Paranormal Activity 3 (Image via RottenTomatoes.com)

Hello, Faithful Reader! I recently saw Paranormal Activity 3, and I wanted to share my thoughts on the whole series now that it is complete. There are spoilers below, so don’t scream at me…you’ve been warned!

So by now, everyone is familiar with both the subject and style of the series. In the first film, a couple (Katie and Micah) is harassed by an invisible and hostile entity, and the evidence of this is all recorded on personal video cameras. As the first film progresses, it is revealed that Katie had similar experiences as a child, and that it seemed like the “demon” (they eventually establish it is not a normal haunting by a ghost) was following her. Towards the end, in one of the most disturbing scenes in the film, Katie, apparently possessed by the demon, stands motionless next the bed, watching Micah sleep, while the video goes into fast forward to show her standing that way for hours. At the end of the film, the possessed Katie murders Micah, and then grins evilly at the camera and lunges at it. While there were alternative versions (the one with Katie simply sitting and rocking until the cops find her was, in my opinion, more powerful), the theatrical ending fits the sequels better, so it was, in fact, the better choice.

In the second film, we focus on the events leading up to part one, where Kristi, Katie’s sister, and her family are threatened by the same entity. Over the course of this film, various theories are evaluated about people making deals with demons, and it is made clear that the demon’s primary interest is Hunter, Kristi’s newborn son, as payment for…something which is never really explained other than wealth and power. It is shown that Kristi’s husband chose to ask his housekeeper, who is apparently versed in some form of witchcraft, to “transfer” the demon to Katie rather than Kristi. The first couple of minutes of the first movie are then shown, and then Katie is shown asking Kristi about the “strange stuff” happening, and mentions it has begun happening at her and Micah’s house. The movie then moves to three nights after the end of the first film. A possessed Katie comes to Kristi’s house, kills her husband, kills Katie, and then takes the baby, Hunter, and disappears.

The third movie works to explain the first two. It is also a prequel, this time showing a group of tapes that were recorded in 1988, when both Katie and Kristi are children. It is shown that “Toby”, Kristi’s imaginary friend, is actually the demon, and over the course of the film it tries to get her to do something, which at first she refuses, which leads to “Toby” tormenting Katie and their parents. The whole time, the events are being recorded by their stepfather, while their mother gets more and more angry (like Dan, Kristi’s husband in the first film, and Micah in the first film) at the whole affair. After a particularly violent attack, the whole family runs to the kid’s grandmother’s house, where it quickly descends into a type of Rosemary’s Baby cliche. It turns out that Kristi’s grandmother is a member of some sort of demonolatry cult, intent on performing a marriage ceremony between Kristi and the demon Toby. After both the parents are killed, grandma takes both girls to prepare for the wedding, and we see Kristi say “Come on, Toby”. The movie closes with demonic breathing and grunting until the camera cuts off, seemingly destroyed by Toby.

Now, before the ending of the third film, I really liked this series. First and foremost, the use of the “found footage” technique, which can often be tiresome, was well-handled in all three films. In addition to this, the real horror factor was at work…this is the sort of things people really do experience. Consider the such luminaries as Bishop James Pike have experienced poltergeist activity, and that whether you believe in ghosts (or other entities) or not, when people get spooked out, it is by the kinds of things that happen in these films. We never run into the special-effects laden monstrosities in real life, but like serial killers, paranormal horror takes an experience that many of us have had, or know other people have had, and uses it to scare the willies out of us. It works because, on some level, it feels very real, like it could really happen.

Which is why I feel like they took the easy way out with the third movie. Blaming everything on a witch-cult not only has a sort of inherent 70s cheeziness, when showing elements of a non-Christian religion could evoke fear simply by existing, but nowadays many of us know real witches or are pagan ourselves, and we know for a fact that a bunch of middle-aged women dancing around a bonfire (they don’t dance, but the circle around the bonfire is shown) is no more inherently threatening than a coffee-klatch after a Bible study. On top of this, I feel like the writer lost a chance to really ramp up the scary.

You see, by making the threat all about the actions and judgments of a group of adults, it moved “Toby” out of the world of children, with their generally odd behaviors, wild creativity, and imaginary friends. To my mind, the idea that there are malevolent entities simply wandering around the planet, befriending children, and then trying to harm them or get them to harm themselves or others, and that we just forget all about this world of supernatural dangers as we become adults, is far more frightening. The idea that there is a whole other world, with its own predators, rules, and sensorium, that only children interact with, cuts straight down to the bottom of many different fears. That’s a fear that, once activated, would have kept me awake all night, remembering the strangeness and visions of my own childhood…and making sure to close to the closet door and leave the light on. Instead, I just chuckled at the old scare-the-Christians-with-paganism bugaboo showing up in a modern horror film.

There is an otherness to childhood. There is something about the world they inhabit that we love…but also fear. They do things for reasons we can’t understand. They see things we do not, hear things we cannot. Their toys are creepy. By keeping the threat fundamentally about the kids, rather than making it a matter of volition for some group of adults, I feel like the final resulting tale of all three movies would have been far more powerful. The notion that not only could adults not stop it, that they have no volition over the situation whatsoever, and that the “demon” Toby was something truly of, and only of, the world of children, would have taken this series from “entertaining and a good scare” to “one of the best horror franchises of all time”.

What are your thoughts, Faithful Reader? Am I simply jaded, or did the “explanation” for the series significantly decrease the horrors implied?

Related articles

• Henry Joost and Ariel Schulman Returning For ‘Paranormal Activity 4;’ Where Will The Story Go? (slashfilm.com)
• Paranormal Activity 3: Actually scary, unlike Paranormal Activity 2 [Video] (io9.com)
• ‘Paranormal Activity’ to ruin your sleep for a fourth time, but where can – or should – the franchise go next? (popwatch.ew.com)

As an author, I’ve had my work stolen. That’s lost money…people who stole an article or short story or novella and put it up on their site, denying my publishers the money they deserve and (sometimes) denying me the advertising revenue cut that makes up online royalties. That’s money in the bank.

