchett or a Niven, I write short stories that are humorous, and novels that have flashes of humor.
Of course, your mileage may vary. Some people might read my wit and see Jack Benny. Others might see Richard Nixon.
Please be kind.
Anyway, the free PDF version of a collection of my short stories, “Rocketships and Stuff” is here, and so is “Ice Fall”, the first of three novels. By November 2017 I hope to have “Earth Fall” for sale.
My books are also available through Lulu Press:
Rocketships and Stuff (softback only)
Ice Fall (softback)
Snow Fall: Second novel in series, coming soon
Ice Fall: First novel of three novel set