So what a law like this is trying to convince all of us is that I should be willing to trade my internet freedoms, and the freedoms of everyone else in the world (that’s right…the world, because the bill specifically is set up to go after people in other countries, too) for money. Cold hard cash. Anyone supporting this bill is saying that they will trade freedom, for them and everyone else, for cash. That makes them traitors of the highest order…traitors to not just any one nation, but the species as a whole.

I’m not saying that the current state of online piracy is acceptable. But the market itself is dealing with this problem. Services like Spotify and Hulu allow all the convenience of piracy, but actually charge reasonable prices and allow for a return for the creators. There is no way to pirate or steal this content because of the way the systems are built. A system like this for books, articles, and stories would finish out the problem for writers, and a similar system for graphical art would serve in the same capacity for artists.

Now, there are complaints about such systems, in that they are not going to give the various industries involved the same kinds of profit margins that they have become used to over the last century or so. That’s tough. As an author, I am one of those people. However, if it comes down to either getting nothing, because it’s all being pirated, or making something by charging prices for content that people are willing to pay, I’ll take something any day.

Publishers, the RIAA, and the MPAA need to come to terms with this. They no longer have the control. They don’t get to dictate terms. If they won’t be reasonable, they’ll be pirated into oblivion. If they will be reasonable, however, they can continue to exist. The consumers of content and the industries producing that content are in an adversarial situation so long as the industry is determined to charge unreasonable prices. People pirate movies because it costs an unreasonable amount to see them in the theater. People pirate music (less now) because it costs an unreasonable amount of money to buy music. And people pirate books because it costs an unreasonable amount of money to buy them. This isn’t all producers and publishers…but it is the majority of them.

For a very long time, these people had the public over the barrel, and they took advantage of that, creating this adversarial situation. They knew they had all the power in the situation because they controlled the means of production and distribution. Now anyone with a computer can publish and distribute for so close to free as to be negligible. So far, the middle-men of the industry have done their best to maintain their control, acting as gatekeepers to keep self-produced and self-published works from being take seriously, but that is working less and less. What it comes down to is that if the industries won’t adapt to the new situation, and the lower profit margins, then they won’t have any profit margins at all.

So right now, and for the last decade or so, these industries have been trying to use the law to maintain their power over the situation. For the most part, they have failed. But now they find themselves hand-in-hand with an increasingly authoritarian government, who will embrace any excuse to make more laws that give them more power. And SOPA and PIPA are the outcome of this unholy collaboration between those who would turn this country into a fascism and those who want to keep control of the means of production within the art and entertainment industries.

So understand this, people: when you support SOPA or PIPA, you are not protecting the rights of creators to profit from their creation. You are saying that money is enough to buy your rights, and the rights of people in other countries all over the world. This isn’t about cash, this is about freedom.

So look around. Think about how many atrocities have been justified with “they’re fighting to protect our freedoms”. The enemy tries to take away our freedoms…that’s what makes them the enemy, and if those people are within our own country, that makes them traitors to everything this country is supposed to represent. So remember what we are supposed to do to those who would threaten the freedoms and liberties of American citizens. We haven’t had a real enemy who could do that militarily since WWII…now we do, and they are our own legislators and the greedy, self-involved organizations determined to maintain their profit margins, no matter what it costs.

Ask yourself this…can you trust the government not to misuse and abuse the powers given to it? Honestly, no matter your stance, Left or Right, ask yourself that question. Can you trust them with the power they are asking for…the power to control the most powerful tool for education, free speech, and free assembly to ever exist? Look around…there is really only one answer to this question, and it’s “no”. It’s not a question of will SOPA and PIPA be abused to control the flow of information and interaction through the internet; it’s a question of how.

Don’t allow this trade of our liberty for money (or rather, the promise of money). Oppose SOPA and PIPA in every way possible.

Related articles

• EU Politicians Send Letter To US Congress Warning Of ‘Extraterritorial Effects’ Of SOPA And PIPA (opendotdotdot.blogspot.com)
• SOPA/PIPA Backers Still Don’t Get It (eliainsider.com)
• Proof we do not need SOPA. – Tea Party Nation (gds44.wordpress.com)

Over at SF Signal, a blog I think every fan of speculative fiction should read, they have an interesting round table on politics in science fiction. The question is:

Q: How should SF writers respond to the politics of their time, if at all?

The various authors responded in various ways, as one would expect. The industry is such that if you ask five writers one question you’ll get seven answers; it’s just the way we roll. However, the question led me to consider how I have dealt with politics in my work in the past, and how I intend to deal with it in the future.

Many of you might know that I have a history of political activism. I was involved with Free Radio Santa Cruz in the late nineties and did labor organizing, helped feed the homeless, and helped organize and run an infoshop, which is a combination library and event/organizing center for activists. Politics have been an ongoing issue for me…growing up poor, several years of homelessness, and generally being a weirdo have led to an acute awareness of how American culture, with its mythology of freedom and individuality, often acts to persecute and punish people for using their freedoms and acting as individuals.

However, in my fiction and poetry, I have always placed emphasis on the experiences of individuals and small groups. When politics and power dynamics are explored, it happens in extremely situated ways that do little to point out any specific, larger political or historical issues. The reasons for this tendency has varied throughout my writing life. When I was younger it was because I hated the way my fellow activists would use poetry and fiction (especially poetry) as an excuse to rant about politics and spew catchphrases. I feel that the art of poetry and prose shouldn’t be whored out to politics and movements; it ceases to be art and becomes propaganda.

As I got older, I also began to feel that the locus of political discussions, which always end up being about politicians, national policies, and ideological movements, is missing the point. People don’t live their lives on a national or international level, or over decades of historical and sociopolitical trends. They live one a day to day basis in small communities of affinity and care. I came to believe that the “big picture” is a symptom, but our true illness lives in our day-to-day lives…how we treat our families, spouses, parents, best friends, and neighbors. When I want to address peace I don’t want to talk about war, because war is too big, it’s too many people doing too many things. The “big picture” obscures the moments, the little bits of narcissism, greed, cruelty, and pain that, when added up, equal the wars and political issues. I don’t want to write about nations, I want to write about people, because people are what really exist; nations are a fantasy.

So when some poetry-slam-happy-hippie spends fifteen minutes “performing” their most recent poem about how awful capitalism is, it makes me want to retch…not because I am a big fan of capitalism (I’m not…taken to its logical conclusion it glorifies and rewards the worst behaviors humanity is capable of; the biggest winner is the biggest sociopath), but because talking about capitalism as a whole, whether in favor or against, is ignoring the real issues of empathy vs. self-involvement, greed vs. generosity, and the personal connections between people that can either damn or redeem us, here and now, with no Heaven or Hell necessary.

So, to my mind, the proper object of art is never going to be the “big picture”, but the little pictures that together make up the big picture. None of us can force our politicians to be honest, kind, or empathetic to whatever “other” or “enemy” has been picked out this week. But we can choose to be honest or lie, to be kind or cruel, and to try to see the world through the eyes of the “other” that the “big picture” is always striving to tell us we are to despise. The true object of art is people, not nations, because nations don’t exist, not really. They are an abstraction at best, a lie at worst. The worst moments of history have come about when people have forgotten they were people and given into the phantasm of the citizen. To whatever degree literature can be healing or constructive to our species, I believe that it is in pointing out the people and their real, lived connections; the abstraction of nations, races, and ideologies hides those connections or redefines them in terms of what benefits or harms the nation, race, or ideology. There will be an end to war when people refuse to be defined as citizens and refuse to see the “other” as citizens, as well. Our nations will become healthy when we, as individuals connected to other individuals, become healthy.

But at the same time, I am an embodied being, the product of my culture and the social and historical context within which I have lived. There is no way to avoid some political cast to my work, especially in light of how stringent modern ideologies have become. Simply by emphasizing empathy and relationships rather than power and wealth, I am declaring a political stance. By challenging the very notion of national identity, I am “unpatriotic” and by denying the existence of the “other”, the “enemy”, I am a traitor. So much of the identity of my country is based on who we hate, rather than who we love, that by refusing to hate I am excluded from what some would say is an important part of being an American. By refusing to turn life and death into a game, I no longer have a “team”.

This recently came out in my exchanges regarding the scandalous (or rather, they should be scandalous, but they aren’t) revelation of a picture of our soldiers urinating on the corpses of the “enemy”. To my mind, the dehumanizing of other people is unacceptable, regardless of circumstance, and desecration of the dead is one of the most dehumanizing and offensive things I can imagine. But apparently, to many people, this is a debatable issue. When our “team” does it, it’s different. Just like when we torture, or detain people without trial, or use secret evidence, or assassinate people. All of these things are horrible inhumanities when other people do it to us, but when we do it, somehow they become okay. By choosing empathy over nationalism, I have excluded myself from the “team”. And because of that choice, I also lost one of my oldest friends. She’s one of those that just can’t bring herself to judge the morality of soldiers…no matter what they do, she “supports the troops”. But armies, like nations, are abstractions; all that exists are people and what they do to each other, and these people who urinated on the corpses of their fallen fellow humans, are monsters and deserve to be called out as such.

In my stories it could be argued that everyone is a monster, or at least has the potential to be. Again and again, I return to the simple theme of empathy and the lack of it, again and again I return to the simple act of choosing to care…even when it makes no sense, even when the object of that caring doesn’t deserve it (whatever that means). In my world, the world inside my head and heart that I try to express in my work, everyone has the choice, every moment, to be a monster or a human, a demon or an angel. So in that sense, I feel that all of my work is political, while at the same time avoiding the language of political thought and philosophy. I am more interested in how one person treats another person than how a given nation treats another nation…but all those little choices, all those people, add up to The People.

Well, enough pontification. What are your thoughts, Faithful Reader, on the role of politics in science fiction, and indeed, speculative fiction as a whole? I’m eager to hear from you.

Related articles

• Bringing Poetry Back Into Politics (themoderatevoice.com)
• Queering SFF: Angels in America by Tony Kushner (tor.com)
• Politics and Fiction: The Story of Occupy Wall Street (nealjansons.com)

Image by Enokson via Flickr

As some of you know, I’m currently working on the second draft of the first novel of my Axis Chronicles series. As I am working through it, I have had a recurring thought: does the fact that my primary protagonist is 13 years old make my series “Young Adult”?

This is a real concern. I know the general wisdom says “just write what you want to write, don’t worry about genre”, but that’s bullshit. Each genre has certain expectations, tropes, and structures that the fans of that genre expect and want to see. I have always considered my fiction work to be firmly entrenched in speculative fiction…horror, fantasy, and science fiction. They’re what I like to read, for the most part, and they are what I am generally inspired to write. While I was back in the writing program in college, I ran into some issues because of my choice…most of the people in those classes were aspiring writers of “literary fiction”, a label which people claim means something, though I can’t understand how the works of Herman Hesse, Franz Kafka, Chuck Palahniuk, and William Burroughs are all categorized together. My teachers didn’t know what to do with the three of us who wanted to write what was (often derisively) called “genre fiction”, and our work was mostly ignored in the endless stream of middle-aged women writing stories about making cookies with their daughters. It was easy, back then, to feel like I had a firm grasp on genre.

However, over the last few years we have seen new genres come into being that don’t make much sense to me. We have what would have once been called “horror novels”…books about vampires, werewolves, demons, etc…except these novels are romances. And I don’t mean the classical literary meaning of a romance, such as the old adventure tales, I mean love stories. We have tales of young wizards, clearly fantasy novels, but they are called “Young Adult”. In fact, somehow it seems that a vast number of different kinds of stories seem to be falling under the category of YA, but I don’t understand what people seem to mean by that, other than the idea that the primary protagonists are teenagers or children.

Now, the Axis Chronicles are my magnum opus. I have been working on the universe they take place in for years. And their primary protagonist is a teenager, Beatrice Gold. But the other protagonists are adults, and have adult relationships and interactions, including a romance between two people in their 30s…real people in their 30s, not people who are said to be in their 30s but who have the emotional maturity of teenagers. There is a lot of violence. There are philosophical issues raised. Indeed, the primary premise is metaphysical…in a godless multiverse created through the interactions of chance and physics, a young girl is destined to bring purpose and meaning to the universe, to become a goddess, while another, darker agent tries to steal that destiny to bring his own sense of justice to the universe. These are not the normal themes of young adulthood in any but the most abstract sense. However, the fact that the main protagonist is a young girl, unique but still mostly human, means that these metaphysical issues are seen through the eyes of a teenager.

Now, of course it is true that this metaphysical journey is symbolic of the rise into autonomous adulthood. Beatrice is doing what we all do, developing a sense of meaning in the complex experience called life. It’s just happening on a much larger level that goes far beyond just her own life. In this sense, I can see how the novels could indeed be seen as YA fiction. I also deal with sexuality with a soft touch…sex is not nearly as important as emotional intimacy in my work, and I work to develop those themes rather than write erotica. I don’t have anything against the erotic, and my favorite authors such as Clive Barker often focus on sexuality. I just feel that in our era, real love and intimacy is more transgressive and threatening than even the most outlandish sexuality. There is sex in my work, but I’m not trying to titillate and it shows.

So in several ways, I think that the Axis Chronicles can fit in the genre of Young Adult, but I’m not sure…once I would have just called in “Dark Fantasy”, but YA is a such a booming genre that I know that publishers and agents want to push the label on anything even remotely featuring children or teenagers. I am going to have to deal with the question, so I want to address it now, and I want to ask my fans and readers…do the Axis Chronicles fall under YA because of their primary protagonist, or does the fact that many of the other characters are adults and many of the issues dealt with adult issues exclude it from that genre?

Related articles

• What is genre? (jesswriteshere.wordpress.com)
• Cross Genre – Everyone’s doing it! (madgeniusclub.com)
• Let’s talk about fear. (nealjansons.com)

Hello, Faithful Reader. As always, it’s a pleasure to have you here, in my little corner of cyberspace. I’ve always felt a little awkward with groups…my best moments are with two or three people at a time. This is why I love being able to write my little messages to you in this way, instead of with a video or in a chat room. I can imagine you and I, sitting together comfortably in a warm, cozy room, drinks in hand and a smile upon our lips, ready to discuss whatever comes to mind with candor and honesty. I’ve never wanted to be on TV or lecture to a hall full of students (though I have had to, from time to time). I’ve always wanted to have a conversation, to be intimate with individuals, each and every one. This has led me, throughout my life, to the written word. Reading is always a private affair, between author and reader, no matter how many readers there may be. The conversation is always one-on-one, and the only frustration the written word has ever given me is the fact that it can be so one-sided.

A minor digression on this frustration. Once upon a time, when I was living in Santa Cruz, California in the mid-nineties, I would go to open mic night at Cafe Pergolesi to perform readings of my poetry and short stories. I was homeless at the time, and this was the only method to share my scribbled longhand available to me. It’s very difficult for a person without an address and no access to a typewriter to submit their written work and, to be quite frank, I was in my late teens and, though I had already been writing for years, this was my distinctly amateur period. I had a long way to go, and I knew it, but I also knew that I would never improve my art without sharing it and getting some feedback. And that feedback was generally good.

However, it was just words in the air. There was no way, except in memory, to go back and hear those words again, and years later I had essentially forgotten how it felt. I had been too busy running my bookshop to write too much for several years, then I went to college. During that time, my ex-wife was very clear that writing was not an acceptable career. She felt the inherent lack of security, the possibility of never making very much money, and the sheer airiness about it all excluded it from the acceptable “real jobs” out there. She wanted me to be a professor instead, which she considered the most secure of intellectual professions.

This, combined with being treated like scum in the series of writing classes I was taking at the time, put me in a pretty dark place. The professor meant well. She was a literary fiction author with an MFA, and considered genre fiction of any type to be crude, low-brow profiteering. Especially horror, which she couldn’t stand. She had never read any good horror, of course, and had no clue that authors like Clive Barker, Chuck Palahniuk, and even Stephen King had done much to bring literary themes to horror and speculative fiction. Her idea of horror was slasher movies like “Friday the 13th” and her idea of science fiction was “Star Wars”.

This attitude, which I have run into again and again throughout my life, doesn’t normally bother me. I don’t understand what people get out of stories about a mother and daughter baking cookies, either, but apparently it’s a very popular theme among a certain type of reader and writer. But at this time the pressures I was feeling on all sides made me feel like aspiring to be the next Clive Barker was like a musician aspiring to be the next Vanilla Ice…inherently wrong-headed, immature, and stupid. But my inspirations just don’t lead to stories of the so-called “literary” type. Many of my premises come from dreams and visions, and none of these are “exploration of the family dynamics of three generations of wine-makers”. Instead my dreams and inspirations are always beyond the prosaic bits of normal human life. They are of miracles and monsters, demons and demigods, the fantastic, awe-inspiring, and horrifying. I simply can’t care about plots like that of “The English Patient” or “The Joy Luck Club”. I can understand what’s appealing in them. They are, like all art, an attempt to express aspects of the human condition. But that is not what inspires me. For me, the heart of my inspiration is in the extremes, the places where we go beyond the human to the divine, the demonic, the mystical…these are my dreams and visions, and there is no room for the normal, the average, or the banal in my work.

So I found myself unable to write what my professor could respect, and unable to address my ex-wife’s attitude towards writing as a whole. I was on the verge of giving up writing entirely. I was resolved to drop the class.

But then, late that same night, I walked down to the 7-11 to buy a pack of cigarettes. There was a line, and I noticed the cashier, a young man with tattoos on his neck, kept glancing up at me as if he recognized me. Santa Cruz is a small town, at least when it comes to locals (UCSC students are another matter), so I thought little of it…there was every likelihood he had seen me around town over the years. But then I got the register, asked for my smokes, and the cashier smiled and spoke.

“Hey, you’re Puck, right?”

I nodded.

“Didn’t you use to read your poetry and stories over at Pergs on Friday nights? Like ten years ago?”

I nodded again and smiled sheepishly. Like I said, that work was pretty amateurish, and I was read to be made fun of for foisting my bad poetry on the world.

“You were really good. I liked your stuff a lot.”

I was stunned. All I could do was stutter out a thank you. Then came the moment of truth.

“Are you still writing?”

“Well…” In that moment I had to make a choice…and I hope to this day I made the right one. “Yeah, yeah I am. Going home to work on a new short story right now.”

And I did go home and write that story, and while my professor didn’t like it (I remember a comment about the “almost loving” way I described a murder within it), the rest of my workshop group did. And the comment given by one of those readers, after reading just my first scene, was “Wow…you’re like a real writer.”

The point of this long digression has been to explain why you, Faithful Reader, are so important to me. While my work hasn’t been loathed since I started writing professionally, I have hit plenty of setbacks and snags. I’ve been selling stories, but between my health problems, my wife’s health problems, and the collapse of the economy in general, I haven’t been selling enough. I have had some pretty dark times, and in a prior era I may have just given up. I love to write, and without it I go a little crazy, but that love can’t withstand everything the world throws at it without some help, some other person who has faith that the bad times will end and the work and pain will be worth it. Writing is a solitary business, and years ago I felt very alone, to make my way or break without any connection to anyone else.

The internet, with its ubiquitous option to comment, has changed that, and allowed me to engage in the back-and-forth dialogue that I require, and most of all…it stays right there. I can go back and read comments again and again when I am in a rough patch. I can go to my Facebook page (have you liked me yet?) and see the old comments. I can always remember, even when my feelings are hurting and I can’t believe it, because it’s there forever.

So I want to thank you so much, Faithful Reader…each and every one of you. Without you I couldn’t hang on, and if I ever manage to grab the brass ring of true literary success, I am always going to remember you. Every novel and every collection will have you in the acknowledgements, because none of this could exist without you.

Now, for the words of wisdom.

This isn’t the New Year I celebrate. I’m a Samhain baby, conceived then, born in Summer, and in love with the Autumn my whole life. But I do want to offer the purest piece of wisdom I have ever learned to all of you as you begin the new calendar year. It’s from my favorite novel of all time, “Imajica” by Clive Barker. This novel changed my life in many ways, and I am rereading it now in preparation for writing the second draft of my own dream-inspired magnum opus, “Beatrice: The Girl Who Would Be God”. I hope that you can gain as much from these lines as I have.

“…everything you learn is already part of you, even to the Godhead Itself. Study nothing except in the knowledge that you already knew it. Worship nothing except in adoration of your true self. And fear nothing except in the certainty that you are your enemy’s begetter and its only hope of healing. For everything that does evil is in pain.”

Look at these words. Study them. Apply them. They are truth, even if they were couched in the lie of fiction. And to all my fans and friends and Faithful Readers, past present and future: Happy New Year!

Image via Wikipedia. This is what our monsters have become.

Hidey-ho, Faithful Readers! I know I have been pretty silent lately, and I beg your forgiveness. As many of you know, last spring I woke up in hideous pain, and it turned out I have a degenerative spinal disease. Since then, I have been trying to deal with pain management and the emotional/mental fallout of being permanently disabled in my early thirties. Slowly but surely, I have been getting a handle on all of this and recovering from the depression and anxiety set off by all of this. I am writing again, and the promised novels, poetry, and short story collection will be coming along…just more slowly.

But while I wanted to reassure my readers and fans that I haven’t died, disappeared, or retired, that is not the point of this post. What I want to do right now is talk about fear…fear in all its forms, flavors, and textures. I want to talk about fear because I feel that the horror genre, as a whole, is suffering from major problems right now. I watch every new horror movie that comes out, mainstream and independent. I also read a lot of the new work coming out and watch the so-called horror TV shows. And I have to say, we have a problem, Faithful Readers, and that problem can be summed up in a single question:

When was the last time you were scared?

I don’t mean scared of not being able to pay the rent or put food on the table. We are living in a period of economic and political instability, and if you aren’t anxious about those issues you either aren’t paying attention or have specifically chosen not to engage with these fears. I also don’t mean the fear of getting robbed in a bad neighborhood or that your spouse/partner will leave you. I mean real fear. Terror. The kind of fear that makes reality itself slip sideways and makes you lay awake in the dark, terrified to move lest “they” realize you’re there. Horror. Terror. Awe. Real fear that used to be the kind of thing writers like myself were trying to tap into.

I can’t remember the last time I was truly afraid in this way. I get glimmers of it every now and then, but those glimmers never come from what the so-called professionals are putting out. Horror movies now are either pathetic remakes of movies from 30 years ago or attempts to make “safe” horror…horror that entertains, that makes us laugh, but does not induce us to sleep with the lights on or question our priorities in life. Horror used to not be safe, remember? Horror used to be able to change us.

The only places I find horror capable of causing these sort of frissons, of inspiring this sort of instability in our personal realities, are the least professional works that exist: the genre of internet media called “creepypasta”…bits of stories and lore patched together on usenet, forums, blogs, and through ARGs (Alternate Reality Games). These works, especially the ones that end up creating an entire mythos unto themselves (check out the Slender Man mythos or “Ben Drowned” for examples of what I am talking about), actually inspire real terror, real fear, as do the blogs and forums that are (ostensibly) telling people’s true stories of interaction with the paranormal (check out From the Shadows, one of the best paranormal blogs I know of, for examples). Indeed, these two genres, the “true” paranormal stories and the creepypasta, overlap…it’s difficult to know what is real and what is meant to be fiction sometimes. And this, of course, leads to a better scare.

It seems to me that the horror genre has gotten stuck in old fears. People in the movies and stories react almost like caricatures of people, rather than resonating with the depth and complexity of real human beings. The fears the stories take up, vampires, werewolves, zombies, and the like…we’re not really afraid of these things. We romanticize them, we reinterpret them, we do any number of things, but it’s pretty safe to say that the stand-by monsters of horror simply aren’t frightening anymore. Serial killers aren’t frightening anymore. Possession isn’t frightening anymore.

Why not? Well, I have a number of theories, and I’m always creating new ones, but the main reason I think these things aren’t frightening anymore is that they are predictable. We have seen them so much and so often that they just don’t scare us. Cthulhu was on South Park and has been made into plushy toys. The most popular vampire of the modern era sparkles in the sunlight, goes to high school at over a century old, and really just wants to be loved. The most popular werewolf is not feared…he is idolized or romantically desired. The zombie is being deconstructed, and we have begun to see movies and shows where zombies are likeable, lovable, funny, and most of all…not scary.

Now, as a writer of speculative fiction of all three types (horror, fantasy, and science fiction), I find myself in a difficult situation. The book that made me want to be a writer was Stephen King’s The Shining. I read it in the first grade (yes, yes, not the best parenting in the world, I know) and I knew, right then, that I wanted to be a writer, and specifically I wanted to be a horror writer. I wanted to be able to inspire the powerful, cathartic terror that changed me forever. Later, I fell in love with other genres and I have written in all of them, but my first love was horror. I wanted to scare people. Not make them laugh, nor make them feel reassured of the moral order they were raised with (horror with a happy ending?). I didn’t want to give pre-teen girls a metaphor for their burgeoning sexuality (or instruct them in how to be a passive, codependent willing victim of abuse…I’m talking to you, Meyer!). I wanted to scare the crap out of people. I wanted them to come out of reading my work forced to view the world differently. I wanted to turn their reality on its ear and leave them screaming.

But how, in the modern era, can I achieve that? The monsters have been used and abused so much that they have turned into inversions and subversions of themselves. The monsters have become metaphors for misunderstood emo kids and fundamentally immature (hence why Edward can fall in love with a teenager and go to high school without it seeming like what it is…creepy pedophilia far beyond Lolita). They stole the monsters that used to plague our nightmares and turned them into ways to sell breakfast cereal.

So what I want to know, Faithful Readers, is this: what scares you? Not a little bit. Not “creeps me out”. Not funny-scary or sexy-scary. Not a metaphor for the insecurity of adolescence or unfamiliar sexuality. Real, unremitting, terror. The sort that, if you were forced to face it, would leave you a drooling, collapsed mess, not inspire you to wear a “Team Edward” t-shirt while writing fan-fiction about the “ultimate bad boy/girl” who changes to a goody-goody because of your pure love. This is the sort of fear I want to hear about. I want to hear about the thoughts, images, and ideas that make death seem like a pleasant release. I want terror.

So tell me. I’m going to leave this post up for a while, so everyone sees it. I want to hear what makes you scream.

Image via Wikipedia

It’s amazing how many people seem to have some sick form of Stockholm Syndrome for the system as it currently stands. People talk about government and economy like it has a defined role and characteristics, even though government is an abstraction we made up, and we can make up different roles and characteristics anytime we want. People talk about “the economy” the same way…as if it were a type of rock that just has certain features and that’s the way it is, as opposed to an abstraction we made up to systematize our exchanges of goods and services. This is a severe problem.

Adam Smith wasn’t a scientist, he was an economist and philosopher, and guess what? His philosophy, that has had us chasing equilibriums the way former eras chased the favor of gods for centuries, is full of holes. It assumes the “Enlightenment” model of the human mind and decision-making process, which means it says that we are all little calculators doing min/max calculations about everything and making our economic decisions rationally. But this is known now, through actual scientific research, to be false…we are very seldom rational, and make economic decisions rather badly, even when we do have all the facts (which we almost never do).

In addition to this, Smith’s system is rigged to favor capital. Capital can always decide, with impunity, to lower wages and make worker conditions poorer. The reason for this is because, as an artificial entity with the hiring privilege, they essentially have a monopoly on work. They can choose not to hire at a given wage, but the worker who has a family to support and has to eat generally can’t choose not to work at the wage offered. Since labor can’t actually force the “price” of their labor to rise to the value they put on it under pain of death and failure in personal responsibilities (in addition to the social stigma we attach to people unwilling to work at unfair wages as being “lazy” and “entitled”), then there is always an unequal power dynamic…the only equilibriums that form are those that benefit capital, not labor. Unionism was an attempt to balance this dynamic, as were labor laws, but the same people it benefits to have the rigged system have generally convinced everyone else that unions are bad, evil, and, of course, socialism, and the moment labor lost all power to demand labor laws to protect them, the NLRB was gutted and labor laws castrated.

Capitalism also assumes a scarcity of labor which will help balance the imbalanced power dynamic of capital vs. labor, which I suppose made sense back in the early days of the Industrial Revolution. It made sense that there was a lot of work to do, just to survive. But thanks to the technological and scientific breakthroughs of the last century, that’s just no longer the case. Now we have a surplus of labor, and a surplus of the main resources necessary to human survival…food, clean water, clothing, and shelter. In order to preserve the profitability of food markets, we have subsidized some foods and also actually destroyed surpluses that would have lowered prices past profitability. That’s right, people are starving all over the world, and we have more than enough food to feed everyone and the technology to do it cheaply, but we destroy the extra, or subsidize it to be used in other ways (high fructose corn syrup, anyone?) rather than feed people, all to keep profits up.

It used to be the reason why humanity had to toil was because toil was required to survive, but that isn’t true at all anymore. Now we toil to create profits for capital, but have been convinced that this is somehow the same noble labor that once put food on our table. It is not. There is nothing noble about working hard to put money in someone else’s pocket.

So why do we accept a system that is designed in such a way that the majority of people are inevitably going to be screwed? Labor is the majority, capital is the minority, and always has been, including back when they were called the aristocracy, the crown, or whatever. They have to convince us to accept these systems. Our ancestors were convinced by a combination of religion and force, but our aristocracy has been more subtle, adopting rhetoric that it is hard to argue with and a system that requires a good deal of expertise to see the “rigged” part of the game clearly, and generally the only way to gain that expertise is to already be one of the people who benefit from how the system is rigged.

We have been convinced through centuries of propaganda that this is “just the way things are”, but that’s not true. “Things” have been very different in different cultures and different eras. Consider that peasants and serfs were once convinced the same thing about feudalism through the notion of “divine right to rule”. The “way things are” was different then…it could be different in the future. We just have to actually reject a system that from its conception was meant to exploit and oppress the majority to favor the minority.

Consider that the two forms of secular economic organization, capitalism and communism, were both put forth at the same time “God” was being declared dead. The worry of the day was that without some governing principle, humanity would fall to chaos and barbarism. To that end, Smith and Marx both presented new systems…but they are both just as “religious” as the system of thought they were replacing.

In the past religions, it was “God’s judgment and providence”, a supernatural guiding force, which gave structure to the system by which people lived and organized their lives. There was no evidence for this invisible guiding force, but it was accepted anyway. Similarly, capitalism has the “Invisible Hand” of the “market”, another invisible guiding force that also has no evidence for its existence, but was accepted anyway. Communism has the notion of a “historical dialectic”, which Marx took from his mentor Hegel…again, an invisible, guiding force that also has no evidence for its existence, but was accepted anyway.

In past religions, just reward or punishment was claimed to come in the afterlife, something for which there is no evidence, through being consigned to Heaven or Hell, two places (or states of being) for which there is also no evidence, but it was accepted anyway. In capitalism, just reward and punishment is to come through the establishment of equilibriums, where all things, including labor, will cost what they are worth. These equilibriums, however, have no evidence for their existence except in mathematical models which assume Smith’s system axiomatically, but they are accepted anyway. Communism has the “communist utopia”, the state of society after the transitional period of a capitalist society to communism, where the state dissolves itself and all authority, wealth, means of production, and resources are held in common. This, obviously, has never happened and there was/is no evidence that it could ever happen. It’s almost impossible to even imagine…how, exactly, could a free populace manage the distribution of goods held in common without some rule-set to define a just distribution? “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” sounds well and good until you ask the question of who is defining my abilities and needs.

The main thrust of my argument is this: we have generally been tricked into accepting systems of living that are:

1. Contrary to our current knowledge of the human psyche and decision-making processes.
2. Intentionally creating an imbalance in the power dynamic between the minority of our population (capital) and the majority of our population (labor) that favors the minority.
3. Based upon ideas with no evidence confirming their existence.

In addition to this, I’m saying that we have fallen into a cognitive trap that causes us to reify abstractions as if they were actual things with actual properties. It happens all the time…we talk about “government”, and especially the flaws of “big government”, as if it were a bear or a tree or a rock, taking for granted a set of properties and relations that are considered “facts”, as immutable as the laws of physics. But this is fuzzy thinking…government is simply an idea, and there have been many such ideas. All it takes is deciding to change things and acting on that decision. The same is true of “the economy”, “the law”, etc. These things exist in our heads, but we act like they exist in the world, and behave as if there were “matters of fact” about what they are and how they behave. This is folly.

Our world has changed a great deal in the last couple of centuries, and no amount of denial will change that. We can’t keep pretending there is a significant scarcity of most resources (food, shelter, clothing, water) that justifies the continued attempt to make profit from them without creating absurdities and inhumanities like burning crops to keep the market from crashing while people are starving in other countries, or having people homeless and in the streets while homes and apartments sit empty. We can’t keep pretending that there is a scarcity of labor that will keep capital honest in its hiring practices…there are more people than jobs, everyone knows it, and capital knows that it can offer unfair and inadequate compensation to their employees with impunity because those employees have to eat, feed their families, etc.

And most of all, we can’t keep making things up and then forgetting they are made up. Government is a technology, a category of answers to the problem of “how shall we live?” The economy is similarly a technology, a category of answers to the question “how do we divide our stuff?” As technologies, it should be expected that we will fix them when broken, innovate upon them where better things are possible, and make them efficient when they are shown to be wasteful. But if we reify these abstractions, if we fall under the spell of thinking these collections of ideas and methodologies are somehow “real” and “binding”, we can’t improve upon them, we can’t fix them when broken, and we can’t remove inefficiencies and inconsistencies. We’re stuck.

We live in a story, and its not a very good one right now. It’s a story that was written back when “all men are created equal” was assumed to exclude anyone who wasn’t white and male…that is, the majority of people in the world. A story that assumed that the right to own deadly weapons was important enough to put in, but the right to not be oppressed simply because of the color of your skin wasn’t. Looking back over the history of humanity, it’s easy to look at the eternal exploitation of the poor and weak by the rich and powerful and judge our species to be monsters. And it would be true. But we have been monsters because we have written ourselves that way, because we have woven a story of monsters ruling over and exploiting others.

It’s just a story, and there is nothing stopping us from imagining a new one, if we can only remember that we are the ones who made up the tale, not simply characters within it.

Related articles

• Mainstream Economist: Marx Was Right. Capitalism May Be Destroying Itself (redantliberationarmy.wordpress.com)
• The General Assembly and social revolution (pogoprinciple.wordpress.com)
• “Class Warfare?” Absolutely! (psychologytoday.com)

Yesterday, Occupy Oakland was raided by police twice, first in the early morning, then later in the evening. Rubber bullets, tear gas, and “flashbangs”, concussive grenades, were used against peaceful protesters in a display of what can only be called police state intimidation.

An Iraq vet, a marine named Scott Olsen, was injured by a rubber bullet or possibly a tear-gas cannister in this brutal attack, though the Oakland PD claims they did not use them, and is in critical condition with a cracked skull and brain swelling. When a small group of protesters went to his aid, the police fired a flashbang (again, which they refuse they used, yet can clearly be shown in this video) into the group attempting to help the injured marine.

His name is Scott Olsen. Remember him when you think it’s really not that bad, that it can’t happen here, that because we’re America we just don’t do this sort of thing.

His name is Scott Olsen. Remember.

Related articles

• Scott Olsen, Iraq War Veteran, Injured By Police During ‘Occupy Oakland’ Protest (huffingtonpost.com)
• Iraq Veteran Scott Olsen Critically-Injured at Occupy Oakland Raid (sfist.com)
• This Veteran Could Be The First Person To Die At A Wall Street Protest (businessinsider.com)
• BREAKING NEWS: Police draw first blood: Scott Olsen in critical condition #OWS (finaloutlaw.com)
• Scott Olsen, Iraq war vet and Oakland occupier, in critical condition (shortformblog.tumblr.com)

Image via Wikipedia

Like many of us, I have been watching the events of the Occupy Wall Street, and the Occupy movement in general, unfold with interest. I have my own hopes and fears about the  recent developments in my country, as many of you who follow my posts on Twitter, Google+, and Facebook know, but that’s not what I want to talk about right now. Instead, I want to talk about how our narratives disclose our attitudes about the world, and the place of social and political ideas in art in general.

Throughout human history, there has been an interaction between the cultural products we produce and our body politic. The assumptions we bring to our writing, in specific, reveal much about our culture and its values. Throughout the 20th Century and into the 21st Century, we have seen our heroes change again and again, but one thing is clear: our narratives have become cynical. The clean-cut, all-American soldier, the undisputed and indisputable hero of the triumphant movies of WWII were challenged and became more complex as our simple faith in our own moral justification has been challenged again and again in real life. The policeman, the politician, the business-leader, the everyday worker, the parent, the child…each of these roles, and the pitfalls and triumphs implied in each, are explored through our fiction. In a sense, we can use our fiction to try out futures, philosophies, and ideas. We can imagine complex and meaningful ways for our real lives to play out through our fiction.

This is not a new idea, of course. From Aristophenes and Ayn Rand to punk rock and Sartre, people have used art to express the world as they see it, sometimes in the hopes that people would embrace it, but just as often simply as play, as a means of exploration of possibilities.

This applies nowhere more than in speculative fiction; what if we developed FTL travel? What if we could engineer people to specification? What if we sent a colony of anarchists to the moon? What if we really did blow it all up?

Now we seem to be experiencing a world our fiction predicted. On some level, we have never forgotten that hubris never goes unpunished, so much of our fiction has been about the collapse of modernity. This is a new type of fiction, in a sense. While the ancients wrote many apocalypses into their religions, the notion of a post-apocalyptic story is all ours. We have told the tale in thousands of ways, but it all comes down to the same thing: the end of the world, and what we do after.

So as I observe the Occupy movement gain strength, I note the fiction that I have seen take hold. The new Batman: Year One animated movie shows us not some caricatured super-villain, but a corrupt police commissioner and a crooked system. We find ourselves loving the Batman as he interrupts the elite dinner party and tells the wealthy and privileged of Gotham that no one is safe.

There’s been a lot of that over the last 10 years or so. Firefly/Serenity showed gave us ragtag heroes oppressed by a benevolent dictatorship that through well-meaning legislation created a race of monsters. Sanctuary, Warehouse 13, and Eureka all present heroes that are geeks and freaks fighting the good fight, often against a government that is not only basically incompetent and needlessly aggressive, but downright malevolent and dangerous. Torchwood’s recent big bad was a combination of all the governments in the world, hand in hand with a group of wealthy conspirators who want not only eternal life, but to profit from the whole world’s misery and oppression.

And now, in the midst of this world crisis, there is a new tale being written, and it follows this model. Around the country, across the world, people come together to stand against those that would destroy everything for their own gain. They are occupying public spaces and marching in the streets in an attempt to write a new story, to give us a new way to live, and an alternative to the path we are on. Their use of symbol and narrative is self-aware…these are people who know they are on TV. They know they are living in a story, and they’re trying to be the heroes.

But there is peril in this…so much of this story is angry. So much of it is hopeless. I know that I often feel that way reading these accounts of the protests and the arrests. We need another new tale, a sequel to Occupy Wall Street, because we need a better story than just fighting back. We need a story about what we do once we win, how we live in such a way that our grandchildren aren’t right back here in a few decades. We need a tale worthy of a new America, perhaps a whole new world. A tale that doesn’t just indict what we are, but praises what we could become.

I don’t know if I have it in me to write such a tale, but hope that others out there are scribbling right now, dreaming us a new American Dream…

But until then, games and my own writing must keep me amused, while advertisers like PartyPoker Portugal must keep my wife and I eating. If any of you have some new tales that you’re working on, leave me a comment…I would love to hear about it!

Related articles

• Superheroes Occupy Wall Street of the Day (geeks.thedailywh.at)

Today my wife and I received a letter from a collection agency. They informed us that we owed over $100 for games rented from Hollywood Video before they went out of business. The games listed were rented under Hollywood Video’s Powerplay Diamond Plan, where they charged each month for unlimited rentals. Here’s the flyer:

Pretty good deal, right? Except for the part where they try to screw you for the rentals after they go out of business. My wife and I are challenging this, but of course it probably doesn’t matter. Yet again, some corporation lies and we pay the price.